Review: Creating Christianity

Henry Davis, Creating Christianity – A Weapon Of Ancient Rome (Independent Publishing Network 2021)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59829661-creating-christianity—a-weapon-of-ancient-rome?ref=nav_sb_ss_2_36

The delicious Jesus-never-existed conspiracy theory

This work develops the Jesus-never-existed conspiracy theory. It’s based on a conundrum all who have compared the works of Flavius Josephus and the New Testament can’t help but notice. The Gospels write about stuff that supposedly happened during Jesus’s lifetime, in the 30s, and Josephus writes about the same stuff happening during the Great Revolt, in the 60s. I mean, exactly the same. Davis lists over 44 parallels, and I myself have come up with more.
The words and phrases used are almost word for word identical; the geography matches; even the body counts tally.
To cite just two examples:
In the story of the Good Samaritan, robbers stole the man’s clothes and goods and left him half dead. At Beth Horon, in Samaria, the rebels stole the legion’s mules, clothes and goods, and left them half dead.
In the story of the Gadarene swine, Jesus casts out the demon named ‘Legion’, who hides in a tomb, into 2000 pigs who run off a cliff. At Gadara, a legion of Jews have a demonic (rebellious) spirit. The leader hides in a tomb. Jews are ‘swine possessed by demons’, they run off a cliff, 2000 are dead.
Many chapters are devoted to arguing that the royalty of Rome and the royalty of Judaea were interconnected genealogically, but I do not find that scandalous at all. Royalty intermarried all over the place. I do not think this means, however, that writers of histories were using secret nicknames in order to obscure their familial connections. I certainly don’t think it implies, as Davis believes, that Flavius Josephus never existed because he was secretly Arrius Calpurnius Piso in disguise.
I skipped over the chapters on onomatology (the etymology of names) because like gematria (numerology), you can manipulate letters or numbers to say anything you want. Using these wacky techniques ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’ of Revelation 1:8 translates as ‘I am Arrius Calpurnius Piso’. I mean, really?
If you’ve read Revelation you know the gospel writers were using some kind of code, but I don’t think this was it.
Everyone in post-70 CE imperial Rome and Herodian descendants take on new pseudonyms, and it’s all great fun, but after a while, my eyes glaze over. If person x was secretly the same person as y—e.g. if Publius Clodius Thrasea Paetus and Gaius Calpurnius Piso and Caesinni Paeti were all names for the same person, then people would have to have had more wives and children and much longer CVs than Suetonius, Tacitus et al say they did. One can always invent fictional wives and children, or conceive that when Tacitus wrote x he really meant y, but it’s applying common sense to the CVs—would person x really have done what person y did?—that we start debunking.
I’m crazy about ancient history conspiracy theories, especially ones that involve ‘Jesus’, like the ‘Bloodline of the Holy Grail’. This is similar. The Bloodline theory posited an imaginary Dagobert III, whose descendants supposedly carried the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene through the Merovingian kings.
It’s rather specious to suggest that Josephus invented Christianity. This is the same man who devoted most of his writing to proving to his Roman and Jewish readers that Titus the destroyer of Jerusalem was the Messiah.