I do have academic credentials. I hold an Honours degree in Classical Studies, which provided formal training in the languages, history, and methods used by professional historians and classicists.

That said, academic credentials alone do not determine whether an argument is sound. They indicate training, not correctness. In historical research, what ultimately matters is the quality of the evidence, the methods used to analyse it, and the reasoning that connects the two.

Formal education can be extremely valuable, and it often makes research more efficient. At the same time, not everyone has the opportunity or resources to pursue postgraduate study, and the structure of academic institutions does not suit every capable researcher. Many respected contributions to history have been made by scholars working outside traditional academic posts.

My work is based on close engagement with primary sources, inscriptions, coins, administrative texts, and the existing scholarly literature, using established historical methods such as prosopography and comparative textual analysis. If an argument is flawed, it should be addressed on those grounds. Evidence can be tested and debated; credentials cannot substitute for that process.

I am not working from a pre-selected theory. My research examines the political, social, religious, and military context of the Roman and Jewish worlds as a whole, particularly in the period surrounding the Roman–Jewish War and its aftermath. The conclusions emerge from that wider investigation rather than the other way around.

Claims that the evidence has been “refuted” are often stated without demonstrating how or where the core arguments fail. In many cases, criticisms address only a very small portion of the material or focus on secondary discussions rather than engaging directly with the full body of evidence. That is not refutation in a historical sense.

Historical arguments are not settled by labelling positions or by appeals to consensus, but by sustained engagement with sources, methods, and reasoning. Where errors are identified, they can and should be corrected. Where interpretations are disputed, they must be tested against the evidence. My work invites that process. It does not depend on any single claim or individual, but on the cumulative weight of historical, literary, and prosopographical analysis.

Historical arguments are not a matter of personal certainty; they stand or fall on evidence, method, and context. My conclusions are based on the cumulative weight of textual, archaeological, and historical evidence, considered within the political, social, and cultural conditions of the Roman world.

One straightforward example concerns literacy and book production. In the first and early second centuries CE, reading and writing were restricted to a small, educated elite. The resources required to compose, copy, store, and preserve complex literary works were substantial. Any explanation for the origin and survival of the New Testament must account for those realities. This places firm constraints on who could plausibly have produced and transmitted such texts.

Historians routinely emphasise that the discipline is concerned less with asserting “facts” than with evaluating evidence from primary sources and testing interpretations against context. That is the approach I follow. The arguments presented on this site and in my book are grounded in close engagement with ancient texts, inscriptions, coins, administrative records, and the established work of respected historians and classicists.

Confidence in historical conclusions does not come from ideology or conviction, but from whether an explanation best fits the available evidence. My work invites scrutiny on those terms.

No.

Historical research rarely “proves” non-existence. What it can do is assess whether the available evidence justifies the claims being made. At present, I do not see sufficient independent evidence to affirm the existence of Jesus as described in the New Testament.

The figure of Jesus in the Gospels appears fully formed within literary texts written after the Roman–Jewish War, and those texts show extensive dependence on earlier Jewish scripture, Greco-Roman literary models, and the political context of the late first century CE. When examined alongside the works attributed to Josephus, the parallels are significant and raise questions about authorship, intent, and historical distance.

The sources most often cited in support of Jesus’s historicity — Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and Suetonius — are all late, elite authors writing decades after the period in question. Their statements are not independent eyewitness testimony, and they add no verifiable biographical information beyond what is already found in Christian tradition. All operated within the same aristocratic and literary networks, which complicates claims of independent confirmation.

Arguments based on Nazareth illustrate the problem. The claim that Jesus must have been historical because the Gospels place him in an obscure location assumes facts not in evidence. At present, there is no archaeological proof of a settled village at Nazareth in the early first century CE. The material evidence points instead to later habitation, largely after 70 CE. This weakens, rather than strengthens, the argument for historicity.

In historical terms, the question is not whether a hypothetical individual could have existed, but whether the evidence allows us to say that one did. At present, the evidence supports the conclusion that the Jesus of the New Testament is best understood as a literary and ideological construction shaped by Roman elite contexts, rather than as a securely attested historical figure. These issues are examined in detail in my book and will be explored further in future work.

It is incorrect to say that biblical scholars are not interested in authorship. Recent work has increasingly focused on who could have written the New Testament, under what conditions, and within which literary and social environments. Studies such as God’s Ghostwriters by Candida Moss and The Origins of Early Christian Literature by Robyn Faith Walsh have shown that the texts required high levels of education, access to resources, and participation in elite literary culture.

Where my work differs is in how far that analysis is taken. I do not stop at general categories of authorship. Using established historical methods — including prosopography, genealogy, and close comparative reading of primary sources — I argue that the evidence allows us to identify specific elite families and individuals involved in the production of the New Testament texts.

Authorship is not an abstract question. Knowing who wrote these texts directly affects how we date them, how we understand their purpose, and how they functioned within the political and cultural world of the Roman Empire. Members of the ruling elite being responsible for their creation reshapes how we interpret Christianity’s origins.

Historical research does not advance by declaring questions unknowable in principle. It advances by testing whether the evidence permits firmer conclusions than have traditionally been allowed. In this case, I argue that it does — and that naming authors is not speculation, but the outcome of following the evidence where it leads.

Yes — in the sense that scholarly consensus is not the same thing as historical proof.

Appeals to majority opinion confuse agreement with correctness. In history, arguments stand or fall on evidence and method, not on how widely they are accepted at a given moment. Consensus can tell us what is currently normal within a field, but it is not an argument against data.

This is especially important here, because much of New Testament scholarship begins with inherited assumptions — for example, that Jesus and Paul were historical individuals and that the texts associated with them are grassroots productions. My work questions those assumptions and examines the evidence without granting those premises in advance.

When foundational narratives are challenged, new arguments are often scrutinised more harshly than traditional ones. That is a well-known feature of academic practice, not a refutation of the evidence itself. Disruptive ideas are frequently dismissed as “fringe” before their methods are seriously engaged.

It is also worth noting that different disciplines approach this material differently. New Testament studies and Roman prosopography rarely cross-check methods, even though the latter is routinely used to reconstruct elite networks elsewhere in Roman history. Applying those same tools to Christian origins produces uncomfortable results — but discomfort is not a criterion for historical judgment.

Agreement with the majority is reasonable when the evidence supports it. I do not aim to oppose consensus for its own sake. But when new or neglected evidence points elsewhere, the historian’s responsibility is to follow it, even if that challenges long-standing assumptions.

Because the conclusion follows from contextual, textual, and comparative analysis — not from arbitrary numerology.

As I explain in detail in my book (pp. 257–260), the argument rests on several points taken together:

First, the number 666 appears outside biblical literature only once before the Book of Revelation, and that occurrence is in Jewish Antiquities. This makes its appearance in Revelation historically specific rather than generic and requires explanation within that literary and political context.

Second, the argument is not based solely on numerical equivalence, but on the broader pattern of parallels between The Jewish War and the Synoptic Gospels, combined with elite Roman practices of coded writing, pseudonymity, and cryptic reference. The numerical analysis does not stand alone; it is part of a cumulative case.

It is often objected that removing zeros from numerical values is “anachronistic.” However, Revelation itself does not specify a method for interpreting the number. Modern reconstructions already rely on assumptions about how isopsephy or gematria should work — assumptions based on scholarly convention rather than textual instruction.

Elite cryptic systems were, by definition, not public or standardised. The Roman ruling class was not bound by later mathematical conventions, and originality in encoding was a feature, not a flaw, of elite cipher systems. Caesar’s cipher is a well-known example: its method is not explained in ancient sources and had to be reconstructed later. The absence of an explicit “rulebook” does not invalidate the cipher.

If elite authors chose to manipulate numbers in ways we do not otherwise have direct parallels for, that would not be unusual. Scholars routinely reconstruct ancient practices without direct precedent when the context supports it. To dismiss a method solely because it lacks another surviving example is inconsistent with how historical reconstruction is normally carried out.

For these reasons, the numerical readings of 666 and 616 should be evaluated within their historical, literary, and political context, not rejected simply because they challenge inherited assumptions.

Additional examples of elite cryptic practices can be found in Roman materials such as the Sibylline Oracles, Martial’s Epigrams, the Notae Tironianae, and mystery cult inscriptions.

Stylistic variation and internal contradiction do not demonstrate independent authorship. In antiquity, they were normal features of elite literary culture.

The presence of differing emphases, narrative order, and stylistic tone is exactly what we see when educated authors within the same cultural network adapt material for different audiences and purposes. Variation was not a flaw; it was a technique.

Literacy in the first century CE was extremely limited. Complex literary texts were produced, controlled, and interpreted by a small educated elite and were typically encountered by wider audiences through oral performance, not private reading. Those who read texts aloud could select passages appropriate to their audience — whether Jewish, Gentile, philosophical, or devotional.

Seen in this light, the Synoptic Gospels can be understood as complementary presentations of a developing narrative, not competing eyewitness traditions.

In simplified terms:

• Mark emphasises endurance through suffering

• Matthew grounds authority in Jewish scripture

• Luke adopts Greco-Roman literary polish and rhetorical style

• John moves toward theological speculation

Contradictions serve functional purposes: they allow the same core story to be framed differently depending on context and audience.

This practice is well attested in ancient historiography.

A clear example appears in the works attributed to Josephus. In The Jewish War, the destruction of the Temple is presented as an unintended tragedy, with Titus portrayed as attempting to prevent it — a narrative that conveniently flatters Flavian patrons. In Jewish Antiquities, the same event is later framed as divinely ordained and executed through Roman power, with Titus bearing responsibility. The contradiction reflects shifting rhetorical and political needs, not ignorance.

Stylistic variation also does not imply different authors. Highly educated writers could and did write in multiple styles, and elite literary culture encouraged this flexibility. Authors we know as Plutarch, Tacitus, and Suetonius all wrote about the same imperial figures, often drawing on overlapping material, yet each cultivated a distinct voice. Variation signalled education, audience, and intent.

Pseudonymous authorship further complicates matters. Elite writers frequently adopted names or personas that created the impression of distance or diversity while remaining intelligible to informed readers. Within such a system, variation helps mask coordination rather than refute it.

In short, contradiction and stylistic diversity are expected outcomes of elite literary production in antiquity. They do not require independent grassroots communities to explain them, nor do they undermine the possibility of coordinated authorship within a shared intellectual and political milieu.

The names were not placed into the Greek texts in an explicit or easily removable form. They were embedded using literary and symbolic techniques — comparable to those used on royal coinage, in wordplay, numerical coding, and layered allusion — which makes them structurally integral to the text rather than dependent on a single line or passage.

Because of this, later editing, interpolation, or copying does not easily remove such material. Altering it would require rewriting the text at a conceptual level, not simply changing words or verses.

This is also relevant to the question of translation. The later move to Latin is significant precisely because the embedded meanings function in Greek. Translating into Latin disrupts those structures. That shift makes little sense under the traditional model of Christian origins, where Greek was already the common language, but it does make sense if earlier Greek texts contained layered meanings that later authorities no longer wished to preserve or foreground.

There were, of course, alterations and interpolations in ancient texts — but these are not the same as wholesale rewrites. Copyist variation and later theological editing tend to affect wording, emphasis, or doctrine. They do not normally dismantle deeper structural features embedded across a work.

It is also important to consider the conditions of literary production. Texts of this scale and complexity required resources, education, scribes, materials, and secure storage. These were controlled by elite networks. While variation could occur, the overall process of production, copying, and circulation was constrained and supervised, not open or decentralised in the modern sense.

Finally, ancient authors — particularly elite ones — were well aware of how texts could mislead, persuade, or encode information. Rhetoric, indirection, and concealment were standard tools of political and literary culture. Reading these texts as if they were produced transparently or naïvely risks misunderstanding how ancient power actually communicated.

For a fuller discussion of these mechanisms and the evidence involved, I outline the argument in detail on the About page and in the book.

I have submitted material for peer review, and I continue to do so.

One of the practical difficulties is scale. The arguments involved require extensive cross-referencing across Roman history, prosopography, literary analysis, archaeology, and New Testament studies. Most journals operate under strict word limits that make it difficult to present this material coherently without reducing it to isolated fragments or removing the very context on which the argument depends.

Several submissions have been declined for standard editorial reasons — including scope, format, prior publication, or the journal’s remit — which is a normal part of academic publishing.

For example, one article reworked from my book could not be accepted because journals generally do not publish material that has already appeared in monograph form. That was an early misjudgment on my part and one I have since corrected.

Other submissions encountered disciplinary constraints. Some journals do not publish direct engagement with the work of other authors, even when the method used — comparative textual analysis — is standard within Classics. These are editorial policy decisions rather than judgments on the evidence itself.

Importantly, my book has been made available for academic review through The Journal for the Study of the New Testament, and I welcome critical engagement in that venue. If scholars believe the evidence is flawed, formal review or rebuttal through peer-reviewed channels would be the appropriate way to demonstrate that.

At present, I have several articles prepared for submission that present discrete components of the wider argument in a format more suitable for journal publication. The process is ongoing.

Peer review matters. But it is not a single gate, and it is not always best suited to work that is cumulative, interdisciplinary, and revisionist in scope. Historically, many major reassessments of ancient history have first appeared in monographs for precisely that reason.

Readers should approach all reviews — positive or negative — critically, just as they would any historical claim.

The one-star reviews you mention make strong assertions, but they do not provide specific examples, citations, or demonstrations showing where the evidence is supposedly wrong. Claims such as “easily proven wrong” are not, by themselves, arguments. If the evidence were genuinely easy to refute, it would be straightforward to show how — by pointing to primary sources, misreadings, or errors of method. That has not been done in those reviews.

Some negative reviews also focus on my background rather than the material itself. As explained elsewhere in the FAQs, credentials can matter for training, but they do not determine whether an argument is correct. Historical claims stand or fall on evidence and reasoning, not on the author’s CV.

It is also worth noting that this book challenges deeply entrenched assumptions about Christian origins. Work that questions foundational narratives — especially ones tied to long-standing academic, cultural, or religious frameworks — often attracts strongly worded reactions. That response tells us more about the controversy of the subject than about the quality of the evidence.

Ultimately, the best way to judge the book is not through brief online reviews, but by examining the sources, arguments, and references for yourself. I have laid out the evidence transparently and in detail so that readers can assess it independently. Agreement is not required — engagement is.

If critics wish to demonstrate that the arguments are flawed, the appropriate place to do so is through careful analysis, citation, and, ideally, peer-reviewed response. Until then, readers are encouraged to look at the evidence directly and decide whether it holds.

In academic publishing, journals regularly receive books from publishers and authors that fall within their disciplinary scope. When a book is made available for review, it means it has been accepted into a journal’s review system as relevant to that field. From there, the journal’s editors decide whether to commission a review, based on factors such as space, editorial priorities, and the availability of appropriate reviewers.

Being available for review does not imply endorsement, approval, or agreement with the book’s arguments, nor does it guarantee that a review will be published. These decisions are made independently by editors and reviewers.

At the same time, inclusion in a journal’s review process indicates that a book is regarded as a legitimate contribution to ongoing scholarly discussion within that discipline. This is how academic debate normally operates: through selective review, editorial judgement, and critical engagement, rather than automatic acceptance or dismissal.