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 (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #145,619 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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89 of 108 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.

22 of 27 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!

21 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How the Flavian Emperors Wrote the Gospels, March 13, 2005

By 

John Hudson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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

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 NT 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.