While a lot of people feel the whole Jesus thing was an elaborate story one scholar says he has found conclusive evidence of the fact and an ancient confession that Jesus Christ was invented to brainwash and dominate certain volatile parts of the Roman empire.
American Biblical scholar Joseph Atwill will be presenting his discovery in the UK on October 19th at the “Covert Messiah” symposium at Conway Hall in Holborn, London.
Speaking about his findings he claims that the New Testament was written and completely fabricated by first-century Roman aristocrats.
Atwill says his evidence is conclusive although there will surely be a lot of opposition.
He was quoted as saying:
“I present my work with some ambivalence, as I do not want to directly cause Christians any harm,” he acknowledges, “but this is important for our culture. Alert citizens need to know the truth about our past so we can understand how and why governments create false histories and false gods.
They often do it to obtain a social order that is against the best interests of the common people.”
He says that the sophisticated government project was an exercise in propaganda meant to subdue and bring into line unruly parts of the empire such as the,
“Jewish sects in Palestine at the time, who were waiting for a prophesied warrior Messiah, were a constant source of violent insurrection during the first century,”
He continued:
“When the Romans had exhausted conventional means of quashing rebellion, they switched to psychological warfare. They surmised that the way to stop the spread of zealous Jewish missionary activity was to create a competing belief system. That’s when the ‘peaceful’ Messiah story was invented.
Instead of inspiring warfare, this Messiah urged turn-the-other-cheek pacifism and encouraged Jews to ‘give onto Caesar’ and pay their taxes to Rome.”
He says Jesus was not based on a real person from history and that:
“in fact, he may be the only fictional character in literature whose entire life story can be traced to other sources. Once those sources are all laid bare, there’s simply nothing left.”
He claims that “Wars of the Jews” by Josephus, the only surviving first-person historical account of first-century Judea, shares a sequence of parallels with the new Testament”
“Although it’s been recognised by Christian scholars for centuries that the prophecies of Jesus appear to be fulfilled by what Josephus wrote about in the First Jewish-Roman war, I was seeing dozens more. What seems to have eluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus ministry are more or less the same as the sequence of events and locations of the military campaign of [Emperor] Titus Flavius as described by Josephus. This is clear evidence of a deliberately constructed pattern. The biography of Jesus is actually constructed, tip to stern, on prior stories, but especially on the biography of a Roman Caesar.”
“Many of the parallels are conceptual or poetic, so they aren’t all immediately obvious. After all, the authors did not want the average believer to see what they were doing, but they did want the alert reader to see it. An educated Roman in the ruling class would probably have recognised the literary game being played.” Atwill maintains he can demonstrate that “the Roman Caesars left us a kind of puzzle literature that was meant to be solved by future generations, and the solution to that puzzle is ‘We invented Jesus Christ, and we’re proud of it.’”
What do you make of this evidence?
Details sourced from Core Spirit.
I’ve always had issues with the story of Jesus and that hasn’t changed but this article should have provided more proof of these findings, otherwise it will all seem like conjecture.