From Joe King: Christ, will they ever stop picking on the guy?
Scholar Claims Jesus Was a Roman Hoax
by Benjamin Radford
news.discover.com
October 11, 2013
A historical scholar claims to have found evidence proving that the story of Jesus as described in the New Testament is a fiction, and that historical claims about Jesus were actually created by Roman aristocrats to control the poor.
According to a news story in The Independent:
“Joseph Atwill, who is the author of a book entitled “˜Caesar”™s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus”™, asserts that Christianity did not begin as a religion, but was actually a sophisticated government propaganda exercise used to pacify the subjects of the Roman Empire.”
Atwill”™s take on Jesus is of course not new. In 1844 Karl Marx famously declared religion as the opiate of the masses. History is filled with skeptics, freethinkers, atheists, agnostics and other doubters who have questioned religious doctrine and dogma.
Atwill”™s claims are based on what he described as important and revealing parallels between a first-person account of first-century Judea (an ancient Roman province now part of Israel and Palestine) and the New Testament.
“What seems to have eluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus ministry are more or less the same as the sequence of events and locations of the military campaign of (Emperor) Titus Flavius as described by Josephus,” Atwill wrote in a blog on his web site.
Atwill believes that the story of Jesus was actually copied and created from the biography of the Roman emperor.
Evidence for a Historical Jesus?
While Atwill”™s thesis is intriguing, there are reasons to be skeptical.
Read the rest of this article here.