Exploring Our Matrix

As Bad as Mythicism Jesus as Caesar « Exploring Our Matrix: Mythicism is just one of several categori… http://t.co/jK6laYA1 #Mythicism

As Bad as Mythicism: Jesus as Caesar – Mythicism is just one of several categories of implausible claims that one wi… http://t.co/jiSkdKN1

Caesar’s Messiah, by Joseph Atwill, seems to be a step in the right direction.  

Atwill is saying that the Gospels came from the Roman imperial court who invented Jesus to control some Jews with a peaceful Messiah. 

Well there may be some truth in that idea.  But I don’t believe it was the origin of ‘Christianity’ which was Jewish.

For a start he bases his arguments on the existence of Josephus who I believe was also a Roman invention.        

Carotta’s hypothesis is that the mythos of Julius Caesar was transposed into the mythos of Jesus Christ. Obviously, he doesn’t want to deal in conspiracy theories, he’d rather see an evolution of one myth out of another. Yet gMark seems too well written for this evolutionary hypothesis, despite the increasingly variant texts the further back you go, the atrocious Kione Greek with obvious Latinisms, the geographic errors, the obvious similarities in the towns and events in Caesar’s campaign after crossing the Rubicon, etc.

I’m not sure if I can buy Atwill’s hypothesis, either. Yet it looks like SOMEBODY plaigarized gMark from a biography of Caesar, overlaid it with events from Homer’s Odysseus, then wrapped it up in midrashed LXX scriptures. And eventually, there were four NON-HARMONIZED Gospels each with discrepancies and irreconcilable contradictions one from another.

@ ’Carotta’s argument […] has many similarities of approach to that of Earl Doherty and other mythicists’

Nevertheless there is a big difference: Mythicism claims Jesus Christ never existed, is merely a myth (Atwill the same: an invention of the Romans). But if he was Caesar, even as a diegetic transposition, as Carotta claims, he existed, really, historically. The contrary of a myth.

Dr. McGrath, if Caesar is the historical source for Jesus, does that mean Jesus of Nazareth existed?

@beallen0417, first you have to look at it the other way around: if “Jesus of Nazareth” really existed, then the historical person behind the Biblical figure called “Jesus Christ” cannot have been Julius Caesar under any circumstances. However, vice versa, if the historical person behind Christ was actually Caesar, and his story was rewritten into the Gospel, then (of course) there was no “Jesus of Nazareth”, no deified itinerant preacher from Galilee. But there would still be a “historical Jesus”… which would be a big relief, don’t you think? “Jesus of Nazareth” would nevertheless continue to exist, as the diegetic transposition of Caesar: in this sense “Jesus of Nazareth” has existed for almost 2000 years, and that cannot be undone. And why should anyone want that? Nobody wants to rewrite the Gospel! It’s perfectly fine the way it is.

By the way… we have published a rebuttal here: http://divusjulius.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/talkingdead/

Thanks for sharing that. I find the attempt to read ancient texts as coded statements about what other texts say or about historic events to be unpersuasive in most instances, and this doesn’t appear to be one that is an exception.

I found your conclusion in your blog post to be a false antithesis. Why must one choose between Jesus not having existed or his having been Caesar?

See now http://antoninuspius.blogspot.com/2012/01/carotta-code-cracked.html 

“I found your conclusion in your blog post to be a false antithesis. Why must one choose between Jesus not having existed or his having been Caesar?”

Almost all mythers believe that both Carotta and Atwill’s hypotheses are absolute rubbish. At least Carotta’s hypothesis attempts to use the laws of evolution and people making sense of things to account for the diegetic transposition, as opposed Atwill’s “The Flavians did it.”

Well, a transposed Julius Caesar is clearly visible in Mark. Yet Homer’s Odysseus is also clearly visible in it! Looks to me the Christians were so embarassed by the historical Jesus (if any), and found Paul’s version so much preferable, that they invented a new Jesus out of whole cloth. And the historical Jesus? Lost to history!

You say that “a transposed Julius Caesar is clearly visible in Mark.” My questions to you are (1) how would you persuade someone who does not find this to be “clearly visible” and (2) if there are slight points of intersection, how do you determine that these reflect a “transposition” as opposed to an attempt by the Gospel author to highlight contrasts and/or similarities between Jesus and Caesar?

@ (1) It’s impossible to persuade someone who does not find this to be “clearly visible”. Why? If you consider that e.g. all the names of persons and locations in both narratives coincide, and that the famous sayings of Caesar are also found in the Gospel, etc., and if ”someone” nevertheless does not find this to be “clearly visible”, then, of course, he belongs to those who “seeing see not”.The mental reason is clear: if you believe that Jesus had an autonomous historical existence, of course you cannot accept that the Gospel is a retelling of Caesar’s narrative. Why? Simply because this would disturb your belief. Not your faith—for the faith it would be better if Jesus Christ had a secure historical existence instead of a questionable one. But yes, the belief would be disturbed. And for some people their belief is more important that the faith.@ (2) That we might have to deal with “the attempt by the Gospel author to highlight contrasts and/or similarities between Jesus and Caesar”, was the working hypothesis of Carotta. He tried to verify or falsify this hypothesis, and he noticed that the (in your words) ”points of intersection” are so systematical, so chronologically conforming, without any exceptions whatsoever, that the working hypothesis was insufficient to explain it. That’s why he was obliged to abandon it and reformulate a more explicit and informative hypothesis: the diegetic transposition. And that hypothesis seems to work: until now no contradicting facts could be uncovered.

It is quite common for someone to find no contradictory evidence when exploring a scenario of which they are persuaded from the outset and which involves not the spotting of intersections but the imagining and concocting of them.

This may be true in general. In this specific case it is not probable, because it is not possible to be persuaded from the outset that the historical Jesus Christ was Caesar. This idea was never formulated before, and it appears at first glance to be absurd, beyond anyone’s imagination. So I don’t believe that Carotta could have been convinced of it from the outset. Furthermore, in order to “concoct” all the sayings, events etc. of Caesar within of the Gospel, you would have to be an Evangelist yourself, or rather be all four at once: Mark, Matthew Luke and John. But alas, we were born 2000 years late for that. ;-)

It seems to me that you might not fully appreciate the awkwardness of claiming that the “plain meaning” of a text is one that only a single individual or small group sees.