Raised in a Christian environment I was taught Jesus' story in scripture classes from an early age, but I was an outsider to Christian scholarship, and am very much an independent researcher. 

Indeed, I think someone fully immersed in Christian doctrine would have had great difficulty uncovering Luke as a parody of War of the Jews, as this would conflict too strongly with their prior assumptions. This is why it takes outsiders such as myself (and for that matter Joe Atwill who similarly considers himself as coming in as an outsider) to point out that the Gospels are written to permit coherent interpretations that are completely at odds with Christian doctrine.

How my research began, and progressed.

It was in 2019 that I began researching the origins of Christianity. My initial focus was to explore the parallels Joe Atwill had published, and to see whether they were in the same order in the Gospels and War of the Jews, or perhaps had some other pattern.  

During my early research I identified that when comparing Luke to War of the Jews hints of some intentional structure were evident. I formed many hypotheses as to what shape the pattern might be - a single line, a giant V spanning the whole chart, a branch, an anchor, etc. But I determined all of them to be false, eventually uncovering a pattern that was far more detailed than any shape I had imagined might be present.

Since then I worked to slowly uncover more parallels, with my work continuing through into 2024. Almost everything else that I discovered was a byproduct of this effort to collate the parallels.

I began with sharing my research in a series of academic articles found on academia.edu. This culminated in my 4th article which brought together a huge amount of evidence in one place, not only showing that the Flavian Government created Jesus' story, but also explaining Domitian's meddling, what the the APTVS signature might mean, and how War of the Jews might have been written in stages.

Until the development of the thesis underpinning my book, I had been assuming that the Flavians intended an extraordinary and grand "revelation" (hence the name of the book Revelation, and the way the Gospels indicate that a great deal of crucial hidden information would be "revealed", even including Jesus' identity). The problem here, is that if the Flavians published evidence that Jesus' second coming was Titus, it would suddenly be hard to attract new believers to faith in Jesus. And if the Flavians published their final revelation that they had invented Jesus' story in the first place, all recruitment would cease. 

I contented myself with supposing that the Flavian family must have been happy that their project would take many years to complete. But this relaxed attitude doesn't fit well with their goal being to promote extreme loyalty within Judea and the Roman Legions, to prevent the recent destabilizing wars from resuming, and to alleviate the consequent risk of losing the throne and ultimately to avoid being killed like their four recent predecessors.

It was only later in 2024 that I realized there was a simple solution, and there were even 1st century models showing how it could be done, in the form of the secrecy cults of Mithras and Isis. The answer was that there weren't going to be public revelations. 

Instead, converts who were drawn in and led to worship Jesus, would be sworn to secrecy, initiated to the middle rank of the religion, and then shown the evidence that Titus should be seen as as the second coming. And once completely hooked on Emperor worship, they could be admitted to the most senior rank of the cult, in which under further oaths of secrecy, they would be shown the evidence that Jesus was fiction all along. The more senior ranks could smile smugly at those below them, knowing that they held the superior information, whilst the junior initiates would go to great lengths to prove their loyalty, in the hopes of progressing upward through the hierarchy and learning the coveted inner secrets. In this manner, with enough Churches, temples and priests, large numbers of people could be driven to worship the Flavian family as their only gods.

It is this final step - realizing that the Gospel story was written with intention of establishing a secrecy cult - which is the basis of, and title of, my book, although it is not the only way which I have developed my research beyond my published paper. 

Happily, the act of writing it enabled me to improve other aspects of my work too. As a result, it represents a step beyond what I have published in my online articles, improving not only the thesis, but also the parallels, the other types of evidence I offer, how it is all presented and explained, and how I can justify that the APTVS pattern cannot result from coincidence nor a biased selection of parallels.

Why publish?

I take great personal risk in publishing this material. I realise that others may have discovered the APTVS pattern before and stayed quiet.

Whilst there is no easy or polite way to tell people that they are being lied to, it is still the right thing to do. I realize that my evidence flies in the face of conventional wisdom, and requires very careful consideration to evaluate, so some will not take kindly to it.

However, I think it is vital to spread awareness that Jesus' story was conceived as a way to control people, maintain inequality, facilitate oppression, excuse ethnic cleansing, encourage racial hatred towards Jews, and originally had been intended as a first step in a process of leading people to worship their rulers as gods.

I also think it's crucial to spread awareness that Jesus' story in Luke can now be proven to originate as 1st Century Roman government propaganda, and I sincerely hope my research is of use to you. 

- Michael Menasgotz

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