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By Root 1109 0

they certainly have become wealthy from the fable of Christ. In fact, during the 500-year period of the Inquisition, which Walker calls, "a standing mockery of justiceperhaps the most iniquitous that the arbitrary cruelty of man has ever devised,"31 the Church grew extremely rich. In reality, there is no other way to explain why the Romans would willingly worship a Jewish man as a god incarnate, a title and honor usually reserved for Caesars. As the Romans themselves said and as was admitted by Christians, they did not believe the tale, immediately recognizing it as a rehash of pre-existing myths, legends and rituals. Nor were they fond of the troublesome Jews, such that they would have exalted one in such a manner. The Romanized Jesus, in fact, was designed to castigate the Jews and, as noted, to give the Romans authority over them.

The gospel story was also designed to put the onus on the Jews for the destruction of their nation, which is why the story was placed at the time it was. The tale had to occur before the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, obviously, or the play would not have had a stage in which to set it. In fact, Church historian Eusebius makes it clear that Christ's advent must take place before the destruction of Jerusalem so that his Passion might be utilized as justification for that deed:

To Pella those who believed in Christ migrated from Jerusalem; and as if holy men had utterly abandoned the royal metropolis of the Jews and the entire Jewish land, the judgment of God at last overtook them for their abominable crimes against Christ and His apostles, completely blotting out that wicked generation from among men. . . . Such was the reward of the Jews' iniquitous and wicked treatment of God's Christ.32

The editor of The History of the Church says of Eusebius:

He regards the first Jewish War (66-73), with the destruction of Jerusalem, as a punishment for the crucifixion of Christ and for the continued persecution of His followers, especially James "the Lord's brother" . . . He records that since the second Jewish War (132-5) the "entire race has been forbidden to set foot anywhere in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem" so that "not even from a distance might Jews have a view of their ancestral soil". Eusebius clearly regards it as a just punishment . . . 33

Eusebius, it should be noted, was from Caesarea, which would essentially make him a Samaritan, although not necessarily of "Jewish" blood. It is obvious that, while he considers Christ from the house of Judah, he is not fond of "Jews"; nor were many others in the Roman Empire. The author of The Other Jesus explains the prevailing attitude of the "Gentiles" towards the Jews during the Empire:

We must remember that the New Testament was written at a time when Palestine had been under European domination for almost four hundred years. Europeans found Jews to be a very difficult people to deal with. To them, the Jews seemed to be the most stubbornly backward kind of barbarians they had ever encountered. Jews spoke an incomprehensible language (meaning that it was not at all like Greek or Latin). And Jews did many things that were intensely offensive to European sensibilities, like cut the tips off of male children's penises as a matter of 'religious' law. They were obsessed with "nonsensical" dietary superstitions and a seemingly endless set of "absurd" restrictions that seemed to prevent them from ever getting anything accomplished. The Greeks and Romans, both being steadfast believers in monogamous marriage and fierce defenders of the sanctity of the institution of the family, were morally outraged when they discovered that Jews allowed a man to have more than one wife if he wanted to. They were even more disgusted and scandalized by the Jewish practice of permitting men to divorce a wife for no reason other than he felt like doing so. In stark contrast to the general Greek and Roman attitude of religious tolerance, the Jews had an obnoxious tendency to denounce everyone's religion but their own in the most disrespectful ways imaginable, and sometimes