Joseph Atwill, Why the Bible is Pro-Roman |464|
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Alex Tsakiris | Sep 22 |
Skepticism
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Joseph Atwill’s insights about the relationship between power and religion seem more relevant than ever.
photo by: Skeptiko
[Clip 00:00:00 – 00:00:31]
That’s a clip from Gladiator, and although the movie is fiction, people who really know Roman history, like today’s guest Joseph Atwill, will tell you that the movie is spot on when it comes to the kind of political manipulation, mind control and conspiracy wielding that the Romans had mastered 2000 years ago.
Of course, this movie has another side to it, a very deep interpersonal family and spiritual angle to it, which, as we all know, plays a much greater role in the rough and tumble world of world politics and social engineering. I love this next piece.
[Clip 00:01:17 – 00:01:27]
Today’s guest on Skeptiko, Joseph Atwill, author of Caesar’s Messiah, has become a real cornerstone in my understanding of how we should approach so many of the deepest, most important questions about religion and spirituality, well, from a Skeptiko perspective at least. At any rate, it was so great to reconnect with Joe and be reminded how especially relevant his work is today.
Joseph Atwill: [00:01:55] Yeah, I actually am quite, intrigued and supportive of your perspective on consciousness because of its political aspect. And, of course, given my background, obviously the first thing I’m looking at is how are our ideas about ourselves manipulated politically? Have we been basically given an idea about our consciousness that is untrue, just so that we can be more easily ruled? And the idea that we are an illusion is, in my mind, a decadent political position. And it’s not even worthwhile discussing in terms of it as spirituality, because you already have this enormous problem, that if you think of yourself as an illusion, if you think of life as something that is absurd or meaningless, then you basically don’t have the right kind of resiliency, in terms of coherent political perspective.
I’m not sold on Atwill’s theories, both about Jesus and about Christianity as a socially engineered program initiated by the Romans. Maybe you can ask Atwill these questions the next time you have him on. Here are a few key reasons (and there are others) as to why I don’t accept his arguments:
First, regarding the social engineering argument: If Rome introduced Christianity to control the populace, and Mark’s Gospel was the initial tool, why did they wait 242 years to make Christianity the official state religion? And why in the interim period, from 70 AD, when Mark’s Gospel was likely written, until 312 when Constantine converted, were Christians viewed in a very negative light, leading to persecution, torture, and execution? Such treatment doesn’t seem to provide much motivation for people to adopt such a religion. There’s no doubt that the state took a position against the religion: For an early example, look up Roman Magistrate, “Pliny the Younger” (no, not the double IPA from Russian River Brewing Company ;-) He put Christians to death for merely stating that they were Christian.
Pertaining to the issue of whether Jesus was a real person of history, I keep hearing about Josephus, but Atwill never mentions the reference to Jesus found in the “Annals of Imperial Rome”, written by Publius Cornelius Tacitus:
“Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.”
Concerning the Tacitus’ account,
History.com quotes Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman: “As a Roman historian, Tacitus did not have any Christian biases in his discussion of the persecution of Christians by Nero. Just about everything he says coincides—from a completely different point of view, by a Roman author disdainful of Christians and their superstition—with what the New Testament itself says: Jesus was executed by the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, for crimes against the state, and a religious movement of his followers sprang up in his wake.
When Tacitus wrote history, if he considered the information not entirely reliable, he normally wrote some indication of that for his readers,” Mykytiuk says in vouching for the historical value of the passage. There is no such indication of potential error in the passage that mentions Christus.”
According to Athiest
blogger (yes, that’s right, Atheist) Tim O’Neill, a seemingly unbiased truth-seeker, “Tacitus was one of the most reliable of all Roman historians and many first-century figures are known to us solely through his mention of them. This means his passing reference to Jesus in Annals XV.44 remains a fly in the ointment of the Jesus Myth hypothesis. Despite Tacitus’ reliability and the scholarly agreement that the reference is genuine, Mythicist ideologues have several ways by which they try to dismiss this reference; all of them characteristically weak.”
Further supporting a historical Jesus, here is an excerpt from a 2006 blog written by Bishop John Shelby Spong who is by no means a traditional Christian. Rather, Spong is viewed by many as a heretic and has received death threats from Fundamentalist Christians. One example of Spong’s views not aligning with mainstream Christianity is his rejection of the “sacrificial lamb” idea, whereby Jesus had to die to pay the price for the sins of humanity. Here are Spong’s comments on the historicity of Jesus:
“Paul writing to the Galatians around the year 51 C.E. chronicles his activities, including his consultations with Peter and others who were called by Paul "the pillars" of the Christian movement. This means that Paul knew Peter and others who were the disciples of the Jesus of history. Paul says that this meeting took place three years after his conversion (see Galatians 1:18-24). The best evidence that has been amassed to date the conversion of Paul was done by a 19th century church historian named Adolf Harnack, who places it no earlier than one year and no more than six years after the crucifixion. So Paul was in touch with disciples of Jesus within 4 to 10 years after the crucifixion. These disciples did not think of Jesus as a fantasy or a mythical person. Indeed myths take far longer than 4 to 10 years to develop. There is thus ample data to support the historicity of the man Jesus. Paul would hardly have given his life to a myth.
There are other things that are so counter-intuitive about the way the Jesus story has been told that to me they constitute compelling additional evidence for his historicity. One is that Jesus is said to have come out of Nazareth, a dirty, petty and insignificant town that had a dreadful reputation. It was said even in the New Testament that people asked "can anything good come out of Nazareth" (see John 1:46)? His Nazareth and Galilean origins were an embarrassment to the Jesus movement. No one creates a myth that will embarrass them. It was undoubtedly this embarrassment that helped to create the myth of his birth in Bethlehem. One does not try to escape a lowly place of origin unless that place is so deeply a part of the person's identity that it cannot be suppressed. Jesus of Nazareth was a person of history.”