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Copyright © (2009) JOHN HUDSON All Rights Reserved
BACKGROUND PAPER FOR THE DARK LADY PLAYERSWHAT GOT MARLOWE KILLED:THE GOSPELS AS ROMAN LITERARY SATIRESby John Hudson
Playwright and theology student Christopher Marlowe was writing a bookagainst the Trinity. It explained that Jesus was a deceiver in vain and idlestories, and that before Titus and Vespasian conquered Jerusalem,Christianity was unknown. He was right. Marlowe knew that the Gospelsare literary and not historical documents. He knew that they were a Romancreation at the court of the Flavian Caesars, a ‘book of riddles’. He wasgoing around giving this atheist lecture to senior courtiers before he was soconveniently killed.This paper covers what Marlowe knew in detail, and was given in a shorter form to the Eastern Great Lakes Bible Society annual conference.
 
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1. OVERVIEW
Sometime in the third century, the literary critic Porphyry of Tyre wrote a 15volume book claiming that writers of the Gospels were “inventors, not narrators of events” and as a result got his books burnt.
 
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In 1835, D. F. Strauss did detailedliterary analysis showing that the majority of the text of the Gospels was not“faithful narration” of historical events, but by implication was a literary creation,and got his work banned.
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More recently, critics from non Christian faiths havepassionately argued that the NT documents are literary fictions. For instance, theHindu historian N. S. Rajaram wrote that :“The Jesus of Christianity never existed! ….In summary, the whole of Christianity, including the story of the crucifixion of Jesus is a later fabrication,created to gain support of the Roman Empire……(which) fabricated large parts of the New Testament to destroy the Jews of Palestine who were in a constantstate of rebellion against the Romans. The mythical Jesus was created tofacilitate this process. The fact that the Gospels are a later fabrication by authorswho were agents of the Roman Empire becomes clear upon examining their language and content.”
 
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 Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic scholars have all had their voices ignored in theStates, as has the Jewish literary critic, Harold Bloom when he stated that Jesuswas simply the world’s best known “literary character”.
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This minority view hasreceived little attention in a country
 
where 87% of the population are noteducated sufficiently to analyze multiple pieces of data in a complex document,
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 and where 93% believe in a Historical Jesus,
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a figure much higher than in other western nations.
 
Yet new literary analysis is proving that those scholars of other faiths were right. It is conventionally recognized that the Gospels began to bewritten around the year 80CE following the Roman-Jewish war, about the sametime indeed that Josephus began to write his massive account of that war. Thelatest research is beginning to show that both documents refer to each other inter-textually, and implies that the Gospels were created as a form of Romanwar propaganda, comic literary satires, targeted against the Jewish people, notso different perhaps, from the comic books featuring Arab superheroes with pro-American values, which formed part of the US Army’s strategy for rebuildingIraq.
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By the end of the Roman-Jewish war, and after the destruction of Jerusalem inthe year 70CE, Palestine had been devastated and at least a million people hadbeen killed. The Romans were confronted with the task of rebuilding the countryand preventing any more outbreaks of religiously motivated terrorism (like theburning of Rome in 64CE). Caligula’s attempt at imposing the Caesar cult hadbeen unsuccessful, so instead they decided to adopt a stealth approach. Theywould create a covert form of Caesar worship.Having burnt most of the Torah scrolls to destroy their dangerous content, theRomans would create a new, pro-Roman, miniature Torah, but divided into thesame five books and themes. It would be called the book of Matthias (Matthew),named perhaps after the Jewish leader who had become the chief Romanpropagandist, Josephus ben Matthias. As one British chieftain complained, theRomans plunder and butcher, and call it ‘Empire’. They create desolation and callit ‘peace’.
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With precisely the same sense of irony, the Romans devastatedJudea and called their new book a ‘Gospel’ (
evangelion
) a technical wordmeaning ‘good news of (Roman) military victory’.
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OPERATION GOSPEL was aPR exercise so that the Jews would view the events symbolizing the battles inwhich they had been defeated—as wonderful and miraculous events!The amusing hero of this new book, in the tradition of Moses or Joshua, would bea literary character called Yeshua (Gk
Jesus
) whose name meant ‘God Saves’ or Savior. The Jews could worship him under that name instead of the equivalentword in Latin
Soter 
, by which Caesar was normally worshipped. The Jews wouldworship what they thought to be the Lord (Hebrew
 Adonai,
the traditional nameused for God) …..but would really be praying to Vespasian and later TitusCaesar who the rest of the world worshipped also as Lord (
Kyrios
).The clincher was that the key events in the career of Jesus were written basedon the Roman battles in Palestine. Moreover, they appear 
in the same order 
as
of 00

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sebreathnach

A great thesis... waiting to be written. And the inclusion of references from Porpyry (whom few refer to) to Stauffer, etc., will greatly augment Joseph Atwill's alarming discoveries. My own view is that Francesco Carotta's work is , as an initial opener, the most effective way to introduce the most collosal question of our age -- a question whose consequences are at one with the entire notion of Christianity and the horrendous damages it has inflicted -- and continues to inflict -- upon the human psyche. Thereafter, of course, the headier wine of Atwill's claims come into focus and give rise to questions that are as yet unimaginable. Like: How did the entire history of the past 2,000 years allow such charlatans to get away with such inhuman behaviour??? In this context Marlowe, like Porpyry and Reuchlin, Annie Besant, Joseph McCabe, and hundreds of others revisit the modern reader with renewed energy. It is interesting, for example, to read Karl Kautsky anew, in the light of Atwill’s discoveries: especially his Foundations of Christianity. One can see that the only thing missing from his scientific analysis of Christianity is Atwill’s discoveries, without which he comes as close as can be to revealing that Christianity is a fabrication of unproveable hypotheses -- indeed, false and forged propositions -- which depend solely , entirely and absolutely upon the existence of a mythical character called Jesus of Nazareth. And now that the world knows that the entire Mediteranean Myth has been built upon a couple of Roman comics, how shall it react when it comes to realise what has happened. Again Marlowe is more than a clue to how the myth-makers will react to those who try to take away their world-wide power. Since the Englightenment, it is without doubt the greatest criminological issue of our time, even if it is swallowed up in oceans of horse-manure! Seamus Breathnach www.irish-criminology.com

reply06 / 24 / 2009
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