I'm not a Christian, and I have no skin in the game. That is, it makes no difference to me whether or not Jesus was an historical person. But here's where I disagree with the author, and the conventional wisdom generally:

Although Christianity can be a comfort to some, it can also be very damaging and repressive, an insidious form of mind control that has led to blind acceptance of serfdom, poverty, and war throughout history.

"Christianity" isn't what's causing these things. What causes them is human nature, hegemony, paternalism, greed, etc. Christianity just happens to be the substrate on which they have operated for centuries. If it were never convened as a religion, there would have been something else. One need only to look to the similar myths of other religions to see that Christianity isn't really any different from the rest, although its core tenets of charity and anti-materialism seem to be quite peace promoting when taken literally. Anyway, my point is that people were warring and greedy before Christianity, and would have been warring and greedy still had Christianity never been invented. Many of the worst things of the Church were all holdovers from the Roman Empire anyway, after they usurped the church authority from the small groups of practitioners.

I'll open with my bias, I am religious, but even with the lack of evidence presented in this press release there are a few things I'm not to sure about (as much as I can surmise without actually hearing his argument).

Firstly, his overarching theory of population control reads like a conspiracy theory. Roman aristocrats spent thousands of hours, constructing the story of jesus, wrote it in a book, and then just hoped that it would catch on? As many unexpected routes that propaganda seems to take today, that seems like a lot of work for something that "might" work. Even then, they constructed a story so bulletproof that it tricked scholars for centuries? Sure religions come and go, but religions that end up being used as population control (egyptian pharaoh as a god strikes me as most obvious), these rose though centuries of cultural development. None of them were just "thought up" by a group of aristocrats. They developed to a point where they could be exploited.

Secondly, him playing the "every scholar before me missed it" card doesn't inspire confidence.

If he has a legitimate theory, I'll hear him out, but (and I realize this is just a press release) it seems flimsy at best. Plenty of people have tried to disprove god or jesus plenty of times, whether through physics or philosophy, but so far nobody has been able to inspire the religion ending effect they hope for.

Christianity is not going anywhere. It would not matter how concrete the evidence was. We are talking about people (not all but many) that don't think Carbon dating is legitimate anyways, unless the artifacts being dated support their claims. Hell, many Christians think the world is less than 3k years old. When the crux of your belief system hinges solely on faith, who cares about evidence?

They surmised that the way to stop the spread of zealous Jewish missionary activity was to create a competing belief system. That's when the 'peaceful' Messiah story was invented. Instead of inspiring warfare, this Messiah urged turn-the-other-cheek pacifism

Does anyone else think it strange that the Romans would create a fictional character who was tortured and executed by the Romans as the basis for a religion which wouldn't hate the Romans?

It's an intriguing idea, and the logic sounds good (for a novel, at least). Whether or not it's demonstrably true depends on what these ancient confessions are. I haven't found out what they are or what they say, so it seems like an awful lot hinges on them. Without a good confession, it's just a theory.

What seems to have eluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus ministry are more or less the same as the sequence of events and locations of the military campaign of [Emperor] Titus Flavius as described by Josephus.

It would be great if they provided some examples.

So much for The Lost Tomb of Jesus.

I can't tell if this is actually serious or not (I've been burned before), but at the very least his claim that it was all written by Romans in 100 AD should be scoffed at by Biblical linguists, according to my limited knowledge of the subject.

It was in Shane Claiborne's book Jesus for President that I first was exposed to the idea that the procession of kinging a Caesar is remarkably similar to Jesus's execution. Since then, I have always thought that the Christian writings must have been a political document. I am happy to hear that this line of thinking is now being discussed.