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If Vespasian after all intended to support the Messianic claim of
a fictional rival, then why make the same claim himself? He cannot
compete with a made-to-order 'Messiah;' he was not, after all, born in
Bethlehem. The conspiracy theorists always ask,
cui bono, who benefits? Unfortunately this question was not asked here, because
Vespasian cannot benefit from undermining his own Messianic claim.
This would be the same as if the historic personage, Jesus of
Nazareth, who claimed to be the Hebrew Messiah, had commissioned a
work of fiction assigning that role to a made-up figure, Moses of Sepphoris.
Why would you do that? Promoting this fictive rival, who is intended
to be taken as fact, will accomplish no more than to sabotage your
own claim. Why make the claim in the first place if you also intend
to discredit it?
There was probably some risk to Vespasian in claiming the identification
in the first place, because the Messiah is a king, while the Roman
emperors or emperors-to-be studiously avoided calling themselves kings. Little Roman
school-children learned to take pride in their noble ancestors who expelled the
kings from Rome, and so even though they had one-man rule, and in
this period they even had hereditary succession— Titus was
Vespasian's biological son,— the word 'king' was not used. There is
a little set-piece in the Talmud where Rabbi Johanan b. Zakkai, the
founder of Rabbinic Judaism, who, like Josephus, deserted and went
over to the Romans, by 'playing dead,' encounters Vespasian and is
rebuked for calling him 'king:' "When he reached the Romans he said,
Peace to you, O king, peace to you, O king. He [Vespasian] said:
Your life is forfeit on two counts, one because I am not a king and
you call me king, and again, if I am a king, why did you not come to
me before now?" (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Gittin 56a).
So Vespasian must have felt this self-identification as the Messiah was
worth something, for him to willingly accept the political risk that
went along with embracing it. This was a serious claim; why make it, and
also undermine it? People who believe that Jesus is the Messiah, do not
believe that Vespasian is the Messiah; people who believe that Vespasian
is the Messiah, do not believe that Jesus is the Messiah. As to the concept
that being the Messiah can possibly be the family business, it is absent
from the New Testament. (Somehow this Messianic claim has to pass from the
one who made it, Vespasian, to Titus, Mr. Atwill's 'Son of Man,' and
ultimately even Domitian, who did not claim to be the Hebrew Messiah.)
Our author explains that Vespasian's family intended the fictional story
of a perfect, 'highly prefigured,' Messiah to appeal to the unwashed
masses:
"I believe that the Flavians did not intend to have
sophisticated people like themselves take their invention,
Christianity, seriously. Josephus describes the individuals who
fomented the rebellion in Judea as 'slaves' and 'scum.' These are
the individuals that Rome would have seen as being susceptible to an
infatuation with militant Judaism. It was for this group, hoi
polloi, that they created the religion." (Joseph Atwill, Caesar's
Messiah, Kindle location 5135).
The gospel authors plainly intend their work to be read as real history,
and their work describes Jesus as the 'only-begotten' Son of God, the
unique Messiah, who was made incarnate, suffered and died under Pontius
Pilate, rose again, and will come again the second time for His people.
Those 'slaves' and 'scum' who believe these representations can safely
rule out Vespasian as Messiah. Joseph Atwill claims there is another
layer of the gospels, a parody; but anyone who credits his 'parody' will
not come away believing that Vespasian was the Messiah, but rather will
join the author in his contemptuous mockery of religion. So for whom was
the claim that Vespasian is the Messiah made? By whom was it expected to
be believed? Middle-brow people? Civil servants?
He situates the writing of both works, the New Testament and the
'War of the Jews,' in a six-month period after Vespasian's death;
why? to get away from the problem of Vespasian debunking Vespasian's
own claim? Was Titus a 'rebellious child,' who wanted
to discredit a claim his father made with all apparent seriousness? The
answer, it turns out, is absurd: ". . .Domitian used his historian
Suetonius to create a history of his life that linked to Revelation and
the Pauline literature and thereby show that he, not his brother, was
the final 'Christ.' By winning a petty game of literary one-upmanship
with his dead brother, Domitian sought to replace Titus as 'Jesus' and
make himself the 'god' that Christians have worshipped for two thousand
years." (Joseph Atwill, Caesar's Messiah, Kindle location 7067). We end
up with four or five people playing 'leap-frog' with the title 'Messiah,' each
debunking the others' claim.
Black Humor
As to the sardonic 'black humor,'— the gospels are supposed
to be a burlesque of Titus' military campaign through Galilee,— I
must leave that to the reader who can make sense of it. It comes as
no surprise that nobody 'got' the joke for two thousand years, until
our intrepid author came forward. The analogies,— for instance that an disastrous
war-time lake engagement in which drowning men were showered with
javelins and struck with swords and decapitated, which is kind of like
fishing or at any rate like harpooning, is supposed to remind
us that Jesus told His followers they would be 'fishers of men,'—
are more than a bit 'off,' like perceiving a Walking Dead movie as
being very much like Christianity, because involving a
'resurrection' of sorts. This author imagines he can make this
problem of 'missing-the-target' work for him by recasting it as
'satire' or 'black humor.'
Our author's methodology allows him to 'find' a parallel either between
two passages he has bracketed, or in other unconnected passages which feature a
character of a similar name, or share usage of the same word, because these crafty authors deliberately concealed their
handiwork. Since the evidence is hidden, the seeker must often wander to an unconnected
passage to find that missing name or other link. "If the satiric connections
between the New Testament and Wars of the Jews were meant to
be seen easily, they would not have remained hidden for 2,000 years.
In this case the satirical connections between Jesus and Eleazar
have been hidden by placing the key parallels to Jesus into a number
of different characters named Eleazar or Lazarus." (Joseph
Atwill,
Caesar's Messiah, Kindle location 2900). Using his techniques, our intrepid
author has cracked the code:
"The authors of Christianity intended that their puzzles
would eventually be solved and Titus' complete triumph be thereby
revealed, a sorry task that has fallen to this author." (Joseph
Atwill, Caesar's Messiah, Kindle location 5697).
The statistical probability that
you can find a convergence either in two passages targeted as
'parallel,' or, if not, then in a passage that shares a word with
one or both of these passages, must hover somewhere around 100%. The wonder
is that, using these techniques, this author comes up with as little as
he does. For instance, there is the 'eleven page' rule: "In the Whiston
translation of Wars of the Jews, which I cite throughout this work, there
are only eleven pages of text between the 'Son of Mary whose flesh was
eaten' passage and the passage that contains the character that I refer
to below as the 'woe-saying Jesus.'" (Joseph Atwill, Caesar's Messiah,
Kindle location 4339). What could someone who knew the Bible not do with
the 'eleven page' rule?
Such coincidences as he does find are not especially remarkable.
Finding the trinity in Vespasian-Titus-Domitian (say good-bye to
filioque) as he asserts, is hardly compelling. Why not from here instead?: "The
third tower was Mariamne, for that was his queen’s name. . ." (Josephus,
Wars of the Jews, Book 5, Chapter 4, Section 3, p. 1657). There are
'three' of something there, as in his index case. In some cases there is an actual parallel,
albeit a weak and uncompelling one, but in other cases it is
impossible to retrace the thought process that identifies a parallel:
for instance, Jesus' healing of the paralytic is coupled with a
massacre committed by Vespasian. In Mr. Atwill's world, 'healing' and
'murder' are precise parallels, because,
"When the Gospels describe an 'illness' or 'demonic
possession' of a Jew, they are referring to the 'fever' that caused
them to rebel from Rome. 'Healing' them of their demonic illness depicts
one of two things: either a rebellious Jew recognized that Caesar is the
Christ — as in the case of Josephus — or 'healing' the
'infection' by killing the Jews that do not." (Joseph Atwill,
Caesar's Messiah, Kindle location 2738).
When did Jesus ever kill anybody, and pronounce him 'cured'? What a happy place first century Galilee must have been if there
were no actual diseases, only political rebellion! It is difficult however
to fathom how it is that 'healing' is supposed to be just exactly the
same sort of thing as 'murder;' usually they are thought to be
different. Certainly one way of making a book about a travelling healer match up with a book
about a war is to redefine 'healing' to mean 'killing.' Redefining 'healing'
to mean 'auto racing' would be similarly helpful in aligning a book
about a travelling healer with a chronicle of auto racing.
In a similar vein, his parallel for Jesus' speech to the
Samaritan woman at the well, offering her the Living Water, is an
incident in the Jewish War where Samaritans suffered from heat
prostration and even died of thirst (I'm not making this up):
"'Now it happened that the Samaritans, who were now
destitute of water, were inflamed with a violent heat (for it was
summer time, and the multitude had not provided themselves with
necessaries) insomuch that some of them died that very day with
heat.'" (Josephus, quoted by Joseph Atwill, Caesar's Messiah, Kindle
location 6970).
So two things can be identified as type and anti-type if a.) they are
like each other (Christians are on board here), or b.) they are 180
degrees different from one another (this is sardonic humor, as in 'heh-heh,
dying of thirst is really just like drinking living water'), or c.) they
are somewhat like and somewhat unlike. What other possibilities are
there? He has boxed the compass.
Our author discovers that Mary Magdalene is
Peter's mother-in-law; how, you ask? Because the mother-in-law had a
high fever; 'high' is 'megalo,' μεγαλω, which sounds a little like 'Migdal,'
though it's the wrong language and it's missing the 'd.' Oh, please. I can do better
than that, without even trying. Mary Magdalene is Diana of the
Ephesians! Of whom it is said, “Now when they heard this, they were
full of wrath and cried out, saying, 'Great [μεγαλη] is Diana of the
Ephesians!'” (Acts 19:28). As it happens, 'megas,'
meaning 'great,' is a very common word. A one megaton bomb is a big
bomb. Since, as it turns out, he's got multiple Mary Magdalenes running
around all over the place, we can have fun going through scripture
and making all the women of whom something is said to be 'great'
into 'Mary Magdalenes,' like the Canaanite woman: "Then Jesus answered and
said to her, 'O woman, great is your faith!'" (Matthew 15:28).
Mr. Atwill's parallel for the Tower of Siloam falling and
killing eighteen people lacks a tower, gravity, eighteen
victims, and the vicinity of Siloam. It does have the word 'fall,' not used,
however, in the same signification; "'. . .he [Titus] also fell upon
great numbers as they marched down the hill. . .'" (Joseph Atwill,
Caesar's Messiah, Kindle location 2324). Josephus' 'Decius Mundus' is
supposed to make us think of the historic Publius Decius Mus, father and
son, even though he does not have the same name, and even though Decius
Mundus' suicide, had he committed suicide, would have been to no one's
benefit (Jesus, incidentally, did not commit suicide). These are not
exactly smoking gun type of parallels; there is some slight similitude but it is very weak.
If Josephus is, as he claims, writing fiction,— in his world,
Josephus is one of three New Testament authors, and his 'Histories' are
not historical,— why can he not come up with stronger parallels, if he
does indeed desire the reader to make a connection?
Two crucified men died and one survived? ". . . he was the sole
survivor among three crucified men. The two must be among the few
individuals in history to have survived a crucifixion." (Joseph
Atwill, Caesar's Messiah, Kindle location 4284). What "two"? Jesus did not survive: He died! Had
He not, how could He have tasted death for all of us? The outcome of what
this author calls the "cruci-fiction" was a dead man buried in a tomb. Can Mr. Atwill possibly be
buying into the 'swoon' theory? But his 'Jesus' is fictional; his only characteristics
are those he has in the text, and in the text, He dies!
A charitable reader might describe these as
exceedingly mangy and threadbare parallels. But 'non-existent' might come
closer. The parallel for, "Then passing
through the midst of them, He went His way." (Luke 4:30), as stated
by our author, is,
"'So when the fighting men were spent the rest of the
multitude had their throats cut (by Titus' soldiers).' Wars of the
Jews, 3, 7, 304)." (Joseph Atwill, Caesar's Messiah, Kindle
location 2557).
I'm not making this up. Our author starts back in horror at the
evil of the New Testament, which he perceives as "perhaps the most
vicious tale ever written" (Joseph Atwill, Caesar's Messiah, Kindle
location 2888), interpreted his way, because it's got all that killing
and all those stacks of dead bodies in it. Except it doesn't.
There is an incident recorded by Mark, where a young man runs
away naked, at Jesus' arrest:
"Now a certain young man followed Him, having a linen cloth thrown around his naked body. And the young men laid hold of him, and he left the linen cloth and fled from them naked."
(Mark 14:51-52).
It has long been speculated that this is a 'signature,' that the
'young man' is Mark himself. Otherwise, as Mr. Atwill points out, it
is a fairly trivial incident; why include it? For Mr. Atwill, of
course, the naked young man has to be Titus; why? Because everybody
has to be Titus! But the intent of typology is not to establish that
everybody in the room, and even people walking along on the street,
are all Titus, because these claims in fact negate one another; if
the naked young man is Titus, then since the naked young man is not
Jesus, neither is Titus! The parallel offered is an incident in
which Titus, who was 'young-ish' if not a young man, went out for an
inspection tour not wearing full armor, but was set upon by
skirmishers and had to fight his way out. He was fully clothed of
course. Josephus does not use the word 'naked' nor call him a 'young
man.' In a sense, a man not wearing his armor is like a naked man;
but this is not a strong linkage, and this 'scorched earth' approach
to prophecy, where everybody on the planet has to be Titus, could
benefit from a touch of careful discrimination.
His parallel for Jesus' resurrection is a statement by an
insidious seducer that he is not really a god. A venial Roman who
despaired of being able to seduce a lady, set up an elaborate scheme
by which he achieved his dreams through impersonating a god, with
the help of corrupt priests of Isis. This story is related by
Josephus. "In fact, in all of literature these are the only two
stories I am aware of that describe anyone coming on a 'third day'
to proclaim that he is or is not a god." (Joseph Atwill, Caesar's
Messiah, Kindle location 5323). First of all, Jesus does not rise on
the third day in order to come back and proclaim that He is God (not a god),
He has already made that proclamation, and there are Unitarians who
deny His deity but who believe in His resurrection; the two things
are not identical. But this is a quibble. Notice, please, that his
author claims the right to find a parallel whenever a given
condition does, or does not, obtain. Between what two things
can one not find a parallel if 'is' equates to 'is not'? Let no one
ever say that atheists are logical people; with this rule-book in
hand, our author disappears down the rabbit-hole with Alice.
One anomalous thing about our author's 'black humor' is that it's
not funny. It may be he is of an adolescent mind, inasmuch as some
thirteen-year-olds do perceive gross things, as such, as funny. But
for the rest of us, the idea that, somebody dies, horribly, yuk-yuk,
doesn't quite compute. We are expected to assume without proof that the Romans 'got' this
type of humor. The reader should incidentally be careful of this
author's habit of quoting himself, i.e., of putting his own words in quotes; check to see whether
Josephus said 'infected' or 'fishing' before taking the author's word.
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