Overview
Thirty-two pages, paper covers, sold by mail. When The True Authorship of the New Testament appeared in November 1979, it came through no university press and no trade house. Its author, Abelard Reuchlin, promoted it himself through a body called the Abelard Reuchlin Foundation, which took out advertisements in The Humanist, and he described the booklet as the product of thirty-five years of research. What those pages claimed was not small. The New Testament, Reuchlin wrote, had been composed by members of the Calpurnii Pisones, an aristocratic Roman family — chiefly by one Arrius Calpurnius Piso, who supposedly also wrote under the pen name Flavius Josephus. Jesus, the apostles, Paul, John the Baptist: all of them, in this account, characters invented by Roman hands.
The booklet argued that the family built the new religion to consolidate its power — a faith engineered to keep subject populations, slaves included, obedient — and that the Pisos pressured Jewish communities to seed their scriptures with passages that would later read as prophecy. The authors, Reuchlin claimed, threaded clues to their own identities through the text for anyone holding the key, and he presented himself as one of a small circle who held it.
The idea that Christianity's documents owed something to Rome did not begin in 1979. In 1877 the German critic Bruno Bauer published Christ and the Caesars in Berlin, arguing that the New Testament epistles borrowed heavily — at points nearly word for word, he maintained — from the Stoic philosopher Seneca, and that the faith's intellectual parents were Philo of Alexandria and Greco-Roman philosophy. Friedrich Engels summarized the thesis approvingly in 1882. But Bauer named no conspirators. Reuchlin named a family.
A Family With a Taste for Plots
The Pisos themselves are entirely real. The Calpurnii Pisones supplied Rome with consuls and statesmen across generations, and in 65 CE one of them, Gaius Calpurnius Piso, led the most famous conspiracy of Nero's reign — a plan to assassinate the emperor and claim the throne by acclamation of the Praetorian Guard. A freedman betrayed the plot, and Piso was ordered to take his own life. The theory borrows this documented appetite for intrigue and extends it a generation: after Rome's war with Judea, the family allegedly traded daggers for literature.
The central figure, "Arrius Calpurnius Piso," is where critics planted their flag. A long rebuttal published at the Tekton apologetics ministry in the 2000s observed that the name appears in no work of Roman historical scholarship — only on websites devoted to the theory — and that where the theory reassigns known events to Arrius, the ancient sources credit other men; Suetonius's account of the death of Vitellius names the general Antonius Primus. The same critic argued that the theory's handling of Roman naming conventions runs against how the conventions actually worked. Believers answered that the record itself had been curated by the conspirators.
The Code in the Names
What gave a mail-order pamphlet its staying power was the method inside it. Reuchlin taught readers to hunt for aliases. Ancient literature, in his telling, was largely the work of royals writing under pen names, and they signed their productions through numerical values and wordplay — a system his successors came to call the "royal language." Under this reading, Arrius Piso was not only Josephus; family members and allies were said to stand behind Philo, behind assorted classical authors, behind the arithmetic of Revelation, where the theory finds the number 666 pointing back to its authors. The booklet went further still, claiming that senior figures in both Christianity and Islam quietly knew the truth. It is a system in which almost any text can be made to confess. That is exactly what critics held against it, noting that the numerological proofs change their own rules from one demonstration to the next.
The Theory Gets a Modem
A second printing followed in 1986, and then the booklet found the internet. Through the late 1990s and 2000s the theory lived on free hosting — Tripod and Angelfire pages, later a WordPress site called the Piso Project — much of it maintained by a writer working under the pen name "Roman Piso," who co-authored a book called Piso Christ with Jay Gallus and kept producing papers on alias-hunting. In July 2019 a researcher named Henry Davis announced through a PR Newswire release that he had verified a Roman authorship of the New Testament, citing Roman Piso and Joseph Atwill and presenting the numbers 666 and 616 as embedded marks of ownership. The booklet's current publisher says tens of thousands of copies have sold since 1979.
Atwill's own book, Caesar's Messiah (Ulysses Press, 2005), carried a related argument down a separate track, crediting the Flavian imperial court — Josephus, Berenice, Tiberius Julius Alexander — rather than the Pisos, and the two theories are generally discussed apart. Scholars responded to Atwill in unusually direct terms. Bart Ehrman said he knew college sophomores who could pull the argument apart; Robert M. Price, himself a doubter of a historical Jesus, described the book as an outrageous display of parallel-hunting; Richard Carrier wrote that every alleged parallel could be explained as coincidence, mistranslation, or a common Old Testament source. A 2013 London event promoting the thesis, billed as "Covert Messiah," drew press attention and the same objections.
Where the File Sits
Nearly five decades on, the theory occupies the same ground it staked in 1979: absent from the academic literature on Christian origins, attributed by its critics to a name no ancient source records, and steadily maintained by a small circle of writers who regard that very absence as part of the design. The thirty-two pages are still in print.