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are literary and not historical documents.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

17
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

18
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.

19
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

20
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

21
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.

22
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,

24
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

25
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

26
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

27
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 .

28
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

29
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’.

30
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

31
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

32
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.

33
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.

34
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

35
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).

36