Free Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus:Flavian Signature Edition by Joseph Atwill

translated in the New Testament above as “soul,” can also mean “heart,” or “the seat of emotions.” Splanchon , the Greek word that Josephus uses to describe the part of Mary that was pierced through, is translated above as “bowels,” but is in fact a synonym for psuche , and can mean either “inward parts,” especially the heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys, or, like psuche , it can mean “the seat of the emotions.” Scholars have not seen this conceptual parallel between the two Marys simply because it was created using different words, even though the words mean the same thing.
    In other words, if a prophet predicted that “next week a dog will bite a mailman” and a historian recorded that during that week “a cur sank its teeth into a letter carrier” the prophecy, in fact, came to pass even though the prophet and the historian used different words to describe the event. The concept the prophet predicted was the same as the one the historian recorded.
    The “fulfilled prophecy” of the “bitten postman” cannot be seen through an analysis of the individual words that the historian and the prophet used. Likewise, the satirical system that exists between the New Testament and Wars of the Jews cannot be seen by analyzing their individual words and nuances of grammar. The system is made up of parallel concepts, not parallel words.
    Notice also that the parallel “heart piercings” of the two Marys are prophetically logical. This is to say that the Mary in the New Testament is the one predicted to have her heart “pierced through” in the future, and the Mary in Wars of the Jews, which occurred later, is the one who fulfilled this prophecy. If the New Testament had stated that Mary’s heart had been pierced through, then the logic of this prophecy would have been contradicted. And notice also that the statement in the New Testament, though innocuous, is a prophecy. One reason that the satiric level of the New Testament has remained unseen is because scholars have failed to recognize the many seemingly innocuous New Testament prophecies that are fulfilled within Wars of the Jews .
    To summarize, within this short passage Josephus has used a number of concepts and names that are parallel to those associated with the New Testament’s symbolic Passover lamb. These are a mother named Mary; the fact that this Mary was pierced through the heart; a son of Mary; hyssop; a son who is a sacrifice; a son whose flesh is eaten; a son who is to become a “byword to the world”; one of Moses’ instructions regarding the Passover lamb; an individual named Lazarus (Eleazar); and Jerusalem as the location of the incident. It is unlikely that there is another passage in all of literature that contains, by chance, as many as half the number of parallels with a concept as singular as Christianity’s Passover lamb. When I first recognized these parallels I felt that the simplest explanation for such an improbable grouping was that it had been deliberately created.  Therefore, the passage was a lampoon of Jesus.
    To argue against this proposition one must accept this idea that Josephus unknowingly recorded these parallels in such detail within a passage of less than two pages. However, because Josephus wrote Wars of the Jews while living in the Flavian court, a place where Christianity flourished, and was one of the few historians to have recorded Jesus’ existence, he would seem to be among the authors least likely to have recorded a satire of Christ accidentally.
    For example, if the passage in question had occurred within a work by Tolstoy, there would be virtually complete agreement that it was a deliberate satire. And notice that when viewed from such a perspective the passage would certainly be seen as darkly comical, the irony being self-evident. The satire suggests that the Messiah who instructed his followers to symbolically “eat of my flesh” was actually eaten by his mother. 
    If Josephus was