I posted this on another forum, but I will repost here since it is more recent, and totally germane.
I agree with Atwill and Price and Matt (see below)... anyone who tries to explain away the in parallels-in-sequence doesn't sound credible IMO.
Well I will yield there are some interesting coincidences and/or similarities between Josephus and the Gospels, but as I've stated I find them far from definitive. One has to ask how 2000 years could have passed before anyone seemed to notice them until Atwill wrote his book in 2005. If they are so strong one would expect a number of people, including experts and academics, to have pick up on it before that. Yet unless I've missed something not a single person in history up to that point made the connections. So I really think this calls into question the strength of the parallels between Josephus and the Gospels. They are there if you strain hard enough, but also vague enough that one should certainly seek other corroborating evidence before his theory can be considered on solid ground.
That being said, I see you seem to have avoided my point about Tacitus' mention of the Christians being in Rome before the Flavians supposedly invented the religion whole-cloth in the 70's AD. If this is the case, it should be clear that it's entirely impossible for Atwill's theory to be true, so this is an important point. I see he addressed this in the interview for this forum, but I think his points are far from solving the dilemma. To explain, first let's look at Tacitus' writing:
Tacitus:
But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. 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 "Chrestians" 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 Pilate, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, 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. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.
So he's referring to a Christ who suffered under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius, just like the Gospels say, so I think we can safely assume these are the first Christians of what would become modern Christianity. The second problem is how negatively he is portraying the Christians. In just a few short paragraphs, he refers to them or their religion as "hated for their abominations", "mischievous superstition", "evil" "hideous", "shameful", AND he's talking about how they are being tortured to death because of all this. If this is really some psy-op operation to get rebellious Jews to believe in this fabricated religion, how does this description encourage people to join this movement? I think it's safe to say Tacitus wasn't attempting to advance the fake religion, which means he was probably just describing what he thought was real history. As such, this pretty much destroys any chance that Atwill's theory is true, regardless of how convincing his parallels may be.
Other problems arise with the timelines given by Atwill when you try to put yourself in the place of a Jew living in the 70’s AD when the Josephus and the Flavians supposedly created the Christian religion whole-cloth. There is simply no way any sensible person living at that time would even begin to believe what was being fed to them regarding the hoax religion.
The Jews living in the 70’s AD would be reading about events that took place approximately four decades earlier, but they would have no reason to believe any of it because there would be no evidence to their direct observation that any of it ever happened. They would be able to know that there was never any enigmatic teacher named Jesus Christ going around and performing miracles and preaching to the masses. Same with the Apostles, they would be able to see there aren’t really any of his followers going around the empire trying to convert people as the texts they are being given say there should be. There should be churches with thousands of people in them that have existed for maybe decades, but none of that would exist because everything in the Gospels is a lie from the 70’s AD, and they would be able to see that.
Same with Paul and his epistles. He is supposedly writing to all these churches in all these cities, and he is telling them in his epistles he has come to them and instructed their leadership and encouraged them. But there are no churches for people to read his messages. Even if there were, they would be the first of the people there, and they would know there was never this Paul guy and he never came to them to teach them. Because Paul never existed and the Jews reading this stuff would be able to see this. But even worse is that because the churches are a hoax, there are no real people there to receive Paul’s messages, even if he did exist.
How would a Jew living in, say, Corinth feel if he was given a document from a guy named Paul addressed to a supposed church in the city, and telling them that he has been there and spoken there, but nobody has ever seen Paul and there is no church to be found in Corinth because the church is a completely fabricated invention of the very text the Jew is reading? Do you not see that thinking the Christian religion could have been founded this way makes literally no sense?
This is why you can’t fabricate from absolutely nothing a religion in the 70’s AD that should have been founded several decades earlier. It doesn’t make sense. People would be able to see there is no real church, there was no real founding Messiah, there are no real Apostles, there is no existing movement, nothing. They would be able to see this with their own eyes, and thus it’s simply absurd to think any significant number of people would have fallen into believing such a baseless idea. And it’s infinitely more absurd to think they would suffer painful deaths in defense of it as the historical record seems to indicate. In short, they would be able to look at the Gospel texts being given to them, which would serve as the basis of the religion, and know that they were not true. Is that not clear to you?
How do you envision this operation would have been implemented? Do you think it was just the 3 Flavian emperors and Josephus? It seems to me a lot more people would have to have been involved. You would need people to write the fake manuscripts to be delivered throughout the empire so that converts would have something to read in their meetings. You would need people to actually deliver the fake manuscripts throughout the empire. You would need people on the ground helping convince local Jews that the hoax religion is real. It seems like the number of people involved could easily have reached into the thousands.
And all these people would have to communicate with each other over large distances for multiple decades to respond to various developments and keep the hoax alive. The only way to do that back then was by letter, so one would perhaps expect at least some record of these communications would have survived and would have been found, but literally nothing of the sort has been discovered. So for this massive, empire-wide, decades-long operation being orchestrated from the highest levels of the Roman government, there is literally nothing outside of Joseph Atwill’s supposed “parallels” that serves as direct evidence of this vast conspiracy. The evidence is so scant that 2000 years passed before anyone suspected this may have happened. It seems pretty incredible that such would be the case, does any of this lack of hard evidence concern you?
so, I don't see any way to read the above as anything other than a psyop / social engineering project. the fact that it failed is kinda irrelevant. I mean, we have no reason to suspect that this Vespasian or josephus thought it would fail... it's just the way that history played out.
Well if it failed so badly don't you think it would have been prudent for them to admit to these rebellious Christians and prove to them that the whole thing they are resisting the Roman emperor over is a complete fraud? It wouldn't have been that hard to do, but there is no evidence anyone attempted to enlighten the Christians about the hoax nature of their religion. And maybe the reason for this is that Christianity is not, in fact, a Roman hoax.
We have manuscript evidence from Emperor Trajan, who took power just a couple years after the end of the Flavian dynasty, that his subordinates were to put Christians to death unless they would renounce Christianity and worship the emperor. According to the manuscript, real Christians would rather die than submit. So to him the true test of being a Christian is that they WON'T worship the emperor, exactly the opposite of what Atwill argues was supposedly the reason the Flavians created the religion in the first place.
AND if this really was a Roman hoax being orchestrated by the Roman royalty throughout the empire for decades, it is kind of incredible that the emperors who immediately succeeded the Flavians had absolutely no knowledge of this massive operation. Note that Josephus was still alive at this point, and wrote his Antiquities in 98AD, AFTER he would have had any motivation of supporting the Flavians as their dynasty had already come to an end. It's totally irrational to think history could have played out this way. When you look at the facts outside of the supposed parallels, nothing makes sense if Atwill's theory was really true.
To finish, I will say that I see this time and time again, that when someone questions Atwill’s theory, his proponents ALWAYS fall back to the parallels, which they claim are so strong and indisputable. Even if that point is granted, the problems come when ones tries to look outside the parallels for corroborating evidence. Unfortunately for Atwill, almost all of what is known about the historical record seems to contradict his theory, rendering the strength of the supposed parallels moot.
Beyond that, the methods apparently utilized by the Flavians are totally senseless. Why go about trying to convince the unruly Jews of the deity of the Roman emperors by creating this proxy religion that almost no one would connect to the Roman authorities? Why not use Josephus to just directly convince people that the Flavians are themselves the Messiah, instead of fabricating this massive myth that apparently had the opposite effect that was intended? It’s beyond absurd to think any of this would be a good idea.
Atwill’s supporters are only focused on one piece of the puzzle, which is the parallels. The problem is that that piece of the puzzle doesn’t fit with everything else. It’s just there by itself, and all the other data is saying something different. In fact, when one looks at what is essentially known about history, the traditional Christian narrative about what took place in Judea at the beginning of the first century makes
WAYYYYY more sense than what Atwill is proposing. Not necessarily all the stuff about Jesus being God and all that, but the idea that he and his followers were real people, interacting with other real people, and laying the foundations of a real movement that flourished well before the Flavians ever took power. That’s what the data seems to indicate.