Of course, all of the Flavian temples have been demolished, and the vast majority of documents from that era have disintegrated. Surely, however, some coins, a leading device used by Romans to promote their political objectives, must have endured to reveal this connection if it in fact existed.
Unfortunately, scattered across museums and catalogs previously isolated in libraries and universities and in segregated collections around the world, a complete inventory of Roman coins was not readily available to us—until the advent of the Internet. It was then, after three decades of looking, without knowing in advance what the coin we were searching for would look like, we found it.
And this is it. It is a coin issued in the millions by the Flavian Emperor Titus, who conquered Jerusalem and sacked the Temple just as Jesus had prophesied. The symbol it bears, a dolphin wrapped around an anchor, is the very symbol Christians used to symbolize Christ for the first three centuries before the Emperor Constantine replaced it with the symbol of the Cross. On the left is the Roman coin of the Emperor Titus, and on the right is the original symbol of Jesus Christ:
Coin of the 1st Century Flavian Emperor Titus (left and middle); and the symbol of Jesus Christ used by Christians for the first three centuries (right)
We had to study the entire literary, historical, archeological and numismatic context of Christianity for three decades before we could even recognize this coin as the evidence we were looking for. This is the first time such evidence has been presented side-by-side.
As mentioned, this coin was the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place after years of research. It filled the final gap in a mosaic. That it would be so conclusive a link between the Flavians and Christianity as to be a literal match was astonishing even to us.
This book will fill in the rest of the mosaic of evidence that led us to this coin as we explore the startling truth that it reveals about the origins of Christianity.
How could Christians represent themselves with any symbol stamped on the coins of a Roman emperor while those coins were still circulating throughout Rome?
How is it possible that the first symbol they chose to represent Jesus Christ was used by a Roman emperor—the very emperor who fulfilled Jesus’s prophecy by destroying the Jewish Temple and who proclaimed himself to be the Jewish Messiah?
Let us assume, at the start, that Jesus was correct in his otherwise baffling prophecy. Let us assume that he did not make a mistake and that he meant exactly what is recorded in the Gospels.
If Jesus did indeed “return” to punish the Jews who unjustly rejected and killed him to sack their Temple within the lifetime of those who heard Jesus foretell it, then he must have returned as Vespasian and Titus. He did come back to rule the world, just as he foretold, as the Roman emperors who fulfilled both Jewish and Christian prophecy by bringing a new era of peace to the war-torn world. If a final End of Days is still pending, the glorious Second Coming predicted by Jesus has come and gone—nearly 2,000 years ago.
The simultaneous existence of more than one “messiah,” or indeed more than one manifestation of God, may strike some readers as strange. How can Vespasian and his son Titus both be the Jewish Messiah—and embodiments of the Jewish God—at the same time? How could the lives of Jesus Christ and Vespasian have overlapped, if they were incarnations of the same divine Being? (2)
This question imports contemporary Christian ideas on the subject of Jesus’s divinity into this context where they did not yet exist, however. According to Hebrew scripture, Jews had already experienced multiple messiahs and, within the Jewish tradition, there is nothing whatever to prevent the existence of more than one (mortal) messiah at the same time. God’s messenger, Moses, named the “messiah” Joshua his successor, just as Elijah named Elisha, and just as the Maccabees, all of whom were messianic figures, could all be of the same family.
The sectarian documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls even suggest that at least some Jews of the period were expecting not just one, but two “messiahs,” perhaps a priestly (although hardly a pacifist) leader, along with a military/political figure. However miraculous their deeds and whatever communications they might receive from God, both were to be mortal, of course. (3)
In the pagan context there is no problem with this, at all. On their coins, Romans identified multiple emperors as manifestations of the divine Apollo or Sol Invictus, for example. The problem we might have with two emperors simultaneously being the “Messiah” would emerge only later as Christians wrestled with the conflict between Christ’s divinity and monotheism. Early Christian documents implying Christ’s divinity also posit the simultaneous existence of more than one divine figure. Thus, the author of Colossians 1:15-16 (whether he was Paul or an early follower of his), wrote that Jesus, “the Son,” was the first of God’s creations and, at the same time, the image of the invisible God Himself. Although divine, Jesus is also the Son of God, and again, still within an allegedly monotheistic tradition.
This is not a problem in either a Jewish or pagan context for the theory we are testing, though it would be a major and logically insurmountable problem for early Christians. The concept of a “Trinity” in the three-fold identity of the single God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—was their somewhat ungainly solution to the fundamental paradox of what would seem to be the worship of more than one deity by a group still claiming to be monotheistic. (4)
In order to test the theory that the Flavians were the validation of Jesus’s prophecy, or that Jesus’s prophecy was a validation of the Flavians’ rule, we must first take a closer look at the physical evidence we have just presented that directly links the Flavian Emperor Titus to those who worshiped Jesus Christ.
Where did this symbol, a dolphin and an anchor, come from? How common was it to both pagans and Christians? Was it specific to Titus, the man who sacked the Temple in accordance with Jesus’s prediction, or was it popular enough at the time that it could have been used by both Titus and Christians as a simple historical coincidence?
Where our journey ended is where we will now begin.
What were the first symbols used by Christians? Although the symbol of the Cross has been, by far, the dominant symbol of Christian belief for the last one-and-a-half-thousand years and remains Christianity’s most recognized emblem, it is widely understood that the most common symbol used by the earliest Christians was not a cross but a fish:
Ichthys
Some of the underlying reasons for using this symbol are also well-known. Spelled out in Koine Greek (the common language of the ancient eastern Roman Empire, the original language of the New Testament and an ancestor of modern Greek), the word for fish (“ichthys” or ΙΧΘΥΣ) forms an “acrostic”—that is, a word puzzle in which each letter is the first letter of the words “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”