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Copyright © (2009) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved BACKGROUND PAPER FOR THE DARK LADY PLAYERS

WHAT GOT MARLOWE KILLED:

THE GOSPELS AS ROMAN LITERARY SATIRES by John Hudson

Playwright and theology student Christopher Marlowe was writing a book against the Trinity. It explained that Jesus was a deceiver in vain and idle stories, and that before Titus and Vespasian conquered Jerusalem, Christianity was unknown. He was right. Marlowe knew that the Gospels are literary and not historical documents. He knew that they were a Roman creation at the court of the Flavian Caesars, a ‘book of riddles’. He was going around giving this atheist lecture to senior courtiers before he was so conveniently killed. This paper covers what Marlowe knew in detail, and was given in a shorter form to the Eastern Great Lakes Bible Society annual conference.

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1. OVERVIEW Sometime in the third century, the literary critic Porphyry of Tyre wrote a 15

volume book claiming that writers of the Gospels were “inventors, not narrators of

events” and as a result got his books burnt. 1 In 1835, D. F. Strauss did detailed

literary analysis showing that the majority of the text of the Gospels was not

“faithful narration” of historical events, but by implication was a literary creation,

and got his work banned.2 More recently, critics from non Christian faiths have

passionately argued that the NT documents are literary fictions. For instance, the

Hindu historian N. S. Rajaram wrote that :

“The Jesus of Christianity never existed! ….In summary, the whole of Christianity, including the story of the crucifixion of Jesus is a later fabrication, created to gain support of the Roman Empire……(which) fabricated large parts of the New Testament to destroy the Jews of Palestine who were in a constant state of rebellion against the Romans. The mythical Jesus was created to facilitate this process. The fact that the Gospels are a later fabrication by authors who were agents of the Roman Empire becomes clear upon examining their language and content.” 3 Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic scholars have all had their voices ignored in the

States, as has the Jewish literary critic, Harold Bloom when he stated that Jesus

was simply the world’s best known “literary character”.4 This minority view has

received little attention in a country where 87% of the population are not

educated sufficiently to analyze multiple pieces of data in a complex document,5

and where 93% believe in a Historical Jesus, 6 a figure much higher than in other

western nations. Yet new literary analysis is proving that those scholars of other

faiths were right. It is conventionally recognized that the Gospels began to be

written around the year 80CE following the Roman-Jewish war, about the same

time indeed that Josephus began to write his massive account of that war. The

latest research is beginning to show that both documents refer to each other

inter-textually, and implies that the Gospels were created as a form of Roman

war propaganda, comic literary satires, targeted against the Jewish people, not

so different perhaps, from the comic books featuring Arab superheroes with pro-

American values, which formed part of the US Army’s strategy for rebuilding

Iraq.7

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By the end of the Roman-Jewish war, and after the destruction of Jerusalem in

the year 70CE, Palestine had been devastated and at least a million people had

been killed. The Romans were confronted with the task of rebuilding the country

and preventing any more outbreaks of religiously motivated terrorism (like the

burning of Rome in 64CE). Caligula’s attempt at imposing the Caesar cult had

been unsuccessful, so instead they decided to adopt a stealth approach. They

would create a covert form of Caesar worship.

Having burnt most of the Torah scrolls to destroy their dangerous content, the

Romans would create a new, pro-Roman, miniature Torah, but divided into the

same five books and themes. It would be called the book of Matthias (Matthew),

named perhaps after the Jewish leader who had become the chief Roman

propagandist, Josephus ben Matthias. As one British chieftain complained, the

Romans plunder and butcher, and call it ‘Empire’. They create desolation and call

it ‘peace’.8 With precisely the same sense of irony, the Romans devastated

Judea and called their new book a ‘Gospel’ (evangelion) a technical word

meaning ‘good news of (Roman) military victory’.9 OPERATION GOSPEL was a

PR exercise so that the Jews would view the events symbolizing the battles in

which they had been defeated—as wonderful and miraculous events!

The amusing hero of this new book, in the tradition of Moses or Joshua, would be

a literary character called Yeshua (Gk Jesus) whose name meant ‘God Saves’ or

Savior. The Jews could worship him under that name instead of the equivalent

word in Latin Soter, by which Caesar was normally worshipped. The Jews would

worship what they thought to be the Lord (Hebrew Adonai, the traditional name

used for God) …..but would really be praying to Vespasian and later Titus

Caesar who the rest of the world worshipped also as Lord (Kyrios).

The clincher was that the key events in the career of Jesus were written based

on the Roman battles in Palestine. Moreover, they appear in the same order as

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each battle appears in the only authorized history of the war, namely The War of

the Jews. The probability of this being due to chance is almost zero. Thus it was

intended to be obvious that these accounts of the fictional Jesus were not history

or biography but rather, in significant part, literary satires of the battles of Titus

and Vespasian Caesar. This Roman version of Judaism was created as a

religious satire to humiliate the Jews. The Flavian Emperors admitted that they

did not care about ‘this business of names’. They decided to wear the mask of a

‘false god’—in order to ensure that they were worshipped by the Jews and to

secure a peaceful economy. Finally, those behind OPERATION GOSPEL

designed this ancient Roman ideology with psychological expertise, to keep the

Jews obedient to authority. Only the elite, who had been educated in Socratic

critical thinking and in the appreciation of literary satire, would be able to solve

the Gospels’ literary puzzles.

Far from being products of a grassroots Palestinian revolutionary movement, and

the record of a historical ‘rabbi’ Jesus, the Gospels stemmed instead from literary

invention at the imperial court of the Flavian Emperors. The suggestion that the

Gospel was composed for presentation to the imperial court of the Flavians has

been made previously for purely literary reasons. Dungan described one of the

Gospels as possibly being composed “under the direct encouragement of certain

members of the Flavian household” and according to Agnew it was written “for

presentation to the Imperial family.”10 They were more right than they knew.

2. THE NEW FLAVIAN CAESAR CULT

Roman Foreign Policy

Thanks to financial support from the Arabs, Vespasian was able to leave the war

in Judea to his son Titus, and take the throne of Rome as the first Flavian

Emperor. But he still had to conclude the civil war at home and put down the

revolt in the lower Rhine. He had to rebuild the northern border, and build a

basic infrastructure to enable the armies to contain the Gauls to the North and

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West. To the east, Jerusalem had been conquered but the entire country was

left in chaos and completely unstable. That instability was spreading to Jewish

communities to the south, in Alexandria, and throughout the Mediterranean

including Sicily. Vespasian would use the gold he had captured in Jerusalem—

the world’s largest reserve of bullion-- to pay the army, centralize the

administration of the Empire, consolidate the provincial government, and to

transform tribal superstitions (superstitio) into a proper religio based on his own

authority as Emperor11. Granted that a small elite of only 2,000 individuals

owned the whole of Europe, and that there was no countervailing force to

prevent them, it would have been relatively easy for the Emperors to gather the

necessary support to implement their policy---especially since it promised to

suppress Jewish discontent across the Empire.

Essentially, in order to defend Rome and the Fatherland, the Romans had to

capture the hearts and minds of the barbarian peoples on their borders. Jewish

unrest was a problem not only in Palestine, but also in Alexandria, Cyprus—and

across the Mediterranean. The Hebrew population had spread widely

throughout the empire in a pattern of colonization that was 'enduring and

significant’.12 They formed part of a cultural synthesis interweaving the East

Mediterranean with the delta of Egypt, and Minoan Crete, all of which had

substantial mutual contact. Indeed the Hebrew civilization covered much the

same territory as the Roman Empire itself, and therefore represented a

widespread problem of socio-political instability.13 The foreign policy of the

Flavian Emperors required an intervention to create a more politically stable

Empire—through the creation of a new piece of ‘spin’, namely the Gospels, to

provide an ideology for the troublesome Jews following the destruction of the

Temple. It would moreover, begin to make Emperor-worship into the single

monotheistic faith of the entire Empire, an attempt at cultic centralization in

which the Emperor would replace all other gods.

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The issue that was faced by the Imperialists at Rome—as in many Empires since

and yet to come—was how to maintain ideological control over the countries on

the distant frontier. How to give the people of Palestine the illusion of self-

determination of their new national identity? How to covertly present an ideology

that they would think was rebellious but would actually be Imperial propaganda?

How to enforce conformity to that ideology---without its true identity becoming

obvious? How to maintain the reality of Roman power and authority, yet

apparently allow the colonial subjects some degree of (fictive) autonomy? How

to create the fiction that the colonial subjects are empowered in their narrative—

although in reality it implements the ideology of the Imperial center at Rome?

There were other questions as well. How to create new types of personality with

more desirable social characteristics--but without imposing too directly an

inappropriate racial and cultural model? How to re-contextualize the beliefs and

traditions of the subject people in order to serve colonialist purposes? How to

contain potential local nationalist interests and suppress the emergence of

another local (Maccabean) elite? How to allow the Jews to retain their

distinctiveness and something of their identity, but ensure that it did not

compromise the interest of Rome in having a single monolithic religious system

of Emperor worship and its associated social status systems. How to combine

Imperialist centralization with a degree of local decentralization? How to create a

new national myth that combined the Eagles with the Messiah? How best to

allow that new narrative to emerge? These are just some of the ancient

questions that Roman policy makers should have been insistently asking about

the Jewish War and its aftermath. Roman Philosophy of Religion

One of the key Roman tools of social and political change was religion. The

Roman intellectuals were highly rational about the instrumental value of religion

as a mechanism for social control. As Lucretius wrote “all religions are equally

sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher”.

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Seneca similarly wrote “religion is regarded by the common people as true, by

the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.” Cicero went further to argue for the

value to the State of having citizens believe in omniscient and powerful gods “ we

must persuade our citizens that the gods are the lords and rulers of all things and

…know who everyone is, and what he does, and what sins he commits, and what

he intends to do, and with what piety he fulfills his religious duties”.14 Aristotle had

even advocated that the tyrant be especially careful to demonstrate his

religiosity. It was this instrumental attitude toward religion that the Romans

brought to the creation of Christianity as a useful mechanism to subdue the

Jews.

After the end of the Roman-Jewish war, Palestine lay in ruins. The Temple had

been destroyed and the Jews no longer had any system of social order, no

regulatory system, to govern their lives. Over a third of the Law had required the

Temple in order to be implemented. This post-war crisis presented the Romans

with a challenge and an opportunity to create what the Letter to the Romans

calls a new system of ‘rational worship’ (Rom 12;1). This required a massive

amount of deliberate planning in creating a new religion. However creating new

religious cults was not a big deal for the Romans. They had a lot of expertise at

it. They did it somewhere in the Empire probably once or twice a year. It was

how they kept control, through religious ideology. Transforming dangerous

Messianic Judaism into pacifist Christianity was something that they could do.

They would create a new ideology for the Jews and devise new media to

communicate it and bring about their program of social change, spanning across

an entire people.

The study of how one religion turns into another, or how members of a religion

handle ‘seismic shifts’ in their environment—such as immigration to a new

country, a major disaster or a war—is at the leading edge of contemporary

religious scholarship. It is only now beginning to provide the analytical tools that

enable us to see how the Romans deliberately created substitutes for elements

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in traditional Judaism by creating Christianity. The ‘seismic shift’ in Palestine

included the destruction of the Temple, the land being contaminated and made

impure, there was nowhere to make sacrifices, many of the Torah scrolls had

been destroyed and the cadre of priests mostly wiped out. The new Roman

religion had to provide a series of alternatives that fitted within the people’s

existing mental models and overall socio-cultural framework;

Temple Judaism Christianity Temple no temple required Land is impure purity categories are abolished No animal sacrifices make spiritual sacrifices/bread/wine Few Torahs Gospel of Matthew

Christianity was therefore rationally designed as a religion that would merge

elements of traditional Judaism with the Emperor cult and other aspects of the

Roman pantheon. Christianity did not just evolve by itself. From the start it was

deliberately created as an organizational ideology to achieve particular political

purposes—and to maintain a ruling Flavian dynasty by suppressing potential

rebellion.

Empire Building with a Twist Judea required merely a slight variation on how the Romans normally went

about Empire building. That process normally had two separate strategies, firstly

establishing the imperial cult and secondly co-opting and re-naming the local

gods of the conquered territory. In Palestine, under their new King Titus these

two strategies were simply merged.

The first normal strategy was to establish the Emperor Cult. From the time of

Julius Caesar onwards, successive Caesars were deified and had their temples

erected throughput the Empire. There were at least three different temples to

Augustus in Palestine in which he was worshipped as ‘son of god’—although the

Jews had forestalled Roman attempts to put Caligula’s statue in the Temple at

Jerusalem. The Emperor cult was the fastest growing religion of the day.15 For

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Caesar to be worshipped as a god encouraged the provinces to obey Rome. It

provided a vehicle for local chieftans to gain status and recognition in the Roman

social, order by taking senior positions in the cult, managing its festivals and so

on. Thus it would have been normal for Titus to have established a new rational

system of worship throughout his personal kingdom of Palestine in which he

could be worshipped, like Augustus as the son of god. We know however, that

the temples that were erected to Vespasian were not successful because the

Jews still refused to worship him---and this difficulty might have promoted the

Romans to adopt alternative tactics.

The second normal Roman strategy for Empire building was renaming the local

gods of the conquered territory. Thus Camulus, the war god of the Gauls, was

renamed Mars-Camulus and 60 other war gods were also identified with Mars.

The shining Celtic god Lugh was renamed Mercury, as were many other gods of

vegetation, the roads, gods of eloquent speech and gods of the hilltops. So when

the Romans encountered problems in Palestine with having an explicit Emperor

cult, they simply disguised the Roman imperial god Titus under the name of a

Hebrew divine/angelic figure, the ‘Messiah’. This is not essentially different from,

say, the way that in Britain the goddess Sullis who presided over the spring of hot

water at Bath, was renamed Sullis-Minerva.

As Tertullian would put it later, the “religion of the Romans” was the Imperial cult,

in its various manifestations.16 From the time of Augustus, the Emperor cult was

a “pillar of the new order in every Roman city in the west”.17 As the Emperor

Caligula put it, the Jews were “pitiable fools” for not being able to recognize

Caesar’s divinity18 and something had to be done about it. OPERATION

GOSPEL was designed to use aspects of the Emperor cult and its Roman

Imperial theology to create a new religious cult that would deceive the Jews into

worshiping the Emperor. The new Christ cult did not have to embrace the

language of the Emperor cult---it could easily have borrowed language from other

cultic models. Nor did the Christ cult borrow these elements from Imperial

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theology because they were attempting to parody the Emperor cult. They

deployed concepts from the Imperial cult because Christianity actually was a

variety of Emperor cult---merely one that worshipped the Emperor under a local

disguise.

After the end of the Jewish war, the Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus

Caesar, who had conquered Judea , were insistent on finding ways to make the

defeated Judeans worship them as part of the Emperor cult. A decade after the

war had finished, the Jewish problem was so much on Titus’ mind that in his first

week of becoming Emperor in summer 79CE, he issued a coin showing the

humiliating image of a strong bearded Jew bowing down before what appears to

be a trophy---symbolizing Titus himself.

Since the Jews mostly refused to worship the Emperor’s statue, Vespasian and

Titus decided instead to use instead a literary icon. Instead of being worshipped

as Soter (savior), the Emperor would be worshipped as Jesus (God Saves). He

would be worshipped under the name of a local hero ‘Messiah’. But core

concepts of the Emperor cult such as faith (pistis), righteousness (dikaiosyne),

hope (elpis), peace (eirene), the coming (parousia), the good news of military

victory or Gospel (evangelion) and many other aspects of Caesar worship all got

transmogrified into the documents of the Christ cult that we call the New

Testament.19 The Emperor Vespasian, who was both a god and Father of the

Country pater patriae, naturally became God the Father. Titus became his

beloved son Jesus.20 This amazing literary satire was implemented as a way

both to take revenge upon, and to provide a medicinal treatment21 for, the stony-

minded Jewish population after the end of the Jewish war.

The Roman intellectuals at the Flavian Court invented the paradigm of the

Historical Jesus as a disguise for the worship of Titus Caesar, hoping to

establish Caesar worship as the Empire’s universal religion. Two things had to

happen. Firstly the Jews and their sympathizers had to be persuaded—by their

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detailed study of the Gospel of Matthew-- to worship Jesus/Titus as the Lord

(Gk. Kyrie/ Heb. Adonai). Secondly worshippers of other pagan gods also had to

be persuaded—by other rhetorical means-- to worship Jesus/Titus. This is why

Paul is presented in the Book of Acts as trying to persuade people not to

worship the Greek gods (20;16-27), or the goddess Artemis (19;25-8). In other

words, Paul is advocating that people abandon both the practice of Judaism and

also the practice of worshipping the other gods. Instead they should practice a

single universal religion—Jesus/Titus/Emperor worship.

Although most of the Emperor cults were based in temples, not all were. Some

were based on highly public marketplaces (agoras) or very exclusive mystery

cults.22 Evidently the Jesus cult took a form somewhere in between, being based

on house-churches. It would have resembled a collegia, association or

synagogue more than a traditional cult, since it had no temple, no sacrifices and,

initially, no priests.23 It would also have resembled the private versions of the

imperial cult that met in houses over dinner to make libations to the Emperor.24

This is the model that the Flavians would use in their covert OPERATION

‘GOSPEL’ to create a new system of ‘rational worship’ (Rom 12;1). As a non-

temple based cult, Christianity could begin immediately without waiting the many

years that it took to build the average temple. It was therefore cheaper, and could

also be started up at many locations at the same time. As a low cost solution it

would have appealed to Titus since "in money matters, Titus was frugal and

made no unnecessary expenditure”(Cassius Dio).

Caesar as the Lord and Savior

The Romans’ hidden educational and pedagogical goal in creating the Gospels

was an exercise in ‘spin’ to convince the Jews to worship a new tame messianic

figure ‘Jesus’ and his ‘Father’ in heaven. They were however underneath the

Roman gods Titus and his father Vespasian---who as Emperor was also pater

patriae, Father of the Country.25 The very dedication of both volumes of Luke-

Acts to Theophilius is an obvious clue---it should really be read phonetically as

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Greek/Latin pun Theofilius, namely the god’s son the Emperor Titus (or possibly

Domitian).

Titus and his associates had the Gospels written—the term is a dead giveaway

since it literally means ‘good news of military victory’--as post-war imperial

propaganda to provide what George Orwell called ‘reality control’ by trying to

make the Jews accept a false reality. The propaganda was designed to convince

the Jews that the battles in which over a million of their countrymen died,

including tens of thousands who were crucified on the hillsides of Jerusalem,

were actually ‘good news’. It was a way to get the Jews and their sympathizers to

honor Caesar and accept non-Jewish values designed to promote a tax paying

and obedient population. These include the legitimacy of working on Shabbat

and the positive ‘spin’ placed on poverty, which is in contrast to the portrayals of

the patriarchs who were blessed by the Lord and acquired wealth.

Josephus was very explicit that the Jewish predictions of a Messiah (or in Greek

‘Christ’) really applied to the Emperor Vespasian.

‘ But what more than all else incited them to the war was an ambiguous oracle also found in their sacred writings, that: ‘At about that time, one from their country would become ruler of the habitable world’. This they took to mean one of their own people, and many of the wise men were misled in their interpretation. This oracle, however, in reality signified the government of Vespasian, who was proclaimed Emperor while in Judea’.26 Similarly the Greek term ‘Jesus’, which means in Hebrew ‘savior’ or ‘God

Saves’, is designed to parallel the Caesar cult. For instance, during the reign of

Caligula an inscription hailed Caesar as ‘High Priest and absolute Ruler… the

God Visible who is born of the gods….the shared Savior of human life’.27 The

citizens of Rome on his return from Jerusalem hailed Vespasian as ‘savior’, while

the troops in Judea composed a hymn to Titus as ‘savior of the world’.28 The

Romans merely turned Caesar the savior into Hebrew and got the savior

‘Joshua’ or in Greek ‘Jesus’. The term ‘Lord’ was also part of the Emperor cult.

Although Augustus and Tiberius refused the title, Caligula had whole choirs and

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high ranking officials whose job it was to praise him as ‘Lord’ (kyrie). Later under

their new Flavian Emperor, the Romans would call each year “in the Xth year of

the Lord Vespasian”.29

Moreover, worshipping Caesar as the son of god was the normal practice

in the Imperial cult. The practice had begun with Augustus (the adopted

son of the Divine Julius) who liked to be known as ‘Divi Filius’ meaning

son of the divine one. In Palestine, Herod had erected several temples to

Augustus addressing him by this title ‘son of god’ which the Jews found

more acceptable than an outright claim to being god.30 For Titus, the title

would have been especially applicable, particularly after he had deified his

father Vespasian,31 and thus it made its way into the Gospels strangely

depicting a ‘son of God’.

2. THE FLAVIAN USE OF THE MEDIA

One of the problems with the Jews was their insistence upon their history. They

were a people who refused to forget, who sustained their identity by

remembering their history and imagining that it gave them some special status

with God as a chosen people. That is why they would not abandon their faith

even under torture—they had been so indoctrinated by their history and by the

conclusions they drew about their uniqueness as a people. The only way around

this was to create a form of early brainwashing, which would destroy existing

memories and implant new ones. The Romans did their best to destroy all of

Jewish literature, although the Jews still recreated it from memory. The Romans

therefore decided to implant false memories. The Gospels as a history of the

years 0-30CE and Josephus’ The Jewish War, as a ‘fabulous’ account of more

recent events, were both false histories. They were deliberately designed to

create false memories---so that the Jews would only have themselves to blame

for their wickedness in rebelling against Caesar. These documents were

designed to convince the Jews that they were a ‘sinful’ and ‘wicked’ generation

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for having rebelled against Rome and for choosing war rather than peace,

“sedition rather than concord” as Josephus put it. The Gospels must be seen

therefore as an early form of war propaganda designed to control an entire

people by co-opting its literature and techniques of reading texts. Flavian Emperors and their State Like States throughout history, the Flavian Emperors had to make sure that they

were the masters of the people. Like those States, the Flavians deployed a range

of patriotic (from pater Father-related) slogans, mottos, literature, paintings and

sculptures to present themselves as strong powerful leaders and as military

conquerors. Ditto for their obsession with national security—after all Titus

personally had the position of Head of State Security (Commander of the

Praetorian Guard) and was accused by the historian Suetonius of misusing his

office in a way which was “high handed and violent”. Another characteristic was

the Flavian control of the mass media---both literary and visual media. A

Caesar’s job was to defend Roman imperial ideology---by placing 25,000 to

50,000 of their own statues distributed throughout the Empire as a visual

propaganda campaign.32 Thanks to this sort of image building, Caesar would be

the best known and most honored celebrity of the day.

Had they been running a State today, can we doubt that the Emperors would

have used television? But they did very well with architecture and pervasive

Imperial statuary. By the 90sCE , according to a middling estimate, around

100,000 statues of the Flavian Emperors had been distributed throughout the

Empire. The statues were treated as if they were (virtually) the emperor himself.

When a new Emperor took the throne a new set of statues were made and

centrally distributed to the provinces. As they arrived in each town in procession,

the notables went out to meet the statue or portrait. It would be greeted with

great pomp, venerated, have homage done to it, and could even act as a

witness to oaths. Magistrates even had the Emperor’s portrait painted on their

official clothing. Because the Emperor could not be everywhere his portrait

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would be set up at tribunals, market places, meetings, theaters, in money

changers’ bureaus, bookstalls, eaves, porches, windows etc. The cities were full

of his images, some painted tablets, some of more costly material. Everywhere

the Emperor’s portrait would be presented for view .33 After all, it was the

Emperor’s justice that brought the rains and the harvest. In return all nations had

to repay him by praising him.

The Flavian Emperors presented themselves as the saviors who would destroy

the nation’s enemies (such as the Jews). Literally demonizing problematic ethnic

groups as enemies—and using the armed forces to conquer them and impose a

Roman “peace” was a typical strategy. At the court of the Emperor Vespasian

and Titus Caesar, OPERATION GOSPEL would have merely been the crowning

glory for the “anti-Jewish propaganda on which the Flavian dynasty based their

claim to power”34 following their conquest of Judea. Because a campaign based

on erecting statues would not work in Palestine, the Flavians would use

literature, a new kind of culturally appropriate Jewish literature, that they would

create especially.

The emperor Augustus had given Rome a new myth to legitimate his dynasty.

He commissioned Virgil, for the enormous sum of ten million sesterces, to

create a new foundation story. The Aeneid is the story of how Aeneas survived

the sacking of Troy and arrived in Italy to found Rome. Virgil traced Augustus’s

lineage both to Aeneas and also to his mother, the goddess Venus, thereby

legitimizing Augustus as the descendant of the gods. When the Flavian Caesars

took the throne, they needed their own literature to legitimate their rule, and

commissioned Statius, Valerius Flaccus, and Silus Italicus to support the

imperial ideology, as well as creating a special set of texts to achieve the same

thing among the Jews.

Roman literature had begun a revival under Nero twenty years before. There

were four main types of literature; Romantic novels, comic/satirical novels,

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revisions of Homer and fantastic stories. Ptolemy the Quail (Ptolemaeus

Chennus) for instance produced an ‘Anti-Homer Poem’. He was one of several

writers, like Lucian, who loved to invent fantastic stories and ‘paradoxical

histories’. An Alexandrian resident in Rome, Ptolemy wrote versions of ancient

mythologies that completely rewrote the past. But he did so , as Bowersock

observes ‘with a completely straight face and in a pose of scholarly precision’

citing multiple references , all of which were fictitious.35 If anywhere there was a

precedent for the works of Josephus and the Gospel it is in the works of Ptolemy

who “adored the paradoxical and the miraculous.” Other writers in the same vein

included Philo of Byblos, active 90-140CE who produced a Greek version of an

(imaginary) pre-Homeric text giving an eyewitness account of the Trojan War.

Similarly around the year 60CE another anonymous writer delighted the Emperor

Nero with his Greek translation of an (imaginary) eye witness account of the

Trojan War by Dictys of Crete.

The Gospels are fictions, not historical biographies. Of course all the Gospels

are somewhat like ancient biographies36 although there are also key

differences.37 Because they have mostly been written realistically, for those who

do not look carefully beneath the surface, the Gospels appear to be

‘reminiscences of the apostles’ as two later church fathers termed them.38 But

just because a Gospel looks like a Roman biography doesn’t mean that it isn’t

fiction, like Plutarch’s fictional ‘biography’ of Hercules, or the fictional biography

of Heraclitus by Digenes Laertius.39 Using the biographical form doesn’t imply

that the man ever existed. At this time there was an entire industry in producing

fake eyewitness testimonies---like the supposed ‘translation’ of a Phoenician

eyewitness account of the Trojan war that was produced to amuse the Emperor

Nero. In any case, since they were written to serve a cultic purpose, the Gospels

are not like real historical biography, like that written by Suetonius, but rather

something like the fictional biographies that were created by the cults of the

gods Dionysius, Asclepius40 and others.

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The Flavian Emperors were pioneers in the use of what Governments today call

not propaganda but ‘disinformation’, ‘deceptive techniques’ and ‘perception

management’. Public relations and other forms of manipulating information are

used to create false news stories. The first century military strategist Onasander,

in a book dedicated to one of the Roman Consuls around 60CE, even stated that

generals should issue deceptive news bulletins during a war in order to

encourage the troops in battle. Deceptive news making was also the approach

taken by OPERATION GOSPEL both during and after the war with the Jews. It

must rank as history’s most successful example of “information warfare”.

Although they did not have modern media to conduct their advertising,

information warfare and self promotion campaigns, the Emperors did have one

other marketing tool---street processions which took place at the very frequent

festivals—at least weekly. Roman processions attracted massive street

audiences and used portable floats. On these were erected tableaux that from

the time of Julius Caesar had words written on them as well. So the onlooker

would see a series of massive moving images appear before his eyes, together

with captions- a pioneering form of moving multimedia. We know that the

procession for the return of Titus and Vespasian to Rome after the Jewish War

was especially spectacular. The Caesars used moving scaffolds four stories

high, decorated in gold and rich materials. These “depicted many

representations”, destruction of Jewish farmland, destruction of Jerusalem,

depictions of the Jews being slaughtered etc, The Roman objective was, as

Josephus put it, so that;

“..due to the skill of the craftsmen, these tableaux displayed the events (of the war) to those who had not been present, as if they had actually been there”.41 We know from the images of the procession that were carved later on the Arch

of Titus, that the imagery of this triumphal procession was grandiose, showing

Caesar as a strong and glorious leader. Skill in creating fictional, and highly

ideological, media images was to characterize the reigns of all the Flavian

Emperors. Similarly the documents we know as the Gospels, for all the apparent

18

naturalism and realism--that deceived so many for so long--were also created by

highly skilled literary craftsmen. They used Flavian literary art to depict a

fictional, but naturalistic seeming story that people would accept as if they had

actually been there.

Their use of the Theater Although Titus allowed the free practice of the Jewish religion in Rome to

those who paid the necessary tax, the task of the Romans was precisely

to get the Jews in Palestine to honor the Roman law and Roman values

instead of the Torah. For Titus to be speaking through the mask of Jesus

was not without precedent. In the Greek and Roman theater hypocrites

(actors or mask wearers) would use the mask to play various roles. The

terms for mask, persona or prosopon meant not only mask, but also

expression, person or stage figure. On the stage gods would frequently

speak from behind such a mask.42 Moreover cultic masks were in

widespread use in the Middle East.

Titus was merely availing himself of precisely such a ‘stage figure’

through which the ‘genius’ or ‘numen’ of the Emperor could penetrate the

world. Moreover when Jesus suddenly addresses other players in a scene

as hypocrites (Mt 23;14) meaning actors, this is precisely similar to the

technique used by Josephus where a narrator may suddenly address

others as a ‘stage manager’.43 In both cases the narrator is alerting the

attentive reader to the theatrical and literary ‘frame’ and staging of the

narrative, so that it is not taken for granted as a depiction of history but

rather appreciated for its artistic and aesthetic qualities.

The Flavian Emperors, builders of the world’s largest theatre, the Flavian

Amphitheater (later known as the Colosseum), were simply taking the

dramaturgical techniques—such as the use of a mask-- that could capture

an audience on the stage, and expanding them into the arena of everyday

life, where the potential for illusion is so much greater. Just as in the

19

theater a mask would act as a megaphone amplifying the voice of the

actor, so Jesus, the mask of a false god, would magnify the reach and

presence of Caesar.

If the Roman satire that exists across the works of Josephus and the Gospels is

to be perceived as drama --- a fictional, false ideology deliberately designed to

replace the historic worldview of the Jews--one might therefore consider whether

theatrical prototypes were also used to create these works. It seems indeed that

Seneca’s revenge tragedies were the dramatic prototypes which the Romans

also adopted for their social engineering. Seneca’s plays were reworkings of the

dramas of Euripides, and show obsessed characters governed by a single

emotion. Crime is one of his major interests---the word was used 200 times in

Seneca’s eight tragedies, and 38 times in Thystes alone. Other stock elements of

a Senecan tragedy are ghosts or furies seeking vengeance (like the one that

pursues Aristobulus), cannibalism, and the revenge itself. In a Senecan tragedy

the citizen has to outdo his ancestors and inflict a punishment that will put down

the enemy for ever and stop the cycle of violence. As it says in Thyestes “great

crimes you don't avenge, unless you outdo them'”(195-96) and the appropriate

response is to do something so bloody and atrocious that the enemy will be

driven to envy by its grotesque and spectacular nature—even as he watches it

destroy him.

This concept of crime reappears in the supposedly historical accounts of

Josephus, a dozen times in Book One of War of the Jews where we have all the

elements of a Senecan tragedy in a few chapters. Once the Romans were

unable to persuade the Jews to surrender---and it had been normal Roman

policy since the days of Julius Caesar to spare an enemy which surrendered—

they were left with the other option, of taking a spectacular revenge of the sort

that Seneca advocated. The way the Romans chose to memorialize their

revenge upon the Jews was by using the literary forms of Senecan tragedy.

20

It has been noted previously that the Gospels contain elements from ancient

Roman comedy. For instance, the themes about knocking on the door of a

good/bad landlord, and themes about buried treasure come directly from the

comedies of Menander and Plautus.44 Despite some comic undertones however,

mostly the Gospels appear to be literary productions derived from Greek

tragedy,45 and specifically the tragedies of Euripides as transformed by Seneca

into Latin tragedy. 46 One can point to a number of examples. In Gospel of Mark

John the Baptist plays a role in introducing the plot very similar to that in a Greek

or Roman tragedy. The accounts of the resurrection are similar to a deus ex

machina which is found in two thirds of the plays of Euripides. In Aclestis for

instance, Hercules appears to bring Aclestis back to life. There are also specific

similarities to the Seneca-like Octavia, which features the resurrection

appearance of a ghost of Aggrippa.

However, the Flavian Emperors would make their tragedy go beyond the walls of

the theater to incorporate the entire nation of Israel --and instead of a play script

they would have the Gospels. A few scholars had begun to suspect that that

Josephus is going beyond the techniques of ancient historiography—by which

even the historian Herodotus had depicted some of his episodes as if they were

scenes in a play. Scholars first supposed that Josephus had merely inserted

dramatic elements into his ‘historical’ accounts. Later, Chapman showed how

whole episodes of the Jewish war—like the Cannibal Mary episode-- are

theatrically constructed as tragic scenes.47 Then Price noticed that Josephus

even uses dramatic structure in scenes in which two of the characters are

referred to as ‘stage manager’ (BJ 1.471,530) and feigners or deceivers. One

even is mentioned as switching masks (1;517)--as actors do when they change

characters—and all the while people are “waiting for the outcome of the drama”

(1;543). By paying close attention to the detail it is seen that the story of the

collapse of the House of Herod is set up as a Greek tragedy. The House has

been cursed, so that Fortune has a grudge (1;431) against it. This leads Herod to

be tormented by an angry demon (1,556,628), while another character has an

21

indwelling an evil ‘genius’ or spirit (1,613). With the addition of two ghosts as well

the entire depiction is of the polluting ‘storm’ (1,448) hanging over the House of

Herod comparable in structure and content to a Greek tragedy but also with

some elements of farce.48 The next development is to show that not only

Josephus but also the works of the New Testament, should be considered

together as one gigantic overall theatrical spectacle in a theater without walls.

We may never really know which events in War of the Jews were truly history,

but we can be sure that some of them at least were invented specifically as

‘perception management’ to create a revenge that was dramatically spectacular.

All the cannibal and amputation motifs could have come straight out of Greek

tragedy via Seneca. Finally, leaving the clues to how the satire was constructed--

-so that at some point any Jews who worshipped this Christ would realize that

they had all the time been worshiping Caesar--- was an act of spectacular

Senecan revenge, so that the Jews would admire what had destroyed them.

The similarities of the Gospel of Matthew to Greek and Roman tragedy are a

major piece of evidence that this Gospel has been produced in part as a work of

Roman literature. Perhaps the most similar play to the Gospels is Seneca’s

Hercules Oetaeus. In this play Hercules has overcome his labors in the world,

washes away his guilt in the river and cleanses his hands (908-9) like in the

Gospel accounts of Jesus’ baptism and of Pilate cleansing his hands. Then

Hercules goes to heaven, from which he speaks to the audience, his form taking

shape in the air as he tells the audience that hell has been conquered (line

1976). The chorus closes, asking Hercules as “peace bringer to the world” to still

be with us. The portents at his death are similar to those at the depiction of the

death of Jesus.

The Romans would therefore create a series of pieces of literary propaganda to

offer a new religious model for Palestine, which would train the Jews to think

22

logically like Romans through a series of what were called ‘scholastic puzzles for

young men’.49 The historian, Justus of Tiberias (who was secretary to King

Agrippa II in Beirut and had written his own history of the war), dismissed

Josephus’s book War of the Jews as sheer fantasy “for the main, fabulous, and

chiefly as to those parts where he describes the Roman war with the Jews, and

the taking of Jerusalem”.50 Perhaps at last we know what this means—because it

was written to create an inter-textual satirical typology with the Gospels. Here, in

Seneca’s theatrical strategies, we have the beginning of the modern theater and

the systems of illusions and narratives of propaganda that successive

Governments would use to construct the dramaturgy of power. So now we know

why it was done, and who by, the last remaining question is how.

3. A NEW TORAH FOR THE JEWS

The very name “Gospel” (evangelion) was an obvious clue. It means good news

of military victory51 and Mark’s Gospel explicitly states that it is such a document

(Mk 1;1). The term can also mean ‘good news’ in general, but among the Greeks

outside the NT the term is a “technical term for news of victory” and is “closely

related with the thought of victory in battle”. In Greek moreover, the term may be

used even though the news is false. Philo uses the term 9 times including

applying it to the Emperor cult, Josephus also uses the term for news of victories

and for political communications like the news of the death of Tiberius (Ant.

15,209) and for untrustworthy news brought by messengers (Ant. 18;228 and

5;227).52 But the name does not make any sense from a Jewish point of view.

The Roman victories in Palestine had not been good news for the Jews---on the

contrary they had been very bad news indeed. But the name would make perfect

sense if it was taken from the perspective, not of the Jews, but of the Romans.

For them their military victories in Judea were very good news. The name

“Gospel” was a brilliant Roman marketing title and it was entirely ironic.

23

Although the values and morality of the Gospel are derived from Roman sources,

and the overall tragic theme from Roman tragedy, the Gospel sagas and

structure are modeled on the Torah. The composite result is a piece of Roman

propaganda that in the Gospel of Matthew looks like the Torah, with similar book

divisions, and a similar structure, but contains Roman philosophical and satirical

content. It is the internal structures that reveal the truth. The Gospel is filled with

pro-Roman values, like assisting the army, being obedient, paying taxes, not

resisting enemies, and not worrying about one’s hunger and poverty. Some of

these values are evidently non-Jewish such as the legitimacy of working on

Shabbat, God’s acceptance of the lame, and the positive valuation placed on

poverty, which is in contrast to the portrayals of the patriarchs who were blessed

by the Lord and acquired wealth. • Accept Poverty -those (poor and statusless) like a child will reach heaven (Mt 18:3 -sell what you have and give the money to the poor (Mt 19:21) -it is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven (Mt 19:24) • Ignore Hunger -do not be anxious about what you will eat or drink (Mt 6:25) -if you don’t have food, and fast, then don’t let it be obvious (Mt 6:17)

-food will be miraculously provided (Mt 15;33) • Self esteem -you are very valuable to God (Mt 10:31) -God accepts even the lame, blind, dumb, and maimed (Mt 15:30) • Be Obedient -the meek shall inherit the earth (Mt 5;5) -do not even be angry, calling your brother ‘’fool’ (Mt 5:22) • Love Enemies -do not resist those who are evil (Mt 5:39) -if one hits you, turn the other cheek (Mt 5:39) -love your enemies and pray for your persecutors (Mt 5:44) • Work a 7 day week with no day of rest -Jesus and disciples plucked ears of corn on the Sabbath (Mt 12:1) -the son of man is Lord of the Sabbath (Mt 12:8) • Pay Taxes -pay the half-shekel tax (Mt 7:24) -give to Caesar what is Caesars, ie the tax ( Mt 27;19-22) • Co-operate with the Army -if the soldiers ask you to carry a pack one mile, carry it for two (Mt

5:41)

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One way to see how the writer of Gospel of Matthew has taken Jewish concepts

and arranged them to suit Roman needs is the passage on the sheep and the

goats (Mt. 25:35-6) which is a midrash on Isaiah 58:7. Traditional Jewish

midrash on the same passage describe releasing the slaves and freeing the

prisoners from prison. The writer of Matthew’s Gospel however simply

recommends that people should be visited in prison, not that they should be

released.

The references to the Romans in the authentic documents of the Dead Sea

Scrolls produced by the Essenes and found buried at Qumran are quite

straightforward. The Romans (or the Kittim as they are called, meaning the

westerners) are the children of darkness, they are evil and deceitful, and the

Emperor Nero is creating plots against the Jews with flattering words. We also

know that in the period 37-47CE, shortly after the time when Jesus supposedly

lived, the Jews were not favorable to Rome. Their attitude towards Caesar was

one of horror and fear and in some cases outright opposition.

It is therefore extremely curious that Gospel of Matthew uses aspects of the

biographies of the Caesars—and in particular aspects from the Emperor cult---to

construct its presentation of Jesus. Far from being hostile to Caesar, Gospel of

Matthew takes vignettes from the lives of different Caesars and uses them to

construct its portrait of Jesus! It is understandable that the writers repurpose

events from the accounts of Elisha and Moses, but it is completely anomalous for

a work supposedly about a Hebrew prophet to incorporate vignettes based on

Caesar, which alone raises serious questions about who wrote it and what their

motivation had been.

Use of Material from Titus and Vespasian Caesar Over a dozen of the core events in the ministry of Jesus, as described in the

Gospels, can be shown to be literary satires of events in the career of Titus

during the Judaen war 66-73CE. The central literary character, of the Gospels,

25

called Jesus (or Joshua) inhabits a plot with various peculiar features: he begins

his efforts by the Lake of Galilee; sends a legion of devils out of a demon-

possessed man and into pigs; offers his flesh to be eaten; mentions signs of the

destruction of Jerusalem; in Gethsemane a naked man escapes; Jesus is

captured at Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives; Simon denies knowing him; he

is crucified with two other men and only he survives; he is taken down from the

cross by a man called Joseph of Arimathea; his disciple John survives but his

disciple Simon is sent off to die in Rome; after his death, his disciple Judas dies

by eviscerating himself.

Each of these peculiar events has a parallel in the writings of Josephus, our sole

record of the military encounters, from 66-73CE, between the Judeans and their

Roman conquerors—even to the unusual crucifixion in which three men are

crucified, and a man named Joseph takes one, who survives, down. To give a

flavor of the humor buried in this grand Roman joke, we see that where, in

Josephus, the crucifixions take place at Thecoe, which translates as the “Village

of the Inquiring Mind,” the Gospels’ satiric version takes place at Golgotha, or the

“Hill of the Empty Skull.”

Events at the Lake of Galilee launch the Judean careers of both Titus and Jesus.

There Jesus called his disciples to be ‘fishers of men’. There the Roman battle

took place in which Titus attacked a band of Jewish rebels led by a leader named

Jesus. The rebels fell into the water and those who were not killed by darts

“attempted to swim to their enemies, the Romans cut off either their heads or

their hands” (Jewish War III, 10). Men were indeed pulled out of the water like

fish.

As for the episode of the Gadarene swine—in which demons leave a Gadara

demoniac at Jesus’ bidding and then enter into a herd of 2,000 swine, which rush

wildly into the lake and drown—Josephus recounts the Roman campaign in

which Vespasian marched against Gadara. In the same way that the demons

26

were concentrated in one demoniac, Josephus describes the faults of all the

rebels being concentrated in the one head of the rebel leader John. Then,

rushing about “like the wildest of wild beasts,” the 2000 rebels rushed over the

cliff and drowned. To take a further example, Josephus describes how Titus went

out without his armor (and therefore to a soldier metaphorically naked) in the

garden of Gethsemane, was nearly caught and had to flee. The parallel in the

Gospel of Mark is a naked young man who appears from nowhere in the Garden

of Gethsemane and flees.

There are a dozen such examples which appear in both sets of texts. Many of

the individual parallels have actually been recognized by previous scholars.

Ched Myers for instance, had spotted the parallel to the Gadara battle in his book

on Mark, John Blunt in 1828 had spotted the parallel of the Samaritan woman to

the Battle of Samaria. The parallel between Flavius Josephus and Joseph of

Arimathea, and hence the two crucifixion accounts, had been spotted

independently in the 1990’s by several writers. Chapman had noted that the

language in the Cannibal Mary passage in Josephus “partly resembles the words

attributed to Jesus at the last supper”. 53 It was however Joseph Atwill’s major

contribution to show that the entire series of events take place in the same

sequence in both the Gospels and the works of Josephus which it is claimed,

provides statistical evidence that both works were created together as a single

literary endeavor in the 80’s CE----and therefore demonstrates the non historicity

of the Gospel accounts.54 It is this sequence which fulfills one of the key scholarly

criteria normally used to assess the legitimacy of parallels, and which proves

they are real and legitimate. Because these events took place between 66-73CE,

there is no way they could accidentally have been anticipated by events in the life

of a historical Jesus figure in 30-33CE.

There is also other material in the Gospels unrelated to the war that anomalously

comes from the reign of the Flavian Caesars. The writers of Gospel of Matthew

suggest that the three Magi had been following a moving star or comet. Stars

27

and comets were generally used to represent the Caesars.55 There are no

records of any comet in the year 1CE. There was however, a comet before

Vespasian’s accession to the throne in 69CE. There was also another comet in

the last days of Vespasian’s life in 79CE before the accession of Titus to the

throne. The balding Vespasian even joked about this comet having a tail of long

hair, saying this could not represent him. So any intelligent inquirer should

understand that Matthew’s account of the Star of Bethlehem to mark the arrival of

a king of the Jews (Mt 2;2) and “ruler” (Mt 2; 6) simply reflected the comets that

had heralded the accession to the throne of Titus and Vespasian, his real life

equivalents as the rulers of the world.

The Emperor Vespasian, as described by Tacitus in his Histories, performed two

healings on his visit to Alexandria (probably staged), in one case healing a

diseased hand and in the other case giving sight to a blind man by touching his

eyeballs with his spittle. An identical pair of miracles appear in Gospel of

Matthew. The Gospel is divided into two halves and one miracle appears in each

half, several chapters away from the center. In the healing of a withered hand,

Jesus says to the man ‘stretch out your hand’ and it is restored. (Mt.12;10). In the

healing of two blind men they call out ‘Lord, let our eyes be opened’ (Mt. 20;29)

and he merely touches their eyes. However in the later rewritings this healing of

the blind also takes place with spittle (Mk 8;22-6, Jn 9;5) just like the Vespasian

miracle.56

It has even been suggested that the Passion account, especially in the rewritten

version in Gospel of Matthew is some sort of satirical rewriting of the triumphator,

the Emperor Vespasian’s triumphal procession in Rome in 70 CE after his

conquest of Palestine. Some of the peculiarities of the Gospel account have

been noted by Schmidt—and I will follow him, in this instance, by referencing

Mark’s re-written account.57 Unrealistically, the crucifixion required calling out “the

whole cohort”(Mk 15;16) over 200 men, similar to the mobilizing of large numbers

of soldiers for the triumphal parade. Jesus is even depicted as wearing a purple

28

robe—which is hardly historically plausible since purple was only worn by

members of the Equestrian order and Pilate would hardly have lent out his grand

robe to be spat on for the occasion. However the detail creates a

correspondence to the purple robe that is worn by a triumphator in his triumphal

procession, and the phrase “they bore him” (Mk 15:22) echoes the way that the

triumphator is carried in the procession in his triumphal chair. The strange detail

of Jesus being offered a drink of wine which he refused (Mk 15;23) parallels the

practice in the triumphal parade in which the triumphator is offered a cup of wine,

which he refuses, immediately before slaying the sacrificial bull. Further, Schmidt

suggests that the spatial configuration of the crucifixion account—with Jesus in

the center and others either side--parallels the way that Vespasian in his triumph

was accompanied on one side by Titus who shared the same chariot, and on the

other side by Domitian on horseback. Finally the Roman triumphal procession

concluded at the Capitol, the place of the skull, which was equivalent to

Golgotha.

Material from Other Caesars One well known passage in the Gospels is derived directly from the life of the

Emperor Nero. It was at the Domus Aurea the Golden House, that King Tiridates

of Armenia and three young princes arrived from the East in 66CE to pay

homage to the Emperor Nero58. The whole city was decorated for the event, and

their whole journey was like a triumphal procession. When the king arrived to

meet Nero he said ‘ I have come to you my god to pay homage, as I do to

Mithras’. Later, after they had given their gifts to Nero, they returned home by

another route. In his book Natural History Pliny calls them Magi. The writers of

the Gospel of Matthew re-use this same story to describe the Magi coming to

‘pay homage’ (Mt 2:2) to Jesus and even use the same detail that they went back

home by another route (Mt 2:12). The gold, frankincense and myrrh are taken

from Isaiah 60:3-6 .

29

Other passages were based on events in the history of Julius Caesar. Take the

passage about the storm and Jesus walking over the water to the boat (Mt 14;24-

32) .The boat is buffeted by the waves because the wind is against it. The sailors

are “terrified” but Jesus firstly discloses his true identity and then tells them "Take

courage! It is I. Don't Be Afraid." This account is a parody of an event in the Life

of Julius Caesar (ch 38) as described by Plutarch. One night Caesar needed to

get to Brundisium by water, so he disguised himself “in the dress of a slave” but

the waters were “extremely rough and angry” and there was a “strong wind from

the sea”. Then Caesar reveals his true identity and says “Friends, do not be

afraid. You carry Caesar and the Fortune of Caesar”. Upon which the sailors

“forgot the storm” and bent to their oars. Moreover the very next passage is

about Caesar’s soldiers being so ill-supplied that “they were forced to dig up a

kind of root” which strongly resembles the following line in the passage in

Matthew about being “pulled up by the roots” (Mt.14;13) This account is not

fantasy literature,59 it is directly modeled on Caesar. Of course that identity is

hard to see because it is disguised. For one thing, the writers of Gospel of

Matthew provide not only a wind but a ghost.60 This could suggest to the Jewish

reader that the account is a reworking of Exodus 14 because at the Reed Sea

there is a strong ‘wind’ (a Hebrew word that also means ghost or spirit). This

might also seem probable because in the overall passage of which this is part,

the Gospel writers are using Moses and Elijah-Elisha imagery to create a satire

of the festival of Passover and the miraculous feeding in the wilderness.

However, the clearest parallels to Julius Caesar are those concerning his death

and the cult that was established to worship him after his ascension into heaven.

This does not mean that “Jesus was Julius Caesar”. 61 What it means is that the

creators of the Gospel used a range of literary allusions to several different

Caesars to construct their literary portrait of Jesus. The authors of Gospel of

Matthew created the account of the crucifixion, in accordance with the fashion—

begun at the court of Nero—for writing death scene accounts of rebels against

Rome62 and drawing on the cultic death of Julius Caesar, who was memorialized

30

as the Divine Julius by the annual recital of his deeds.63 These included his

practice of forgiving his enemies, which was adopted by Augustus and other

Caesars—as well as being a critical aspect of the teachings of Jesus. This

articulation of the elements of the divine Caesar cult would later be re-written as

the Gospels’ passion narrative---a fact which was first detected by Engelbert

Stauffer, Professor of New Testament at the University of Bonn, back in the

1950’s.64

Caesar’s deeds, as described by the historian Appian included the following. He

rode into the city on horseback and was acclaimed as a king, a "remarkable"

privilege recently granted. He was dressed in a purple robe hand got shoved

before being stabbed. Hs body was displayed (as a wax copy) to the Senate

upright on a rotating spit or cross (tropaeum) for maximum visibility. Someone

raised above the bier an image of Caesar himself, made from wax. His body was

taken to the Capitol, meaning in Latin, the place of skulls.65 The sun dims after

the murder and continued pale and dull for the whole of that year, giving a feeble

heat. He was high priest Pontifex maximus when he died, was made a god the

Divine Julius, and ascended into heaven. These are aspects of the Emperor cult

of the Divine Julius and later they were merged with satirical sketches of aspects

of the Jewish War, and with aspects of Book of Leviticus, in order to write the

Passion story.

Use of Hebrew Structure and Motifs

The material from the Caesars in the Gospel of Matthew was concealed within an

overall structure and presentation that, on the surface, would make it appear as a

rewritten Torah. Like other works of classical literature, the Gospel of Matthew

has a specific center and is structured into five books like an alternative rewritten

Torah66 although unfortunately no edition of the Gospel makes this explicit. That

is why it starts with an account of Genesis (1;1-2;12). It moves next to an account

of Exodus (2;13-23) then includes passages about wilderness which remind us of

the Book of Numbers (3;1-4;16) which Jews call the book of ‘In the Wilderness’.

31

The last book about the passion mirrors the Book of Leviticus which is about

sacrifice and atonement (23;34-.28;16). Then most important of all, there is a

Book of Instruction (8;1-26;1) that opens in a similar way to the way in which

Moses begins the Book of Deuteronomy and similarly comprises five sections.

Both books also have similar beginnings since Deuteronomy would have been

known among the Hebrews by its initial ‘these are the Words’ which is similar to

Matthew’s initial ‘from that time forth Jesus began to say these Words’ (Mt 4:17)

Like the five speeches by Moses in Deuteronomy, the central section is

organized around a series of five great speeches67. The similarities include the

fact that the content of both books was in part given on a mountain, both consist

of teaching or instruction, and both have very formal rhetorical endings. The

literary structure is also shown by the very formal symmetry. It is evident that if

the events in the Gospel of Matthew have been composed to correspond to

events in the Torah that they are literary inventions. In the case of the passion

account even the empty tomb corresponded structurally to the Holy of Holies in

the temple, and the two accounts of blasphemy in the Book of Leviticus are

repeated in the Passion Narrative in exactly the same positions. In other words,

the writers of Gospel of Matthew have created the two accounts of Jesus being

accused of blasphemy in order to precisely reflect the positioning of the two

blasphemy accounts in the Book of Leviticus. Thus the overall structure of the

Passion Narrative shows it is a literary artifact.

The writers of the Gospel of Matthew also re-purposed the sagas from the Torah,

most notably in the way that the career and miracles of Moses from the Book of

Exodus were used to create parallel events in the life of Jesus through a process

known as literary typology68. There are many different ways of listing the overall

Moses/Jesus parallels69 which apply even at a minute level. For instance the

account in Book of Exodus about the plagues of Egypt was used as a literary

template---but in reverse. So at the end of the plagues in Egypt, the first born

have been killed and the land has been reduced to chaos---but at the end of

32

Matthew’s Gospel the dead are coming alive. If we look at each of the plagues

we can identify a particular set of Jesus’ miracles that reverse the plagues. One

of the plagues was boils and skin diseases: well, Jesus heals ‘leprosy’. Another

of the plagues was a great storm: well Jesus calms the storm. One of the

plagues was that the river water turned to blood (Exodus 7:16-21): but with Jesus

water turns into wine. Finally, Jesus walking across the water of the lake parallels

the account of Moses walking across the dry bed of the Reed Sea—although it

also has other associations as well. All this is evidence of an exceptionally

precise literary technique.

Finally, the passion story Gospel of Matthew would give maximum attention to

the torture of a Jew by using parts of Psalm 22—but in precisely the reverse

order. The Psalm’s rhetoric moves from a scream of agony “my God, my God,

why have you forsaken me?” in line one, proceeds through mocking and dividing

of garments to eventual confidence in God. However Matthew (and Mark after

him) misses out the part about confidence in God and uses these passages back

to front. Thus the Gospel account picks up the theme with the dividing of the

clothes, mentions the mocking, but then ends in hopelessness and a scream of

agony.70 It is an expression of brutality and nihilism, and it is profoundly Roman.

4. CONCLUSION

There are many more anomalies in the Gospel accounts. For instance the

Gospel compares the people of Galilee to “sheep without a shepherd” (Mt 9;36).

Jesus is sent to the “lost sheep” of Israel (10;6), this disciples are sent out like

sheep (Mt 10;16). Jesus talks to people about how they will lift out their sole

sheep from a pit on the Sabbath (Mt 12;11), and compares his audience to

shepherds who go in search of a missing sheep (Mt 18;12). The problem then

gets compounded even further when Luke produces actual physical shepherds.

This is all very pastorally picturesque, but seems to have little relationship to

33

agricultural life in Galilee in the year 30CE. Sheep rearing takes place on waste

land that cannot otherwise be used. Yet in Galilee previous to the year 70CE,

Josephus tells us that “there is not a parcel of waste land” and “in fact every inch

of the soil has been cultivated by the inhabitants”71 and was where the Imperial

granaries were located. There are also many other errors of geography.72 But

whereas mistaking a town or a distance is a relatively small error, to suppose that

a heavily populated agricultural area is really a remote wasteland inhabited by

shepherds perhaps indicates that the writers were creating their depictions based

on their own experience of rural life in rather different circumstances---say after

the devastation by the Romans.

After the Gospel of Matthew was created, it was rewritten for a more

sophisticated audience using the literary model of Virgil’s Aeneid to create the

Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, then it was rewritten again for a popular,

non Jewish audience in Rome using the model of Homer, to create the Gospel of

Mark.73 Finally to bridge the period from the supposed death of Jesus onwards, a

set of homilies and letters were created, none of them authentic.74

Over the next 2000 years most Jews would refuse to accept the Gospel,

bringing enormous hostility upon themselves, which began with the pogroms and

ultimately led to the Holocaust. In the 20th century many would uncritically accept

the fiction of a historical ‘Rabbi Jesus’ as a way of creating peace with the

Christian majority.75 Yet others lived lives as Marranos/Conversos, who

pretended publicly to be Christian, and who communicated their knowledge in

secret, waiting for the day when they could take their literary revenge against the

men who had destroyed their country and created a false parody of their religion,

until one day the same satirical literary technique found in the Gospels could be

turned against their creators.

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ENDNOTES 1 Porpyry’s Against the Christians in Fifteen Books has not survived although some quotations have; cited in G A Wells The Jesus Myth (1999;199) 2 ibid pg 867 3 N. S. Rajaram Christ And Christianity In The Year 2000, Sword of Truth ,January 8, 1999 4 Marvin Meyer, Gospel of Thomas : The Hidden Sayings of Jesus, with an interpretation by Harold Bloom, HarperSanFrancisco (1992;96) 5 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (2003) 6 Newsweek Poll, December 2004 7 ‘Psy-Ops, D.C. Comics’ Harpers Magazine vol. 310, no 1861, June 2005 pg 17 8 Tacitus, The Agricola, section 30. 9 The term can also mean ‘good news’ in general. 10 in essays in (ed) W.R.Farmer New Synoptic Studies:The Cambridge Conference and Beyond (1983), namely D.Dungan ‘The Purpose and Provenance of the Gospel of Mark pg 440, and Peter W Agnew ‘The Two Gospel Hypothesis and a Biographical Genre for the Gospels’ pg491. 11 Susan Mattern Rome and the Enemy;Imperial Strategy in the Principiate (1999) Berkley;University of California Press, Edward Lutwak The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (1976) Baltimore;John Hopkins University Press 12 Howard Marblestone ‘Mediterranean Synthesis: Professor Cyrus H. Gordon's Contributions to the Classics’ (March, 1996) Biblical Archaeologist magazine. Volume 59 Number 1 13 Martin Bernal Black Athena; The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, (1987) 14 Cicero The Laws 2;15-16 15 N T Wright ‘Paul Leader of a Jewish Revolution’ Bible Review December (2000) 16 Clifford Ando Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (2000;30) University of California Press;Berkley 17 Paul Zanker The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (1990) University of Michigan Press 18 Philo Leg. Ad Gaium, 367 19 Dieter Georgi ‘God Turned Upside Down’, and Helmut Koester “Imperial Ideology and Paul’s Eschatology in 1 Thessalonians’ in (ed) Richard A. Horsley Paul and Empire;Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (1997)Trinity Press International;PA Harrisburg 20 The standard biographies are B.W. Jones The Emperor Titus St. Martin’s Press, (1984) and Barbara Levick Vespasian (1999) London & NY; Routledge 21 the Romans regarded satire as a form of cleansing psychological medicine 22 S.J.Friesen Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John Oxford; Oxford University Press (2001;65) 23 James D.G.Dunn The Parting of the Ways; Between Christianity and Judaism and their Significance for the Character of Christianity (1991;81) SCM Press; London 24 Ittai Gradel, Emperor Worship and Roman Religion (2002) Oxford: Oxford University Press 25 Mary Rose D’Angelo “Abba and ‘Father’;Imperial Theology and the Jesus Traditions’ Journal of Biblical Literature 111,4, (2001) 611-630 26 Jewish War VI, 312-13.

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27 Bart D Ehrman The New Testament:A Historical Introduction to early Christian Writings (2000:25) 28 Josephus. Jewish War, 4,112-113 29 Donald L. Jones “Christianity and the Roman Imperial Cult’ ANRW (1980) vol 23,2,1023-1053 30 Adela Y. Collins ‘The Worship of Jesus and the Imperial Cult’ in C.Newman et.al (ed) The Jewish Roots of Christian Monotheism (1999) Brill;Leiden 234-257 pg 257 31 Traditional NT scholars have not been able to explain why—on the assumption that there were a real historical Jesus—he would have been given such a title. See P. M. Casey From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God ;The Origins and Development of New Testament Christology (1991) Westminster/John Knox; Louisville KY. 32 Estimate given in Paul Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed In Search of Paul; How Jesus’ Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom (2004) XXX 33 Clifford Ando Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (2000;213,235,232) University of California Press;Berkley 34 Martin Goodman ‘Current Scholarship’ in (ed) Andrea M. Berlin & J. Andrew Overman, The First Jewish Revolt: Archaeology, History and Ideology (2002) Routledge. 35 G W Bowersock Fiction as History; Nero to Julian (1994) University of California Press. 36 Richard A. Burridge What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (1992) Cambridge University Press 37 Mark Harding Early Christian Life and Thought in Social Context A Reader (2003;167) T&T Clark Continuum London 38 Justin Martyr 1 Apology 66;3, writing around 150CE and Papias, referring to Gospel of Mark, quoted by Eusebius Church History 3.39.15 39 David E. Aune The New Testament in its Literary Environment (1987;64) Westminster Press;Philadelphia 40 Charles H. Talbert, What Is A Gospel? (1977) Philadelphia: Fortress. 41 my paraphrase, Josephus Jewish War 7,139-43 42 Joseph Campbell The Masks of God;Primitive Mythology (1987) XXX 43 SBL Josephus Seminar Papers (2003) Jonathan J Price ‘Drama and History in Josephus’ BJ’ 44 H Rosen ‘Motifs and Topoi from the New Comedy in the New Testament’ in (ed) Rosen East and Weest; Selected Writings in the Linguistics volume 1 (1982) pgs 476-88 45 D.W.Riddle The Gospels;their Origin and Growth (1939;142-44) Chicago;University of Chicago. Gilbert G. Bilezikian The Liberated Gospel; A Comparison of the Gospel of Mark and Greek Tragedy (1977) Baker Books; Grand Rapids Michigan. 46 D.W.Riddle The Gospels;their Origin and Growth (1939;142-44) Chicago;University of Chicago. Gilbert G. Bilezikian ,The Liberated Gospel; A Comparison of the Gospel of Mark and Greek Tragedy (1977) Baker Books; Grand Rapids Michigan. 47 SBL Josephus Seminar Papers (2000) Honora H Chapman “A Myth for the World’;Early Christian Reception of Infanticide and Cannibalism in Josephus, Bellum Judaicum 6.199-219 48 SBL Josephus Seminar Papers (2003) Jonathan J Price ‘Drama and History in Josephus’ BJ’ 49 Josephus, Against Apion 1, 10, (53) 50 Photius, Bibliotheca, volume 33. 52 Gerard Friedrich ‘Evangelion’ etc. in ed. G Kittel Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (1964;707-737) Wm Eerdmans; Grand Rapids MI

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53 SBL Josephus Seminar Papers (2000) Honora H Chapman “A Myth for the World’;Early Christian Reception of Infanticide and Cannibalism in Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum 6.199-219. Footnote 51 54 Joseph Atwill’s Caesar’s Messiah Berkeley; Ulysses Press (2005). 55 Stefan Weinstock Divus Julius Oxford; Clarendon Press (1971) 56 First observed by Arthur Drews, The Christ Myth (1910;240) New York; Prometheus Books 57 T. E. Schmidt ‘Mark 15;16-32;The Crucifixion Narrative and the Roman Triumphal Procession’ New Testament Studies, vol 41. (1995) 1-18 58 Raymond Brown The Birth of the Messiah (1979; 174) Doubleday; New York 59 Patrick J. Madden, Jesus' Walking on the Sea: An Investigation of the Origin of the Narrative Account, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, (1997), George W. Young, Subversive Symmetry;Exploring the Fantastic in Mark 6:45-56 Brill Academic Publishers, (1999). 60 R.D.Aus Caught in the Act;Walking on the Sea and the Release of Barabas Revisited (1998) University of South Florida 61 Francesco Carotta Jesus Was Caesar (2005) Uitgeverij Aspekt B.V., Soesterberg;The Netherlands 62 K.M.Coleman ‘The Emperor Domitian and Literature’ Aufstieg und Niedergang der Romischen Welt; Geschichte und Kultur Roms (1986),11,32,5,3087-3115 63 Gary Courtney Et Tu Judas? Then Fall Jesus (2004) New York;iUniverse Inc, and Francesco Carotta Jesus Was Caesar (2005) Uitgeverij Aspekt B.V., Soesterberg;The Netherlands 64 Engelbert Stauffer Christ and the Caesars (1952) Friedrich Wittig Publishers;Hamburg 65 Later translated into Hebrew to get Golgotha the place of the empty skull 66 The Temple scroll and Book of Jubilees are other examples see Sidnie White Crawford The Temple Scroll and related Texts (2000;17-19) Sheffield Academic Press; Sheffield 67 Back in the 1920s Bacon thought that these five divisions corresponded to the whole of the Torah. But that was not correct. They only match Deuteronomy. 68 Dale C. Allison The New Moses;A Matthean Typology (1993) Augsburg Fortress 69 M D Goulder, Type and History in Acts, (1963;1-4) 70 V. K. Robbins, Exploring the Texture of Texts, Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, (1996; 50) 71 Josephus Jewish War 3,40-44 72 Harold Leidner The Fabrication of the Christ Myth (1999;182) Survey Books, Tampa, Florida 73 Allan J. McNicol with David L, Dungan and David B. Peabody Beyond the Q Impasse Luke’s Use of Matthew: A Demonstration by the Research team of the International Institute for Gospel Studies (1996), David Peabody et al. (ed) One Gospel From Two; Mark’s Use of Matthew and Luke A Demonstration by the Research Team of the International Institute for Gospel Studies, Harrisburg: Trinity Press International-Continuum (2002), Dennis MacDonald The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark, Yale University Press (2000), Charles H.Talbert Literary Patterns Theological Themes and the Genre of Luke-Acts SBL Monograph Series (1974). 74 Darrell J. Doughty ‘Pauline Paradigms and Pauline Authenticity’ Journal of Higher Criticism, 1 (Fall 1994), 95-128 75 Susannah Heschel Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (1998), Bruce Chilton Rabbi Jesus;An Intimate Biography (2000).