A Cult Grew Around the First Emperor of Rome in 27 B.C. A New Book Argues His Followers Might Have Created the Template for Christianity {plus my opinion on why the book has incorrect conclusions}

How did the scattered followers of an itinerant preacher come to form the most populous religion in the world? Tim Whitmarsh—a classicist at the University of Cambridge —offers a compelling answer in his new book, Rome’s Age of Revolution: Augustus, Empire and the Making of Christianity. To wit, Christianity took much of its shape from the cult of Augustus.

The Augustan age saw a unique revolution that redefined authority, space and literature, remaking both the inner world and the outer. Augustus drew on centuries-old Roman prophecies to cast himself as the promised one. According to his propaganda, Italy experienced auguries and miracles at Augustus’ nativity; Augustus was declared a descendant of Rome’s mythical founder, Aeneas, and therefore of the gods, and he promised to renew Roman liberty from the decadence of the late Republic. As Whitmarsh writes: “The new world was presented as the fulfillment of all the best ideals of the old.” Just so, Jesus’s birth was claimed as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies about a coming emissary of God on Earth, and this novel form of monotheism was simultaneously cast as the fruition of the Hebrew faith.

Whitmarsh goes further, arguing: “What we call messianism is a symbolic byproduct of the concentration of absolute power over vast territories and multiple populations in the hands of one individual or family.” Jesus, then, is “the divine doppelgänger of the most powerful human authority imaginable,” i.e., Augustus, and Christianity came to operate “as a strange doppelgänger of the Roman imperial system.”

Whitmarsh has a keen eye for the religio-cultural give-and-take between Judea and Rome: “The Christian idea of a savior king ... is partially shaped by the prior model of Augustus as a world savior. But that model was itself partially indebted to Jewish messianic traditions.”

My review is that this book is written by someone who made a conclusion then put selected facts to arrive at his guess; 1. He forgets that the Roman empire was only the latest of the empires to roil over large swathes of territory - the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Macedonians, Seleucids, Ptolemies etc. had done much of it before. Rome was grand, but it build on top of these and it very self-consciously KNEW that it was an infant compared to the impossible ancientness of the east. Rome was acutely—and often self-consciously—aware that its own history was an infant compared to the immemorial antiquity of the East. To treat the connectivity of the Roman world as a uniquely Augustan innovation ignores the deep, pre-existing networks of Hellenistic and Near Eastern statecraft.

2. His framing of Paul completely ignores the Assyrian Church and the Marthomite church -- he shows a EUROCENTRIC idea of Christianity - which is quite frankly racist (ignoring the fact that Christianity is an Asian religion and until the 9th century 1/3rd of Christians lived under the Catholicos of the Ancient Church of the east which stretched right up to Mongolia (Genghis khan's wife was a Christian belonging to the Ancient Church fo the east) . In the decades following the crucifixion, Christian communities pushed rapidly east beyond the Euphrates, penetrating the Parthian Empire and establishing flourishing traditions along the Malabar Coast of India. These movements developed robust theological, liturgical, and institutional structures completely outside the sphere of Roman law, Latin administrative infrastructure, and Augustan ideology. Tying Christianity’s institutional birth to Augustus collapses the moment one looks east of Syria.

3. The author has no answer as to WHY the apostles would have political opportunism when nearly all the disciples died horrific deaths and didn't get any glories in life

4. His idea that early Christian conflict with the authorities was intermittent completely overlooks the holocaust like conditions of 64 to 67 AD under Nero or the later Diocletian etc. attacks. Yes, it wasn't 300 years of continuous persecution, but it wasn't as intermittent as he alleges

5. When early Christians proclaimed "Jesus is Lord" (Kyrios), they were issuing a direct challenge to the state decree that "Caesar is Lord." This is clearly shown in Pope Benedict's books on Jesus Christ.

6. hi "The Christian idea of a savior king ... is partially shaped by the prior model of Augustus as a world savior. But that model was itself partially indebted to Jewish messianic traditions." -- completely ignores the OT examples or even the examples of Cyrus the great or Alexander etc. or any number of other Middle Eastern rulers who styled themselves as such

7. his "a cultural dynamic that he calls a swirl" is simplistic - you see the same nonsense combining Confucius, Mahavira, Buddha and Zoroaster even though time and distance separated them. The Mediterranean was a 'globalised' economy right from the Bronze age.

8. Whitmarsh relies on a false dichotomy: either early Christians were isolated anti-imperial rebels, or they were integrated participants operating comfortably within the Augustan framework. This overlooks the reality of "In the world, but not of it"—a core principle of early Christian self-understanding. Early Christians routinely used Roman roads and spoke Greek without identifying with or endorsing the imperial order. Utilizing the infrastructure of an occupying power to subvert its foundational worldview is a standard dynamic in colonial and imperial history, not evidence of ideological alignment or structural dependency.

9. he then seems to forget "the little people" - we know of the cities, but the vast majority of the empire’s population lived in rural agrarian settings where the imperial cult had minimal ideological impact compared to local indigenous deities, family rituals, and traditional agricultural religion. Tying the birth of a populist, bottom-up movement of slaves, women, and rural workers directly to an elite civic cult overestimates the imperial cult's reach into daily life.

And these little people converted to Christianity which offered equality (refer both HBO's series "Rome" and Tom holland's "Dominion")

10. His book has confirmation bias -- he relies heavily on reading New Testament texts (such as Paul's epistles or the Book of Revelation) through an Augustan lens. In doing so, he cherry-picks Greco-Roman rhetorical tropes while ignoring the overwhelming density of Old Testament (Tanakh) citations and allusions.

Statistically, Paul’s letters and the Gospels cite the Hebrew scriptures hundreds of times, while explicitly invoking Greco-Roman political models far less frequently. Treating the minor Greek rhetorical framing as the "core engine" while reducing the massive Hebrew scriptural framework to background noise is a clear example of confirmation bias.

11. a far better book - in my biased opinion - Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth remains a far more accurate guide to the true collision between Christ and Caesar.

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Tim Whitmarsh’s Rome’s Age of Revolution is a stylishly written, intellectually stimulating work, but its central thesis rests on quicksand. By working backward from a predetermined conclusion, Whitmarsh mistakes the background scenery for the main actor. Roman roads, Greek literacy, and Augustan titles were the setting in which Christianity emerged, not its cause.

By ignoring non-Roman Eastern Christianity, downplaying the Hebrew scriptures, reducing apostolic sacrifice to strategic adaptation, minimizing state violence, and misreading direct treasonous subversion as ideological debt, Whitmarsh delivers an imaginative exercise in confirmation bias.

Net-net, this is like the book "the God delusion" - hailed by critics as a Christianity-destroyer, until you read it and ask, 'This is what passes for serious scholarship?'

ok, the historical “squeeze-mes” got me even more angry

The guy thinks that Divi Filius was analogous to Son of Man

Divi Filius means “Son of the Deified One”
“Son of Man” (Bar Enash / Huios tou Anthropou) is a completely different, purely Jewish apocalyptic title.

The title “Son of Man” does not come from Roman imperial cults or Divi Filius. It comes straight out of the Old Testament—specifically Daniel 7:13–14, where “one like a Son of Man” comes before the Ancient of Days to receive everlasting dominion and an eternal kingdom. Jesus’s primary self-designation in the Gospels was “Son of Man,” which is thoroughly Jewish and has zero connection to Augustus. By conflating Divi Filius with Son of Man, your correspondent demonstrates they are mixing up their biblical terminology.

then he dashes in the Nag hammadi discoveries and sneakily adds AT THE END “seem to go back to the second century CE” — these actually date to the 2nd through 4th centuries AS (the physical codices were buried around 350–400 AD), so quite a time later. in contrast the canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) and Paul’s epistles were written in the 1st century AD (roughly 50–90 AD), within the lifetime of eyewitnesses to Jesus.

AND his little “they paid little heed to his resurrrection” — this is a classic historical anachronism. It mistakes late, secondary philosophical offshoots for the original 1st-century foundation. Every single piece of 1st-century Christian literature—across all geographical locations and textual traditions—places the bodily Resurrection of Jesus at the absolute center of the faith.

There is zero 1st-century textual evidence of any Christian group that viewed Jesus merely as an “esoteric wisdom teacher” without reference to his death and resurrection. The Gnostic texts Whitmarsh cites represent a later synthesis of Christian themes with Greco-Egyptian Middle Platonism, not the original starting point of the movement.

Whitmarsh tries to frame Nag Hammadi as evidence of a grassroots “variety of early beliefs.” Yet Gnosticism by definition (gnosis = secret knowledge) was an exclusive, elite, intellectual movement restricted to small circles of initiates who looked down on Christians. Gnostics rejected the material world (and the human body) as evil, created by a lesser demiurge. They ignored the bodily resurrection not because it was an optional detail in a fluid landscape, but because their Greek Platonic dualism made the idea of a physical body being resurrected abhorrent to them.

Then he goes into “the Copts of Egypt, the Ge’ez in Ethiopia moulded Christian teaching into new forms” — did he ever bother to read their texts or even ASK them? What “new forms” is he talking about when they all

I am so glad that Amazon allows you to buy and then return - I finished this off and went Sheesh, i want my money back - the last book I did with was the God delusion, another over hyped book.

Save you money and buy “Jesus of Nazareth” for a far more humble (and REAL) scholar who doesn’t get a strain jumping to conclusions

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