In his letter to Trajan, Pliny the Younger refers to the decline of Christianity’s popularity from its peak some 20 years earlier, during the Flavians’ rule. This correlates with everything we have seen.
After Titus’s death, the youngest of the Flavian emperors, Domitian, who was not associated with the Jewish War and who did not enjoy the status of Jewish Messiah with his father and brother, quickly discontinued his brother’s dolphin-and-anchor motif on his own coinage. He also restored the recently burned-down Pantheon and rededicated it to the traditional gods of Rome. Domitian’s own coins feature a different slate of deities from his brother and father, favoring Minerva and Jupiter.
Toward the end of his 15-year reign, Domitian purged Epaphroditus and Titus Flavius Clemens (the “pope” St. Clement of Rome) among “many” others, while banishing Clemens’ wife (St. Domitilla).
It is only after Domitian’s assassination that we see the first Christian images in the Catacombs of Domitilla herself, images that reflect iconography stamped on the coins of Titus and illustrated in the Herculaneum mosaic at the imperial baths buried during his reign.
Even after Domitian’s death, it is quite possible that the descendants of the Flavian family held out hope that another of their kin might someday restore their imperial fortunes and reestablish their dynasty. Such hopefuls most likely would have been the descendants of Clemens and Domitilla who were adopted by Domitian to be his heirs. Such Flavians would have had an active interest in keeping their family’s imperial cult alive. We can only speculate how many generations such hope persisted with the Flavians.
The imperial cult of Julius Caesar lasted for centuries after his death. After the deaths of Vespasian and Titus, there is no doubt their official cult continued for decades. For the period immediately following the death of Vespasian, we have evidence of a thriving cult of his divinity. More “Flamens” or priests of Vespasian have been identified than for any other emperor except Augustus. While we know that Trajan disfavored the worship of Vespasian—for some reason it did not share the same “pristine glamour” as the cults of the Divine Julius and Augustus for him, according to one historian—there were named priests of Titus as late as the 3rd Century. (4)
Maintaining such a family cult with too great a zeal could easily have been regarded as a threat by future emperors, however. And, after the Flavian dynasty was defunct, the Gospels’ Jesus would have had no propaganda value for subsequent emperors or dynasties—with the possible exception of Hadrian, who also prosecuted a war against messianic Jews a few decades later. Without such a motivation, imperial sanction of Christianity by future emperors would have ended. The Flavian Christians would no longer benefit from advertising imperial connections. At that point, indeed, such connections could have become risky.
Hadrian, who would prosecute the second Jewish War that finally expelled the Jews from Judea, made use of Flavian propaganda by issuing a limited edition of coins bearing the dolphin-and-anchor symbol. By then, of course, it was a recognized symbol of Christianity. Indeed, Eusebius seems to imply that Hadrian deliberately sent Christians to populate Jerusalem after he had expelled the Jews.
The letters of Paul, which are older than the Flavian dynasty and date to Nero’s administration, and the Flavian-era Gospels themselves, would, over time, become more easily separated from Flavian politics, enabling them to develop a life of their own. Since the Christian project had likely begun under Nero with Paul’s mission, Christianity could credibly be detached from the Flavians altogether after enough time had passed.
At the outbreak of the Second Jewish Revolt, Hadrian may have had reason to reestablish clandestine Roman support for Pauline Christianity. Though the Flavians were by then irrelevant, both the letters of Paul and the Gospels would have been too useful to set aside as Hadrian fought his own war with the Jews.
By the start of the 2nd Century, Christianity had become almost entirely detached from its purported roots in Judaism, as well, as many Christians drifted from the doctrine expressed in the Gospels. Twentieth Century discoveries at Nag Hamadi and elsewhere in Egypt have dramatically revealed that during the 2nd and 3rd Centuries of the Common Era an anarchic variety of Christian doctrines sprang up. No longer anchored to any centralized authority, a wide range of disparate gospels and other Christian literature variously identified as Gnostic, “Pseudo-Clementine,” or Arian emerged in this post-Flavian period, containing ideas that would seem startlingly strange and alien to contemporary Christians. (5)
Some of the doctrines from this period imply that Jesus was not a physical human being at all but only a spiritual entity. Some argue that he was a divine being but that this same divine element could be found in each of us. Some suggest that he was a divine man but a separate entity not to be equated with the God who created the universe.
Much of this literature never cites the Old Testament, at all. Other Christian writers, like Bishop Marcion of Sinope (whose lost work can only be inferred through rebuttals by Christian writers like Tertullian), simply did away with the Hebrew Bible altogether, using as canon only Paul’s letters and the work of the evangelist Luke.
All of this demonstrates the radical break from Judaism that “Pauline” Christianity actually represented. And all of it is consistent with the hypothesis of Christianity’s Roman origins.
In so short a time after being detached from the anchor of the Flavians, Christians were completely erasing whatever Judaic influences remained. The Jesus Christ presented in the Gospels proved so perfect a syncretism of ancient pagan religion and philosophical thought that it was easy to separate from the proximate historical and political purpose of its creation. Once decapitated from the imperial agenda, the religion quickly mutated into a plethora of pagan-influenced “Christianities.”
The cults of deified Roman emperors continued long after their deaths. Deceased emperors were permanently enrolled in the pantheon of recognized state gods as their state-sanctioned rites continued to be performed. It was Vespasian who completed the Temple of the Divine Claudius, for example, an emperor from the previous dynasty. The worship of the Flavians, as well, continued throughout the 2nd Century, and there is evidence of Sodales Titiales Flaviales, that is, an official priesthood of the God Titus, up to the time of the Emperor Septimius Severus in the early 3rd Century. In time, however, the Temple of the God Vespasian became known as the Temple of Janus. (7)
The cults of the emperors Vespasian and Titus certainly contained many pagan elements and, therefore, could never have been exclusively associated with the God Jesus. As we have seen, however, these pagan elements would deeply influence Christian worship, belief and symbolism. Even the original structure of the Christian Church resembles a top-down empire-wide Roman administration instead of a humble, underground and organic grass-roots movement. It is that organizational structure that may have helped it survive and might account for the surprisingly meticulous (if sometimes contradictory) tracking of its “Apostolic Succession.”
At some point, even the worship of an emperor comes to an end. In the case of the Flavians, however, this did not stop the worship of their Romanized Christ. The pre-Flavian Pauline tradition and literature under Nero enabled Christianity to maintain a separate identity from the Flavians that outlived its imperial patrons, while the later Emperor Hadrian had every reason to both continue using Christianity as propaganda while detaching it from its Flavian connections.
The hidden agenda of the Gospels—to demonstrate Flavian messianic claims to the freshly conquered Judea—would remain hidden, and thus could be easily forgotten. Eventually, any obsolete connection between Christianity and the Flavians could be discarded, including Titus’s dolphin-and-anchor symbolism, leaving Jesus Christ eternally in error about the prophecy of his Second Coming.