Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus Page #2

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

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