03:29 In a nutshell, the Caesar's Messiah hypothesis is that a Roman imperial family—the Flavians—constructed the New Testament and created Christianity as a way to deflate the Jewish sects that were inspired to fight the Roman Empire because of their belief a Messiah would come to lead them to military victory. So now you give them this Jesus, the peaceful Messiah who says turn the other cheek don't fight back and is ultimately steamrolled in brutal fashion by the Roman Empire and it just makes so much sense but maybe you can elaborate a bit about this new way of viewing Christianity and the best evidence for your case for people who just might not be familiar? Sure well The first thing people need to understand
04:13 grasp Christianity is how implausible the religion is historically. It just makes no sense from what we record as the year 1 through the year 135, the Roman Empire was fighting against a Messianic movement. These were Jews who were motivated to rebel against the Roman Empire who had colonized Judea by their belief in the coming of a Messiah and And that fact is recorded by the Roman historian Flavius Josephus. He said, hey what was most propelling the Jews to rebel against the empire was their belief in the coming
04:51 of this Messiah. And so when Christianity emerges, it is right in the middle of this 135-year period where there was just one messianic rebellion against Rome after another and that would be the first thing that very often lay people have an understanding about Christianity misunderstand is that the Gospels characterize Jesus sort of in a pastoral and peaceful manner. He's wandering around, and often doesn't have any interruptions from Roman military authorities but this just could never have happened
05:29 In this period, the Jews who were rebelling against Rome would never have permitted someone to have claimed to be a Messiah and also would've cooperated with the Roman Empire. They certainly attempted to kill that individual and destroy his movement And that would have been recorded in the Gospels if the Gospels were history. So, that's the first thing is just historically it's... The story of Jesus is really implausible very suspicious and then secondly you have to understand that the gospels are written using a genre of literature called typology and typology is a little complicated basically just means one
06:15 story is based on another, and so that the character Jesus Christ is a typologic story. I'm just going to give a real quick example—I don't want to get bogged down in this technical literary analysis—but just this is something that most people can understand very quickly But oddly enough, most people aren't aware of. You know in the story of Matthew very first page of the Gospels you have the famous story of Jesus' pre-ministry of his childhood and that story starts at Matthew 2 13 with His father Joseph going to Egypt Then you have the famous massacre of young boys by Herod, Matthew 2.20 You've got this divine person telling Joseph he can go back to Judea He says they are dead which sought the young child's life And then you return from Egypt Israel and you have the baptism where Jesus passes through water and then you go into wilderness 40 days and then you have the famous The devil in Jesus engaged and you have a devil attempts to tempt him by bread
07:16 You have the line, do not tempt God. And then finally in Matthew 4 10 Jesus resolves all this and points out that you must worship only God okay so that's the pre-ministry of Jesus and so in the Old Testament Joseph goes to Egypt famous story everyone knows this then you have the pharaoh masquering the boys The next is you have the line that occurs in the New Testament, is taken literally right out of the Old Testament where the angel says to Moses all the men are dead which sought thy life. Then you return from Egypt Israel and you have the passing through water and now you go into the wilderness not for 40 days but for 40 years then they have these lines which appear in the New Testament or taken directly read them out of the Old Testament tempted by bread do not tempt God worship only God
08:05 So, one story is based on another. Now this is a fictional genre right? You don't write history using typology. Typology has different purposes in religious sense it normally links prophets together or divine individuals shows that the hand of God is passing over both of these individuals and so there's parallelism So anyway, this is the beginning of the Gospels and this is the foundation of the character Jesus. It's not a historical character it's not a historical genre, it's not writing history, it's writing typology... And in Caesar's Messiah I show that all of the events of Jesus' adult ministry are using the same genre okay? so they're all typologic They're basically based on another story and this would be the story of the Flavian military campaign
08:57 makes a lot of sense because for one thing Jesus makes direct predictions of Flavian military victories, which is also very suspicious in terms of Jesus being a Jewish Messiah. Because why would he be predicting Roman military victories? But he predicts that the Galilean towns will be crushed Jerusalem will be encircled with a wall, the abomination of desolation that Daniel predicts will occur. He predicts the temple will be razed not one stone on top another. These are all military victories in the Flavian campaign against the Messianic movement and the war between 66 and 73. So right off the bat you have a lot of events from the war that appear or predictions by Jesus and these are given in the same sequence
09:44 You know, if you looked at the example I gave early on one of the elements of it is sequence. All of the events in the New Testament that I talked about in Matthew which are based upon events in the Old Testament occur in the same sequence so the way that you can really see that you're dealing with a completely fictional character with Jesus Christ is that if you start his adult ministry at the Sea of Galilee where he calls the people together, his disciples. And He says if you follow me, you'll become fishers of men and then you start comparing the events in His life with the events of the military campaign You'll see that the events in Jesus's life are actually based upon these military campaign events and that they're occurring in the same sequence and at the same geographical location
10:36 So, you know, you start at the Sea of Galilee. You wander around Galilee for a bit. You head from there to Jerusalem. You stay outside of Jerusalem for awhile then you have a triumphant entrance into it. The temple is raised basically that Jesus makes prediction once he gets inside the city and then you go outside and then you have the crucifixion of Jesus Well, all these events basically throughout his adult ministry once you lay them in the correct order relative to the military campaign just laying them side by side. You can see that one campaign when Jesus's religious campaign is based completely on Titus' military campaign they go to the same exact locations They have these parallel events some of them are conceptual
11:23 we take a bit of mind puzzling, sort of see the parallelism. But very often they are transparent—they're just completely obvious and then beyond that often it's literally the same event I mean when Jesus predicts the crushing at the Galilean towns these are the towns that were in fact destroyed when he talks about Jerusalem being encircled with a wall. I mean, this is exactly what is accomplished by Titus during the military campaign and then Jesus says you know the temple be raised This is the actual event that He's predicting that Titus achieved so That's the Caesar's Messiah thesis in a nutshell, is that the Flavians produced it and then they left because they were very vain and wanted legacy. They put this type of logic hidden level that people later on would recognize and see
12:15 they had created the literature. And then finally, the actual purpose from perspective of logic as to what they're actually trying to do with the typology is Jesus talks about a character he calls The Son Of Man and He says He's going to come in the future. He gives these specific things that occur when this individual appears. These are all events from the war, so you can see that what Jesus is really saying when he's predicting that the Son of Man is going to come as He's giving that title to the Roman Caesar if you just took two Gospels and when Jesus talks about the coming of the son of man and you took out the phrase son of man and put in Titus Flavius then the Gospels would make perfect sense because Titus actually claimed or the Flavian Caesars claim to be the Jewish Messiah
13:03 all of their core historians, Suetonius, Diotasidus, Josephus. They all said the same thing. They said that the Jews believed that a Messiah was going to come and lead them but they were wrong about the identity of Messiah. The Messiah was actually talking about the Flavian Caesar So, when you understand the Gospels with that historical perspective they just make perfect sense. All the mystery drops away and the literature finally is easy to comprehend because as Christians and New Testament scholars typically understand it's just...they can't really make much sense out of it but I think when people read Caesar Messiah they can see that the Gospels are actually very logical straightforward stuff we've just got a look at them for the right perspective