The witnesses from this time speak a deafening truth in unison with no need for tortured interpretations or speculative somersaults. They tell us what Christianity was when it was invented through the events, politics, people and relationships they reveal.
There may have lived a man named Jesus, but there remains today no historical evidence that he did. And there need not have existed such a man in order to explain everything that has been passed down to us about him. There is no part of him that is not prophesied by others or prophetic of others, and no aspect of him that is not symbolic, political, syncretized or borrowed from other men or gods.
There is no doubt that the Romans had a motivation to create such a convenient “man-god” who would be scorned and mocked as a “King of the Jews” while predicting a glorious return when the Jews would be vanquished and their Temple destroyed, just as Titus would in fact do. Attempting to adapt and conform the hostile Jewish religion to Roman culture would have been their standard practice.
Thirty years ago, while researching the origins of Christianity, the possibility of a Roman provenance for the New Testament leaped out at us when we noticed that Jesus’s apocalyptic vision nearly quoted Josephus’s historical account of that prophecy’s fulfillment 40 years later. When we discovered that the Gospels and Josephus’s accounts were written during the same period of time, the possibilities became all the more compelling.
When this glaring coincidence was combined with the political implications of the Gospels’ ideology, the evidence quickly implied a revolutionary hypothesis about Christianity’s origin. Yet it took three decades of painstaking research to confirm it—in ways that were ever more predictable and increasingly astonishing.
As traditional assumptions about Christian origins were challenged by impossible contradictions and coincidences at every turn, we never found any solid evidence to contradict the emerging theory we were testing. Pieces of the mosaic continued to fall into place as an entirely new picture was filled in.
If we were right, we assumed from the very beginning that at some point we would find a Flavian coin that would confirm our suspicions and complete that picture. We did not discover that final evidence until the very end of that long and thorough examination of the evidence, when the Internet finally made the scattered catalog of Roman coinage globally accessible for the first time since the 1st Century itself. And then the last piece fell into place.
During the course of our research, the works of Robert Eisenman, Francesco Carotta, Joseph Atwill, Rose Mary Sheldon and Thijs Voskuilen appeared, providing us with new details in support of the theory we were pursuing, and the reader will find in their books evidence and arguments on specialized aspects that offer further support to this revolutionary view of Christian origins.
This is the only theory that uniquely explains all of the evidence and solves all of the paradoxes that have puzzled scholars for centuries. What we have explored here hardly exhausts the evidence that is sure to confirm and illuminate it further. Much evidence no doubt already occupies a drawer or a shelf in a museum archive, unrecognized for what it is. And much more surely awaits discovery by archeologists.
The historical period that many think of today as an era in which miracles and mystical events frequently occurred was actually no different from today. Culture, politics, and even science took a religious form in that era, when gods like Serapis were nakedly created by rulers such as Ptolemy and worshiped for centuries. Ironically, it is we in the modern era who mystify such accounts that have become so distant from us we bestow on them a patina of supernatural authenticity. Likewise, the Flavians counted on the masses in their day to do the same when creating the biography of a Christ who had existed 40 years before their victory and who perfectly and prophetically justified their conquest of Judea.
Rather than adding any validation to other religions, this revelation should serve as a powerful admonishment that all ancient religions were a product of similar human creativity at a time when religious invention was readily employed and widely accepted as a tool of statecraft and conquest, as we have seen.
Certainly, while everything else in our knowledge has evolved—our science, our art, our technology, our forms of government—it is only the supernatural grip of these ancient philosophical artifacts that have kept the most lofty principles guiding our lives from also evolving, freezing them in place from an era of war and tyranny. In the West, science, art, and technological innovation have been liberated from the fetters of the past. Yet, in an age when we have created nuclear weapons, in the realm of philosophy we find ourselves still adhering to primitive agendas hatched during a distant, largely forgotten political war between what were, in fact, two forms of dictatorship.
One thing we can learn from this discovery is that our spiritual insights must be allowed to evolve along with the rest of our knowledge, unhindered by ancient expediencies inherited from long bygone times. If not, in the very pursuit of heaven or paradise, we may well bring about our apocalypse.
Demystifying Christianity will be seen by some as disarming Western Civilization in the face of a new barbaric assault like that faced by the Romans 2000 years ago. Instead, we believe this revelation will illuminate both sides and help prevent history from repeating itself. On one side of this ancient conflict was a religion of “peace” that bestowed divine authority upon a brutal dictator and upon centuries of kings to come, in the name of order. And on the other side was a religious fanaticism wreaking self-destructive violence to destroy that authority and achieve an even more monolithic domination over the human race.
Philosophy provides powerful answers to mankind’s deepest needs by providing a context for all of our knowledge and the nourishment of moral values, inspiration, and purpose. As purveyors of this vital need, religions have endured for millennia by adapting over time to accommodate different eras and cultures. Christianity has proven able to do so, resulting in sects as varied as Shakers and Mormons.
Christianity is interwoven into the very fabric of Western history. From the evolution of literature encompassing Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost, to the ethical arguments over slavery in antebellum America (on both sides of the argument) and the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th Century, the influence of Christianity on Western Civilization is profound.
However, denying that Venus was actually born of the sea-foam does not diminish the beauty of Botticelli’s art. Disbelieving the gods of ancient Egypt does not demolish the power of the monumental architecture they inspired. To bathe in the glow of the stained glass of Chartres Cathedral, to be transported by the immortal beauty of Schubert’s Ave Maria, or to be rendered speechless at the sight of Michelangelo’s Pieta will always be deeply moving experiences for the sensitive human being—just as the majesty of Luxor and Abu Simbel or the dramatic skills of Homer have not been injured by the passing of religions into myth. Indeed, as we have seen, though Christianity eradicated and replaced paganism, it carried forward a veritable ark of its cardinal virtues (and vices) into the modern world.
Whether there was a Jesus or not is still a question we cannot answer. The reality of the experience of Christianity for millions of people over thousands of years, on the other hand, is certain.
What is also certain is that other faiths now long gone were just as devoutly followed by billions who lived and died believing them—even as many of the moral teachings behind their religious trappings continue to endure and enrich us.
References and Notes