So, despite the heavy odds against taking on Rome’s powerful war machine in the 1st Century, they rebelled and kept fighting even after defeat was certain. Described by the historian Josephus as a misinterpretation of their messianic prophecies, their xenophobia was compelled by strict adherence to Mosaic Law—and their rallying cry was “Messiah!”
It was at this moment in history that a new religion emerged, one that was at once radically different from messianic Judaism and yet seemed to be an offshoot from it. It would come to be known as Christianity, the world’s second major monotheistic religion.
The letters ascribed to the Apostle Paul, or at least some of them, may have been written within a decade or so before open warfare in Judea broke out. The Gospels and most of the rest of the New Testament were probably composed in the decades following the First Jewish-Roman War (66-71) during the imperial rule of the Flavian dynasty of Roman emperors and immediately after. The oldest of the Gospels, Mark, may have been written during or shortly after the First Jewish-Roman War. The latest material in the Bible may not have been written until a few decades later. That is to say, the New Testament was written in the years just before and in between the two great Jewish Revolts, from the middle decades of the 1st Century through the early decades of the 2nd.
An apparent outgrowth of messianic Judaism, the emergence of Christianity during this period of intense religious conflict between messianic Jews and the Roman Empire cannot be a coincidence. The only mystery is the nature of the causation: exactly how and why did this conflict between Jews and Romans frame the emergence of Christianity? Just how closely are these two historical movements related? That is the topic this book explores.
For most of their ancient history, Romans had never legally required the worship of any single deity or cult, and this is why religious tolerance was never a major problem in their empire—until the monotheism of Judaism. This new conflict between cultures and religions in 1st Century Rome makes it easy to understand why the Roman state began to encourage solar cults like those of Mithras or Sol Invictus. Ironically, such gods tended to be worshiped exclusively and began to prefigure a new imperial monotheism.
As gods like these flourished across the Empire at this time, as far north as Roman Britain and as far east as Syria, the Romans came to seek a single unifying political force in religion for themselves. And, over time, the consolidation of the many faiths of their diverse peoples was regarded as increasingly desirable for political order and stability.
The opening centuries of the Common Era were rife with religious innovations, including outright religious fraud practiced nakedly as political statecraft. The audacious deification of Roman emperors is only one example. Arguably, this was the most religiously dynamic period in all of Western history.
Modern readers readily acknowledge religious fraud in long-dead faiths from this period, like the gaudy emperor cults. When even educated 2nd Century Roman historians report with credulous sincerity that the 1st Century Roman Emperor Vespasian miraculously cured the blind and lame, a 21st Century audience readily sees this as outright religious fraud and simultaneously crass political propaganda. During this time, however, Christians were also engaging in religious improvisation.
Through literary forensics we now know, for example, that some letters attributed to St. Paul are not likely to have been written by him. The letters’ author(s) may have been influenced by Paul’s theology—but his language, his concerns and context, and some of the ideas that he develops, all suggest someone other than Paul wrote them at a later date. Scholars of Christian literature actually have a term for this type of material. They call it “Pseudepigrapha.” As the name suggests, this material is considered to be falsely attributed. The letters ascribed to St. Peter and the names that tradition credited as the authors of the Gospels have also been persuasively challenged.
After these Christian fictions were revealed, even more creative liberties by editors’ activities in the New Testament were discovered. During the first two or three centuries we can see that there was a veritable explosion of Christian creativity that displays a remarkable range of bold innovations and bald contradictions.
In this book, we will see how, by the 4th Century, Christians began modifying the actual text of previous writers (such as the historian Josephus) in order to make those older texts more consistent with their current views. We will also reinvestigate the apocryphal letters between St. Paul, author of what may be the oldest material in the New Testament, and the Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca the Younger, tutor and advisor to the Emperor Nero himself. So similar were the ideas of these two contemporaries that such a correspondence seemed to help explain why there are such uncanny echoes between them. Today, however, this correspondence is known to be a fraud, again simply by language and content. And it must have been a relatively early fraud since it was already known to St. Jerome, who wrote about it around the year 400.
Explanations for this kind of “creativity” among early Christian writers, to put the matter generously, range from so-called “pious fraud” (e.g., sincere Christians who had themselves had ecstatic visions or other religious experiences that personally confirmed for them, for example, that it was Paul’s words that they were writing down and not their own), to innocent misattribution or simple error, and, finally, to outright fraud (e.g., it is hard to imagine the phony correspondence between Seneca and Paul, or the enhancement of existing texts like that of Josephus, to be anything less than conscious and deliberate).
For both the Roman state and the early Christians, this was a period of liberal religious invention in which practicing outright religious fraud was a matter of routine. Against this historical backdrop, the first Gospels of the New Testament were being set down on paper for the first time.
In this book, we will reveal how and why the calamitous clash of civilizations between the Romans and the Jews brought into existence a new religion. For the first time, we will present astonishing new evidence proving beyond any reasonable doubt that the Roman government, in direct response to this bitter clash of cultures, created the religion known today as “Christianity.”
Although we will in the course of this book agree with nearly all of the accepted factual conclusions of historians who have covered the subject of Christianity’s origins, we will require no conspiracy-theory-like leaps of faith or logic to establish what we are suggesting—quite the opposite. The theory presented reconciles all of the seemingly contradictory evidence of Christianity’s origins for the first time with none of the convolutions employed by scholars and historians for centuries.
Over the 30 years of research that produced this book, it was only at the very end, when we discovered the last piece of the puzzle we had suspected would be there at the beginning, that this hypothesis, which resolves mysteries concerning the history of Christianity that are age-old, was at last confirmed by physical evidence. Not only did our theory and all of the other evidence predict it must exist, but by the current understanding of Christianity’s origins it was impossible that it could exist. And, though we anticipated it, what we discovered was far more conclusive than we ever imagined.
During the 30 years since we began our research what can only be described as a new school of thought regarding Christianity’s origins has been emerging—one that is starting to reveal a long-buried secret. In various ways, an increasing number of scholars are recognizing that most of the New Testament has a Roman provenance.