Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity

Exhaustively annotated and illustrated, Creating Christ is an explosive work of history, unearthing clues that finally reveal the truth about one of the world's great religions. Christianity was born out of the cataclysmic conflict between the Roman Empire and messianic Jews that culminated in two bitter wars fought during the 1st and 2nd Centuries. The Romans not only reduced the legendary Jerusalem Temple to a Wailing Wall, they grafted their imperial rule onto the religion of the vanquished, as well--just as they had done with other conquered cultures. Inherited from an era of tyranny, war and deliberate religious fraud, the New Testament was created for a long-forgotten purpose: the pacification of messianic rebels.
After 30 years of research, authors James S. Valliant and Warren Fahy present irrefutable archaeological and textual evidence that proves Christianity was created by the Roman state with arguments that break new ground in Christian scholarship while providing a clear and definitive voice to a growing new understanding of Christian origins--one that is destined to change the way the world looks at religion forever.
Praised by scholars like Dead Sea Scrolls translator Robert Eisenman (the author of James the Brother of Jesus), Creating Christ is a comprehensive synthesis of historical detective work that integrates all of the surviving ancient sources about the earliest Christians and reveals new archaeological evidence for the first time--and, when taken together, that evidence is resoundingly conclusive: Christianity was invented by Roman emperors.

"I have rarely encountered a book so original, exciting, accessible and informed on subjects that are of obvious importance to the world and to which I have myself devoted such a large part of my scholarly career studying. In this book they have rendered a startling new understanding of Christianity with a controversial theory of its Roman provenance that is accessible to the layman in a very powerful way. In the process, they present new and comprehensive archeological and iconographic evidence, as well as utilizing the widest and most cutting edge work of other recent scholars, including myself. This is a work of outstanding and original scholarship. Its arguments are a brilliant, profound and thorough integration of the relevant evidence. When they are done, the conclusion is inescapable and obviously profound."
--Prof. Robert Eisenman, Author of James the Brother of Jesus and The New Testament Code

"A fascinating and provocative investigative history of ideas, boldly exploring a problem that previous scholarship has not clearly or credibly addressed: how (and why!) the Flavian dynasty wove Christianity into the very fabric of Western civilization."
--Mark Riebling, author of Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

"Valliant and Fahy have given us a rare and valuable gift worthy of the Magi: A readable, balanced, and scholarly text on one of the most controversial topics in history. What makes this work approachable are its clearly wrought style and beautifully organized sections. What makes it invaluable for anyone (scholar or amateur) with an interest in Christianity (be it religiously inspired or not) is that it provides the reader with research that is too compelling to dismiss."
--Eric Hill, University Honors College Senior Instructor, Rhetoric (Semiotics, Epistemology, Abrahamic Religions, and Translations), Oregon State University