Joseph Atwill's Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus (2005) argues the Gospels' Jesus narrative was composed to parallel Titus Flavius's Judean campaign as described in Josephus's The Jewish War (c. 75 CE), sequence-for-sequence, producing a messiah who teaches tax-paying and obedience. Scholarly reception is overwhelmingly negative: critics, including Richard Carrier in his review, classify the method as parallelomania, unfalsifiable sequence-matching, and note no Flavian-era evidence for the alleged authorship program.
The thesis anchors a wider genre, the Piso theory, Abelard Reuchlin's variants, Maxwell's lectures, all converging on Rome as scripture's ghostwriter. The genre's engine is real and documented: Christianity did become Rome's state religion under Theodosius I (Edict of Thessalonica, 380 CE), so the instinct to read the religion as imperial by design has a genuine political fact behind it, inflated into an authorship claim.
The thesis's actual question survives its method: why does a messiah born under occupation preach 'render unto Caesar' (Mark 12:17) and turn the other cheek? Whether answer is Roman authorship, community survival strategy, or eschatology, the political shape of the early Jesus movement is a documented scholarly debate, Crossan's work among others, that Atwill annexed.
If the parallels were planted, who was the intended reader, and why did nobody notice for nineteen centuries?