I've posted before about the eerie similarities between the life of Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ. They are too numerous to mention again. Suffice to say that there are too many coincidences in their life stories for there not to be something else afoot, things like their friendship with a Nicomedes of Bithynia / Nicodemus of Bethania; their work in the land to the north, Gallia / Galilee, etc.
The main proponent of the theory is Italian scholar Francisco Carotta, an Italian scholar. Acceptance of his theories ranges from "as groundbreaking as the Theory of Relativity" to extreme defensiveness from Christian apologists.
I recently read his landmark book on the subject, and frankly it seems to stretch things too far. I almost feel like he could have stopped halfway through most of his claims (which he details with precision and specificity), and just pointed out things with greater generality.
In other words: After reading his theories, it seems abundantly clear to anyone with a brain that of the Gospel of Mark (and the other Gospels, which drew heavily from Mark), were based at least in part on the "Life of Julius Caesar," and that many of the stories contained therein result from a mis-translation of Latin into the Koine Greek spoken in the Holy Land at the time.
We can start this with an analogy so you get what I mean. Imagine you are reading a story told on a Martian colony in the year 2120. It goes like this:
"Once there was a great Martianball player named Beef Bryan. He figured numbers using flowers. They died when their spaceship crashed."
Now the original text:
"Once there was a great basketball player named Kobe Bryant. His accountant's name was Flores. They died when their helicopter crashed."
In this little example, you can see how the Martians translated the story to make more sense in their world (spaceship crash versus helicopter crash, etc.) and also how they transliterated the Spanish surname "Flores" into something that didn't really make sense (the flowers part). Similarly, they took Kobe's first name and turned it into "beef," and misspelled his last name. Now, imagine that these Martians Internet connection doesn't connect to Earth's (isolation), and that paper is super expensive on Mars, so they pass down everything verbally, and you can really see how the story would have evolved.
Turns out the Gospels are full of things just like this. And such errors, mis-translations, poorly understood puns, etc. are waaaaaaaay too coincidental to support any other conclusion other than the somewhat disturbing fact to some, that many stories about Jesus's life were simply borrowed from the Life of Caesar.
Let's go through some of the biggest ones:
1) The most widely read book about Caesar's life, circulated among those who could read in Israel at the time, and repeated in verbal tales throughout the empire, was by an author named Asinius Pollio. (Indeed one of the first references to Christians is graffiti from a Roman soldier joking that they worship a donkey's colt.)
Asinius Pollo was also with Caesar during his adventures.
Anyway, his name roughly translates into "donkey's colt." One can imagine a native Aramaic speaker, reading a text translated from Latin into Koine Greek, coming across this proper name and saying, "hmm...donkey's colt." Are there odd references to a "donkey's colt" in the gospels? Yep! Caesar entered Rome with Asinius Pollio. Mark and Matthew say that Jesus entered Jerusalem with a donkey's colt...
2) The bible very clearly says that Jesus sailed on a salt-water sea to a location called Dalmanutha. They indicate that this happened when Jesus was done preaching in Galilee. He went there and cattle was running down the hills. He fed the thousands.
Despite exhaustive searches, and well-documented records, no place name Dalmanutha has ever been found, now, or in antiquity. Moreover, the Galilee lakes are freshwater.
Does this story make sense if it was a poorly translated tale from the Life of Caesar?
Well, Caesar crossed a saltwater sea and landed in Dalmatia. He went there, and his legions, who were starving, caught cattle running down the hills. Caesar miraculously fed his starving legions. It is very easy to see how this story was transposed. Indeed, in the bible, Jesus heals a man named, "Legion" after crossing the sea! (In case you're wondering, in ancient times, just like now, men didn't have the name, "Legion.")
Dalmanutha (which doesn't exist) = Dalmatia. The protagonist crossed the sea, fed thousands and healed the legions. It's hard to draw any other conclusion here folks.
3. After Caesar died, a life-size, life-like effigy of this body was hung up on a cross. Few people know this. But it's very well-documented. (See here for images).
Most importantly, they hung Caesar's battlefield decorations on the effigy.
Caesar had won Rome's highest military decoration. It was like 10 Medals of Honor. This award was given for military men who saved an entire army under siege. It could only be awarded if the besieged men voted to do so. It was called the "Corona Gemina."
What was the Corona Gemina? Well, unlike other medals and decorations, the besieged army would make it at the battlesite to commemorate their lack of resources. Victors in the ancient world often got laurel wreaths to wear on their head, but a besieged army had no laurels.
No, instead, the Corona Gemina -- Rome's highest honor -- and the one mounted on Caesar's crucified effigy -- was a crown of thorns.
Do you have chills yet?
3. Coins of Caesar circulated in the Holy Land, and his adopted son, confusingly also called, "Caesar" [Augustus] call them the "Son of God."
Take all those coincidences above. Now know that there are hundreds more. Too many to list. Let's do one more, then recap.
4. It's well know that when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he said, "Alea Ilacta Est." (The die is cast). Would you believe this phrase appears mis-translated in the bible? See, the word "dice" (alea) is very similar to the word fisherman (halea), and thus, in the bible, we have the story of the fisherman casting...
The list goes on and on. A quick recap:
Does this mean Carotta's theory is perfect? No, far from it. Does it mean that a holy man named Jesus, who changed the world for the better with his revolutionarily good ideas, did not exist? NO!
But it is abundantly clear that large swathes of the gospels are either mis-translated stories from the life of Caesar, or are borrowings, to make the new cult figure (Jesus) similar to the old.
Now let's look at the most likely mechanism: Remember, Caesar settled his veterans in Judea. These were rural Italians, mostly illiterate. They were allowed to marry local Jewish women. Their descendants lived in colonies. The soldiers worshiped Caesar as a God. Each colony had churches set up to him, plus priests, etc. Same for his son Augustus.
One can imagine in an illiterate society how memories fade and get transposed over the years. Caesar died in 44 BC. Imagine now it's 50 AD, and the colonies are populated by his veterans' great grandkids. They speak Aramaic and some Greek now; the Latin of their great grandfathers is a distant memory. Someone pulls out a book by Asinius Pollio, which they still revere (for some reason), and they stumble through tales re-told by the one literate guy in town.
Does he personalize these stories for the children? Make Gallia into Galilee? Change the Rubicon river (which they never heard of) into the Jordan river? Simply refer to the "big city" (Rome --> Jerusalem)? Absolutely. All of this is likely.
Now imagine a local kid is doing well. He is Jesus. He is teaching profound things that mean a lot to a poor and repressed population. His followers desperately want him to become revered. Do they borrow some stories from the lives of someone else who is worshiped? Likely.
More troubling would be the theory that Jesus of Nazareth never really existed in the form we know him. That ALL of the gospels represent the fading memories of a people who told and re-told stories of Caesar, like a game of "Telephone" spanning 120 years, using three languages. Backers of this theory point out that there are no records of Jesus at all: that all contemporaneous references that are close to "Christus" don't really use that term, which means "Anointed" in Greek, but instead use the far more common "Chrestus," which simply means "good."
Some go so far as to say that the Anno Domini dating was forged to hide the Caesarian beginnings of the church, noting that the church father assigned to date the life of Christ coincidentally listed him as being born exactly 100 years after Caesar, as if almost to say, "it was too far after, so it wasn't the same guy." (Side note, we know that Christ wasn't born in the "year zero" because even the gospels make that date impossible, based on what they say about Herod).
The fascinating evidence for the "Jesus never existed/He was just a transmogrified memory of Caesar" theory is actually pretty solid. For one thing, the Dead Sea scrolls, ancient Jewish religious manuscripts that were found in the Qumran Caves in the Judaean Desert. There are 981 of these documents, all dating from right after the time of Christ. Not one mentions him. You'd think that if a messianic figure was put to death by the unpopular rulers at the time, at least a couple documents would mention him, if even to decry him as a false messiah. Nope.
Additional evidence for this theory is that contemporary Roman records don't mention Jesus, and therefore the first written text we have about him, the Gospels, date to about 150 A.D. -- about 120 years after Jesus died. Were the Gospels just a twisted retelling of Caesar stories, with several mistranslations? Did Jesus as we know him never exist?
We needn't go that far. And therefore we can conclude that Carotta likely goes too far, ascribing just about everything in the Gospel of Mark to a story about Caesar.
Do
we have a history of Christianity and Judaism borrowing from other
faiths? Absolutely. It is possible that the date of Christmas was
chosen to supplant the dominant montheistic faith of the time, that of
Sol Invictus. And much of the Old Testament, from the flood narrative,
Ecclesiastes, the Garden of Eden, etc. has been shown to be a borrowing
(or ancient game of "telephone") from the earlier mesopotamian Epic of
Gilgamesh.
We can safely conclude that the bards and storytellers who told and re-told great verbal stories of Caesar's life profoundly affected what eventually got written down into the Gospels. Several of the stories in the Gospels, particularly those that seem strange, or odd, or out-of-place, were just mistranslations of actual tales from the life of Julius Caesar.
Epilogue: The text of Asinius Pollio's work on Caesar has been lost to time. If and when it is ever rediscovered, if, as some suspect, it matches the Mark gospel almost word-for-word, Christianity will have a lot of explaining to do -- a profound identity crisis. Some speculate copies were purposefully destroyed.
