Creating Christianity - A Weapon Of Ancient Rome

About the Book

 

 

Creating Christianity examines the origins of Christianity by placing its earliest literature within the political and cultural world of the Roman Empire following the Jewish War of 66-73 CE. Rather than beginning with theological assumptions, the book starts with the realities of Roman rule, elite power, and post-war reconstruction.

 

It focuses on the period after the destruction of Jerusalem, tracing connections between the Herodian dynasty, the Flavian emperors, and the aristocratic family known as the Calpurnii Pisones. Through prosopographical analysis (the study of families, their names, and the networks that linked them) and close reading of ancient texts, the book explores how a small circle of ruling families dominated political authority, literary production, and the religious ideas that later came to define Christianity.

The central claim is that Christianity developed within these elite-controlled environments rather than emerging independently of them. Read in this context, early Christian writings appear not simply as expressions of belief, but as products of a Roman world deeply concerned with order, legitimacy, and control in the aftermath of war.

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Why It Matters

 

History is often told as the story of great ideas. But ideas don’t float free — they emerge from particular social worlds, and they serve particular interests. Creating Christianity puts power back at the centre of the story by examining who was in a position to shape narratives in the Roman world after the Jewish War.

 

Using this approach, the book traces connections between the men and women who guided Rome through war and its aftermath. Their marriages, patronage, and literary activity left visible traces in the texts that later shaped much of the Western religious and cultural tradition.

 

The book challenges familiar assumptions about how Christianity began, but it does so on the basis of evidence rather than speculation: classical sources, inscriptions, and family histories that reveal just how tightly interconnected Rome’s ruling elite really was.

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What the Book Argues - and Why 

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(1) The book argues that the name Flavius Josephus functioned as a literary pseudonym used by Arrius Calpurnius Piso, an aristocrat of the powerful Calpurnii Pisones — a family linked by blood and marriage to the Herodian dynasty and the Flavian emperors.

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(2) It presents evidence that these interconnected families possessed both the resources and the political motives necessary to shape the earliest Christian texts.

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(3) Through alliances, adoptions, and marriages, Roman and Judean elites were bound together into a single extended imperial network.

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(4) The religious movement that emerged from this environment was employed by these families to stabilise authority and reinforce elite control in the aftermath of the Jewish War.

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Inside the Research

 

Creating Christianity presents a detailed, evidence-based investigation into how the New Testament texts came into being within the political and cultural world of the Roman Empire after 70 CE. The book is not written polemically, but analytically. It begins from a simple historical observation: the creation, copying, and preservation of complex literary texts required resources, education, and institutional support available only to Rome’s highest social circles.

 

The study therefore asks which individuals and families possessed both the means and the motive to shape new religious literature in the aftermath of the Jewish War. By examining elite networks connected to the Flavian emperors, the Herodian royal house, and the senatorial family of the Calpurnii Pisones, the book reconstructs the social environment in which the New Testament texts were produced and transmitted.

The investigation looks closely at linguistic and symbolic practices common in elite Roman culture, including numerology, name encoding, and literary self-referencing. In particular, it examines:

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(1) how the Book of Revelation encodes the name of a member of the Piso family associated with the oversight of Christian literature;

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(2) why the number 666 was later altered to 616, and where this numerical motif appears outside biblical texts;

 

(3) the literary and symbolic techniques — comparable to those used on imperial coinage and official inscriptions — that embed elite family names within the New Testament;

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(4) how ancient naming systems in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin reveal these connections through isopsephy and gematria (names and words revealed through numbers).

 

Central to the research is the use of prosopography. By tracing names, marriages, adoptions, and political careers across generations, the study exposes how elite family interests shaped both political and religious developments in the Roman world. The analysis draws on primary sources studied in their original languages, alongside the work of earlier scholars who have examined these individuals and their historical contexts in detail.

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Reception and Context

 

Creating Christianity has drawn strong interest and criticism because it is a new way of looking at one of history’s most influential moments. It became a best seller in New Testament criticism and Ancient Roman history. Its controversial conclusions mean not all academic journals treat it as a typical submission — but it has been made available for review in relevant venues such as the Journal for the Study of the New Testament.

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Closing Note

 

Creating Christianity forms part of a wider investigation into how power operated in the early Roman Empire, and how religious narratives were used to stabilise a world reshaped by war and conquest. It invites readers to approach the origins of Christianity not as mystery, but as history — grounded in textual, prosopographical, and historical context. It was written as an early exploratory study intended for a general readership. Since its publication, my research has continued to develop, with increasing emphasis on methodological control, sustained primary-text analysis, and engagement with academic standards of historical argument. My current work reflects this later stage of research.

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