Religion
In reply to the discussion: Ancient Confession Found: 'We Invented Jesus Christ' [View all]Agnosticsherbet
(11,619 posts)The article says, "Many of the parallels are conceptual or poetic, so they aren't all immediately obvious. After all, the authors did not want the average believer to see what they were doing, but they did want the alert reader to see it. An educated Roman in the ruling class would probably have recognised the literary game being played."
So what Atwill has done is say, if you interpret the works in this way, like a highly educated Roman in the first century, you will see it was just a ruse, a con, propaganda.
Well, biblical scholars, street preachers, and "Jesus freaks out in the streets handing tickets out for god" have been reading and interpreting ambiguous statements for a very long time. I will read his books, but from the PR release it appears that he is just teaching an alternate way to interpret the a body of literature handed down from about 1500 to 2000 years.
Finally, it is conceivable that an imperial state that created and managed a religion that deified their emperors as Gods would have created another false religion to keep the peasants happy. At the same time that the Christian Pot came to boil, Cults of Attis, Cybele, Mysteries of Isis, Trophonius, Dionysian Mysteries, Eleusinian Mysteries, and Mithraic Mysteries (to name just a few) abounded in the empire. Many of these cults appealed to a narrow demograph9c. Mithraic was a cult of the legions, Christianity of the poor, and the others each had their own followers.