User:Arne Eickenberg/Caesarian origin of Christianity/Addendum

The first German edition
Initial reactions to the first German edition of War Jesus Caesar? were mixed. Based on Carotta's past as a part-time satirical artist some feuilleton critics and former journalist colleagues assumed that his book was meant as a science parody, while other journalists praised the book and called it "provoking", "astounding" and "meticulous". Archaeologist and peer reviewer Erika Simon wrote that Carotta's research ties with preexisting publications on the tight interconnections between Christianity and the Roman world empire, but "goes further and reveals new connections which have never been seen that way." She hoped that Carotta's book would contribute "that we remain open to questions concerning early Christianity". Except for few statements other scholars and clerics remained silent, which only changed with the English and Dutch translation, the latter spawning an often heated controversy in some academic and journalistic circles of the Netherlands.

The Dutch controversy
The Dutch debate, which lasted for several years to this day, was for the most time characterized by a strong partisan rift between journalists and between scholars, with one faction at times resorting to hostile antagonisms, and the other partially indulging in immoderate eulogies.

Philosopher and columnist Paul Cliteur started the debate by refuting the initial criticism coming from former academic history lecturer Anton van Hooff, who rejected the theory although he had never read the book. Cliteur wrote that Carotta presented an "overwhelming amount of material […] to support his thesis", which for him was the "key to unlocking a lot of mysteries on the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire". Sylvain Ephimenco called Carotta's book a "sensation". He wrote that some of the arguments might be "farfetched", some however "compelling" and "more than plausible", and also expressed his worries that recounting simply a summary of Carotta's arguments could rather weaken the theory. In a short classical review for the Dutch Library Service J. Kleisen wrote that Carotta's very popular book demonstrated an "overwhelming quantity […] of striking, almost systematic parallels" between Christ and Caesar. He noted as significant that the cult of Divus Iulius vanished as soon as Christianity surfaced. The reader would be able to determine whether the argument that the worship of Caesar was replaced by that of Christ is stronger than the unprovable historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth. Philosopher Andreas Kinneging stated the "extreme importance" of Was Jezus Caesar?, which "provides [for] a new opening to the research on the accounts of Jesus' life", a view that was shared by many commentators: Political publicist and architectural historian Thomas von der Dunk applauded Carotta's "thoroughly researched and documented study", while Willem Dijkhuis emphasized the compelling nature of the resulting perspective on the European heritage. Professor of Future Studies Wim J. de Ridder stated that Carotta "participates in the development of normative future models which the elite of church and state considers undesirable", but which for the "average citizen [will be] experienced as inspirational". Classicist Gerard Janssen wrote that "Carotta has developed an extremely interesting and major theory, which will further require profound examination and verification or falsification."

The release of The Gospel of Caesar, a documentary feature film about Carotta's research, reignited the original controversy, in part because Janssen also endorsed Carotta's theory in the film. Based on a random and sketchy overview of Carotta's research by theologian Matthijs de Jong, the Dutch Bible Society NBG (Nederlands Bijbelgenootschap) distanced themselves from Carotta in a press release, in which they declared that his book placed itself outside of the scientific discussion and that it was eccentric fiction disguised as science. While most scholars and critics like theologians Jacobine Geel and Rob van Houwelingen had found a more moderate tone with regard to the theory, van Hooff harshly criticized Janssen and his students for participating in the documentary and for publicly debating Carotta's "superstition". In the most extensive Dutch article on the theory to date, van Hooff attempted to show that Carotta's book contained severe methodological flaws and factual errors, and accused its author of being a pseudoscientist, whereas Peter Veldhuisen had attested scientificity and verifiability a few years earlier. Shirley Haasnoot, the editor-in-chief of the university magazine De Academische Boekengids, eventually lost her neutrality in the controversy by refusing a balanced scientific debate, and only a short and redacted rebuttal of van Hooff's article was permitted. Van Hooff's unscientific methods of criticism were also rejected by Cliteur, who even compared his actions to fanaticism, stalking and libel.

Reception since 2005
Theologian and priest Jerome Murphy-O'Connor superficially criticized Carotta's abstract and believed that he avoided explanations of his theory. He also expressed unspecified doubt concerning the parallels between Jesus' and Caesar's life. Based on information gathered from Carotta's website Maria Wyke, professor of Latin, considered the parallels between Caesar and Jesus demonstrated by Carotta as "sweeping and often superficial", despite their being "detailed and justified at book length". She summarized that "Caesar is no longer the shadow of Christ, but Christ the shadow of Caesar." Commentating on Wyke's book, classical reviewer Peter Stothard called Carotta's interpretation of Mark's gospel as a corrupt retelling of the Roman civil war "highly notable" in the reception theory form of historical scholarship. Historian and classical philologian Luciano Canfora called Jesus was Caesar an "original book" and added another argument to Carotta's framework by showing that both Caesar and Christ only narrowly escaped the desecration of their bodies. Carotta's conclusions were fully endorsed by classical philologian and peer reviewer Fotis Kavoukopoulos, who also called the theory "a paradigm shift in the history of religion". Anthropologist Francisco Rodríguez Pascual stated that Carotta's theory is a very important working hypothesis, which closes a gap that has never been heuristically investigated from this angle. New Testamentarian philologian Antonio Piñero stated that a diegetic transposition was "almost impossible" due to the severe cultural differences displayed in the Roman and Biblical sources, and that Carotta's theory would create "uncertainty". He later wrote that the theory of the Gospel as a diegetic transposition was one of the most remarkable and ingenious exercises he had read about the problem of Jesus' historicity, but also noted its complexity as a possible problem.

Popular reception
From the beginning, Carotta's book was frequently mentioned and discussed on the internet, where reactions were mixed and often partisan. The new theory was temporarily embraced by proponents of chronological criticism and also utilized for atheist and even anti-Christian writings, whose authors occasionally engaged in debates with supporters of Carotta's research. Furthermore, e-mail discussions between Carotta, Richard Carrier and Earl Doherty were made public on an internet board. While some authors questioned the seriousness of the new theory altogether, others felt compelled to write reviews. Classicist and author of historical childrens' literature María García Esperón praised Carotta's work on her weblog, and Peter Stothard substantiated the new theory's notability (see above).

Film
In 2007 the documentary feature film Het Evangelie van Caesar premiered in Utrecht, Netherlands. It was directed and produced by political journalist Jan van Friesland and co-financed by Dutch public television broadcaster VARA. The English version The Gospel of Caesar premiered in 2008 and was screened at several European film festivals. The film generally documents Carotta's research and the reactions to his theory, but also emphasizes Carotta's collaboration with a Spanish priest in reconstructing and staging the funeral of Julius Caesar according to the historical sources.

The documentary received mainly positive reactions. The reviewers at the Leeds International Film Festival described the film as a "mesmerising", "thrilling" and "utterly intriguing look" at Carotta and his "controversial idea". Gerry van der List called it a "relentlessly original" film. The documentary also revived the scholarly debate on Carotta's theory in the Netherlands (see above).

Theater
In a background paper for the Dark Lady Players anthropologist and dramaturgical theorist John Hudson partially supported Carotta's observations and wrote that passages in the Gospel were "based on events in the history of Julius Caesar", for example the pericopes of Jesus walking over the water and his triumphant entry into the city on horseback, which has also been noted by other scholars. The clearest parallels were to be found in the death, apotheosis and worship of Caesar: Hudson agreed both with Ethelbert Stauffer's conclusion that the Easter liturgy follows Caesar's funeral, and with Carotta's analysis that the passion and crucifixion account is also modeled on this ceremony, where a wax figure of the deceased was shown to the people on a cruciform tropaeum, including the geographical transposition of Capitolium to "Golgotha" (see main article). Hudson also augmented Carotta's research by showing that the sun over the cities darkened after Caesar's and Christ's death in both accounts. Although Hudson acknowledged a direct modeling on Caesarian sources, including the passion and Resurrection, which are pivotal to Christianity, he maintained that these dependencies are merely part of a broad cluster of Roman hypotexts, which were rewritten into the Gospel as a Roman satire, especially by including material from The War of the Jews by Flavius Josephus.

Francesco Carotta
Francesco Carotta is an Italian industrial engineer, linguist and philosopher as well as a former IT entrepreneur, editor and publisher, who now works as a classical historian, philologian, archaeologist and Biblical researcher. As a classical scholar he is best known for his controversial theory that the historical Christ was Julius Caesar, and that Christianity developed from the cult of Divus Iulius.

Biography
Carotta was born in 1946 in Ca'Zen near Lusia (Polesine), Veneto, Italy, to a mother, who was a dressmaker from a family of farmers, and a father, who was an artist painter and the local socialist mayor from a family of entrepreneurs. From early childhood Carotta's paternal grandfather Domenico had been a friend of Italian socialist Giacomo Matteotti, with whom he later sided as a political comrade.

Carotta entered a Redemptorist seminary in Bussolengo, Verona, but was soon discharged "due to critical thinking". He registered with a technical college instead and received an Italian diploma as a chemical-industrial engineer.

After working as a laboratory technician he moved to France to study philosophy at the University of Burgundy, Dijon, where he also worked as a medical technologist. He completed his studies with a Licence ès-Lettres in philosophy. After 1968 he studied polemology in Strasbourg and taught philosophy in Mulhouse. He later moved to Germany to study linguistics, Romance languages, German language and literature at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, where he also attained his ancillary degrees as state-certified interpreter and translator.

Carotta stayed in Frankfurt, where he worked as a teacher of languages, interpreter, translator and junior lecturer at the university. In these times he also supervised social initiatives, founding educational programs and centers for gastarbeiters and Italian culture. He became active in left-wing political groups that had formed in the wake of the protest movement of 1968, and he freelanced for an alternative publishing house, a communal cinema and the ID Informationsdienst.

In the 1970s he returned to Italy where he worked as a journalist for several magazines and newspapers. In Bologna he co-founded Radio Alice, the first free radio station in Europe. In Rome he supported one of the initial environmentalist movements in Italy. He remained active in both Italy and Germany, and as a senior member of the 1978 Berlin Tunix Congress he became co-founder of the renowned newspaper die tageszeitung, for which he remained an occasional author over the years under his pseudonyms Cham or Cam.

In the 1980s Carotta moved to Freiburg im Breisgau, where he founded the IT company Legenda Informationssysteme, which specialized on OCR and EDP for press archives and documentation centers. In Paris he worked for Cora, a company specializing on linguistic technology and artificial intelligence. In Freiburg he also supported Kore, a publishing house for feminist and women's literature.

At the University of Freiburg Carotta then studied ancient history, archaeology and classical philology. His primary focus on Laurentius Valla later shifted to new humanistic research on the cult of Divus Iulius, the deified Julius Caesar, and its influence on early Christianity. In the 1990s he left both of his companies in order to pursue his research full-time, which eventually led to the 1999 publication of his report on the Roman origin of Christianity in the book War Jesus Caesar?.

Related research
Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar were already associated in the Gospel. In his Divina Commedia Dante Alighieri equated their respective betrayers, and in his play Julius Caesar William Shakespeare created at least one possibly deliberate allusion to the Biblical narrative, when the abstemious Caesar shared wine with the conspirators, which has been regarded as a hint at the Last Supper. Christ's and Caesar's corresponding initials were widely debated in Mediaeval and Renaissance times as late as Victor Hugo.

Today the close ties between early Christianity and the Roman imperial cult have been a recurring theme in scientific publications for more than a century, beginning with books by Alexander del Mar and Gustav Adolf Deissmann. However, only few authors like Bruno Bauer proposed a Roman origin of Christianity, and at first even fewer actually noted direct parallels between Christ and Julius Caesar. Later researchers into the cult of the emperor often stated similarities between the story of Christ and the life of Caesar and Augustus respectively, especially Lily Ross Taylor and Henri Jeanmaire. Graeco-Roman origin and mimesis theories from the mythical school also presented parallels between Christ and the deities, cults and legends of the ancient Mediterranean region, which were also commonly associated with Julius Caesar or the imperial cult, like the Dionysian Mysteries. Others showed more specific accordances, e.g. that core elements of Christian scripture and theology like the Savior as Son of God had been directly copied from the imperial cult, which forced historians and theologians to find suitable explanations for these correlative phenomena, the most common being that early Christians including the evangelists chose to mimic the Roman cults and copy their terminology as a form of antithetical ideological protest against the worldly empire of Caesar as god.

The Latin Ur-Gospel
While the Vetus Latina manuscripts of the New Testament and the later Vulgata had always had ecclesiastical priority over the Greek editions, parts of the early Christian Church had furthermore maintained that the original Gospel of Mark had been written at Rome in Latin ten (or alternatively twelve) years after the death of Christ. This corresponds to Carotta's claim that the Latin Ur-Gospel is the Historiae by Asinius Pollio, the Caesarian parts of which would have been published exactly ten to twelve years after Caesar's death and resurrection, since the work's redaction began at the earliest in 35 BC, followed by a consecutive serial publication until approximately 30 BC.

In the 16th century Cardinal Wilhelm Sirlet assumed from ancient codices that the original Gospel of Mark had been written in Latin. His view was supported by Caesar Baronius, who especially emphasized the many Latin words, which had been graecized in the Gospel of Mark. In later times the theory of a Latin origin of the Gospel was occasionally mentioned, e.g. by Max Meinertz, who thought it significant that Greek words in the Gospel were literally explained by Latin terms.

In the 1920s Paul-Louis Couchoud, an adherent of the mythical school of Jesus' historicity, demonstrated in a widely unnoticed philological essay that the original Greek Gospel of Mark was already a translation based on a Latin Ur-Gospel. XYZ MORE SUMMARY

Sermo castrensis
Cancik?

Ethelbert Stauffer
Before Carotta it was the German Protestant theologian Ethelbert Stauffer, who produced the most substantial research into the accordances between Caesar and Christ and their religions respectively. Stauffer focused primarily on Caesar's divine grace and forgiveness (Clementia Caesaris) and on the ritual content of his funeral.

Christ and the Clementia Caesaris
Orosius, Hist. 6.17.1; http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/orosius/orosius6.shtml#17

Improperia
During Caesar's funeral an uncustomary laudatio funebris was delivered by Mark Antony, who was the designated flamen Divi Iulii, highpriest of the deified Caesar. His oration included lamentation over the deceased Roman savior and lord, praise for his divine deeds, but also accusations and reproach against his enemies. He was answered with dirges sung by choirs among the crowd. During the funeral lament the voice of an invisible Caesar—possibly belonging to an archimimus—resounded and uttered a verse of Ajax bemoaning his unfair defeat and the treachery of his companions, quoted from Pacuvius' play The Arms of Achilles—"Oh! Have I saved them that they might murder me?"—, which was meant to mythologize Caesar's undeserved assassination upon his resurrection as god during the funeral. The choirs replied with verses from the Latin version of Electra by Atilius. It has been shown that the general structure of this ritual is mirrored by the Good Friday improperia, which contain lamentation, praise for divine deeds, and probrum ("reproach", "disgrace"), furthermore also a dialog between the priest and a Latin-Greek double choir, as well as similarly structured songs like the Popule meus: "My people! What have I done to you? How have I offended you?".

The Gospel of Mark and Plutarch's Caesar
The interpretation of the Gospel in the context of the ancient Graeco-Roman biography has been a common topos in modern scholarship. In addition, the textual dependency of Mark's gospel on Roman sources was further corroborated by Detlev Dormeyer, who verified that the Markan gospel and Plutarch's Caesar biography are based on a common genre pattern that probably originated with the Historiae by Asinius Pollio, whose work served as the basis for many later historical sources—often verbatim, as in the case of Appian's Roman History. Dormeyer demonstrated striking parallels between Caesar's biography and the Gospel of Mark in terms of the genre of the Roman vita: Their dramatic structures are in full accordance XYZ MORE SUMMARY

Other Roman origin theories
Over the course of the 20th and 21st century, several other theories on a Roman origin of Christianity have surfaced, some of them pseudohistorical and/or conspiracy theories. Classicist and philosopher Livio C. Stecchini alleged that the Gospel was derived from a hypothetical lost play by ancient dramatist Seneca the Younger. An author writing under the pseudonym "Abelard Reuchlin" invented the conspiracy theory that "Flavius Josephus" was simply a pen name for a supposedly historical person called "Arius Calpurnius Piso" or "Arrius Piso", who—with the help of authors like Pliny the Younger—fabricated the gospels in order to perpetuate the dominion of the Roman aristocracy and deceive the common people. In a similar approach the Flavians conspired with Flavius Josephus and others like Pliny the Younger to invent the Gospel as war propaganda aimed at the Jews, and as a secret typological satire of Vespasian's and Titus' campaigns in Palestine, intertextually connected to Josephus' The War of the Jews. Stephan Huller did not question the historicity of Jesus, but argued that he was only a herald of the true Roman messiah Marcus Iulius Agrippa, the last king of the Jews, who is supposed to be the historical figure behind Saint Mark the Evangelist.