Adam

Joseph Atwill's Caesar's Messiah (2005) is about the only concept I've seen here on FRDB that looks like a challenge. The supposed parallels between Josephus and gMatthew seem interesting. But in all the online stuff and videos, I've seen nothing to indicate he has any source-criticism. He's no scholar, and if he does not have source-criticism, then there's no reason to put my money out for a book.
Robert Price gave a long, harsh attack on Atwill, but I know some others here on this forum think well of him. Any pros and cons?
Interesting that Wikipedia had him in three times and removed each time.

Toto

I don't think Atwill has any strong followers here, although some think that the parallels he has identified are interesting. You can find some older threads in the archive:

Atwill's Caesar's Messiah and some threads linked there.

ApostateAbe

Atwill's proposition strikes me as playing in the same ballpark as any other conspiracy theory. Like any other conspiracy theory, plausibility is a problem. There was a small group of people who manufactured all of the evidence indicating the historical founding and development of a diversified religion, socially-engineered it into popularity, and fooled everyone throughout history except Joseph Atwill. His theory is sort of the caricatured strawman of mythicism that Christians have in mind when they come across mythicism for the first time. Well, at least it has the details of who was responsible and when.

Toto

Atwill is not a mythicist.

Doug Shaver

Simply calling a theory implausible begs the question. What is it about conspiracy theories in general that makes them, in general, implausible?

jakejonesiv

There is nothing wrong with conspiracy theories per se, as long as they can pass a reasonableness test. (In fact, I do think that proto-orthodox Christians engaged in an effort to rewrite history to make it appear as if proto-orthodoxy was the original Christianity.) We must account for the ability of the alleged conspirators to actually pull it off, the effort must be proportional to the goals attained, and we need to find some loose ends, redactor faituge, textual evidence of redaction and interpolation etc to be able to unravel the "truth." A perfect conspiracy would be undetectable.

The bigger the alleged conspiracy, the tougher it is to pull it off, and the harder to justify the ROI (Return on investment). Let me give an example. It was easily within the human power of "Eusebius" to forge the TF, so we may reasonably debate whether he did. But if we propose that Eusebius forged the entire pre-Nicene church fathers from scratch, there is a pretty big wall of WTF? to get over before we can view this as the exercise that a rational person (who presumably also had other things to do) would engage in.

Nothing is impossible, but sometimes it is easier to do something else. Or to explain the evidence in a more parsimonious manner.

Jake

jakejonesiv

Adam,

I would say buy the book. i think you would enjoy it.

It is worth the price to read how the disciples ate Lazarus, and then on Easter morning got confused, went to Lazarus' tomb, found it empty and concluded that Jesus had risen from the dead. It get's even funnier when the disciples and women leaving in one gospel meet themselves coming in another gospel. You have to understand that Joe proposes the Flavians wrote the gospels and the works of Josephus all at the same time as a big inside joke to... well I don't exactly remember why, but Joe has his reasons.

But if you think that Joseph Atwill's Caesar's Messiah is the only thing that would present a challenge to you, you are still wading in the kiddie end of the pool.

Jake

ApostateAbe

Conspiracies happen all of the time, of course, but conspiracy theories as we call them (secret, widespread and evil) are generally implausible for the reason that they requires a small group of people to have far more organization and leadership power than could be reasonably expected. They require that all whistleblowers be silenced, for example. We can imagine secret conspiracies for just about anything, and they play on our anti-authoritarian mentality, but we kinda need to keep the perspective that people are chaotic and not as easily controlled by other people as we tend to think. When there is a dangerous cult that wields excessive power over its members, it is generally easily perceptible from the outside, because that sort of social engineering isn't easy.

ApostateAbe

Sorry, I should have said, "Jesus-minimalist."

Toto

He's not even that.