Ancient World Review

Jesus Cult Conspiracy Theories (Updated)

The obscure origins of the Christian religion make it a natural subject for "hidden history" conspiracy theories. Dozens, if not hundreds of books have been written over the years, arguing, among other things, that Jesus was a magic mushroom, a solar deity, an Essene or a guerilla fighter sanitized to make him more palatable to the Romans. Some authors claim that Jesus was actually the deified Julius Caesar or that the gospels were propaganda written by the Flavian emperors to help pacify a rebellious province. Whatever the argument, the scarcity of original sources and the ambiguous nature of the evidence leave a lot of room for entertaining speculation.

Very little is known about the original Jesus cult during the first few centuries of its existence. No one really knows when the "official" canonical gospels were written, but the general consensus is that they appeared sometime after the middle to late first century, at least thirty or forty years after Jesus's death. Matthew and Luke are thought to have been written from an earlier account commonly referred to as the "Q document," which as far as I know has never been discovered. Its existence is assumed based on similarities in the manuscripts.

As for Jesus himself, the only independent documentary evidence (from the first few centuries AD) that he even existed consists of  a handful of references in Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, and a few others. Most of these references, however, are about the Christians as a group, so they don't really support the existence of a historical Jesus. As far as I can tell, the only direct references to Jesus are found in Jewish Antiquities by Josephus and the Annals of Tacitus, but their authenticity has been challenged and Tacitus refers to a Christus (or Chrestus in some translations) rather than a Jesus. They could be insertions made by later Christian writers -- when it comes to ancient sources, you can't take anything for granted. Classical writers weren't very reliable to begin with and the church wasn't above forging references, gospels, apocalypses, epistles and martyr stories in order to market their new religion. For an interesting and extremely detailed description of the "Christian Forgery Mill," see "Forgery In Christianity: A Documented Record Of The Foundations Of The Christian Religion," by Joseph Wheless. Highly recommended.

Video from 2015. I can also recommend Ehrman's book Forged. Very interesting stuff.

Christian origins get even more complicated when you consider all the parallels that exist between Christian doctrine and various Near Eastern fertility cults, Zoroastrianism, astrology, Roman and Egyptian mystery religions and Jewish ascetic, messianic and apocalyptic groups in existence at the time. These parallels aren't very surprising because all of these different movements appeared in the same general landscape, but they provide fertile ground for alternate histories.

Almost everything we know about the rise of Christianity comes from texts and there are a lot of missing sources and "secret doctrines" so popular with conspiracy theorists. Besides the books in the "official" New Testament, there's a huge body of apocryphal literature which reflects the existence of dozens of "heretical" groups like the Gnostics which were gradually suppressed, often by violent means, as the Roman Catholic Church consolidated its control and standardized Christian dogma. More recent discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls fill in some of the historical context, but the general picture is still hazy and confused. "Suppressed gospels" and alternate histories have inspired books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the inspiration for the bestselling Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

The rest of this 2010 interview can be found here.

If Jesus was a real person, he lived during an extremely turbulent period of history.  Rome conquered Judea in the first century BC, allying itself with the Maccabees and later using the Herodians as client kings. The Jews revolted in 66 AD and Jerusalem was eventually destroyed around 70 AD by the future emperor Titus, son of Vespasian. Titus took over the suppression of the Jewish revolt, a bloody conflict documented by Josephus in his classic history "The Jewish War," after Vespasian returned to Rome to stake his claim to the throne during the Year Of The Four Emperors in 69 AD.

It was a chaotic time of civil wars and bloody revolutions. The Jewish population in Jerusalem was either massacred, enslaved or scattered around the world (the Diaspora) and the temple was destroyed. The Jews (some of them, anyway) were in almost constant rebellion against the Romans and their puppet rulers in Judea during Jesus' lifetime and the desert was crawling with self-proclaimed messiahs. The idea that a religion like Christianity, preaching peace, forgiveness and universal brotherhood, would appear in this context is surprising, to say the least. "Render unto Caesar" could be seen as treason and collaboration to a population living under a brutal occupation. The Jews were waiting for a military messiah, a descendant of King David who would lead them out of bondage, not some hippy claiming to be the Son of God, which they would have considered blasphemy.

This secular background has inspired a series of books arguing that the real Jesus was actually a military messiah, a guerrilla fighting the Roman occupation. I read several of these books years ago, but I can't remember their titles. The best summation of the argument can probably be found in two chapters written by the anthropologist Marvin Harris in his book "Cows, Pigs, Wars And Witches". Both chapters ("Messiahs" and "The Secret Of The Prince Of Peace") fill in the historical context and argue that Jesus was a revolutionary transformed into a peaceful messiah by later writers in order to protect their underground resistance movement from the Romans. This is plausible enough as far as it goes, but the theory discounts the actual message of the gospels. If there's a hidden message in the New Testament, there's also a surface message which can't simply be dismissed as a kind of cover story designed to conceal an ancient conspiracy.

Speaking of conspiracies, Joseph Atwill's book "Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy To Invent Jesus" argues that Christianity was actually the invention of the Flavian Emperors -- Vespasian, Titus and Domitian -- the same Romans who crushed the Jewish rebellion. Faced with the problem of Jewish resistance in the province and elsewhere, the Flavian court (which included the turncoat Josephus) invented the story of a "peaceful messiah" as a form of counter-propaganda to the more militant religious doctrines causing so much trouble in Judea. According to Atwill, the gospels also include a coded message which reveals that the figure of Jesus in the New Testament is actually Titus -- a kind of Roman inside joke. This hidden message can supposedly be unraveled by reading the gospels together with Josephus' account of the war and deciphering the parallels. Atwill's book makes an interesting read and I particularly like his idea that the gospels were a form of early propaganda designed to pacify a rebellious population. Unfortunately, his argument depends on the numerous parallels which are supposed to exist between the gospels and Josephus and these are obscure, to say the least.

"Jesus Was Caesar" by Franceso Carotta also uses parallels to make its argument that Jesus Christ is actually "the historical manifestation of Divus Julius," i.e., the Divine Julius Caesar. The basic idea is that the Christian religion is a modified version of the cult of the Divine Caesar and that the gospels are a mythologized biography of Caesar from the time of the Roman Civil War to his assassination. In other words, the gospels are seen once again as a kind of code which can only be interpreted by reading them in conjunction with other books. Caesar was made an Imperial God after his death, but his cult disappeared around the time that Christianity emerged. "On the one hand, an actual historical figure missing his cult, on the other, a cult missing its actual historical figure: intriguing mirror images." Intriguing, yes, but is it actually true? Who knows? Like Atwill's book, whether you accept it or not depends on how strong these "mirror images" actually are.

"The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross" by John Allegro takes a different approach. This is a fascinating, scholarly and difficult book. Allegro believes that Christianity originated in a very ancient Near Eastern fertility cult centered around the use of the hallucinogenic mushroom amanita muscaria. If I understand Allegro's argument correctly (and I'm not sure I do), Christianity evolved as a kind of "false front" to protect the truth about the cult and its practices from the Romans, and its sacred texts are supposed to be full of references to the magic mushroom. Once again, Christianity is seen as a code to be deciphered, an esoteric, multi-layered conspiracy. This is an excellent book, but Allegro bases his theory almost entirely on linguistic arguments, "deciphering the names of gods, mythological characters...and plant names..." by tracing them back to their Sumerian roots, and the average reader will have a hard time verifying or even following his arguments. Still, if there's nothing to this, how do you explain the mushrooms in Christian iconography? For example, a fresco in the Chapel of Plaincouralt, France, shows Adam and Eve standing next to what definitely appears to be a giant mushroom. That's kind of peculiar, to say the least.

Hidden Christian history covers a huge amount of territory. I've only summarized three books, but there are literally hundreds of them available and I've only scratched the surface. For example, "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold" by Acharya S argues that Christianity was "created by members of various secret societies, mystery schools and religions in order to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion." Her book "Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled" explores the use of solar symbolism in world religions, arguing that Jesus is actually a sun deity. Whether you buy any of these various theories is irrelevant. The whole period is so interesting that they're worth reading just for their wealth of background information.

Trying to separate truth from fiction in these theories is an almost impossible task unless you want to spend the rest of your life tracking down sources and doing your own research. The problem comes when you step back and look at all the books that are out there -- all the different theories. One book, taken by itself, can be very convincing, but when you take them all together, it's obvious that they contradict each other in hundreds of different ways and the net effect is literary white noise -- a flood of information, speculation, questionable evidence and mutually exclusive conclusions. In this sense, the hidden history of Christianity is like the JFK assassination: an intractable mystery. The record's too sketchy and complex to come to any solid conclusions, but it doesn't really matter. Most people, as usual, will end up believing exactly what they want to believe and what they were raised to believe.

The most basic question about Jesus is whether he actually existed. Most of these theories about "who he really was" simply melt away if he's just another mythical character like all the other gods of the ancient world.

Joseph Atwill: Saint Veronica Is Actually Princess Berenice - Mistress Of Titus

This short clip about Princess Berenice, the mistress of the Roman emperor Titus, and her supposed identity with Veronica of the Stations of the Cross, is from the bonus materials included with the Caesar's Messiah documentary by Joseph Atwill. 

Note: Atwill's 2011 book, Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus, argues that the Christian religion was created by the Flavian emperors as counter-propaganda to the anti-Roman Jewish Messianism which was causing so much trouble in Palestine at the time.

Atwill's theories are interesting, I guess, but they tend to fall apart when you get into the details. For instance, in this particular case there doesn't seem to be any connection between the Saint Veronica of Catholic tradition and Berenice, Titus' mistress, other than their names. Veronica is the Latin version of Berenice (or Bernice -- I'm not sure how it's supposed to be spelled), but the fact that the names are the same doesn't really mean anything.

Atwill's argument assumes that the figure of Veronica existed in Christianity when the religion was first created (supposedly) by the Flavians. After all, if Veronica was actually Berenice, Titus' mistress, and the whole point of including her was to plant a clue as to the true origins of the religion, then she must have been inserted into Christianity during the reign of the Flavians.

Unfortunately for Atwill's argument, there is no mention of Veronica in the Gospels--not according to the Catholic Encyclopedia at least--and the Stations of the Cross tradition seems to have originated during the Middle Ages, perhaps during the Crusades. The whole story is apparently a medieval legend and it has a lot of similarities with the story of the Shroud of Turin.

In the Stations of the Cross tradition, a woman later identified as Saint Veronica gave Jesus her veil to wipe his face while he was being led off to execution. When he gave it back to her, the image of his face had been left imprinted on the veil. The "Veil of Veronica" was supposed to have healing powers like the Shroud of Turin, but the legend apparently never caught on in a big way and a lot of Catholics don't believe the story's authentic.

If the legend originated during the Crusades, the Veil of Veronica was probably just another pious fraud invented by the Crusaders, who brought back all sorts of "holy relics" in order to make a profit off the gullible and superstitious peasants back in Europe.

Atwill's theory that Veronica refers to Titus' mistress collapses entirely if the figure of St. Veronica was created during the Middle Ages, and that seems to be exactly what happened.

The legend of Veronica is based on a miracle reported in the gospel of Luke (and Matthew?) where an unnamed woman "was healed by touching the hem of Jesus’s garment (Luke 8:43–48)..." (Wikipedia) This woman was "later identified as Veronica by the aprocryphal Acts of Pilate," thought to have been written around the middle of the 4th century AD, i.e., almost 300 years after the death of Domitian, the last Flavian emperor.

The church historian Eusebius (260/265 – 339/340 AD) described the origins of the legend of Veronica. Interestingly, she was originally only called Veronica in the East while she was known by a completely different name in the West:

"Eusebius in his Historia Ecclesiastica (vii 18) tells how at Caesarea Philippi lived the woman whom Christ healed of an issue of blood (Matthew 9:20-22). Legend was not long in providing the woman of the Gospel with a name. In the West she was identified with Martha of Bethany; in the East she was called Berenike, or Beronike, the name appearing in as early a work as the 'Acta Pilati', the most ancient form of which goes back to the fourth century." Source: Encyclopedia Britannica (quoted by Wikipedia).

Note: It's unclear, at least to me, how the bleeding woman healed by Jesus morphed into the Veronica who wiped off his sweat and blood with her veil, but we're dealing with a muddled tradition here that evolved over the centuries.

As for the Stations of the Cross ritual, it apparently originated with the pilgrimages to Jerusalem. According to Wikipedia, "The earliest use of the word 'stations', as applied to the accustomed halting-places in the Via Sacra [the route the pilgrims followed] at Jerusalem, occurs in the narrative of an English pilgrim, William Wey, who visited the Holy Land in the mid-15th century, and described pilgrims following the footsteps of Christ to the cross."

Conclusion: I don't see how St. Veronica could actually be Berenice, Titus' mistress, if the woman in question wasn't even given a name until the Acts of Pilate were written some 300 years after the death of the last Flavian emperor. If Atwill is aware of some earlier documents, he should cite them. Otherwise, his whole argument boils down to the fact that the names are the same. This doesn't mean much, however. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised) lists five different Berenices, so it wasn't exactly an unusual name in the ancient world.

The OCD does verify that Berenice, the niece and later the wife of Herod, king of Chalcis., was Titus' mistress before he became emperor. "Titus fell in love with her while he was in Judea (67-70), and when she visited Rome with [her father] Agrippa, [Titus] openly lived with her, perhaps for some years. He deferred, however, to public opinion and did not marry her, and on his accession [79 AD], he dismissed her with regret on both sides and ignored her when she visited Rome again."

Related: The Caesar's Messiah section on this site.

When Were The Gospels Written?

Synopsis: Christian researchers tend to date the gospels as early as possible, while atheists and militant anti-Christians tend to come up with much later dates. Neither side can be trusted and it's very difficult, if not impossible, to find reliable information on the issue.

Quote: "Dating the gospels is very important.  If it can be established that the gospels were written early, say before the year A.D. 70, then we would have good reason for believing that they were written by the disciples of Jesus himself.  If they were written by the disciples, then their reliability, authenticity, and accuracy are better substantiated.  Also, if they were written early, this would mean that there would not have been enough time for myth to creep into the gospel accounts since it was the eyewitnesses to Christ's life that wrote them.  Furthermore, those who were alive at the time of the events could have countered the gospel accounts; and since we have no contradictory writings to the gospels, their early authorship as well as apostolic authorship becomes even more critical." Source: Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry.

Comment: This is about as straightforward a declaration of research bias as you can get and it's not an isolated case. Christian scholars have traditionally dated the gospels and epistles as early as possible because they think that this tends to support the authenticity of the content and supposed authorship of these documents. In other words, the earlier the gospel, the more likely it is that it's true and was written by an apostle of Jesus.

Putting aside the admission of bias for a minute, there are some obvious problems with this argument. First of all, when it comes to transmission errors, even if it could be shown that the Book of Mark, for instance, was written in, say, 50 AD, there's no way to know if our copy of the document is the same as the original. We would have to have an original copy before we could say it was free of transmission errors and interpolations introduced by later copyists. Also, while it's true that early documents are less likely to contain mythical material inserted by later copyists, that doesn't mean that the original writer didn't insert a lot of mythical material himself.

Secondly, while it's true in a general sense that a document written around the time of the events it describes is probably more historically reliable than one written hundreds of years later, the dating of a document has nothing to do with its authenticity or accuracy. Even if we had the original Book of Matthew, for instance, and could prove that it dated to around the time of Jesus' supposed death, that doesn't prove that it was actually written by the apostle himself or that the events it describes actually happened. After all, someone else could have written it under the apostle's name and contemporary accounts don't always provide accurate descriptions of events. You can see that just be reading the news today.

Another problem with Christian dating methods is that even if they're correct, nobody really knows when Jesus was born. The assumption that he died around 30 AD is just that--an assumption based on Biblical legends like the Slaughter Of The Innocents, a story which is so absurd it couldn't possibly have happened (besides being totally implausible, the story isn't mentioned in Josephus or any pagan sources). So these Christian scholars are trying to date the gospels as close as they can to the date of Jesus' death, a date which probably isn't accurate in the first place.

But never mind all that. The main issue here is the obvious bias of modern Christian scholars. They start with the conclusion and then look for evidence to support it. I should qualify this by saying that not all Christian scholars work this way, but it's hard to believe that any Christian scholar would conclude, for example, that the gospels were actually written in 200 AD or any other late date that would cast doubt on their authenticity. They need to come up with early dates in order to support their religious beliefs and, sure enough, that's exactly what they come up with.

I have to point out, though, that this kind of bias works both ways. If Christian scholars can't be trusted when it comes to the dating of the gospels, then neither can militantly atheist or anti-Christian scholars. If the Christians want to find early dates to support their argument that the gospels are authentic, the atheists want to find later dates to support their argument that the gospels aren't authentic. As a general rule, Christian research always ends up supporting Christianity and research by atheists always ends up undermining Christianity. They all have their agendas.

Needless to say, all this bias complicates the issue, as anyone can testify who's tried to find a trustworthy source for the dating of the gospels. Scholars who research this stuff always seem to end up supporting their own preconceived conclusions, and while I don't claim to be a scholar, I guess I'm no exception. At this point, all I can say is that the canonical gospels were probably written sometime during the period between, say, 50 AD and 200 AD, which is more or less what I thought before I started this fruitless search.

To be continued, maybe...

Tacitus And Caesar's Messiah - Part 1/2

According to Joseph Atwill, author of Caesar's Messiah and Shakespeare's Secret Messiah, Christianity was invented by the Flavian dynasty of Roman emperors as a kind of "counter-religion" to prevent the spread of militant Jewish messianism. This is an interesting idea because it can be falsified, at least in theory, unlike so many other alternate histories of the origin of Christianity.

If Atwill is correct, it means that Christianity couldn't have come into existence until at least 69-70 AD when Vespasian, the first Flavian emperor, rose to power. That's the earliest possible date. Atwill's theory runs into problems at this point, however, because we have documents from Roman historians--Tacitus, in particular--which describe Christianity as already being in existence during the reign of Nero, the emperor who came just before Vespasian.

Tacitus And Caesar's Messiah - Part 2/2

Tacitus wasn't a "Flavian court historian." He was in favor with the Flavians, but as far as I can tell he was never a member of their inner circle. During the period when Atwill says that Christianity was being invented, Tacitus was an orator, a magistrate, a senator, a financial administrator, a priest, etc., and he may have commanded a legion in Asia from 81-96 AD. Like many other Roman politicians of the time, he kept his head down and watched what he said during the reign of Domitian. When Domitian finally died in 96 AD, Tacitus felt free to start writing history and his aim seems to have been to correct Flavian propaganda:

Caesar's Messiah: The Conspiracy That Failed

Joseph Atwill, author of Caesar's Messiah and Shakespeare's Secret Messiah, believes that the Flavian Roman emperors invented Christianity as a peaceful "counter-religion" to offset the spread of militant Jewish messianism. If that was the Romans' plan, however, it didn't work out very well.

Dating The New Testament Manuscripts

"The New Testament books appear to have been completed within the 1st century. However, the original manuscripts of the New Testament books do not survive today. The autographs [documents written in the handwriting of the author] were lost or destroyed a long time ago. What survives are copies of the original. Generally speaking, these copies were made centuries after the originals from other copies rather than from the autograph." Source: Wikipedia.

Note: Paleography is apparently more accurate than radiocarbon tests when it comes to dating really old manuscripts. The contents of the manuscripts are also used to establish tentative dates. For instance, some Biblical scholars -- mostly Christians as far as I can tell -- believe that some of the gospels were probably written before 69-70 AD because they don't mention the destruction of the Temple in Judaea.

Most scholars seem to accept the idea that the earliest extant gospels were based on earlier manuscripts like the hypothetical "Q Source" believed to have been used by the writers of Matthew and Luke. The Gospel of Matthew "is generally believed to have been composed between 70 and 110, with most scholars preferring the period 80–90..," according to Wikipedia, and "The most probable date for Luke-Acts is around 80-100CE," also according to Wikipedia.

Note: if these dates are accurate, they would support Joseph Atwill's theory that the gospels were written by the Flavian Dynasty of Roman Emperors who were in power from ~69 AD to 96 AD. The dating of the gospels is critical to Atwill's theory that the Romans invented Christianity.

Joseph Atwill: Shakespeare's Secret Messiah

Comment: I have a lot of problems with Atwill's new book, Shakespeare's Secret Messiah, and I'm still skeptical about his basic theory that the Roman Flavian emperors invented Christianity as counter-propaganda to prevent the spread of militant Jewish messianism, but he's right about the danger to Rome presented by Jewish rebels. I had never realized the extent of the Jewish insurrections at the time until I listened to this particular interview and started to do some research for myself. The Romans had a serious problem with Jewish insurgents, but Atwill's theory about the origins of Christianity needs a lot more support, to say the least.

Tacitus On The Christians (Updated 7/21/14)

"But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor [Nero], and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration [the Great Fire of Rome, 64 AD] was the result of an order [from Nero]. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called 'Chrestians' by the populace.

"Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular.

"Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired." Source: "Tacitus on the Christians," Livius.org.

Note: If I understand him correctly, Joseph Atwill, author of Caesar's Messiah and Shakespeare's Secret Messiah believes that this passage from Tacitus was either an interpolation or based on earlier sources such as Josephus and the early gospels themselves (see his response to my review of Shakespeare's Secret Messiah in the post below). As far as I know, however, this remains conjectural.

The authenticity of Tacitus' material on the Christians is critical to Atwill's theory that the Flavian emperors invented Christianity. I'm hoping that Atwill will cover the issue in more detail in future books, but in the meantime I'm going to see if I can track down more information on it myself. Tacitus used a lot of different sources, but so far I haven't been able to find anything on the source for his story about the Christians and the Great Fire. It's possible that Tacitus was simply describing what happened based on his own experience; he was a student in Rome at the time of the fire (???-see below).

Update: Tacitus was born in Gaul in 55 AD, according to Livius.org. He was sent to Rome "as a young man" to study rhetoric, but I'm still trying to find out exactly when he went to the capital. The Great Fire of Rome occured in 64 AD, so if Tacitus was there, he would have been nine years old (assuming these dates are accurate). At this point, it doesn't seem likely that he was an eyewitness.

I'm also trying to find out if there's a consensus about the authenticity of Tacitus' description of the Christians in Rome at the time of the fire. Stephen Dando-Collins, author of the "The Great Fire of Rome"--a fantastic book, by the way--says on page 6 of his introduction that the description is an interpolation:

"...many modern-day historians believe that this tale of Christian persecution was apocryphal and was inserted in Tacitus' Annals by a Christian copyist, centuries later."

Note the qualifier "many modern-day historians." Some historians apparently disagree. For instance, according to Wikipedia, "[s]cholars generally consider Tacitus's reference to the execution of Jesus by Pontius Pilate to be both authentic, and of historical value as an independent Roman source."

Three sources are cited for the statement in Wikipedia. Two of the sources appear to have been written or edited by Christian apologists. The third, a researcher in Edinburgh, doesn't appear to have any particular religious axe to grind.

This is the problem with researching this stuff. You start off with a simple question: "Are these passages in Tacitus authentic?" and you end up trying to make judgments about the credibility of various scholars and independent researchers you've never heard of before. It's a bottomless well, but this is common with ancient history.

Joseph Atwill's Response To My Review Of Shakespeare's Secret Messiah

Note: Last week, I reviewed Joseph Atwill's new book, Shakespeare's Secret Messiah. This is his response to that review: