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