CESAR'S MESSIAH; SUMMARY OF FINDINGS Our understanding of Jewish and Christian history changed dramatically with the publication of Caesar's Messiah by Joseph Atwill (Ulysses Press), which had previously been published privately as The Roman Origins of Christianity. According to Atwill, the Gospels are not accounts of the ministry of a historical Jewish Jesus compiled by his disciples sixty years after his death. These are texts deliberately created to induce Messianic Jews to worship the Roman emperor in “disguise.” The essence of Atwill's discovery is that the majority of key events in Jesus' life are in fact satirical: each is an elegant literary piece about a military battle in which Jewish armies were defeated by the Romans. This is an extraordinary claim, but one supported by all the necessary evidence. Why would the Romans go to the trouble of writing and distributing such a text? The Jewish War, culminating in the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, had devastated the Mediterranean economy, and the Romans were anxious to prevent a new messianic epidemic, which could easily result in an additional 500,000 deaths, as would be demonstrated the Bar Kochba revolt. a generation later. In order to make any reconstruction of the country sustainable, the Romans had to offer the Jews alternative histories that would distract them from the messianic messages inherent in the Torah and persuade them to accept Roman values. Titus Flavius ​​Vespasianus 39-81 According to Atwill, The Romans' solution to these problems was to create a particular type of post-war propaganda. In Greek they called it evangelion, a technical term meaning “good news of military victory.” In English, it is translated as “gospel.” The name is actually ironic humor: the Romans toyed with the idea of ​​making the Jews accept, as actions of the Messiah Jesus, what were in fact literary echoes of the very battles in which the Romans defeated the Jewish armies . . Another joke was buried in the unmistakable parallels between the lives of Jesus and that of Titus: in worshiping Jesus, the Jews who adopted Christianity, as it came to be called, were in effect hailing the emperor of their conquerors as God. The Romans therefore created a literary equivalent of the Torah, the Gospel of Matthew (and soon after the Hellenistic and Roman versions known as Luke and Mark). The central literary character, called Jesus