Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus [Paperback]

Joseph Atwill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 2005

I have purchased the rights to my work "Caesar's Messiah" from the publisher and in May 2011, I released a second edition known as The Flavian Signature Edition of this same title. This new edition contains two discoveries not in the first. The first is the confession of the Flavians that they invented Christianity. The second shows that a sequence in the Gospel of Luke is a virtually line by line symbolic representation of a section of Josephus. I refer to this discovery as the Flavian Signature in Luke, and believe it puts the question of who wrote the Gospels to rest.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"Challenging and provocative. If what Joseph Atwill is saying is only partially true, we are looking into the abyss."  -- Robert Eisenman, author of "James the Brother of Jesus"

Was Jesus the invention of a Roman emperor? The author of this ground-breaking book believes he was. "Caesar's Messiah" reveals the key to a new and revolutionary understanding of Christian origins.

The clues leading to its startling conclusions are found in the writings of the first-century historian Flavius Josephus, whose "War of the Jews" is one of the only historical chronicles of this period. Closely comparing the work of Josephus with the New Testament Gospels, "Caesar's Messiah" demonstrates that the Romans directed the writing of both. Their purpose: to offer a vision of a "peaceful Messiah" who would serve as an alternative to the revolutionary leaders who were rocking first-century Israel and threatening Rome.

Similarly, "Caesar's Messiah" will rock our understanding of Christian history as it reveals that Jesus was a fictional character portrayed in four Gospels written not by Christians but Romans.

About the Author

Joseph Atwill is the author of "The Roman Origin of Christianity" and "Caesar's Messiah". A German edition of "Caesar's Messiah" has been published by Ullstein under the title: "Das Messias Ratsel - (The Messiah Puzzle)" and will be released in September, 2008.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Ulysses Press (April 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1569754578
• ISBN-13: 978-1569754573
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,211,265 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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88 of 107 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful and Stimulating, June 12, 2005

By 

Michael Turton "NT Exegete" (Taichung, Taiwan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus (Paperback)

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.

26 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars but what about . . ., July 7, 2006

By 

William A. Poe "Poe" (Silver Spring, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus (Paperback)

Atwill could easily be correct in all that he says, but in order to be taken seriously, he needs to approach the subject from a broader viewpoint. A bit of respect for the scholarship of others would not hurt his cause, either. Here are a few of my issues with some of Atwill's premises.
1) Matthew, Mark, Luke and John only came together as a set in the early 4th century. Did the councils just happen to pick the very ones that were written together? Why do the other gospels not follow the patterns Atwill describes? Or do they? Atwill should not leave out a discussion of other Christian writings and how they relate to his theory. Either he should demonstrate that the pattern continues through all the works (including Acts and the Letters of Paul, not to mention Revelations), or explain why only the four "canonical" gospels should be considered.
2) So far, no Christian document predating the fall of Jerusalem has been uncovered. Still, one must account for the narratives purported to relate stories that occurred prior to Jerusalem's fall. Paul is shown in the documents attributed to him (and that describe him) as someone who interacted with James in Jersalem and others in Judea well before the final destruction of the temple. The traditions and stories about James (said to be a brother of Jesus) show that he was the "bishop of Jerusalem." Atwill quotes the Dead Sea Scroll scholar, Robert Eisenmann, on many occasions. It is difficult to read Eisenmann and not conclude that a historical James lived in Jerusalem and that he was at odds, theologically and personally, with Paul. How does this drama play out in Atwill's scenario that Christianity was invented out of whole cloth by the Flavians after 70 C.E.? If he does not think Paul or James actually existed, he needs to provide more discussion on the matter.
3) Atwill theorizes that Josephus and the gospels "play off" each other in ways that show they were written at the same time, if not by one person, then by a coordiated group of authors. Why is it not just as plausible to consider that Josephus used early materials as a "guide" to writing his history, thus "reflecting" the events and meanings of the earlier writings? Josephus was both a Roman and knowledgeable Jew who may have wanted to ridicule sects within his own faith as well as offer the possibility that his patrons, the Flavians, and Titus specifically, were the "God / Messiah" predicted by figures such as Jesus. Atwill makes a good point that after the destruction of the temple, the Flavians had access to many Jewish scribes and priests needing work.
4) Atwill makes much of the story about the Jewish zealot, Mary, who, it is said, devours her son and offers his flesh to Roman guards. But this is Josephus' story and he may have included, or invented, it for the very purpose of ridiculing Christians. Again, this could be a way of diffusing the Christian faith and making it a laughing matter to the Flavians. He was writing to please his Flavian masters. If some in the Flavian household had become Christian, this may have been part of the impetus to write a history that would make Christianity seem morbid and foolish. It is an alternative motive to the one Atwill provides.
5) Atwill presents a compelling explanation for the the "empty tomb" stories, suggesting they relate a "comedy of errors" based on various visits to the wrong tomb (an empty one) at different times of the morning. Atwill suggests that each visitor (within the stories) misinterpreted events - apostles being mistaken as angels or as Jesus himself, among other confusions. Atwill proposes this "combined reading" works as narrative because a single set of authors worked in concert to produce the stories. But couldn't this interpretation of events, when combining the stories, result from our own perception? Couldn't the seemingly logical reading be an artifact of the writers' needing to "make room" for the narrative he is reporting. I would presume that each oral tradition was slightly different and the writers of the Gospels (in the traditional view) could not know which was the most accurate. Therefore, each "visitation" had to occur at a different point in time, however slight (daybreak, just before daybreak, etc.). In this line of reasoning, the gospel writers did not want to have disciples running to the tomb in one account just as "the two Marys" are leaving the tomb in another author's account. This effort to accommodate all stories may have created the seeming comedy Atwill describes. However, I must add that this is my favorite portion of Atwill's book. To my knowledge no one has suggested a combined reading of the empty tomb narratives, nor to have drawn such attention to the different times of morning that each action takes place. Whatever the reasons for the time delays in visiting the empty tomb, it is conceivable to me that the gospel writers wanted to suggest the possiblity that the disciples had fooled themselves into seeing what they expected to see (one cannot know the beliefs of the scribes who produced the extant texts). Atwill points out the obvious - dead people do not rise from the grave, a fact as needless to state now as it would have been 2000 years ago. Therefore, the gospel accounts are either complete fiction as Atwill suggests, or relate events that led to a misunderstanding of reality as told to actual disciples by their senses. Or, most probably, they are simply stories that became more fantastic with each telling and literary artifacts of that re-telling can be interpreted as comedy by readers such as Atwill.
6) From the standpoint of anthropology, Atwill should study the nature of "revitalization movements." Atwill suggests that no "messiah" figure among the Jews of that period would have held the notions that we see Jesus preaching in the gospels. He note in particular these ideas: turn the other cheek; love thy enemy; and render unto Caesar. . . Atwill suggests these are Roman words put into the mouth of Jesus in an effort to diffuse Jewish rebelliousness and provide an alternative method of rebelling (a pacifist one). That could be, but Judea was a land under military occupation. Jewish culture was being challenged by force of might as well as idea. If Atwill were to read some of the works by anthropologist Anthony Wallace, among others, he would learn that in such situations it is common (expected even) for a charismatic figure to arise. These charismatic figures invariably preach a syncretic religion that encapsulates the highest ideals of the old religion while accommodating the beliefs of the occupiers. The Jesus movement has many parallels, for instance, with the Sun Myung Moon movement in Korea that arose during the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. During the U.S. military occupation of Native American lands in the 18th and 19th centuries, we see figures such as Handsome Lake arise among the Seneca in New York State.
Again, Atwill could be on to something, but he needs to find a more humble tone and a broader intellectual scope in order to be taken seriously. Caesar's Messiah is, at best, literary deconstruction leading toward historical speculation.

21 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Un-put-down-able!, August 23, 2005

By 

P. M. TILTON (Fargo, ND) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus (Paperback)

Jeri Nevermind should re-read her beloved Suetonius. The reference is to "CHRESTUS" -- not "Christus". Furthermore, Suetonius said that JEWS (not Christians) were expelled from Rome for RIOTING at the instigation of Chrestus. Does Jeri believe that "Christ", up in Heaven seated at the right hand of His Father, instigated a Jewish riot in Rome? "Turn the other cheek" indeed!

In all probability, those rioting Jews were acting on an impulse to strike back at Rome due to their Messianic fervor (the Greek word Christos is used to translate the Hebrew word Messiah/Machiach). Suetonius was relating an event involving the same sorts of Jewish Zealot/Sicarii/Maccabean/'freedom-fighters' that Titus Flavius sought to defang and declaw with his invented religion -- Christianity.

Atwill's book is devastatingly believable. Seeing the 'progress' of Jesus -- beginning at Mt. Gerizim... onwards to the 'calling' of his Apostles at the Sea of Galilee... thence to the incident at Gadara with the "demon-possessed" man, etc etc -- SEEING all this through the lens of the Flavius Josephus-Titus Flavius connection, leads to the realization that the supposed piety evinced by Jesus was in actuality a sick, vicious joke perpetrated on the downtrodden losers of the War of the Jews.

Josephus has always been a troublesome figure for Jews -- the turncoat who was adopted into the Flavian circle, who declared that Vespasian was the fulfillment of Jewish prophecies, and who took the side of the Romans against his own people. Think of how the French thought of the Vichy collaborators after the Allies drove the Nazis out of France -- if the Zealots HAD repulsed Rome and caught Josephus, he'd have been executed as a traitor to Judaism.

History is written by the winners -- and Titus' falsified scriptural pseudo-history (aided and abetted by Josephus' pro-Roman propagandistic works) was no exception. The DEAD SEA SCROLLS were those writings that reveal the undiluted views of the losers of that conflict: the Zealots, the "Sons of Light". Their texts were hidden away in jars in caves inaccessible to the world's scholars for 1,900 years. Their fervent beliefs (unfortunately for them) turned out to be false: their God did not save them from the evil pagans who, unable to force them to bend to their will, instead crushed them under their boots.

The 'progress' of Jesus on his 'ministry' EXACTLY parallels the military campaign of Titus, serving as a falsified 'prophetic' vicious satire which Rome's conquering warlord 'fulfilled' 40 years later, to the DAY (at least, according to Josephus' conveniently manufactured chronology of the War, designed to make it seem as if the prophet Daniel foretold Titus' triumph over the Jewish Zealots, synchronized with the invented timeline of Jesus, who is quoted as warning that the Temple would be destroyed in one generation -- the 40 years that would pass between his Crucifixion and the Fall of Masada.

Titus' invented religion took hold, and the "slaves" and "scum" who took to it did so because they didn't have the intellectual armor to guard against it. They were led to believe that a God-Man named Jesus lived decades earlier, who had prophesied that the "wicked" generation (of Jews) living then (c. 30-33 A.D.) would be destroyed... and, lo and behold, the writings of Josephus catalogue that very destruction, 'proving' that Christ was a true prophet! Virgil invented a pseudo-prophesy in Book 6 of the AENEID -- where his hero is shown a tableau of his yet-to-be-born descendants culminating in Caesar Augustus. Writing prophecy is EASY if you're writing after-the-fact, putting words in the mouth of a LITERARY CREATION who supposedly lived 40 years (or, in Virgil's case, over a thousand years) before the time of 'prophetic fulfilment'.

What did Titus do? He created a religion that was intended to domesticate the 'wild animal' that was Militant Judaism, the Zealot/Sicarii movement that sought to revivify the spirit of the Maccabeans, who succeeded in overthrowing Antiochus Epiphanes' pagan forces. The new religion -- a New Judaism -- would have a 'savior' who would preach SUBSERVIENCE to the ruling authorities (Rome). If it accomplished that, then that would be reason enough for him to do it.

Unfortunately, for the world, this new religion also gave us a legacy of religious-based and governmentally-enforced dogma that kept Europe stagnant for over a thousand years. The Dark Ages.

It also gave us another false religion: Islam. The Quran acknowledges that Jesus was a prophet of God, and that Mary was his mother... but Atwill's book shows (and proves, in my opinion) that the Jesus and Mary of New Testamental scripture are literary fictions. They never REALLY existed, save as grotesque (yet unrecognized, till now) parodies of the Zealot losers: the many 'Eleazar'-figures and the 'Mary'-figures, etc etc [read Atwill's book for his masterful explication of this topic]. Thus, Islam is also based on lies, since the so-called 'prophet' Mohammed believed the fiction -- created literarily by Titus' circle, including Josephus -- that 'Jesus' and 'Mary' existed.

I couldn't put the book down, it was that compelling. Jeri (above) states: "Nor does [Atwill] bother to explain how he imagines Christianity was disseminated to the Jews, other than a quick paragraph speculating on false priests talking to slaves." The whole point, Jeri, is that Christianity was disseminated to those who were considered "scum" and "slaves" -- the gullible wretches who were NOT literate. By the time Titus manufactured the defanged Messianic religion of Christianity, most of the hardcore Zealots were DEAD. The Roman armies had already massacred them wholesale and destroyed their Temple as well as their royal family (the Maccabees). It was to prevent a FUTURE outbreak of MORE Jewish anti-Roman violent Messianism that Titus cooked up Christianity. If Zealots fought against Rome, they lost -- paying for their 'wicked' disobedience with their lives. Those who were cowed by Rome's might -- those who accepted the 'meek' and 'humble' savior that Jesus was designed to be -- would live... They'd live the life of a slave. They'd pay their taxes, even IF the coins had the 'graven image' of a Roman Emperor on it (the "divine"/"divus" 'god', the enforced worship of which was the very CAUSE of the Jewish Zealot movement in the first place).

There will come a time when more and more people will come across the evidence Atwill (and others) have put forth proving the ludicrousness of their invented religions... and maybe, just maybe, Mankind will shrug off all this nonsense. The fear of a non-existent 'God' threatening a non-existent 'Hell' -- it will all, eventually, be relegated to the foolish, superstitious Past, just as belief in Thor and Vulcan and Apollo and Quetzalcoatl has disappeared into the bin of "myth".

Atwill's book is challenging reading. I challenge any and every Christian to read it with a critical eye. The next time they take 'Communion' -- humbly eating that wafer fed to them servilely by a robed 'holy' man -- perhaps they'll remember Chapter 3 of Atwill's book ["The Son of Mary Who Was a Passover Sacrifice"] where he quotes the passage of Josephus' WARS OF THE JEWS (VI:iii)... describing a woman named Mary (a 'name' that means 'Jewish Female Rebel') who, during a war-induced famine, had to resort to CANNIBALISM of her own Son! Atwill's book shows that this account told by Josephus is yet one more parallel of Titus' military campaign to the Jesus myth -- the very FULFILLMENT of that invented prophetic myth of Jesus-as-Passover-Lamb made into a Eucharistic meal.

A sick, vile joke... told by the winners (Titus, et al.) at the expense of the losers (the Jews who rebelled against Rome). Titus has been laughing in his grave for two millennia at the gullibility of the devout believers in the b.s. religion he invented. John Boorman's film "ZARDOZ" bears an eerie similarity plot-wise: a man (Arthur Frayn) invents a religion based on the ancient forgotten children's book "The Wizard of Oz" in order to control the 'brutals' who live in the devastated wilderness.

I could go on and on and on... Read Atwill's book, then RE-read the New Testament and Josephus and the 'Church Fathers' who used circular logic to claim that Josephus' histories prove the divinity of Christ! This book will pull off the wool that has been pulled over the eyes of the world.

A magnificent accomplishment!