Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus Page #8

Jesus goes into the

wilderness for 40 days.

in the wilderness in the wilderness

Finally, we have the three temptations.

In the Old Testament,

we have the temptation by bread,

the statement "Do not tempt God",

and the commandment to worship only God.

These appear again in Mathew,

where Jesus is tempted by bread,

tells the Devil "Do not tempt God",

and instructs him to worship only God.

Therefore, when you compare the life

of Jesus with the life of Moses,

you see a linkage that shows that

the character in the Gospels

was divinely connected to the

character in the Old Testament.

The life of the first savior of Israel,

Moses, forsaw the life of Jesus,

who's now claiming to be

the next savior of Israel.

To understand the rest of the

Jesus story, his adult ministry,

we simply need to know that the

same system of parallel names,

locations and concepts,

occurring in the same sequence,

was used to connect

Jesus in the Gospels

to Titus in the works of Josephus.

Our scholars explain this Gospel typology

in the following three examples:

FISHERS OF MEN:

Jesus comes to the Sea of Galilee

at the beginning of his ministry.

He gathers his disciples

to him and He says:

"Don not be afraid,

follow me and become fishers of men. "

In the Gospel of Luke,

Jesus actually says "catchers of men".

Titus comes to the same location,

to the Sea of Galilee.

He gathers his troops, his disciples

together and he says "Don't be afraid".

And then he leaves them.

They follow him

and they attack a

group of Jewish rebels.

They sink the Jews boats.

The Jews attempt to swim to safety

and the Romans use their

spears to catch them.

They become fishers of men.

The match isn't exact, but we

should never expect it to be exact.

It's simply a type which is repeated

across the whole of the New Testament.

LEGION OF DEMONS

Jesus is constantly

dealing with devils.

Josephus also deals with devils,

but Josephus defines

who these devils are.

He states that the devils

are those individuals

who have a rebellious spirit

and rebel against Rome.

At Gadara, Jesus encounters one man who

has a legion of demons inside his mind.

They then are driven out by Jesus.

They infect a herd of swine and this

herd rushes wildly into the water.

This is a parallel to

Titus' battle at Gadara,

where one individual infects an entire

legion of Jews with his demonic spirit.

And then that group, in turn,

infects another group

and this combined group is driven

by the Romans into the sea.

What's being suggested here is that

this story that you find in the Gospels

is in some way sort of like a grim

parabole about that military event.

(?) It's sort of like a bit ???, I think,

the Romans had a vicious sense of humor

like this, a very black sense of humor.

In a medieval text that I've studied,

which is called the Gospel of Barnabas,

when you read that story,

the way it's presented is in a

unsophisticated form,

that is to say,

it's sort of being decoded in some ways.

And it becomes clear that

what we're talking about here

are the Jewish rebels

are chased into the sea.

And they drown in the sea.

In the Gospels,

these are presented as pigs.

This is, once again, a very dark,

black, sort of Roman sense of humor.

Some of this literature really

needs to be understood like that.

THREE CRUCIFIED - ONE SURVIVES

In Josephus' biography, he describes,

when he was in the entourage of Titus,

during the closing stages

of the siege of Jerusalem,

he chanced upon to three of his friends

who were being crucified.

And he pleaded with

Titus for their release.

And Titus gave that permission

and the three figures

were removed from the cross,

two of them died and one revived.

Now, if you're looking for a

stereotypic example of how some idea

was floated into the mind of

someone writing the Gospels,

that is a pretty clear example.

It's certainly a strange occurrence

that we find such an incident

in the works of Josephus,

when it shows up in such a

dramatic form in the Gospels.

In the Gospels, Joseph of

Arimathea asked the Roman commander

to take Jesus down from the cross.

In Josephus' history,

Joseph Bar Mathias asked

the Roman commander

to take someone down from the cross.

Arimathea is a pun on Josephus'

last name, Bar Mathias.

JOSEPH BAR MATHIAS

(hebrew name of Flavius Josephus)

When you read our sources

really carefully...

and you have to do it really,

really carefully...

because they didn't spell it out first...

It's effectively very well hidden.

We have to understand that our

literature, a lot of our literature,

is essentially propaganda. The Romans

are not writing objective history.

And all of our literature has

been through Roman filters.

Perhaps that's the significance

of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This is literature that hasn't

been through the Roman filters.

It's important to realize

that Josephus wrote in an era

when allegory was

regarded as a science.

Educated readers were expected

to be able to see another meaning

in religious text than the one that

appeared in the surface narration.

We're dealing with Roman

literature on the one hand

and Jewish literature on the other.

And, it has to be said that,

in both cases,

they're much more sophisticaded,

much more multi-layered and allusive,

and much trickier than

modern readers suspect.

No, it's not a simple literature.

It's very, very complex,

alegorical literature that

indulges in the literary games

that the Romans played.

The more you understand that

Roman literature in this period,

and then you place the Gospels

and other Christian literature

in that same milieu,

you can start to see the games that

are being played in that literature.

Now, these parallels have

been seen by other scholars.

But, what hey failed to notice,

is that they occur in the same sequence,

and, thereby,

they create a typologic pattern.

(?) The Flavian ??? is trying to

read these texts in context.

Because, in any given text, you've

got the text in the first instance,

and then you've got the context,

the environment in which it happened,

and, of course, in all of these texts,

also, you've got a subtext.

So, you've got text,

context and subtext.

And you have to be able to read all

of those things and, unfortunately,

many religious people,

who are coming out of seminaries,

who are coming out of religious

colleges, they're just not being trained

in this sort of level of reading.

They're instead being trained

to just read on one level,

which is a literal level.

And I think that that's very unfortunate

and that really needs to be challenged.

By studying the multiple

layers in these ancient texts,

in the original Greek language,

Joseph Atwill was able to discover

not just a handful,

but over 40 typological parallels

between the Gospels and

the works of Josephus,

which showed that the

ministry of Jesus Christ

followed an exact sequence:

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