WHY AM I DOING THIS RESEARCH?

WHY?

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* [ ] numbers inside squared brackets indicate an endnote, which can be read at the bottom of this page.

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I study and write about the ancient world for one simple reason: like many historians, I'm fascinated by it. The puzzle of what really happened — and how we can possibly know — never gets old. Historical investigation, at its best, is a disciplined and independent-minded pursuit of the past, and should not repeat tradition, belief, or faith claims when the evidence contradicts them.

Good history means keeping an open mind. It means listening to every scrap of evidence, asking awkward questions, testing what doesn't quite fit, and being ready — however reluctantly — to change your mind when the facts demand it. Even the smallest fragment can overturn a cherished story. Sometimes that's uncomfortable; but we have to deal with that. History isn't a fixed slab of "what happened". It's a moving argument about the past.

 

My own interpretations challenge several long-standing assumptions in classical scholarship. I lay out the evidence as clearly and transparently as possible — not to provoke, but because that's where the material leads. To my knowledge, Classical Studies has not yet given this evidence the sustained attention it deserves, despite its enormous importance for understanding the history of Rome. Recognising and addressing it is essential if we want a fuller picture, and I present the situation as I currently understand it.

 

Fairly recently, the American historian Barry Strauss put it neatly in an interview for Antigone, the open forum for Classics, when speaking about one of his books:

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"Historians succeed when they are open-minded about the evidence they're approaching.

They should hope to be surprised by it. The historian's job is only done properly when opinions

are changed during the process of rsearching the evidence."
— 'The War That Made the Roman Empire: An Interview with Barry Strauss'

 

That's exactly how I work. There's no point declaring your commitment to open-minded history if you retreat the moment the evidence becomes awkward. Good historians don't flinch when things get controversial — they dig in to verify or refute; and they shouldn't be insulted when they do. 

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The great English classicist Dame Mary Beard once wrote in her book SPQR:

 

"Roman history is always being rewritten, and always has been; in some ways

we know more about ancient Rome than the Romans themselves did.

Roman history, in other words, is a work in progress." (p. 16)

And:

"If the job of the historian of early Rome is to squeeze every single

piece of surviving evidence for all it can tell us, by the first century CE

the question is how to select the pieces of evidence that tell us the most." (p. 335)

 

That, too, is my approach — always squeezing the evidence for what it can give, knowing that the story is never finished. It's also worth saying plainly: there's little sense in celebrating openness and revision if you turn away the moment the findings unsettle accepted wisdom. History moves forward only when we keep looking, even when it's uncomfortable.

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The words of Professor Brent D. Shaw also strike a chord:

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"Often the purpose of historical research is to create by explanation

and description; occasionally, however, it is destruction that is required."
— 'Raising and Killing Children: Two Roman Myths',

Mnemosyne, Series IV, Vol. LIV Fasc. I (February 2001)

 

Shaw later reflected on this in his 2015 article "The Myth of the Neronian Persecution", and in his "Response to Christopher Jones: The Historicity of the Neronian Persecution", observing:

 

"In reference to a rather different problem, I once wrote that the purpose

of historical research is to create by description and explanation but that sometimes

it is destruction that is required. So it is in this case."

 

He's right. Sometimes historians have to dismantle ideas when the evidence won't hold them up. I believe this same attitude should guide us even when the evidence is controversial — controversial does not automatically mean wrong. Some material is uncomfortable, and yet it must still be followed where it leads. One of those subjects is the Roman elite origins of Christianity. To my mind, the field of Biblical and New Testament studies has long known of some of this evidence, yet largely dismissed it. It presents itself as dedicated to understanding how Christianity began and how the New Testament was written, and by whom. But the evidence, as it stands, does not support the traditional story of Christian origins. Ignoring that evidence is a choice of method, not a reflection of what the material actually says.

 

Some scholars — notably Associate Professor Robyn Faith Walsh and Professor Candida Moss — have offered valuable insights. Both argue that educated Roman writers were responsible for producing the Synoptic gospels. Walsh suggests that these “Roman literary elites” were educated individuals who might have been slaves, freedpeople, or born into modest backgrounds (The Origins of Early Christian Literature, pages 15–16). Moss focuses on enslaved intellectual labour and the ethics of recognising marginalised contributors (God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible).

 

These perspectives have advanced the conversation by showing that the New Testament texts were not simple records of oral memories. Yet they stop short of tackling a fundamental issue: motive.

Why would educated writers, not necessarily rich or well-connected, invest time and resources in creating and preserving these works with no clear personal gain? Who first read them, deemed them authoritative, and ensured their survival?

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Reviews of Walsh's book have noted this gap. They caution that her argument may underplay the role of "communities" or oral tradition in spreading the Gospels' message. But appealing to "communities" as an explanation simply restates an assumption: the texts exist because communities did, and we know the communities existed because the texts survive. That's circular reasoning — and we still have no inscriptions, records, or archaeological traces of Christian group activity in the mid-first century.

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The evidence I'm pursuing offers a way out of that circle. It fills the motive gap without imagining invisible communities. After 70 CE, Rome's ruling families, who controlled the Mediterranean world, had both the resources and the political incentive to craft and preserve literature that reframed the Jewish War and promoted submission to imperial authority. In this context, Christianity looks less like an accidental grassroots movement and more like a deliberate project shaped by the Roman oligarchy. That's why my work concentrates on the Roman aristocracy, the Roman–Jewish War of 66–70/73 CE, and the origins of Christianity. These questions demand a conversation between Classical and Biblical studies — two fields that, for too long, have spoken past each other — by which I mean, they've talked without really listening.

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The Gospel stories themselves are not unique creations. This may not be news to many, but for those who are unaware, I offer the following examples. Set aside the supernatural moments — the darkened sky, the dead walking — and almost every episode borrows or adapts familiar Mediterranean material. The "virgin birth" echoes both Isaiah 7:14 and Greco-Roman heroic myths of divine conception (Perseus, Heracles, Alexander). Healing and miracle tales resemble those of Asclepius and other wonder-workers. Ethical sayings about forgiveness, neighbour-love, and anger owe much to Stoic and Jewish wisdom traditions. The authors wove Jewish scripture into the Jesus story to attempt to show that prophecy was fulfilled — even when the original Hebrew texts, like Psalm 22, which is a personal expression of grief, not a prophecy of crucifixion, had nothing to do with a future messiah.

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The Popular Story of

Christianity's Origins

 

If the first question is why we do history, the next is what we think we already know. The story most people hear about the beginnings of Christianity is neat, familiar — and, as it turns out, not well supported by the evidence.

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The popular version runs something like this:
 

Christianity grew naturally out of Judaism. It began with small, devout Jewish groups — ordinary, mostly illiterate followers — who shared stories and teachings about Jesus by word of mouth, passed down from the time of his ministry (approx. 27/29-30-33 CE). Those tales were later written down by more educated members of the early Church. Over the next few centuries, the movement supposedly expanded across the Mediterranean until, around the year 312 CE, Emperor Constantine adopted it, turning a once-marginal faith into the religion of Rome, with elites and political players who were fighting for status using fear to draw followers.

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It's an appealing story: grassroots origins, humble beginnings, and eventual triumph. But it doesn't fit the evidence.

 

For one thing, the literacy rates of the period make this narrative implausible. The evidence we have about reading and writing in the first century CE contradicts the idea that illiterate or semi-literate followers could have composed texts rich in Greek philosophy and rhetorical style. There is simply no reliable evidence to support the first half of the popular story — the part that assumes the Gospels began as oral traditions passed along by peasant communities.

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This website sets out to introduce the material showing that Rome's involvement with Christianity didn't begin later, under Constantine, but at the very start. The evidence points instead to a movement that was written, edited, and shaped from within the circles of Roman power. To many readers, the Gospels appear to be the work of modestly educated Greek speakers — perhaps converts within new Jewish groups/sects — but that impression was carefully constructed.

 

Supporters of the traditional story often highlight archaeological finds or textual fragments to argue for a slow, "bottom-up" development of Christianity: regional variations in practice, doctrinal disputes, or local differences in ritual. At first glance, that patchwork diversity seems to undermine the idea of elite control. Yet, as every student of empire knows, Roman rule rarely imposed uniformity overnight.

When Rome conquered a territory, it generally allowed local customs to continue — so long as they didn't threaten stability — before gradually introducing its own political and religious order. Diversity, then, is not proof of independence. It is precisely what we would expect from a system of indirect imperial control: a gradual, flexible process that blended Roman authority with local traditions.

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Seen this way, the eventual fusion of Church + Empire was not a historical surprise but the predictable outcome of how Rome managed new provinces — through adaptation, toleration, and selective incorporation. As for the contradictions within the Gospels, they are often presented as signs of independent traditions or competing communities. But disagreements don't necessarily mean ignorance. The Roman elite disagreed — vigorously — about many things. Divergence was part of the intellectual landscape.

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Contradictions could also serve a purpose. They allowed the same story to speak to different audiences: Gentiles or Jews, philosophers or the devout. A simplified way to think of it might be:

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• 'Mark' emphasises endurance in suffering;

• 'Matthew' grounds authority in Jewish scripture;

• 'Luke' adds literary polish and rhetorical style;

• 'John' leans toward theology and speculation.

 

The Gospels, in other words, reflect the development — and different ideas of direction — within one educated network rather than the voices of separate, grass-roots communities. Consider one example: the cleansing of the Temple. In Mark 11:15–19, Matthew 21:12–17, and Luke 19:45–48, Jesus drives out the money-changers in Jerusalem during his final week — the spark that leads to his arrest. In John 2:13–22, the same episode occurs at the start of his ministry, after the wedding at Cana. The shift isn't ignorance; it's design. John uses the scene to introduce Jesus as the "new Temple", turning theology into narrative structure.

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This kind of deliberate reshaping was standard practice among ancient writers. Take the figure known to us as Josephus, currently thought to be a first-century Jewish historian whose works describe the Roman–Jewish War. In The Jewish War he presents the destruction of the Temple as an act of tragic inevitability — the result of factional chaos and divine judgement — and portrays Titus as reluctant to see it burn. Yet in Jewish Antiquities, written later, the same event becomes the will of God executed through Rome. Two tellings of one story, crafted to suit different audiences and political needs.

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Roman authors did this all the time. The same event could be retold to flatter one patron, justify another, or align with the shifting rhetoric of empire. The Gospels' differences fit comfortably within that literary world. Even stylistic variation doesn't prove independence. The men we know as Plutarch, Tacitus, and Suetonius all wrote about the Caesars, each in his own voice. Variation was part of elite literary culture — and in fact, a hallmark of it. Style was how authors signalled education, audience, and intent.

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The nineteenth-century assumption that the Gospels came from an oral, peasant tradition has been repeated so often it has hardened into “truth.” But repetition isn't evidence. Some modern New Testament scholars now question it, yet it still lingers as a convenient explanation for difficult questions. Take, for instance, the First Epistle to the Corinthians 15:1–8, often cited as proof of oral transmission. The context of the letter is the man known to us as 'Paul' discussing the information he received about the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. It's said that 'Paul' "received" the gospel from those who were in Christ before him. But the text itself says something else: that the message came from scripture, not from living witnesses.

 

That leads to a deeper problem — the historicity of 'Paul' himself. The man we call 'Paul' (or 'Saul') is treated as one of the best-attested early Christians. Yet no contemporary, first-hand evidence verifies his existence or his claims. The letters attributed to him are the only source; there is no external evidence. And they tell us nothing independently confirmable about his life. A recent assessment published by Cambridge University Press questions the long-accepted assumption that these letters date to the 40s–60s CE. Using modern literacy-based analysis, it places their composition in the second century CE (101–200) — squarely within the period of Flavian influence and imperial control over literature.

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​Traditionalists object that this argument relies on "absence of evidence". But that objection only holds water when an area hasn't been properly examined — which, in this case, it has. The real issue is discomfort: if the Pauline letters belong to the second century, the tidy timeline of early Christianity collapses. The supposed "bridge" between the life of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels disappears, leaving a forty-year gap with no secure historical record.

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That, understandably, unsettles scholars who have built careers on the earlier chronology. But evidence isn't obliged to respect our preferences. The familiar grassroots story of Christianity — local communities, oral traditions, and heroic missionaries — may be comforting. Yet comfort is not the goal of good history. The evidence shows something more deliberate, more political, and much more Roman. Some scholars still defend the traditional story, even when the evidence pulls the other way. A few continue to argue that the Gospels were written before 70 CE.

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The Jewish War of 70 CE and the Writing of the Gospels

 

All of this brings us to a decisive moment — the Jewish War of 70 CE, an event whose shockwaves shaped both the Roman world and the literature that followed. It is fair to ask why one might question long-standing scholarly views. My position is that what matters most is not who presents an argument but whether the evidence itself is sound. During my own formal studies, I was never taught to avoid questioning established conclusions — quite the opposite. The discipline of history demands that we follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if that means re-examining what respected figures have long assumed to be true.

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The four canonical Gospels — 'Mark', 'Matthew', 'Luke', and 'John' — are widely recognised as problematic sources (see “Christianity” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed., Oxford University Press). They were written after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, but their narratives were deliberately backdated about forty years to make it appear as though that destruction had been “foretold".

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This technique, known as vaticinium ex eventu — prophecy after the fact — was common in ancient literature. We see it in Virgil, who framed prophecies of Rome's destiny in the Aeneid ('Death and the Optimistic Prophecy in Virgil's Aeneid', pages 128–29); in Horace, Herodotus, and Pindar, all of whom used retrospective "prophecies" to lend authority to their narratives. Earlier Jewish and Babylonian texts did the same, such as the Book of Daniel and the Marduk Prophecy.

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The Gospel writers followed this well-established pattern. In passages like Mark 13, Jesus "predicts" the fall of Jerusalem — a literary choice, not an eyewitness account.

 

Evidence for a post-70 CE authorship also comes from the striking parallels between the Gospels and the Roman military campaign in Judea, led by Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus. The satirical tone of certain Gospel passages —

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"How can Satan cast out Satan?" (Mark 3:23)
"If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot last." (Mark 3:24)
"Now if Satan has rebelled against himself and is divided, he cannot stand either —

it is the end of him." (Mark 3:26)

 

— echoes the internal strife among Jewish factions described by Josephus in The Jewish War. In that conflict, Jewish groups/sects tore one another apart, effectively destroying themselves from within — the very scenario Rome wished to emphasise. So although not explicitly said, the phrase "Satan casting out Satan" reads, in this context, as satire: Jerusalem becomes the "House of Satan" consuming itself in chaos while Rome restores order.

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The themes and structure of the Gospels, in short, fit Rome's political needs after the war far better than the traditional timeline placing Jesus in the 30s CE. The Gospel narrative is not an independent religious memory but a literary recasting of recent events from the Roman–Jewish War — the trauma that reshaped the Mediterranean world.

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Individually, these parallels might be dismissed as coincidence. But taken together, they reveal a clear pattern. When a man called Joseph Atwill first highlighted these sequential parallels in Caesar's Messiah, his presentation was dismissed by many as sensationalist. But the controversy obscured the core of his argument: that comparative textual analysis shows a structured relationship between The Jewish War and the Synoptic gospels. Critics labelled it "fringe" or "conspiratorial", yet the method itself — comparing primary texts for sequence, theme, and intent — is one of the oldest tools of classical and biblical scholarship.

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Historians routinely use it when studying the "Synoptic Problem" or identifying sources in Greek and Roman historiography - that is, Greek and Roman historical writing. In fact, comparative analysis is central to understanding literary borrowing in antiquity. As I argue elsewhere, the problem is not the method, but where it leads.

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Attempts to refute these parallels often rest on mis-readings. For example, it is sometimes claimed that Titus did not begin his campaign in Galilee — unlike Jesus's ministry — but in Judea, when he met Vespasian at Ptolemais (War 3.60–66). Yet the record shows otherwise: after meeting at Akko-Ptolemais (modern Acre), father and son advanced directly into Galilee (War 3.111–117), where Titus had his first direct, in-person, military engagements in that campaign.

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Another common objection concerns the story of the Gadarene demoniac, found in Mark 5:1 and Luke 8:26–30, where a "legion" of demons possesses a man and is driven into a herd of pigs that rush into the sea. Critics argue that no such parallel exists in The Jewish War because a Roman legion was, by definition, an army, not a band of rebels. But in War 4.402–415, Josephus describes insurgent bands "possessed by a madness that spread", plundering villages before vanishing into the wilderness — "smaller than an army but larger than a mere band of robbers." This description matches the approximate size of a Roman legion at that time, which was the largest unit of the Roman army but not the entire army. The "legion of demons", then, represents a literary parody of Rome's campaign in Galilee.

 

A sober and non-polemical discussion of these sequential parallels can be found in An Analysis of Claimed Sequential Narrative Parallels Between The Jewish War and the Synoptic Gospels — which also summarises feedback from The Journal of Roman Studies.

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Ancient literacy evidence further supports elite authorship. As Ancient Libraries (Jason König, Katerina Oikonomopoulou, and Greg Woolf, pages 6–7, 301) notes, reading and writing were limited to a small educated class. Catherine Hezser estimates Jewish literacy in Roman Palestine at "well below 10–15 percent" (Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, p. 496). Ancient works were written to be heard, not read, by the wider population.

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Publishing was a privilege of wealth. Creating and copying manuscripts required imported papyrus or vellum, trained scribes, dry and secure storage, and patronage. In such conditions, no large-scale, popular literary movement could exist outside the control of elite networks. The very survival of the Gospels demonstrates they were produced and preserved within that sphere.

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​Historicity

 

If the Gospels were written after 70 CE and in the shadow of Rome's victory, the next question is obvious: what, if anything, in them is historical?

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They could only have been produced and preserved under the conditions already described — conditions available only to the wealthy and educated. They cannot, and indeed should not, be separated from those conditions and treated as exceptional. The texts bear all the fingerprints of elite craftsmanship: literary polish, rhetorical poise, and an ease with both Jewish scripture and Greco-Roman storytelling. The miracles, too, are hardly unique. Turning water into wine, calming storms, raising the dead — these are set-pieces familiar from the wider Mediterranean world. Greek and Roman heroes such as Asclepius, Hercules, and Dionysus did the same, as did prophets in Jewish tradition. The Gospels sit comfortably inside that tradition. They were not written by credulous villagers, but by authors steeped in the literary and theological tropes of their age.

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You might think that makes them derivative. It doesn't — it makes them Roman. The Gospel writers weren't copying; they were re-working the forms and conventions of their own culture, just as Virgil re-worked Homer. This is why the study of Christianity's origins can't stop at theology. It belongs just as much to Classics — the study of how the literate elite of the Roman world wrote, borrowed, and re-imagined their past. Here lies one of academia's quiet divides. Many New Testament scholars begin by assuming Jesus's historicity. Many classicists, on the other hand, sidestep the question or simply note that no reliable evidence confirms his existence. On a surface reading of the sources, there is nothing contemporary or independent that verifies the Gospel narrative.

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The texts cannot serve as their own proof. They borrow heavily from earlier Jewish and Greco-Roman literature, so they can't be treated as eyewitness accounts. Archaeological detail — real places, plausible customs, authentic names — only shows that the authors had access to accurate information. Familiarity is not proof, as any good historian knows. For many classicists, the "historical Jesus" question has often felt insoluble — or professionally awkward. Cathryn Nixey, in Heresy, described a long-standing "gentlemen's agreement": classicists study the 'history' and 'mythology' of the pagan gods; theologians study the Christian one (Heresay, p. 23). Andrew Copson, reviewing her book, called it a “conspiracy of silence.” The classicist Sarah Bond has written on the same divide, noting how these two fields have too often worked in parallel rather than in conversation. The result is that Christian origins have frequently escaped the same level of scrutiny we apply to every other ancient belief system.

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Take Nazareth. The Gospels treat it as Jesus's hometown, but archaeology tells a different story. Currently, there is no evidence that a settlement existed there in the early first century CE — only agricultural installations and tombs dating to after 70 CE, when refugees from Jerusalem resettled in Galilee — as detailed here. The Nazareth of the Gospels appears to be an anachronism, written back into history.

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Defenders of historicity point to Josephus, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, and Suetonius as "independent" witnesses. But they're not, and it cannot be stated as fact that these writers were not repeating stories already circulating in Christian sources; there is, in fact, much more going on with these authors — a subject I'll explore fully in my next book. Even if we take Josephus's Testimonium Flavianum as genuine — which is doubtful — it adds nothing we don't already find in the Gospels themselves. By the time they wrote, the myth was already established. They appear to testify to its supposed literary spread — not its factual basis.

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Another popular claim is that "we have more sources for Jesus than for Alexander the Great". We don't. The sources for Alexander are earlier, fuller, and independent. Those for Jesus all stem from one textual tradition. All this leads to a simple point: the origins of Christianity must be studied with the same methods historians apply elsewhere — prosopography, textual comparison, political context — without the insulation of inherited assumptions.

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In that light, dismissing the Roman elite as possible authors of the New Testament looks premature. They had every means and motive: wealth, scribes, education, political control, and a clear incentive to shape ideology. Other examples of Roman propaganda and ideological control — from Augustus's Res Gestae Divi Augusti (The Deeds of the Divine Augustus) — an autobiographical inscription designed to promote his achievements — to Flavian monuments — show exactly how power wrote its own story. Though not a religious text, the Res Gestae Divi Augusti functioned as a sacred political narrative, blending self-promotion and moral authority to shape imperial identity.

 

After 70 CE, a small network of interconnected families dominated the empire's politics, culture, and publishing. The New Testament fits neatly within that system — not as an outlier, but as another chapter in Rome's long history of writing its power into permanence. Pulling the threads together, the survey of the ancient texts shows two things. First, after 70 CE an oligarchic network in Rome controlled the Mediterranean's literary production — the major histories and letters we still read, from"“Flavius Josephus" to Pliny the Younger and Tacitus. Second, behind the New Testament's Jesus stands a historical individual. Not an obscure Galilean preacher of the 30s, but a very wealthy Roman aristocrat, a member of the ruling elite and a descendant of Herod the Great, active roughly from the mid–first to the early second century CE. In context, his name appears to be 'encoded' in the original Greek — most clearly in the Book of Revelation.

A Roman Oligarchy: Who Controlled the Empire - and Its History

 

If the Gospels emerged from Rome's literary circles, we must ask: who, precisely, controlled those circles?

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The idea of a Roman oligarchy is not new. In 1939, the historian and classicist Sir Ronald Syme revolutionised the field with his landmark work The Roman Revolution — a book he described himself as “a rather a shocking one that nobody will like” (Select correspondence of Ronald Syme, pages 165-167) In it, Syme made two striking statements:

 

"In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy,

an oligarchy lurks behind the facade; and Roman history, Republican or Imperial,

is the history of the governing class."

 

And also:

 

"The policy and acts of the Roman People were guided by an oligarchy, its

annals were written in an oligarchic spirit" (Roman Revolution, pages 7-8).

 

Syme's point was devastatingly simple: Rome was never truly democratic. Power lay not with "the people", but with a tight network of aristocratic families bound by blood, marriage, and mutual interest. He showed that when Augustus (born Gaius Octavius) seized power after the civil wars, he rebranded monarchy as "restored republic". In reality, he built a durable imperial oligarchy — government by the few, dressed in the language of tradition. The name "Augustus" itself was a masterstroke of propaganda, meaning "blessed by the gods", chosen to sanctify his rule.

 

Some scholars have claimed Syme neglected the archaeological record, but as Tonio Hölscher later pointed out, Syme fully acknowledged material evidence where it mattered (Select Correspondence of Ronald Syme, pages 8-10). His method was prosopography — the study of how individuals and families were connected through birth, marriage, and adoption. This approach let him map the webs of power behind political events, revealing the real engines of Rome's history.

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Prosopography, in Syme's hands, answered two essential questions:
 

First: what motivated political action? It exposed how personal and family interests shaped policy.
 

Second: who truly held power? It uncovered the dynastic structures that kept control within a small social circle — the emperor's own class.

 

When The Roman Revolution appeared, it struck a nerve. Politicians and historians alike saw uncomfortable parallels between Syme's Rome and the 20th century's authoritarian regimes (those of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin). The controversy did not stem from the claim that Rome had elites — as classicists such as Mary Beard herself has observed, "nobody was fooled". Romans knew perfectly well who held power. What disturbed readers was Syme's argument that the oligarchy endured, merely adapting its rhetoric. The fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire, he showed, were not ruptures but a rebranding of the same ruling class. It was this continuity — not the existence of elites — that made the book so unsettling. One contemporary, Harold Julian Amery, a British Conservative Party politician, wrote Syme a congratulatory letter with a touch of anxiety when Syme received his knighthood in 1959:

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"The Roman Revolution remains one of the great modern political text-books —

though from the point of view of the stability of our society I trust it will never be

too widely read in political circles!" (Select Correspondence of Ronald Syme, p. 77).

 

Syme's insight matters here because his framework exposes the political machinery that also controlled ideas, education, and publication. The same oligarchy that managed Rome's provinces managed its history.

Building on Syme's method, I have applied prosopography to the surviving evidence of the period from the Roman–Jewish War of 66–73 CE through to the reign of Emperor Constantine. The results point to a ruling elite made up of three interconnected families: the Flavians, the Herodian royal line (descendants of Herod the Great), and the Calpurnius Pisos — an old aristocratic senatorial dynasty known for the Pisonian Conspiracy, a failed plot to replace Nero with Gaius Calpurnius Piso. However, because my work also examines the origins of Christianity, it necessarily extends into the early first century CE and slightly before, addressing the ruling oligarchy of that earlier period — for example, the family connections between Herod the Great, Mark Antony, Cleopatra, and Seneca the Younger. The same family names appear, often subtly, in the New Testament itself.

 

If Rome was governed by such a network, it follows that no literary work — whether history, biography, or theology — could have circulated without at least tacit elite approval. The system that authorised Josephus's Jewish War or Tacitus's Annals was the same system that would need to have permitted — or commissioned — the New Testament texts.

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This control was not always heavy-handed censorship; it was a subtler mechanism of permission and omission. Key genealogical links, dates, and authorial identities were often deliberately obscured. Biographical information that might expose family connections between emperors and historians was carefully avoided. The resulting gaps — the silences — are not random. They are signs of a coordinated culture of discretion. Some argue the omission was due to ignorance — that ancient authors simply didn't know these genealogies. But the fragments we can now reconstruct suggest otherwise: such information must once have been available. Its absence, then, looks deliberate. As Syme put it, “The upper order usurped wide liberties in nomenclature. Who was to gainsay [speak against them]?" ('The Paternity of Polyonymous Consuls', Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Bd. 61, pages 191-98).

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Names were fluid; identities were masked. The elite often wrote under pseudonyms — "cover names" that disguised their real selves but hinted just enough for the educated reader to decode. The classicist Gilbert Highet observed this practice in Juvenal the Satirist:

 

"Some of the names in Juvenal's topical references are cover-names only,

with a faint similarity in sound to the real person known to Juvenal and his audience." (p. 291)

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Even the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Letters of the Younger Pliny notes that Juvenal may have satirised some of Pliny's correspondents under false names:

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"It has even been suggested that in his choice of pseudonyms Juvenal

satirises some of Pliny's correspondents."

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Pseudonyms were part of elite culture — a kind of literary wink. But they also make prosopographical work essential. Many of these aliases were constructed from ancestral names or wordplay, sometimes reversing or reordering the traditional tria nomina (first name (praenomen), family name (nomen), nickname (cognomen)). By the second century, the system had grown even more flexible (for further discussion see 'What's in a Name? A Survey of Roman Onomastic Practice from 700 BC to AD 700', The Journal of Roman Studies). As Syme remarked in his Emperors and Biography book:

 

"One trick is to modify the shape of familiar names." (p. 8)

 

The freedom of the powerful extended to their own identities. To my knowledge, the use of pseudonyms has not been the focus of continued scholarly attention. The most substantial work on the topic remains that of Syme — for example, his discussion of "Bogus Names" in Emperors and Biography: Studies in the Historia Augusta (p. 3). For the historian, this means the Roman literary record must be read not just for what it says, but for what it conceals. The omission of certain details — or the playful alteration of names — was a political act. It maintained the appearance of variety while preserving control.   

 

​Controlled Publishing

 

If Rome's ruling families controlled power and information, we should not expect the surviving histories to be neutral. The record itself was curated.

 

The clearest case is the Roman–Jewish War of 66–70 CE. The only detailed surviving account, The Jewish War, comes from 'Flavius Josephus' — a text that was preserved deliberately, not accidentally. It was written under the patronage of Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus, to whom it was formally presented. Josephus himself tells us as much:

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"presented the volumes to the Emperors...Titus...he affixed his own signature to them and gave orders for their publication." (Life 1.357-367)

 

That statement makes its purpose unmistakable. The Jewish War was imperially approved history, a version of events authorised for posterity. Vespasian, we are told, also did not tolerate the publication of distorted accounts or writings that expressed genuine criticism of those in power[1], and banished those who spoke against his rule.[2] For that reason, most classicists treat The Jewish War not as neutral reportage, but as official narrative — a victory text shaped to serve Flavian legitimacy.

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This pattern was not unique. In the Roman world, literary production was expensive, exclusive, and — above all — controlled. As established earlier, complex written works were produced by and for the educated elite. The infrastructure of writing — papyrus from Egypt, trained scribes, well-lit and weather-proof rooms, skilled copyists — required significant resources. Those resources were available only to the rich and well connected.[3][4] Rome's "public" libraries did not make literature public in the modern sense. They were symbols of prestige, built to show off imperial munificence rather than to democratise reading. Most Romans were illiterate, and those who could read rarely had access to complex works. Books were for the few who could afford to own or commission them.

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The same logic applied to what could be written. No manuscript that touched on sensitive imperial subjects would have circulated without permission. The emperor and his circle had the authority to suppress, endorse, or promote texts — an early form of publishing control.

 

When we see which works survived — and which did not — the pattern is telling. The histories of 'Josephus', Tacitus, and Suetonius; the letters of Pliny; the philosophical texts of Seneca — all these come from within or close to the same network of elite families. This is not coincidence. It reflects a canon curated by power.

In this light, the survival of The Jewish War looks less like an accident of preservation and more like a deliberate choice. Its endurance tells us what Rome wanted remembered. As 'Josephus' himself said, his work was meant “for all the subjects of the Empire” — but only insofar as it upheld the empire's self-image.

 

For a historian today, the implication is clear: the archive of Roman history is not neutral ground. It is the product of control — control of materials, of access, and of narrative.

 

​The New Testament 

 

If Rome's publishing system was tightly controlled, then the origins of the New Testament must be reconsidered within that same framework.

 

Based on the evidence already outlined, a key question arises: could the earliest Christian texts have been written inside the imperial libraries of Rome or Alexandria? At first glance, that sounds improbable — especially if we accept the traditional narrative of Christianity as a persecuted, underground movement. The emperor controlled these libraries, and access was limited to approved scholars and imperial staff[5]. But if the authors of the New Testament were drawn from elite Roman families, such as the Calpurnius Pisos, supported by the Flavians and the Herodian royal house, then the imperial libraries would not have been forbidden territory. They might, in fact, have been the ideal environment for producing, copying, and preserving such texts.

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The next question is why? What motive would the Roman elite have had for creating literature that promoted humility, obedience, and divine kingship? The answer, as the previous evidence suggests, lies in politics and ideology. After the Jewish War, the Flavian regime needed to reframe rebellion as sin and submission as virtue. Christianity's central themes — turning the other cheek, rendering unto Caesar, loving one's enemies — fit perfectly into that moral framework. A religion that discouraged revolt and sanctified empire was politically useful.

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Another piece of evidence supporting elite authorship lies in the use of numerical codes, or gematria. The most famous example appears in the Book of Revelation, which names the “number of the beast” as 666 (and, in some manuscripts, 616). Traditionally, this has been read as a veiled reference to Emperor Nero. But the same numerical pattern also aligns with the name Flavius Iosepos — the Greek form of 'Flavius Josephus'.

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When tracing where the specific number 666 appears before Revelation, we find that the only other known text using it outside of Biblical literature is the Jewish Antiquities (written in the 90's CE). In Volume 5 (V), Book 8 (VIII), p. 667 (Loeb edition), it reads, “six hundred and sixty-six.” That is a very specific number, used for a specific reason. When we keep this in mind — and consider the sequential parallels between The Jewish War and the Synoptic gospels — asking whether “666” might spell 'Josephus' is not an unreasonable question.

 

The number 666 spells the name 'Christ/Flavius Josephus' in Greek — ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΦΛΑΟΥΙΟΣ ΙΩΣΗΠΟΣ (Χριςτος Φλαουιος Ιωςηπος):

 

Χ (Chi) was, and still is, commonly used as an abbreviation for “Christ” — ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ / Χριςτος — and in Greek numerals totals 600.

 

The name Flavius (ΦΛΑΟΥΙΟΣ / Φλαουιος) adds up to 30 using the Greek alphabet once the zeros are removed:

 

Φφ (Phi) = 5 (normally 500); Λλ (Lambda) = 3 (normally 30); Αα (Alpha) = 1; Οο (Omicron) = 7 (normally 70); Υυ (Upsilon) = 4 (normally 400); Ιι (Iota) = 1 (normally 10); Οο (Omicron) = 7 (normally 70); Σς (Sigma) = 2 (normally 200).

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Adding these values (with the zeros removed) gives a total of 30.

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The name Josepos (ΙΩΣΗΠΟΣ / Ιωςηπος) appears several times in The Jewish War. Two examples in Greek can be seen in Volume 3 (III), Book 5 (V), p. 368, chapter 13, verse 3, line 542 — “...Josepos was borne away...” — and Book 6 (VI), p. 404, chapter 2, verse 1, line 99 — “...Josepos cried aloud...” (Loeb).

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This spelling is linguistically correct in Greek — that is, it is the historically accurate Greek form of the name — but by using a P instead of an F it changes its numerical total. With the zeros removed, the total is 36 (instead of 33):

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Ιι (Iota) = 1 (normally 10); Ωω (Omega) = 8 (normally 800); Σςσ (Sigma) = 2 (normally 200); Ηη (Eta) = 8; Ππ (Pi) = 8 (normally 80); Οο (Omicron) = 7 (normally 70); Σς (Sigma) = 2 (normally 200).

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Adding these values gives 36, and combining all three names — Christ, Flavius, and Josepos — produces a total of 666. All that is required is the removal of zeros for the name 'Flavius Josepos'. This suggests that the author of Revelation created the riddle by mixing the “normal” Greek number values, while also seeing the numbers without zeros — a deliberate wordplay linking 666 to the name 'Flavius Josepos'.

 

If the ruling elite decided to manipulate numbers in new or unusual ways — even ones we do not have other examples of — no one could have stopped them. The 'rules' of reading and writing, or of using numbers, were whatever the elite chose them to be, since they controlled both education and access. For that reason, dismissing the zero-removal method simply because we do not see it elsewhere is inconsistent and unfair. Scholars often create reconstructions without having earlier examples to rely on. And if such an example of zero removal did exist, would the same critics then claim it was just copying an older idea? That is why context matters so much: it helps us to judge whether something was possible, even when direct parallels are missing.

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As for the variant number 616, the key question is why 666 was changed to 616 — especially when Revelation 22:18-19 warns readers not to alter the text:

 

"If anyone should add to these things, shall add God unto him the plagues which are

written in this book. And if anyone should take from the words of [the] book of this prophecy,shall take away God his part from [the] book of life, and out of the city holy, and of those who are written in book this."     

 

So what does 616 represent? In this case, it appears that both the 'normal' Greek numbers (those including a zeros) and the sequential numbers of the alphabet were used together. If the name 'Christ' can be shortened to Chi' (Χχ), there is no reason the name Piso or Pisone could not be shortened to Pi (Ππ) — the sixteenth letter in the Greek alphabet. That makes it possible to read the number 616 as a 'coded' reference to that name.

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​Other literary techniques - such as switching vowels and consonants, something often done in ancient languages - were also used by the Roman elite authors. These changes helped them to hide their identity, mark their work as their own, and include 'coded' information about family and context. Again, as Syme noted in his Emperors and Biography book, "One trick is to modify the shape of familiar names" (p. 8).

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When we apply this principle to early Christian literature, it opens an entirely new dimension. The Roman elite, far from persecuting Christianity in its earliest form, may have sponsored and encoded it — embedding political theology in narrative form. Evidence from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum reinforces this possibility. The villa, owned by the Piso family, contained the largest library of papyri ever found outside Egypt. Most were Epicurean philosophical texts, but also treatises on logic and mathematics[6] — the very tools required to craft intricate coded works like Revelation. Epicurean and Stoic ideas both played a major role in the philosophical background of the New Testament. But if New Testament texts were found there, it would not surprise me. It is interesting, though, that some scholars hope unopened scrolls from the site may one day reveal new information about early Christianity — although not from the same perspective as mine.  It would be naïve to dismiss the coincidence of location, family, and literary form.

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If the Synoptic Gospels were written within such ruling elite circles, it is worth recalling that after Jerusalem's destruction in 70 CE, the Jewish scroll of the Law was taken from the city and stored in the imperial palace at Rome.[7] The precedent is clear enough: the empire didn't just seize texts — it kept them, curated them, and put them to work for its own ends.

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Persecution and Control

 

Of course, none of this means much without evidence — and that evidence is exactly what I aim to provide.

 

Still, one question inevitably arises: why would Rome persecute Christians if its own ruling circles had created the religion? The short answer is that it probably didn't — at least, not in the way most people imagine. The stories of savage imperial crackdowns and martyrdom in the arenas are largely retrospective creations, part of a mythology that helped later Christians define themselves 'against the empire'. When we look at the earliest sources, the picture that emerges is far more bureaucratic than bloodthirsty.

 

Take the famous letters of Pliny the Younger to Emperor Trajan — often cited as one of the earliest non-Christian references to persecution. In them, Pliny, then governor of Bithynia-Pontus, describes interrogating people accused of being Christians and asks the emperor what to do with them. Trajan replies that they are not to be hunted down, only punished if they persist after proper questioning. Hardly the image of a relentless empire bent on exterminating believers; it sounds more like routine provincial administration.

 

This exchange tells us less about Christianity's suppression than about how imperial control actually worked. The Roman state cared about loyalty and order, not theology. If there were 'Christians' at that point, then based on normal Roman practice it would have been a legal category, not a coherent movement — and, as my research argues, certainly not a grassroots one at all. But that, of course, assumes Pliny was telling the truth when he wrote.

 

If Christianity began as an elite literary and ideological project, as the evidence suggests, then these scattered references to persecution make more sense as political theatre — episodes of public discipline designed to reinforce imperial authority. They also illustrate how easily later generations — descendants of the same family's discussed here — could recast the routine mechanics of governance as martyrdom, transforming administrative caution into moral drama.

 

The same rhetorical pattern continues throughout Roman history: emperors shoring up legitimacy by invoking threats to social order, writers turning those episodes into moral lessons, and later institutions re-casting them as moments of sacred resistance. What we think of as persecution, then, was often a conversation between power and narrative. Read that way, the supposed antagonism between "Church" and "Empire" begins to look less like opposition and more like a family argument within the ruling class — one branch asserting spiritual power, the other political control. And as the evidence accumulates, the line between the two all but disappears.

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The arguments I've outlined here are not speculative theories, but the outcome of years of detailed investigation into texts, contexts, and the political machinery of ancient Rome — and the commitment to refuse to shy away from the controversial and to maintain the approach of open mindedness and revision.   

 

My work brings together Classical and Biblical studies to re-examine some of history's most familiar stories and to ask, with an open mind, how they were really written — and by whom. I invite you to explore the evidence for yourself, in my current book (available [here, here, and here]) and on my blog, where I introduce the material in greater depth. One recent post, for example, traces the blood and marriage connections between Emperor Vespasian and the Herodian royal family — links that, once seen clearly, make it hard to read the ancient sources in quite the same way again.

 

Good history thrives on scrutiny. What matters is not how comfortable a conclusion feels, but whether it fits the evidence. That principle guides everything I write — and I hope it encourages others to look again at the past with the same curiosity.

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