CAESAR'S MESSIAH ; A SUMMARY OF THE FINDINGS Our understanding of Jewish and Christian history changed dramatically with the publication of Caesar's Messiah by Joseph Atwill (Ulysses Press), which had previously been published privately under the title The Roman Origins of Christianity. According to Atwill, the Gospels are not accounts of the ministry of a historical Jewish Jesus compiled by his followers sixty years after his death. They are texts deliberately created to trick Messianic Jews into worshiping the Roman emperor "in disguise." The essence of Atwill's discovery is that most of the key events in Jesus' life are actually satirical: each is an elegant literary work about a military battle in which the Jewish armies were defeated by the Romans. This is an extraordinary claim, but supported by all the necessary evidence. Why would the Romans have bothered to write and disseminate such a text? The Jewish War, culminating in the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, had devastated the Mediterranean economy, and the Romans were anxious to prevent another messianic epidemic, which could easily have led to another 500,000 deaths, as the revolt would demonstrate by Bar Kochba. a generation later. To make the reconstruction of the country lasting, the Romans needed to offer the Jews alternative stories that would distract them from the messianic messages inherent in the Torah and persuade them to accept Roman values. Titus Flavius ​​Vespasian 39-81 According to Atwill, The Romans' solution to these problems was to create a special kind of postwar propaganda. They called it evangelion in Greek, a technical term meaning "good news of military victory". In English it is translated as "gospel". The name is in fact ironic humor: the Romans enjoyed making the Jews accept, as actions of the Messiah Jesus, what were in reality literary echoes of the same battles in which the Romans had defeated the Jewish armies. . A further joke was hidden in the unmistakable parallels between the life of Jesus and that of Titus: in worshiping Jesus, the Jews who adopted Christianity, as it was later called, in fact hailed the emperor of their conquerors as god. Of the Torah, therefore, the Romans created a literary equivalent, the gospel of Matthew (and shortly thereafter the Hellenistic and Roman versions known as Luke and Mark). The central literary character, called Jesus