Introduction
Over the past 2,000 years, most people have never questioned whether Jesus of Nazareth existed as a historical figure. Yet it must be noted that just a century ago scholars assumed that Abraham existed, and until 50 years ago it was the consensus that Moses was historical as well. Now the past two decades have seen growing doubt from experts toward the historicity of both David and Solomon. On this basis alone, it should not be shocking that leading edge scholars are today putting forth a compelling case that Jesus never existed as a man who walked the earth, and that the earliest Christians worshiped a Jesus Christ who was strictly a heavenly figure.
It is not the main goal of this writing to merely lay out that case, but to go well beyond that, presenting the full story of how Christianity was born out of Judaism and popularized without a human Jesus. To accommodate a wide audience, I have attempted to write in a way accessible to a non-scholarly crowd, but well-presented and fully-cited enough to warrant scholarly consideration.
To start with all the necessary context for the eventual birth of Christianity, in Chapter 1 we’ll dive into the world of the ancient Israelites, separating out the Bible’s mythology from reality. Chapter 2 will move on to reveal the great and greatly overlooked influence of Zoroastrian religion on the shaping of Judaism during their 200 years as part of the Persian Empire. Chapters 3 and 4 will cover the dramatic events of the Jews under the Greek rulers who succeeded Alexander of Macedon. We’ll witness the great Maccabean revolt and establishment of an independent Jewish theocracy, as well as the emergence of the pivotal Essene sect of Jews who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. Chapters 5 and 6 will then examine the mounting resentment and fanaticism of the Jews under the cruelly oppressive rule of King Herod and the domineering Roman Empire which fans the flames of messianic expectation and violent acts of revolt.
Beginning in Chapter 7 we’ll see how the first Christians emerged out of the Essene movement whose radical doctrines, greatly influenced by Persian religion, perfectly match that of men like John the Baptist and the founding apostles Peter and John. It is their unique method of scriptural analysis and penchant for holy visions that utterly convinced their followers that the Son of God, Lord Jesus, had been revealed to them—his sacrificial crucifixion in the heavens, and his imminent arrival to usher in the End Times.
We’ll then examine the surprising way in which the apostle Paul, a latecomer to the new faith, largely hijacked the movement started by Jewish messianic fanatics and stripped it of its Judaism to win Greek and Roman converts to what he essentially repackaged as a salvation cult in the style of many other such “mystery religions” popular across the empire in his day.
The simmering tension between Jews and Romans will break out into a catastrophic all-out war in 66 to 73 CE, and in Chapters 11-13, we’ll dive into the drama of this massive conflagration so as to understand its utterly profound effects on the course of both Christianity and Judaism. It is not until the decades following this war that we finally see the composition of the earliest Christian gospels, each published anonymously. Only here, starting in Chapter 15, are we first introduced to the notion of a Jesus who walked the earth a few generations before. We’ll explore the possible motivations for these devotional writings, and in following chapters we’ll take an in depth look at the many marked differences between the various gospels, books of acts, and books of revelations written during this era.
Our final chapters will tell the story of a Christianity that was fractured into inimical sects from its very inception, and how one such well-positioned sect emerged victorious by successfully merging itself with the government of the Roman Empire and using its newfound power to crush both its fellow Christian rivals and all forms of other religious practice, establishing itself as the de facto religion of the West for two millennia.
Note About Images
As both an author and visual artist, from the very start of this project, I envisioned a book richly illustrated with hundreds of images—setting it apart from a typical history publication on this or any topic. To that aim, frequent maps are provided to assist geographical understanding; portraits of characters—historically informed where possible—are included to help humanize what might otherwise be an overwhelming number of names; and visual depictions of key actions and events are used to add life to the flow of the historical narrative.
Among the images provided, many are sourced from the public domain, but I have also used burgeoning AI and more traditional computer art tools to create representations of a huge number of subjects for which no adequate representative image could otherwise be found.
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