Christianity: A Roman Invented Peace Movement? - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Christianity: A Roman Invented Peace Movement?

With the advent of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and its more popular version, The Da Vinci Code, the attempt to disprove Christianity by attacking Christianity has become more common. In the more recent past, the scholar Joseph Atwill has claimed that “Romans used Christ as propaganda to pacify subjects.”

The most glaring idiocy of his theory is his notion of the political calculations of the Romans he claimed to be the fabricators of Christianity. I find his thesis absurd. Let’s grant for the sake of argument that these Roman aristocrats were able to plant all of the manuscripts we have found, kill or torture any living Jews who could have falsified their fictitious Jesus story, and then convinced a bunch of Jews who were rebelling against the Empire into adopting a fake Messiah that never even existed. All of that granted, why in the world would they have made Jesus say everything that he actually said? So they would have liked the “render unto Caesar” part and a few others, but what about the whole “I am the way, the truth, and the life”?

That is just one quote that shows the exclusivist monotheism that pervades Jesus’ words. If I were a Roman aristocrat in the first century AD, I would not have added that. The fictitious writers would have lived around the peak of the empire. They would have had to assimilate more tribes, peoples, and religions than ever before. Why would they have allowed this intolerant exclusive religion to persist? The Roman’s did not care about the faiths of their subjects so long as they would add the veneration of the Roman Pantheon to their own.This feature of Judaism had proved particularly obnoxious to many a Governor of Palestine.

So why would these powerful fabricators leave this glaringly inconvenient facet of the Judeo-Christian worldview in place? This same feature would go on to destroy every vestige of the former pagan religions, and ultimately come to rule even the Emperors themselves. These same fabricators would be to blame for the famous humiliation of the Emperor Theodosius before Bishop Ambrose. Moreover, if the historiography of Edward Gibbon and others like him is correct, the Christianization of the Empire led to the destruction of the entire Roman world. So if we suspend our disbelief and accept the absurdities that have to be granted to make this fabrication and dissemination possible, we must then conclude that these fabricators were shockingly awful at solving the political problems that existed in Palestine at this time.

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