Overview

Christianity began not with the worship of a man named Jesus, nor even with the worship of a heavenly Christ - Christianity began with the misinterpretation of fictional stories. The quest to identify the beliefs of the “first Christians” has been misguided, because the first writings about Jesus Christ were not created by people who worshiped Jesus.

Many biblical scholars now recognize that all of the Gospels were written after the First Jewish-Roman War, which lasted from roughly 68 CE to 73 CE. However, scholars overwhelmingly continue to maintain that the Gospel stories and other Christian writings can be traced back to real events and beliefs from prior to the war. The story of Jesus Christ is set during the governorship of Pontius Pilate, from roughly 27 to 37 CE. Conventional scholarship continues to assume that Christian writings were produced by people who were inspired by real events that took place during the governorship of Pontius Pilate and that real anecdotes about Jesus were passed on through generations until they were finally written down sometime after the First Jewish-Roman War.

Cracking the New Testament Changes Everything We Thought We Knew About Jesus definitively shows, however, that stories about Jesus were not just recorded after the First Jewish-Roman War—they were invented after the war. Biblical scholars have long recognized many parallels between writings of the Jewish historian Josephus and the writings of the New Testament. The conventional explanation is that both sets of writings have many things in common because they are both about a similar period in time. Cracking the New Testament shows, however, that the writings of the New Testament are not merely similar to the writings of Josephus, they were fundamentally inspired by the writings of Josephus, which were produced between 78 and 99 CE.

Indeed, we know it was common practice in the ancient world to create “prophetic” narratives about major calamities after-the-fact, in which the stories were set prior to events like wars or natural disasters and fictitious prophetic characters were used to “foretell” the coming catastrophes. Such stories were frequently mistaken for real history. One can argue that the Jewish scriptures themselves are an example of such stories, which are largely stories about the destruction of Israel by the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE written long after the events that they narrate. But Jews were not the only people to write such stories. Greeks and Romans also used pseudo-prophetic narratives to tell stories about the past that provided platforms to make predictions about the future.

Fundamentally, this is what the writings of the New Testament are—they are pseudo-prophetic works that were all developed in early second century. The writings of the New Testament were inspired by Josephus’ account of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem. According to Josephus, the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem had defiled the temple, causing God to leave his sanctuary and take up residence among the Romans. The God of Abraham, according to Josephus, used the Romans to punish the Jews because they had defiled his house. In Wars of the Jews Josephus claims that during the siege of Jerusalem he told its inhabitants that “it is God himself who is bringing on this fire, to purge that city and temple by means of the Romans, and is going to pluck up this city, which is full of your pollutions.” (WJ Book VI.2.1)

After the war, Josephus was taken to Rome, where he was adopted into the household of the Roman emperor Vespasian. Josephus ministered to the Romans and encouraged them to adopt the worship of the God of Abraham. The writings of the New Testament are fictitious pseudo-prophetic works that reflect on the demise of Temple Judaism and develop an origin story for Roman worship of the God of Abraham. None of the writings of the New Testament can be traced back to a time before the war—all Christian literature developed after the First Jewish-Roman War. Christian writings were initially inspired by the works of Josephus before taking on a life of their own.

All of this can be proven through intensive literary and intertextual analysis of the works of the New Testament and other ancient writings. Cracking the New Testament walks through a detailed analysis of the Christian scriptures to show that the canonical narratives of the New Testament were derived from earlier stories that depicted Jesus and his ministry quite differently.

Christianity as we know it is founded upon the claims of a small group of men from the second and third centuries known as the “church fathers”. The church fathers tell us that during their lifetime there were dozens of different Christian sects, all of whom, according to them, had been founded by agents of Satan in order to trick people into false beliefs about Jesus Christ. According to the church fathers, the world was awash in fraudulent writings about Jesus Christ, which misrepresented who he was, where he came from, who his Father was, and the purpose of his mission on earth. But, according to the church fathers, they alone possessed the one true collection of writings about Jesus Christ. It was only the “One True Church” in Rome that had preserved the original writings of the apostles of Jesus.

The church fathers argued that the true writings of the disciples and their associates provided many statements that disproved the claims of various heretical Christians. In Cracking the New Testament, Price methodically works through the writings of the New Testament to show how they were modified in order to refute the beliefs of earlier Christians, who thought that Jesus was an immaterial heavenly spirit sent to overthrow the God of Abraham. This is not to say that these other Christian beliefs were “true” or original either, but that early Christian literature was very diverse and developed many different interpretations of the original stories about Jesus and Paul. The church fathers claimed that the writings they used were the originals, but the evidence clearly shows otherwise. The canonical New Testament is a collection of second-century forgeries that were derived from earlier so-called “heretical” works. All Christian writings can be traced back to a small collection of allegorical works that were based on the writings of Jopsehus.

Ultimately, we can see that there was no cult of people worshiping Jesus Christ prior to the First Jewish-Roman War. The writings of the New Testament are not records beliefs that people held, they are creative works that gave rise to beliefs. Worship of Jesus Christ developed in the second century as a result of people reading allegorial stories that appeared to explain the demise of the Jewish people at the hands of the Romans in the context of the on-going conflicts between Jews and Romans that lasted from the middle of the first century to the middle of the second century.

Chapter Summary

1. Review of the traditional account of Christian origins, citing key statements made by the church fathers.
2. Overview of biblical scholarship from the Protestant Reformation to the present day. This is followed by an in-depth review of scholarship on the scriptures of Marcion. Analyses of the Gospels of Luke and Matthew are then provided in the context of the Marcionite scriptures.
3. Review and analysis of Acts of the Apostles. The writings of Josephus are explored, specifically how they relate to Paul and the New Testament. This leads to an assessment of the historicity of Paul.
4. The canonical Gospel of Mark is reviewed and analyzed. Relationships between the Markan narrative and Jewish scriptures about the destruction of Jerusalem are explored, as well as relationships between the Gospel of Mark and the Pauline letters. Finally, relationships between the Gospel of Mark and the writings of Josephus are explored.
5. The Gospel of Mark is analyzed to show that the canonical text is not original. Analysis begins with the Parable of the Sower to show that the parable refers to characters within the story, but relationships between the parable and the characters have been obscured because the canonical text has been modified. The analysis goes on to show other ways in which the canonical narrative has been altered.
6. Analysis of the New Testament narratives concludes with the Gospel of John. It is shown that the Gospel of John was originally a Gnostic Gospel that has been significantly revised to conform to orthodox claims. The "disciple that Jesus loved" is addressed, as well as the Johannine letters and the Revelation of John.
7. Having analyzed many of the individual works of the New Testament, the entire collection as a whole is now considered. Various features of the New Testament are explained, to demonstrate that the works of the New Testament must have been collectively created and/or revised in the middle of the second century.
8. The final chapter reviews various models of Christian origins in light of the facts presented throughout the book.