If Josephus calls Vespasian the Jewish Messiah, this must be no more than shallow lip service—as it must also have been in the case of his contemporary, Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, when he, too, acknowledged Vespasian to be the true Jewish Messiah.
If St. Clement of Rome is, to every appearance, the cousin of the emperors Titus and Domitian, and if his wife St. Domitilla who originally occupied the first Christian catacomb is their niece and the granddaughter of the Emperor Vespasian, then we are told that Domitilla must be Clement’s niece, not his wife, and St. Clement cannot be Titus Flavius Clemens but someone else altogether.
If we find friendly mentions of Epaphroditus and those in Caesar’s household in Paul’s own letters, then we are told he cannot be the “Epaphroditus” of “Caesar’s household” known to Flavius Josephus and Suetonius, and Christian scholars warn us that there must be two or even three separate Epaphrodituses.
If Paul and Josephus are victims of shipwrecks at around the same time on their way to Rome with messianic Jewish prisoners, and all are miraculously saved, they must be two unrelated shipwrecks and such a miraculous salvation must have happened twice in virtually the same place and time.
If Josephus’s life bears unique resemblances to the story of Christ in the New Testament, they must all be mere coincidences.
If Josephus thinks well of no fewer than three protagonists of the New Testament—including Jesus Christ himself—we are cautioned that this must involve at least two wholesale interpolations combined with two transcription errors.
If Vespasian performed the same miracles that Jesus performs in the Gospels, it must be yet another coincidence.
And, now that we know that the same unique symbols used by the Emperor Titus himself would be used by Christians to identify themselves for the first three centuries of their history, what new reasons will be offered to deny this physical evidence?
And yet the theory we have explored, the hypothesis that the Gospels originated as a form of Roman propaganda formulated to dampen the conflagration of Jewish resistance, reconciles all of the mysteries with no such tortured convolutions and explains all of the evidence whether it be chronological, ideological, historical, archeological, theological or political, whether it be in pagan, Jewish, or Christian literature, whether it be on Roman coinage or in the earliest Christian iconography. It solves everything by simply taking the evidence at face value.
The proponents of other theories must come up with a succession of elaborate explanations, a new one for each ancient text or image or discovery that presents a fresh problem for their assumptions in a perpetual game of cognitive dissonance, all to deny what the plain evidence is saying in perfect harmony.
IV.
Engineering a Religion
From an historical perspective, the human sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross could not have happened at a more convenient time. Not only did Jesus predict Titus’s destruction of the Jerusalem Temple but Jesus’s own sacrifice ended forever the need for the Jewish practice of animal sacrifice, making redundant the annual plea of the high priest in the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur for the atonement of the sins of the Jewish people. Jesus himself made the Temple he predicted would be destroyed obsolete, suggesting that he—indeed his bodily resurrection—would be a metaphorical lamb and a metaphorical Temple.
According to the Gospel of John:
The Jews then responded to him, “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”
Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”
They replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?” But the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken. (1)
Thus did Jesus indicate how his impending death and resurrection could replace the Temple. And this is perfectly consistent with Jesus’s own condemnation of the Temple:
On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the Temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the Temple courts. And as he taught them, he said, “Is it not written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’” (2)
Having been corrupted, the Temple is therefore worthy of the destruction to follow at the hands of the Flavians. As a justification for razing the Temple, passages like these echo the goals that the Flavian apologist and historian Josephus promulgates as someone who both cherished the sacred building and sanctified its destruction at the hands of his imperial masters. Josephus even lays the blame for the Temple’s destruction, at least in part, on the rebels themselves. Jesus’s own words, “Destroy this Temple…,” seem to suggest that his listeners will be the ones who will destroy it. In any case, Jesus’s attack on the Jewish Temple prefigures, justifies and even commences the deeds of Titus.
Jesus lamented the Temple’s impending destruction. According to Josephus, Titus himself sought to spare the “magnificent” structure. Yet notice how Jesus prophesies that the “construction” of his metaphorical temple, the Church, cannot begin until after the Temple is destroyed. Thus Titus’s deed is a necessary part of God’s plan. Jesus condemns the Temple as corrupt, predicts its destruction, his own sacrificial act removes all need for its existence as a place of further sacrifice, and Titus destroys it as predicted. In this way, instead of serving a purpose millennia after they were written, the Gospels served a very real political purpose in their time.
To be sure, Jesus is not alone in his condemnation; the Dead Sea Scrolls “sectarians” very much agreed that the Temple had become thoroughly polluted. But they entirely disagree with Jesus about why. The pollution of foreigners was not a concern for Jesus. Just the opposite.
The Scrolls community would be appalled that Jesus claimed the Temple was designed “for all nations” equally. That was a Roman, imperial goal. In this respect, the Jesus of the Gospels is again adopting the transnational agenda of the Jews’ conquerors. Jesus’s own physical attack on the Temple only begins the same physical attack the Roman general Titus would finish 40 years later.
Even the 40-year separation between these events is rife with Biblical significance and not just a random historical coincidence. It matches the same 40-year period that the children of Israel were compelled to wander in the wilderness for rebelling against Moses as they doubted that the Promised Land could ever be conquered. (3) For 40 days and 40 nights rains poured down on Noah when God collectively punished humanity for its sins. (4) In the Bible, 40 is the period of redemption.
If Noah experienced relief from the rains after enduring a period of 40, what relief was Jesus now promising? If the Children of Israel arrived at the Land of Milk and Honey after enduring their period of 40, what reconciliation with God would Jesus bring? If Moses brought down the stone tablets after 40 days of fasting on Mount Sinai, what good news was Jesus delivering?
If the answer was only the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple, this would only have amounted to more punishment. Where was the Jewish deliverance this time? It came in the form of Christ’s Glorious Second Coming 40 years later, in the persons of Vespasian and Titus, who would fulfill the traditional interval of redemption. This time, however, the Jews’ deliverance was to Rome. And Christianity would assure that this message was delivered, loud and clear.