Proof the Gospel of Luke originates from the Roman Government - in 12 minutes. 

This was an unexpected result from a research effort to catalog the parallels between 'War of the Jews' and the Gospel of Luke. A number of parallels were already known thanks to J Atwill, but this had not been extensively researched.

But surely everyone knows Josephus is a highly respected historical writer with impeccable credentials?

It's certainly surprising. But with hindsight, perhaps more attention should be paid to the extremely suspicious claims Josephus makes in War of the Jews - namely that he:

* was able to prophesy the future, including telling his own troops the exact date that they would be defeated (which no commander would do even if they could), 

* was the 'supreme commander' of the main enemy of the Romans and yet was allowed to switch sides after his defeat and capture, and given freedom, and treated like royalty by Emperor Vespasian and given lands and tax free status (which is absurd since Roman commanders were expected to bring back the enemy general to be publicly and horrifically executed in front of the Emperor in Rome),

* was the only person ever to have claimed to be a member of the Essene sect, and somehow then became the religious leader of the Jews across Judea, and also their supreme military leader, and also of royal Jewish descent, and yet no Jewish records of the time mention him,

* was able to prophesy Vespasian and Titus becoming Emperors (which should have been impossible, and also was absurdly dangerous since it makes execution by the current one even more certain), 

* was given permission by the victor, Emperor Vespasian, to write the Roman Government's biggest propaganda document, giving the government's official account of the war that had defined the politics of the era, and which was in large part fought against himself!

Considering for a moment that the Roman war against Judea directly killed a greater proportion of the world's population that WWI and WWII together - this is like the American president intervening to save Hitler's life, and then pardoning and freeing him, and then giving him permission to script the American government's TV and radio propaganda about the war. 

With hindsight, we can recognize that Josephus' life story is total nonsense, and was fictional propaganda, aiming to provide a role model for Jews who might consider defecting to the Roman side?

But isn't there proof that Josephus was real?

A lot of evidence. But not proof. 

Josephus is widely taken to be an important historical writer, not least because various Roman-government-aligned writers of the time commented that they knew him personally, indeed even in private correspondence of theirs that somehow just happened to become widely circulated.

But if a totalitarian government had a need to present a role model for Jews considering defection, and the Emperor's project required that people mustn't suspect this role model was fictional, then paying off (or indeed controlling) prominent writers of the time to add innocent comments to their letters, and have them distributed to convince people that he was real, was a trivially easy thing to do.

Why does it matter that Josephus' story is a parody of Jesus?

J Atwill has already shown that Luke itself is a parody of Titus' victories described in that same document: War of the Jews. Indeed my own research revealed that this parody is much more extensive and detailed than Atwill showed.

Making two stories parody each other's core narratives in such a detailed manner is impossible except by creating them as a single literary project (either writing both from scratch, or alternately editing them until they form parodies of each other).

War of the Jews is undeniably the product of the 1st Century Roman Government, so the logical upshot is that the Gospel of Luke is of Roman Government origin too.

Why would the Roman government in the AD 70s create a story about a Jewish Messiah? Hadn't they just crushed the Judean rebellion in the greatest war of the era?

The obvious reason to create a story of a new Messiah who promotes humility, is to convince the Jews to stop rebelling against Rome, turn the other cheek to oppression, and render taxes to Caesar (and Jesus was described as living a generation earlier in large part so that nobody could dispute it)  - but that wasn't the ultimate goal.

If a government had created Christianity, surely they would have avoided leaving evidence of this? 

The Roman Government was trying to get the Jews hooked on the new Messiah, so that later it could be revealed that Emperor Titus (the son of Emperor Vespasian) was Jesus' second coming. The goal was to get the Jews - and other commoners too - to worship the Emperor's family.

This was going to be achieved by telling the state controlled synagogues to reveal the first set of parallels - i.e. Jesus' story was to be revealed as a 'miraculously' prophetic forerunner of Titus' victories over Judea. This explains why Jesus indicates his second coming will occur within a generation and will be revealed by the destruction of Jerusalem (which was done by Titus).

But the end goal was to turn the Jews into pure Emperor worshippers. 

Once the followers were  happily worshiping Jesus AND Titus, the state controlled synagogues would be instructed to reveal the second set of parallels, as when viewed together the reader can see that both documents must have been written together, proving that Jesus' story was invented by the roman government. And just to be certain these parallels could not be dismissed as coincidences, they were arranged so that when plotted like a Hipparchian star chart, they would spell out their emperor's signature using the five letters.

Then why didn't Vespasian and Titus get round to finishing their project - why isn't everyone worshipping them?

Vespasian and Titus both died unexpectedly just two years apart, possibly of malaria. Their successor was Domitian, who was naturally reluctant to promote the idea that his brother was god, not least because that would be a threat to his reign. 

Instead of enthusiastically pursuing the project, he published John and Acts complete with riddles designed promoting the idea that god was three in nature, which helps explains why we ended up with a doctrine of holy trinity.

Although he tried to maximize the chances he would get worshipped if his brother did, he had little incentive to pursue his brother's project. For his successors though, they had a clear need to prevent information getting out that might lead people to worship their predecessors, as with Domitian, this posed a threat to their rein.  

Eventually Constantine decided that Christianity was useful, but only if people viewed Jesus as historical. And the early Church had an extremely strong motive to prevent anyone discovering the evidence that Jesus was fiction.

This explains why the Bible was only available in Latin, why many commentators published information suggesting early Romans such as Nero persecuted the Christians (because doing so makes it hard to imagine that Jesus' story was written a few years after Nero died).

It also explains why early Christian apologists who were clearly familiar with Josephus' works were at pains to avoid mentioning that those documents refer to Jesus' story. The fact that those apologists avoided mentioning it when it seems that it would be in their interests to do so, has led some historians to conclude the references to Jesus must have been added by other Christian apologists who supposedly must have made all of the surviving copies! Aside from this not being something that people do to important and valuable historical documents, the hypothesis doesn't explain why the slavonic josephus version has its own references to Jesus' story that are different, why no copy survives without such references, nor why the references to Jesus do not align with what a Christian would write. Indeed that whole explanation falls apart once it is realized that the core narrative of War of the Jews is itself a parody of Jesus' story. 

But coincidental parallels occur all the time. How can you show its a parody? 

The documents provide a shockingly large amount of evidence!

The parodies were written to have extraordinary detail, although always ensuring each parallel was subtle enough to go unremarked on, and many of the parallels are actually riddles designed to hide unnoticed within the texts. Only by reviewing all of the parallels and riddles together does it become clear that both documents contain extensively detailed parodies of the other. 

However, recognizing that some would be skeptical, the parallels were also arranged in a pattern, so that when plotted (position in Luke vs position in WAR) they would form five letters. These letters happen to be: APTVS, the latin word apt/fitting which is referenced in Luke 9:62 when describing he who is fitting to be in the kingdom of god. 

This explains why the text in Luke seems incredibly disorganized. It's because the author moved text around to ensure the parallels had the necessary locations.

Where is this APTVS signature?

Please see the academic paper. The link is below.

Why APTVS? What it mean?

The letters TVS clearly signify Titus (Titvs Vespasianvs - seen on his coinage as TVS). The letters AP appear to relate to the Agion Pneuma (in English 'Holy Ghost'), and there is evidence this either means Arrius Piso  (presumably an undocumented royal of the powerful Piso family), or it might simply be a title - a Latinization of Areios Piso (meaning Immortal Piso, or War God Piso), i.e. it's possible it simply stands for "Immortal Piso Titus Vespasianus". The Piso were at that time immensely powerful royals, a fact attested to by one of them being named heir to the throne 6 months before the first Legions declared for Vespasian to become Emperor.

However, there is an added complication: There is evidence that only the VS (signifying Vespasian) was present in the widely theorized (but non-surviving) original version, and the initial half, spelling out APT, may have been added after Vespasian's death by Titus.

So the original signature, might have been just 'VS'.

Why is the APTVS signature important, if we can't be 100% sure what all the letters were meant to represent?

Irrespective of the intended meaning, the fact the parallels are arranged in lines defining well formed letters, can be used to demonstrate that these are not distributed at random, but must be intentional. 

In my paper I show that 'faking' such a pattern by only selecting those parallels that happen to align with the desired pattern, would only be possible if there were over 2000 notable but unintentional parallels between the two documents. This means there would have to be one for every two verses of Luke, which is absurd not least because most of the identified parallels involve considerably more than two verses of Luke. 

This is not only implausible, but if it were true (and somehow hadn't been noticed by generations of historians) it would still lead to the conclusion that Luke and War of the Jews must have been written to parody each other, and thus were the product of a single project, and thus both originate from the Roman Government.  

But plotting in 2D wasn't a common technique in the 1st Century?

This is true. The technique was known since Hipparchus in the 2nd Century BC, but it was certainly uncommon. However if you wanted to hide a message that nobody would find until you revealed it, you'd need to choose an uncommon technique. 

How can you be so sure it's two opposed parodies, and not just one?

This is explained in the academic paper.

So are you claiming the Flavian government invented Jesus per se? Isn't there evidence the story existed before AD 69?

All this proves is that the Flavian government invented Jesus' story as set out in Luke. The idea of a Jesus Messiah probably already existed, not least because the Pauline epistles appear to predate Luke. This would explain why Paul shows no awareness of most of Jesus' story, and why there are no copies of any of the new testament stories dating from the time Jesus was supposed to have lived.

Where's the evidence supporting such claims?

Incredible claims require incredible evidence, so...

You can find the full parody with the supporting evidence, starting on p42 of my paper, available:

 - online at Academia.edu (you can view it without an account - just scroll right down past the adverts)

or

- download it here as a pdf.

Can you give a short example of how Josephus is a parody of Jesus?

I could, but what is important is the level of detail. I will instead offer a sizable sample since otherwise it would be easy to dismiss it as merely a few similarities.

To understand the parody the reader needs to appreciate that Titus and Vespasian expected and required to be seen as gods, and indeed went on to be deified as gods by the senate - i.e. in this parody of Jesus' story, the soon-to-be-deified Titus and Vespasian have the role of 'God'.

If you are not intimately familiar with Jesus' story then some of the details below may seem unfamiliar. However I assure you these are all part of Jesus' story (mainly in Luke with details provided by Mark, Matthew, John and Acts) - for evidence of this see the full description in my paper.

A sample of how Josephus' story parodies Jesus':

He (i.e. Josephus in War of the Jews, parodying Jesus' story) was betrayed by a Jew, and His betrayal corresponded to the hour when his followers were sleeping, and His betrayer procured by his actions a field of blood (a battlefield described as running with blood, matching the description of Judas in Acts), whereupon guts were spilled and the betrayer was hanged.

His betrayer's field of blood contained caverns that are equated with being graves (in Luke they are a potters field of graves indeed to be used for graves, and in War of the Jews, they are where Josephus hid with his dead companions, and his cavern in particular is described as having the shape of a sepulcher - i.e. an exit to the side and then up - Important note: This means that Josephus' sepulcher-shaped cavern is equated with being a grave), whereupon "a man's position was taken and the place became uninhabited" (This is what Acts goes on to immediately describe. In War of the Jews it is Josephus whose place as ruler is taken by Vespasian, and his city is left totally uninhabited).

And at the time of his capture by the Romans, he was confined in His grave for two days, only to be raised up on the third day by God. (in Josephus' case he was raised up to the surface by the soon-to-be-deified Vespasian, who is being equated by the parody, as a God).

There were romans guarding outside his grave, and the person who led them to His grave was a woman that He had been with earlier, and when they went into His grave they found two men, who implicitly would have been kneeling and wearing shining garments and when they looked in, they found dead men there (in Josephus' case this is because he was a commander who had fled the battlefield, and so implicitly was in his armor when he surrendered as the Romans came in, and he was surrounded by dead men since all but one of his 40 comrades had just killed themselves in that very cavern, with him having nowhere else to dispose of their bodies.

He had prophesied that his city would be taken by the Romans, and even prophesied the timing of its taking, and His prophecy was linked to a duration of 46 units of time relating to that same city (in the Gospels, 46 is the number of years it took to build the temple Jesus said would be destroyed, and in War of the Jews, 46 is the number of days His city would survive, what with it being taken at dawn as Josephus had prophesied on the 47th day).

He was considered dead outside Jerusalem, but afterwards He was found to be alive and so He appeared there outside Jerusalem, in front of Simon and showed His wounds, thereby confounding His mother’s expectation of him being buried, and this part of His story specifically mentions Lazarus.

His grave belonged to a man with 'Joseph' and 'Mathia' in his first and last names, and there was also a man there at His grave whose name began with 'Nic' who had defended Him.

His story involves ‘the son coming’ resulting in death associated with someone called Jesus, with a specific place of a skull being mentioned which involves a distance of a stone cast, whilst he was outside the city.

His story involves a Galilean Jew being crucified after refusing to speak, followed by both the sun and the night sky becoming darkened, and then the son of man, who was also the son of God, came in a cloud with great power and glory (In War of the Jews, this is described as a miraculous mist descending providentially at dawn, just as the son of soon-to-be-deified Vespasian came in over the walls killing 40,000 Jews with virtually no losses on his own side).

His city had a ‘den of robbers’, and clothes that in one sense were His, got parted, and He was subjected to soldiers casting lots over Him. 

His story involves the names Joseph and Matthias being placed side by side, along with the name Justus which in turn is linked to insurrection and murder in the city, in which two men were confined together. 

After His capture He was given the clothes of an Emperor, and indeed both at his capture and his birth, he was treated in ways equating him with royalty.

His story involves an adult version of a lamb hung from a great wooden cross, three wooden towers with men on them, a great trumpet sound, a great shaking, the daylight being darkened, and cloth at the gates of the city being torn, and in His role as lord/ruler He appointed 70 leaders to go into each of the cities, with them successfully subjecting those cities to their rule, through His authority/name. (In Josephus' case, the darkening is described as being due to arrows, the trumpets were Titus' trumpeters, the shaking was the battering ram, the adult lamb was an iron sculpture of a ram hung under a cross of wood, and the cloth at the temple was in the form of sacks of chaff designed to deter Titus' battering ram)

He was captured by the Romans 33 years after a key point in a Jesus’ life, and his main role in his published story ended in Jerusalem when He was aged 33. His associates included a Simon, a John, a Matthew, a Joseph and a Jesus, and his story also mentions multiple Marys, a Judas, a James, a Lazarus, an Eleazar, a Philip, and also specific individuals such as Augustus Caesar, Tiberius Caesar, Emperor Nero, the two Herods, and Pontius Pilate.

He promoted the idea that commoners should pay taxes to Rome, and submit to oppression and accept servitude, and give up possessions and wealth, and accept little or no pay, and He suggests that God’s sacred covenant with the Jews ended, and is being replaced by a new arrangement, as a result of the ‘abomination’ of the Jews.

His story makes it at least implicitly clear that He was one of the two most important members of the ‘Essene’ sect (in Josephus' case, because he is the only person to claim to have been a member, and the primary source for its existence).

Etc... (There is still considerably more to how Josephus' story parodies Jesus'. )

Is it just Josephus in War of the Jews that parodies Luke?

No. The text of War of the Jews as a whole contains an extraordinary parody of Luke as a whole, of which Josephus' story is just a small part. 

Some of the more obvious similarities have been noticed by other scholars - e.g. taking them to simply be references to Jesus' story. And indeed Atwill observed that the bit in War of the Jews where a Mary sacrifices and eats her baby son is a parody of Jesus' story. 

What has not been realized before, is that there is a coherent yet carefully concealed parody of Luke, that is strung throughout the entirety of War of the Jews.

You can find both parodies in full, with all the supporting evidence in my paper (with the section about Josephus starting on p42). 

It is available:

 - online at Academia.edu (you can view it without an account - just scroll right down past the adverts)

or

- download it here as a pdf.