"Is this the end of Rico?"

Mr Atwill claims to have discovered the super secret code in Josephus text of “Wars of the Jews”

Josephus (a Jew) and the Gospels (written by Jews) therefore the Romans did it!


Eat more Ovaltine!
 
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metalman said:
Josephus (a Jew) and the Gospels (written by Jews) therefore the Romans did it!
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Josephus, a Jew, who was a part of the Roman elite, friend of the powerful Flavians who adopted him and whose name he took.
 
cecilia said:
The Romans invented christ?
I sure hope this is true
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Also of interest are the parallels between the Roman construction of Jesus Christ and the cult of Julius Caesar which used a lot of the same iconography - and of course the excuse to take over those things the cult of Julius Caesar marked with his initials, I.C. or in Greek, I.X.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
Also of interest are the parallels between the Roman construction of Jesus Christ and the cult of Julius Caesar which used a lot of the same iconography - and of course the excuse to take over those things the cult of Julius Caesar marked with his initials, I.C. or in Greek, I.X.
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:rolleyes:

"The Da Vinci Code" had more verisimilitude.

Another book for the conspiracy gullible
 
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metalman said:
"The Da Vinci Code" had more verisimilitude.

Another book for the conspiracy gullible
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Hey, if you want a book with absolutely nothing to back it up, I know one you might like.
 
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.'"
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The problem is that it's rather clear that Atwill found what he was looking for. A Christian could probably use the same material to prove the opposite. This isn't really proof nor will it convince anyone to abandon the religion. There's already enough reason to do so, those who cling to it will ignore this as they ignore countless other evidence that it's nothing more than pure fiction.
 
Glaucus said:
The problem is that it's rather clear that Atwill found what he was looking for.
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Doubtless there's a lot to interpretation. However, contemporary elites use the same sort of "coded language" though that is perhaps over stating the case. It's more like they have a shared viewpoint and a shared jargon that gives away the game to those that know the game. It's kind of like when some parent tells a misbehaving kid that Santa won't bring them a present if they're not good and all the other adults nod and tut-tut. The adults know the game, the kid doesn't.
 
the theory fails the Occam's razor test

the Jews were a small minority in the Roman Empire

the Roman Empire didn't need to invent a pacifist messiah to control the Jews, it had Roman legions, which when needed, easily crushed any Jewish rebellion

The Romans had much bigger problems with others, particularly the Celtic and German tribes. Why didn't the Romans try “psychological warfare” against the Celtic Gauls and the German tribes? both groups actually wiped out Roman legions example: Battle of the Allia
 
metalman said:
The Romans had much bigger problems with others, particularly the Celtic and German tribes. Why didn't the Romans try “psychological warfare” against the Celtic Gauls and the German tribes? both groups actually wiped out Roman legions example: Battle of the Allia
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Well, they kinda did when they adopted Christianity. The fact that they adopted Christianity is rather interesting although it doesn't really support or challenge the idea that they may have invented it themselves. After all, the Romans did use Christianity to control the masses, which is what religions are designed for.

Still, I'm rather skeptical of this author. I understand the "coded language" thing, even before Fluffy explained it to me, I'm just not convinced that it's really there.
 
Christianity is a Greek religion, which the Greeks "culturally appropriated" from Judaism and Jesus evangelizing disciples.

Mr Atwill has no credibility as a historical researcher, and has said he can't read Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic ... and has read only translations of the documents he discusses in his books, if there were any coded messages, it would only be in the original language, not the translations, so its just an entertaining book, just like "The Da Vinci Code" and he seems to have found a ready market of gullible atheists, who want to believe, who buy it, hook, line, sinker, for example OP
 
For some reason, when I read "Rico" in the title, I was thinking about the Crime Act, not a religious thing.
 
Wayne said:
For some reason, when I read "Rico" in the title, I was thinking about the Crime Act, not a religious thing.
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I was just quoting a line in the movie Little Caesar with Edward G Robinson

For some reason it just popped into my head when I read that article.
 
metalman said:
Mr Atwill has no credibility as a historical researcher, and has said he can't read Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic ... and has read only translations of the documents he discusses in his books, if there were any coded messages, it would only be in the original language, not the translations, so its just an entertaining book, just like "The Da Vinci Code" and he seems to have found a ready market of gullible atheists, who want to believe, who buy it, hook, line, sinker, for example OP
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Technically speaking, Cecilia only said she hopes this to be true, not that she believes it to be true. I'm an atheist and have doubts about this as well, so being an atheist doesn't automatically make you gullible or believe what Atwill says to be true. And since you brought it up, I think the Da Vinci Code is more credible. Also, you might wanna work on breaking up paragraphs into sentences.
 
and example of historically correct "praying" in pre-Christian Rome

taurobolium


she is chanting her prayer, “Meum fillium Magna Mater” ( “Protect my son, Great Mother.”)

From the first century until Pagan worship died out, the Romans sacrificed bulls, in highly ritualized ways, and dedicated those sacrifices to the Great Mother ( Cybele). The Great Mother was the goddess of fertility (including good crops) and military success.

It’s easy to think the ancient Romans were like us, because Rome was such an influence on Western culture, however it was a dramatically different world then, and Christianity would have been as alien to them as this is to us now.

The Romans society was a violent society. Violence was even part of their way of entertaining themselves. They build arenas all over the Empire for staging gladiator fights, wild animals tearing people apart, even their comedy was violent, they would take two elderly slave women whom they had starved for weeks, then put them in an arena armed with weapons with a sumptuous meal laid out before them, but only the winner got to eat. They staged midgets gladiator fights as another way to get a good laugh.


The Roman solution to problems, was violence.
 
metalman said:
From the first century until Pagan worship died out, the Romans sacrificed bulls, in highly ritualized ways, and dedicated those sacrifices to the Great Mother ( Cybele).
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The Jews were offering animal sacrifices up to 70 CE and only stopped because the temple where they held the sacrifices was destroyed.
It’s easy to think the ancient Romans were like us, because Rome was such an influence on Western culture, however it was a dramatically different world then, and Christianity would have been as alien to them as this is to us now.
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True, true. And the Christianity (Christianities) they had back then would be pretty alien to Christians today.

Only when the state church of Rome (and it's top official the Pontifex Maximus/Emperor Constantine) adopted Christianity as the official religion of the empire did it start to settle into something like Catholicism (and they had to do an awful lot of persecution of those "other" Christians to achieve that homogeneity) . Of course Catholicism was an offshoot of the original Christianity of Constantine who had set up shop in Byzantium, changed the name to Constantinople (now Istanbul) and propagated the Orthodox version of Christianity while the empire split and the Romans got a new emperor who devolved the title Pontifex Maximus to a subordinate.

The Roman solution to problems, was violence.
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Violence and some pretty cool engineering. They were, ultimately, a Christian state with a state crest that retained the pagan (and martial) emblem of the eagle which had military bases spread around large parts of the known world and vast wealth accumulated by procuring the resources of the lands and people they had conquered. They also had a large cosmopolitan population of people who had figured out that it was smarter to follow the wealth into Rome rather than stay where they were and watch their stuff get taken away. Hated and admired. Wealthy, powerful, hugely culturally influential and in the end, gone.
 
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