“So, I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, ‘Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach…” – Revelations 10:9
“We deserve to know how we’ve been fooled. If Jesus and Shakespeare are both fake, what isn’t?”
— Joe Atwill, author, Caesar’s Messiah
As an identical twin by birth, I was fascinated with the 1939 movie The Man in the Iron Mask about one twin brother incarcerated as a political prisoner, forced to wear an unremovable iron mask to hide his aristocratic facial identity, while the other brother hijacked his role as ruler. The plot of this movie uses a tantalization device called transposition.
Transposition is an act, process or instance of exchanging something for its opposite, a reversal. It is frequently used in music, algebra, drama, literature, movies, magic tricks, in crimes by confidence men and most important in what we consider history. In Christianity, “Jesus’s transposition” refers to the Transfiguration, a biblical event where the resurrected Jesus is said to have been transformed as divine on Mount Herman revealing himself to a reincarnated Moses and Elijah, before his Ascension to heaven.
Joe Atwill’s book Caesar’s Messiah (2005), describes how a secret society surrounding the Roman emperor Vespasian wrote the Christian Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) using transposition as the main part of its captivating story. Their trick was to invent a fictional pacifist Judean messiah in the Gospels to persuade Judeans in Jerusalem not to rebel against Rome and to prevent the spreading of violent resistance throughout the empire. Atwill’s genius was to see sequential parallelism in the uncanny similar stories of a fictional Jesus, with the real life of emperor Vespasian’s son and military commander Titus. The intent of the Romans was to persuade Judeans that Titus was divinely carrying out the prophesies from the Old Testament and Jesus by destroying the Temple.
To create the counterpart story of emperor Titus as a demi-god, the Roman Flavian family of emperors reportedly captured the Judean priest Josephus and employed him as a propagandist to help write a fake sequentially parallel history to the Gospels in his book The Judean War Against Rome. This literary plot also involved writing the Gospels to draw additional sequential parallels of Jesus with King David, Moses and Elijah in the Old Testament, backdating the book of Daniel, adding Second Isaiah, and writing the books of I & II Samuel to create the appearance of fulfilled prophecies. Every step of Titus’s military campaign in Jerusalem was made to mimic that of Jesus to signal Titus’s divinity.
No peace-loving New Covenant religion would stand a chance of adoption in Jerusalem if it was invented “whole cloth” unconnected to Judaism. So, the New Testament used plagiarism and syncretism by selectively borrowing of stories from the Old Testament, and by writing religious books that countered the story of James the zealot in the War Scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Authentic Judaic religious documents had to go underground and were put in clay jars in caves in remote Qumran to prevent book burning by the Romans and later the Visigoths of the library at Alexandria, Egypt, in 48 BC and again in 391 AD.
Writing the Gospels and Paul’s letters was such a complex production that it could only have been accomplished by a large clandestine task force working under the emperor Vespasian. Even Paul’s “letters” could never have been conveyed from Rome to Corinth or Ephesus as there was no postal service except the imperial courier system. Neither are there any return letters back to Paul. There was no right to free travel on Roman roads without paying tolls at bridges and gates.
A light turned on in my mind that what Atwill had discerned was not only sequential Gospel parallelism but oppositional transposition. Specifically, Jesus’s Transfiguration and glorification portrayed in the Gospels was the juxtaposing of the fictional pacifistic prophet Jesus with the real life anti-Roman revolutionary James the Just, whose life was recorded in the time capsule of the War Scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The fictional pacifistic Jesus could never have existed without his real-life trans-poser, James, who was dubbed the blood brother of Jesus plausibly to give him equal divine legitimacy. The unadulterated real life story of James’ the zealot wasn’t found until the 1940’s discovery in the Dead Sea Scrolls, best described in Robert Eisenman book James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls,1997.
Christianity morphed to be become a 2,000+ year mass Psychological-Operation that was successful by suppressing any heresies (e.g., Tertullian, Against Marcion, 207 AD), by mandating every economic transaction could only be between those who wore the “mark of the beast” tattoo, and by ironically appealing to goodness and moral superiority especially through the Ten Commandments. However, Christianity failed to persuade Judeans in Jerusalem to convert to Christianity, eventually ending up with Judeans losing the battle against Rome at Masada. But Christianity eventually spread world-wide when Constantine made it the religion of empire.
The appeal of Christianity is that people wanted to believe there was such an exemplary person as Jesus given the wars and corruption of Rome, and wanted to believe in their own goodness, and thus, in their own self-deception. So, religious participation by church attendance, conversion by the ritual of baptism, hypnotic eyes-closed group prayer, emperor cult music lyrics where Jesus was portrayed as a king and displays of piety and holiness were not a rational belief system but emperor worship. Christianity evolved into a set of religious customs and rituals that justified suffering, slavery and death under Constantine. Conversely, for the Roman rulers who created Christianity, it was a display of their vanity, as well as the sense of the superiority gained by dark humor at the gullibility and dupery of the masses. The way other countries kept the Romans from warring and destroying them was by establishing Christian churches as a sign of emperor worship. No one became a Christian based on rational truth claims that there was a Jesus or Moses, but rather by the threat of Roman force and eventually passing Christianity to the next generation through family ties.
Atwill went further and asserted the book of Revelations was not written by John the apostle but was concocted by Vespasian’s second son Domitian to cryptically warn Gentiles that Christianity was not divinely revealed or inspired, but invented by his father, Roman emperor Vespasian and his brother Titus. Domitian was worried that if his family’s secret of Christianity’s origin was revealed Rome might collapse during his reign. Thus, Domitian had the perplexing and cryptic book of Revelation written to scare Romans about such an apocalyptic scenario.
About the same time that I read Atwill’s book, I also recall reading historian Lionel Jensen’s book of a similar transposition by suggesting how the Roman Catholic scholar Matteo Ricci in the 16th century lived in the Forbidden City of Beijing, China, to attempt to convert the emperor. In the course of investigating Chinese archives, Ricci covertly invented the figure Confucius (confusion) that the Chinese unknowingly came to embrace as part of their own history (Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism, 1998).
To those modern-day Christians who refute Atwill’s evidence of a manufactured Jesus, I would point out that Christian Preterism and Pauline Christianity are not inconsistent with it. Christian Preterism (preter means past) is a view that Old Testament and Jesus’s prophecies were all fulfilled in the First Century and, as such, there is no fear of current day imminent destruction of the world nor necessity of a second coming of Jesus. Preterism is a justification of Roman destruction of Jerusalem for its collective sins.
Moreover, the Apostle Paul’s Christianity was based on a vision about Jesus not necessarily relying on experience, Old Testament prophecy or third-party reports about Jesus. The Apostle Paul taught that Christianity was not based on factual history but upon “faith (which) is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).
In the early 1800’s, Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said: “Christendom is an enormous illusion” because Christians acquire their identity by socialization and social status not by acceptance of rational proof of Jesus’s existence.
Withstanding the above, Fundamentalist Christianity requires absolute certainty of a human Jesus existing and if one card is removed from their house of cards of weak belief, their entire faith is lost. This leads to what social psychologists call “cognitive dissonance” where any doubt can only be handled by doubling down stronger on their beliefs. Christianity is disguised emperor worship. This doesn’t mean there was no Jesus, since, if such a god-man figure should appear today in, say, Los Angeles, and was medically euthanized for COVID, few might even know of his existence. Moreover, there were so many book burnings during the Roman Empire’s existence, how would we know if a Jesus appeared?
Atwill went even further in his second book Shakespeare’s Messiah, describing how many of the 17th century Shakespearian plays were Judean revenge literature covertly aimed against not only the divine right of rule of the British Crown but the entirety of Christendom. Atwill made a convincing case that many Shakespearean plays were written by Amelia Bassano, an Italian-Jewish poetess employed by the Crown as a musician and entertainer; witness the plays The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, the Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet. What started as a counter religion against revolutionary Judaism ended up a counter-counter literary weapon against gentile Christendom.
Atwill also interpreted more recent literature showing such modern transpositions were accomplished by the pseudo-sciences of psychology and sociology on his PostFlaviana.org website. But Atwill never called them Transpositions. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud transposed Ikhnaton, the Pharoah of Egypt, into Moses; sociologist Theodore Adorno transposed and stigmatized The Authoritarian Personality with the authority figures of American males in the military, police, and the priesthood. Adorno’s transposition was also further carried out by Herman Wouk in his novel and movie The Caine Mutiny about a fictional authoritarian commander of a warship during WWII. Military commanders in all wars must be authoritarian to survive, but Wouk’s hidden agenda was to undermine the authority structure of hierarchical institutions (military, schools, church).
Moreover, the infamous novel that became mandated reading in American high schools in the 1950’s, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, was shown by Atwill to be a mind control device, of the same anti-Christian revenge genre of literature as Shakespearean plays (see Joe Atwill, Freemason in the Rye, 2015, also see James and Lance Morgan, The Catcher in the Rye Enigma: JD Salinger’s Mind Control Device, 2016). Salinger’s novel was designed to corrupt youth and use operant conditioning to mentally trigger assassinations. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy as assassins John Hinckley, Mark David Chapman, Sirhan-Sirhan, Timothy McVeigh, Robert John Bardo, Jodie Foster and many others became hypnotized by Salinger’s book to carry out non-contract political assassinations. Were the Christian Gospels any less mind controlling?
In 2024, independent scholar Michael Menasgotz issued his book Christianity’s Origin (APTVS) as a Flavian Secrecy Cult, which tested 250 of Atwill’s sequential parallels between the Gospels and Josephus’s Jewish War, including use of statistical correlation and probability analysis. All Atwill’s parallels correlated positive. Menasgotz discovered a pattern between paragraphs in Josephus’s Jewish War book and the corresponding chapter in the Gospel of Luke, that indicated the anagram “A-P-T-V-S”, forming an abbreviation for the Roman emperor “Ares Piso Titus”. The writers of the Gospel of Luke and War of the Jews could only be the same. Menasgotz’s book amasses overwhelming quantitative evidence confirming the Gospels and Josephus’s so-called history of the Jewish War against the Romans, were meant as co-validating religious propaganda, not written by peasants or fishermen Matthew and Mark and presumed physician Luke.
European and American culture, not only ancient Roman culture, has been besot with covert brainwashing transpositional “switcheroo” stories for over 2,000 years. It became the secret literary and movie genre of the banking elites who control modern society.
“We Deserve to Know How We’ve Been Fooled”
Joe Atwill takes the position that religious propaganda is typically expressed through cruel hoaxes or spectacles disguised as history (9/11, COVID). It is crafted by secret societies funded by wealthy banking family clans mainly through fabricated religious scriptures and resembling an historical account (i.e., dissimulation, dissembling). He says “we know more about the future than the past” because the past is all a pack of lies piled upon lies (also see John Hamer, The Falsification of History: Our Distorted Reality, 2013).
To undertake an “Atwillian” understanding of what we know about history we must go beyond the simplistic cliches that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana), that “history is written by the winners” (supposedly Winston Churchill), or even “history is a lie, commonly agreed upon” (Voltaire). Understanding history through Atwill’s lens suggests the following underlying assumption: history is secretly falsified by elites to further their pecuniary interests, for social control, population control, and such elites are not merely amoral but malevolent, albeit socially constructed as benevolent government and religion.
An implied sociological corollary extracted from Atwill’s independent works is that truth-telling depends on social location uncoupled from church, state or corporation. It took some 2,000 years for independent scholars like Atwill to show up that were not bound by financial, theological or ideological control of organized religion or state subsidized academia, despite the printing press was invented in 1440. Seen through an “Atwillian” lens Martin Luther’s 95 theses opposing the corruption of the Catholic Church in 1517 did nothing to expose Christianity as elitist-crafted religious propaganda. Rather, the Enlightenment merely provided a secular competitor to dissimulated religion that was also co-opted by a different set of secular elites to create a false dialectic of the “separation of church and state”. Oversimplified, a dialectic is opposing black and white ideologies that merely create two camps of self-interest, both of which cover up their competitive pecuniary interests (called “ideology” and “historical materialism” by Karl Marx, The German Ideology). The Enlightenment was not about being enlightened but was a profound failure that had little to do with “reason” over faith.
A forerunner of Atwill as an independent thinker might be Niccolo Machiavelli (1513) who has been demonized for writing books telling us how “princes” really rule not how they should ideally rule. As Machiavelli put it: “There is nothing more important [for a ruler] than to appear religious”. In 1995 Machiavelli was slandered as a “teacher of evil” by modern secular Judean Leo Strauss. (see my Amazon.com book review “Who is the Machiavellian, Strauss or Machiavelli?” about Strauss’s twisting of Machiavelli’s book The Prince as evil “Machiavellianism”). I’m sure Atwill initially will not appreciate the comparison with Machiavelli, but Machiavelli is an example of how truth tellers and realists are demonized, discredited, and assigned to the metaphorical dustbin of history. Put differently, secularism is the transposition of organized religion not religious liberation.
This indicates the extent of the stranglehold of social control both church and academic secular state authorities have together wielded over understanding the stories that make up world history. Atwill avers that there never has been a separation of religion and state. Religious and secular propagandists play both sides of the street so to speak just as Vespasian retained Josephus to write a seeming secular history of the Judean War with Rome that corresponded with the New Testament Gospels. So, what does this suggest for Atwill’s challenge to “know how we’ve been fooled”?
Firstly, we must assume two postulates as the default position when evaluating history or current events: a postulate of secrecy and postulate of malevolency. When historical and current events don’t make sense, it is best to assume it serves the interests of a secret society or cabal (“follow the money”) and that their motivation is malevolent (witness COVID).
Atwill asserts that what is needed as an antidote to the mind controlling aspects of Christianity is the Socratic Method of skepticism, asking probing questions rather than providing pat answers, deductive logic, pattern and sequence recognition, cross examination to separate lying, gossip or mistakenness from fact, and discerning hidden agendas to produce well-informed citizens in a democracy. But the Socratic Method is too emotionally cold, methodical, and lacks transcendent power to appeal to most people seeking cosmic religious meaning and recognition that some things in life must be held sacred.
But it is my opinion, not Joe Atwill’s, that to produce responsible consciousness and accountable citizens in a democracy, a new Civic Religion, not the Current Civil Religion, would need to be established which would change the religious folkways and norms that define what is considered religious behavior (religiosity). All religions accept only religious servility and submission, hypnotic group prayers, physical prostration and kneeling, repetition of sacred scriptures, adherence to commandments (10 Commandments) that never bind elites morally or legally, monologues by religious authorities (sermons, homilies), initiation rituals such as baptism, legalism and literalism, infallibility of scriptures, popes, and gurus, and emperor worship as what defines being a religious person. People mostly go to church to feel they are a good person not to explore valid truth claims about Christianity.
For example, what is needed is social acceptance of eyes-wide-open group prayer that does not function to put a person into a momentary trance, dialogue wherever possible not only monologue, non-infallibility of scriptures and popes, the end of indirect emperor worship through exemplary archetypes, an awakening and non-debased genre of music, vigilance that government constitutions are crafted to be circumvented in contrived emergencies. In short, a demythologized religion. What is missing here, however, is the economic factor. “Most religions begin as a movement, evolve into a business and end up a racket”, said Eric Hoffer.
The Danish Christian philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard in the early 1800’s outlined something similar to Atwill’s call for the Socratic method in his advocacy of Socratic-Spirituality in his book Upbuilding Discourses. In his book The Present Age: The Death of Rebellion, Kierkegaard was prophetic about the dangers of mass media – particularly advertising, marketing and publicity. Kierkegaard showed how we have been deceived into believing that we are someone we are not and that our life is often a living lie. To Kierkegaard, God is uncertain or it would not be God despite uncertainty or absurdity.
One of the biggest impediments to perceiving religious propaganda is the human quest to be good which disarms critical perception. This desire to be a good person can be manipulated in elections by elites conspiring with each other to portray one candidate as the bad guy, the other the good guy.
The final transposition is that original Roman Christianity was a counter religion to Jerusalem-based Judaism by opposing its legalism, circumcision, sacrifice of first-born children as a right of entry into the clan, money changing and usury, psychological projection of their racism onto other groups, and total war slaughter of women and children practiced by Deuteronomic Judaism. However, today Christianity has changed places with Judaism and became a counter-counter religion to original Christianity whereby Judeans are worshipped by Christians instead of Christ, as it was believed “salvation comes from the Judeans” (Gospel of John 4:22).
