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Website created by New
Century Marketing Concepts
by
Joseph Atwill
Supporting Joe Atwill
Supporting Joe Atwill is a special place on the
Internet for people that want to investigate further the implications of
“Caesar’s Messiah,” a book by Joe Atwill whose thesis is that Christianity
was invented by the Roman’s to
- Further the deification of Vespasian and
- Put a grip on the rebellious Jews by providing
them with a religion that incorporated support of Roman domination.
According to this theory, Jesus was invented a few
years after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in order to provide a
“holy man” and “prophet” who would prophesy the ascendancy of Vespasian
and his son Titus to the world stage. These prophesies were intended to
convince the Roman Senate that Vespasian deserved to be deified in the
same manner as other successful Roman Emperors. The details of Jesus’
life were invented integrating made up events, actual historical events
and literary typology that enabled Josephus and members of the Roman court
to proclaim themselves followers of this “Jesus” in order to buttress the
effort in the Roman Senate to deify the dead Emperor Vespasian.
Indeed, if this theory has any validity, a great
number of other historical facts would support it and very few would
refute it. For instance, just the fact that the Gospels were written
about Jesus does not validate the idea that Jesus existed. In order to
validate it, you would need much more than documents purportedly written
several decades after he lived. In fact, the very nature of the Gospels
having been written so many years after Jesus supposedly lived also
supports Atwill’s theory. It is reasonable to assume that if there was an
effort to invent a credible prophet to support Vespasian’s deification
that the supporting documents would have been written around the time the
need for such a prophet arose, that is, the time when the Senate was
considering the issue. The nature of Jesus’s prophecies about the
destruction of the Temple would also support it and even explain why those
prophecies were made. The fact that the Fabian family contained a number
of reputed Christians should also be of interest for Atwill’s
contentions. The positive mentions of members of the Flavian family in
Christian documents are also explained by this theory.
This page is designed to publish the words of
scholars and even armchair intellectuals who have found connections in the
historical record that support Joe Atwill’s thesis. We will begin with a
short article by Roberto Diego (http://www.robdiego.com)
on Sepphoris in the Galilee.
Why Didn't
Jesus go to Sepphoris in
the Galilee? by
Roberto Diego
Copyright
2006 Roberto Diego
Sepphoris is an extremely well known archaeological
site in the Galilee. In the television show entitled Mysteries of the
Bible – Jesus in the Galilee, Narrator Richard Kiley states:
“Living with oppression, turning the other cheek,
tolerance, forgiveness, love of one’s enemies; it may be merely
coincidence that the ages of violence that culminated in Roman oppression
also culminated in these immortal teachings. Or maybe not. But the
mystery of the Galilee and what kind of place it truly was in the time of
Jesus persists. (Picture of Sepphoris) It is now 1931. An excavation
begins here at Sepphoris not 3 1/2 miles from Nazareth, the boyhood home
of Jesus. From historical and archaeological accounts, scholars
extrapolate that Sepphoris had about 20,000 inhabitants in Jesus’ day.
What puzzles them is that the Bible makes no mention of Sepphoris which
was a vibrant city less than an hour’s walk from where Jesus grew up.
Could Jesus possibly have lived so close by and never have visited this
city? What secrets of the man of Galilee might we find in these
particular layers of civilization? When we come back, the silence of
Sepphoris. (Commercial break)
(Continuation of Program) On screen text: Act IV The
Silence of Sepphoris
In the autumn of his 30th year, Jesus and
his mother are invited to a wedding celebration in the town of Canaa.
Lying inland from the Sea of Galilee, Canaa is considerably larger than
tiny Nazareth, 8 miles to the south. Significantly, it is not as large as
the nearby city of Sepphoris. “And there was set there six waterpots of
stone, after the manner of purifying the Jews. And Jesus saith unto them,
‘draw out now and bear unto the governor of the feast.’ When the ruler of
the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, he knew not whence it
came. He called the bridegroom and saith unto him, ‘Thou has kept the
good wine until now.” – John 2, 6.
Thus according to John, Jesus begins his public life
with a nod to the Greek god of the vine. At the time, the act of changing
water to wine was seen by many as a charlatan’s trick. Of all the
physical miracles, why would Jesus choose this one to begin his ministry?
Dr. Jonathan Reed, University of La Verne, La Verne,
California: “What’s important about that is when you look at the Galilee,
you have Dionysus as a major figure that is revered. Part of the reason
for that is that wine is one of the main staples of the Mediterranean diet
and if your deity could not produce wine or be involved in the production
of wine, he wasn’t much of a deity.”
(Picture of a Church) According to tradition, this
church, the Church of the Miracles, marks the site of the wedding feast
where Jesus changed water into wine. Why would Jesus have chosen Canaa to
begin his work? Why not an even larger city, a population center like
nearby Sepphoris which was barely 3 ˝ miles from Nazareth? And equally
puzzling, why do the Gospels make no mention of the busy metropolis? Why
is the Bible silent on Sepphoris?
Dr. Andrew Overman, Macalester College, St. Paul,
Minnesota: “For someone familiar with the topography and the lay of the
land of the lower Galilee, when he or she picks up the Gospels, the
absence of Sepphoris shouts at you, or one of the other large cities also
in lower Galilee during the first century, where are these places and why
doesn’t the movement go through them, spend some time in them? In fact,
these cities are unavoidable; you’d have to walk through them to go from
one village to another. This remains a mystery.”
Dr. Eric M. Meyers, Duke University, Durham, North
Carolina: “When Herod Antipas was building this city, it would have
brought in people from all the environs. It would have certainly involved
the people of Nazareth to some extent. That it is not mentioned in the
Gospels or anywhere in the New Testament is surely significant.”
(Picture of Sepphoris) This is the site where
Sepphoris stood in the time of Jesus. Originally built in the Persian era
it was taken over and rebuilt by the Romans in 70 BCE. It was destroyed
once again in an uprising against Herod the Great, and his son, Herod
Antipas would rebuild Sepphoris in 4 BCE. From that time forward,
Sepphoris was continually inhabited until 1940. The city sits on a high
promontory with the Mediterranean to the west and the Sea of Galilee to
the east. Medieval Christians revered Sepphoris as the birthplace of
Saint Ann and Mary the mother of Jesus. Crusaders built a church to Saint
Ann, presumably over the spot where she lived with Joaquin, her husband
and Mary her daughter. On the one hand, it is difficult to imagine Jesus
spending 30 years of his life so close by in Nazareth and never visiting
his mother’s birthplace. On the other hand, it is conceivable that Jesus
stayed away from Sepphoris because he would not have found a sympathetic
ear in this Roman stronghold.
Dr. John Dominic Crossan, DePaul University, Chicago,
Illinois: “Within about 25 years in lower Galilee, two cities were built.
Sepphoris was rebuilt around 4 BCE after the death of Herod the Great and
Tiberius was built as its rival, and almost replacement around say 19-20
of the Common Era. So within 25 years you have two major cities in the
lower Galilee in a very small area. The building of cities is not good
news for peasants.”
(Picture of Grid) Ancient Sepphoris was set out in a
Roman grid pattern with a bustling marketplace, a huge amphitheater and
splendid palaces. Archeological excavations began in 1931 and continue to
this day.
Dr. Jonathan Reed: “It is very likely that the
villagers, that the peasants, that the people that lived in Galilee went
to Sepphoris to sell their ware, went to Sepphoris to buy other peoples’
ware and it is therefore quite plausible, though it cant’ be proven, that
Jesus himself, as a carpenter, would have visited Sepphoris at some time
or another.”
(Picture of Ruins) Did Jesus walk these streets?
The hopes of finding clues to the physical Jesus compel researches to dig
deeper and faster through the ruins of this ancient city. But the silence
of Sepphoris is a mystery that endures to this day.” (End of segment)
In reading other articles on Sepphoris and Jesus, it
is interesting to read how many assumptions are made about Jesus. This is
due to the sparse nature of actual evidence about Jesus and his life. For
instance, Harold W. Attridge writes:
“Recent discussions of Jesus' social class try to
locate him within the social structures of Mediterranean society
generally, or Galilean society, in the first century. And there seems to
be a debate among many contemporary scholars of Jesus as to whether he was
really a peasant or... somewhat higher in the socio-economic strata. We
know in general he was low class, by the standards of the Roman imperial
aristocracy or even of the ruling class of Palestine, the Herodian client
kings. But he may have been an artisan. He doesn't seem to have been a
peasant in the strict sense, someone who was working the land for a
living. He was close, however, to peasant society; all of the images in
his parables and his aphorisms are firmly rooted in peasant society and
call upon everyday things like a sower, or sowing seed. But they also call
upon images of land owners and relationships between slave owners and
slaves, masters and servants. So Jesus seems to have been aware of that
level of the socio-economic mix. And he may well have stood in some
relationship to it. So an artisan of some sort is probably the best way of
describing him.”
The problem with assumptions of this kind is that they yield nothing
but unsupportable speculation. If you assume that Jesus lived in a
certain place in a certain time, you cannot assume that he must have been
anything of any kind without some proof. In order for one characteristic
to be true of Jesus it would have to be true of all residents and this is
not possible. To take statements attributed to Jesus and then extrapolate
from those sentences the vocabulary and intellect of peasant is dubious to
say the least. Yet Biblical scholars constantly take this approach
without even a thought to the fact that scholarship requires proof, not
mere speculation.
Indeed, the spectrum of possibilities regarding Jesus is endless. He
could have been a Herodian for all we know; and a scholar could just as
easily support the idea that he was a carpenter or a lawyer or a court
jester because the Herods needed all those specialties. How can you
possibly know? In fact, all the facts point to the possibility that he
should have wanted to stay away from Sepphoris and Nazareth. When you
consider that presumably he had once needed to escape execution by Herod
by going to Egypt, one has to speculate that it doesn’t make sense that he
would be anywhere near anything Herodian. Why would he live only a few
miles from Sepphoris, a city that was built by Herod’s son? Was he not
the heir to David’s throne and a clear target? The point is that this
sort of speculation is fruitless and cannot possibly yield real knowledge
until we adequately define, without speculation, who Jesus really
was. That has still not been established, with all due respect to the
many scholars that have a vested interest in him being a divine son of
God.
Yet speculations of this type are made on a continuous basis by
scholars because that is all they have. They take their considerable
knowledge, what they do know about the period during Jesus’ life and
assume that if this is true, then it must be true that Jesus was affected
in this way or had certain characteristics. That there is little evidence
is overcome simply because these men are experts.
However, I think we have a number of facts in Sepphoris that supports a
different view. Jesus never mentions Sepphoris because he didn’t need
to. If indeed, Christianity was invented by the Flavians, in particular
Titus, and if the movements of Jesus mirror the movements of Titus in his
campaign in Israel, as Caesar’s Messiah theorizes, then the reason Jesus
did not go to Sepphoris is because Titus did not need to go to Sepphoris –
it was already secure; it was a Roman stronghold full of Herodian and
Roman supporters. This possibility fits all the known facts about
Sepphoris more than does all the speculation about Jesus being a carpenter
or, mystery of mysteries, never went there. That’s right, he didn’t go
there, because the idea that Jesus lived close to Sepphoris is not true;
he never lived in Nazareth because he was invented and inserted into
Nazareth after the destruction of the Temple.
If you
would like to contribute to this series of articles, please send your
article by email to
robdiego@insmkt.com. Copyrights will be posted on your
article and links to your webpage if you'd like.
Read A
Critical Evaluation of Joseph Atwill's Caesar's Messiah
Visit the Roman Origins
Weblog where Mr.
Atwill answers readers' questions about the thesis of his book Caesar's
Messiah.
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