American Bible scholar claims ancient ‘confessions’ prove story of Jesus Christ was entirely fabricated by Roman aristocrats

Short form: Some Guy has read the same stuff scholars have been reading for millenia (“The Jewish War” by Titus Flavius Josephus) and has concluded that Jesus Christ, and thus Christianity, was invented out of whole cloth by Roman aristocrats.

The argument goes:

First Century Roman #1: “Hmm. These Judean Jews are troublesome. Constantly rebelling, won’t pay their taxes. Every time we lay a military beatdown on them, they just get snippier. What to do?”

First Century Roman #2: “Hey, don’t the Jews have some sort of a legend about a forthcoming messiah? What say we invent one for them, one that says to ‘turn the other cheek’ and to pay your taxes?”

First Century Roman #2: “Sounds good, but won’t they notice that this guy doesn’t actually exist?”

First Century Roman #1: “Well, what if we say they guy has *already* lived and died and performed a bunch of miracles? It’s not like the Judeans can look up his death certificate on Google.”

First Century Roman #2: “Brilliant!”

First Century Roman #: “Brilliant!”

While an interesting hypothesis, from my reading of the admittedly Daily Mail article what I get is that the guy came to this conclusion by reading something you can buy on Amazon and seeing something that two thousand years of readers haven’t seen before. While it is of course possible that these confessions could have gone unnoticed by everybody for this long, it seems at best very unlikely. Sadly, we’ve reached a point (or, perhaps just as likely, we’ve always been there) where someone can pull something like this directly out of their keister and get taken seriously. Perhaps even get a recurring “guest expert” spot on a show on a reputedly respectable TV network.

Perhaps shockingly, the guy has a book.