Conspiracy 2.0

As I noted in a March 10^th blog entitled “A Conspiracy?”, I have long been fascinated about the mysterious origins of the New Testament of the Holy Bible.

I am an atheist now but was once a card-carrying “born again” Christian. I believe that most of the morality promoted by the major religions, including Christianity, is positive stuff. And, as far as any religion being a source of hope and generating a feeling of positivity is concerned, I’m all in favor of that. My wife is a Catholic, came from a family of true believers, attended a convent, and is a model human being. To the extent that her religion has had a positive impact on her life and that of others, I cannot argue.

People who live by the “Golden Rule”, whether they be religious or not, are the kind of folk that I want to associate with. I try to adhere to it as best I can because it’s the right thing, not because I’m trying to curry a god’s favor.

The origins of all religions are shrouded in mystery, and all religions have a mythical backstory. That would include fantastic claims like virginal births, folks conversing directly with God, lots of miracles being performed, holy men prophesying future events, main characters dying but being resurrected from the dead, and such. The Holy Bible, including the Old and New Testaments, is but one religious tome that includes a litany of mythical provenance, if one can call it that.

If Moses could part the Red Sea with his staff, couldn’t Paul Bunyan plow the Grand Canyon with the help of his blue ox “Babe”? We are entertained but scoff at the latter myth, but Jews and many fundamental Christians believe wholeheartedly in the Moses story. Why? Because they want to believe.

I don’t need to believe in religious myths, but I have always been very interested in where they came from and why.  Luckily, I love to read and there are quite a few scholars who have been investigating these religious back stories ever since the Reformation.

Research into the origins of the New Testament has been prolific in the past few decades. It is a difficult field of study, as most of the literature from the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd centuries no longer exists, including the original Gospels. This absence of source data is not by accident: the Catholic Church oversaw things in Europe for 1,200 years or so and were famous for “disappearing” literature that cast doubt on evolving Christian dogma. What is left of the 1^st through 3^rd century literature for researchers to sift through is mainly copies of copies of copies. And, of course, with every manual copy (by a scribe or monk), there were opportunities to make errors in translation, make modifications, or insert new material that pleased the Church.

In other words, very few “breadcrumbs” were left for modern Christians or biblical scholars to follow. Accordingly, the Church has invented convenient “traditions” to fill in the blanks, which the faithful are expected to believe… as an expression of their faith.

I’ve recently read four books by modern scholars who have put a lot of energy into examining the origins of Christianity and the New Testament. These writers are not theologians, apologists, or even religious scholars but, rather, historians. Thus, they are attempting to take the available factual data and theorize how and why a new religion was created 2,000 years ago.

The books that I’ve been reading are as follows:

          Caesar’s Messiah by Joseph Atwill, published in 2005

          On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier (2014)

          Creating Christ by James Valliant and Warren Fahy (2018)

          Creating Christianity by Henry Davis (2020)

As any religious scholar will admit, no one knows who wrote the books of the New Testament. In fact, the faceless writers took pains to hide their identities, but inserted “clues” here and there to tease the reader. The Gospel writers gave the impression that the stories and quotes from Jesus were factual even though modern religious scholars concede that the Gospels were written anywhere from 40 to 120 years after the supposed actual events portrayed. Thus, every verbatim quote of Jesus Christ in the Gospels was invented by clever writers who never could have met the man… if he even existed.

On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier explores this topic in some detail. His conclusion is that the fellow that Christians worship (the one described in the Gospels) probably didn’t actually exist but was an invented man-god. Of course, that begs the question, “Why was he invented?”

The other three books (Caesar’s Messiah, Creating Christ, and Creating Christianity) theorize that the Christian religion was invented out of whole cloth under the auspices of the Roman Empire, specifically at the direction of the Flavian emperors Vespasian and Titus in the late 1^st century.

In those books, the common theme is that the objective was to pacify Roman subjects, particularly zealous Jews, who had been rebelling against the Empire. As the authors point out, in detail, a close reading of the books of the New Testament reveals: (1) Even though the Jesus character is a Jewish rabbi, his main effort seems to be antisemitic, i.e. against the Jewish religious establishment in Palestine; (2) Jesus’ message is one of pacifism, submission, and cooperation with Roman authority rather than the intransigence and militarism of 1^st century Jews; and, (3) Within the New Testament, all stories involving Rome, its leaders, and even Roman soldiers in Palestine reflect positively on the Empire.

It is known that the Gospels were written after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 73 A.D. by Titus’ Roman army. Thus, it was possible for Gospel writers to have their Jesus character prophesying the same catastrophe some 40 years earlier, blaming the zealous Jews for the troubles (starvation, death, slavery) they would have to endure.

During the Vietnam War, there was a famous quote from a U.S. Army officer who noted that, “We had to destroy the village to save it.” This is basically the intent of the New Testament: destroy militant Judaism so it can be replaced by a pacifistic religion acceptable to the Roman Empire. The Messiah (or savior) that the Jewish people had long prayed for, to deliver them from their oppressors, ironically turned out to be the Flavian emperors who rescued the Jews from their zealous, militaristic leaders.

How do we know that the Flavians were involved in the creation of the New Testament?

For one thing, a new religion was seemingly created under the noses of Roman officials. This couldn’t happen without the sanction of the Flavian emperors because religious practices were controlled by the political establishment. Secondly, Hellenized Jews (the Herod and Alexander families from the Middle East who had family connections with the Flavians) and captured ex-Pharisee/Flavian historian Jospeh bar Mathias (i.e. Flavius Josephus) were present at the Roman court, providing extensive knowledge of the Jewish religion. Thirdly, the production of literature was costly, something only the wealthy or the government could afford. The idea that common folk, following a wandering, itinerant preacher, could produce such literature for mass consumption in the 1^st through 3^rd centuries, without Roman government help or permission, is preposterous.

Author Henry Davis, in Creating Christianity, postulates that a very influential Roman family, kingmakers of a sort with the last name of Piso, were involved in the scheme to producethe new “Christian” religion. This family had the wealth, the connections with the Flavians, and the motivation (i.e. pacified Roman subjects were good for business and stability throughout the Empire) to orchestrate the production of the New Testament literature.

To me, Davis seems to be overreaching in his identification of the Piso family as the driving force behind the new religion. Also, he matter-of-factly identifies several historical characters (famous 1^st century writers) as participants in developing the mythology of Jesus, his disciples, the Apostle Paul, and so forth. I don’t believe Mr. Davis has enough proof to claim what he does, but his basic premise seems plausible, as good as any I’ve heard.

The fact that Christianity developed in plain sight of the Flavian emperors and likely at their behest is underscored by the fact that many of the earliest Christian leaders had connections with the Empire.

In fact, possibly the first real Pope (excluding the disciple Peter, who was likely mythical) was Titus Flavius Clemens (St. Clement of Rome), who was a cousin of emperors Titus and Domitian. The famous Catacombs of Domatilla in Rome, the earliest burial sites of known Christians, was dug on property owned by 1^st century noblewoman Flavia Domatilla, granddaughter of Emperor Vespasian and wife of St. Clement of Rome. Vespasian’s official court historian, Flavius Josephus, writing at the exact same time as Apostle Paul’s New Testament epistles emerged, reveals in his biography stories that match Paul’s adventures almost to a tee. Epaphroditus, a freedman and later imperial secretary to Emperor Nero, appears to have had the job as Secretary of Letters under Vespasian and Titus at the Roman court. He is possibly the same fellow Epaphroditus who is identified as a friend of the (mythical) Apostle Paul in one of his epistles and is now revered by the Church as St. Epaphroditus. One historian, Robert Eisenman, has argued that a group around the Flavians, possibly led by Epaphroditus, likely produced the Gospel literature itself. Domitian, the last of the Flavian emperors, officially distanced his regime from Christianity and had Epaphroditus executed.

There are many more intriguing connections like this, but I think you get the point: the early Flavian emperors were neck-deep involved in creating the religion that would cooperate with the Roman aristocracy and ensure Pax Romana (the “Roman peace”).

The major impediment to the peace that Rome craved was zealous Judaism. There were an estimated 8 million Jews within the Empire in the 1^st century. Many of those Jews in Palestine were eliminated or driven into slavery by the Romans by 73 A.D., but that still left millions of Jews that represented a problem for Rome.

The psy-ops campaign devised by the Flavians to rejigger militant Jews into compliant Jews (i.e. Christians) was probably the most effective propaganda campaign in world history.

Much credit goes to those Flavian schemers.