With Christianity, the Romans engineered what they must have thought was the perfect strategy—a demonstration that the Jewish “messiah” did not embody the national or cultural independence of the Jews at all, but was, in fact, a pro-Roman, peace-loving, tax-paying, transnational Hellenistic philosopher of the Platonic and Stoic schools who offered a mystery cult-like salvation to all people of all nations.
And they added to this Roman vision of “Christ” that the Jews themselves, failing to recognize his true nature as the Messiah, killed him and thus merited their divine punishment at the hands of the Romans.
As radical and new as this hypothesis may seem, it actually reflects insights as old as New Testament scholarship itself. Though there were previous translations of Josephus's writings, when William Whiston, in the 17th Century, first translated the collected works of Josephus into English he set the standard, until recent decades. Whiston was a famous man. He had succeeded his mentor, Sir Isaac Newton, as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, though he later lost this position because of his theological views. Whiston thought Flavius Josephus to be a secret Christian.
Whiston did not think Josephus was a Trinitarian Christian, however, as were most Christians in Whiston’s day. Instead, he believed Josephus must have been a Christian like himself: that is, one who denied that Jesus was one aspect of a single pre-existent divine Trinity. Rather, he believed that Jesus was merely a divine human being created by and subordinate to God the Father. And he, to be sure, did not question the authenticity of Flavius Josephus’s Testimonium.
Still, Whiston believed that Josephus, the in-house historian of the Roman emperors Vespasian and Titus, was a Christian.
In addition, Bruno Bauer, a student of the 19th Century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and a teacher of Karl Marx, also recognized that most of the New Testament embodied a Hellenized and Roman worldview instead of a Jewish one. Bruno Bauer was an anti-Semite, to be sure, revealing the dark side of acknowledging the intrinsic anti-Semitism in the New Testament. (1) Well known in his lifetime but almost completely forgotten today, Bauer had debated one of the fathers of critical Bible studies, David Strauss, who helped shape the entire field of Bible scholarship with his book, Life of Jesus. (2)
Strauss’s book has been available in English editions since 1846. As a result, in so many ways, Strauss set the stage for all Biblical scholarship since. However, at the turn of the 20th Century, Albert Schweitzer wrote that:
[Bruno] Bauer's 'Criticism of the Gospel History' is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognize, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found. (3)
Bauer’s work on Christianity is no longer in print like Strauss’s, and it has never been translated into English. The famous philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once called Bauer "my entire reading public." (4)
Nietzsche himself, of course, a notoriously harsh critic of Christian morality, derided the doctrine of Jesus as a “slave morality” that appeals to weakness, cowardice, and submissiveness in contrast to the life-affirming virtues of the pagans. (5) Whether the consistent Christian advice of submission to authority is a virtue or not on a philosophical level, Nietzsche’s insight can now be seen in a new light. And by this same light, even critics of Marxism can re-evaluate the assertion of Bauer’s other student, Karl Marx, who famously called religion “the opium of the people.” (6)
We must imagine the historical reality that after winning their war with the Jews, a conflict that may have taken more than a million lives, the Romans found themselves the owners of tens of thousands of Jewish slaves. Many if not most of these slaves were messianic Jews. Titus alone took many thousands of his own Jewish slaves to Rome to build his triumphal arch, his famous baths, and the Colosseum itself, where so many of their countrymen would later be sacrificed for entertainment.
The Romans needed to opiate these former radicals and recondition them to life as Roman slaves in the wake of their defeat. And the New Testament was precise in this regard. This new form of Judaism repeatedly commands slaves to obey their masters—even cruel and harsh masters—just as it commands free men to obey the Roman state as God’s agent on earth.
So effective was this Roman formula it outlasted their empire, and it would supply kings with a divine right of absolute rule over their subjects for the next 16 centuries as well as conferring masters with a “right” to own their slaves. Europeans are not only still driving on roads Romans built, they are still worshipping a god Romans created in order to legitimize the rule of monarchs they are still honoring.
Romans were ruthless and pragmatic conquerors. They dealt with the Jews as they had dealt with other conquered foreigners—by absorbing elements of their culture and adapting it to their own practical purposes in service of the Empire. It was their instinct and custom to syncretize the religious source of conflict into a cultural justification for both their military incursion and their imperial rule. The Romans did it before with the Greeks—even as Alexander the Great’s generals had done it before them with conquered Egyptian and Persian nations.
It would be far more surprising had the Romans not attempted to do this in the aftermath of the Jewish War, especially considering how instrumental religion was in that particular conflict. If not for the existence of Christianity, we would need to ask where was the typical Roman response to cultural conflict during the Jewish War?
As its first symbols reveal, Christianity was already syncretizing with the ancient pagan world. The pagan iconography chosen by the Emperor Titus is reflected in Christian symbolism all the way to the Emperor Constantine more than two centuries later, when the prominent symbol of Christianity finally changed. Signaled by Constantine’s famous revelation in the sky over a desperate battle that led the way to his victory, the symbol for Christianity from that point forward would shift… to the Cross.
And so, with the administration of Emperor Constantine and his official instatement of Christianity, the last symbolic link to the Flavian cult was buried.
Constantine the Great
Flavian connections to Christianity became more and more awkward as time passed. By the 4th Century it became necessary to replace the old Flavian symbols entirely.
Dolphins would still adorn Christian sites for some time to come, including panels at Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Among Constantine’s favorite gifts to churches were silver and gold ornaments in the shape of dolphins. But the dolphin-and-anchor motif coined by Titus was finally retired as Christianity was officially rebranded under the sign of the Cross.
None of the Flavian temples remain. Like most pagan temples, they have been ground to rubble and lost to history. And yet, though documents and monuments can be tampered with and destroyed, coins, minted in the millions by the Roman propaganda machine, have survived the last 19 centuries. The last links to that past, scattered and buried under layers of time, still bear witness to the truth.
Yet most of the evidence has been there all along. By merely taking at face value the New Testament, Josephus, Suetonius, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius, Dio Cassius and all the rest we have considered, we were able to predict what kind of symbol we would find on the other side of Titus’s coin and, conversely, whose face was behind the symbol of Jesus Christ.