Joseph Atwill began his religious studies as a youth in Japan at the only English-speaking school in the country, the Jesuit-run St. Mary’s Military Academy. The majority of each of his school days was spent studying Greek, Latin, and the Bible, which he found fascinating, although he eventually drifted away from the faith.
Having studied computer science in college, Atwill formed a series of successful companies with one of the most renowned programmers in the world, David Ferguson. Many years later, the sale of his interests in these companies allowed him to return to his earlier interest – the origins of Christianity. He spent over a decade studying hundreds of books, among them, the works of Robert Eisenman and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Together with Eisenman, Atwill wrote a paper on the dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
While studying the two most prominent works of the 1st century – Josephus’ “Wars of the Jews” and the Gospels – Atwill noticed a series of parallels occurring in sequence between the military campaign of the Roman Caesar Titus Flavius and the ministry of Jesus. His findings led him to a startling new conclusion about the origins of Christianity – that a Roman imperial family, the Flavians, had created Christianity to pacify the Jews’ rebellion against Rome, and even more incredibly, they had placed a literary satire within the Gospels and “Wars of the Jews” to inform posterity of this fact.
The results of Atwill’s research are set out in his book “Caesar’s Messiah”. The second edition of “Caesar’s Messiah”, Ulysses Press 2006, became the best selling work of religious history in the US in 2007, and its German translation “Das Messias Ratsel”, Ulstein 2008, achieved #1 Best Seller status. The Flavian Signature edition of “Caesar’s Messiah”, CreateSpace 2011, adds the most detailed presentation of the parallels Atwill discovered between the works of Josephus and the Book of Luke. His upcoming book, “The Single Strand”, is also slated to be published by Ulstein, and a documentary film based on “Caesar’s Messiah” is being released in 2011. Atwill is an avid chess player, having more than 100 victories over Grandmasters and International Masters, and holding an ICC Masters rating of 2358.