Comment: Most of the arguments in this video make a lot of sense, but the dating issue is the most critical. According to Joseph Atwill, the author of Caesar's Messiah, Christianity was invented by Josephus and other court historians working for the Flavian emperors in Rome. If it can be shown that the religion was already in existence before the Flavians came to power, this would completely destroy Atwill's theory.
The Flavian emperors were Vespasian and his two sons, Titus and Domitian, who reigned in that order. Vespasian, the first Flavian, took power in AD 69, the Year Of The Four Emperors, a period of chaotic civil war that followed the death of Nero. So, if Atwill is to be believed, the very earliest that Christianity could have appeared would be AD 69.
Note: I'm using the year of Vespasian's ascension as an absolute bottom line. Obviously, if the Flavians invented Christianity, it couldn't have existed before the first Flavian emperor appeared in 69 AD.
The question is: were the Christians around before the Flavians arrived on the scene? As it turns out, this isn't an easy question to answer. As far as I know, there is no hard archaeological evidence that can be used to establish when Christianity first appeared. All we have are documents and the dating and authenticity of these documents have been the subject of a lot of debate ever since they were discovered.
For example, no one is quite sure when the gospels were written. The suggested dates are all over the place. According to one source I found, the gospel of Mark was written sometime between 37 to 100 AD, but another source claims it was written between 68 and 73 AD. The variation in the dating of the other gospels is just as bad, so they can't be used to determine if Christianity appeared before Vespasian took power.
There appears to be less variation in the dates assigned to the letters of Paul, which I believe are generally considered to be earlier than the gospels. Most of the sources I've found say that the letters were written sometime between roughly 40 to 70 AD, which would place most of them well before the Flavian dynasty. However, the dates of the letters appear to be based on tentative chronologies of Paul's career which were apparently reconstructed using internal evidence in the letters themselves. Atwill has argued that the Flavians who invented Christianity wrote the gospels in such a way that they would appear to be older than they seemed to be. This was done so that they could accurately predict "future" events which had already happened at the time the gospels were fabricated. The same argument could be made for the letters of Paul.
Tacitus is a completely different matter, however. This is where Atwill's theory runs into trouble. In a famous passage in the Annals, Tacitus describes the Great Fire of Rome and how it was blamed on the Christians:
"As a consequence, to get rid of the report [that he had started the fire], Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace." -- Tacitus, Annals, XV.45, Modern Library, Trans. Church & Brodribb.
Tacitus goes on to briefly describe the Christians--how they followed Christus, who was crucified by Pontius Pilatus during the reign of Tiberius. As far as I can tell, this passage in Tacitus is considered authentic and one of the earliest non-Christian references to Jesus and the Christians in existence. If authentic, it definitely establishes the fact that there was already a Christian community living in Rome in 64 AD--five years before Vespasian took power. And that means that Caesar's Messiah is wrong.
This is about as close to a smoking gun as we're likely to find in this case. At the very least, the existence of this passage in Tacitus raises a major problem for Atwill's theory. His only way out, as far as I can see, is to argue that the passage is inauthentic, perhaps inserted into the Annals by Christian writers at a much later date. That could very well be true, but until he can produce evidence to support that claim, it looks like Caesar's Messiah is dead on arrival.
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