Caesar's Messiah

Did You Know?

• Atwill argues that the Testimonium Flavianum (Ant. 18.3) is genuine because he sees it as the introduction to a literary triptych.
• Immediately following the Testimonium Flavianum is the story of Decius Mundus, who pretends to be the god Anubis to trick a woman named Paulina into having sex.
• Atwill argues that Mundus's return on the third day to boast he is not a god is a parody of Jesus's resurrection.

1st century Flavian Christians

There are signs that the Flavian family had a hand in early Christianity. Their drive to destroy Jerusalem and pursue empire was supposedly fueled by a Roman theology of Victory. It is uncertain which Flavian converted first; possible candidates are Vespasian's nephew Titus Flavius Clemens and his wife Flavia Domitilla. The legendary sixth-century Acts of Saints Nereus and Achilleus claims Pope Clement I, whose name clearly points to the Flavian family, was the son of Titus Flavius Sabinus.

Atwill argued that in the First Epistle of Clement, the pope describes himself like a Roman prefect commanding soldiers he expects to obey. Atwill also speculated that Saint Veronica might be the same person as Berenice, Emperor Titus's mistress. If at least some of this Flavian connection to early Christianity is correct, Atwill says these early ties are hard to explain if Christianity was a struggling grassroots movement from Judea. Furthermore, the early church's sacraments, its College of Bishops, and its leader's title of Pontiff were all based in Rome on Roman, not Jewish, traditions.

In response, Acharya S argued these Flavians were Chrestians, not Christians, and that the Chrestians were just one of several sects later absorbed into Roman Christianity.

Typological representation of the Emperor Titus in the Gospels

Atwill claims that typological relationships knit together the Gospels and the works of Flavius Josephus. Atwill notes that according to the Preterist school of biblical interpretation, the prophecies of Jesus and Daniel were fulfilled by the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. He suggests that this is evidence that the Gospels were actually written after the Jewish War, and that the Gospels are ironically predicting that Titus is the anticipated 'Son of Man'.

Atwill argues that Jesus's mission in the Gospels foreshadows the military campaign of Titus in Judea. According to Atwill, this indicates that the Gospel authors wanted to signal that the character Jesus Christ, as the fulfillment of the messianic prophecies of the Hebrew scriptures, was a representation of Titus Flavius. Also, Atwill says that Josephus's narrative in The Jewish War is built around the idea that Daniel's prophecy was fulfilled by Titus's conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple.

The mythicist Biblical scholar Robert M. Price said that Atwill's view that the Gospel son of man who would destroy Jerusalem was Titus, was 'one of Atwill's most attractive suggestions'.

Josephus' satirical view of Christianity

Atwill argues that Josephus wrote several vicious satires of the Gospel narrative and Christian faith, indicating that he was highly familiar with its tenets, but also disdainful. The first occurs at The Jewish War 3.10, where Josephus describes an attack by Titus against Jewish rebels (led by a man named Jesus) at the lake of Gennesareth, in which the rebels are drowned and speared like fish. The Sea of Galilee is the lake where Jesus told his disciples that they would become 'fishers of men' in Luke 3:21.

Josephus enigmatically describes the lake of Gennesereth as 'a vein of the Nile' where 'Coracin fish' grow. 'Chorazain' was a Galilean rebel town, cursed by Jesus at Matthew 11:21. Atwill argues that the two events, both built on the 'fishers of men' trope, must be read together to understand the satirical meaning. In Wars 4.7, the rebel leader John is described as suffering a sort of inflammation or distemper.

His party meets Vespasian at Gadara, where the rebels are driven into the River Jordan. The passage contains dense verbal parallels to the Gospel description of Jesus meeting the demoniac at the land of Gadarenes, who contains a legion of unclean spirits that enter into herd of swine and then drown themselves in the sea. According to Josephus, the Romans captured a 'mighty prey' of livestock, but no swine. Atwill conjectures that there were no swine captured because they had all run into the river.

Atwill sees a parallel between the Gospel narratives of a supper after Lazarus has been raised from the dead, where 'Mary has chosen the good portion', and Wars 6.3, in which Josephus describes a woman named Mary who roasts her baby son as if he was a Passover lamb, eating half of him while saving 'a very fine portion' to be eaten later. 'Come, eat of this food', she says, in words which Atwill argues are reminiscent of the Catholic eucharist. Wars 6.5 describes the fate of a certain Jesus, the son of Ananus, who cries 'A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the holy house, a voice against the bridegrooms and the brides, and a voice against this whole people!'

No matter how severely whipped, this Jesus simply repeats again and again, 'Woe, woe to Jerusalem.' Finally he says, 'woe to myself also', and he is killed by a stone from the Roman artillery. In these passages, Atwill sees a parody of Jesus's sayings in Matt. 23:13-33, 24:27-25:1 and Luke 11:43-52. Atwill claims to have discovered another sprawling satire in the Gospels and Josephus, which he calls the 'New Root and Branch.'

Atwill wrote: 'The purpose of this particular satire is to document that the 'root' and 'branch' of the Judaic messianic lineage has been destroyed and that a Roman lineage has been 'grafted on' in its place.' The mythicist Richard Carrier analyzed all of these alleged parallels, and stated that they can be explained as either coincidences, mistranslations, or references to Old Testament sources or tropes.

Publishing and marketing

Caesar's Messiah was first published by Ulysses Press in 2005 and endorsed by Rod Blackhirst and Jan Koster. Robert Eisenman stated that if Atwill's claims are only partially true, we are looking into the abyss, and later explained that he has long believed the Gospel texts were overwritten with a pro-Roman slant, and that Atwill may have carried it a step forward. A German translation was published in 2008 as Das Messias-Rätsel and received reviews in mainstream German publications.

The book served as the basis for a 2012 documentary film by director Fritz Heede and producer Nijole Sparkis, featuring interviews with Atwill, Eisenman, Kenneth Humphreys, Timothy Freke, and Dorothy Murdock. A 2013 conference called Covert Messiah was organized in London to discuss the film and the book's thesis, attracting interest and a critique from Richard Carrier, to which Atwill posted a response. Atwill's 2014 book Shakespeare's Secret Messiah expanded the thesis to suggest that the Pauline epistles and Revelation were written during or after the reign of Domitian.