User:Arne Eickenberg/Caesarian origin of Christianity


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The Caesarian origin of Christianity is a controversial new theory positing that the historical Christ was Julius Caesar, and that early Christianity developed from the imperial Roman cult of Divus Iulius. Its framework was developed in the late 1980s and 1990s by the Italian linguist and philosopher Francesco Carotta. After a few preliminary releases Carotta's research report was first published in the German book War Jesus Caesar? (1999) and in a scientific article in Quaderni di Storia (2003). In the following years his book was translated into Dutch, English and Spanish. The theory was revised and extended in the second German edition of 2009.

Overview
Until today the common modern view of the historical Jesus as a Jewish itinerant preacher, which was originally derived from the failed application of the historical method to the primary Christian sources, has remained an unfalsifiable and unverifiable hypothesis, because there are no independent historical sources beyond scientific doubt on the existence of this hypothesized person. Critically distilled biographical data on the commonly proposed historical Jesus rarely fill more than a few pages in scientific publications.

Categorical description
The theory of the Caesarian origin of Christianity breaks with this speculative and still ahistorical, yet persistent view of Jesus by producing a relocated historical framework of high falsifiability and testability, based on an extensive and exposed empirical investigation of the available sources, with supporting evidence from other fields of study. As a unified theory it naturally ties in with much of the pre-existing research on the Graeco-Roman context of early Christianity, but it goes further and concludes with a fundamental and elementary new solution: a direct and immediate relation between two religious phenomena. Due to the extent of early Christian writings the theory relies primarily on an analysis of the oldest known Christian source. Therefore it not only leaves room for a large amount of future studies, corrections and changes, but also predicts further correlations and observations. An example is the corroborating evidence for the admissibility of Carotta's conclusion of the Gospel as a diegetic transposition, found in the back-transpositions of the Gospel from Christ to Caesar by Roman authors, which prove the existence of this scriptural mechanism in Christian antiquity.

Summary
At the core of Francesco Carotta's research lies a detailed philological synoptical comparison of the oldest Gospel of Mark with the ancient sources on Julius Caesar's final years during the Great Roman Civil War, especially those by Appian, Plutarch and Suetonius, who all relied to some extent on Asinius Pollio's Historiae, which Carotta maintains to be the Ur-Gospel, the primary textual basis of the synoptic gospels. The extended Roman-Christian synopsis is augmented by comparisons based on archaeological sources, ritualistic and liturgical traditions as well as on iconography. Carotta came to the conclusion that the multiple parallels and similarities between the lives and cults of Caesar and Christ and between the respective primary sources can be explained best by formulating the theory that Jesus Christ is Divus Iulius, the deified Julius Caesar, as he has been transmitted through history.

Carotta argues that a cultic and scriptural transformation from ancient Rome to Jerusalem took place, and that the Gospel narrative, its geography, dramatic structure and characters were neither enhanced with an antithetically mimetic Caesarian approximation nor fabricated as a purely mythological amalgam, but had formed as a directly dependent, albeit corrupted retelling of the Great Roman Civil War—from Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon to his assassination, funeral and resurrection, paralleled by Jesus' ministry from the Jordan to his capture, crucifixion and resurrection. Following Gérard Genette's terminology Carotta maintains that the textual mutation and delocalization came about by diegetic transposition, an error-prone process of copying mistakes, false translations, misreadings, misinterpretations, adaptations and redactions in different cultural contexts for distinct political purposes, which produced the vast amount of divergent early Christian literature, among them the canonical gospels.

He further argues that the final Christian metamorphosis of the new religion, which was to reinterpret the Julian imperial founding cult according to the new Flavian theopolitical ideology with special regard to ancient Roman Palestine, was induced under emperor Vespasian and his historian Flavius Josephus, whose vita provided the groundwork for the hagiography of the Apostle Paul in Acts II. According to Carotta Jesus Christ is therefore the Divus Iulius of the Flavians, and Jesus existed historically as Gaius Iulius Caesar.

Transpositional theory
Introduction: impetus; problem of the ahistoricity of Jesus.

History
Civil war; apotheosis; state cult; veterans; settlements; holy scriptures.

Dramatic structure
Internal Markan structure.

Later material
working hypothesis for Q/Q+; Augustan sources; Mark vs. Luke/Matthew; Asinian vs. Damascenian structure; Nativity; Apocalypse: Philippi and Actium; Acts; Flavian overlays

Apocrypha
Gospel of Nicodemus; Acts of Paul and Thekla etc.

Back-transposition
Juvencus, Arator etc.

Reactions
Scholarly reception of Francesco Carotta's book was scarce at first, and journalistic reactions were mixed. Following the Dutch translation of his book, an intensive debate ensued among a number of scientists and journalists in the Netherlands, with the majority praising Carotta's novel and in-depth approach. Popular recognition grew in the following years, especially due to the English translation and additional articles and lectures. Scholars like Erika Simon, Luciano Canfora and Antonio Piñero have endorsed or supported Carotta's theory, whereas criticism has remained infrequent and unsubstantial to this day.