There are weird conspiracy theories, and then there are bonker crazy ones. Today we're going to refute

one such conspiracy about Jesus that even fringe atheist scholars think is insane. But documentaries

supporting this theory get over a million views on YouTube. So it counts as extremely popular

low-hanging fruit to rebut, namely the claim that Jesus Christ never existed because he was invented by the Roman Empire.

The main book peddling this theory is Joseph Atwill's Caesar's Messiah, the Roman

conspiracy to invent Jesus.

According to Atwill, Christianity was invented by Emperor Titus sometime after the Jewish

revolt that took place between AD 66 and 73. Jesus was invented in

order to promote a pro-Roman, peaceful Jewish Messiah who would suppress further revolts against Rome.

In order to accomplish this goal, the Romans had Flavius Josephus, a former Jewish freedom fighter

who defected and became an advisor to Titus,

create what we now know as the New Testament.

There's a lot wrong with this argument, so let's go through the key parts of the documentary

that try to support it.

It's during this period that a new literature enters history, which describes a peace-loving

turned the other cheek preaching Jewish Messiah

named Jesus Christ. But if the Flavians wrote the Gospels, how could a Roman family

know how to write Jewish literature that refers to Jewish prophecy? The answer lies in the Flavians'

collaborations with a number of Jewish intellectuals, beginning with their own court historian, Josephus.

No, Josephus did not write the Gospels. You can tell they're written by different authors. Mark is not Luke, is not John, is not Matthew, etc.

And Mark wrote before the temple was even destroyed. But even if per impossible,

Josephus did write the Gospels, that still doesn't explain the Jesus story, because the documentary

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