Forensics expert J.S. Valliant reconstructs back story of how Roman Elites conspired to create Christianity, changing th | dG1fYVJ1b2lhMTRvQ1U
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00:00 The Creating Christ book is really very fascinating.
00:11 There's so many fascinating things about this.
00:16 Very early on we began looking for archaeological evidence.
00:21 For years my co-author had been looking for this physical evidence and happened across
00:25 the specific image that was used thousands of times by the Emperor Titus on his own coinage.
00:33 This image was never used before by a Roman Emperor and early Christians began using different
00:40 versions of it in the same era.
00:43 That's so strange.
00:45 Now if the Romans were hated enemies, why would Christians appropriate this?
00:53 That was a very surprising thing, almost a smoking gun, so I have to take that seriously.
01:03 And the kings that came in the wake of Alexander the Great, such as the Ptolemies of Egypt,
01:07 were attempting an integration both of local culture, the Egyptian culture, with Greek
01:12 culture.
01:13 The Ptolemy commissioned the creation of this god.
01:17 They took the face and the hair and the overall impression of Serapis and Asclepius and then
01:23 turned him into Jesus Christ.
01:29 That's not so strange because all the Middle Eastern empires for hundreds of years had
01:36 gone farther than that.
01:38 It's not fantastic in the least.
01:47 All this religious innovation on the part of the Romans did not sit well with the monotheistic
01:54 Jewish people.
01:57 So they said that we should have no ruler but God and so we're going to throw off the
02:02 yoke of Rome.
02:06 People think, "Oh, the scrolls are just an early version of Christianity."
02:09 No, they're not because they're not peaceful.
02:14 It's always been a revolutionary movement, the real revolutionary movement in Palestine.
02:21 And this was a source of conflict.
02:24 What's interesting in the New Testament, therefore, is that all of these barriers seem to be eliminated
02:32 in the teachings of Jesus and Paul.
02:35 Christianity didn't exist.
02:36 I don't think they had the word Christ.
02:39 Paul starts to use these words in his letters.
02:42 Paul creates this language.
02:44 Paul is from the Herodian family, the enemies of the Jewish people.
02:51 And during the last two years of Nero's reign, Vespasian successfully prosecuted the war
02:57 in Galilee and wider Judea.
02:59 And so when he became emperor, he left his son Titus in charge of the final sack of Jerusalem,
03:05 which would fulfill Jesus' prophecy, as he returned to Rome to take up world rule and
03:11 to proclaim himself a new prince of peace.
03:16 Everybody's jockeying for position.
03:18 By the end of the second century, you've got the Romans are in charge.
03:21 It's the Roman Catholic Church now.
03:23 It becomes the Holy Roman Empire.
03:25 It's no longer the Roman Empire.
03:27 It becomes the Holy Roman Empire.
03:32 And now set adrift from that Flavian origin, Christianity was free to form different sects
03:39 and spread out into a rather unorganized variation of Christian themes.
03:45 And this has become all the clearer in light of the 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic
03:53 manuscripts.
03:55 This revealed an amazing array of types of Christianity.
04:02 And by the time we get to Constantine, when it becomes the official religion of the Roman
04:09 Empire, a single Orthodox version of it has to be laid down.
04:13 And that was the principal function of the Council of Nicaea in the early fourth century.
04:18 And so then it becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine.
04:23 And once that happens, you're going to get a huge amount of people coming in.
04:28 And that's what happened.
04:34 One can really only understand the theory of Roman providence by assembling all the
04:39 pieces of the mosaic.
04:40 And only when you put each piece in its appropriate place can you pan back and then accurately
04:46 see the entire picture.
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