archibald wrote:UndercoverElephant wrote:Yes. I just downloaded and read "Caesar's Messiah" by Joseph
Atwill. Highly recommended and very convincing. The only thing I found hard to believe is that it has taken until the 21st century for anyone to notice the striking parallels between the story of Jesus' ministry in the gospels and the the historical facts of the Flavian war in Judea. The answer was staring us in the face, and nobody noticed it. "Fishers of men" indeed...
If this theory is true, Christianity is the cruelest joke in the whole of history. The Messiah turns out to be Titus. Christians have spent 19 centuries worshiping a Roman emperor who declared himself to be a god. The real "Father and Son" aren't God and Jesus, but Vespasian and Titus.
http://www.fargonasphere.com/piso/
This review by NT scholar Robert Price, himself a mythicist, seems to suggest he thinks
Atwill's book is a load of cobblers.
http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/rev_atwill.htm
It looks to me like Price has either not understood what is being suggested, or is deliberately misrepresenting
Atwill.
Atwill�s theory does have the advantage of accounting for the persistent pro-Roman tendencies of the New Testament, but consider what else it requires us to accept. First, we are to accept a common, if committee, authorship of Matthew, Mark, Luke John, and Josephus� The Jewish War. The whole idea seems, well, absurd.
"It seems absurd" is not an argument. It does not seem particularly absurd to me.
There is way, way, too much else in any and all of the gospel texts that cannot be dismissed (really, neglected) as mere padding, ballast, which is all it would be if Atwill is right.
No. The other stuff in the gospels is not "ballast" or "padding". The inventors of Christianity were much cleverer than that. In order to work, it had to been done properly. No ballast. No padding. Christianity was a
synthesis. The parts of the gospels which were not parodies of The Jewish War came from two "genuine" religious sources. One of them was the astro-theological "mystery religions", with their repeated tales of a crucified God-man with twelve disciples, etc... The other was a book of sayings that we know as "Q". This is not padding or ballast! This is the sort of stuff you need if you want to create a religion that is going to actually succeed in doing what you want it to do. It is what gave Christianity its power - what made it into a real religion, and not
merely a tool for pacifying rebellious messianic jews.
All this requires is for the Flavian emperors to have been very clever, or to have had access to people who were so. And they did, which is also explained by
Atwill.
Similarly, only the most obtuse reader, the most tin-eared, can possibly fail to appreciate the sublime quality of so much of the New Testament (agree or disagree with it), which is necessary to do if one is to dismiss the whole thing as an elaborate joke on the reader.
Wrong again. If
Atwill is right, the situation is much more complex than this. IOW, the above is a strawman. It
is an elaborate joke,
but that's not all it is. There's jokes within jokes here.
Rather, the joke is on Atwill, whose great learning has apparently driven him mad. Just think of someone advancing the same theory about, say, the Buddhist scriptures. The worst of them are far too tedious and turgid to have been composed to fill out a hoax (who would have gone to the trouble?), while the more readable and winsome (like the Dhammapada) are filled with a wisdom beyond the reach of a worldly-minded scoffer. As to Jesus� teachings, Atwill declares that �those who see spiritual meaning in his words are being played for a fool� (p. 234). Such a statement is only a damning self-condemnation, revealing the author�s own absolute inability to appreciate what he is reading. This is why one must not throw one�s pearls before swine.
All I am learning from this is not to take much notice of Robert Price.
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