memes

there's an (admittedly fringe) book from 2005 called Caesar's Messiah that suggests Titus, Bernice, Alexander, and Josephus created the New Testament together as Josephus was writing War of the Jews around the time of Titus's destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and that Christianity is essentially an imperial comprador version of Judaism stitched together from Greek stoicism, Jewish monotheism, and Roman ritual, as a sly way to get enslaved Jews to worship the imperial cult indirectly. It's one of my favorite conspiracy theories of all time even if it's total horse shit. It draws its ideas based on strange parallels between the life of Jesus, and Titus's military campaign, as well as parallels between the New Testament and Josephus's War of the Jews, and also it is fond of pointing out that of all the Militant Messiah figures floating around in Jerusalem in that era, Jesus is the only one who is a pacifist and advocates paying taxes to the Romans.