Critical Evaluation of Joseph Atwill's  “Caesar’s Messiah”
Reviewed by J. Harold Ellens, PhD
Research Scholar, Department of Near Eastern Studies
University of Michigan

Joseph Atwill has written an intriguing "Jesus-Book." He calls it Caesar's Messiah. It is ingeniously conceived, and as was the case with Steinfeld's runaway best seller, The Passover Plot, Atwill's new study will be both highly stimulating and enormously controversial. It will entertain, inspire, provoke, and enrage various learned scholars and informed lay readers.

Atwill approaches his subject with the plainly announced assumption that "the question of how Christianity began" is "an open one." This claim is grounded in the facts that numerous messianic sects and mystery religions were percolating through Roman and Jewish cultures in the first century, all of which have proven to be fictitious, if not hilarious, and all of which have come to nothing, except Christianity. Moreover, we have no objective evidence today that a person named Jesus of Nazareth ever existed at that time.

So the author of this innovative volume has proposed a new and radically unconventional approach to the "Jesus question," and then carries his thesis through consistently to formulate an alternative model for understanding the narratives of the New Testament and the works of Jesus' contemporary, Flavius Josephus.

Noting that events in the narratives of Jesus' ministry, reported in the gospels, parallel episodes in Josephus' reports of Titus Flavius' military campaigns, Atwill explores the possibility that "a Roman imperial family, the Flavians, created Christianity, and even more incredibly, ... placed a literary satire within the Gospels and War of the Jews to inform posterity of this fact."

Vespasian and his sons, Titus and Domitian, maintained the Flavian Dynasty from 69 - 96 CE, just the period of Josephus' tenure as their court historian, and the rise of the Christian Movement. Atwill contends that the Christian ideology and ritual practice built upon the model of Mithraism, was generated by the Flavians to offer a persuasive alternative to the numerous contentious and rebellious Jewish messianic sects constantly troublesome in Roman Palestine.

The author adduces a remarkable spate of data from the New Testament, the Works of Josephus, and the history of the Roman Empire of the last half of the first century, to weave a coherent, solid, and internally consistent tapestry. He tells a story never before attempted, sounds a trumpet never previously heard, and explores a world of potential truth until now thoroughly obscured from our vision. "Once Jesus was universally established as a historical individual, any other possibility became, evidentially, invisible.  The more we believed in Jesus as a world historical figure, the less we were able to understand him in any other way." After being driven from Palestine by the revolutionary Sicarii in 66 CE, the Roman army under Titus reentered the Israelite domain and destroyed the revolutionaries.  Atwill contends that Christian Messianism was then created by the Flavians to fill the vacuum so created. The experiment succeeded with enormous effect, marginalizing Judaism and the emperor cult, and moving the new religion toward a dominant role in the empire.

Atwill's thesis is eminently worth exploring. Both for its new ideas and for its anti--establishmentarianism in the world of biblical studies, this book is likely to become a notable best seller.

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CAESAR'S MESSIAH; A SUMMARY OF FINDINGS
by John Hudson

Our understanding of Jewish and Christian history has changed dramatically with the publication of Caesar's Messiah by Joseph Atwill (Ulysses Press).

According to Atwill, the Gospels are not accounts of the ministry of a historical Jewish Jesus compiled by his followers sixty years after his death. They are texts deliberately created to trick Messianic Jews into worshipping the Roman Emperor 'in disguise'. 

The essence of Atwill's discovery is that the majority of the key events in the life of Jesus are in fact satirical: each is an elegant literary play on a military battle in which the Jewish armies had been defeated by the Romans. This is an extraordinary claim-but supported by all the necessary evidence.

Why would the Romans go to the trouble of writing and disseminating such a text?  

The Jewish War, culminating in the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, had devastated the Mediterranean economy, and the Romans were anxious to prevent another messianic outbreak. In order to make any reconstruction of the country lasting, the Romans needed to offer the Jews alternative stories that would distract them from the messianic messages inherent in the Torah, and persuade them to accept Roman values.

According to Atwill,  the Romans' solution to these problems was to create a special kind of post-war propaganda. They called it in Greek evangelion, a technical term meaning "good news of military victory."  In English, it is translated as "gospel."  The name is in fact ironic humor: the Romans were amusing themselves with the notion of making the Jews accept, as the actions of the Messiah Jesus, what were in fact literary echoes of the very battles in which the Romans had defeated the Jews' armies. 

A further joke was buried in unmistakable parallels between the life of Jesus and that of Titus: in worshiping Jesus, the Jews who adopted Christianity, as it came to be called, were in fact hailing the Emperor of their conquerors as god.

To replace the Torah, then, the Romans created a literary equivalent, the gospel of Matthew (and shortly thereafter the Hellenistic and Roman versions known as Luke and Mark). The central literary character, called Jesus (or Joshua) inhabits a plot with various peculiar features: he begins his efforts by the Lake of Galilee; sends a legion of devils out of a demon-possessed man and into pigs; offers his flesh to be eaten; mentions signs of the destruction of Jerusalem; in Gethsemane a naked man escapes; Jesus is captured at Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives; Simon denies knowing him; he is crucified with two other men and only he survives; he is taken down from the cross by a man called Joseph of Arimathea; his disciple John survives but his disciple Simon is sent off to die in Rome; after his death his disciple Judas dies by eviscerating himself.

Each of these peculiar events has a parallel in the writings of Josephus, our main record of the military encounter between the Judeans and their Roman conquerors-even to the unusual crucifixion in which three men are crucified, and a man named Joseph takes one, who survives, down. To give a flavor of the humor buried in this grand Roman joke, we see that where, in Josephus, the crucifixions take place at Thecoe, which translates as the "Village of the Inquiring Mind," the gospel's satiric version takes place at Golgotha, or the "Hill of the Empty Skull."

Events at the Lake of Galilee launch the Judean careers of both Titus and Jesus. There Jesus called his disciples to be 'fishers of men'.  There the Roman battle took place in which Titus attacked a band of Jewish rebels led by a leader named Jesus. The rebels fell into the water and those who were not killed by darts "attempted to swim to their enemies, the Romans cut off either their heads or their hands" (Jewish War III, 10).  Men were indeed pulled out of the water like fish.

As for the episode of the Gadarene swine-in which demons leave a Gadara demoniac at Jesus' bidding and then enter into a herd of 2,000 swine, which rush wildly into the lake and drown-Josephus recounts the Roman campaign in which Vespasian marched against Gadara.   In the same way that the demons were concentrated in one demoniac, Josephus describes the faults of all the rebels being concentrated in the one head of the rebel leader John. Then, rushing about "like the wildest of wild beasts," the 2000 rebels rushed over the cliff and drowned.

To take a third example, Josephus describes how Titus Flavius went out without his armor (and therefore to a soldier metaphorically naked) in the garden of Gethsemane, was nearly caught and had to flee.  The parallel in the gospel of Mark is a naked young man who appears from nowhere in the Garden of Gethsemane and flees.

So far over dozen of these parallels have been identified many of which had already been discovered by other scholars. But Atwill is the first researcher to have identified that they happen in the exact same sequence.  The events occur in Josephus in exactly the same order as their counterpart events in the Gospels.

Since it is impossible to imagine that the Romans would have invented accounts of battles taking place in locations marked 50 years earlier by the ministry of Jesus, we need an alternative explanation, of which there is really only one, and it is Atwill's in Caesar's Messiah. The Gospels were written in the late 70s and 80s CE, about the same time as Josephus' The Jewish War. Key events in the life of Jesus were written as literary satires of the Roman battles, ambushes, crucifixions, cannibalisms, etc., in the military campaign of Titus Caesar, as recounted in Josephus.  Rather than four different communities separated in time and space writing the NT Gospels (the traditional understanding), they were written together as a single literary undertaking-possibly at the Imperial Court.  The Jews who ended up following the false Messianic literary character 'Jesus' would, unbeknownst to them, really be worshipping the Emperor Titus.

Perhaps the most important new evidence for the ahistoricity of Jesus is the reading that Caesar's Messiah provides of a critical passage in Josephus' other major work, Jewish Antiquities. This is the famous 'Testimonium' passage in which is supposedly the major independent textual source for the historical existence of Jesus. Atwill demonstrates that this text is genuinely by Josephus. However, when read in context with the surrounding passages, it amounts to a confession admitting that the Flavian emperors invented the character of Jesus to deceive the Jews into worshipping a false messiah.  The reader merely has to read the text as it was originally composed, using a well-known Hebrew compositional technique found in the Book of Leviticus, and known as 'pedimental composition'.  This technique gives emphasis to the central passage of text by framing it with mirrored passages either side. (Thus, Leviticus 19, which concerns righteous dealing, is framed by two chapters about prohibitions).

Applied to Jewish Antiquities, the Testimonium passage about Jesus is evidently the left hand side of a triptych. The right hand side passage is about Paul, and the figure in the central panel , who is a composite of all three Flavian Emperors, wears the mask of a false god to have sex with a woman he could not persuade with gifts and money. The central focus of the triptych is that the Roman Emperors did not care about 'this business of names' but were willing to pretend to be a false god in order to be worshipped by the Jews. Patterns of word parallelisms link across the three panels of the triptych, to reveal the true story. (For example, the word hedone used for the Emperor's sexual enjoyment is also used-quite inappropriately-for the way that Christ's followers worship him, thereby linking the two stories).

Professor Robert Eisenman of California State University describes Atwill's research as rendering contemporary Christian scholarship so challenged that it is now "looking into the abyss".  It is worth noting, in this regard, that the general scholarly consensus that there was a historical, Jewish Jesus is itself largely a recent historical idea, traceable to Abraham Geiger in the 1860's.  He persuaded scholars that the Gospels were an account of a historical Jewish Jesus, a typical Pharisee of his day.  Since then this view, and with it the notion of Christianity as a development of Judaism, has become the dominant paradigm in Christianity.  However, as the new discoveries in Caesar's Messiah make clear, this is not just misleading, but a dangerous concession to a false system of belief. The Romans created this new religion deliberately to humiliate the Jews and to keep them in submission.  For contemporary Jewish scholars to collude with this Roman literary invention, and to even pretend that this fictional character had historic reality, is the height of irony.

In the past, evidence had been put forward to suggest that the NT gospels are literary accounts containing mythological accretions.  However, Christians have been able to dismiss that evidence on the grounds that underneath it all there 'must' be a Historical Jesus.  Atwill's discovery changes all that.  There was no historical Jesus and the Gospels were Roman imitations of Jewish sacred texts created by the Flavian Emperors as ironical 'good news' to deceive the Jews. It is one thing for Christians to use works of literature as their sacred documents.  It is quite another for them to continue using what have now been discovered to be deliberate Roman fakes about a non existent Messiah.
                                 

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Changes History by Meryl Zegarek, Meryl Zegarek Public Relations

There have been a number of theories about the origins of Christianity, but none have the solid and consistent evidence presented in CAESAR’S MESSIAH: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus by Joseph Atwill. Our understanding of Jewish and Christian history will change dramatically with this book.

Atwill, who received a Jesuit education, is an expert at dating the Dead Sea Scrolls. He worked with Dr. Robert Eisenman in the1990’s, and the results of their work were published in the Dead Sea Scrolls Journal in 2004. Atwill is founder of the Roman Origins Institute in New York City, and has devoted his life work to researching the history of the New Testament. In CAESAR’S MESSIAH Atwill reveals three major discoveries which tell us why the New Testament Gospels were written, who wrote them, and what they really mean. The book has received advance praise from scholars across the globe.

Atwill’s findings insist that the key events in the Gospels are not accounts of the ministry of a historical Jewish Jesus, compiled by followers sixty years after his death. Atwill shows they are part of a trick deliberately created to persuade Messianic Jews into worshipping the Roman Emperor in disguise. He demonstrates how they were written by a group of intellectuals at the court of the Roman Emperors Vespasian and Titus, in the period following the Roman-Jewish war, 70-85 CE – a literary hoax designed to persuade Jews to worship them.  Atwill shows that the majority of the key events in the life of Jesus are in fact satirical: each was an elegant literary play on a military battle in which the Jewish armies had been defeated by the Romans. Atwill  concludes that there could not have been a historical Jesus. Yes, this is an extraordinary claim -- but readers will find it supported by all the necessary evidence.

Atwill knows that some readers will find his analysis disorienting. He says, “This book is in no way a criticism of the faith of contemporary Christians. I felt required to present my findings because of the light they shed on the origin and purpose both of anti-Semitism and the moral structure of Western society. Christianity has been the basis for much of humankind’s moral progress. I present this work with great ambivalence.”

CAESAR’S MESSIAH may just be the most talked about book of the moment.  I urge you to aquire it for review.

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How the Flavian Emperors Wrote the Gospels, March 13, 2005
by John Hudson

This is the most exciting book on Jesus that I know. I was fortunate to read it in galleys and have had some time to reflect on it. Every church, every synagogue and seminary should set up groups to work on its implications. These extraordinary new discoveries will have a major role to play in the current 'culture wars' about the place of religion in public life.

Professor Robert Eisenman, Director of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian Origins, California State University, calls Atwill's work "challenging and provocative". Professor Rod Blackhirst , Professor of Biblical Studies, La Trobe University, calls it "Fascinating and of course profoundly challenging....a milestone in New Testament studies.....a fantastic, ice-breaking contribution". Both these scholars used the word "challenging". They are right. Atwill's book is a major challenge to the existing model of how Christianity originated, and a major threat to the hypothesis of the Historical Jesus---seeing him instead as a literary character in a Roman fraud.Caesar's Messiah has three unique and amazing features:(1) Atwill is willing to look objectively at the facts and discard false assumptions. He makes rational judgments of the evidence and follows the implications wherever they lead. He is therefore able to show what others have missed. This is enormously exciting and refreshing.

(2) His discovery that the key events in the life of Jesus are literary satires of events in the Roman military campaign in Judea (66-70CE) shows definitively that these parts of the gospels (and one might infer probably the rest as well) were created by the Romans to deceive the Jews into worshipping a false literary messiah.

(3) His discovery that the so called 'Testimonium' passage in Josephus's book Jewish Antiquities is essentially a confession by the Flavian Emperors that they wore the 'mask' of Jesus as a false god to seduce the Jews into worshipping them in disguise, is also an ground-breaking discovery.

Atwill heads an independent research group, the Roman Origins Institute, and previously worked on the dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now, his latest work will transform the field of NT research. However this new paradigm of Jesus does raise several concerns:

(1) It is emotionally hard to learn that the character of the Virgin Mary was really a satire of Cannibal Mary during the siege of Jerusalem, and that a close reading of the Gospel of John shows that Lazarus is taken out of the tomb only to provide the substance for a cannibal feast. As the text says 'they made him a supper' (KJV,ASV, NASB,LITV translations).

(2) Caesar's Messiah does not situate its findings within the existing NT scholarly literature and does not spell out how the entirety of the Gospels was actually created. It also does not discuss the implications of its thesis on the Pauline Letters and on the Book of Acts. If the Gospels are literary fakes then can both the Letters and Acts be proven to be fakes as well? The Institute's next book, covers these issues in detail, providing additional support for Atwill's thesis.

(3) Atwill will not endear himself to other NT scholars. He insists on a very high standard of evidence, and backs his findings where necessary with statistical analyses. This is similar to his ground breaking work on dating the Scrolls, published in the Dead Sea Scrolls Journal. Atwill sets standards that, to their frustration, other scholars will have difficulty in matching.

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A customer review:

Insightful and Stimulating, June 12, 2005
Reviewer: Michael Turton "NT Exegete" (Taichung, Taiwan)

The last few years have seen the publication of three books arguing that the Jesus story is really the story of a Roman Emperor. These include Jesus was Caesar: On the Julian origin of Christianity, an Investigative Report, by Francesco Carotta, and Gary Courtney's Et tu, Judas? Then Fall Jesus!, both of which argue that that the Jesus story is based on the story of Julius Caesar, and Joseph Atwill's Caesar's Messiah, which makes the case that the Jesus story is the story of Titus. Of these, Caesar's Messiah is by far the best. While Carotta's work virtually ignores modern New Testament scholarship, Atwill is cognizant of it, though he does not locate his narrative within the scholarly paradigms. Caesar's Messiah reads the texts closely, has a fresh perspective, and many original insights. The result is a book that is informative and challenging, and will repay even those readers who reject his main thesis.

Atwill's main thesis is actually a combination of several ideas. First, he argues that the stories of Jesus in the New Testament are actually stories of Titus' campaign through Galilee and the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple. In this reading, the Gospels are clever satires created by the Flavian Emperors and their supporters. They thus function on the surface as religious tales, but the underlying story is actually a huge in-joke. Second, he argues that Josephus and the New Testament are essentially two sides of the same coin, one written in intimate relationship to the other. For example, discussing the sequence with the demoniac in Gadara/Gergasa, Atwill writes:

"The reason that the New Testament's demoniac of Gadara can be seen as a satire on Josephus' "tyrant" John and the battle at Gadara is simply because the two stories follow the same plot outline. In other words, the characters and events that can be seen as parallel occur in the same sequence. And it all occurs near Gadara. The satirical version in the New Testament tells the same story that Josephus does but, as is often the case with satire, the characters have different names."(p65)

In addition to the idea of satire and the close relationship between the NT and Josephus, this passage highlights another important theme of Atwill's: the importance of name switching among these texts. Discussing the famous passage about Jesus in Josephus, Atwill writes, citing Josephus himself:

"To solve the puzzle the reader must simply do as Decius Mundus recommends in the following chapter and 'value not this business of names.'"(p217)

The importance of this work lies in the originality of its reading of Josephus against the New Testament. Here Atwill's work resembles that of Cliff Carrington and other exegetes who have come to the conclusion that there is something highly suspicious about the way the two bodies of work are related. Atwill's strength is that not only has he pushed this line of insight farther than anyone else, he has constructed a full-fledged model to explain why this relationship exists. Hence, a good alternate title for this work might well have been There's Something Funky about the New Testament and Josephus.

After reviewing the history of the day, and exploring the links between the Flavians and early Christianity, Atwill lays out his thesis at the end of Chapter 2:

"The Gospels were designed to become apparent as satire as soon as they were read in conjunction with War of the Jews. In fact, the four Gospels and War of the Jews were created as a unified piece of literature whose characters and stories interact. Their interaction gives many of Jesus' sayings a comical meaning and also creates a series of puzzles whose solutions reveal the real identities of the New Testament's characters. Understanding the New Testament's comic level reveals, for example, that the Apostles Simon and John were cruel lampoons of Simon and John, the leaders of the Jewish rebellion."(p36)

Atwill concludes this chapter with a discussion of Mark 1 and Mark 5 and parallels to Titus' first battle on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

Chapter 3 gives us Atwill's discussion of the strange tale of Cannibal Mary. For readers who have read Josephus many times, Atwill's claim that she represents a parody of Christianity will come as a shock. Yet it is hard to see a woman named Mary who kills and eats her son in the manner of a Passover sacrifice as anything but a satire on the tale of Jesus as told in the Gospels. Atwill observes that the words in her mouth were placed there by Josephus, and if read as a satire on Christianity, they take on a new and portentous meaning:

"As to the war with the Romans, if they preserve our lives, we must be slaves. This famine also will destroy us, even before that slavery comes upon us. Yet are these seditious rogues more terrible than both the other. Come on; be thou my food, and be thou a fury to these seditious varlets, and a by-word to the world, which is all that is now wanting to complete the calamities of us Jews."(Whiston translation, cited on p46)

Why should anyone roasting and eating their own child expect it to be a "by-word to the world" and a fury to the "seditious varlets," the Jewish rebels? As Atwill points out, if this scene were in a piece of modern literature, it would instantly be seen by everyone as a parody of Christianity. Nor is Atwill the first scholar to have had this insight into the passage, for Honora H. Chapman noted parallels between the 'Cannibal Mary passage' in Josephus and the symbolic Passover Lamb of the Gospels in her SBL seminar paper 'A Myth for the World', Early Christian Reception of Infanticide and Cannibalism in Josephus' Bellum Judaicum' (2000).

Over the next few chapters Atwill then attempts to sort out the problem of who Jesus really was and solve the problem of the Empty Tomb. His thesis is that the Gospels were essentially written together, and thus, must be read together. Hence, he reads the Empty Tomb tale as four versions of the same tale, in parts, distributed across the various gospels:

"My analysis revealed that these four versions were intended to be read as a single story. This combined story is divided into two halves. One half consists of the visits to the tomb described in the Gospel of John. The other consists of the visits to the tomb described in the other three Gospels. In the combined story the individuals described in the Gospel of John meet the individuals described in the other three Gospels and, in their emotional state, the different groups mistake one another for angels. This comedy of errors causes the visitors to the empty tomb to mistakenly believe that their Messiah has risen from the dead."(p129)

The next few chapters cover the authors of the New Testament and how the tale was constructed. Then comes perhaps the most fascinating chapter in the work, his discussion of the Testamonium Flavianum (TF). Atwill's reading of this and its surrounding passages as a complex satire is perhaps the most revolutionary insight in the work. Unlike his allegorical reading of the New Testament, which is easy for the reader to swat away, Atwill's analysis of the TF and its companion passages will be impossible to ignore. Not only does his reading make sense of this section of the work, it is supported by strong linguistic and thematic links that will be difficult to refute. This chapter alone makes the book worth the price of admission.

But if a fresh and compelling look at the TF were not enough, Atwill offers in Chapter 13 a very interesting argument that Josephus has adjusted the dates of important events in his works to make them conform to the prophecies in Daniel.

Caesar's Messiah closes with a discussion of the Apostles and the Maccabees, and other parallels between the New Testament and events in Titus' campaign in Palestine prior to the destruction of Jerusalem. The coincidence of dates and names has also been noted by other authors, most recently in Jay Raskin's piece in the Journal of Higher Criticism on the Maccabees and early Christianity.

Atwill's prose is spare, even grim, and the book is refreshingly free of the silly attacks on New Testament scholars for being fools and scoundrels that tend to populate works of authors with out-of-the-mainstream ideas. Atwill usually is able to strike a sturdy posture that enables him to explain why no one has made all the connections he has (though a surprising amount of scholars have stumbled across pieces of the puzzle) without sounding triumphalist. My own view is that this work, intended for a lay audience, would have been even better had it presented some of the scholarly support for Atwill's specific claims (a companion volume aimed at scholars due out soon). There are some regrettable moments, such as the statistical analysis of the parallels on p224 that reads like something out of Erich Von Daniken, and the mistaken attribution of a quote on p296 to Jesus rather than to John the Baptist. Overall, the work is clearly structured and very accessible.

I doubt that the central thesis of Caesar's Messiah will find many takers; nor, ultimately, was this reader convinced. But many of the book's insights commend themselves to thoughtful reconstruction and deconstruction. Well worth the price of admission, both lay readers and scholars will be able to find something in Caesar's Messiah to challenge, to entertain, or simply to get the old gray matter back to pumping iron.

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Fascinating and I Believe He Is Absolutely Correct!
by Sheldon R. Waxman, South Haven, MI - March 10, 2005

Jesus never existed. If true, what does that do? It means that the Jewish Messiah is yet to come. I like that. And I really liked Atwill's book, which I read in its first version: "The Roman Origin of Christianity." I also met Mr. Atwill at a Book Expo convention. He is a mild and patient man, who has had the misfortune of exposing the Christian fraud. Not something that can be done without tremendous courage.

Moreover, the writing style is easy and not overly annotated and filled with scholarly expositions. It can be understood by anybody.

Since it is only a theory, albeit a theory with a lot of scientific evidence, it will be interesting to see the attack of the Christians and the Critics.

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