I am posting this five-star review in support of Joe Atwill and in opposition to the many vicious and personal attacks that have been posted on the Internet against him. Atwill's most severe critics are atheists, humanists and freethinkers from the Christ Mythicist camp, such as Robert Price, Richard Carrier, and Tom Verenna, who (one might imagine) would be his natural allies. However: finding his arguments unconvincing, they seem to fear being tarred with guilt by association, and thus they want to establish their distance from him. This is a shame, because Atwill's ideas deserve attention from a broader cross-section of informed scholars who might be in a position to move the theory forward, as well as from lay people who can consider the case on its own merits.
Atwill's book is a brilliantly original reading of the Gospels and early Christian history, taken together with the works of Josephus. He shows that Josephus contains several dark satires and puzzles that display an intimate knowledge of the Christian gospels, and also that the Gospels are constructed as both prophecy and fulfillment of the military campaigns of Titus as described in Josephus' Jewish War. The New Testament is shown to be so interwoven with the secular history of Josephus, that neither could possibly have priority: these documents must have been composed together, and with the combined purpose of conveying an occulted message that Vespasian and Titus, emperors of Rome, were the true fulfillment of the Jewish prophecies of a coming Messiah. Solving a cross-textual puzzle, Atwill claims that these ancient works contain a confession that they were written by the families of the Flavians of Rome, the Herodians (kings of Judaea) and the Alexanders (wealthy Jewish merchants and philosophers of Egypt.)
The critics claim that this reading in no way reflects the original intent of the authors, but rather is a product of Atwill's allegedly overactive imagination combined with a lack of rational critical facilities. They hold that Atwill's proposal is impossible on its face, and also that Atwill's evidence is bogus beyond all redemption. However, I must disagree on both counts, as I will now explain in some detail. Specifically I will be discussing Richard Carrier's review, since Price has been answered elsewhere, and Verenna is basically more of the same. Carrier's review is found at: [...]
Carrier states that the prior probability of Atwill's thesis is extremely low, based on "eight general problems" which are as follows:
(1) "The Roman aristocracy was nowhere near as clever as Atwill’s theory requires. They certainly were not so masterfully educated in the Jewish scriptures and theology that they could compose hundreds of pages of elegant passages based on it…."
My response: Perhaps Vespasian and Titus weren't, but their allies (Josephus, the Alexanders, and the Herods) certainly were. The Alexanders were supremely wealthy and powerful Diaspora Jews who were also highly educated and informed commentators on the Jewish religion. The famous philosopher Philo was a member of this family. Obviously the Herodians, rulers of the Jews, would have made it a point to be well-informed about the Jewish scriptures. Eisenman argues that Paul was of the Herodian family, and I suspect Atwill would agree. And the Flavians rose to power in Rome from a base in the East, in the midst of the Jewish War, with the Alexanders playing a role as king-makers. These three families were eminently qualified to initiate the New Testament; it's hard to imagine any better qualified group of people. Vespasian saw himself as a fulfillment of the Star Prophecy of the Hebrew Old Testament, as Josephus prophesied that he would be. So, the Gospels make perfect sense as a product of that context.
In general, Carrier's rhetoric is strangely reminiscent of the tactics of denial and obfuscation used by mainstream media and government apologists, against evidence of elite criminality and deceit in more modern cases such as the JFK assassination and the 9/11/2001 "terrorist" attacks. If you don't buy the official story in those cases, you're exactly the sort of "crank" that could learn a lot by reading Atwill. Whereas if you aren't yet convinced of the evidence of elite conspiracy in those cases, Atwill might not be the place for you to start: in modern examples, the evidence trail is much warmer.
(2) "We know there were over forty Gospels, yet the four chosen for the canon were not selected until well into the 2nd century, and not by anyone in the Roman aristocracy. Likewise which Epistles were selected."
My response: The difference between the canonical Gospels and the others, is like the difference between the original Star Wars movies and all of the fan fiction flicks on You-tube. I don't believe there was ever any doubt which ones would be the winners. The epistles are more widely varied, and Atwill makes no claims that all were the genuine article (that is, written by the original conspirators).
(3) "The Gospels and the Epistles all contradict each other far too much to have been composed with a systematic aim in mind. Indeed, they contradict each other in ways that often demonstrate they are deliberately arguing with each other…."
My response: Yes, the Gospels were written with varying intents, and for varying audiences. Each Gospel was more than likely written by a different author. The existence of a conspiracy doesn't create a mind control field that completely suppresses all difference of opinion and all independence of thought. If Atwill is correct that the Flavians, Herodians and Alexanders all had a hand in concocting the New Testament, then obviously these families had their own agendas and their own power base, even while working towards a common goal.
(4) "The Gospels and the Epistles differ far too much in style to have come from the same hand, and many show signs of later doctoring that would problematize attempts to confirm any theory like Atwill’s…."
My response: Where does Atwill claim that all the Gospels and Epistles come from the same hand? Or that they didn't suffer some corruption in their journey from the original signature copies to our most ancient surviving manuscripts? The only reason Carrier would make an argument like this, is because he refuses to read the book.
(5) "Christianity was probably constructed to 'divert Jewish hostility and aggressiveness into a pacifist religion, supportive of–and subservient to–Roman rule,' but not by Romans, but exasperated Jews like Paul, who saw Jewish militarism as unacceptably disastrous in contrast with the obvious advantages of retooling their messianic expectations to produce the peaceful moral reform of society….”
My response: Paul, the Herods and the Alexanders certainly were "exasperated Jews" with the goal of "retooling… messianic expectations." I don't think Atwill could've said this any better himself, except that Carrier doesn't recognize that this was a key goal of the Flavians as well.
(6) "Pacifying Jews would not have been possible with a cult that eliminated Jewish law and accepted Gentiles as equals, and in actual fact Christianity was pretty much a failure in Palestine. Its success was achieved mainly in the Diaspora, where the Romans rarely had any major problems with the Jews."
My response: The possibility that Jewish revolutionary fervor could spread from Judea into the Diaspora, would have been an obvious concern for the Romans, even if it hadn't happened much yet in the 1st century. The Jewish religion of the time was virulently evangelical and tremendously successful everywhere in the Hellenistic world.
Atwill would certainly agree that the Greek New Testament as we know it was targeted at the Diaspora. In fact, this is one of the arguments he gives in favor of the Roman origins theory: why would Aramaic-speaking Palestinian Jews write their testament in Greek?
(7) "If the Roman elite’s aim was to “pacify” Palestinian Jews by inventing new scriptures, they were certainly smart and informed enough to know that that wouldn’t succeed by using the language the Judean elite despised as foreign (Greek)."
My response: We know that there were Jewish Christian sects (possibly beginning with the Jerusalem church of Peter and James described in the NT) and we know that they eventually failed, evolving into sects such as the Ebionites, Nazarians, Mandaeans and Manicheans. However, we have little evidence of what textual sources those early Jewish Christian sects might have used, or to what extent they might have been influenced by the Roman conspiracy described by Atwill.
And supposing that the Romans also attempted to pacify Palestinian Jews by bombarding them with Aramaic-language Christian documents, and that attempt was an utter failure -- why would that be surprising, or in any way contrary to Atwill's thesis? Governments bungle their social engineering projects at least as often as they succeed.
(8) “The Romans knew one thing well: War. Social ideology they were never very good at….”
My response: On the contrary, the ancient Roman religion was very effective in creating a sense of social cohesion among the core members of Roman society. It was based on ritual and tradition, and maintenance of right relations between the gods and the community. The approval of the gods was always sought and said to be obtained for every major action.
However, Roman religion was not effective among non-Romans, in competition with religions such as Judaism which offered a sense of social justice and equity as one of God's demands; nor with Hellenistic mystery cults which offered a route to personal salvation.
Vespasian's rise to power in Rome was in some aspects a victory of the Diaspora and of enlightened Hellenistic and Judaic philosophy, displacing the ancient Roman ways. This took several centuries to become fully visible, but a trend was established at that time; although the amount of justice, equity and truth extended to the slaves and commoners was strictly limited and cosmetic in nature, rather than a truly egalitarian and progressive movement.
Based on all of this, I find the "prior probability" of Atwill's thesis to be quite reasonably high, contrary to Carrier and other critics who find the proposal laughable on its face. But of course the heart of Atwill's book is the evidence he provides, based on the texts of the New Testament, Josephus, and other records of the time.
In the remainder of his review, Carrier takes on only three of Atwill's major arguments from textual evidence.
Firstly, Atwill points out that Titus' campaign begins at the Sea of Gallilee in a sea battle in which his enemy's ships are destroyed and the rebels are killed in the sea like fish; while Jesus begins at the same place, where he calls for his apostles to become "fishers of men". This parallel is underscored by a pun: Josephus refers to the Coracin fish, while Jesus refers to the town of Chorazain. This pun is where Carrier focuses his attack, claiming that the Greek words don't match at all and that "No one could possibly have imagined a pun being intended between these two words or references." Carrier goes on to assert that Atwill, by choosing this example, proves that he doesn't know Greek: which is denied in Atwill's autobiographical material in the book, which claims that he learned Greek during his youth in a Jesuit school in Japan.
My response: Supposing that you are looking at a poem, such as:
Atwill says that Coracin's
a Flavian pun on Chorazain;
Carrier shouts that "Atwill lies!"
But I believe my eyes.
Leaving aside the question of my limited skills as a poet: surely anyone can see that the word "lies" rhymes with the word "eyes", even though out of four letters, there are only two in common. And the rhyme, I can guarantee you, is a function of the author's (my) intention.
Putting this in more mathematical terms, and looking at the Greek:
KAPPA-omicron-rho-alpha-KAPPA-iota-nu
CHI-omicron-rho-alpha-ZETA-iota-nu
The two words both have seven letters. Out of those, five are identical. Over the set of letters in the greek alphabet, we could define a metric of distance of one letter to another based on the configuration of the vocal apparatus necessary to produce the sound; using that metric, kappa and chi would be closer together than most random pairs of letters, and similarly for kappa and zeta.
If you were to choose any two words at random from a Greek corpus, they wouldn't be any where near this close to each other, by any reasonable distance metric. In fact, from what little Greek I do know, the English transliterations look like a pretty accurate phonetic representation of the two words, and they're almost the same phonetically.
Furthermore, on a Zipf distribution of Greek words, both Coracin and Chorazain would be extremely low-frequency words. That increases the statistical significance of their appearing together in a parallel context.
Atwill has been accused of "multiple comparisons", but how many passages are there in Josephus that invoke the "fisher of men" motif? And how many in the New Testament evoke this same theme? That is the very small set from which this comparison is being drawn. As Carrier points out, the "fisher of men" schema appears in Homer, so that could be a common source; but the incidence of this Coracin / Chorazain pair confirms that the parallel is being consciously implemented by either Josephus or Matthew or both.
In the next parallel: a Gospel story in which Jesus meets a demon-possessed man, and carries out an exorcism in which the demons are driven out of the man into a herd of swine, which run into the sea and drown themselves, is compared to Josephus' story about a rebel leader, John, who incites a large number of the Sicarii into revolt. The rebels are attacked by Vespasian and driven into the Jordan River, where many drown. Once again, Carrier blusters and claims he can't see the obvious parallel, and then focuses on a triviality: the location of the incident. Josephus says it happened at Gadara, and most modern translations of Matthew say the same. However, other sources give Gerasa or Gesara as the location.
Carrier argues that "almost certainly" the original autograph read Gesara. There's a lot of room for debate in that phrase "almost certainly", since the simple fact is that we don't have that original autograph, all we have are texts from literally hundreds of years later. So where those surviving manuscripts disagree, really we are forced to resort to conjecture. Carrier reproduces the text of an email debate in which he attempts to bully Atwill into submission on this point -- but rather than conceding, Atwill resorts to some rather dubious geographical arguments about the possible location of Gadara, argues that demon-possessed pigs could easily run six miles to the sea, and discusses a quote about Origen's opinion on the issue. Atwill seems to be working with a different version of this quote than Carrier, or perhaps he completely misreads it; but this discussion seems to be what convinced Carrier that Atwill is a "Crank".
And it is not to Atwill's credit, that after having held this discussion with Carrier, he failed to include this information about variant readings in the most recent edition of his book. It's Atwill's job, not only to give the arguments in favor of his view, but also to disclose problems.
The final parallel discussed in Carrier's review: Josephus' story of a woman named Mary who is forced by hunger to kill and eat her baby, in a macabre re-enactment of the meal of a lamb at Jewish passover. It seems that everyone agrees that Josephus is constructing a typological and literary parallel, and the question is whether the parallel is sufficiently explained by Old Testament sources, or whether the passage also betrays a knowledge of the New Testament.
Here, at least, Carrier is not blind to the parallel. However, in his argument that Josephus based this parable entirely on the Old Testament, Carrier also does a fundamental dis-service to his readers, by his complete failure to describe any of Atwill's demonstration of the specific parallels to the New Testament. In my view, this is at least as "Cranky" as anything Atwill does in his discussion about Gadara. But, giving Carrier the benefit of the doubt, the problem might be simply that Carrier refuses to read the book. So I will sum up Atwill's argument as cogently as I can.
Atwill points out that Josephus describes the incident as "so portentous to posterity, but that I have innumerable witnesses to it in my own age." Why would this event be "portentous to posterity" and how would Josephus have "innumerable witnesses"? Although the event was reportedly discussed among many, there could be at most a modestly countable number of the "seditious" who witnessed the Cannibal Mary in the act of eating her son, and no witnesses at all to Mary's speech, or the actual event. Atwill doesn't specifically point this out, but the reference to "innumerable witnesses" seems to be a reference to the multitudes who reportedly witnessed Jesus' resurrection, which indeed was a myth "portentous to posterity".
Mary describes the event as a "myth for the world", and a "fury to the varlets" that would "complete the calamities of the Jews". Atwill further sees a pun on the words "mythos" (myth), "mysos" (an atrocity), and "misos" (inspiring bitter hatred, in this case the bitter hatred by the Romans against the Jews.) This again seems uncalibrated and inappropriate as a commentary on the plight of the starving Jews; but if it's talking about the anti-Semitic effects of the Christian myth against the Jews, it is tremendously perceptive, if not prescient.
The Josephus passage is not, however, only a diffuse reference to New Testament in general. According to Atwill, it is also tied to the synoptic pericope of Luke 10:38-42 and John 12:2-3. In this NT pericope we meet Lazarus, supposedly just raised from the dead. However, he's been dead for 4 days, which is one day later than his soul would have departed from his body, according to Jewish lore. So unless you're inclined to believe in very unlikely miracles (from either a Gentile or Jewish perspective), Lazarus is nothing but a dead body.
In the story, we also meet Mary, who is served a meal of "the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her." This, of course, is exactly the same portion which Cannibal Mary has saved for herself of the child. And if Lazarus is dead, "they made him a supper" can only mean one thing.
The gestalt seems clear enough. In Josephus, Mary is eating her child; in the NT pericope, Mary is eating the body of Lazarus, who allegedly was resurrected but is obviously dead; and according to Christianity's spiritualized interpretation, the believers are eating the body of Christ the son of Mary, after his alleged resurrection on the third day. The central and distinctive themes of the Eucharist and its macabre association to cannibalism, the Passover sacrifice of Jesus, and the Resurrection. But it's also pulled together by the very specific verbal motif of the "good portion… not taken away." This is a powerful parallel, and yields a remarkable if macabre interpretation. Yet Carrier won't have any of it.
And this is where Carrier's review comes to a stop. Which is unfortunate, because there is much, much more in the book. Don't make the same mistake as Carrier, and refuse to read it.
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Top reviews from other countries
- S. KellyReviewed in the United Kingdom on October 23, 2021
Will you all wake up now?
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