The Romans Didn’t Invent Christianity. UsefulCharts Gives Them Too Much Credit Anyway.

Matt Baker sets out to examine one of the stranger theories in Christian history: that Roman emperors secretly manufactured the story of Jesus to make conquered Jews worship their conqueror.

He ultimately rejects it. Correctly.

But in Did the Romans Create Christianity?, published by UsefulCharts, Baker commits a different historical error. He gives a defeated conspiracy theory an elaborate hearing, overlooks evidence that could dispatch it much more decisively, and then offers his own remarkably tidy explanation for Christianity’s success: Rome destroyed Jerusalem, Jewish resistance became hopeless, and a more peaceful, Roman-compatible religion rose to prominence.

The trouble is that Christianity existed decades before Jerusalem fell. Its foundational writings reveal disagreements about Jewish religious law before the Flavians came to power. Its literature contains images that can be read as hostility toward Rome. And Jewish resistance survived the destruction of Jerusalem by more than half a century.

Baker is careful to distance himself from the conspiracy. He is considerably less careful with the history he uses to explain why Christianity supposedly prospered.

That distinction matters. Rejecting a ridiculous explanation does not make the explanation offered in its place correct.

1. The Evidence That Should Have Ended the Conspiracy Comes From Before the Flavians

Joseph Atwill’s Caesar’s Messiah, published in 2005, proposes that Christianity was manufactured after Rome defeated the Jewish revolt and destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE.

The alleged architect was the Flavian imperial family, particularly Titus, who commanded the Roman forces that conquered Jerusalem.

Baker spends considerable time examining parallels between the Gospels and Roman military history.

Yet he largely neglects the most damaging evidence against the theory: the letters of Paul.

These are not obscure documents that require speculative reconstruction.

Seven Pauline letters are widely accepted as authentic by critical scholars. Among them, First Thessalonians is generally dated to approximately 49–52 CE.

That places a surviving Christian document roughly two decades before Jerusalem’s destruction.

As Sydney Tooth explains in the Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements, First Thessalonians already presupposes an established community concerned with Jesus’s return, resurrection, death, and salvation.

The significance is difficult to exaggerate.

Christianity did not begin when Titus conquered Jerusalem. Communities already existed in different parts of the Roman Empire.

Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, generally dated to the 50s, preserves traditions that he explicitly says he had received from others.

In 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, Paul describes Jesus’s death, burial, resurrection, and appearances to Peter, James, and other followers.

Whether those events happened is a separate historical question. What matters here is that the traditions were circulating before the supposed Flavian invention.

Paul also describes meeting Peter and James in Jerusalem.

These were not characters awaiting invention by Roman propagandists in 70 CE. They were identifiable figures within an existing religious movement, according to testimony written before that date.

None of this proves that every Gospel story preserves authentic biography. It does, however, make the proposal that Titus created Christianity after Jerusalem’s destruction extraordinarily difficult to sustain.

Baker instead emphasizes that the earliest Gospel, Mark, was probably written during the Flavian period.

That chronology is itself less precise than the video implies.

The Oxford Bibliographies entry on Mark places scholarly opinion between the mid-60s and shortly after 70 CE. The distinction matters because the earlier end of that range predates Flavian rule.

More importantly, the first surviving Gospel is not the first surviving Christian writing.

Baker allows the date of a biography to stand in for the birth of the movement it describes.

The difference is elementary. A history book published after a war does not establish that the people it describes were invented by the victors.

2. The Gospels Are Not Nearly as Friendly to Rome as Baker Suggests

Baker finds the Gospel portrayal of Jesus politically surprising.

Judea had experienced repeated opposition to Roman occupation. Yet Jesus teaches forgiveness, nonviolence, and respect for certain obligations to Caesar.

Roman soldiers sometimes appear sympathetically. Tax collectors become followers. Jewish religious authorities frequently oppose Jesus.

Baker therefore characterizes the Gospels as substantially favorable toward Rome.

This interpretation depends on what he chooses to emphasize.

Consider the most famous example: Jesus’s instruction to give Caesar what belongs to Caesar.

In Mark 12:13–17, the statement comes during an attempt to trap Jesus with a question about taxation.

Jesus asks to see a coin bearing Caesar’s image. He then distinguishes between Caesar’s claims and God's.

The passage does not explain exactly where Caesar’s rightful possessions end and God’s begin. It can be understood as permitting taxation without establishing unlimited political obedience.

Treating it as straightforward enthusiasm for Roman government removes the ambiguity that gives the exchange much of its force.

Baker also discusses the story of a possessed man whose demons enter a herd of pigs.

He introduces it because Atwill believes the episode disguises a Roman military victory.

But Baker overlooks a rather inconvenient feature of the story.

The demons call themselves Legion.

In Mark 5:1–20, Jesus expels these demons into approximately 2,000 pigs, which subsequently drown.

Legion was also the name of a major Roman military formation.

The story can therefore support an interpretation almost opposite to Atwill’s: not Jesus celebrating Rome’s military power, but Jesus symbolically overcoming it.

This is not merely an interpretation invented to contradict Baker.

In a 2007 article in the scholarly journal Biblica, Markus Lau examined possible connections between the passage and Legio X Fretensis, a Roman legion associated with the Jewish War.

Lau considered the legion’s boar emblem, the number of pigs, and military activity during the revolt. His interpretation presents Jesus as a potential liberating figure rather than an image of Roman conquest.

Such symbolism remains debated. It cannot establish what Mark intended with certainty.

But that uncertainty is precisely why Baker should not flatten the Gospels into a pro-Roman political program.

The earliest Christian literature also places Jesus’s execution under Roman authority.

The Roman historian Tacitus, writing in the early second century, records that Christus was executed during Tiberius’s reign under Pontius Pilate.

Tacitus additionally describes Nero’s punishment of Christians following Rome’s fire in 64 CE, although historians continue to scrutinize the details of his retrospective account.

A movement whose central figure was executed by a Roman official cannot be classified as politically accommodating simply because some of its teachings discourage violence.

The Gospels contain conflicting pressures: obedience, judgment, mercy, confrontation, and competing claims to authority.

Removing those tensions makes the historical problem easier.

It also makes the history less accurate.

3. The Supposed Roman Victory Over Jewish Resistance Was Not Final

Baker offers what he regards as his strongest objection to the Flavian conspiracy.

Why would Titus bother inventing a new religion when Rome had already defeated the Jews?

Jerusalem was devastated in 70 CE. By the time Titus became emperor in 79, Baker suggests, Jewish resistance was largely a thing of the past.

It is an attractive argument.

It is also historically defective.

Roman military victory in 70 CE did not end Jewish resistance to Roman rule.

Major Jewish uprisings erupted across parts of the eastern empire in 115–117 CE.

Then came the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135 CE, an enormous confrontation in Judea that demanded another substantial Roman military response.

The Cambridge History of Judaism documents this later rebellion, its leadership, the evidence for Jewish administration during the conflict, and the scale of Rome’s reaction.

The interval between Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 and the beginning of Bar Kokhba’s revolt in 132 was approximately 62 years.

That is not a minor historical aftershock.

It demonstrates that Jerusalem’s destruction had not made the pursuit of Jewish political independence disappear.

Of course, Titus could not have known that another major rebellion would erupt decades after his death.

But Baker is making a retrospective argument about Roman interests. He treats the conquest as having solved a political problem that subsequent events demonstrate remained unresolved.

A government may defeat an insurgency and still seek ways to prevent its return.

This does not establish that Rome invented Christianity.

It merely exposes the weakness of Baker’s claim that there was no conceivable reason for Roman authorities to influence Jewish religious politics after 70 CE.

The absence of a demonstrated Roman conspiracy is an excellent reason to reject the conspiracy. An imagined absence of Roman political interests is not.

Baker also mentions Titus’s competing responsibilities: the eruption of Vesuvius, the fire in Rome, and completion of the Colosseum.

These events occurred during Titus’s reign. They are real.

But they prove remarkably little.

An emperor being occupied with disasters does not establish that his government lacked the capacity to pursue ideological or religious interests.

The Roman Empire was an administrative system, not a personal to-do list.

The argument from Titus’s busy schedule is especially unnecessary when earlier Christian documents already present such a severe obstacle to Atwill’s theory.

Baker reaches for speculation when chronology would do the job.

4. Christianity Was Already Becoming Accessible to Gentiles Before Jerusalem Fell

Baker argues that Christianity enjoyed a competitive advantage because Gentiles could join without adopting every traditional Jewish practice.

He specifically mentions circumcision and dietary restrictions.

That observation has substantial historical support.

Its placement in his explanation is the problem.

The disputes over Gentile participation were already central to Christianity before the Flavian dynasty.

In Galatians 2:3, Paul records that his Greek companion Titus was not compelled to undergo circumcision.

This Titus was a Christian associate of Paul, not the later Roman emperor.

The passage belongs to an authentic Pauline letter written before Jerusalem’s destruction. It reflects an existing dispute about whether Gentile followers of Jesus must observe Jewish law.

The significance is straightforward.

One of the features Baker identifies as helping Christianity flourish after the Jewish–Roman War had already emerged within the movement.

The Roman conquest may have affected the movement’s subsequent development.

But it did not create its openness to uncircumcised Gentiles.

Baker's account compresses processes that developed over decades into a convenient aftermath of Roman victory.

This is particularly damaging because the video presents that aftermath as its principal alternative to the Flavian conspiracy.

The question is not whether the destruction of Jerusalem mattered.

It plainly did.

The question is which developments it caused, which it accelerated, and which were already underway.

Those distinctions are not optional details. They determine whether the explanation works.

5. The Literary Parallels Are Less Extraordinary Once Earlier Jewish Sources Enter the Picture

Atwill’s most memorable evidence involves the expression “fishers of men.”

Jesus uses the phrase when calling his first disciples near the Sea of Galilee.

Atwill connects it with Josephus’s account of Roman soldiers killing Jewish fighters in the same region.

Josephus describes soldiers attacking people in the water with long poles and other weapons.

The resemblance is striking enough to make an entertaining story.

But there is an obvious question.

Was fishing for people a metaphor available to Jewish writers before Titus fought his battles?

Yes.

Jeremiah 16:16 already describes God sending fishermen to catch people, followed by hunters searching for them.

The imagery appears in Jewish scripture long before the Roman conquest.

Biblical scholar Mary Chilton Callaway discusses the relationship between Jeremiah’s fishing imagery and its later Christian reception in Jeremiah Through the Centuries.

The two passages do not have identical meanings.

Jeremiah’s imagery belongs to a context of divine judgment, whereas the Gospel saying is commonly understood through the disciples’ mission.

But the existence of an older Jewish literary precedent substantially weakens any attempt to treat the metaphor as a distinctive reference to Titus.

Baker explains Atwill’s proposed correspondence without examining this much more immediate source.

The same methodological problem affects the wider theory.

To establish deliberate literary borrowing, one must consider more than an intriguing resemblance.

Were the expressions unusual? Did they appear in earlier texts? Are the narrative sequences genuinely comparable? Do the passages share distinctive wording? Are apparent matches being selected from a much larger collection of unrelated material?

Without those controls, a reader has no reliable way to distinguish deliberate imitation from coincidence or common literary tradition.

Atwill’s parallels require this scrutiny.

Baker's account supplies surprisingly little of it.

6. The Flavian Family Evidence Is Separated From Its Most Important Dates

Baker discusses traditions connecting members of the Flavian imperial family with Christianity.

These include Flavia Domitilla and her husband Flavius Clemens, whom Atwill attempts to identify with Clement of Rome.

There are genuine historical questions surrounding the family's religious affiliations.

But the evidence is not nearly as direct as the theory requires.

The Oxford Classical Dictionary identifies Flavius Clemens as a consul in 95 CE who was executed under Domitian.

The ancient accusation concerned impiety and may have involved Jewish religious practices. The claim that he and his wife were Christians belongs to later tradition.

That is a considerable distance from demonstrating that members of the imperial household invented Christianity.

The catacombs associated with Domitilla introduce another chronological problem.

Baker mentions their early images of Jesus as part of the apparent connection between the imperial family and Christianity.

But the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission of Sacred Archaeology distinguishes between members of the extended Flavian family who shared the name Domitilla.

It also dates an early Flavian underground burial complex to the end of the second century, with Christian burials and biblical decorations appearing there during the third century.

That chronology matters.

The events supposedly responsible for inventing Christianity occurred around 70 CE.

Much of the cited Christian funerary artwork belongs to a period more than a century later.

A later Christian image on property connected with an imperial family does not establish that the family created the religion.

The 2018 book Creating Christ offers another proposed connection through symbols appearing on imperial coins, Christian rings, and catacomb carvings.

Yet visual resemblance is only the beginning of an archaeological argument.

The objects would need secure dating, provenance, and a demonstrated connection between their meanings.

A symbol can move between cultures without carrying its original political significance unchanged.

Baker does not endorse the theory outright, but presenting its archaeological claims without establishing these basic controls gives the evidence more apparent weight than it deserves.

An old object is not automatically an old explanation.

7. Rome Did Not Consistently Regard Christianity as a Convenient Ally

Baker's final interpretation rests on a plausible political intuition.

A movement that discouraged rebellion and welcomed Gentiles might have appeared less threatening to Roman rulers than armed Jewish resistance.

That possibility deserves examination.

But Baker moves from potential compatibility toward a much larger historical conclusion.

He argues that the empire under the Flavians offered Christianity a substantially better environment than the empire under the Julio-Claudians.

Where is the comparative evidence?

The video presents no reliable figures establishing Christian population growth across these periods.

It does not demonstrate a systematic difference in imperial treatment of Christians under the two dynasties.

And it does not establish that Roman officials generally understood Christianity as a useful instrument of political stability.

The surviving evidence points toward a more complicated relationship.

Around 112 CE, the Roman governor Pliny the Younger wrote to Emperor Trajan about Christians brought before him.

Pliny described interrogating accused Christians and punishing those who persisted in their religious identity.

He also explained how suspects could demonstrate that they had abandoned Christianity: they worshipped the Roman gods, honored the emperor’s image, and rejected Christ.

Those who remained committed Christians were reportedly unwilling to perform these acts.

The letter dates from after the Flavian dynasty, so it cannot establish Flavian policy.

It does, however, expose the limitations of treating Christianity as naturally compatible with imperial ideology.

Christians could accept certain civil obligations while refusing religious acts that Roman authorities considered important.

A movement could discourage armed rebellion and still challenge the religious foundations of imperial authority.

These positions are not mutually exclusive.

Baker never properly develops that distinction.

He also overlooks the danger of confusing a religion's eventual survival with the intentions of the political authorities under whom it survived.

Christianity's expansion does not prove that emperors welcomed it.

Survival is not sponsorship.

8. The Jewish Future Was Not Simply Replaced by the Christian One

Perhaps the most consequential weakness appears near the end of Baker’s episode.

After Jerusalem’s destruction, he argues, hopes for an independent Jewish state were largely extinguished.

More accommodating groups supposedly gained influence, while Christianity benefited from its accessibility to Gentiles.

He concludes that Christianity eventually eclipsed the other forms of Judaism.

The presentation turns a complex religious transformation into an almost mechanical story of winners and losers.

Rome destroyed Jerusalem. Rebellious Judaism lost. Christianity adapted. Christianity won.

The historical record does not permit such a tidy progression.

The destruction of the Temple profoundly affected Jewish religious life.

But Jewish communities did not simply disappear, abandon their traditions, or surrender their future to Christianity.

Jewish religious scholarship, law, communal institutions, and modes of worship continued developing.

Nor did Christianity emerge as a fully separate religion in a single moment.

In The Cambridge Companion to the Apostolic Fathers, Philip Alexander describes Christianity and Judaism as traditions that developed out of the diversity of late Second Temple Judaism.

Their growing separation was a historical process, particularly significant between the revolt beginning in 66 CE and the Bar Kokhba War of 132–135 CE.

An extensive scholarly volume edited by Daniel R. Schwartz, Zeev Weiss, and Ruth Clements examines precisely what changed after 70 CE and what continued from earlier Jewish life.

Its premise is instructive: even the importance of 70 CE must be assessed across different institutions, religious practices, and communities rather than assumed to explain everything.

There is another uncomfortable complication.

In a study of Christian responses to Jerusalem’s destruction, scholar G. W. H. Lampe observed that the surviving Christian literature of the following century and a half contains surprisingly few clear references to the catastrophe.

Lampe did not deny the event's historical significance. He challenged the assumption that it immediately dominated Christian thinking in the ways later historians might expect.

That finding cuts directly against Baker’s neat explanation.

If Jerusalem’s destruction was the decisive event that transformed Christianity's prospects, historians must still establish how, when, and through which institutions those effects occurred.

Baker does not provide that chain of evidence.

He substitutes a plausible sequence of events for a demonstrated causal relationship.

And the consequences extend beyond an academic dispute.

Presenting Jewish history after 70 CE primarily as failed resistance, while treating Christianity as its successful and more adaptable successor, risks repeating a distorted historical narrative in which Judaism becomes little more than a defeated precursor to Christianity.

This is not a question of protecting religious sensibilities.

It is a question of accurately describing two living traditions whose histories developed through conflict, interaction, adaptation, and continuity.

Judaism did not need to become Christianity to survive Rome.

The evidence establishes that it did not.

Verdict: The Conspiracy Is Weak. The Replacement Story Is Not Strong Enough.

Baker's conclusion that the Flavian emperors probably did not invent Christianity is sound.

His method of reaching it is considerably less impressive.

He spends time entertaining literary coincidences, imperial family connections, and questionable archaeological interpretations while leaving the earliest surviving Christian writings largely outside the argument.

Those writings establish that Christian communities, beliefs, and disputes existed before Titus destroyed Jerusalem.

They make the central conspiracy difficult to sustain without the need to speculate about an emperor's workload.

The deeper failure comes afterward.

Baker correctly observes that political events can influence religious development. But he treats that reasonable observation as the foundation for a much less secure account of Christianity’s success.

Roman victory did not eliminate Jewish resistance. Christianity’s openness to Gentiles did not begin with the Flavians. The Gospels are not uniformly supportive of Roman authority. And the destruction of Jerusalem did not mark the disappearance of Judaism as a competing religious tradition.

These are not peripheral qualifications.

They alter the explanation.

The most revealing possibility is not that Rome secretly wrote the story of Jesus.

It is that later religious communities developed under an empire whose violence, institutions, and political demands shaped the conditions in which they lived—sometimes through accommodation, sometimes through resistance, and often through both.

That history is more complicated than Atwill's conspiracy.

It is also more complicated than Baker's preferred alternative.

A Roman emperor did not need to invent Christianity for imperial power to influence its development. But imperial influence is not imperial authorship, political survival is not political obedience, and military conquest is not the end of a people's history.

Baker understands the first distinction.

His video is much less convincing about the others.

References

Original work

1. UsefulCharts — Did the Romans Create Christianity?
Creator: Matt Baker. YouTube.
Watch the original video

The work under review. Its central argument rejects the Flavian conspiracy while proposing that Roman conquest helped create favorable conditions for Christianity’s expansion.

Primary historical and religious sources

2. Paul — First Corinthians 15:3–8
New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, published by Bible Gateway.
Read the passage

Preserves an account of Jesus’s death, resurrection, and appearances in an authentic Pauline letter written before Jerusalem’s destruction. The passage demonstrates the existence of earlier Christian traditions without independently verifying the events described.

3. Paul — Galatians 1:18–19 and 2:3
New Testament, available through Bible Gateway.
Paul's meeting with Peter and James · Gentile circumcision dispute

Documents Paul's reported contact with early Christian leaders and an established disagreement over whether Gentile Christians needed circumcision.

4. Josephus — The Jewish War, Book III
Ancient historical work, English translation hosted by the University of Chicago.
Read Josephus's account

Describes Roman military operations around the Sea of Galilee, including the battle Atwill connects to Jesus's language about fishing for people.

5. Jeremiah 16:16
Hebrew Bible, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.
Read the passage

Establishes that imagery involving fishermen catching people existed in Jewish scripture long before Titus's military campaigns.

6. Mark 5:1–20 and Mark 12:13–17
New Testament, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.
The demons called Legion · Jesus and Caesar's tax

Provides the original Gospel passages needed to evaluate claims about Roman military symbolism and Jesus's attitude toward imperial taxation.

7. Tacitus — Annals 15.44
Written approximately 105–116 CE. Published in translation by the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization.
Read the historical extract

Records Roman traditions concerning Jesus's execution under Pilate and Nero's treatment of Christians after the fire of 64 CE. Its retrospective nature limits its value as contemporary evidence for those events.

8. Pliny the Younger — Letters 10.96–97
Approximately 112 CE. Historical correspondence, available through Roman Letters.
Read Pliny's letter

Documents Roman administrative concerns about Christians and the use of emperor worship as a test of religious conformity.

Modern historical scholarship

9. Sydney E. Tooth — 1 Thessalonians
Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements, January 11, 2023.
Read the study

Explains the scholarly dating of First Thessalonians to approximately 49–52 CE and identifies the religious beliefs already present within the early Christian community.

10. Gospel of Mark
Oxford Bibliographies in Biblical Studies, Oxford University Press, 2010.
Read the scholarly overview

Places the Gospel's composition in the mid-60s or shortly after 70 CE, making the chronology less precise than a simple Flavian-era date implies.

11. Markus Lau — Die Legio X Fretensis und der Besessene von Gerasa
Biblica, Volume 88, Issue 3, 2007, pages 351–364.
Read the research abstract

Develops a possible anti-imperial interpretation of Mark's Legion narrative using Roman military history, insignia, and the passage's numerical details. The accessible abstract establishes the author's thesis, not scholarly consensus.

12. Mary Chilton Callaway — Jeremiah 16
Jeremiah Through the Centuries, Wiley, April 9, 2020.
Read the scholarly discussion

Explains the relationship between earlier Jewish fishing imagery and its interpretation within Christian literary traditions.

13. Flavius Clemens, Roman Consul, 95 CE
Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford University Press, March 7, 2016.
Read the historical entry

Distinguishes the ancient accusations against Clemens from later traditions identifying him and his wife as Christians.

14. Pontifical Commission of Sacred Archaeology — Catacombs of Domitilla
Vatican, October 10, 2001.
Read the archaeological description

Identifies different members of the Flavian family and dates important burial structures and Christian decorations, preventing later archaeological material from being mistaken for direct first-century evidence.

15. Hanan Eshel — The Bar Kochba Revolt, 132–135
The Cambridge History of Judaism, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Read the historical study

Documents the major Jewish revolt against Rome more than six decades after Jerusalem's destruction, contradicting the suggestion that political resistance had effectively disappeared.

16. Philip Alexander — The Image of Jews and Judaism in the Apostolic Fathers
The Cambridge Companion to the Apostolic Fathers, Cambridge University Press, May 28, 2021.
Read the chapter overview

Explains Christianity's and Judaism's development from Second Temple Jewish traditions and places their growing separation within a longer historical process.

17. Daniel R. Schwartz, Zeev Weiss, and Ruth Clements, editors — Was 70 CE a Watershed in Jewish History?
Brill, 2012.
Read the publication overview

Brings together 20 scholarly studies examining changes and continuities after Jerusalem's destruction. The available overview establishes the scope of the investigation rather than a single agreed explanation.

18. G. W. H. Lampe — A.D. 70 in Christian Reflection
Jesus and the Politics of His Day, Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Read the chapter overview

Challenges assumptions about the immediate importance of Jerusalem's destruction to early Christian writers by examining the comparatively limited surviving literary references to the event.