Never Read a Press Release Headline

Find a Bible verse you don’t understand, read
it in its surrounding context. Find a surprising headline, always be sure
to do the same.

I just came across this: “Ancient
Confession Found: 'We Invented Jesus Christ.'” Well, that is news, indeed!
The first paragraph gives more information:

American Biblical scholar Joseph Atwill will be appearing before the
British public for the first time in London on the 19th of October to present a
controversial new discovery: ancient confessions recently uncovered now prove,
according to Atwill, that the New Testament was written by first-century Roman
aristocrats and that they fabricated the entire story of Jesus Christ.

Wow! So why did they
do it?

Atwill asserts that
Christianity did not really begin as a religion, but a sophisticated government
project, a kind of propaganda exercise used to pacify the subjects of the Roman
Empire. "Jewish sects in Palestine at the time, who were waiting for a
prophesied warrior Messiah, were a constant source of violent insurrection
during the first century," he explains. "When the Romans had
exhausted conventional means of quashing rebellion, they switched to
psychological warfare. They surmised that the way to stop the spread of zealous
Jewish missionary activity was to create a competing belief system. That's when
the 'peaceful' Messiah story was invented. Instead of inspiring warfare, this
Messiah urged turn-the-other-cheek pacifism and encouraged Jews to 'give onto
Caesar' and pay their taxes to Rome."

And the evidence for this?

What seems to have
eluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus
[sic] ministry are more or less the same as the sequence of events and locations of
the military campaign of [Emperor] Titus Flavius as described by Josephus. This
is clear evidence of a deliberately constructed pattern. The biography of Jesus
is actually constructed, tip to stern, on prior stories, but especially on the
biography of a Roman Caesar.

So…when are we going to get to the part
about the confession?

How could this go unnoticed
in the most scrutinised books of all time? "Many of the parallels are
conceptual or poetic, so they aren't all immediately obvious. After all, the
authors did not want the average believer to see what they were doing, but they
did want the alert reader to see it. An educated Roman in the ruling class
would probably have recognised the literary game being played." Atwill
maintains he can demonstrate that "the
Roman Caesars left us a kind of puzzle literature that was meant to be solved
by future generations, and the solution to that puzzle is 'We invented Jesus
Christ, and we're proud of it'" [emphasis mine].

And there it is. Not
exactly a confession. This is starting to sound more than a little fishy…

"[W]hat my work has done is give permission to many of those ready to leave the religion to make a clean break. We've got the evidence now to show exactly where the story of
Jesus came from. Although Christianity can be a comfort to some, it can also be
very damaging and repressive, an insidious form of mind control that has led to
blind acceptance of serfdom, poverty, and war throughout history. To this day,
especially in the United States, it is used to create support for war in the
Middle East."

No bias to see here.
Move along.