For Min

[MichelleH]

Scholar Claims Jesus Was a Roman Hoax

http://news.discovery.com/history/religion/scholar-claims-jesus-was-roman-hoax-131011.htm

[Minimalist]

Atwill's a crack pot.

[MichelleH]

I thought you might like the absurdity of it......

[Minimalist]

I went through this some months ago with Ishtar.

The worst thing with Atwill is the timing and his fixation on Palestine. Titus Flavius Vespasianus crushed the Jewish revolt in Galilee and then swept down to systematically cut Jerusalem's routes to the north and East. The Xth legion famously destroyed the facilities at Qumran in 68. With Egypt and the coastal roads firmly under Roman control (Titus the Younger had marched the XVth legion overland from Alexandria to Ptolemais) the Romans had Jersualem isolated with Roman troops to the north and west, the Dead Sea to the East and the desert to the south backed up by Arab troops supplied by allied states they were well and truly contained.

So Vespasian watches events in Rome for some time before deciding to make a play for the throne. His armies defeat Vitellius but Rome is badly burned in the process, the empire is broke, a serious revolt breaks out in Germany and Gaul but Atwill acts as if the only thing Vespasian gives a rat's ass about is the friggin' Jews.

Titus handled the Jews in the traditional Roman method. He killed scads of them. The message was so thoroughly implanted that when trouble broke out in other Jewish communities in 115 the Jews in Judaea said "no thanks, boys...we'll sit this one out." In fact, until Hadrian provoked them beyond the breaking point in 132 they probably would have retained the lesson a lot longer. Vespasian certainly did not need to make his son Titus into a god for the Jews. They understood what Roman swords could do. That was enough of a "god."

[Barracuda]

Using Christianity to control the masses worked pretty well for Constantine a few hundred years later...

[Minimalist]

A scenario which makes far more sense than Atwill's especially as we have no indication that the Romans took any notice of xtians in the first century at all.

At the beginning of his movie Atwill makes a couple of utterly silly assertions. One that the Flavian family was an old line patrician clan. They weren't.
Vespasian's grandfather had been a centurion under Pompey in the civil war - which means he was on the losing side. Atwill also stated that Vespasian had an army of 120,000 which was nearly double what his force actually was. I explained to Ishtar that errors like this - easily detected and refuted - are evidence that the man doesn't know what the hell he is talking about or is so loose with the facts that nothing he says can be trusted.

In any case, the earliest Roman mention of xtians..... and it may have said "Chrestians"...was Pliny the Younger and what he described didn't sound like any recognizable version of xtianity that we later had. By the middle of the second century we are getting actual commentary by Roman writers about xtians and it is unfavorable but this is long after the Flavian Dynasty had exited the stage.