Jesus Was Invented By Rome, Why Not?

Old, old news by now, but there’s another guy claiming Jesus was invented by Rome in order to appeal to the occupied Jewish population, and he has suspiciously non-peer-reviewed evidence to prove it. That a nation would go to such great lengths and expense to play pattycake-nice with (or a joke on) people who where more or less second-rate citizens for is unclear. But it’s clear that if a subject normally dealt with in the academic realm happens to bounce over to the documentary realm, then caveat vigilem:

Sometime in the mid 70s AD, Atwill suggests, Greco-Roman intellectuals wrote the now-well-known stories—in Greek, not the popular Aramaic of the Judaic populace—about the Jewish messiah who defied the Judaic traditions of militancy to preach a sweet, accommodationist message.

Explained in better detail better here, but the fake historical Jesus theories arrive and depart in Internet-rhythm cycles with varying degrees of marketing stickiness and profitability, due to the abbreviated long-term memory of consumers and a circadian need for world-scale scandal. The last really profitable one was the The da Vinci Code installment—other ones haven’t fared as well, I think. I don’t prefer to keep close track of rehashed material.

But if the evidence is “overwhelming” (evidence that scholars for centuries have somehow missed), the amount of ‘splainin’ to do is of equal magnitude. Immense, undeniable revisionism doesn’t sprout in a vacuum—there’s a despot’s harem-sized ton of things that need to be explained via logic at the first level, then historically at the next level, before they can be taken seriously.