PACE UNIVERSITY LEFT FORUM 2010

THE GOSPELS AS ROMAN WAR PROPAGANDA.

by
John Hudson

Today we look at a new paradigm which offers a way of rethinking the most
influential texts in the western ‘canon’, and shows them to be something very
different from what is normally assumed. All new ideas always seem strange—it
took many years for the fact that the earth revolves around the sun to overthrow
the old geocentric group-think. But in evaluating any new idea, the question to
ask is whether it solves the problems in the existing model.

In 2005 the Baylor Religion Survey found that 3% of Americans think Jesus
existed but was nothing special and only 1% think he was a fictional character.
The vast majority, 70%, think that Jesus was the son of God. In Sweden or the
UK or China, a group of poorly educated believers, who have been sold a lot of
snake oil, would normally be an unimportant religious fringe. But in America
fringe religious beliefs have become the mainstream and are shaping national
policy. And it is far too late for the churches to begin a product recall.

The traditional model of the Historical Jesus has several very major problems.
Why was this Messiah so strangely pacifistic and pro-Roman? Why is there no
other evidence he existed? Why are the Gospels such complex works of
literature and how were they created? How did his cult spread so fast? Why did
the Romans not stop it? Why did the Romans not prevent the copying of the
manuscripts of the Gospels—which were illegal as praise of a criminal. Why was
the HQ of the Jesus cult in the center of the Jews’ enemy territory, not just in
Rome, but in the mansion of one of the imperial family and led by one of the
Emperor’s own relatives?

So lets begin. The Gospels are attributed to Matthew, Mark and Luke, supposed
followers of Jesus mentioned in the text. This fictive authorship makes these
Gospels appear to be separate eye-witness accounts, supposedly written by
ordinary Jewish peasants with Greek names. So despite their incredible and
fantastic subject matter, full of far-fetched supernatural miracles, this attribution
makes the Gospels seem authentic and realistic. It makes them appear to be
actual histories or biographies produced somewhere in Judea based on the
memories of eye-witnesses, and their high degree of overlap makes them seem
to independently reinforce each other’s story. But that is what the writers
intended you to think by attributing them to these imaginary authors. You need to
understand classical literary composition to work out that they really are
something very different.

Far from being historical biography or myths they are fictions or as Harold Bloom
says Jesus is simply the world’s most famous literary character. This basic idea

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is not new. Most Buddhist, Moslem and Hindu scholars take this view of the
Gospels. In the west it is more difficult because it means standing up against the
power structure of the church, and their vested interests. The first person to do
so was Porphyry of Tyre in the 3rd century who wrote Against the Christians
claiming that writers of the Gospels were “inventors, not narrators of events”. The
church burnt his books--the first of many thousands. When in 1835 theology
professor D. F. Strauss said the gospels are literary works and not “a faithful
narration of events”, the Pope accused him of being devilish, and the church
threw him out of his job. Whoever knew that doing theology would be so
dangerous.

But it is one thing to argue that the Gospels are invented fictions ----that still
leaves open what sort of fiction and who wrote them. This is where the very
latest scholarship goes the next step to show, shockingly, that the Gospels are
actually Roman imperial war propaganda. I am going to look at three things;
• why it matters who wrote them
• how they were written
• and the allegory that lies below the surface

1. WHO WROTE THE GOSPELS AND WHY IT MATTERS

Granted that the Jews were bitter towards the Romans occupiers of their country,
resented paying tribute and refused to worship Caesar, one of the oddities of the
Gospels is that they depict a pacifist messiah. He has pro-Roman values telling
people to pay their taxes, love the Romans, help the Roman army, and give what
they owe to Caesar. This alone makes them look suspiciously like Roman
propaganda.

Traditional scholarship is clear when the Gospels were created, in the period 70
to 80 CE. Could they have been created by the Romans after they won the
Roman-Jewish war in year 76 CE? The Court of Vespasian and Titus—who had
been the generals who destroyed Judea and Jerusalem before they staged a
military coup and became Caesars-- was known for its works of propaganda and
its anti-Semitism.

If they are Roman, the Gospels would seem to be examples of the Romans’
favorite genre of fantasy literature, and as works about military victory. That is,
after all, what the word ‘gospel’ or evangelion actually means. It is a technical
term associated with the Emperor cult, meaning good news of military victory.
The Jews wanted a messiah to follow and believe in, so maybe the Romans
gave them one, a fictional, dead, pacifist pro-Roman messiah, as a role model.

This is not far-fetched. We know the Romans invented religions as a device for
State control. Why not Christianity? State sponsorship would explain the major
question of how it grew so fast and why the Romans did not suppress it. It would
indeed be a perfect example of what Marx described---a religion that was created
“as a cover” for a State trying to pursue “the infamy of its secular ends”. It makes

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sense that Christianity was cleverly designed by the Imperial bureaucracy to
suppress dissent, create pacifism, and promote Roman rule. It would promote a
false consciousness and false understanding of their history among the Jewish
population—which then got extended to non Jews.

The rulers of Christendom suppressed any knowledge of what the Gospels really
were—like the books of Porphry and D. F. Strauss--- for fear of losing power.
And the Churches continue to flourish today. There are maybe one billion
secularists worldwide, but there are two billion Christians. The Catholic church
alone, has assets in the USA that are bigger than the 5 largest corporations.
Worldwide it is the biggest financial power and wealth accumulator on the planet
and has massive political influence. Similarly, the Evangelical churches including
50 million members of the Religious Right put their political influence and their
money behind State policies that are destructive to the environment, to peace in
the Middle East, and to human rights such as gay rights and abortion.

One of the reasons I am excited about this new paradigm is that it opens up a
new way of challenging religious conservatives with a new line of criticism. As
Marx wrote, criticism can force the State that bases itself on the Bible into
“intellectual disarray” by revealing that the religion is an illusion. In order to push
for change in a progressive direction, we need to deconstruct the illusions that
conservative policies are based upon. That means challenging their false
systems of logic and their false explanations of the world, so that, as Marx put it
in his Critique of Hegel, people will discard their religious illusions and “regain
their senses”. This new paradigm offers a new way to do so.

So to summarize;
• the Roman social values in the Gospels suggest their Roman origin
• creating propaganda to capture the hearts and minds of a defeated people
is commonplace
• and creating religious propaganda was the Romans’ regular business in
managing a defeated people. It would have been easy to take over the
idea of a messiah from the Jews, and create their own pro-Roman literary
messiah, in the same sort of approach they took elsewhere.

But the decisive evidence is in how the Gospels are written and the allegories
that they contain. These are covert literary allegories for major players at the
Roman Court which make it clear that the Gospels are not 3 separate discrete
witnesses to a historical Jesus written by peasant apostles in Galilee. Rather
they are a clever literary stratagem to create multiple documents that appear to
be independent, but really were not.

2. HOW THE GOSPELS WERE WRITTEN

Research into how the Gospels were written by professor Bacon in the 1930s,
shows that the Gospel of Matthew is a re-writing of the Torah—almost a comic
parody of the Torah. Its different sections cover the same themes as the 5 books

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of the Torah, and are introduced in the same way. For instance, the end of the
Gospel which mentions the tearing of the curtain and the empty tomb, was
created on the literary model of how the Ark or Temple is described in Leviticus,
as having a curtain and the empty stone Holy of Holies. The two accounts
accusing Jesus of blasphemy parallel the two counts of blasphemy in Leviticus
and take place at exactly comparable locations. So someone wrote Matthew as a
sort of parody Torah---a heretical, anti-Semitic parody.

Gospel of Matthew was the first Gospel to be written—according to several

studies by the International Institute for Gospel Studies. They show that the Book
of Matthew was then rewritten—first using the literary model of the Aeneid and
then rewritten again using the literary model of Homer. In that way the first three
Gospels mirror the three great epics of the ancient world; the Jewish epic the
Torah, the Roman epic the Aeneid, and the Greek epic the Odyssey. Why the
epics? Jewish peasants didn’t write Graeco-Roman epics.

However, the epic form would be compatible with the Gospels having been
created as works of fiction at the court of the Flavian Caesars. To parody the
Torah is highly anti-Semitic, which the Roman Court was. Also the Court was
known for commissioning epic poems that praised the Flavian Caesars. This
could explain why the Gospels are modeled on epics.

To review:
• the Gospels were re-written one after the other based on epics
• the first Gospel Matthew was a parody of the Torah
• it remains to explain why they are called ‘Gospels’ meaning Good News of
Military Victory. Whose military victory? To answer that we have to look at
the allegories in the Gospels.

3. WHAT DO THEIR LITERARY ALLEGORIES SHOW?

Some classical literature was written using allegory—a kind of rhetoric-- in which
what appears on the surface is just a symbol for something else. Aesop’s Fables
are a famous example. Work by a dozen scholars in the last 200 years has
shown that allegories exist in the Gospels as well.

Individual pieces of the Gospels seem to be literary allegories of the lives of the
Caesars, such the story of the 3 Magi which is modeled on the Magi who came to
worship Nero Caesar.

However, other events in the Gospels are allegories of events in the Roman-
Jewish war of 66-70E including the destruction of Jerusalem. Until recently
scholars just looked at each of these in isolation. It is only in the last 5 years
that the whole picture has been put together. Two recent books Das Messias
Ratsel and Caesar’s Messiah have shown that all the allegories form an overall
pattern. They can all be explained together. About a dozen key events in the life
of Jesus seem to be based on Titus Caesar’s battles in Judea. (These are

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described in the official record of the war, the Bellicum Judaicum by Josephus---
the chief propaganda minister of the Flavian Caesars.The book was even signed
off personally by Titus Caesar).

How could this have happened? The only possible explanation is that after
winning the Roman-Jewish war, the Flavian Caesars had the Gospels written,
with their pacifist messiah, as parodies of the battles Titus Caesar had won
against the Jews. That is why these documents were called gospels. It was to
make the Jews un-knowingly worship Caesar and think that the battles in which
they had been defeated were wonderful miracles—for instance the famous story
of Jesus healing the demoniac called Legion at Gadara. It was very compatible
with Roman ideas about revenge, and propaganda, and Roman black humor.
The figure of Jesus is primarily an allegory for Titus Caesar and God the Father
is an allegory for Titus’ father the god Vespasian.

This research on the literary allegories in the Gospels does two important things
It situates the origin of the gospels as part of the literary endeavors by the
propagandists at the Flavian Court and it explains the name Gospels, as
commemorating Roman military victories in the Roman Jewish war

We can see some of the examples here,

• Titus’ battle at the lake of Galilee and the fishers of men
• Titus’ battle at Gadara
• the event in the siege of Jerusalem about Mary’s son being eaten like a
Passover lamb
• the crucifixions that Josephus describes at the end of the war in which one
man was taken from a cross and survived at the hands of a surgeon

4.CONCLUSION
This theory fits with what we know about the Romans and how they governed the
Empire. Turning the religions of conquered peoples into Caesar cults was
business as usual. The Roman Civil Service even had a special department
responsible for doing it.

This research shows that the Gospels are Roman propaganda and Christian
churches who worship Jesus today are actually practicing a Caesar cult.
Archaeological evidence shows that the cult even began in Rome in the Flavian
mansions, and the leadership positions were taken by Titus’ relatives. We know
the rest of the story. The Gospels became accepted as truth. To question them
meant you would be killed as a heretic or as a danger to the State. One of the
very few people who worked it out for himself, 1500 years later, was Christopher
Marlowe—a theology student and expert in literature. The book Against the
Trinity which he was writing got him killed at the hands of the Secret Service…