Caesar's Messiah, The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus

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51. The 'scholarship' attributed to this would be the same as a

Creationist explaining that all of the different species that were found at Galapagos were the result of something that was found in the book of Job.

The authorship and purpose of the three synoptic gospels is something that has been studied for a couple of hundred years and which there are hundreds of thousands of books on.

I had one professor that spent 14 years on the book of Matthew. He took off 2 years to live and study in Germany so that he could fluently read all of the German scholarship on the subject. This guy is to Biblical scholars as a cub scout is to Seal Team 6.

Most of the scholars are not related to the Church and the peer review process is the same as any other academic discipline, brutally honest and highly competitive.

So the idea that Christianity was somehow invented or encouraged by the Romans is just laughable. To begin with Palestine was a small little backwater in the Roman empire. The early Church was not a happy place. All of the narrative books of the Bible were written in deep crises. Genesis was written during the Babylonian Captivity, the Synoptic gospels were written trying to patch together a broken movement struggling to understand how this terrible murder and the destruction of the Jewish establishment by the Romans (and the loss of the Temple) were part of God's plan.

Beyond that there are too many intrinsically non Roman elements (beyond the structure, content, style and authorship) to allow anybody above a cartoon level of thinking to think that this is plausible.

Just how, for example, would the Romans come up with Pentecost?

It is a poorly informed non scholarly profit making enterprise trying to duplicate the financial success of The Da Vinci code with spurious books and movies.

The Romans weren't in the 'myth building' business. They were in the 'co-opting and destroying' business. This is what they did with the Sadducees and the Temple.

All of these attempts follow the same fallacy. Because they see the Jewish and early Christian writers borrow heavily from other sources, including Pagan sources they try build constructs that it came from those sources rather than the obvious, and well established point that the Jewish tribes were very good at intellectual integration and absorption which accounts for numerous outside influences going all the way back to the Noah myth to the Roman Jew Paul who showed that he could and would take any non Jewish metaphysical thought and adapt it to explain his Christian faith and experience.

I don't mind a little charlatan hucksterism with a view of putting some dollars in a person's pocket, I object that it is such a poorly done one.