Caesar's Messiah is a 2005 book by Joseph Atwill, which argues that the New Testament Gospels were written as wartime propaganda by scholars connected to the Roman imperial court of the Flavian emperors: Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. According to Atwill, their primary purpose in creating the religion was to control the spread of Judaism and moderate its political virulence. The Jewish nationalist Zealots had been defeated in the First Jewish-Roman War of 70 AD, but Judaism remained an influential movement throughout the Mediterranean region. Atwill argues that the biblical character Jesus Christ is a typological representation of the Roman Emperor Titus.