Christ And The Caesars

A Christian universalist, Stauffer believed and professed that God's irresistible grace would eventually save all people, and that divine punishment, while real, was a remedial measure meant to bring about salvation. Much of Stauffer's writing (including Christ and the Caesars) is based on his extensive research into the way Roman sources influenced early Christianity. He died in 1979, at the age of 77, in Erlangen, Germany. Book jacket.

Nearly thirty years after Bruno Bauer published his 1877 book, Christus und die Caesaren...(Christ and the Caesars...), Albert Schweitzer left the Lutheran ministry in his native Alsace-Lorraine to study medicine in Paris (1905 at age 30). In 1911 he earned a Doctorate in Medicine and two years later (1913) he and his wife set off to establish a hospital in Lambarene, now Gabon, West Central Africa. He had given chapter eleven of his 1906 book (Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung; English: The Quest of the Historical Jesus) the title "Bruno Bauer." In that chapter, Dr. Schweitzer had concluded with this statement: ..".his [Bruno Bauer's] work...is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found...The shaft which he had driven into the mountain...laid bare once more the veins of ore which he had struck...for his contemporaries he was a mere eccentric...But his eccentricity concealed a penetrating insight. No one else had as yet grasped with the same completeness the idea that primitive Christianity and early Christianity were not merely the direct outcome of the preachings of Jesus, not merely a teaching put into practice, but more, much more, since to the experience of which Jesus was the subject there allied itself [with] the experience of the world-soul at a time when its body-humanity under the Roman Empire-lay in the throes of death...Bauer transferred it to the historical plane and found the 'body of Christ' in the Roman Empire," The Quest of the Historical Jesus, translated by W. Montgomery, B.A., B.D. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1911), second English edition, pp. 159-160, with a Preface by, F. C. Burkitt, M.A., D.D. What, according to Albert Schweitzer, were the ..".bare...veins of ore..." that Bruno Bauer had struck about Jesus' history (and the New Testament)? Chances are that it can be found in the last chapter (VIII) of Christ and the Caesars(Bloomington IN: Xlibris, 2015): Chapter VIII The Completion of New Testament Literature A Great History and a Late Work of Fiction "We have now seen unfold, in a series of images, the fate of imperial rule, nationalities and social classes during the first two centuries of our calendar. As diverse as the figures were who acted before our eyes, they were still just shells hiding one and the same fact. If on the one hand already at that time the friends of tradition saw the removal of the citizens from their political and national efforts only as a violent act of the new Lord of the world, so we also recognized on the other hand in imperial rule the consequence and image of an emancipation of minds from their limited daily tasks, and a political form that corresponded with the ideal of a world community during that time. Personal freedom within the newly opened world-wide coherence was the heartfelt wish of that discredited time, which, in the history books since the days of Tacitus, has been decried as decayed and lost. The immaterial goods which Greece had produced in a similar time of political decline filled the political void; in Rome and Alexandria they united around the center of the Jewish Law, and Seneca gave the new associations the leader in the image of the one who would perfect mankind and who was eventually able to join in battle with the powerful ruler in Rome," Christ and the Caesars, pp. 365-

Though the first century a.d. saw the striking rise and expansion of Christianity throughout the vast Roman Empire, ancient historians have shown that an even stronger imperial cult spread far more rapidly at the same time. How did the early Jesus-followers cope with the all-pervasive culture of emperor worship? This authoritative study by Bruce Winter explores the varied responses of first-century Christians to imperial requirements to render divine honours to the Caesars. Winter first examines the significant primary evidence of emperor worship, particularly analysing numerous inscriptions in public places and temples that attributed divine titles to the emperors, and he then looks at specific New Testament evidence in light of his findings.

"Caesar's Messiah," a real life "Da Vinci Code," presents the dramatic and controversial discovery that the conventional views of Christian origins may be wrong. Author Joseph Atwill makes the case that the Christian Gospels were actually written under the direction of first-century Roman emperors. The purpose of these texts was to establish a peaceful Jewish sect to counterbalance the militaristic Jewish forces that had just been defeated by the Roman Emperor Titus in 70 A.D. Atwill uncovered the secret key to this story in the writings of Josephus, the famed first-century Roman historian. Reading Josephus's chronicle, "The War of the Jews," the author found detail after detail that closely paralleled events recounted in the Gospels. Atwill skillfully demonstrates that the emperors used the Gospels to spark a new religious movement that would aid them in maintaining power and order. What's more, by including hidden literary clues, they took the story of the Emperor Titus's glorious military victory, as recounted by Josephus, and embedded that story in the Gospels - a sly and satirical way of glorifying the emperors through the ages.

Exhaustively annotated and illustrated, this explosive work of history unearths clues that finally demonstrate the truth about one of the world’s great religions: that it was born out of the conflict between the Romans and messianic Jews who fought a bitter war with each other during the 1st Century. The Romans employed a tactic they routinely used to conquer and absorb other nations: they grafted their imperial rule onto the religion of the conquered. After 30 years of research, authors James S. Valliant and C.W. Fahy present irrefutable archeological and textual evidence that proves Christianity was created by Roman Caesars in this book that breaks new ground in Christian scholarship and is destined to change the way the world looks at ancient religions forever. Inherited from a long-past era of tyranny, war and deliberate religious fraud, could Christianity have been created for an entirely different purpose than we have been lead to believe? Praised by scholars like Dead Sea Scrolls translator Robert Eisenman (James the Brother of Jesus), this exhaustive synthesis of historical detective work integrates all of the ancient sources about the earliest Christians and reveals new archeological evidence for the first time. And, despite the fable presented in current bestsellers like Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus, the evidence presented in Creating Christ is irrefutable: Christianity was invented by Roman Emperors. I have rarely encountered a book so original, exciting, accessible and informed on subjects that are of obvious importance to the world and to which I have myself devoted such a large part of my scholarly career studying. In this book they have rendered a startling new understanding of Christianity with a controversial theory of its Roman provenance that is accessible to the layman in a very powerful way. In the process, they present new and comprehensive archeological and iconographic evidence, as well as utilizing the widest and most cutting edge work of other recent scholars, including myself. This is a work of outstanding and original scholarship. Its arguments are a brilliant, profound and thorough integration of the relevant evidence. When they are done, the conclusion is inescapable and obviously profound. Robert Eisenman, Author of James the Brother of Jesus and The New Testament Code "A fascinating and provocative investigative history of ideas, boldly exploring a problem that previous scholarship has not clearly or credibly addressed: how (and why!) the Flavian dynasty wove Christianity into the very fabric of Western civilization." -Mark Riebling, author of Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler