John Mariner’s book, The Men Who Invented Jesus Christ & Their Hidden Political Agenda, transports the reader on a epic journey to discover the surprising origins of Christianity. So let us wind the clock back to the years immediately following 100 CE, and zero in on an ancient Near-Eastern city called Edessa, the capital of the Kingdom of Osroene, located in what is now modern-day, south-eastern Turkey. There you would find an unknown Greek-speaking Gentile scribe of North-African or Near-Eastern ancestry, who Christian tradition has identified as evangelist “Mark.” As per his assignment, Mark invented a purely fictional character–Jesus of Nazareth–at the behest of his Edessan paymasters as part of a desperate effort to spare their country from being swallowed up by the Roman Empire. Along the way, since Mark himself had known virtually nothing about Palestine, Mark resorted to plagiarizing Jewish texts that he had found in general circulation. And although Mark’s gospel had been composed for strictly political reasons having nothing to do with religion per se, this was the exact moment that birthed what ultimately became Christianity.
Nonetheless, it seems impossible from this great a distance in time to determine with precision the identity of Edessan scribe Mark–the original fabricator of this monumental deception–although in my book and in the accompanying Appendix, I do venture to make a decent, educated guess: Mark was Lucian of Cyrene, Sr., and for good measure, the third evangelist Luke was Mark’s son–Lucian of Cyrene, Jr. At any rate, far more important, we need to explore fully who had likely commissioned Mark to compose his gospel. And although the exact names of the culprits in Edessa involved in subsidizing this hoax may still elude detection, the motives of those who had encouraged Mark to manufacture a blatantly false history of an earlier period in order to further someone’s early-second-century CE political agenda can finally be deciphered with surprising clarity.
Mark’s purpose was unabashedly political, not religious. For it was obviously in someone’s political self-interest to peddle the imaginative literary fiction that the pro-Roman, anti-Jewish counter-messiah–Jesus of Nazareth and his movement–who had suddenly appeared in Palestine circa 32 CE, had then enjoyed a brief spate of missionary activity, had then ultimately been crucified by the Romans (with Jewish connivance), and who had then vanished (along with his movement) without a trace.
While first-century CE Jews held the hope that a great military leader (a Messiah, if you will) might arise to liberate the Holy Land from oppressive Roman imperial rule, Mark’s gospel depicted his imaginary Jesus as an altogether different type of Jewish messiah–one who was apolitical and had obediently accepted Roman authority, while being solely concerned with combating “sin” and offering personal salvation. In their long-storied history, the Jews had never envisioned the appearance of such a non-warrior messiah. So my book will explain how and why Mark had invented his fictional Jesus in order to reassure Rome of Edessa’s political loyalty.
Equally important, this Edessan connection to evangelist Mark leads to yet another surprising conclusion. For despite the traditional narrative that a large number of Jews had embraced a fellow-Jew Jesus as their Lord and Savior, in actuality, not a single ethnic Jew had ever abandoned his or her ancestral faith and converted to the new sect in order to play any role whatsoever in the initial construction of Christianity. For the religion of Jesus had been a strictly Gentile operation right from the outset. Besides, no authentic first-century CE Jewish nationalist/messianic movement would have ever featured a “Deliverer” like Jesus, who would have acknowledged the legitimacy of Roman imperial control over the Holy Land.
In my book, I will furnish sufficient proof to support these (as well as a host of other) provocative conclusions concerning the origins of Christianity. Along the way, I employ a number of innovative, historical investigative techniques that have enabled me to piece together the real story behind the invention of Christianity. However, the most important proof of Jesus’ non-existence comes courtesy of the gospels’ purported truthful accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds. For in order to fashion their portrait of their fictional Jesus, the four gospel writers (Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John) had shamelessly plagiarized, not only each other’s work, but had plagiarized at least four identifiable, first-century CE Jewish texts then found in general circulation, which were suitably “Christianized”–all in the service of the evolving Jesus narrative. These ancient Jewish texts include (A) the works of the great first-century CE Jewish historian Josephus (B) the Dead Sea Scrolls (C) material of undetermined origins but that centuries later appear in the Jewish Talmud and (D) the Jewish Old Testament. Moreover, all of the above-referenced ancient Jewish texts, from which the Christian authors had plagiarized, contained absolutely no information about Jesus, although the first three of the aforementioned sources had been penned either during Jesus’ supposedly lifetime or shortly thereafter.
If truth be told, these ancient texts themselves do not lie. An elegant ten-letter word–“Plagiarism”–carries the day. And the full extent of this rampant Christian shenanigans will be amply documented in the Appendix to my book. At any rate, my meticulous, passage-by-passage (indeed my verse-by-verse) comparison–involving similarities in single words, phrases, quotations, expressions, allusions, people, and events–will serve to demonstrate this fact. Then too, instead of randomly plagiarizing Jewish texts, the New Testament authors often betrayed their literary handiwork by copying from the same ancient Jewish documents on multiple occasions–indeed sometimes purloining material from adjacent passages. All told, such a thorough examination of the twenty-seven New Testament books based upon an extensive level of cross-referencing has never previously been attempted, let alone envisioned.