It took me a long time to suffer through Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity by James Valliant and Warren Fahy. But my verdict is now in. Its thesis is bogus. Its method of argument is tediously amateurish. And its only significant evidence appears to be fabricated.
Backstory
Valliant and Fahy are advancing yet another “Roman emperors invented Christianity” conspiracy theory that is no better argued than Behold Babylon USA! Their approach is even more tedious and hard to follow than Joseph Atwill’s, the more-or-less inventor of their overall idea. And as far as that goes, I’ve been there, done that. See Atwill’s Cranked-up Jesus and Killing Crankery with Bayesian Reasoning: The Kooky & Illogical Postflaviana Review. It’s well known that I have very little patience for amateur Jesus mythicism. It needs to pass peer review for a reason, precisely to wash out all the bad arguments and incorrectly presented evidence, and thus justify our spending any time reading it. Otherwise all it does is spread disinformation that I then have to waste time correcting. But I’ve made that point before, so I needn’t reiterate it here. See The Problem with Varieties of Jesus Mythicism and Please No More Astrotheology.
I’ve also come to the conclusion that James Valliant is catastrophically unreliable. Of course, neither he nor Fahy have any relevant credentials, nor have ever published anything under peer review. But I mean even more than that. They are not just amateurs too incompetent to be arguing theories in any advanced subject of history, but Valliant in particular is actually anti-competent in this subject. For a glaring illustration, see my assessment in Reading Josephus on James: On Valliant Flunking Literary Theory. By comparison, Earl Doherty, with at least an undergraduate degree in Ancient History and Classical Languages, demonstrated he is competent enough to argue theories in this subject. Indeed, I think with feedback and improvements relatively easy for him to complete, his first book could have been worked into a successful doctoral dissertation at any university. Fahy might merely be comparatively bad at that. But Valliant is the diametrical opposite of that. He has no business even having opinions about history that anyone should heed.
It should also be noted that Valliant and Fahy are not, strictly speaking, “mythicists” in the popular sense. They are not sure Jesus didn’t exist (regarding that an unresolvable question, p. 306). Rather, they are only sure that a cabal of Roman Emperors created Christianity. In particular, they mean Pauline Christianity (what mainstream scholars recognize as the later, far more successful branch of it: the Gentile church). They are not so clear as to whether any other kind of it existed before that. They seem (?) to imagine Torah observant “Christians” (like Peter and James) were just garden-variety messianic Jews (e.g., pp. 22–41), and Paul as the actual inventor of the entire Christian gospel. They are aware that the New Testament contains documents against the Pauline sect (principally Matthew, James, and Revelation), which kind of refutes their thesis, but they just flippantly dismiss Matthew and James with vague apologetics (pp. 37–40, 132–33) that ignores almost all their relevant content or significance—and that still doesn’t explain why these books are in a New Testament supposedly published by Emperor Titus (or whomever) to undermine messianic Judaism. While Revelation (the most damning to their thesis) they completely ignore.
The Book
I have to be frank here. Their book is insufferable. I could barely endure it. I struggled to find anything resembling a clear or coherent argument—or indeed even a clear or coherent statement of their thesis. Every page feels like a random list of assertions, almost all of which trivial and of little relevance to their case, and whenever they say anything substantial, it tends to be so spottily cited as to be almost impossible to check. In this fashion their discourse just wanders like a drunkard through point after point, hinting at something they never clearly state. I still do not know exactly what their hypothesis is, so as to look for what evidence there is for each element of it (which means facts that have no better explanation—otherwise it isn’t evidence at all).
Even their Conclusion, which claims to present their “hypothesis” in outline (pp. 290–94), never actually explicates what exactly their hypothesis is. (I must pause to note that in the hardcover edition I have, their table of contents doesn’t even have page numbers, which I hope has been rectified, otherwise we are even physically in amateur hour here. There is also no index. And the kindle edition is unpaginated. So navigating their book is arduous.) There they allege the New Testament is full of exhortations to obey the authorities, and overkind representations of the Romans, because agents of the Roman Emperor wrote it all—but then they never give us any logical reason why we should believe this. They ignore alternative reasons for that material (obviously any sect that expects to survive Roman rule will advocate that way) as well as material contradicting their thesis (Revelation is a coded screed against the Flavian emperors).
Instead, Valliant and Fahy just go on listing random points, none of which are evidence for their thesis, just non sequiturs, or even outright falsehoods. For example:
- They say Paul knew members of “Caesar’s household.” That phrase actually means slaves and freedmen: the imperial “household” encompassed literally thousands of slaves and freedmen spanning three continents, few with any direct line to the emperor (see No, Paul Was Not a Relative of the Herods and Did Paul Write Philemon?). But, aside from their incompetently not knowing that, one might have thought they have to claim his letters are fake, composed by imperial henchmen decades after its dramatic date. And how does that evince Paul even existed, much less knew the imperial family? Instead, they seem to mean some of his letters are real. But then those were written decades before the Flavians came to power (so Paul would be referencing here the imperial agents of Nero—a Julian, not a Flavian; Paul is also talking about people who are already Christian converts, possibly even Jews). When Paul was active (see How Do We Know the Apostle Paul Wrote His Epistles in the 50s A.D.?), Vespasian was in retirement—he wasn’t even in government, and had by then no experience with Judea or Judaism, nor any reason to believe he’d be a future emperor. So what are they talking about?
- They say Paul knew “associates” of Titus and Vespasian. They give no real evidence for this, and it’s not in any obvious way plausible. There is no evidence Paul was even alive when Vespasian conquered Judea and then Rome. And if they concede Paul’s letters are authentic and predate the entire Flavian dynasty, they are refuting their own thesis: because Paul confirms Christianity was created by Peter, not “the Roman Emperors.” And it was revised by Paul only a few years later, who then lobbied Peter to accept his revisions, exactly as mainstream historians aver, and all while Jerusalem still stood. Charitably, I have to assume they confused “Christianity” with “the Gospels,” but all the pro-empire stuff they are crediting to the Flavians appears already in Paul, before any Flavian could have been involved.
- So are they saying the Flavians only commissioned the Gospels? Valliant and Fahy never articulate what they are saying as to which books were written when or by whom (they never actually articulate any clear or coherent thesis about anything), but since they keep saying things like “the New Testament is Flavian propaganda” (p. 292), it sure sounds they mean all of it. But let’s charitably assume they erroneously meant to say “Gospels” here. That would’t be creating Christianity. Christianity had spanned three continents for a whole human lifetime by then, and in every form pertinent (both the original Torah-observant Jewish Christianity and Paul’s Gentile Christianity). The Gospels simply reify those sects’ teachings into an appropriate myth-narrative (and Matthew is representing the Torah sect; Mark, Paul’s: see Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles). They also present no evidence the Flavians commissioned the Gospels or had anything whatever to do with them (and they’ll get no support here from Walsh, and even less from Trobisch and Vinzent, or Livesey).
- They claim the Flavian family produced a 1st century pope. That’s bollocks. The notion that Titus Flavius Clemens (a distant relative of the Flavian emperors) was Clemens Romanus was a conceit of 19th century cranks. Literally no ancient source says any such thing, or is aware of it. Not even ancient lists of Popes say this (see Ancient Lists and Testimonies of Popes Succeeding from Peter). Those are not credible anyway—so it can’t be established that any early pope was named even Clement. And this was certainly not the author of 1 Clement (see How We Can Know 1 Clement Was Actually Written in the 60s AD; nor did an office of “pope” exist in the first century, as I explain in Did Paul Write Philemon?, but they at least admit that, and mean just a revered elder or something: p. 161).
- Even the legend that Flavius Clemens was a Christian (not the same thing as a pope) is a modern fabrication. No ancient source claims this, and all real evidence is against it (see Myths & Legends of the Christian Catacombs). Eusebius is the first to say his sister Domitilla was a Christian (proving Eusebius had never heard any report that Clemens himself was, much less that he was the very Pope!), but earlier sources don’t say this (they report their interest was, rather, in Judaism), and Christians routinely fabricated their history by coopting others’ stories into Christian ones just like this (see The Rain Miracle of Marcus Aurelius: A Case Study in Christian Lies and How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity; fabricating their history is also a theme developed by Vinzent).
- They claim this non-existent Pope Clement’s tomb was “the first” Christian catacomb. Bollocks. The earliest Christian catacomb burials begin in the 3rd century; and the specific catacombs associated with “Flavia Domitilla” were originally commissioned as a pagan graveyard, not a Christian one, near the end of the 2nd century; and its association with her at all is a modern Christian legend invented by the Vatican anyway; there is literally no evidence of it (see Myths & Legends of the Christian Catacombs).
- They claim that because Christians emulated a lot of pagan and imperial ideas, symbols, and motifs when communicating their understanding of Christ to pagan audiences that therefore “Roman Emperors” invented Christianity. This is so wholly devoid of logic I can’t believe I have to write this, but: all religions (including Judaism) routinely coopted the ideas, symbols, and motifs of the larger (and especially imperial) culture to communicate with. This does not mean the Flavians invented any of this. To the contrary, this was common across all religions. The cooption of such material was meant to subvert or appropriate its original meaning. In other words, the Gospels emulate pagan memes to replace their original intent, not promote it. This is well explained by Dennis MacDonald in The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark and Mythologizing Jesus: From Jewish Teacher to Epic Hero.
- They claim if Christianity evolved out of Judaism, it should have done so gradually. Already they are off the rails: across its entire first generation Christianity was a sect of Judaism; not a separate religion that evolved “from” it. But their reasoning is wholly void of any contextual understanding: Paul’s Gentile mission had to do away with all kosher elements at once—that was the entire point of his mission. So in no way would we expect these items to drop away slowly “one by one” (p. 291). And Paul did this literally decades before any Flavian came to power. So there is no way to give them credit for it.
- In a very weaselly fashion they say/don’t say (p. 292) that the New Testament was written by Josephus and Tiberius Alexander and a certain “Epaphroditus,” whom they call an “imperial Secretary of Letters.” There is no evidence for this whatsoever. They shadily avoid clearly saying it anyway, but just name-drop these guys, I guess hoping you somehow think they have made a more substantive assertion.
- This “Epaphroditus” is especially perplexing. They are conflating three different people who have no connection to each other (pp. 142, 167, 212–19). They claim this is a Flavian client who helped “Paul” and “Josephus” do…something (they are never clear on what, but the implication seems to be “write the New Testament”). But they present no evidence of this. They just argue by innuendo—like every conspiracy theorist in history, they simply declare any juxtaposition entails collusion.
- There is a man of that name in Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (a Philippian Christian who brought Paul some gifts he requested), but he is not an imperial secretary; he’s just a church emissary. Nor is he a member of the imperial household that Paul only mentions separately in that same letter—who are not, like Epaphroditus, people from Philippi visiting Paul, but people already staffing Paul’s location.
- There is another man of that name who was an imperial secretary, but for Nero, not the Flavians. He retired in wealth before Nero’s death (and according to the Suda, was the eventual owner the famous slave-philosopher Epictetus), but never again serving as any emperor’s secretary (when Domitian kills him, this aged retiree is known only as Nero’s freedman, not any Flavian’s).
- And that was not the same Epaphroditus whom Josephus dedicated the Antiquities to, as that man was still alive when Josephus wrote Against Apion years later, whereas Domitian had killed Nero’s freedman within a year after Josephus published the Antiquities (in 95 AD: Cassius Dio 67.14.6; Antiquities was published in 94)—and thus before Josephus could have written both his Life and Against Apion. Moreover, with the epithet κράτιστε, Josephus addresses his patron as a man of political (most likely equestrian) rank, and thus not a freedman (see Weaver, “Epaphroditus, Josephus, and Epictetus,” Classical Quarterly 1994).
And that’s it. That’s all they got. The rest is just three hundred pages of more handwaving and tale weaving. Except for one thing I skipped here, because it is the most important thing of all, the centerpiece of the entire book (and, yes, movie), as they rest everything else on it. And it is scandalous to the point of outrage.
But before I turn to that, I must forestall the common tactic of all cranks: fanatics (and probably Valliant himself) will complain that I have not dispatched “every” claim in this book; and it’s full of hundreds. But that very argument is crank. Because it is a standard crank tactic to litter their case with hundreds or thousands of claims and insist the thesis still stands if even a single claim remains unchallenged. You’ll see this in everything from flat earthism to QAnon. But that is not how logic works. Any such “claim” we address will, I guarantee, fall to either of two fates: it will be bogus; or it will be a non sequitur. How do we know that? Because it holds for all their most important claims, the ones they themselves emphasize in their concluding summary. So we’ve already proved they can’t do facts or logic. To then tediously address every single claim of hundreds is precisely the game they want us to play. Honest historians would simply admit they’re wasting our time. But I welcome any attempt to prove me wrong in comments by finding any claim anywhere in this book that is both (a) factually true and (b) actually increases the probability of their thesis by any valid logic. I’ll revise accordingly. I wish you luck.
But now to the scandal of scandals…
The Anchor and Dolphin Bullshit
This image is the centerpiece of the entire book and their entire argument (p. 158; cf. p. 6):
Valliant and Fahy claim (a lot throughout the book—like, insanely a lot; to the point of almost lunacy) that the “symbol” of the Flavian family is “the anchor” (p. 290). There is literally no evidence for this whatsoever. The anchor was a common symbol then, used by many imperial and royal dynasties (they themselves show it being employed by the Jewish Hasmonean and pagan Seleucid dynasties on pp. 59–60 and 136; even with fish on pp. 13 and 58), and just ordinary people of means. They try to make it sound like it’s supposed to be a special Flavian symbol by many shady devices. For example, they claim (without any evidence) that an anchor mosaic recovered from Herculaneum was “adorned” by the Flavians (p. 234). They show a photo but cite no source (even for the photo, much less to any scholarship about the mosaic in it). I could not trace their photo, but there is a famous mosaic of an anchor in a home recovered at Pompeii; with no evidence of any Flavian connection.
And the Herculaneum mosaic simply depicts an anchor surrounded by sea creatures. Routine nautical imagery. Valliant and Fahy try to make more hay out of an anchor-and-fish image (because a symbol of Jesus is a fish), yet you will find the very anchor with fish or dolphin entwined that they go on about in the villas of pre-imperial Delos before Christianity even arose—which they even admit, though incorrectly ascribe to the god Apollo (p. 57). It was a symbol of Neptune. And this is its only connection to the Flavian emperors they can muster, because the Flavians ran a series of coins celebrating the twelve gods of Olympus (by Titus after the eruption of Vesuvius and again by Domitian after a conflagration at Rome), and the anchor-entwined-by-dolphin was the issue for Neptune. It had no special relevance to the Flavians at all, any more than the images symbolizing the other eleven gods did. See: Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum, Vol. 2 (Vespasian to Domitian), p. lxxii–lxxiii.
And that’s just the beginning of what’s gone wrong here.
Note that Valliant and Fahy cite no scholarship on these coins—not even a photo credit, but even more importantly, no catalog number; and even more importantly, they cite no discussions of these coins in the numismatics literature, such as I just provided. This literature is very hard for lay people to navigate, so it is especially appalling to provide no sources for them to check any of this by. Indeed omitting this information also looks shady. And this is even more so when it comes to the startling third image, which they imply but never say is some kind of coin. Is it? Or is it a ring sigil? Or a medallion? A catacomb painting? You will never find out. Because they cite nothing. They don’t even describe what it is, much less suggest a date for it. But this is far too important an evidence for them to just flippantly throw up here without any references that we can run down to check what it is, what it dates to, who produced it or why, or what any other scholars have said about it. Both authors have since been asked to supply this information. They have never complied.
That this third image is not a photograph but a mere drawing is a big red flag. Why do they have a photo of the Flavian Neptune coin—but not of this thing? Why can neither author adduce any source for it? Why do they have no information about it even in their book? Because even there they don’t tell us what they think this is (“the symbol of Jesus Christ” is not a description of the artifact, much less a provenance). It looks to me like the kind of made-up stuff you might find in the plethora of crank literature of the 19th century that Dorothy Murdock was so fond of. Or did Valliant draw this himself? Without a confession, we’ll never know where it came from. But without a citation—even after repeated requests—I have to conclude this image is fabricated (and we just don’t know by whom). And badly. Because the drawing has transformed the coin image—which is of a dolphin, not a fish; whereas the drawing is of a fish. Why?
There is a clue. Another piece of evidence they claim to have (on pp. 43 and 169) is shown to the right, which depicts an anchor with two fish feeding on its bills (in emulation, one might suspect, of fish on a hook, symbolically projecting the Gospel theme of “fishers of men” perhaps). Notice that these are, indeed, fish. The demarcated head and scaled body, and vertical tail fin, leave this entirely clear. But the Flavian coin depicts a dolphin—as you can tell especially well from the image they produce on the page facing their “coin and symbol” triptych above:
Notice the creature wrapped around the anchor here has a bulbous head and beak and a horizontal tail fin (and no scales or demarcated head). Then notice that the drawing replicates this exactly—except it replaces the dolphin (the supposed symbol of the Flavians) with what we know as a fish (which cannot therefore be “the symbol of the Flavians”). In fact, a fish that looks a lot like the ones in the above catacomb art, janked a little to sort of resemble the dolphin but not quite. The ancients did classify dolphins with fish, but they clearly demarcated them in art, so they well knew the difference. And Christian fish imagery stems from the common consumable variety—the kind you fish for, so as to eat. Dolphins do not represent that.
Now, even if this were a Christian symbol anywhere, that still does not get us to the Flavians. We entirely expect that Christians would, on their own, subvert and appropriate a universally recognized symbol of any pagan god like Neptune (whose most ubiquitous symbols were, indeed, the trident, anchor, and dolphin) into a symbol of their Lord meant to replace him, by emulating his symbol, but swapping his dolphin out for the fish of Jesus. Although dolphins could also be appropriated by Christians, since dolphins commonly symbolized salvation, ever since the pagan myth of Arion. And either kind of cooption is exactly what Christians routinely did (see, for example, The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art by Thomas Mathews; but a famous example is repurposing statues of Isis with baby Horus to represent Mary with baby Jesus). And that requires no contact with the Flavians. It’s just a commonplace symbol; appropriated by Christians in a commonplace way.
But Valliant and Fahy botch even their catacomb claim. Not only does that image not resemble what they claim to be Flavian (there’s no dolphin; and it’s not entwined), but, once again, they don’t cite any source for this catacomb image. Which means we cannot check if it is even Christian (those catacombs began pagan and are full of non-Christian inscriptions and art), or what date it hails from (if that is even known), which is crucial because these catacombs continued to be used for centuries. They then caption it as “anchor and fishes in the catacombs of St. Domitilla” and conclude that this is therefore “the very first acknowledged Christian use of the anchor-and-fish symbol,” and that it is “connected through Domitilla to her uncle, Emperor Titus, who used the symbol on his coins,” and that “this tomb also happens to be the oldest archaeological evidence for Christianity in the world.” But none of these things are true.
Titus’s coin’s symbol is of a dolphin, not a fish, and is representing Neptune, not the Flavians, and depicts one dolphin wrapped around the anchor, not two fish biting at its bills. And the tomb in question has no evidenced connection to any Domitilla, much less the famous one. That’s a modern Vatican myth—and all but impossible, because that catacomb was first dug almost a century after Flavia Domitilla was banished by Domitian for being too friendly to Jews. In fact, the earliest Christian evidence in that or any catacomb is from the 3rd century—well over a hundred years after the last Flavian Emperor had died. And Valliant and Fahy have presented no evidence that this drawing was even from that century (the so-called Catacombs of Domitilla were used well into the 400s A.D.), or even Christian (by anything other than presumption).
If you check real scholarship (like this 1993 PhD dissertation by Laurence Harold Kant at Yale, “The Interpretation of Religious Symbols in the Graeco-Roman World: A Case Study of Early Christian Symbolism” or this chapter in Studia Patristica by Emanuele Castelli, “The Symbols of Anchor and Fish in the Most Ancient Parts of the Catacomb of Priscilla: Evidence and Questions” or Jason Whitlark’s contribution to Early Christians and Their Art) you will find that fish and anchor art were a thing in antiquity for centuries before and during the rise of Christianity. Fish were particularly common symbols associated with the dead and thus appear in pagan grave art. These studies also show that Christians were quite various in how they used anchor and fish symbols: most of the time, not together; and anchors were more common than fish. There was therefore no awareness of the supposed Flavian version, combining anchor with entwined fish or dolphin (at most only one example exists, and not at Rome, as we’ll see below). The widest consensus is that Christians glommed onto the anchor as an image because of a passage in Hebrews; and fish for entirely separate reasons (fishing for men, Jesus as ICTHYS, and so on).
Moreover, when Christians coopted these symbols, the intent was specifically not to be obvious about it—in other words, until Christianity was endorsed by the Empire in the early fourth century, they were avoiding anything distinctively Christian about their use of these symbols. Hence our one account of this—from Clement of Alexandria (in Paedegogus 3)—says nothing about a fish or dolphin entwining an anchor; he has no knowledge of such imagery at all. To the contrary:
Let our seals be either a dove, or a fish, or a ship scudding before the wind, or a musical lyre, which Polycrates used, or a ship’s anchor, which Seleucus got engraved as a device; and if there be one fishing, he will remember the apostle, and the children drawn out of the water. For we are not to delineate the faces of idols, we who are prohibited to cleave to them; nor a sword, nor a bow, following as we do, peace; nor drinking-cups, being temperate.
Notice that Clement believes the anchor symbol comes not from the Romans at all (much less the Flavians), but the Seleucids (following what were then renowned legends as to why the original Seleucus declared the anchor a sign of salvation and thus chose it for his sigil). These are the very same Seleucids that Valliant and Fahy included a coin of showing this (above). This soundly refutes their entire theory. Done and dusted. It’s even worse that Clement has no idea of a combination of anchor and fish (much less dolphin).
Another example of their shady mode of argument comes on page 110 when they have this clever juxtaposition of assertions: “anchors and fish have been the dominant symbols of Christianity” (which is not controversial) and in Tunisia “all of the early Christian iconography…comes together,” showing a famous mosaic in the Catacomb of Hermes (so named for the mosaic itself, which reads Hermes coniugi et fil[iis] dulcissimis, “Hermes [built this] for his dearest wife and sons”), shown at right. Which is also legit. But the way they say all this makes it sound like this (a dolphin entwined around an anchor) is “the dominant symbol” of Christianity, when in fact this is literally the only instance of this image in the entirety of ancient Christian grave art—alone among literally hundreds of other Christian images of anchors or fish across multiple ancient cities.
There is no reason to believe any Christian meaning is intended by this decoration. The mosaic contains nothing distinctively Christian, and is located in a famous naval town, where nautical imagery is expected. There is also no evidence that this began as a Christian tomb. It might have. But this is the only inscription in the same catacomb that lacks the distinctive Christian inscription in pace (“in peace,” see the dissertation of Luigi Quattrocchi, §113–21), and yet it’s the only epitaph using this symbol—which we know widely represented the pagan god Neptune. This may well represent a family of mixed faith, diplomatically chosen as a symbol suitable to both, representing the Olympians for some and the salvation of Christ for others; or the catacomb (and its mosaic) was erected by pagans who later converted to Christianity by the time they were buried. Or it may have originally been built to honor family who died at sea; or that Hermes gained his wealth from the sea. Regardless, a single instance of this symbol, nowhere near Rome, with no clear indication of its having any specific Christian meaning, does not get Valliant and Fahy what they need. There is no connection to Flavians; it’s far too late (this inscription is from the early 4th century); there is no ICHTHYS inscription as depicted in their presented drawing; and this instance is unique, and thus not a “common” Christian symbol. It is, rather, a common pagan symbol—of Neptune.
Ancient iconography served the function of communicating efficiently to a mostly illiterate public. Thus, symbols were meant to be already recognizable. When the Flavians issued the Olympian coins, they did not invent new symbols for it. They used already-widely-known imagery. The anchor and dolphin was already widely understood to represent Neptune. That’s why they used it. It was not because it was some unique family crest or some innovative new image. That would defeat the purpose of symbolic communication, which depends on the audience already knowing what the imagery means.
This is also why Christians did not invent their own imagery but borrowed already-familiar pagan imagery. For example, when Jesus was depicted performing miracles, he is shown with a magic wand—not because Christians believed Jesus used one, but because wands were a widely understood symbol for the performance of magic (which, contrary to modern propaganda, was not then distinguished from miracle-working; Jesus’s “magic” was simply sold as genuine, more powerful, or not evil—from God, not demons). The wand was a pagan symbol. But Christians used it to communicate Jesus as a great miracle worker, using imagery the populace already understood to mean that. The same goes for anchors and fish. Note how Clement’s point was that pagans already widely use these symbols; and all he is doing is limiting which ones Christians should use, because of their widely understood connotations.
In short, Valliant and Fahy’s “new evidence,” the “physical evidence” they claim is “impossible” on any other explanation but theirs, the evidence that establishes their thesis “beyond a reasonable doubt” and is “far more conclusive” than they “ever imagined” (p. xiv), the evidence “presented here for the first time” (p. xvi), is simply fabricated. The “image” that is supposed to reveal how the “symbol of Christ” exactly replicates a Flavian coin issue does not appear to be real, but something some modern crank drew somewhere (I guess we shall never be told where). Whereas all the real stuff evinces no such connection. Christian uses of anchors and fish (even, more rarely, dolphins) appears to be completely unrelated. Whereas the Flavian coin issue itself isn’t providing any distinctively Flavian symbol—it’s simply one of twelve symbols released on a twelve-coin series, each for a different Olympian god; and that image was simply a ubiquitous and widely recognized symbol of Neptune (a.k.a. Poseidon), known from even before Christian times (such as we see in those mosaics at pre-Christian Delos—also a naval town, and from elites earning their wealth by sea).
Hence when Valliant and Fahy show us some signet rings with the dolphin-and-anchor image (pp. 43–45), they will claim these are Christian—but as they cite no sources for these images, and nothing Christian is on them, we have no reason to believe them. Take a look at this example from the British Museum (also displayed here at right), which they claim is a Christian image (on p. 44), but there is literally no reason to believe it is. It’s just a commonplace signet ring. Even what one might think is a little “cross” (bottom right) is actually the letter chi—it is just part of the name Epitynchanos (in the genitive, signifying ownership) surrounding the outside (probably its owner; this was a common name).
I feel like we’re being conned.
Even the single instance they show of a drawing (and why only a drawing again, when every other example is a photo?) of a putatively Christian signet ring with a tiny fish (not dolphin) and not entwined but swimming around an anchor (on p. 44), they again cite no source for this drawing so we can’t even confirm that this artifact exists, or its date. The word ICHTHYS on it was often used by Christians, but it also simply means fish—so how do we know which it means here? And even if owned by a Christian, it does not follow that they understood this image to be in any particular way Christian (not all art by Christians is religious). And this is the only example that has anything remotely suggestive of being Christian on it—once again, the one thing they can’t produce a photo of. And it’s still not the Flavian image. That doesn’t look good.
There simply isn’t any evidence that the “Flavian” dolphin-on-anchor symbol was a “common” Christian symbol. It appears to have been used as a Christian symbol somewhere between almost never to actually never. And there is no evidence that it was peculiarly “Flavian.” It was simply a universally recognized symbol of Neptune, and had connotations of representing salvation (such as from shipwreck and thus death) to everyone, even pagans and Jews, and could be used (even by Christians) for entirely nonreligious reasons (such as signifying association with any sea trade, or as a family sigil long predating its Christian members).
There is nothing here supporting their thesis.
Conclusion
In short, this book is terrible. Its thesis is never clearly articulated, none of the arguments for it are logical, and the evidence presented for it ranges from irrelevant or misunderstood to outright fake. It’s badly organized and densely packed with meandering and needless digressions. It is poorly sourced—citations will be given for irrelevant or ancillary facts padding their storytelling, but not for crucial pieces of evidence they need to get right. And most of the time they have no idea what they are talking about. They don’t know what an imperial “household” means; they can’t tell apart different people with the same name; they don’t know what the coins they talk about were issued for or why they have the images on them they do; they don’t know that their claims about the catacombs of Rome are modern Vatican propaganda; they have a completely unintelligible chronology (where somehow Paul is hanging out with Titus in 80 A.D. and Domitilla is digging her grave almost a century after she lived); and so on. The book’s endnotes are also full of disastrously incompetent analysis on almost every page. It’s just a mess.
Illustrating this lack of basic field knowledge is how Valliant and Fahy do not understand why Flavius was a common name in ensuing centuries. They seem to think throughout the book that anyone of that name descends from the imperial family. But that’s incorrect. Those monikers became the name of thousands of families during the Flavian dynasty, families in no way connected to that dynasty. Freed slaves and their children, and countless newly minted citizens, often took the family name of whichever emperor was reigning at the time. The Flavians ruled for more than a generation—in an empire of tens of millions. That’s a lot of Flavians. And anyone gaining citizenship under a Flavian would bequeath that name to their family, who would keep that name for generations after, multiplying the number of people so named.
So merely finding someone with the name Flavius does not mean you’ve found someone with any actual connection to the Emperors. In fact, you almost certainly have not—because thousands of times more people will have received that name than biological kin of the emperors (distant or near). As William Turpin put it when writing the Oxford Reference on Roman naming conventions, “because of the massive emancipation of slaves and enfranchisement of foreigners” since Augustus, “new citizens usually had the nomina of prominent Romans, especially emperors: there were now huge numbers of Julii, Claudii, Flavii, and Aurelii.” And they in turn produced entire family trees expanding into the population for centuries. Hence Constantine the Great was not a Flavius because he descended from the Flavian emperors (that was a fabricated heritage). His father, Flavius Valerius Constantius, was a relative nobody (albeit of rank), and not even from Rome (his family hailed from Illyria—modern Albania). He likely inherited the name from an ancestor freed or granted citizenship during the reign of either Vespasian, Titus, or Domitian.
I will close here with some distilled lessons for anyone who wants to do the kind of thing Valliant and Fahy did, but not fuck it up so horribly:
- You need to clearly state your thesis. In some concise way, outline its necessary elements. The only way anyone can test your theory is if they have some clear and consistent idea of what it is. So, for example, what books of the New Testament are being written by whom and when? What is your timeline for these books? And if there are uncertainties about any of that, what are they? Or, for example, how was a religion then sold on that? Because, after all, you don’t start a cult by just publishing some books hardly anyone can read. And if you are promoting a new cult, how are you doing this without anyone knowing you are and that fact never entering the record? And so on.
- You need to present evidence for every single element of your thesis—and that means facts that are unlikely on any other supposition than yours, and not just evidence “compatible” with your theory. You can’t just make assertions and tell stories and insist it’s obvious.
- Very often this will motivate you to cut the fat by dropping unnecessary elements, simplifying your theory. Indeed, you should stick to mainstream conclusions about as many things as possible. For example, do we really need Paul to still be around during the Flavian dynasty? Aren’t you thereby adding yet another deviation from consensus that you now bear the burden of proving? Isn’t it easier to just not insist on that and retool your theory so it works without it? Adding more and more required “could be’s” to your theory actually reduces its probability, indeed by geometric progression.
- You need to understand the background evidence far better than this, to be able to situate your thesis within it. So, for example, when Rome’s routine method of using religion as a vector of influence is always open and public, why are we to believe that suddenly, just this one time, they did it in secret, even though that destroys every advantage of prestige they could have used to sell it? And after you invent a “just so” story to answer that question—where is your evidence that the story you just made up is true, and not just some story you made up? Possibly does not get you to probably.
- And through all of this, you need to cite sources for every piece of evidence you need—and that means real, expert sources, peer reviewed studies or competent analysis, that in turn cite more sources and scholarship so readers can breadcrumb their way to the primary evidence and the most expert analyses. Don’t just plop a photo in, make assertions about it, and move on.
- And finally, you need to test your theory against existing scholarship. So, if you are going to make claims about a coin and its iconography, what does the scholarship already say about that coin and its iconography? What is the best, most probable, most evidenced alternative explanation of every fact you are claiming to be evidence for your theory? Did you check? Because in claiming it is evidence for your theory, you are claiming it is not evidence for any other theories. So you really do need to prove that. And competently. That’s The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking.
Valliant and Fahy’s book fails at every single one of these requirements—multiple times; indeed relentlessly, page after page. And that is why it really should just be binned. Waste no more time on it.
Romans did not invent Christianity. With the three Jewish wars and subsequent repression of Judaism the Romans did provide fertile grounds for Christianity to emerge from the battered and disillusioned remains of Second Temple Judaism.
I don’t know how much that really helped (the Godfearer market was already buying up Christianity before then), but it may have helped a little (by creating a crisis within Judaism that allowed Jews to be more easily poached, and by the propaganda mechanic of exploiting the war to “sell” Christianity as more true than Judaism to Gentiles).
In truth, the numbers suggest Christianity grew at a universal standard rate for all evangelical religions (their growth curve is almost identical to Mormonism; this is argued by Stark and I vet the argument in chapter 18 of Not the Impossible Faith). So whatever effect the war had, it was small or merely a lateral pivot for Christians.
The real moment that mattered was Constantine declaring imperial support for the religion and shifting funding to it from pagan temples, leading eventually to it being declared the religion of the empire under pain of death or exile by Theodosius some sixty years later.
And Constantine’s move could be due to the events of the third century, when several emperors tried doing this with different religions, like Baal and Sol Invictus, but they died too soon to implement it; and by the third century every other religion suitable had been “tried” in some fashion or another, leaving Christianity well positioned to win the favor.
So the chaos of the third century may have been more important than the decision of Constantine, which was just the output to that input. I discuss this as well in that same chapter.
Why is this idea so prevalent? Why do people seem to cling to it despite lack of evidence? Where did it even originate from? Honestly it seems rather bizarre and out of left field to me.
Sort of like saying “Romans were in power at the time, so therefore they made up all the religions in the area”…
I honestly can’t even see any connection between the two other than that.
Conspiracy thinking is psychologically popular; and conspiracy theorists are lunatics and thus very loud and active, and thus seem to “be everywhere,” when in fact they are fringe.
Add to this the fact that most of the public never checks this stuff, so they will simply repeat it as something they heard, and thus “Joe Rogan” their way to “I guess it’s a possibility.” It’s thus similar to flat earthism, QAnon, 911-truthers, holocaust denial, antivaxx, climate denial, even reptoid theory, with the only difference being that far fewer resources are devoted to debunking the Empire Invented Christianity meme, so fewer people encounter the inoculation.
Every conspiracy theory has some psychological appeal (anti-Semitism motivates a lot of it; and conservative or liberal identity politics motivates a lot of it). For example, since admitting climate science constitutes admitting to the need of an inconvenient effort to do something about it, to remove the inconvenience one must remove climate science—a common reaction to cognitive dissonance—and the only way to do that is to invent a conspiracy theory.
Something similar happens with Jesus mythicism generally: people react to discovering how relentlessly Christians lie (and even more then lied) about their history with an explicable distrust of Christian narratives; the easy popularity of conspiracy theories then makes “conspiracy” mythicism an easy sell. Rising loathing and distrust of “big government” today then easily translates into accusing the ancient “big government” of saddling us with Christianity. It has psychological appeal. It just lacks any empirical plausibility. Like all conspiracy theories.
It is thus not strange, I suspect, that Valliant is an Ayn Randroid; and Murdock was the woo liberal horseshoe side of that, arguing “Jesus” was an anti-woman conspiracy of the patriarchy to destroy “the people’s” religion (hence the The Crunchy-to-Alt-Right Pipeline).
The only credible mythicism, I found, does not involve any conspiracy theory (least of all anything like theirs). It’s just hard for lazy thinkers to decouple the fact that “Christians routinely lied and made shit up” from the fable that “therefore some organized conspiracy of dark actors invented it all,” rather than the organic reality of how all religions grow, sell, and evolve their doctrines and fabricate a history to suit.
Part of the reason why Hitchens’ Razor is so valuable is as a timesaver.
When incompetent people make arguments that you cannot verify immediately are true, are implausible or at least could very easily be false, and they don’t give evidence for it, even a pretty thorough Fisking doesn’t actually need to track down their bull. They didn’t provide any evidence, so it’s argumentatively valid to dismiss it with the same threshold of evidence, which is zero.
Obviously for your purposes you needed to vet their crap and non-existent citations, but it really is sufficient to say “They didn’t cite proof for relevant matters of fact, didn’t refer to scholars, didn’t even try to break down the original language in context, etc.” Prove it or STFU.
All true.
From your second bullet point under The Book: “Paul confirms Christianity was created by Peter…”
I believe you are referring to 1 Corinthians 15:5, where Paul says that the risen Jesus appeared first to Cephas. However, this is a reference to Cephas, not to Peter. All Paul says about Peter is that he was apostle to the circumcised (Galatians 2:7-8) — unless of course Cephas and Peter were the same person, as is usually assumed.
How sure can we be that Cephas and Peter really were the same person?
One of my pet hypotheses is that they were actually two separate people. Like Paul, 1 Clement refers to them separately, showing no knowledge that they were the same.
But the author of Mark noticed that “Cephas” and “Peter” both meant “rock” in their respective languages. He perhaps concluded that they must be the same guy, and wrote his story accordingly. The character he called Peter was modeled on the guy Paul called Cephas. Later Gospels followed Mark’s lead, in this as in much else.
This issue is completely tangential to the current post, and I don’t want to hijack the thread. If you prefer, I can develop this idea more fully in an email.
Cephas and Peter:
Correct. I am operating within mainstream theory that they are the same. Because the probability of them being different is quite low—because otherwise you have an inherently improbable “coin-cidence” of two men named “Rock” or “Rocky” placed at the highest rank (the pillars) and varying only in whether they are hailed in Aramaic or Greek. And indeed, I can just say Cephas is Peter via translation into English (Cephas literally means Peter).
But as you already note, in respect to my point here in this article about Valliant, it won’t matter to my point what the founder’s name was.
So you want to undermine Messianic Judaism? You’d support the already trending soon-to-beRabbinic Judaism; not create a cult that is not only a not-Judaism but an anti-Judaism involving blood drinking; cannibalism; and profaning corpses. You’d support that guy who got smuggled out in a coffin from the Siege of Jerusalem and his ilk; and the Rome-friendly priests and rabbis of the regime overthrown by the revolt. Which, if I’m not mistaken, is what we actually see.
Really, what the Romans would do is what they did: brutally suppress messianism.
The idea of running a convoluted psy-op to somehow change the minds of millions of Jews was simply not a thing back then. Moreover, you wouldn’t do it by building a useless Gentile church. If your goal is to pacify Jews, you need to back the Jewish sect of Christianity.
I already pointed this out in my review of Atwill (which I linked), so I didn’t spend time on it here, but since you bring it up:
Valliant argues in the book that the Torah Christians were militant zealots. His analysis to this conclusion is complete crap, failing even at basic Greek, much less context. This is among the many things I mention as being garbage arguments besides those I specifically focus on. But it’s why Valliant doesn’t realize the actual pathway for Rome was to support the Torah Christians, because they were in fact building a program to de-escalate militant messianism, exactly what Rome would want. They would thus have simply composed (or funded the dissemination of) Matthew. Mark and Luke would never show up as a thing.
Nor would they cotton to Paul.
Valliant mistakes Paul as arguing that Jews should abandon Torah. Paul never argues that; he is deliberately vague as to whether Jews can abandon Torah, but he adamantly argues Jews can still be saved through Torah, and in fact will—it’s just more arduous for them. I cover this in my article on the Israel First crankery. Paul’s principal argument is only that Gentiles don’t have to convert to Judaism (they don’t have to enter the first covenant, they can just directly enter the second); not that Jews should ditch the agreement they already entered. That’s why the detente he reaches is that he will keep converting Gentiles, while the Torah apostles (like Peter) will keep converting Jews (Galatians 2). It is not “Peter will go tell Jews they can abandon Torah,” but that Peter will convert Jews to Christian Torah observance, while Paul will convert Gentiles to Torah-free Christianity.
In short, Valliant’s entire thesis makes no sense in context; and it makes no sense of including Paul or Mark or Luke, or most of the contents of the New Testament. Torah Christianity was already an anti-temple, anti-violence sect, which deferred judgment to a celestial rather than an earthly messiah (thus eliminating militarism). I discuss the significance of this in Ch. 5, Elements 23–28, in OHJ.
Promoting a Gentile church would do literally nothing to Jewish militancy. So this would surely not be the route Romans would take to accomplish that aim—even if it would ever occur to them that such a project would work (and it wouldn’t—it would neither occur to them, nor would it work; and neither would they believe it would work).
I agree in toto with the review. And yet I see that minimal mythicism allow for “conspiracy theories” about why Jesus was euhemerized, if by Mark or by proto-Mark or even by a lost gospel preceding all our gospels. For example, at least two mythicist scholars, Jean Magne and Robert M. Price, think that Jesus was euhemerized as reaction to news from Judeophobic haters of YHWH: the Gospel midrash from OT being devoted to reassure the readers that Jesus is the son of YHWH against other Christians who had introduced the idea that Jesus was the son of an unknown god. Couchoud, for example, advanced this theory about Barabbas, beyond the midrash from Leviticus 16: Barabbas is the caustic parody of the Son of an unknown Father, i.e .the marcionite Jesus who had proclaimed that all the OT prophets were thieves and robbers. Hence my point is that it is justified to indulge in ‘conspiracy theories’, under the minimal mythicism paradigm, insofar the first insiders who euhemerized Jesus worked de facto, as conspirers.
Magne does not argue Jesus was invented. He only argues he was mythologized (which is already the mainstream view). But if you can find a statement from Magne doubting historicity altogether, please give me the citation.
But note that nothing you describe is a “conspiracy” theory. Ideological propaganda and revisionist history-writing are not conspiracies. They are normal, ubiquitous aspects of all religious development.
We must not confuse “lying” with “conspiracies.” Otherwise, everything is a conspiracy theory, including mainstream historicity.
As I wrote in OHJ:
And that’s whether Jesus existed or not. The behavior—and observed outcome—is the same.
Hence:
I quote from the his book
prefaced by Jakob Neusner:
The function of the Emmaus narrative, for example, will be to affirm that the heavenly crucifixion of the saviour by the Archons — terminating the reign of astral fatality and alluded to in 1 Co 2.8 —, transposed into a Roman-style crucifixion ‘by the archpriests and archons’, was predicted of the messiah.
(p. 69)
To conclude, one last problem must be tackled. How were the principal characters in early Christianity, John and Jesus, who did not exist, any more than a few others who necessarily appear with them in the gospels, endowed with a quasi-biography?
(p. 203)
It’s not clear to me that Magne is talking about minimal historicity there. I’ve read that whole book. And it appears that he is talking about what (he thinks) the Gnostics did as far as inventing the Jesus of the Gospels—not Jesus altogether—based on their interpretation of Paul, not Magne’s.
Hence when he surveys the quests he concludes (p. 206):
And p. 213: “All these speculations were based on exegesis, that is the reasoning applied to texts believed revealed,” referring to the theories he just discussed. In other words, Magne does not appear to be saying he agrees with these Gnostic inventions, but merely to explain how they came about. He never himself makes any clear statement as to what he himself thinks of the historical Jesus (other than appearing to agree with the third quest that nothing can be known of him beyond that he was crucified by Pontius Pilate, e.g. p. 205).
Since I can’t get a reliably clear statement from his book as to what Magne himself believes about minimal historicity (indeed he seems adamantly to avoid ever voicing this), I cannot yet justify citing him on it (though of course his work is also decades old by now, so it wouldn’t be relevant to polling 21st century opinion, but still, it would have been helpful if he had been more clear).
In this chapter quoted fully from another book by Jean Magne, I have coloured the parts where the mythicism of the author is evident.
In particular, where he writes:
If Magne calls the Gospels ‘fanciful testimonia’, then it is clear that in the context he assumes that an earthly Jesus was invented entirely on paper (i.e. he was euhemerized) in order to judaize him and remove him from the orbit of the anti-YHWH field (a better term for the haters of YHWH or ‘Gnostics’ would be: anti-demiurgists). This is de facto a conspiracy by some Jews, but it is not justified to think that Magne is a conspiracy theorist (and not even Robert M. Price, who thinks just as Magne (about how Jesus was euhemerized) in his book ‘Judaizing Jesus’. I write this because Chrissy Hansen has accused wrongly Bob Price of anti-Semitism in this article..
No, it isn’t. That’s my point. All mainstream scholars call the Gospels some equivalent of that. Many don’t even believe any history can be extracted from those fables at all. Others believe only some can and only by complex methodological devices.
The general mainstream consensus is that the Gospel Jesus is a fiction and their stories made-up. The only disagreement with mythicists is whether some of those stories had any historical kernel, or none did; and even historicists who agree with us that none did, still disagree with us on other grounds (such as that it is “impossible” to explain Christianity in any other way than there being “some” guy). So, no, Magne is not being clear here at all. He could hold any one of these mainstream positions.
See my survey of this very point in Historicity Big and Small: How Historians Try to Rescue Jesus.
And no, Magne’s thesis involves no “conspiracy.” He’s just proposing a loosely disorganized thought-movement (later Gnostics) developing a program to sell a package of ideas about Jesus, which they then lost control of. This is why even historians who agree the Gospels are all 100% fiction invented in the 2nd century (and indeed, even the Epistles!) tend even still to be historicists. Though one might question why, the point is, they are. So even such statements as these don’t get us to either “they take mythicism seriously” (you need more specific remarks from them for that), or that “there was a conspiracy,” because a movement developing propaganda is not a conspiracy, it’s just a religion (see my quoted remarks above for the difference).
But you are right about Hansen’s approach being ad hominem and illogical. I have several articles about that here, documenting other examples. That would be another; indeed, what Hansen presents there as evidence doesn’t even come close by any logic, though you can see she accuses others of being bigots on the same kind of nothing evidence, so this is a trend with her.
P.S. And in respect to the untranslated portion of the Magne quote, when he talks about the authors of the Gospels reifying their belief in a heavenly crucifixion in an earthly story, he is describing later Gnostics and their motives, he is not describing his own personal view or what actually happened to start the religion before Gnostics started repackaging it. Magne never gets to stating that. He always just talks about what later Gnostics thought and how they created the Gospels to serve (along lines very similar to Vinzent, as linked—a historicist). So he is never clear on whether there was ever a real Jesus that started the religion or not. I found that frustrating, but alas.
I think that this article removes any doubt about Magne being a mythicist. I invite you to read only the final, transcribed here for convenience.
It is too much evident that Magne thinks that the answer to this rethorical question:
Pourquoi Paul, qui n’a “ni reçu ni appris son Evangile d’un homme mais par révélation de Jésus-Christ”, et qui ne veut connaître “que Jésus-Christ et celui-ci crucifié” (1 Co 2,2), n’accuse-t-il jamais ni les Juifs, sauf dans le discours que Luc lui fait tenir à Antioche (Ac 13,27-30), ni les Romains, ni Caïphe, ni Pilate, et pourquoi ne connait-il pas non plus aucun autre épisode de la vie de Jésus, pas même son baptême, ni Jean Baptiste?
…is that, according to Paul himself, Jesus was crucified in outer space.
In addition, in the curriculum page of Jean Magne, an article figures with a title very intriguing:
Is Jesus the Paradise Snake historicized? (Communication présentée au Sixth International Congress of Biblical Studies, Oxford, April 3-7 1978), inédit.
where clearly he means for ‘historicized’ the same definition of ‘euhemerized’ (i.e. converted from a mythological figure, the Genesiac Serpent adored as Son of Father by the anti-demiurgists, to two human beings: respectively the ‘good’ Jesus ‘called king of the Jews’ and the ‘evil’ Jesus “Bar-Abbas”.
That’s all still too vague.
The latter stuff is about myths being historicized that even historicists agree with. So that’s unhelpful.
The former stuff is out of context. The entire paper is on the alleged Gnostic invention of the crucifixion narrative, which (apart from the anachronistic attribution to “Gnostics” and their peculiar motives) is already what mainstream historicists agree happened: that narrative is an invention. He repeatedly affirms that this added Jewish elements to an original story that had simply and only the Romans involved. So when he says “anti-Jewish polemic” is the “invented” crucifixion, he means the stuff added to the simpler Roman story, which by implication is the real story and thus historical (Magne never makes a clear statement about that, but he makes clear he only is talking about what he believes to be anti-Jewish additions).
For example, on p. 8 his “conclusion from the previous analyses” is that
This appears to be what Magne is selling as the historical core to which “Gnostics” added all the other stuff as anti-Jewish polemic. Magne never says this core is also myth.
In the final section (p. 9) where he has a section “Neither the Jews, nor the Romans, nor God are Responsible for the Crucifixion, but the Archons” he is talking about cause, not agent, and when he gets to the rhetorical question you quote, Magne is again describing the Gnostic redactor’s point of view (they are the ones asking this question, they are the ones reading Paul this way), which Magne concludes with (p. 10), which is a strange astrotheological belief supposedly extractable from Gnostic texts:
In other words, Magne thinks this was a transposition, i.e. this cosmic crucifixion was a later corruption of history. His theory is a bit bonkers, since he thinks Justin is one of these secret Gnostics who now “understands” the crucifixion this way (he didn’t), but the point is, Magne is calling this a later development, not the original faith or belief. Elsewhere he seems to clearly mean Jesus was simply executed by Romans for treason or some such, and Christians then just made up a bunch of apologetics about this, and then eventually “Gnostics” transformed that into anti-Jewish polemic, and went so far as to “transpose” the crucifixion all the way into outer space.
Magne himself never says this is what he believes. Or that this is how the religion started. He always and only talks about what these second century “Gnostics” believed and how it supposedly motivated them to make all the changes to the story that he goes on about. Maybe Magne does believe this, but if so, he carefully avoided ever saying so. So there is nothing we can do with this.
Excellent Review! Thanks for writing this. I was hoping you would address this book. I feel like I’m not crazy because I read about half of Creating Christ and was struggling to get clarity on the thesis. I now feel vindicated. It did seem like they were leaping to unwarranted conclusions with the coinage. Anyway, great work. I’m looking forward to your upcoming appearance on History Valley.
By reading what Bruce Chilton says about Magne here, Jean Magne started as historicist, and as historicist he arrived to the conclusion about the lost earliest Passion story reporting only the scarne reference to Jesus being delivered to Pilate and crucified by him. Subsequently, according to Chilton, Magne becomes a mythicist and even then he preserved the belief that the first Passion story (that euhemerized Jesus) had only the short note about Jesus being crucified by Pilate.
In a paper which he gave to the International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in 1990, Jean Magne developed the most succinct analysis of the passage, but it is based on his finely developed exegetical monographs.! Magne begins with a refutation of the two-source solution of the “Synoptic Problem” in its simplest form. He realizes that the variants among the Synoptic Gospels are too complex to admit of the facile solution of direct borrowing; he asserts his challenge by citing the work of Philippe Rolland. 2 Only attention to the likely antecedents of the Gospels can offer a literary answer to the question of what produced the texts as they can be read today.
Magne sees the overall scene of the session of the Sanhedrin as an expansion of the “primitive text,” which he takes to be reflected in two passages which frame the scene of the trial and Peter’ s denial (Mark 14:53; 15: 1, in the translation of Magne’s rendering):
They led Jesus to the high priest, and the elders and the scribes gathered and, the morning come, they took counsel and, having bound him, they brought him to Pilate.
In referring to the passages as “primitive,” Magne intends to say that was as much as was known about how Jesus came to be condemned to death by Pilate. Everything else is embellishment. The literary formation of the text is elegantly set out by Magne. Within the primitive reference to the taking of counsel at the opening and the closing of the present sequence, two interior chiasms are formed, one involving Peter and his denial, the other involving the “trial.” The artificiality of the devices is evident to Magne. The evidence brought against Jesus is dangerously close to the truth (see John 2:19; Matt 27:40; Mark 15:29; Acts 6:14), so that the reference to false witness in Mark 14:57-59 is maladroit to say the least.
Moreover, the christological question posed by the High Priest (Mark 14:61) is unrelated to what precedes, and the beating of Jesus and the mocking demand for hirn to prophesy (14:65) seem unmotivated. Finally, the notice of people “taking counsel” (Mark 15: 1) is not the language of any sort of legal proceeding, and actually suggests the accused was not present.
Within Magne’ s overall understanding of the development of Christianity, as a popular Gnosis, the creation of the vignette of the trial, with its implicit anti-Judaism, makes good sense. Indeed, Magne is inclined to see a great deal within the Gospels as a pure fabrication on the basis of scriptural texts. So the striking feature of his analysis of Mark 14:53-72 is not that he sees so much elaboration, but that he invokes the hypothesis of the historical memory of Jesus being handed over to Pilate for execution by High Priest, elders, and scribes. Indeed, Magne has revised his analysis since the work cited above, to posit that even the crucifixion, although primitive from the point of view of the memory of events, was also fabricated. [7]
Note 7 reads:
I have benefitted from private conversation with him. In that Magne cannot actually cite a text which he alleges inspired a narrative of the crucifixion, his position in this regard is now purely theoretical. His citation of 1 Cor 2:8 shows how the crucifixion was appropriated, but not how reference to it was first generated.
I don’t see any reference in there to Magne being a “mythicist.”
Chilton literally says in that final note that even in private conversation Magne wouldn’t tell him what he thinks about the historical Jesus!
This is precisely my frustration, which you just documented was shared by Chilton.
I called bullshit on Valliant’s Creating Crank years ago when that heaping triceratops pile first came out. Where’s Jeff Goldblum when you need him?
Great article . On Valliant being a “Randroid” and its link to conspiracism, consider 1) Valliant has been outcast by the Ayn Rand Institute, experts on her philosophy , 2) The amazing work they have done on the topic of conspiracism and why it’s so prevalent such as “An Alternative to Conspiracism’s Foolish Illusions” By Ben Bayer. I think you will find it valuble .
Do you have a source for Valliant being “outcast” by the ARI?
In general that is meaningless since Randroids are notorious feuders who expel people all the time, creating endless sects of Radroidism—just like any other religion. And also just like any other religion, most Randroids are “heretics” and just haven’t been expelled yet. Just like most Christians’ ideas of how the Trinity works are not only heretical, but named heresies, but churches just don’t run exhaustive inquisitions anymore so as to know that; and probably don’t want to know it for all the money and power having heretics on the books affords them.
But still, I’d be curious to know why the ARI would “expel” Valliant!
P.S. And yes, that’s my own position on conspiracism: one should not conflate conspiracy with what are simply shared ideological goals and values, which result in coordinated action without any actual coordination. Because the former is not rare but ubiquitous; so the rarity of the latter should not be invalidly commuted to the former. That would be an equivocation fallacy.
Hello Dr. Carrier. I enjoyed the History Valley episode yesterday in which you and Adair debunked the coin evidence. I was wanting to see if you think this is correct. Regarding the the pro-Roman ideology that occurs in the gospels: It does seem to dovetail with the Flavian historians and Josephus’ proclamation that Vespasian was favored by the god of Israel. Atwill and Valliant incorrectly infer from this that the gospels were an imperial PSYOP contrived to pacify restive Jewish rebels. In reality it is perfectly compatible with your mythicist thesis. The gospel writers were highly educated and therefore likely part of a social elite that was sensetive to the propagandistic demands of the Flavian regimes under which they found themselves. This fact seems sufficient to explain the pacifistic pro-Roman currents in the gospels (and the use of Josephus to inform the narratives) without positing a high level conspiracy. Does this comport with you rviews on the matter? Thanks.
This is a fallacy called confirmation bias. That something is compatible with a theory is not evidence for it. Because that “something” could be equally well explained by other causes. Like this: there is nothing unique about that attribute of the Flavians. All emperors had tales of proclamation of divine election, and all emperors were proclaimed in the Jewish temple elected by Yahweh to rule (as Philo records).
So there is no way to get from this to the conclusion that Christianity began under the Flavians. It began under the Julians, as well attested by Paul; and Paul’s declaration of obedience to Rome is even more clear and forceful than any in the Gospels. So that concept clearly had no causal relationship to the Flavians.
Thanks for the reply Dr. Carrier. I take your point that this attitude towards Roman authority shows up prior to the Gospels.
I wasn’t very clear in my question. I was taking for granted that the cult began in pre-Flavian times as per your minimal-Doherty thesis. And that it was a Jewish off-shoot revelatory cult as reflected in authentic Paul. (This by itself refutes Atwill and Valliant.)
I should have specified that I meant the gospel of Mark (as well as the others to the extent that they are derivative). Mark sort of represents a second phase of the religion in which the cosmic archangel soteriology was euhemerized. Mark was likely composed under Flavian rule and therefore, as the product of elite authorship, reflects the ideological pressures of his elite mileau. The euhemierization process began under Flavian rule, which could explain the use of Josephus in shaping Mark’s Little Apocapalypse and the parralels to Jesus Ben Ananias. I was wondering if you considered this usage of Josephus, as one of Mark’s sources for constructing the original biography of the earthly Jesus, the result of the author’s deference to the demands of Flavian propaganda that show up in other writers of the period. I hope my question makes sense. I don’t always articulate things well. Thanks.
Oh, yes, thank you for clarifying that. I misunderstood your point then.
In that frame, yes, Mark is reacting to developments under the Flavians, and may have frontloaded his rhetoric to leverage on theirs (since that would be the most widespread framework then to communicate by reference to, as there was no ancient media conglomerate then but the imperial house).
But be aware, it is not signifying that Mark employed Josephus, because we don’t have the other authors on the war, so we cannot say Mark preferred Josephus over them (or even if he did, why). There may be lots of material in Mark that riffs on other histories of the time (or other histories may have been too try or inadequate for Mark’s needs); but because we don’t have those histories, we will never know.
The only reason we have Josephus is that late antique (and then medieval) Christians liked him—and mainly because of the interpolation promoted by Eusebius (if not indeed created by Eusebius). That Eusebius also cited no other historians of the war may also be an accident (per Carriker’s study, who, fun fact, studied under my advisor William V. Harris at Columbia University shortly after me: see The Library of Eusebius of Caesarea and Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea). By happenstance, Origen did not acquire other histories of the war, and Eusebius was just using what his library had. As it was a private library, it wasn’t a particularly large collection (nothing like a major public city library of the day).