Creating Christ is a book that is easy to underestimate. That may well be out of an instinctive kind of jealousy, as well: who wouldn’t have wanted to come up with a revolutionary theory about the single philosophy and institution that has shaped the world more than any other over the past 2,000 years? God knows I would have! But another, more benevolent, reason is that when we are used to reading nothing but the most reserved and nuanced explanations for a phenomenon, it becomes second nature to be suspicious of any interpretation which offers a simpler and leaner understanding of something that we have come to regard as mystically complex.
Now my personal acquaintance with ‘the Church of Rome’ was quite limited for a long time. Luckily, my mother did give me a bit of background on her side of the family, and one of the highlights of the family lore was her reference to her grandfather as a ‘Papist-eraser’. Growing up in a country with a dominantly Puritan culture, I can’t say that this view of the Church was ever seriously challenged. The slavishness towards authority made any follower of the edicts of Rome an easy target for ridicule. Now I did learn more about the Roman Catholic Church at a more factual level over the years, but it took quite a few years before my insight was brought to a qualitatively different level. It was an Italian friend of mine who rather matter-of-factly pointed out to me that the Church (as, indeed there is no pretender to that title) is the oldest institution in the history of mankind.
In a nutshell, the theory that Creating Christ develops is the idea that, beyond and underneath that incredibly rich and powerful institution in Vatican City, it was Christianity itself which was the product of the most powerful institution of the era in which it came into being, the Roman Empire. So, for all ideological suggestions to the contrary, which present Christianity as the hope for the powerless, the poor, and the immaterialist, the authors present the theory that Jesus Christ was an invention intended to consolidate the power of the Flavian emperors. I believe their theory, in essence, is inescapable, and whatever my ideas and suggestions are, I believe they would make their case stronger, and certainly not weaker.
The authors’ case is substantiated by archaeological/iconographic, textual, and circumstantial evidence. Prominent in the latter category is the considerable number of interpersonal connections between the Imperial household of Titus and ‘alternatively Jewish’ personae, of whom Flavius Josephus is the most widely known. Flavius Josephus was the Jewish leader who changed sides during the 1st Jewish-Roman war. The authors carefully explain how Josephus’ justification for doing so – he was a prolific writer and documented both his personal history and that of the Jewish people – basically amounted to the co-optation of the Messianic Jewish ideologies which were in fashion in those days, for purposes which were in line with those of emperors Vespasian and Titus. Forgive me if I’d like to avoid giving away more than the nutshell of a book I really think you should read for yourselves, which forces me to be compact in my critique as well.
The authors identify the Roman-friendly versions of Messianic Judaism that we have come to know as Christianity as the result of syncretism. Sun-gods, semi-gods, healing gods and the single God of Judaism all conspired to create a new religious brew. In itself this was not a unique event, but where I believe the case of the writers would gain consistency is if they were to emphasize, over the longer term, how this syncretism remained a winning recipe during the geographical expansion of Christianity throughout Europe, and elsewhere. Now they may protest that this would carry them well beyond the scope of their area of study, but this is exactly where I think they could make a more precisely circumscribed argument. Even if their central idea – that Christianity was an invention by the Flavian Emperors to support their worldly power – is perfectly accurate, it is helpful and enlightening to distinguish that particular photograph of ‘Christianity’ from what we perceive as such (being the result of historical developments), as well as from what the Messianic Jews themselves sought in ‘Christ’. Khristos, ‘the anointed’ – as we have learned from the Dead Seas scrolls – was a non-exclusive concept, like a vacant title up for grabs for anyone who was able to make a strong enough case. If we lose sight of the enormous gap that divides this ‘year zero minus 1’ from ‘year zero plus 1’ (or ‘plus 2,000, give or take’), it may give the impression that even the authors’ revolutionarily new theory substantially argues that somewhere in between, on C-day, what we know now as Christianity was pointedly created. It is easy for retrospect to turn into determinism.
The final point of criticism I’d like to leave here, is the limited attention Julius Caesar and emperor Augustus get as a mold for ‘the Father and the Son’. The authors describe the creation of Christianity as the adoption and transformation of a powerful ideology by the Flavian emperors, in order to subjugate the rebellious territory that was inspired by it, giving it the spiritual fuel to resist Pax Romana. There was a substantive internal motive, however, which was pushing for the development of a different type of ideology. The cursed kings had just made their creepy way back to Rome. The whole concept of empire was intended to get around the taboo of the aborted republic. The point is, the Roman leadership, still very much an upstart entity, was logically looking for alternative foundations for their power. Instinctively, they would always have looked eastwards, but as unattractive as Persian despotism may have seemed in its descriptions by Greek writers, and as mixed a symbol as Egyptian pharaonic power still was, even after the flirting of both Marcus Antonius and Caesar with Cleopatra, it was, perhaps, not strange per se they would have shopped for more spiritual gadgets in Judea. What is for sure is that no one could foresee then what stellar career this particular Khristos would have, both over the course of the following 2 millennia and retroactively. For me, Creating Christ has not only re-arranged – or let’s simply say: ordered – a vital passage in the history of religion, but it has also left me with a number of pertinent questions that are worth examining. The most prominent in my mind is whether the historical misinterpretation of the Flavian apocalypse – leading Christians as we know them to keep waiting for, i.e. postponing, the end of times – actually led the way, by default, for a linear conception of time which was resilient enough to dominate the cyclical idea which was closer to the experience of natural phenomena. And as such, it may even suggest that the super-natural was an – at least historically – necessary step for man to emancipate from nature.
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Theresa
Pieces of the mosaic continued to fall into place with the turning of each page
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 9, 2021
