Creating Christianity - A Weapon Of Ancient Rome

About the Book

 

 

Creating Christianity asks a simple but unsettling question: What if the story of Christianity’s beginnings wasn’t one of humble fishermen and wandering preachers — but of emperors, aristocrats, and their families? This book looks at what happened to Rome, Judaism, and the wider Mediterranean world

after the Roman–Jewish War. By tracing family ties between the Herods, the Flavian emperors, and the Calpurnius Pisos, it explores how a small circle of powerful families controlled the post-war world — and shaped its politics, culture, and new religion.

 

The argument is bold: Christianity, as we know it, was not a spontaneous movement from below, but a carefully managed creation from above — designed within the elite networks that ruled the Empire.

​

​

Why It Matters

 

History is often told as the story of great ideas. But ideas don’t float free — they come from somewhere, and they serve someone. Creating Christianity puts power back at the centre of the story. Using prosopography —

the study of families, their names, and the networks that linked them — it follows the connections between the men and women who guided Rome through war and its aftermath.

Their marriages, patronage, and literary projects left fingerprints across the texts that shaped Western civilisation. The book challenges familiar assumptions about how Christianity began, but it’s grounded in hard evidence: classical sources, inscriptions, and family histories that show just how interconnected Rome’s ruling class really was.

​

​

What the Book Shows

​

(1) The name Flavius Josephus was a literary disguise, a pseudonym, used by a man called Arrius Calpurnius Piso, an aristocrat of the powerful Calpurnii Pisones — a family linked by blood to the family of Herod the Great and the Flavian emperors. 

​

(2) These families directed and funded the creation of the earliest Christian writings.

​

(3) Their network of alliances and adoptions tied the Roman and Judean elites

into one extended imperial web.

​

(4) The new religion that emerged from this world was used by these families in an

effort to reinforce their hold on power after the chaos of war.

​

​

Inside the Research

 

The purpose of Creating Christianity – A Weapon of Ancient Rome is to present factual, evidence-based research into how the New Testament came into being. The book isn’t written polemically; it explains how only members of Rome’s highest circles had the means and the motive to create the Christian scriptures after 70 CE. Drawing on feedback from professors of ancient history at Oxford and Cambridge, the study concludes that the New Testament — the “new law” — was created under the direction of the Calpurnius Pisos, a powerful aristocratic senatorial family supported by their relatives, the Herodian royal house

and the Flavian emperors.

 

The investigation looks closely at linguistic evidence, numerology, and naming practices:

​

(1) how the Book of Revelation encodes the name of the Piso family member

who oversaw the creation of the Christian scriptures;

​

(2) why the number 666 was later changed to 616, and where it first appears

outside Biblical texts; 

​

(3) the literary and symbolic methods — similar to those used on imperial coinage —

that embed family names within the New Testament;

​

(4) and how ancient naming systems in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin reveal these

links through isopsephy and gematria.

 

Central to the work is the use of prosopography. By tracing names, marriages, adoptions, and political careers, it exposes how elite interests shaped both political and religious change — much as power networks do today. The investigation draws on both primary sources — studied in their original languages — and the work of earlier scholars who have examined these historical figures in detail.

​​

​

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. Because it challenges long-held assumptions about Christian origins, not every academic journal may choose to review it — but readers who do engage will find a tightly argued case grounded in evidence, not conjecture.

​

​

Closing Note

 

Creating Christianity is part of a wider investigation into how power worked in the early Roman Empire — and how belief was used to bind a fractured world together. It invites readers to see the origins of Christianity not as mystery, but as history.

​

​

​