According to Christ, the faith of one centurion exceeded that of any contemporary Jew. Paul refers to his contacts as those in “Caesar’s household” so casually in his correspondence to the Philippians it must have some basis in fact. Indeed, Paul’s contacts reach the highest level of imperial servants and Roman aristocrats, including associates of Vespasian and Titus who had achieved their imperial office by conquering the messianic Jews and becoming Jewish messiahs and Roman man-gods.
This same family of Roman emperors produced a 1st Century “pope.” Most of the New Testament was composed during their reign. Their family tomb became the first Christian catacomb. Their family symbol was Christianity’s first icon: the anchor.
The founder of the Flavian dynasty, Vespasian, presented himself as “the New Serapis” and performed healing miracles identical to Christ’s, syncretizing pagan elements of a mystery religion with his own status as the Jewish Messiah. Vespasian advertised himself as the father of universal peace, a new Pax Romana. And he was a monarch born to humble circumstances. Both his ascension to the throne and his death were portended by a star.
Jesus, too, was a Jewish messiah, a divine “monarch” born into humble circumstances, and his birth was heralded by a star.
Both Vespasian and his son, Titus, were worshiped as savior gods in the East while they lived, and they were worshiped as official state gods in the city of Rome itself long after their deaths. The Gospels, no matter who wrote them, would have been ideal prophetic demonstrations of their divinity and messianic status as Roman Jewish Messiahs.
The cult of Emperor Titus praised his beneficence with propaganda extolling his charity and fatherly love for the masses. Within only a few decades of his death, after his brother Domitian was assassinated, his dolphin-and-anchor motif became the predominant symbol of Christianity.
The Gospels systematically, even melodramatically, absolve the Roman Empire of any culpability for the death of Jesus, laying the blame exclusively on the Jewish people with such a heavy hand that it inspired centuries of anti-Semitic retribution.
The Flavians’ own historian, Josephus, favorably portrays New Testament protagonists who are associated with the Flavians. The New Testament expresses inordinate sympathy for Titus’s own Jewish friends. Though he became an object of shame to his own people, Christians to this day enthusiastically cite Josephus as frequently as any Church father.
As Jesus explains in the Gospels, he is himself the replacement of the Temple that Titus would destroy: he was the ultimate sacrifice, the complete Atonement for the sins of the People, and the final reconciliation of man with God.
If Christianity was an organic development from Judaism, the product of an evolutionary process, one would expect that the most culturally alienating aspects of the mother religion, such as male circumcision, strict Sabbath observance and Kosher diet, would have disappeared slowly, one-by-one, over a period of time. We have seen how fiercely the first Christians fought for these traditions against Paul. It was those very aspects of Judaism for which the rebels were fighting, the features of their culture that created problems of intermarriage, inter-employment, and even made having lunch with Gentiles a source of heated conflict. In the work of Paul and the authors of the Gospels, however, we see all of these aspects of Judaism swept aside suddenly, stridently, simultaneously. And we see it all happening among a group of messianic Jews, the group least amenable to any modifications of the Torah. More than that: they were done away with at the same time pagan elements and ideas were introduced, transforming the faith into a kind of Mystery Cult that worshiped a man-god.
And all of this radical revision is done all at once in the work of Paul on the eve of the Jewish War and in the Gospels immediately after that war.
Again, if the New Testament is Flavian propaganda, what would the evidence look like other than what we have? It is remarkable just how much evidence still exists, from such a wide spectrum of sources, to support this revolutionary conclusion.
The first Gospels were written during the Flavian era by authors familiar with Jewish religion and history, just like the people who happened to surround the “Messiah” Titus. This same group included Titus’s second-in-command, Tiberius Alexander, the nephew of the Jewish Platonist philosopher, Philo; also, the historian Flavius Josephus, who produced a history of the Hebrews from the Creation to their war with the Romans and who received the holy Jewish texts from the Temple after it was sacked; also the long-serving imperial Secretary of Letters, Epaphroditus, who assisted Paul and Josephus; also Pliny the Elder, who endorsed the divinity of helping others, praised as divine this quality in the Flavians, and dedicated his own works to Titus; and even the Jewish royals Agrippa II and Bernice (Titus’s one-time fiancée), who appear in the Bible itself.
Some of these figures in the New Testament stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Titus during the Siege of Jerusalem and witnessed the central prophecy of Jesus being fulfilled: the same events recorded by Josephus in terms that match the Gospels’ prophecies down to the last visual detail. And both Jesus’s prophecies and Josephus’s histories were written concurrently, after the events had taken place and during the rule of the Flavians.
The unique combination of means, motive and opportunity, of time, place and people, surrounding the Flavians perfectly coincides with the origins of the New Testament. The oddly organized and widespread administration of early Christianity so unaccountable to scholars implies a top-down governmental hand in its creation. Moreover, that such a widespread effort could have been mounted so publicly in the wake of the Jewish War without Roman sanction is impossible to believe.
The idea that Christians would be so favorable to the Romans, by praising a centurion’s faith so extravagantly in the New Testament or adopting an emperor’s seal as their own at their gravesites, simply in order to avoid persecution contradicts the entire story of Christian martyrdom and their refusal to appease pagans. Occam’s razor hovers over all efforts to explain away these facts, which collectively and effortlessly conform with this theory.
At the crossroads of Western history, the great Jewish War with the Romans was a conflict of two diametrically opposed views of civilization: one that was exclusive vs. one that was universal. Their epic collision created an urgent need for the exclusive side to protect its heritage against invasion from outside pollution (as evidenced even in the last ditch depositing of the Dead Sea Scrolls) and the Romans’ need to defeat the militant exclusivity that opposed their comparatively pluralistic empire.
The Jews’ rebellion from Rome sealed their fate. After their brutal treatment by the Romans, theirs was a culture in Diaspora for another two millennia. The Jewish people had already spread far and wide across the Middle East following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in the late 6th Century BCE and, later, in response to the Mediterranean-wide trade opened up by the Pax Romana. The final legal exclusion of Jews from Jerusalem would be ordered by Hadrian in the 2nd Century, following the Bar Kochba revolt, thus making permanent their status as global exiles until the creation of the state of Israel in the 20th Century.
As we have seen from reports of 1st Century disturbances in the city of Rome, messianic Judaism posed a serious problem not just in Judea but throughout the Empire, including at its very heart. The Romans realized that a military opposition to the Jewish conflict would not be enough. They would need an ideological campaign, as well.