Who was Jesus?
Is he this historical character?
Who wrote the Gospels?
Why are they written in Greek?
Why did they have a
pro-Roman perspective?
Why was the religion
headquartered in Rome?
Those were the misteries
that I saw about the Gospels.
The origin of the Christian religion
has been a subject steep in
mistery for nearly 2,000 years.
Joseph Atwill is one of the number of
scholars today from all around the world
who are questioning the historic
facts behind these ancient misteries.
When examining the actual
history of this era,
many of the answers provided by
the Church and Christian scholars
do not hold up to rigorous scrutiny.
This is really important
for our culture.
To understand where
Christianity came from.
No doubt, Christians have done
a lot of good for the world.
But then there are other
Christians, often the most dogmatic,
who create wars, hatred and other
harm under the disguise of religion.
In studying how Christianity
emerged, many of our scholars agreed
that it was used as a political
tool to control the masses of the day
and it's still being
used this way today.
The problem is that Christianity
has been used as a tool by government
that uses the goodness
in people against them.
For example, support for
the wars in the Middle East
has been preached to
evangelical Christians
as a way to speed up the end of days.
This is just one example
of the way that propaganda
is used to control and
manipulate the populace.
Actually, according to my
study of the ancient text,
the second coming of the
Christ has already occurred.
Maybe we need to expand
the possible answers
about how Christianity originated
and deeper questions need to be asked.
Maybe we need to examine
what political motives
were behind the formation
of the Christian religion.
I think it's a requirement
of alert citizens to know how
the Gospels were written,
why they were written,
who produced them, what was the
purpose and back of all this.
This is good citizenry. Everyone
should be involved in this.
Today, we live on a brink of
an immense paradigm shift.
And this modern time is very parallel to
the era in which Christianity emerged.
Studying this ancient era can
give us the perspective needed
for coming up with solutions
to today's problems.
And for helping create the
better world that we envision.
The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus
Caesar's Messiah
The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus
England
And the penny dropped!
The penny dropped that Jesus,
as a human being, never existed!
Kenneth Humpreys - historian and author
"Jesus Never Existed"
The presentation of the Jesus
character is somewhat of a composite
of many messianic leaders of the time.
Prof. Robert Eisenman, author, "James the
Brother of Jesus" and "The New Testament Code"
Well, let's just go back to the
drawing board and we'll leave aside
all of the assumptions of Christian history.
And let's just look at the text
afresh and consider every possibility.
Let's open the whole game up.
Can you ~rsxuthat Christianity is
really paganism by a different name?
Now it feels completely obvious.
Some of us are saying that this was
a sun-god turned into a Jewish man.
In all of this, we're
dealing with literature,
we're not dealing with history.
So, the answer is no, there is no
history to this character Jesus.
It's entirely a literature creation.
John Hudson, Literary Analyst and Author
"Goodbye Jesus"
John Hudson, Literary Analyst and Author
"Goodbye Jesus"
Some of our Bible
scholars are mavericks,
working outside the restrictions of
mainstream religious instituitions.
This allows them the freedom
to provide fresh insights
and draw some startling conclusions
about how Christianity was born.
Arch of Titus, Rome
We began reading a number
of books on the subject.
This turned into a decade long research.
For Joseph Atwill, the key
was in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The only Jewish literature ever
discovered from the 1st century AD or CE,
the time that Jesus would have
been preaching among the Jews.
The characters in the Dead Sea
Scrolls were militaristic...
and you can see that this movement wanted
to push the foreigners out of Israel.
They were fundamentalists.
Whereas the characters in the Gospel
are different. They are pacifistic.
They are turning the other cheek.
They're giving to Caesar what is Caesar's.
How did a movement like Christianity
come to exist in a region
that was occupied by Roman soldiers
and had Jewish zealots within it
that were going to
push these Romans out?
How was that possible?
I began studying the other
two major works of the era:
The New Testament and Wars
of the Jews, by Josephus,
(?) a Roman ??? historian
who described the war
between the Romans and the
Jews in the 1st century.
While reading these works side by side,
I noticed an amazing
connection between them.
Certain events from the ministry
of Jesus seemed to closely paralell
episodes from the military campaign
of Roman Caesar Titus Flavius,
a campaign which took place 40
years after Jesus supposedly lived.
My efforts to undestand these connections
lead me to an incredible discovery.
Christianity had been invented by a
little known family of Roman Caesars:
the Flavians.
And they left us documents to prove it.
Part One: the Flavians' Rise to Power
(?) The Flavians, another household ???,
and yet, it's the Flavians
who completely reshape the Roman Empire.
In Rome, of course, there's the
Colosseum, which is understood to be
the best known monument of the
ancient Roman Empire, perhaps.
The Colosseum is, in fact,
a Flavian construction
produced during the Flavian period.
FLAVIAN PERIOD 69 - 96CE
Flavian Ampitheater - The Colosseum
It's under the Flavians, that both
rabbinic Judaism and
Christianity take shape.
Why would the Flavians be
interested in creating religions?
Much like today, their era was
marked by political power struggles,
a bankrupt economy, religious
conflicts and endless wars.
In amidst of this turmoil, the Flavians
seized control of the Roman Empire
and ushered in an
immense paradigm shift.
To understand the Flavians rise
to power, we need to go back
to the reign of the previous powerful
rulers, the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
JULIO-CLAUDIAN DYNASTY
Beginning with Julio
Caesar, in the year 49 BCE,
the Julio-Claudians ruled
Rome for over a hundred years,
transforming the government
from a republic into an empire.
This family contained
all the famous Caesars:
Julius, who predated the time of Jesus;
JULIUS CESAR 44 BCE
Augustus, who was Caesar at the
time of Jesus' supposed birth;
AUGUSTUS 27 BCE
Tiberius, who ruled during
Jesus' supposed death;
TIBERIUS 14 CE
followed by the infamous Caligula;
CALIGULA 37 CE
then Claudius
CLAUDIUS 41 CE
and ending the Julio-Claudian dynasty
with Nero, whose reign begins in 54 CE.
NERO 54 CE
The Julio-Claudians enjoyed a godlike
status until the family degenerated
JOSEPH ATWILL - Biblical Scholar and Researcher
Author of Caesar's Messiah
and began to damage the Roman Empire.
By the time of Nero, his famous
decadence was bankrupting the Empire
and the Jews of Judea were staging a
huge rebelion against their Roman rulers.
Judea was one of the many conquered
provinces that made up the Roman Empire.
This region, which was
also known as Palestine,
was controlled by a family that served
as Rome's tax collector, the Herods.
(?) They were a Greco-Arab family, somewhat possible ???,
(?) though only ??? when it was convenient
to please the subjects they were given,
who were put in power in
Palestine and destroyed
the previous Jewish ruling family,
the Macabean family, root and stalk.
Besides being heavily taxed and
ruled by a non-Jewish family
put in power by Rome,
the Jews were further inflamed
by the requirement that
the statue of the Caesar
be placed for worship in every
temple throughout the empire.
In the Roman Empire, you could pretty
much have any god you want but,
legally, you had to submit to
the Emperor as a god as well.
You had to at least acknowledge that the
Roman leader was also a divine figure.
But the Jews would not have any of it.
It's fundamental to the Jewish belief
that you shall make no graven images.
It's one of the Commandments
given at the Sinai by God.
So, the Jews never made
representations of God.
The Jews had a very
different type of religion.
They had a religion which was
much more focused on the book
(?) and less focused upon cult in statues.
This presented a real
problem for the Romans.
They tried to install statues of Caesar
but the Jews werent't
gonna buy that at all.
In fact, it aggravated
them, it's enraged them
and the Romans really, I
think, didn't understand this.
It's not statues, it's books.
And those books contained what are known
as the Jewish Messianic Prophecies.
The thing that most moved the Jews revolt
against Rome was an obscure prophecy
from among their writings that a world
ruler would come out of Palestine.
Holy books inspired the Jews to expect
a redeemer, who would redeem Israel,
rescue Israel, restore Israel to
power and leadership in the world.
The Messiah that the literature
described was a warrior.
The Messiahs would have claimed
the same attributes that David did.
David could overcome any army because
God gave him the power to do it.
If you had the power of God, you
could easily defeat the Roman army.
The people rebeld against Rome and were
led by a messianic movement that had
a series of Messiahs that had come
forward to fight against the Roman Empire.
The Hebrew word Messiah is translated
into Greek as Kristos or Christ.
MESSIAH = KRISTOS
So, the title of Christ can describe any
of the numerous Messiahs of this movement.
Yes, the word Christ or Christians can
refer to the Palestine messianic movement.
But it's a later term,
it's a later reformulation
of the messianic movement in Palestine.
This movement rebels against
Rome in 66 and it's successful.
It actually defeats them militarily.
So, it must have been a huge movement.
The victorious Jews set up a nation-state
directly in the Roman Empire.
And the Romans had to
do something about it.
There was a real danger that this
messianic movement could not only
boil over in Judea itself, but could
spread to other Jewish communities
and other parts of the Roman Empire.
Rome ruled its colonies
with a rod of iron.
And any resistance was going
to be met with brute force.
At this time during Nero's reign, two
of the finest military men in the Empire
were the Flavians
Vespasian and his son Titus.
Vespasian and Titus were military men.
They spent a great deal of
their life outside of Rome.
For over a decade, they had waged war
against the Druids in Britany and Gaul.
Vespasian and Titus were successful
in, essentially, destroying the Druids.
They left behind no historical
record of their existence.
And it's the Flavians
that Nero calls upon
when he needs to supress
the Jews rebellion in Judea.
Nero responded by asking his best
general, Vespasian, and his son Titus
to go into Judea with a
huge army, 67,000 troops,
and similar number of support
individuals. So, they meant business.
The Romans came down
to crush the rebellion.
In the year 66 CE, the Flavians begin
their military campaign against the Jews.
They start further north, in Galilee,
where the first of three
keys events takes place.
They destroy the Jewish
towns of Galilee.
They also capture a Jewish rebel
who later becomes a critical figure
in the formulation of Christianity.
This is where they captured one
of the leaders of the rebellion,
a Jew named Josephus Bar Mathias.
Now, Josephus presented himself
to the Flavians as a prophet.
He survived.
He survived, apparently,
by telling Vespasian
that the prophecies
(?) that the Jews pointed out ???,
Vespasian would become Emperor.
And, of course, he did. So,
Vespasian quite liked Josephus.
He used him as a
translator in his entourage.
He used him to appeal to
the rebels to surrender.
At this point, Josephus
became a turncoat.
And worked with the Flavians
against the rebellion.
Meanwhile, chaos is
increasing back in Rome,
where Nero's rule is being threatened.
In the year 68, the Senate
found the courage to depose Nero
and he committed suicide.
Now, in that circumstance,
Vespasian was a prime
candidate to become Emperor.
In the middle of this war, Vespasian
returned to Rome and seized the throne.
The Flavians then became
the Imperial Family.
With Vespasian becoming
the new Caesar in Rome,
Titus stays behind on the battlefield
and sets his sights on Jerusalem,
where the other two
key events take place.
Titus encircles Jerusalem with a wall,
and finally, he razes the temple,
leaving not one stone atop another.
It took a while, they eventually
had to bring on starvation
by building a wall, a barricade
entirely enveloping the city.
What happens, of course, is the
temple, in 70, is completely destroyed.
For the Jews, it was the ultimate
calamity, because, of course,
this was the house of
their god and it was
destroyed by the
Romans quite thoroughly.
Titus, of course, was the
victor of this great siege.
Titus carried the spoils of this captured
city back to Rome for his triumph.
He took the treasures of the temple,
the famous 7-branch candle stick.
You can see it on the
Arch of Titus in Rome.
It celebrates that tremendous
victory of Rome again triumphant
and Titus, of course,
is the hero of the day.
All of the artifacts from
the temple that they seized,
they put on public display in what
they refer to as the Palace of Peace,
except for one item:
the Jewish Scripture.
Josephus records that the Flavians
took and placed in their private palace,
where no one was allowed to see it.
Although Titus Flavius successfully
ended the rebellion in Judea,
another rebellion soon broke
out in Alexandria, Egypt.
The Flavians were clear
that this was not the end
of the Jewish messianic movement.
They also recognized that
it was the Jewish literature
that was fueling this movement.
So, once they captured
the Jewish Scripture,
they had all of the
copies of it destroyed.
And that's why the Dead Sea Scrolls
had to have been buried in a cave,
because that was the only way they could
be safe from the Roman destruction.
There was not a single scrap of literature
found from the messianic movement,
until the Scrolls were discovered.
That's why they're such a treasure,
because they're the only real voice
of the messianic movement that we have.
And the real voice of the
Jews messianic movement,
according to our scholars,
was violent and militaristic,
not the pacifistic version
depicted in the Gospels.
War against Rome was a messianic war.
So, that's why I say that the
Scrolls were not only the literature
of the messianic movement in Palestine,
they were also the literature
of the war against Rome.
The Romans needed to
subdue the Jewish religion,
so they set about influencing
it and changing it.
They realize they can't destroy
the Jewish religion altogether.
That's not their objective. They
realized... they're sensible enough
to realize that they can't do that.
So, what you have to do is
try to create a type of
Judaism that is benign.
And it's exactly consorting with
the rise of the Flavian dynasty
is the arrival of two benign
forms of Jewish ideology.
RABBINIC JUDAISM CHRISTIANITY
It's during this period that a
new literature enters history,
which describes a peace loving,
turn the other cheek preaching
Jewish messiah named Jesus Christ.
But if the Flavians wrote the Gospels,
how could a Roman family know how
to write Jewish literature
that refers to Jewish prophecy?
The answer lies in the Flavians
collaborations with a number
of Jewish intellectuals, beginning with
their own court historian: Josephus.
Josephus arrives back
in Rome with Titus.
He becomes an adopted
member of the Flavian family.
An amazing turn of events
for the Jewish turncoat.
He becomes Flavius Josephus.
FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS
FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS
Josephus, at this time, begins
writing the history of the war.
And he records that Titus
gave him the Jewish Scripture.
Josephus' histories have
always been associated
with the origins of Christianity.
Time and again you can find
paralels with what Josephus writes
and what turns up in the Gospels.
It's a powerful evidence
of their true origin.
In reading the works of Josephus
side by side with the Gospels,
scholars have noticed
paralels between the two works.
It appears as though the history
of Josephus records events
that fulfill the prophecies
of the Old and New Testaments.
Early Christians
understood this connection.
In fact, when the Bible first began
to be printed in the middle ages,
it included the history of Josephus.
He was employed to write the
official history that we have.
The other histories from this period have
been destroyed ruthlessly by the Romans.
Josephus tells this in very
chilling passages how the Romans
exerted complete control of
the literature of this period.
(?) There were alternative histories of the Jewish ??? written
where the Romans rounded up the writers
of those histories and executed them.
They rounded up all the copies of
those histories and destroyed them.
That is to say they ruthlessly
wiped out any alternative history,
so that the only history we
have is written by Josephus.
And let's remember who Josephus was:
chief propagandist of
the Flavian dynasty.
He was very very successful.
He moved back to Rome.
He was given an apartment
in Emperor's own town house.
And he was appointed the chronic
clerk of the Roman-Jewish war
using Vespasian's own
diaries of the events.
Also in the pages of his history,
Josephus declares that the
Jewish messiah or Christ
is none other than Flavius
Vespasian and his dynastic family.
To put it succinctly, Josephus
says that there was a prophecy,
that a world ruler would
come out of Palestine.
The Jews thought this
applied to one of their own.
But they were wrong in
their interpretations.
He used the most cinical interpretation.
He applied it to the rise of
the Roman Emperor in Palestine.
Josephus recorded that the messianic
prophecies foresaw not a Jew,
but Vespasian and his dynasty.
In fact, all of the
Flavian historians recorded
that the Flavian Caesar was the Christ.
It was important to the Flavians
that they'd be seen as the Christ,
as divine and godlike. And
this was not mere vanity.
The Julio-Claudians before them had
already stablished that presenting
themselves as gods was a powerful
tool in controlling their subjects.
When the Flavians took over the throne,
they inherited an enormous burocracy
that was already in place:
the Imperial Cult.
Which was dedicated to promoting
the idea of Caesar as a god.
ROMAN IMPERIAL CUL Another part of the puzzle
is the Roman Imperial Cult.
Why is it important?
Well, because it coincides
with that same period of time
as the emergence of the Christ cult.
You had a whole social community.
The whole social structure
of these conquered territories
was governed by the Imperial Cult.
If you wanted to succeed, the key social
community to join was the Imperial Cult
because that's where all
the movers and shakers were.
This idea of the Emperor
becoming an object of worship
was well stablished in the Roman system
before Vespasian and Titus came along.
It was prevalent in all major
centres. It had its own priesthood.
There was a ceremony,
an annual celebration,
annual games for the Imperial cult.
Now, it had many characteristics which
would later color the Christian cult.
(?) It grew in the same centres ???
claim that were later transfered to Christ.
The Julio-Claudians had claimed
that they were of divine descents
and that they were therefore legitimate.
The power base was the Roman
aristocracy, the Roman nobility.
All of that colapsed
into this power vacuum.
Vespasian was declared Emperor
by the troops, by the Roman army.
So, effectively,
it was a military coup.
With the change of dynasty,
they have to create a whole mythology
to legitimize that dynasty.
At the same time,
they're creating a whole mythology
to counter Jewish messianism.
Somewhere along the line,
those two things get mixed together.
When Vespasian died, Titus began the
process of having his father deified.
This is a complicated process
because only the Roman Senate
can bestow on an individual
the title of deist or god.
Titus came to the Senate and presented
evidence that the life of his father
had been divine. Certainly, this would
have included the military campaign
that the Flavians waged through Judea.
And it's at this time, I think,
the Gospels were written.
Because the theological structure
in the Gospels of a God, the father,
and the Son of God, is the same one
that Titus would have been presenting
to the Roman Senate.
Well, the Roman Senate
did accept Titus' evidence
and Vespasian was
deified and became a god.
Titus, therefore, became a Son of God.
The Arch of Titus, that still
stands in modern Rome today,
(?) is inscribed ??? dedication to the divine Titus,
son of the divine
Vespasian or son of a god.
This Imperial Cult set up
to worship Caesar as God,
also provided the basis for the
structure of the Roman Catholic Church.
Now, the rituals, paraphernalia
and symbols of paganism
would transfer wholesale
to the Christian Church.
The most obvious and clear
example is where the title
of the pagan chief priest of Rome,
the Pontifex Maximus,
became the title of the
Pope, the Christian Pope.
If you look at who held the
original bishop positions
in the Catholic Church
in those early times,
you would see that they are members
of the same pagan aristocracy.
They simply changed their
clothing a little bit,
they wore the same garments, but they
wore slightly different hairdresses.
They had become from being
a priest of a pagan cult
to being a priest of Rome.
Where the Vatican now stands,
there was once a pagan temple
which celebrated the mysteries of
a dying and ressurecting God-man
who wasn't Jesus.
There are many churches in
Rome, I've been to a few where
you go above into the
church, and there is Jesus;
and you go underneath, and there
is a little sanctuary of Mithras.
And it's basically the same figure.
PAGAN GOD MITHRAS
So, the Roman plot to invent
Christianity is just so clever,
when you think about it.
Through the Pope, who is
God's representative on Earth,
they no longer needed
expensive standing armies,
wars and punishment of
disobedient peasants.
They could, through
religion, rule their subjects.
Over time, Roman Christianity
propagated throughout the Empire
by way of the mass media of the day:
the Roman roads.
The Romans must have approved
of this new religion because,
as some scholar says, if the Gospels
really were Jewish literature
about a Roman sentenced criminal,
why wouldn't they have been destroyed?
One of the really surprising things
for me was to realize the extents
of Roman control of
propaganda and of literature.
So that, when you suddenly get all
of these Christians literature arising
in this period, one has to
ask: how did that happen?
The conclusion that one has to reach
is that that could not have happened
without some degree of complicity
on the part of the Romans.
So, one is led to the conclusion
that the Romans must be involved
in the production of this literature.
RULING FAMILIES: a CONSPIRACY
To produce and disseminate this
literature was a huge undertaking
and the Flavians
undoubtedly had colaborators.
We know they were funded
by the wealthiest family
in the world at this time: the
Alexanders, a Jewish family,
who served as Roman
tax collectors in Egypt.
Like the Herods in Judea, the
Alexanders had strong motivation
to keep the Jewish messianic
movement from threatening
their position and their wealth.
One of their family members
was Philo of Alexandria,
a famous Jewish teologian,
who was already writing works
that combined Jewish beliefs
with the modern Greek and
Roman pagan beliefs of the day.
Many scholars agree that his
writings formed the basis
from much of the
philosophy of Christianity.
In these pages is practically
every concept that you can find
(?) within Christianity. ???
combined to Greek philosophy and he took that
and he combined it with Judaism.
On top of that, he was from
a extremely wealthy family.
And this is important because
you have to follow the money
(?) when you're looking at major trends,
you've ??? paradigm is being set.
If you look at his family, then you
start seeing... well, this is interesting
because now we're starting to
come across the Flavians again.
His relatives were very
involved with the Flavians.
That whole area is where we're
going to look very closely
for the Christians origins.
It's from exactly this same circle
of people that you get the first signs
of Christian ideology and they all
lead to the rise of the Flavian dynasty.
Another wealthy influential
character, Princess Berenice,
was from the Herod family in Judea.
She's the grandaughter
of Herod, the Great,
a product of the Herod's intermarriage
with the conquered Jewish
ruling messianic lineage.
Princess Berenice appears
in the New Testament,
which makes her an
interesting character.
She had two or three husbands and
then became the mistress of Titus.
(?) So, you can see ??? rather like
dynasty here, you know, powerful people,
mixed marriages, you know,
shacking up with the conqueror.
Yea, and it's really where
Joe Atwill takes his idea
of a conspiracy to
write the New Testament.
But, let him say in his own words.
Berenice was a Herod related by marriage
to the Alexanders and, of course,
later she became the mistress to Titus.
The fact that she was so closely
linked with the Flavians, shows you that
the three families were very
unified in financial, romantic
and likely theological issues.
By the looks of things, this coalescence
seemed to have acquired about a dynamic
that led to the synthesis
of Judaism and paganism
and eventually became Christianity.
So, this is a very key time period.
I believe that the Gospels were
actually written under the control
of the Herods,
the Alexanders and the Flavians.
These families had the
motivation to create Christianity
and with the expertise in
Judaism that the Alexanders
and the Herods had, they had the
actual tecnical ability to come up with
(?) these stories that are a
fulfillment of a ??? prophecies.
So, it seems the Flavians
had the motivation, the means
and the colaborations through
which they likely constructed
PART TWO: THE DOCUMENTS
and began disseminating Christianity.
PART TWO: THE DOCUMENTS
And if our scholars are correct,
one of the documents they left behind
are the Gospels themselves.
THE AUTHORS OF THE GOSPELS
I began working on the study
of the Gospels in the 1970's
and I looked at texts in terms
of how were these composed,
JOHN HUDSON
what is understanding their structure
tell you about who wrote them
Literary Analist and Author
"Goodbye Jesus"
and why they were written.
These texts were not
independent Jewish texts,
but they were created as literary
works using classical literary models.
If we expect that this is
the testimony of witnesses,
we've got a major problem.
We actually have four
anonymus documents.
MARK, MATHEW, LUKE AND JOHN
They were not written by the named
people on those documents.
This is simply church tradition
that the Gospels are so named:
according to Mark; according to Mathew.
So, this idea that the Gospels are
reliable testimony is patent nonsense.
Why are the Gospels called Gospels?
That's a critical question. Well,
Gospel in Greek is "Evangelion".
And it means good news
of military victory.
Whose military victory are we
celebrating here in these Gospels?
Well, seems to me that
we're celebrating, clearly,
the Roman military victory, because
these events: the Battle of Gadara,
the Battle of the Lake of Galilee,
the successful Battle of Jerusalem,
these are battles that the Romans won.
Why are the Gospels celebrating
battles that the Jews lost
if these things were
written by the Jews?
The fact that the Gospels
are known to us in Greek
and not in Aramaic or Hebrew is, I
think, just evidence of their ownership.
They were not written by
any followers of Jesus,
who would have surely spoken Aramaic.
And if they had been
fishermen and simple folk,
they would not have had the
literate skills to write them anyway.
If we look closely, there
actually are clues in the Gospels
that point to who the true authors were.
A lot of the Christian
literature advocates
turning away from the Jewish
law and obeying Roman law.
All this fits perfectly into
Roman propaganda purposes.
And then you have, in general, the
portrayal of Jesus as the peaceful Jew,
who was wondering around in what is
depicted as a sort of pastural scenes,
talking to fishermen and farmers
and so forth, when, in fact,
this is a war zone. Judea is a war zone.
And you ask yourself: why is
it not portrayed as a war zone?
(?) ??? they really had it ???. ??? they have Jesus saying
'Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's',
which is basically in response
to talking about money.
Whose benefit would that be?
So blatantly obvius.
The perception of Roman
characters in the Gospels,
they're all interpreted in a
favourable light. They are pro-Roman.
They do not depict the Romans as the
forces of evil. They reverse that.
It's the Jews who become
the forces of darkness.
It's very striking that
various passages in the Gospels
refer to the Jews as some people
separate from the heroes
of Jesus and his disciples.
The Jews are those who object.
The Jews are those who try
to fault the divine plan.
Now, that gives us a clue, certainly, to
who were the true authors of this book.
They are works of literature
created by people who
are trained in Jewish literature,
but whose values are pro-Roman.
The Romans wanted to
promote antisemitism
and so they arranjed the story of
the beloved man-God Jesus Christ
to appear as if the Jews
had brought about his death.
Because of this,
the Jews would have to suffer
antisemitism throughout history.
So, this was a piece of work
that could not have been done
except by a fairly stablished literary
team, such as the literary team
that was in Rome actually
writing the books of Josephus.
I mean, that was written
by a literary team
and it was written as one of
the atempts to give prominence
(?) to the Flavian Caesars which the Gospels ??? so do.
So, it is extremely likely that
the Gospels, as a form of epic
designed to magnify
alegorically the Roman Caesars,
is also written at the court
of the Flavian Emperors.
But the Jesus story
takes place many decades
before the Flavians came to power,
why would the Flavians create a work
about a Jewish messiah that
wasn't even from their own era?
The Gospels were very
precisely backdated 40 years.
Jesus's ministry was started
in 30 CE, exactly 40 years
from the destruction of the temple.
His ministry ends at Passover
33 CE, which is 40 years before
the end of the Jewish-Roman
war, which occurred at Passover,
in 73 CE, with the
famous battle of Massada.
The Gospels are backdated into
the period of Poncius Pilate,
that is to say before
the first Jewish war,
which is to say in the
Julio-Claudian period.
But this is typical of Flavian literature.
It's a Flavian tecnique.
What they do is they backdate the
story into the period of their enemies,
namely the Julio-Claudians.
And so, generation after
generation of Christian scholar,
and even secular historians,
go hunting, in the Julio-Claudian period,
for the origins of the Gospels.
They don't really find
any anwsers there.
There are allusions in the Gospels
to the destruction of the temple.
The most reasonable answer
to that is that these texts
DESTRUCTION OF THE JEWISH TEMPLE 70 CE
were written after the
destruction of the temple.
DESTRUCTION OF THE JEWISH TEMPLE 70 CE
That is to say, in the Flavian period,
after the change of dynasty.
This backdating of the
story of Jesus Christ,
40 years earlier from the time the
Gospels may actually have been written,
explains why many of the
prophecies of Jesus came true
within exactly 40 years.
What does this all add up to?
In my view,
the thing that is most significant
is the research by Joseph Atwill,
in his book "Caesar's Messiah",
which sugests that the Gospels
were actually created as works
of Roman propaganda at the
end of the Roman-Jewish war,
under the reign of Flavian emperors,
that is Titus Caesar
and Vespasian Caesar.
And if you end up worshipping Jesus,
what you really end up doing is
worshipping Caesar in disguise.
This may have been how the
Flavians finally got the Jews
to worship Caesar as a god:
by giving them Jesus Christ,
a messiah more to the Roman's liking.
But is there any actual
history to this character?
Where did he really come from?
The mistery to me begans
with his very name.
In Greek, Jesus means savior
and Christ means the messiah.
JESUS - SAVIOR, CHRIST - MESSIAH
This didn't strike me as something
you would call a young child.
JESUS - SAVIOR, CHRIST - MESSIAH
These two words are already
important within Judaism
before Jesus Christ supposedly existed.
Major biblical figures,
to a Jewish Greek-speaking populace,
DAVID - THE CHRIS would already be called Christ.
Their ears would already be
acclimated to accepting this title.
So, it isn't just a unique name of a
single person that just suddenly pop up.
What did we actually know
about Jesus Christ, the man?
I don't think that Jesus can
be historically defended.
I don't think there's any evidence that
we can extend to that particular Jesus.
So, when you actually set out to
investigate the historical Jesus,
as opposed to the Christ of faith,
you very abruptally enter a void.
You find that whereas you might
imagine the core details of Jesus
are readily known and accessible, you
actually discover there's no such thing.
Further, there've never been
any archeological evidence
of Jesus Christ that
had ever been discover.
You cannot find an established
and incontrovertible
biography of Jesus at all.
It doesn't exist.
You enter a strange twilight
zone of early Christian belief.
What we have here is not
a movement that's grown
on the accretion of legends
on a real flesh and blood man,
but instead, the development
of the religious movement
around the idea of a man.
There isn't even an actual
physical description
of what Jesus looked like
anywhere in the Gospels.
The presentation of the Jesus
character is somewhat of a composite
of many messianic leaders of the time.
Many messianic leaders of the time,
most or all of them came to a bad end.
Usually by crucifiction,
because crucifiction was
the Roman punishment
for seditious activity.
And the penny dropped.
The penny dropped that Jesus,
as a human being, never existed.
In all of this,
we're dealing with literature.
We're not dealing with history.
So, the answer is:
no, there is no history
to this character Jesus,
it's entirely a literary creation.
What the Romans did was they saw the
Jews reliance and belief in prophecy.
So, they said ok, they want a prophet,
let's give them one.
It seems that in the construction of
the literary character Jesus Christ,
the Roman authors borrowed religious
concepts not only from Judaism,
but also from other gods and
religions that they knew.
Some scholars have noticed
the similarities between
the story of Jesus and
the ancient pagan mysteries.
PAGAN PARALELS
PAGAN PARALELS
In ancient mythology,
we find this whole strain of thought
called solar mythology.
Many gods start taking on solar
attributes because as agricultural
communities become more important,
the sun becomes the big focus,
but most obvious reasons
are planting and harvesting.
The sun is then personified.
So, now we have a male sun god.
APOLLO - SUN OF GOD
Becomes a religion in
many parts of the world.
KRISHNA - SUN GOD
Christianity usurped a tremendous
amount of sun worship.
Some of us are saying that this was
a sun god turned into a Jewish man.
This December 25th birthday was,
in fact, the Winter Solstice.
This is really, in fact,
the birth of the god of light.
December 25th, actually,
is the end of a three-day period
when the sun stands still.
The sun appears to be dying...
as the days become shorter...
and the sun is reborn at that point.
BIRTH OF THE SUN
Across the ancient world,
there was this form of experiental
and phylosofical spirituality in these
mystery cults, or mystery schools.
And at the center of these schools,
you would find a mythos.
(? ) Which was an initiating myth,
a symbolic myth which would help people
who were going through
the initiating process
(?) come to this spiritual awakening,
this knowledge, this ??? Gnosis.
And what you see in these myths
is the elements that will
later become the Jesus story.
Let's ask the question:
is Jesus developed
from pre-existing literary characters?
Jesus has certain episodes in his
so-called life and each one of them
can be traced to a prior
representation of that time.
If you look at the elements which
we found in the pagan mystery
school myths, you find the story of
a dying and ressurecting son of God,
who's born of a virgin,
has 12 disciples,
turns water into wine in a wedding,
brings a new religion of love,
is accused of heresy or
provocation by the authorities,
is put to death,
sometimes by crucifiction.
And then, if you want to commune with
the God-man, you take bread and wine.
Ant then you can come to eternal life.
Well, all of this is,
of course, Christianity.
EASTER
Easter itself is a long pre-Christian
celebration of the ressurection
of Spring from the death of Winter.
This is an ancient xamanic rite,
you'll find all over the world,
that you go through a ritual death.
Where you get reborn,
but you reborn as an awake being.
So, you died just to your lower nature
and woken up to your higher nature.
OLD TESTAMENT PARALLELS
You can find them in the Old Testament,
in the Jewish mythology as well,
it isn't just pagan parallels.
I mean, the New Testament...
For example, the ascension...
we have an ascension
with the Old Testament figure of Elijah.
And it's a very dramatic ascension.
Elisha/Elijah cycle.
These are two Jewish prophets.
One followed on from the other,
which have many of the story
elements found in Jesus.
For example, there is a
multiplication of food miracle;
there is a raising of the dead miracle;
there is a water miracle;
there is, ultimately,
an ascension to heaven miracle.
Is this fulfillment? Or is this,
simply, copying of a useful theme?
You can see where they just use Old
Testament characters and scriptures
as a blueprint to create this new one.
A lot of the ethics of
Christianity actually were around
before Christianity. "Do unto others
as you have them do unto you",
is, in fact, from the Old Testament.
Jesus didn't make that up.
Many of the other aspects
of Christian ethics,
many things which we
might want to applaude,
as very good aspects of
Christian ethics, can be found in
the Stoic phylosophy in Rome.
Which, by the way,
is exactly the phylosofical and ethical
school promoted by the Flavians.
There is little that is
original about Jesus.
If one separates from his words
advice that was in the interest
of the Roman imperial family,
all that you have left are
snippets of widely known phylosophies,
truisms
and concepts that came directly
from prior Hebraic literature.
The reason I'm now convinced
there's no historical Jesus,
which seems a real...
like oh...
to people who are not familiar with
the idea, is a combination of things.
First of all, there's no
evidence for an historical man
which stands up to proper scrutiny.
Secondly is the story of
Jesus is full of these motifs
which come from the pagan mysteries.
And the third reason is because
in the early Christian movement,
(? ) there's these two types of Christians,
circa by the 2nd century.
(?) Which I think ??? Gnostics and Literalists.
What marks out the Literalists,
who will become the Roman Empire...
the Roman Catholic Church,
is that they've got an historical man.
What marks out the Gnostics,
is that they see it allegorically
(?) and a great heresy is the Christ in coming in the flesh.
Now, the winners write history...
and the history books have been
written by the Literalists.
And all of the tradition about
the Romans trying to torture
and supress Christians,
these traditions are correct.
They definitely persecuted the
messianic, militaristic Christians
and they certainly would have
frown on the Gnostic independent
thinking Christians,
but the Roman, pacifistic
"giving to Caesar what is Caesar's"
Christians,
that group would have been promoted.
Which makes it perfect for the Roman
empire and it's a fascist empire.
It's got a very simple message:
"Just believe this.
You don't have to transform and you
have to go through the authorities,
through the bishops,
through the State, ultimately. "
It's the perfect thing for them to
pick out. And that's what they do.
Our scholars agree that the Gospels
are complex literary creations,
drawing from both
pagan and Jewish myths.
But Joseph Atwill goes a step
further to say that the Flavians
wrote passages directly into the Gospels
which show that they were the authors.
THE SON OF MAN
One of the most famous prophecies
that Jesus makes is about
the coming of someone he
refers to as the Son of Man.
Now, many people believe that He's
talking about a second coming
of Himself.
And many believe that this is going
to occur some point in the future.
Well, the fact is this coming
of Jesus has already occurred.
Jesus makes very specific prophecies
as to what will happen
when the Son of Man
makes his visitation.
He refers to three key events:
The Galelian towns will be crushed;
Jerusalem will be encircled with a wall;
And the temple will be razed,
leaving not one stone atop another.
He also states exactly when
this individual will come.
He says that the Son of Man will
appear before the generation,
that is alive and listening
to Jesus' words, passes away.
Now, to Jews of this era,
a generation is 40 years.
And so, the only individual, that
could possibly be the Son of Man
that Jesus predicts, is Titus Flavius.
Titus Flavius did destroy
the Galilean towns.
He did encircled Jerusalem with a wall.
And he razed the temple and
left not one stone atop another.
And he did this within 40 years.
CRUCI-FICTION OF JESUS - 33CE
END OF ROMAN-JEWISH WAR 73CE
CRUCI-FICTION OF JESUS - 33CE
Josephus recorded that,
no matter how Titus tortured the Jews,
they refused to call
him Lord or God.
So, to circumvent this stubbornness,
the Flavians wrote the Gospels,
in which a Son of Man was
predicted to come in the future.
Titus fulfilled these prophecies
and became the Son of Man.
So, you end up worshipping
Titus without knowing it.
To further support his thesis that
the Flavians originated Christianity,
Joseph Atwill points to the
Roman-Catholic Church's earlier saints,
known as the Christian Flavians.
CHRISTIAN FLAVIANS
The Flavian family is
connected to early Christianity
in a number of unusual ways.
So many members of the family
were recorded as having been among
the first Roman-Catholic saints.
These include Flavia Domitilla,
who is either Titus' sister or his niece.
And there is an inscription
honoring Flavia for donating
the land that became the
first Christian catacomb.
And Flavia Domitilla was
the first Christian saint.
Her son, Clement,
is recorded as having been
the first Roman-Catholic Pope
after the Apostle Simon.
In addition,
there were two members
of the Flavian household staff,
Nereus and Achilleus.
Both of them had
churches named after them
in the very earliest
Christian diocese in Rome.
There was a Christian theologian,
whose name was Titus Flavius Clemens,
Clement of Alexandria.
And he's the one who actually
described the first Christian symbols.
And he said they were the anchor,
the boat,
the fish, the olive branch, the star.
And, oddly,
these are the very symbols
that the Flavian Caesars
used on their coins.
The final connecting point,
between the Flavian
family and Christianity,
is that, in the fourth century,
Flavius Constantine made Christianity
the State religion of Rome.
FLAVIUS CONSTANTINE
1st Christian Roman Emperor 313CE
The military achievements of Caesars
were important to all Romans.
So, certainly,
the Flavian Christians,
the group that the
Roman-Catholic Church states
were the first saints of the religion,
would have known the
identity of the Son of Man
that Jesus predicted,
who would crush Galilee,
encircle Jerusalem with a
wall and raze the temple,
was Titus Flavius.
TITUS FLAVIUS
TITUS FLAVIUS
So, it seems, if a person
knows hot to uncover them,
there are actually many clues pointing
to the Flavian origin of Christianity.
And perhaps, the most intriguing
one that Joseph Atwill uncovered
is a secret code the Flavians
used in their documents,
which enabled him to make
his startling discovery.
So, the Romans had the Jews scripture
locked up inside their imperial
court and they studied it.
And what they discovered
was that there was a unique
literary code hidden in the text.
This hidden code, which was
common in Jewish scripture,
was used by the Flavian literary team
to place passages into the Gospels
that had to be deciphered
to be undeerstood.
This hidden literary technique
is known as typology.
TYPOLOGY
Typology is used throughout
the ancient Hebraic literature.
And is a genre that is really no
longer understood or used today.
But, simply put, typology is
using events from the past
to provide form and context
for subsequent ones.
What we're talking about is
stereotypic, stereotypic.
In other words,
there's an idealized prototype,
which shows certain characteristics
or performs in certain ways.
For instance, one of the things
they do, is they take an old story
and they retell it in a new form.
And they superimpose contemporary
history upon old stories.
And they create these
multi-layer texts.
In Hebraic typology,
texts were design
to be read in comparison to
one another, or intertextually.
And in doing so,
a meaning that would not be visible,
in the surface narration,
would become apparent
to someone who understood the typologic
connection between the stories.
HEBRAIC TYPOLOGY
Hebraic typology connects prophets.
Events in the life of one prophet
are placed into the life
of a subsequent prophet.
And this shows that there's a
divine pattern, stablished by God,
connecting his prophets to one another.
The Gospels actually show how
we can decipher for ourselves
this hidden code, or typology,
that was used to
create the Jesus story.
MOSES - JESUS PARALLELS
At the very beginning of the Gospels,
GOSPEL OF MATHEW
there's a primer of this typology.
GOSPEL OF MATHEW
What the author of Mathew
has done is take events
from the Old Testament and place
them into the life of Jesus.
These events occurred in the same
sequence, in the story of Jesus,
as they occur in the Old Testament.
Numerous Bible scholars had already
identified the following parallels:
OLD TESTAMENT MATHEW
Both stories have a patriarch named
Joseph who travels from Israel to Egypt.
Joseph goes to Egypt Joseph goes to Egypt
A ruler who massacres innocent boys.
Pharaoh massacres boys Herod massacres boys
A divine character who states that
"All the men are dead
who sought your life"
"All the men are dead "All the men are dead
who sought your life" who sought your life"
And then a return from Egypt to Israel.
From Egypt to Israel From Egypt to Israel
This is followed by events which
have passing through water.
In the Old Testament,
the Israelites pass through the Red Sea.
In Mathew, Jesus is given a baptism
in which he passes through water.
Passing through water Passing through water (baptism)
(?) ??? travel into the wilderness.
The Israelites are in the
wilderness for 40 years.
Jesus goes into the
wilderness for 40 days.
in the wilderness in the wilderness
Finally, we have the three temptations.
In the Old Testament,
we have the temptation by bread,
the statement "Do not tempt God",
and the commandment to worship only God.
These appear again in Mathew,
where Jesus is tempted by bread,
tells the Devil "Do not tempt God",
and instructs him to worship only God.
Therefore, when you compare the life
of Jesus with the life of Moses,
you see a linkage that shows that
the character in the Gospels
was divinely connected to the
character in the Old Testament.
The life of the first savior of Israel,
Moses, forsaw the life of Jesus,
who's now claiming to be
the next savior of Israel.
To understand the rest of the
Jesus story, his adult ministry,
we simply need to know that the
same system of parallel names,
locations and concepts,
occurring in the same sequence,
was used to connect
Jesus in the Gospels
to Titus in the works of Josephus.
Our scholars explain this Gospel typology
in the following three examples:
FISHERS OF MEN
Jesus comes to the Sea of Galilee
at the beginning of his ministry.
He gathers his disciples
to him and He says:
"Don not be afraid,
follow me and become fishers of men. "
In the Gospel of Luke,
Jesus actually says "catchers of men".
Titus comes to the same location,
to the Sea of Galilee.
He gathers his troops, his disciples
together and he says "Don't be afraid".
And then he leaves them.
They follow him
and they attack a
group of Jewish rebels.
They sink the Jews boats.
The Jews attempt to swim to safety
and the Romans use their
spears to catch them.
They become fishers of men.
The match isn't exact, but we
should never expect it to be exact.
It's simply a type which is repeated
across the whole of the New Testament.
LEGION OF DEMONS
Jesus is constantly
dealing with devils.
Josephus also deals with devils,
but Josephus defines
who these devils are.
He states that the devils
are those individuals
who have a rebellious spirit
and rebel against Rome.
At Gadara, Jesus encounters one man who
has a legion of demons inside his mind.
They then are driven out by Jesus.
They infect a herd of swine and this
herd rushes wildly into the water.
This is a parallel to
Titus' battle at Gadara,
where one individual infects an entire
legion of Jews with his demonic spirit.
And then that group, in turn,
infects another group
and this combined group is driven
by the Romans into the sea.
What's being suggested here is that
this story that you find in the Gospels
is in some way sort of like a grim
parabole about that military event.
(?) It's sort of like a bit ???, I think,
the Romans had a vicious sense of humor
like this, a very black sense of humor.
In a medieval text that I've studied,
which is called the Gospel of Barnabas,
when you read that story,
the way it's presented is in a
unsophisticated form,
that is to say,
it's sort of being decoded in some ways.
And it becomes clear that
what we're talking about here
are the Jewish rebels
are chased into the sea.
And they drown in the sea.
In the Gospels,
these are presented as pigs.
This is, once again, a very dark,
black, sort of Roman sense of humor.
Some of this literature really
needs to be understood like that.
THREE CRUCIFIED - ONE SURVIVES
In Josephus' biography, he describes,
when he was in the entourage of Titus,
during the closing stages
of the siege of Jerusalem,
he chanced upon to three of his friends
who were being crucified.
And he pleaded with
Titus for their release.
And Titus gave that permission
and the three figures
were removed from the cross,
two of them died and one revived.
Now, if you're looking for a
stereotypic example of how some idea
was floated into the mind of
someone writing the Gospels,
that is a pretty clear example.
It's certainly a strange occurrence
that we find such an incident
in the works of Josephus,
when it shows up in such a
dramatic form in the Gospels.
In the Gospels, Joseph of
Arimathea asked the Roman commander
to take Jesus down from the cross.
In Josephus' history,
Joseph Bar Mathias asked
the Roman commander
to take someone down from the cross.
Arimathea is a pun on Josephus'
last name, Bar Mathias.
JOSEPH BAR MATHIAS
(hebrew name of Flavius Josephus)
When you read our sources
really carefully...
and you have to do it really,
really carefully...
because they didn't spell it out first...
It's effectively very well hidden.
We have to understand that our
literature, a lot of our literature,
is essentially propaganda. The Romans
are not writing objective history.
And all of our literature has
been through Roman filters.
Perhaps that's the significance
of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
This is literature that hasn't
been through the Roman filters.
It's important to realize
that Josephus wrote in an era
when allegory was
regarded as a science.
Educated readers were expected
to be able to see another meaning
in religious text than the one that
appeared in the surface narration.
We're dealing with Roman
literature on the one hand
and Jewish literature on the other.
And, it has to be said that,
in both cases,
they're much more sophisticaded,
much more multi-layered and allusive,
and much trickier than
modern readers suspect.
No, it's not a simple literature.
It's very, very complex,
alegorical literature that
indulges in the literary games
that the Romans played.
The more you understand that
Roman literature in this period,
and then you place the Gospels
and other Christian literature
in that same milieu,
you can start to see the games that
are being played in that literature.
Now, these parallels have
been seen by other scholars.
But, what hey failed to notice,
is that they occur in the same sequence,
and, thereby,
they create a typologic pattern.
(?) The Flavian ??? is trying to
read these texts in context.
Because, in any given text, you've
got the text in the first instance,
and then you've got the context,
the environment in which it happened,
and, of course, in all of these texts,
also, you've got a subtext.
So, you've got text,
context and subtext.
And you have to be able to read all
of those things and, unfortunately,
many religious people,
who are coming out of seminaries,
who are coming out of religious
colleges, they're just not being trained
in this sort of level of reading.
They're instead being trained
to just read on one level,
which is a literal level.
And I think that that's very unfortunate
and that really needs to be challenged.
By studying the multiple
layers in these ancient texts,
in the original Greek language,
Joseph Atwill was able to discover
not just a handful,
but over 40 typological parallels
between the Gospels and
the works of Josephus,
which showed that the
ministry of Jesus Christ
followed an exact sequence:
the military campaign of Titus Flavius,
through parallel names,
locations and concepts.
Once I understood the system
that the Flavians were using
to link Jesus and Titus,
I was able to discover dozens
of these parallels
between Jesus and Titus.
And, what was amazing,
is that they occur in the same sequence.
And this simply proves
that this was deliberate,
that these unusual parallels had been
created by the Flavians as a signature.
It is their way to telling posterity
that they authored the Gospels.
These parallels are the Flavian
signature of the Gospels.
THE FLAVIAN SIGNATURE
Both Jesus and Titus began their
campaigns at the Sea of Galilee.
And then go into the
Galilean countryside,
followed by a journey to Jerusalem.
Once they reached the city's outskirts,
they pause for a period
before they enter.
Finally, they leave the city where
their campaigns come to an end.
To catalog the many parallels,
I gave each one a convenient name that
related to the concept in
that particular parallel set.
Starting at Galilee,
each of these are episodes that occurred
both in the Gospels story of Jesus
and in the history of Titus'
military campaign.
Cast out the supporters of the Son of Man
John possessed by a demon
The legion of demons
Demons infect another group
The herd ran violently
The herd drowned
Identification of the son of the living god
Binding and loosening
Both Jesus and Titus
journey to Jerusalem,
each sending messengers ahead to
meet him when he gets to the city.
On to Jerusalem - the messengers are sent ahead
Don't bury your dead or look back
The good Samaritan
When the Romans get to Jerusalem,
they noticed that the Jewish factions
are fighting against themselves.
At this point in the Gospels,
Jesus talks about "a house divided
against itself cannot stand".
Divide the group 3 for 2
Then Josephus wrote that,
in preparation for battle,
Titus ordered all of the fruit trees,
between the Roman camp
and the walls of Jerusalem, cut down.
At this point in the Gospels,
Jesus states that if a fruit tree
does not bear good fruit, cut it down.
Cut down the fruit tree
The narrow gate and the shut door
How to build a tower
Titus goes around the walls of
Jerusalem looking for the best place
to construct a tower, from which
they can watch their attack.
At this point in the Gospels,
Jesus asked which one of you who is going
to build a tower, doesn't first
sit and think about the cost.
Send a delegation
Inside the city:
At this point in the history,
Titus sends Josephus to ask the Jews
what terms they will accept for peace.
In the Gospels,
Jesus describes a king who sends a
delegation to ask for terms of peace.
The triumphal entrance and the stones that cried out
Both Jesus and Titus, at this point,
have triumphant entrances in Jerusalem.
During which, amazingly,
stones are said to cry out.
JOSEPHUS GOSPELS
And the stone came from it, and If every voice were still, the stones
cried out aloud... THE SON COMETH would immediately cry out
Each then drives a den of thieves out
from the area in front of the temple.
This is followed by Titus
encircling Jerusalem with a wall
and Jesus predicting that Jerusalem
will be encircled with a wall.
Because of wall,
starvation sets in Jerusalem.
Josephus wrote that a woman named Mary,
who called her son a myth for the world,
(?) slained him, ate him, thereby turning
him to a human Passover lamb.
In the Gospels,
we now have the Last Supper.
Jesus tells his disciples: "Take, eat,
this is my body, this is my blood. "
Thereby,
turning him into a Passover lamb.
Here, then, is the Flavian signature
of their authorship of the Gospels.
(?) You can see the fingerprints, ???
where they left their fingerprints
(?) all over these texts. You can start ???
to decode these texts
and start to arrive to really
startling conclusions about
how early Christianity first arose.
CONCLUSIONS
Our scholars have shown that
the Gospels were not a product
of primitive Jewish fishermen. Rather,
they are a sophisticated literary work
combining religious ideas of the day
with Roman political
perspective and power.
Joseph Atwill's research reveals that
reading the works of Josephus,
concurrently with the New Testament,
shows that the events of Jesus'
life were not historical,
but, rather,
all of them are dependant on the events
in the military campaign
of Titus Flavius.
Jesus Christ was an allegory
for the Roman Caesar Titus.
The messiah of the Roman Empire.
The Roman son of a god that
Christianity was set up to worship.
I certainly don't wanna undermine the
positive things seen in Christianity.
I'm happy to admit that there are
positive things in Christianity
and the other religions as well.
What's at issue here,
are the historical claims
of these religions.
Traditionally,
religious dogma has forbidden
the examination of
historical discoveries.
Or the inclusion of certain scientific
findings in their teachings,
asking their followers, instead,
to blindly believe as they say,
not as the objective facts may show.
We live in a time, perhaps,
a new intellectual Rennaisance,
which is getting fed up with many
of the structures that we live with
and which is recognizing major frauds
at the heart of our financial markets
(?) and the heart of ??? our industry
and the plug is being pulled on them.
And my view is that we have yet
another fraud, the biggest of them all,
and it's a fraud at the
heart of Christianity.
And it's a time for
whistleblowers to come out
and to make this information available,
not just to scholars
in academic journals,
but to have it widely available
to anybody who wants to know.
It's helpful to hear a
wide diversity of voices,
in order for people to arrive
at their own conclusions.
And the theories brought
forth by our scholars
are a part of that diversity.
When they hear that the
Jesus story is a myth,
people feel that you're taking
something away, but you really not.
You push people and you go "why do you
believe in the historical Jesus?",
often people will go "well, you know,
the Bible..." and something.
But when you go "have you studied
it as an historical document,
have you looked at the evidence?",
they'll go "no, I haven't. "
So, that's not the real reason.
The real reason, when you push people is
"well, I have a relationship with Jesus. "
"I have a personnal relationship with Jesus
and that's what I don't wanna loose. "
And that's a really good
reason to be a Gnostic
and a really bad reason
to be a literalist.
The Gnostics, as well as
pre-Christian pagan mystery schools,
believed that the myth of the
dying and ressurecting god-man
was an allegory,
to be used for personnal growth,
to die to their lower nature and
arise to their higher nature.
The literalists took control
of the original myth
and shaped it so it would take the
power away from the individual
and placed it into a central authority.
Redescovering the original
myth gives people the freedom
to choose the beliefs
that truely serve them.
Ok, some Christians have
developed their personnal faith
to the extent that Christ is this
energy or force or power within them.
This is how they have
interpreted the story now.
The story has become again what
it actually began as: an allegory.
I have no issue with the Christ within,
I have an issue with
the Church militant.
(?) What threatens humanity is organized,
regimentized (?) religion on the march,
taken so seriously that you
will act out its worst precepts.
If we examine all the
religions of the world,
we find that there is a common thread
that connects all faiths and all people.
And it is from this connection
that we can make the choices
that have now become so
critical to our future.
I like to focus on the
origins of religious ideas.
(?) And it turns out that they're very
unifying underneath all of the ???
that we see on the surface.
It would be extremely helpful
for all of humanity
to realize that there is
this underlying unity.
And those origins are,
basically, nature worship.
The study of the son,
the moon, stars, planets.
This is all what humanity
has been looking at...
of course, with great awe and
reverence for thousands of years
and it's extremely important, I think,
for us to get back to those roots.
The destruction of the planet is also
directly tied to religious ideas.
This can help to restore
balance to the planet
in a very,
very profound and significant way.
The very survival of humanity depends on
viewing history from a new perspective,
so that we can be clearer
on the historical facts
and still honor the myths that
offer us the greatest wisdom.
It's what the myth,
what the poetry says that matters,
not what actually happened.
So each new generation, whatever
you say, is going to hear the myth,
and that's what it's true for
them and what follows is...
the actual history is much too complex for
the average person to
ever get her head around.
Though the actual history is complex,
and we may never know
all the facts about what
happened 2,000 years ago,
the voices of our scholars are
contributing to an ever widening dialog
and the growing paradigm shift being
witnessed all around the world today,
that can lead to a more empowered
and enlightened humanity tomorrow.
This is really important
for our culture.
To understand where Christianity came
from and this is direct evidence.
You can actually walk this path
and come to this conclusion.
You can know that Christianity
was an invention of the Romans...
it was done to pacify their subjects.
And this is important,
because it gives us a different way
of understanding government.
How government operates,
the tools that government uses,
the purppose that government has
for the various propaganda apparatus.
(?) ??? Christians are getting away
with debunking facts as mere theories,
even subjects like evolution.
But they provide no evidence
(?) for their position other than
the simply sight religious dogma.
And if you look at the influence that
dogma is having in the media today,
you can easily see it is increasing.
I would like to challenge these
extremists to consider the possibility
that my findings are correct.
Though there is much
good in Christianity,
we have to understand how rulers
have used it to control us...
and how they're still using
it to control us today.
I hope citizens to be more skeptical
when they hear an authority figure
using faith to interpret laws,
or a belief in armaggedon to
create governmental policies...
The Flavians encoded a secret
message into the Gospels,
which we can now
understand in a new light.
"You shall know the truth and
the truth shall set you free. "
subtitle by:
S.J.Mahmoudi