Roman Piso

The Roman Piso theory is a pseudohistorical theory of the origins of Christianity. It states that a conspiracy of well-educated Romans &mdash; the Piso family &mdash; wrote the New Testament, particularly the Gospels, as a social control mechanism. Its advocates call it "The New Classical Scholarship". Nobody else takes it seriously. (Not even Acharya S bought into it. )

The theory originated in Bruno Bauer's Christus und Caesaren (Christ and the Caesars) from 1877, which claimed that the Romans had authored the New Testament and that Josephus Flavius was the inventor of Jesus.

The Pisos are also claimed to have invented the Christian calendar, rather than it having been proposed around 525 and adopted in the 800s.

Joseph Atwill, an anti-Stratfordian, in Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus, claims that the events of Jesus' ministry in the Gospels parallel the military campaigns of Titus Flavius in Josephus' Wars of the Jews. Atwill's theory is based on Bible Code-style pareidolia applied to the four canonical Gospels (ignoring the forty-plus others) and apparently only in English translation (his claimed puns don't work in the original Greek). Conspiracy connoisseurs will delight at Atwill's explanation:

Other proponents include Abelard Reuchlin (the "Abelard Reuchlin Foundation" used to sell his 1979 pamphlet The True Authorship of the New Testament on the subject in the newspaper's small ads; he invented the supposed kingpin of the conspiracy, Arrius Calpurnius Piso), James Ballantyne Hannay and Jay Gallus, and an author who writes as "Roman Piso" (John Duran, who used to advocate this theory on Usenet).

A decent takedown of this nonsense is here, a longer one here, and Richard Carrier knocks it out of the park here.

It's people like this that give Jesus mythicists a bad name.

In real life
was a 1st-century Roman senator who gave his name to the actual a plot to usurp Nero. This had nothing to do with religious works over in Judea.