Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity by James Valliant and Warren Fahy
By Andrew Bernstein
Hertford, NC: Crossroads Press, 2018.
361 pp. $29.99 (hardcover).
Christianity was created by the Roman state, and the New Testament was Roman propaganda designed to pacify fanatically rebellious Jews. This is the boldly original thesis James Valliant and Warren Fahy present in Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity.
The Romans dominated a vast polyglot, multicultural, religiously tolerant empire of conquered nations. They adroitly co-opted the gods and customs of subjugated peoples as a means of assimilating enemy tribes under their political hegemony.
Jews, on the other hand, are known to have been fanatically monotheistic, ferociously nationalistic, intensely xenophobic, and fiercely intolerant of paganism. Ancient Judea was a seething hotbed of Jewish fanatics determined to overthrow secular Roman governance and establish an independent state ruled by strict orthodox Judaism. The Jews utterly repudiated Rome’s vision of a religiously tolerant empire. In their view, God’s “chosen people” held “the truth” denied to lesser faiths and tribes.
The two cultures were ice and heat, water and fire. The relentless Jewish uprisings against Rome were inevitable. Valliant and Fahy describe the conflict, drawing parallels with modern events:
Religious fanatics from the Middle East are waging an assault on Western Civilization, . . .and have just struck a demoralizing blow to the very capital of “foreign decadence.” Leery of war with an entire people, the West acknowledges only advocates of peace to be “true” followers of the terrorists’ religion. Indeed, Western leaders claim that their attackers’ own dogma commands peace.
The year is 66 C.E. The civilization under attack is the Roman Empire. And the terrorists: an ancient fanatical sect of Judaism.1 (ix)
The cultural conflict was bitter. Twice, the Jews rose against Roman subjugation. The first war was fought between 66 and 73 CE and the second between 132 and 136 CE. The Romans, of course, wielded a powerful military. They were brutal conquerors who went through Judea with a blowtorch. Valliant and Fahy write:
In the end, two prolonged, bloody wars were fought in Judea in the 1st and 2nd Centuries, wars that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, the enslavement of thousands more, the complete and final destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem [leaving only what has come to be known as “the Wailing Wall”], and a legal expulsion of the Jewish people from Judea that extended the Diaspora for two thousand years. . . . the conflict between Romans and Jews was a cultural and military cataclysm that would reverberate through the centuries. (x–xi)
Although the Romans were ruthless conquerors, they were also political geniuses. For example, the Romans conquered Greece in 146 BCE and co-opted the Greek gods, incorporating them into the Roman pantheon. They ascribed to Jupiter the qualities of Zeus, and both gods could be worshipped in either name. They cross-identified their own deities with Greek ones, giving them new stories and traits. Large and important elements of Greek culture and religion were welcomed and integrated with Roman culture, making Greeks as at home as is possible for conquered peoples to be in a vast military empire. The Romans did this repeatedly.
Given this, the authors write: “Attempting to adapt and conform the hostile Hebrew religion to Roman culture, and especially its messianic flashpoint, would have been the Romans’ standard practice and, considering the stakes, one of their major priorities” (298). As Valliant writes elsewhere, “If there were not an official Roman form of Judaism, it would be a lacuna. But there is—Christianity.”2
The evidence for this thesis falls into two categories: that within the New Testament and that without.
Creating Christ shows that the New Testament should be read as a political plea to fanatical Jews to obey the Roman state. In a famous line, Jesus commands Jews to obey Caesar and to pay their taxes to Rome; further, he befriends the hated tax collectors. In an era of bitter Jewish tension with Greco-Roman culture, he declares that the faith of a Roman centurion exceeds that of any Jew.
He repeatedly calls for peace and even proclaims the very non-Jewish, anti-Old Testament principle that Jews should turn the other cheek and not resist evil. Jesus delivers this exhortation to a people whose holy book repeatedly preaches the need to annihilate all pagans occupying the Holy Land of God’s “chosen people.” For example, speaking of pagans, God says in the Old Testament, “I will send hornets before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite from before thee. . . . I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before thee. . . . They shall not dwell in thy land.”3 Jesus preached nonviolence against Rome to a people nurtured on such Old Testament calls for relentless warfare against pagans.
In 70 CE, the future emperor Titus razed the Jews’ sacred Second Temple. Valliant and Fahy point out the generally accepted truth that the earliest Gospel—that of Mark—was most likely written in the 70s CE, a few years after the destruction of the Second Temple and forty years after Jesus’s crucifixion. Therein, Jesus “predicted” the destruction of the Second Temple as punishment for the Jews’ war against Rome, saying that peace would ensue thereafter. Titus, who claimed to be the second coming of Christ (as had his father, Vespasian), now offered to Jewish followers of Jesus the era of peace and flourishing he promised—the Pax Romana (Roman peace)—on the grounds, of course, that they desist. Titus thereby fulfilled Jesus’s “prophecy.” Or, as Valliant and Fahy cogently argue, the “prophecy” was written to cohere with and legitimize Roman conquest: “Jesus prophesies that the ‘construction’ of his metaphorical temple, the Church, cannot begin until after the [Jewish Second] Temple is destroyed. Thus, Titus’s deed is a necessary part of God’s plan” (277).
So, the story told in the New Testament is that God punished the Jews for rejecting and murdering the Messiah, for demanding the execution of the “Prince of Peace”—the man who called for nonviolence against Rome. Now they get a second chance to worship him after “Christ’s Glorious Second Coming 40 years later, in the persons of Vespasian and Titus” (278).
Creating Christ makes this clear: The New Testament’s villains—always—are fanatically violent Jews who kill the “Prince of Peace” and war against Rome—and justice is served on them. In the Gospels, the Roman governor, Pilate, is extremely reluctant to execute Jesus; the unruly Jews demand it. In Acts, Roman officials save Paul numerous times from bloodthirsty Jewish mobs intent on murdering him. Paul writes of friends highly placed in the Roman government. Valliant and Fahy note, “Paul . . . closes that letter [to the Philippians] with warm greetings from those ‘in Caesar’s household’” (203). The message of the New Testament is consistent: “The Gospels, Acts, and even Paul’s letters, show Romans in only one invariably positive light”—and militant Jews only in a negative one (209). Indeed, the intense anti-Jewish propaganda of the New Testament brought on centuries of bitter Christian anti-Semitism.
Valliant and Fahy show that the New Testament drumbeat for obedience to Rome is incessant. For example, the authors quote from Romans 13, in which Paul commands full obedience to Rome: “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. . . . Consequently, whoever rebels against the authorities is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.”4
Who would most benefit from the teachings of the New Testament in practice? Valliant and Fahy’s book shows that the answer is, unquestionably, Rome. “The Romans realized that a military opposition to the Jewish conflict would not be enough. They would need an ideological campaign, as well” (293).
Perhaps the most striking evidence for the book’s thesis from outside the New Testament pertains to Christian symbolism. The cross did not become the symbol of Christianity until the fourth century CE. For three centuries prior, the Christian symbol was a dolphin wrapped around an anchor. The authors show a picture of this earliest symbol of Christ side by side with a picture of a surviving Roman coin. Such coins were
issued in the millions by the Flavian Emperor Titus, who conquered Jerusalem and sacked the Temple just as Jesus had prophesied. The symbol it bears, a dolphin wrapped around an anchor, is the very symbol Christians used to symbolize Christ for the first three centuries before the Emperor Constantine replaced it with the symbol of the cross. (5–6)
The authors ask: “How is it possible that the first symbol Christians chose to represent Jesus Christ was used by a Roman emperor—the very emperor who fulfilled Jesus’s prophecy by destroying the Jewish Temple and who proclaimed himself to be the Jewish Messiah?” (6). The inexplicable becomes clear in light of Valliant and Fahy’s argument.
Then there was St. Clement of Rome, who the church considers one of its earliest popes. St. Clement was Titus Flavius Clemens, “Vespasian’s nephew and Titus’s cousin” (162). He was a consul (a high-ranking government official) under these two emperors. “How could such a close relative of the Flavian emperors [and an official of their government] be the second, third, or fourth pope, or any such high-ranking figure in the early Church?” (161–62). Because, as the book’s subtitle states, Roman emperors invented Christianity. It’s no surprise that a Catholic saint and an early pope of the church was a close relative and a government functionary of Roman emperors—who themselves claimed to be the Jewish Messiah and the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Creating Christ provides a trove of unprecedented insights about the genesis of the modern world’s most popular religion. All interested in Christianity’s provenance would do well to read this boldly original book.