See Heggarty “Ancient DNA and the Indo-European Question” (2015). The question of the Indo-European (IE) origin does not only deal with the Western branch but also requires attention for the Eastern branch into even India. It is useful to reproduce the Bellwood (2005) picture of the spread of agriculture to the West.
The spread of Indo-Europeans would be first via agriculture 8000 BC, then wine from Georgia in 6000 BC, then with horses who still had a tendency towards backpain in 3500 BC, and later the current domestic horses who have less backpain in 2000 BC.
“The spread of wine throughout west Asia and Mediterranean Europe may reflect early PIE expansions, but is absent from later expansions across the steppes of Eurasia. The views of Mallory and Adams (2006) on cognates for “wine,” combined with evidence for diffusion of wine technology from the Caucasus (McGovern, 2003) can be construed as support for Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1990), that the Caucasus was a center of diffusion of PIE culture and language.”
Dugan p17 points to the mixed evidence: “Also, there are widely distributed cognates (“wheat,” “barley,” “apple,” “farmer,” “plough,” “pottery,” etc.) which seem difficult to reconcile with the vocabulary of steppe peoples whose lives would be centered on nomadic, pastoral tending of livestock, (…)” One branch of IE maintained the wine culture, where it could be cultivated, but the steppe riders would have switched to koumiss, fermented mare milk. The taming of the horse was important not only for riding but also for milking.
Science 2022 gave the study by Iosif Lazaridis et al. “The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe”. A comment by Paul Heggarty below the article is, with the abbreviation CHG = Caucasian Hunter Gatherers: “Conveniently redefining Indo-European now to exclude Anatolian does not change the fact of their common origin, nor that the real root of this language lineage does not lie in the Yamnaya EHG-CHG mix (red-blue). Rather, hiding in plain sight in the pie charts is a component not just ubiquitous across Indo‑European (Anatolian included), but ubiquitous at markedly higher proportions: CHG alone (blue).”
The latter more ancient origin would be in the Caucasus 7000 – 5000 BC.
The spread from Georgia, of wine, language and people, might also be via trade rather than conquest. Caesar conquered Gaul mostly by bribing regional chiefs with wine, while the fighting had the finishing touch for whom would not be bribed.
As Dugan p34 remarks, the various sets of evidence can be reconciled by waves of migration: ““the two theories of Indo-European origin [Anatolian vs. steppes] may not, in fact, be mutually exclusive” (Atkinson et al., 2005), a conclusion shared by others (Piazza and Cavalli-Sforza, 2006)”.
A relatively new element in this is the existence of two types of horsebacks. But the origin would be in agriculture while a second impulse would be from wine.
The three elements of wine, Dionysus and Jesus Christ come into focus because of the earlier discussion of the Divus Julius cult and how the Roman emperors likely created Christianity. Julius Caesar had some connection with the cult of Dionysus in Rome, see the Bona Dea scandal and the discussion below. Subsequently we find this statement:
“The identification of Marcus Antonius with Dionysus-Osiris was clearly a political move (…) turning to his political advantage the immense popularity of the Dionysiac cult (…) Indeed, Antony could hardly choose but to play the role of Dionysus for that went along with his position as consort of Cleopatra and therefore as king of Egypt. (…) The career of Alexander [the Great] was, in legend at least, bound up with Dionysus.”
“It was a frequent occurrence for Roman leaders to relate their ancestry to Greek gods and the decisions of Octavian and Antony were no exception. Octavian chose Apollo and Antony Dionysis [sic]. The difference in such a choice could not have been more significant; Apollo’s image was that of discipline, morality, purification, and punishment for excess, while Dionysis [sic] was a passionate lover of wine, parties, and affairs. For an empire that had endured decades of civil war and drastic leadership change, the image of Dionysis [sic] as ruler was not likely to be endearing.”
With Antony in the East and Octavian in the West, we should avoid seeing this clash as one between East and West, or as a clash between Ratio and Emotion. The core remains politics (with military action and troops motivated by some faith). While Antony first lost to Octavian, eventually however, a grandson of Antony became emperor Claudius, so that the respect for Antony was somewhat restored, and he wasn’t lost to history.
There is “Dionysus and Politics. Constructing Authority in the Graeco-Roman World“: “This volume presents an essential but underestimated role that Dionysus played in Greek and Roman political thought.” and “(…) a fundamental feature of ancient political thought which until now has been largely neglected by mainstream academia.” There is also Fiachra Mac Góráin who warns: “Studies of the reception of Dionysus, which now themselves make up a small scholarly industry, have shown how much modern perceptions of Dionysus owe to German Romanticism and Nietzsche (who privileged Greek over Roman source materials), as well as to Renaissance painters and poets.” (Here “owe” seems the wrong word.) It leads too far to delve into these volumes now. Let us first check some aspects about wine, Dionysus and Christ.
Wine, Dionysus and Christ
Wikipedia – a portal and no source – suggests: “The earliest known traces of wine are from Georgia (c. 6000 BCE), (…) Iran (Persia) (c. 5000 BCE), (…) Armenia (c. 4100 BCE), (…) and Sicily (c. 4000 BCE). (…) Wine reached the Balkans by 4500 BC and was consumed and celebrated in ancient Greece, Thrace and Rome. Throughout history, wine has been consumed for its intoxicating effects. (….)”
It is tempting to deconstruct the name “Georgia” as coming from the Greek “ge, gaia” (land) and “ergein” (to work), thus also giving “George” the meaning of “farmer”. However, proper etymology would rather be the “region of the wolves“. Early grapes had little sugar and the brew was originally mixed with honey to increase this base for fermentation. There is a link with beer around 13.000 BCE and fermented milk, already 10.000 BCE. Apart from the different taste of wine compared to milk and beer, it apparently got a higher alcohol percentage, making for better preservation and intoxication. The Phoenicians are known for spreading their alphabet but also wine.
Dionysus, the god of wine and intoxication, seems to be difficult to trace in the pantheon of gods. (See here his epithets.) Wine-making arrived late in world civilisation, and Dionysus may have had to create his own place amongst the established names of the other gods. An earlier version of wikipedia has been retained here, and contains this statement:
“The above contradictions suggest to some that we are dealing not with the historical memory of a cult that is foreign, but with a god in whom foreignness is inherent. And indeed, Dionysus’s name is found on MyceneanLinear B tablets as “DI-WO-NI-SO-JO”1, and Kerenyi traces him to Minoan Crete, where his Minoan name is unknown but his characteristic presence is recognizable. Clearly, Dionysus had been with the Greeks and their predecessors a long time, and yet always retained the feel of something alien.”
This remains curious. It would seem that mankind would have had other kinds of intoxication. Wine came after beer, and alcohol was only an easier way of intoxication, so that there would have been similar gods before. E.g. “trance dance” and see also John M. Allegro, not likely for the source of Christianity but for the mushrooms.
At this website, we find an indication that Dionysus might have an early source as “son of Zeus”.
Absolutely crucial is Rendell Harris, “The origin of the cult of dionysos“, who has the notion that oak trees, being high, can be struck by lightning most often. Thus the oak associates with lightning (fire) and thunder, Athena with the owl living in an oak hollow, and Dionysus with ivy. Harris agrees with a hypothesis of “miss Harrison” that there first was a beer god before it developed into the (more potent) wine god, but also finds that the link to alcohol is secondary, and that the real source of Dionysian totem-mark of ivy relates to the oak of thunder. PM. “Once ivy reaches a mature age, it sends out flowers and berries. Ingestion of berries or leaf material in may cause mild gastrointestinal issues in small doses. Eating larger amounts of the plant can cause breathing difficulties, muscle weakness, coordination problems, fever, hallucinations, and even coma.” Apparently, goats like to eat ivy. Subsequently, Semele is associated with Earth, and then Dionysus as “son of Zeus and Semele” becomes clear. Subsequently, the vine is a variant of ivy. Bees can settle down in hollowed oaks, Melissa is a honey-nymph, and the Maenads may be such bee-maidens. Honey was important in early wine-making, because of the sugar content. Harris refers to Kretschmer for the reading that “nusos” could be son or young man, and expresses some doubt on this.
PM. Remarkably, Diodoros book 1 has: “The discovery of ivy is also attributed to Osiris by the Egyptians and made sacred to this god, just as the Greeks also do in the case of Dionysos. (5) In the Egyptian language, they say, the ivy is called the “plant of Osiris” and for purposes of dedication is preferred to the vine, since the latter sheds its leaves while the former ever remains green. Moreover, the people of ancient times have followed the same rule in the case of other plants which are perennially green, ascribing, for instance, the myrtle to Aphrodite and the laurel to Apollo.” This attribution is less deep than Harris’s and miss Harrison’s deconstruction.
Early religions had animal sacrifice. The attire of the Jewish high priest is a butcher’s apron. Some early religions had human sacrifice, and within Christianity this was stopped by the ritual death of Jesus, the sacrificial Lamb of God. Roman Catholism still has the “miracle” in which bread and wine are “transsubstantiated” into the flesh and blood of Jesus. The priest drinks the blood while the flesh is shared in Holy Communion, as joint cannibalism. This ritual might have other sources than Dionysus, and anyway found its way into Christianity apparently because of its powerful psychological impact. The sparagmos ritual is the tearing apart of an animal, and omophagia is the eating of raw meat. The Catholic ritual is described here, and the transsubstantiation apparently takes place at the “doxology” when the priest lifts the items above him and states: “Through him, and with him, and in him, O God, almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, for ever and ever.” The related Latin phrases would be “Hoc est corpus meum (…) sub Pontio Pilato passus et sepultus est” – here is my body that suffered and was buried under Pontius Pilatus – that was transformed into the “magic spell” of “hocus pocus pilatus pas“.
Looking at these three elements, the first question arises whether we can find more about the origin of Dionysus.
Anatolian origin
Herodotus in Histories 2:146 decomposed “Dionysus” into “Dio” (Deus, God) and “Nysos”, and has:
“but as it is, the Greek story has it that no sooner was Dionysus born than Zeus sewed him up in his thigh and carried him away to Nysa in Ethiopia beyond Egypt; and as for Pan, the Greeks do not know what became of him after his birth. It is therefore plain to me that the Greeks learned the names of these two gods later than the names of all the others, and trace the birth of both to the time when they gained the knowledge.”
“Many Greeks were sure that the cult of Dionysus arrived in Greece from Anatolia, but Greek concepts of where Nysa was, whether set in Anatolia, or in Libya (‘away in the west beside a great ocean’), Ethiopia (Herodotus), or Arabia (Diodorus Siculus), are variable enough to suggest that a magical distant land was intended, perhaps named ‘Nysa’ to explain the god’s unreadable name, as the ‘god of Nysa.’ Apollodorus seems to be following Pherecydes, who relates how the infant Dionysus, god of the grapevine, was nursed by the rain-nymphs, the Hyades at Nysa. The Anatolian Hittites’ name for themselves in their own language (“Nesili”) was “Nesi,” however. The Hittites’ influence on early Greek culture is often unappreciated.”
Indeed, this link to the Hittites is no longer present in the current version of wikipedia (a portal and no source). NB. The Hittite capital of Hattusa was from a later period, and an earlier origin was apparently in (Ka)nesh. To complicate the issue, the empire of the Hittites rather overlaps with the Luwians: “Hittite is the language of the Hittite Empire that ruled over large parts of Anatolia and Syria from 1650-1200 BC. It is attested in some 30,000 pieces of clay tablet excavated in the Hittite capital Hattusa. It is the oldest attested Indo-European language. Hieroglyphic Luwian is a sister language of Hittite, written in an indigenous hieroglyphic script and attested from ca. 1400-700 BC in Anatolia and North Syria.”
James Muhly warns us: “The first thing to realize about Hittites is that they are not Hittites. (…) In the surviving Greek literary traditions there is not a trace of anything that can be said to indicate Greek knowledge of the Hittite civilization of Bronze Age Anatolia.”
This does not exclude, however, the transferral of some religious practice associated with wine.
Remarkable is also Mary Bachvarova‘s 2016 link-up of Homer to earlier Hittite stories. Wandering bards might rephrase Hittite stories to entertain a Greek audience, but this would not constitute a transfer of knowledge about the Hittites. (It is not clear what the latter would imply for the pantheon.)
See below discussion of Watkins and the golden fleece.
Ian Rutherford in “Hittite texts and Greek religion” (2020) suggests that there is little overlap between the Hittite and Greek pantheons:
“The Greeks associated a number of their deities with Anatolia, and there are many general resemblances between the two pantheons, and some types of deity seem to be common to both – e.g. fate goddesses, goddesses of springs. However, there are very few Greek theonyms which have close Hittite parallels, and examination of the evidence leads to the conclusion that there was no significant Hittite influence on the Greek pantheon, which is surprising, given that there was contact between Hittites and Greeks. Perhaps any interaction there was with Anatolia was with the West, i.e. Arzawa and earlier Assuwa, about whose religious traditions we are less well informed.” (It has been suggested that “Assuwa” gave rise to the term “Asia”.)
I did not read Rutherford’s book but it seems that we have to make an amendment on Dionysus. Dan Stanislawski in “Dionysus Westward: Early Religion and the Economic Geography of Wine” (1975), (unfortunately also behind a paywall, and indicated by Melvin Konner as a superb article), indicates that Dionysus was linked up with the Earth Mother cult, so that the Dionysus cult became accepted more easily, but that there still was “serious opposition in some places because, in its growth, it became a threat to encysted orthodoxy and established institutions”. Such resistance apparently survives in academic resistance of the link of Greek Dionysus with an Anatolian origin, and the academic hesitance to resolve the issue of paywalls (see here).
John fits in his coat. His coat fits into his bag. John fits in his bag.
If John is a person then the logic is deficient. If John is an abstract notion then we might accept the reasoning. Watkins compares the Hittite hunting bag, the kursas, and the Greek aegis. The aegis used by the goddess Athena is known from the story of Jason and the golden fleece.
First, Watkins establishes that the hunting bag had a practical meaning for hunters. For example it might contain fat to apply at night to keep warm. See Ötzi’s pouch. Also the gods had their hunting bags, that however contained abstract concepts like peace, longevity, offspring, cattle, battle-strength, integrity, … Watkins refers to the cornucopia, the horn of plenty, as alternative. Subsequently, while the hunting bag originally was made of sheep skin or goat skin, the skin itself could stand for the bag. Thus all abstract notions that could be in the bag thus could also be in the goat skin. Potentially this was in a later religious phase. Potentially hunters or warriors draped skins around their shoulders for other protection like against rain. Subsequently, any kind of material might be used, linen, beads, metal, as long as the (iconic) reference to the kursas itself remained intact. The holy kursas or holy (golden) fleece was hung on the eya tree (the tree of life, perhaps the yew tree, but perhaps also the oak, German “Eichen“, Dutch “eik”), potentially in origin simply to dry but in the spiritual sense now for renewal, uploading or safekeeping of all its wealth.
(Restated from here: Ilya Yabukovich in his 2008 thesis: “{…) the small stock of likely lexical borrowings from or via Hittite into Greek, such as Hitt. eshar ‘blood’ vs. Gk. ἴχwr ‘blood of the gods’, Hitt. huhubal ‘a percussion instrument’ vs. Gk. κύμβαλον ‘cymbal’, Hitt. kuwanna(n)– ‘copper ore’ vs. Gk. κύανος ‘dark-blue enamel, lapis lazuli etc.’ [our cyan], Hitt. kubahi- ‘a head gear’ (< Hurrian) vs. Gk. κύμβαχος ‘crown of a helmet’, Hitt. kursa- ‘hunting bag’ vs. Gk. βύρσα ‘leather, hide’.” The latter relates to French bourse, Dutch beurs, English purse. The Dutch beurs relates to the “stock exchange”. Perhaps the Hittite kursa contained stock options.)
Joost Blasweiler (2013a) p5 & p8 has an image on a cup of 480-470 BC from Etruscan Cerveteri, and a drawing of that by Volkert Haas 1977, “Magie und Mythen im Reich der Hethither”, p122. On the left there is the dragon attacking Jason, with above them the golden fleece hanging in the tree or ivy. On the right there is Athena, wearing her aegis with the Gorgon head. Originally Athena put the head into the aegis-as-bag but now it is in the aegis-as-fleece. While Watkins subscribes to the notion that the Hittite kursas and the Greek aegis are basically the same, Blasweiler rejects this basic identity, and holds that the kursas was a bag and that the aegis was a fleece. Unfortunately, Blasweiler does not explain how the Gorgon head got into Athena’s aegis … It seems that he doesn’t follow the magic that he wants to describe.
Watkins’s article has a remarkable second objective. He refers to poetry by Pindar c. 518 – c 438 BC from Thebes in Greece. Clearly Pindar was long after the downfall of the Hittite empire or the 1177 BC civilisation collapse in general. We may presume that he did not know about the Hittite empire and their tales. However, Watkins points to similarities in Homer and Hittite stories, also other than kursas and aegis, and actually provides some backup to Bachvarova’s proposition. Watkins refers to a poetic structure that Pindar adopts and that reminds of a Hittite literary construction. Pindar mentions three notions that at that time apparently were attributed to Corinth but that actually derive from the Hittites, and perhaps the poem was a transcript too:
The dithyramb song for Dionysus. Watkins indeed directly links up to the venerable Great Mother, who he identifies as “none other than Kybele, the Anatolian goddess Kubaba of the second millennium”, while the Dionysian dances would be similar to a “great Hittite festival, an EZEN in its Sumerographic form”.
The bit and bridle for a horse, supposedly given by Athena to Bellerophon, but wikipedia has: “To date, the earliest known artistic evidence of use of some form of bitless bridle comes in illustrations of Syrian horseman, dated approximately 1400 BC.”
The “two king of birds to the temples of the gods”, supposedly referring to eagles on Corinthian temples. However, Christopher Pfaff (2003) footnote 59 states: “Most scholars attentive to Greek architecture and sculpture have interpreted Pindar’s [oionon basilea didumon] as a reference to double pediments rather than to actual images of eagles on temples”. A pediment is a triangular upper part of the front of a classical building, typically surmounting a portico. Watkins provides another interpretation: “an echo of the “double-headed eagle” as quintessential emblem of authority in second-millennium Hittite Anatolia, from seals to the monumental image on the (…) sphinx gate (…)”. See also Jesse Chariton 2011.
Wikimedia commons, sphinx gate Alaca Höyük, by Ingeborg Simon
The stag vessel
A magnificent piece of art is the “stag vessel”, c 1400-1200 BC, a gift of the Norbert Schimmel Trust. It is often called a rhyton but actually it has no drinking hole at some point, as would be required for a rhyton. It is so intricate that one cannot but imagine that the vessel could have been used in actual rituals. As a vessel, it would have been used for drinking, perhaps water, but beer or wine are not excluded.
Wikimedia commons, “stag rhyton“, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Of importance is the iconography in the frieze around it. Oscar White Muscarella 1992 p9 has this strong argument: “Hittite texts record that animal vessels were fashioned in the form of the deity’s animal attribute and were owned by that god. Thus our vessel was probably considered the property of the Protective Deity.” On page 181 of this 2008 catalogue we find this drawing reproduced again (while the image is here). A discussion of the order of the icons is by Hans Güterbock 1981.
Here on the left we see the eya-tree, a stag with antlers, a quiver with arrows, a kursas, and two spears. Then a deity sitting on a chair with stag legs, with a cup and bird (raptor, falcon). The curious “mushroom” or “beehive” would be an altar with conical base. Muscarella 1992 suggests a brazier (heater). A smaller god on a stag has the curved rod of authority, the “kalmus” (a.k.a. lituus, a tool for hunting hares), and another bird (raptor). The roundish drawings with the gods would be hieroglyphs for their names, still untranslated. The catalogue suggests “the Protector God of the Countryside [open fields], who is described in Hittite texts as standing on a stag”. It reminds one of the royal privilege of hunting. Supposedly the three persons on the right would not be gods but kings giving tribute, or one king in different acts. The pouring of a liquid is called a “libation”. The beaker jug has been found in excavations. It is rather an urceus or ewer, used for easily pouring water for washing. The second may hold a round loaf of bread. The third, kneeling, holds a pitcher for more controlled pouring.
Potentially the actual image starts with one spear and ends with the other. Gueterbock agrees with Alp’s identification of the third person as the “cup-bearer of squatting” or parsna(u)was SAGI-as. One is reminded of Genesis 40.1: “Some time later, the king’s cupbearer and baker offended their master, the king of Egypt.” However, the seated god already has a cup, and if the kneeling person is a cupbearer, he is not shown in such an act. (PM. Check Muscarella 2002 on “The lie became great. The forgery of Ancient Near Eastern cultures”.)
Potentially the seated god is male, with the falcon on the left arm. However, Blasweiler (2013b) sees a long dress, and takes the seating as indicative of a female: “It is quite possible she is Inara, the goddess of fertility and nature, and the daughter of the Stormgod.” He quotes: “Volkert Haas (1994-437) states: “In the festivals, Inara is reproduced on several occasions as having the features of the goddess of the hunt, and also as the mistress of the animals.” Our counterpart would be Artemis or Diana, goddess of the hunt.
Important is to know that these researchers refer to “cervus“, which appears to be a genus of deer. If you don’t know this, you may get lost. The stag god can be referred to as (Deus) CERVUS. The Luwian god was (K)Runtiya, and his name was generally written with the image of antlers. While the deer on the left is dead, there is a young deer on the right again, the succession of death by life, but this depends upon the order of reading.
Blasweiler also points to star constellations, that in Sumerian / Babylonian times somewhat differ from our own 12 constellations since the iron-age. Thus the goddess of war Anunitu (Inanna, Ishtar, not to be confused with Hittite Inara) or “the stag” Lulimu would now be Pisces and Andromeda (“the chained maiden”). The water pourer might be our Aquarius but their “The great one”, but this comes with the question why their great one would be pouring water. The bread carrier might be the sign of the “farm worker”, nowadays Aries.
They indicate the months of January (Aquarius), February (Pisces) and March (Aries).
Subsequently there is Boötes, supposedly “herdsman, plowman, ox-driver”. Wikipedia: “In ancient Babylon, the stars of Boötes were known as SHU.PA. They were apparently depicted as the god Enlil, who was the leader of the Babylonian pantheon and special patron of farmers. (…) Exactly whom Boötes is supposed to represent in Greek mythology is not clear. (…) Another myth associated with Boötes by Hyginus is that of Icarius, who was schooled as a grape farmer and winemaker by Dionysus.” We also find that Arcturus in the Big Dipper’s handle is the brightest star in the northern sky, and the alpha star in Boötes. “In winter, the best time to observe it is in the wee hours before dawn.” Here: “It rises 50 days after the winter solstice and has always been associated with the advent of spring.” This website refers to: “Shupa, Enlil, who decrees the fate of the land (Bootes)” An extensive discussion is here.
Blasweiler also refers to a constellation of “the carter” (an awkward translation), likely Auriga, “charioteer”, prominent in Winter. It spans 14 degrees of Gemini, and can best be seen in February. Sumerian MUL.GAM, Akkadian gamlu, meaning “the scimitar” or “the crook”. Perhaps there is a link to the rākib narkabti, the maryannu, the Streitwagenfahrer, the chariot drivers. The mythology is quite chaotic, which is suggestive of quite some cultural interaction. One of the stories is about (warrior) Athena and a son.
Subsequently, Blasweiler has an interesting discussion of links to Kybele (the Great Mother, perhaps Rhea ?), and symbols of the long robe, falcon (foresight) and cup. None of this is decisive. One returns to the notion that a link to Inara is strong and sufficient. (NB. Hittite Inara 1600-1200 BC is not to be confused with Sumerian Inanna 5000 BC, see also here and here, but there are linkages.)
Nativity scene
These Hittite roots are strong and we should beware of reading too much in this from other perspectives. However, the picture reminds of Maria with the holy spirit (dove, angel), the birth of Jesus (with stag rather than ox and donkey), and the visit of three men (kings or sages). Perhaps the writers of the New Testament took their inspiration from a limited repertoire of memes, even though mythology allows for many more options.
Wine god Tipariya
The depicted three persons may also be gods. In Luwian religion, Kumarma is a grain goddess, also regarded as the “good god”, with Matili another grain god, and the wine god Tipariya ((DEUS) VITIS-ti-PRÆ-ia), see Wikipedia ENG & DE.
There is Mark Weeden, “The Good God, the Wine-god and the Storm-god of the Vineyard”, 2018, again behind a paywall. The weather-god of the vineyard or turwarasina Tarhunza would be a Luwian invention. The original Hittite weather god Tarhunna en the Luwian weather god Tarhunz remind of Thor. Supposedly, the epithet piḫaššaššiš (“of the thunderbolt, of the flash”) resulted in the name of the winged horse Pegasus, On the other hand Sleipnir could also run/fly in the sky but using only eight legs.
Wikipedia: “King Warpalawas II of Tuwana (2nd half of the 8th century BC) had an imposing rock relief with a depiction of this aspect of the god erected near a productive spring at İvriz. Tarhunz is depicted as a bearded god with curly hair and a helmet. He wears a knee-length skirt and a belt, but no sword. In his left hand he holds a bunch of grapes and ears of corn in his right hand.” There is a separate discussion, that also points to the sickle, indicating the time of harvest – another Dionysian element.
The ears of corn resemble the Thyrsus used by Dionysus. Ancient iconographers were rather strict in what was depicted exactly, so we cannot take shortcuts. But syncretism is a phenomenon too.
Ilya Yakubovich 2015 has: “The delineation of a substrate lexicon in Luwian is a debated issue. In particular, claims were made about the common origin of Luw. tabar- ‘to rule’ and Gk. λαβύρινθος, Mycenaean da-pu 2 -ri-to- ‘labryrinth’, on the assumption that the Greek word originally referred to the royal palace of Cretan kings in in Knossos (Yakubovich, 2002). Also noteworthy is the comparison between Luw. tuwars(a)- ‘vineyard’ and Gk. θύρσος ‘thyrsus, i.e. wand wreathed in ivy associated with Dionysus and his followers’. In both cases the scenario of the Greek borrowing into Luwian appears to be precluded for historical reasons, while the irregularity of phonetic correspondences militates against the hypothesis of common Indo-European heritage or Luwian loanwords in Greek. In order to prove the hypothesis of a common Mediterranean substrate in Luwian and Greek, one has to collect additional items displaying similar correspondences.”
Rome and its claimed relation to Aeneas of Troy
The Fred Woudhuizen 2006 thesis about the ethnicity of the Sea Peoples (as said, see the 1177 BC civilisation collapse in general) gives a surprising confirmation of some link of Aeneas of Troy (or some variant) to the Etruscans. Rome was at the border of Etruria and there were some Etruscan kings, As he states on p89: “If we are right in our conclusion that Luwian population groups from western Asia Minor colonized Etruria in the late 8th or early 7th century BC, there may also well be a kernel of truth in the colonization by Trojans of the coastal region of Latium as transmitted to us by the famous Aeneas’ saga.”
A word of caution is required here, for which I thank a critical reader. Woudhuizen’s analysis on the ethnicity of the Sea Peoples best receives critical review from the recent findings, like said book by Eric Cline on the 1177 BC collapse. Subsequently, there have been critical reviews of Woudhuizen’s papers on the link Luwian and Etruscan, on the use of the Luwian language itself (South or West Anatolia), and indeed the ethnicity of the Sea Peoples. What might remain are the suggestion of hypotheses.
Our word of copper comes from Cyprus, or Cyprus from copper. The Greek word for copper is χαλκός, of unknown etymology but curiously sounding like chalk. The word was also used for bronze (alloy with tin, while brass is an alloy with zinc). The Greek attribution of a “Trojan” name Αἰνείας may also have an unknown origin and only inspired a Greek interpretation as “terrible grief” αὶνóν ἄχος. Still, when Aeneans would have settled parts of Latium and Etruria, they might have introduced bronze there. Latin Aeneus means “made of bronze”. Proto-Indo-European for ore would be ayos, similar to ashes. When landing on Italian shores Aeneas thus might also gotten known as “mister Bronze”.
Remarkably, Woudhuizen p92: “This inference coincides with the fact that the place name Roma is based on the same root as that of the Lycian heroic name Romos, being likewise derived from the Luwian name for the stag-god, Rum/nt-.” He already suggested this in Talanta 1994, referring to Herbig 1914, and the 1961 thesis by Ph.H.J. Houwink ten Cate, p128-131. I have read the latter now and it appears to be strong argument, that is, that Runtiya has had priests whose names started with R-omega, while it is an entirely other issue whether Romulus came from the same origin.
Houwink ten Cate refers to Runtiya, the Luwian got of the hunt, who had a close connection to deer, the very stag god whom we have met above. There is similarity to the Hittite Kurunta. Luwian personal names that start with “Ru” or “Ro” occur, also in 18th century Kültepe, formerly (Ka)Nesh.
Somehow, it seems to be a well-kept secret amongst students of Luwian that Rome might have gotten its name from the Luwian stag god. I do not know about a stag icon about Rome, but perhaps Roman civilisation had passed on from hunting, and the animal wasn’t much available in the area itself, see Martyn Allen on this.
Woudhuizen (at least in his thesis of 2006 but not in said later book of 2013) seems to preclude a Luwian influence upon Etruscan language (the number of immigrants was too few), but on p91: “One of the outstanding deeds with which Aeneas is credited concerns his introduction of the cult of the ancestral Trojan gods, the Penates.” See also p118. These household gods were venerated in each home, There is a relation to the vestal virgins, who protect the hearth. From there, we are back to the Bona Dea cult, and now we can better understand the reference there to a possible link to Earth Mother Cybele, potentially linked to Luwian Kubaba / Kupapa. And, with this, also the connection to Dionysus (Tarhunz of the vineyard) and his maenads. Remarkably, Roman tradition seems to claim an own independent cult of Liber Pater, “the free father”, that supposedly merged later with Dionysus from Greek origin, but it may well be that Liber Pater was already Dionysus via the Aenean root. An epithet for Dionysus is Eleutherios or Lefteris (Greek: Ελευθέριος, “the liberator”), and e-re-u-te-ro was already a root in Linear B. (Djeu Pater became Jupiter, and perhaps the name given to Liber Pater was given too late to change further.)
NB. Research by the Max Planck institute e.a. in 2021 about DNA analysis generated the remarkable suggestion that there would be no Anatolian influence in Etruria in say 800 – 200 BC. (See also here and a summary.) This is curious, because Pellecchia in 2007 showed that DNA from Etruscan cattle was identical to that of cattle in Anatolia. (See here.) An explanation can be that Aeneas and his people would have fled from Troy rather in 1177 BC, and that their custom was cremation rather than burial (Hector and Caesar had funeral pyres). The 2021 study would be accurate on the bones and teeth that were processed but should be more careful about the implications for migration.
The 2022 study in Science on the Indo-Europeans
Science 2022 gave the study by Iosif Lazaridis et al. “The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe”. A comment by Paul Heggarty below the article is, with the abbreviation CHG = Caucasian Hunter Gatherers: “Conveniently redefining Indo-European now to exclude Anatolian does not change the fact of their common origin, nor that the real root of this language lineage does not lie in the Yamnaya EHG-CHG mix (red-blue). Rather, hiding in plain sight in the pie charts is a component not just ubiquitous across Indo‑European (Anatolian included), but ubiquitous at markedly higher proportions: CHG alone (blue).” The latter more ancient origin would be in the Caucasus 7000 – 5000 BC.
The spread from Georgia, of wine, language and people, might also be via trade rather than conquest. The second thing to know is that Caesar conquered Gaul mostly by bribing regional chiefs with wine, while the fighting had the finishing touch for whom would not be bribed.
Thus, the spread of Indo-Europeans would be first via wine in 6000 BC, then with horses who still had a tendency towards backpain in 3500 BC, and later the current domestic horses who have less backpain in 2000 BC.
A dubious theory relating to an actual person
Admittedly, Indo-Europeans were people of flesh and blood. Legends and perhaps gods may derive from actual people. There still is the search for the actual tomb of Alexander, though there is a sarcophagus. Caesar gave his name to Kaisar and Czar. China has the first emperor Qin. Might there have existed a man called “king”, or a man called “Thor” ? A rather radical theory is given by Henry Shephard, with the articles 2008 “On the origin of Dionysus” (“rough draft”) and the 2015 “The oldest epoch of Dionysian religion“. Close to Purcari along the Lower Dniester River, in Moldava, in a region that would have been excellent for making wine, there has been found a grave of a man, 2.15 m tall, 55-60 years old, in the Usatove Culture period site Tumulus 1/Burial 21 (1/21). This would have been in the Chalcolithic Age (copper age) 3500 – 3000 BC, when the climate changed, see David Antony. The burial chamber suggests a high status. Shephard suggests a link to the river Tyras / Dniester, the sound TRS, the staff Thyrsus, perhaps Thracia itself (with the Greek etymology of θράσσω (thrássō, “to trouble, stir”)). Of note is that Shephard is a co-author on this article in Science 2022 on the origin of Indo-Europeans, on this article in Nature 2021 about the origin of the Western European domestic horse, while this is the Oium society website.
Shephard does not state this, but there is Tarhunz to the South and Thor to the North, both gods of thunder. The general spread of agriculture is rather from the Crescent to the North-West though. 3000 BC still is much later than the development of wine supposedly in Georgia 6000 BC. A thousand years is much, and though the speed of development was rather slow, (pre-) history is also punctuated with revolutions. A distinction can be made between a local population who develops some technology, e.g. cultivates wine, and the PIE speaking horseback warriors who take over control, the common language, and beer and wine drinking habits.
Shephard’s male figure supposedly was limping, and this reminds of the “limping god” in Hesiod’s theogony (here and here), who must be Hephaistos. In the Greek colony of Syracuse, νύσος survives in the meaning of limping, though the common Greek word became χωλός. Nysos might be the name of a god, see Hyginus, but Shephard suggests that it means “lame” here, though he also refers to: “Pherecydes of Syros, nũsa was an archaic word for “tree””. With Dionysus linked to ivy, we may see that ivy is rather weak / lame compared to the stronger oak, but there are no stories of Dionysus limping (or dancing in such fashion). If Shephard’s (“rough draft”) suggestion is that this particular limping king/priest would be the source for a limping god and perhaps Dionysus, given the title of his article “On the origin of Dionysus”, then this by itself would be rather unconvincing.
Shephard’s two papers (of a larger corpus) provide an overview of issues – e.g. the reference to oak as building material before stone pillars were used – but the papers are dense in (etymological) associations, and a developed argument would require more elaboration.
Concluding
The Dionysian link between Julius Caesar and the Bona Dea cult, and the subsequent link of the Divus Julius cult and Christianity, and the role of wine in Christianity, gave us three elements to look into. We found that Dionysus started from ivy and later took along wine, likely overtaking an earlier god of beer (as persisted in the Norse Aegir or had existed in Mesopotamia – see this overall list). The Hittite / Luwian stormgod Tarhunz has elements of Dionysus. Tarhunz, the Stag god Runtiya, and Inara / Kupapa / Great Mother would have arrived in Rome via 800 BC Luwian colonisation of Etruria. This was reshaped into the saga of Aeneas and in the cults of Liber Pater and Bona Dea. The cult of Dionysus was an important factor in the Roman civil war after the assassination of Caesar. Christianity absorbed elements from Divus Julius, Dionysus / Liber Pater and Bona Dea. A surprise finding in all of this was that Rome (Romulus) may have derived its name from the Luwian Stag god Runtiya.
How does one prove that the rise of Christianity is related to the Flavians ?
Such a link has been suggested by more authors, but apart from (i) the very destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, and the Arch of Titus with the spoils of the Temple, (ii) the parallels between scripture and the writings by Flavius Josephus, and (iii) that the “third” pope Clement (likely) was a Flavian (with also wife Flavia Domitilla, niece of Titus and Domitian), there seemed to be little direct evidence.
Francesco Carotta starting in 1988, some 35 years ago, called attention to (iv) the Divus Julius cult (movie). I use the abbreviations IC = Julius Caesar and IX = Jesus Christ, see the former two weblog entries (1 and 2), with the English J replaced by the original I, to link up closer to original textual references. Carotta’s theory IC > IX highlighted that the fast adoption of Christianity by the Romans implied that it received support from the Roman emperors and their powerful bureaucracy. Instead of persecution there would be tacit or active support. Looking at the various emperors, the Flavians would be the most likely original ones – with Constantine arriving late and only formalising it. Still, could there be tangible evidence ?
James S. Valliant and C.W. (Warren) Fahy, in their book “Creating Christ: How the Roman emperors invented Christianity” (video discussion) (review by Robert M. Price), suggest that they started 30 – 35 years ago too, with the hypothesis that there should be evidence in the symbolism on coins, and (v) that they only discovered their crucial bit of hard evidence recently, resulting in the publication of their book in 2016. (Valliant on Carotta).
(There is also Joseph Atwill with a (vi) direct (?) link, in his book Ceasar’s Messiah (movie). Some comments on Atwill are here and here.)
Valliant and Fahy present their evidence carefully, so I must apologise for barging in and present the main piece of evidence directly. Quoting from their book:
This is phenomenal evidence, and earlier authors who saw this, and possibly reported on this, should feel much invited to explain why its value wasn’t put at center stage before. Evidence need not be proof however.
Trace evidence versus proof
Let us use FP = Flavian Propaganda and ADI = anchor and dolphin icon. One hypothesis is that there was FP and another is that it resulted into Christianity. The Flavian Propaganda Hypothesis (FPH) can be formalised as Hyp0: FP > IX. There now is a piece of evidence. The process can be denoted as FP[using ADI] > IX[using ADI]. It is like a murderer leaving traces. It is forensics to check whether those traces could have other origins. DNA might also be planted. The discovery by V & F (Valliant & Fahy) is that there now is this trace, or piece of evidence, which researchers were not aware of before (or were silent about). As I understand V & F, they do not solidly conclude a reverse: that IX[using ADI & other evidence] > FP, i,e. it is no longer a hypothesis, and the evidence, including that early Christianity used ADI, proves that the Flavians created Christianity. For this, Valliant, former Deputy District Attorney of San Diego County for 16 years, builds a case using more pieces of evidence, supported by the writing skills of fiction writer Fahy.
Understanding the evidence
The Christian symbol on the right hand side above has ἰχθύς. To understand the evidence, we can try to trace back the symbol to the battles by Vespasian and Titus. Titus’s father Vespasian had only become emperor because of the support of Gaius Lucinius Mucianus, governor of Syria: “A strong force drawn from the Judaean and Syrian legions marched on Rome under the command of Mucianus, and Vespasian travelled to Alexandria [in Egypt, the granary of Rome], leaving Titus in charge to end the Jewish rebellion. [ftnts] By the end of 69, the forces of Vitellius had been beaten, and Vespasian was officially declared emperor by the Senate on 21 December, thus ending the Year of the Four Emperors. [ftnt]”
At the time of Titus, there was still memory about the Seleucids, i.e. Greek kings who descended from one of the generals of Alexander the Great. The Getty Museum: “The anchor and dolphins are common Seleucid symbols, referring to legends of the divine origins of Seleukos I, the dynasty’s founder. According to these stories, the god Apollo supposedly fathered Seleukos and gave his mother a ring decorated with an anchor. The dolphin was Apollo’s sacred animal.” Supposedly the Oracle of Delphi got its name when Apollo in the guise of a dolphin brought priests there. More likely though, delphus means womb, the dolphin is a fish with a womb, and the oracle is located at a cave, so that it might be derivative, that there a temple of Apollo was built. Somewhat remarkable, after the Maccabean Revolt 167-160 BC of the Jews against the Seleucids, Jewish coins featured the anchor without the dolphin (Apollo), perhaps with the suggestion that a false god had been rejected, see here: “The most common coin (prutah) of Herod the Great is similar to Hasmonean coins – an anchor with Greek inscription “HRwD BACI” (King Herod), and a caduceus between double cornucopiae.”
The story of the anchor and dolphin is more complicated though, if we leave out the myths. Pfrommer (1993) in a discussion of the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, decorated vessels on page 21-26, suggests the following. There are coins of Seleukos with an anchor, and there are coins of Seleukos with a dolphin, but there are no Seleucid coins of an anchor & entwined dolphin / fish. Pfrommer: “Among the innumerable representations of anchors on Seleucid coins, clay bullae, and lead weights, there is not a single example of a dolphin curled around an anchor known to me. Consequently, there can be no doubt that this symbol was not a widely known, official dynastic emblem in the Seleucid world. (…)” Instead, he points to Mithridates II, who later conquered most of the Seleucid empire, with a coin with anchor and entwined dolphin, known as Sellwood 26.30. (See an expensive new catalogue.) Pfrommer (1993): “We can only speculate about the historical background behind the anchor and dolphin motif.” He refers to a military / diplomatic stand-off around 230 BC. Pfrommer suggests a mix-up of dolphins and fish: “(…) the dolphin can be seen as a nomadic symbol, and the Parthians were of nomadic, central Asian origin. [ftnt] The fish is to be found on nomadic-Scythian monuments as early as the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. [ftnt] (…) The symbol of the dolphin continued to be used by the Parthians as well as by the Indo-Parthians, although scarcely any of the craftsmen or artists (…) could have been familiar with this particular animal. (…) The combination of the nomadic dolphin and the Seleucid anchor could symbolize the Arsacid dynasty’s conquest of the Seleucid realm and the Parthians’ view of themselves as their legal successors. In that case, the emblem would be more than appropriate for Parthian table silver. (…)” Presumably, then, the later Roman conquest of Parthian and formerly Seleucid Syria came with the knowledge of the symbol, and Titus’s adoption of it for this particular coin issue. We must be aware that ancient kings used coinage as means of propaganda, as a way to reach a mostly illiterate public.
PM. In Autumn 79 Vesuvius erupted, and a mosaic with an anchor and dolphins and persons was covered in ashes, for us to rediscover, that Valliant & Fahy use for the cover of their book (but the dolphin not intertwined with the anchor). PM. Look at the horror show, how archeologists have treated the library of the Villa of the Papyri. PM. The Jews had to change coins that carried the image of false gods (Roman emperors) for sound Temple money, in order to pay their taxes, whence the role of the moneychangers.
A second step is the use of the symbol within Christianity that was being created. It was apparently only with Constantine 330 AD that the symbol of the Christians changed from the archor and dolphin into the cross. This fits Carotta’s view that the Divus Julius cult was satisfied with the death by stabbing, and with showing the wax effigy on a tropaeum, rather than death on a cross.
Christians also used a star stylised as the IX Monogram, such that, with the circle around it, one can read the capital letters IXΘYΣ. Caesar’s Comet, also Caesar’s Star, “was a seven-day cometary outburst seen in July 44 BC. It was interpreted by Romans as a sign of the deification of recently assassinated dictator, Julius Caesar (100–44 BC). [ftnt] It was perhaps the most famous comet of antiquity.” (wikipedia). The Sidus Iulium was much used in the Divus Julius cult, e.g. on coins. The Chi-Rho symbol XP > ☧ was an abbreviation for “chrestos” = useful, worthy, and “was also used to mark a particularly valuable or relevant passage in the margin of a page” (wikipedia). Chi-Rho ☧ reminds of a star when the X is large and the P fit inbetween, and it reads also as PX > Pax Christi.
One might suppose that the Romans and Christians hated each other for using the same symbols, or, more likely, these Romans created Christianity while keeping the same symbols. Rituals and spells in the Divus Julius cult remained but the explanations changed and the original truth was forgotten. For the Judaic religion we have comparison with customs, rituals and liturgy, but we no longer can compare with what the Romans did with their gods, since all has been absorbed within Christianity or eliminated as heresy. Like the Latin “et” (and) became the symbol “&”, and few still knew where the symbol came from. Or the “Quaestio” = “I ask” was abbreviated as “Q.” (notice the dot), which became “?”, and few knew that the past had only declarative sentences so that the “Quaestio” was inserted to turn the text into a question.
In our times, the symbol of anchor and dolphin got more direct commercial application. A modern printer and designer explains, potentially not aware of the religious symbolism: “The anchor and dolphin mark symbolizes the phrase, festina lente, latin for “make haste slowly” or “hasten slowly.” The dolphin represents “haste,” and the anchor represents “slowly.” The Roman emperor Augustus often chided his military commanders to “hasten slowly,” as he thought rashness was a dangerous quality for an officer. Roman coins minted during the time of Augustus and later Titus bore several emblems that symbolized the adage festina lente, including the dolphin and anchor.” Blessed are the ignorant. (Actually, Valliant & Fahy are discovering that, after the publication of their book, the anchor & dolphin symbol is beginning to disappear from Christian websites, see their report.)
Flavia Domitilla
The Catholic Encyclopedia states on the anchor and Flavia Domitilla (wife of Clemens):
“The rare appearance of a cross in the Christian monuments of the first four centuries is a well-known peculiarity; not more than a score of examples belong to this period. Yet, though the cross is of infrequent occurrence in its familiar form, certain monuments appear to represent it in a manner intelligible to a Christian but not to an outsider. The anchor was the symbol best adapted for this purpose, and the one most frequently employed. One of the most remarkable of these disguised crosses, from the cemetery of St. Domitilla, consists of an anchor placed upright, the transverse bar appearing just beneath the ring. To complete the symbol, two fishes are represented with the points of the curved branches in their mouths. A real cross, standing on a sort of pedestal to the right of this, is sufficient indication that the author of the figures intended a symbolic cross in this instance.”
Remarkably for the religious tradition, so well trained on historical events, the author does not recognise the “fishes” as dolphins, nor the symbol as deriving from the Seleucids. The phrase “sufficient indication that the author of the figures intended” is pure imagination presented as fact. The cross might also have been added after the 4th century when it was felt that a Saint required a cross. If it had been there before, it might also have been a tropaeum, later adapted to a cross.
Divergence between Christianity and Judaism on the Apocalypse
The theories that Christianity originated with the Flavians, or got a strong impulse from them, all use the scheme that Jesus easily could foretell the destruction of the Temple – “not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down” (Mark 13) – since the gospel writers knew that it already had happened. Jesus also foretold the coming of a second messiah for this to happen: his phrasing is such that this did not need to be himself – in this case it was Vespasian and his son Titus.
Thus the Christian churches might still be correct in waiting for the Final Judgement and the Apocalypse with the Second coming of IX, but they should not use this particular prophecy to justify this.
Orthodox Jews, on the other hand, would not believe the Christian story that their messiah already had come. They would still await the Rebuilding of the Temple, to have their Götterdämmerung.
Vespasian was the messiah – the Christ of the Old Testament (OT)
Valliant and Fahy’s book was important for me, as well, because they highlight that Vespasian presented himself as the messiah according to the Torah.
When you learn about this this then you can look for corroboration, e.g. partially here: this first refers to the Balaam prophecy w.r.t. the comets, and then the quote of Josephus refers to Daniel. When you don’t know about Vespasian’s claim, then you have less clarity about his likely approach towards the zealots. I should have known this, because I read the passage in Josephus before, but apparently it did not stick in memory. Zealot Jews would have to accept Vespasian as their ruler because their own Torah told them that he was the prophesized governor of the world, yet, they might still rebel about a multiplicity of issues, perhaps point to the Parthians or kings in India that weren’t subject to Vespasian yet. Nevertheless, Vespasian and his office of management of religious issues apparently were aware of the usefulness of playing the card of the Torah. Still, there is Voskuilen & Sheldon’s “macabre analogy“, that in W.W. 2 people would not worship their nazi conqueror, as would be expected, instead, from the zealots w.r.t. Vespasian. But it might be strong psychology: that the zealots can be blamed for executing the prophet of the messiah of their own creed. Obviously, Vespasian would not need to be the Christ according to the Christian faith, but, his playwrights were doing something about this, by creating Christianity.
Some weak points in Creating Christ
A weakness is that Valliant and Fahy suggest that the New Testament (NT) is targetted at zealots only. It would not be very convincing for the zealots that this Christ would claim to speak to all people in the world but actually would speak only to them. Instead, each gospel rather has a different target audience, e.g. Mark for the soldiers, Luke for the educated citizens of Rome (gentiles in general), Matthew for the Romanising Jews, John perhaps, I am guessing here, for the “light versus darkness” scheme according to Mithras. If a Jew would have to surrender part of the Torah, then this could be achieved easier when it was seen that a Roman also surrendered part of Jove. Also, a single witness is no witness, and it is supposed to increase credibility when there are more witnesses.
A weakness of Valliant and Fahy’s book is that they maintain the conventional time sequence between the gospels and the letters by Paul. They follow convention that Paul wrote his letters before the destruction of the Temple, so that the Flavians only interfered with the gospels. Thus they hold that there still could be, according to Paul, some real (revolutionary) Jesus who died and resurrected around 33 AD. Instead, it is more logical that the whole story of some Jesus was made up, including Paul himself. There is much to say for the view of Thomas Brodie that Jesus ~ Yahweh, and Paul ~ Moses, see here. The argument that Judaic religion did not have the notion of a “son of god” is not correct: Mss itself is Egyptian for “son of [the unspoken one]”. There is also Psalm 2.
In 1 Cor 15:3-6 Paul states: “(3) that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, [rather the gospels and not the Torah] 5 and that He appeared to Cephas (a) and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, He appeared to more than five hundred brothers at once, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.” It is rather weak that the gospels do not mention those 500. If the gospels came after Paul, they could have used him as a source for this, because 500 is an impressive number. But he refers to them, and thus must have had a source that they did not have. It is rather bad editing, perhaps a job in some haste. (I have this example from vridar.org, here.) (A branch is here to Detering and RM Price on Detering.)
Circumcision is mentioned in the gospels only a few times (one search engine gives 1 in Luke and 3 in John). Thus, it isn’t mentioned in Mark, which is the first gospel, that, within the Divus Julius framework, would be intended for Caesar’s soldiers. When Matthew is included for the Romanising Jews, then John and (inconsistent, and supposedly evolving) Paul are required to get rid of circumcision, in order to keep Christianity acceptable to the Romans. (See a discussion on the New Testament (NT) and circumcision: “Thus the question of circumcision in the New Testament went to the heart of the message of Christianity.” That, and taxation.) In other words, the gospels, basic epistles and acts must have been written at somewhat the same period, for no text by itself could have made much of an impact. Bible historians seem to have assumed a low capacity of only a few writers over a century, so that the writing process took a longer period. Instead, we may assume sizeable numbers of clerks and playwrights in both Rome and Alexandria, who could well produce a relatively small book in a relatively short framework of time. The gospels would be for the passion plays about the Vita Caesaris (with relatively little information about the underlying theology), and the epistles by Paul would be targeted at the priests. A converted rabbi would mean a converted congregation. Not everything needed to be complete in the state as we have them. Over the 2nd century, texts could be adapted a bit, and earlier versions destroyed as heresy.
The frame of mind of the playwrights
The reconstruction of how IX was created may focus on the frame of mind of the playwrights. They would be versed in Latin, Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, and the respective literature and some astrology. They would have experience in writing theology, and be aware how earlier authors had created similar works, like on the Serapis cult. They would be aware of the classical scheme of a hero, that Frazer in “The golden bough” identified as the dying and rising king, or that John Campbell has called “The Hero with a Thousand Faces“. Carotta calls attention to the intertextuality of diegetic transposition, taken from Gerard Genette. A word is bricolage: constructing something with building stones, or using text and images as Lego. My own suggestion is to see this also as creating and solving cryptic crossword puzzles. Biblical scholars must also become anthropologists.
Flavius Josephus, originally known as Yosef Ben Matityahu (34–95 AD) (Matityahu = “Gift of Yahweh”), might well be the ascribed Matthew of the gospel too, or there is a role for this actual brother Matthias, see here. “Paulos” means short, and Josephus great-grandfather was Matthias Curtus (“humpback, short”) (or here, and here a text that apparently has been removed from wikipedia). At Yodfat, potentially FJ was let down from the cave in chains, like in a basket, like the story of Saul of Tarsus being let down from a tower at Damascus, or Moses in a basket: and Greek “tarsos” means “basket”, see here.
When we allow for various building blocks, rather anything is possible. A key point is that there need not be a single exegesis for a text. There might be multiple explanations for a single chapter or phrase. If a final text has been accepted by a group of writers with different views, it still gives a final text. Passion plays can be tested on the audience to see what works best, as those existed in Egypt already for Osiris and later Serapis.
Indeed, when Vespasian was in Alexandria, and considered his own Roman belief in Jove and the Ptolemean syncretism of Serapis, it might have been suggested to him by the priests in the Serapeum that a pacification of the Jews would require a prophet amongst themselves towards a new syncretism.
Carotta on Fulvia
Carotta highlights that, right after the assassination of IC in 44 BC, Mark Antony and his wife Fulvia brilliantly turned the tables, by trading an amnesty for the murderers for a state funeral, officially organised by Caesar’s father-in-law but actually by Mark Antony, who happened to be consul at that moment.
Antony and Fulvia would have been acutely aware that also their own fate would be closely linked to how IC would be remembered by the Romans: either as a rightly disposed-off tyrant or as a treacherously assassinated protector of the people. Fulvia apparently was involved in the Dionysus cult, and already had experience with the funeral of two former husbands: (1) When her husband Clodius (of the Claudia gens) was murdered in 52 BC, the mob set the building of the Senate into flames, and this turned public sympathy against Clodius and pro the Senate. Thus, Fulvia knew that burning the Senate in 44 BC was no wise course. (2) When her husband Curio died in battle in Africa in 49 BC, and his remains were not in Rome, she staged a funeral in Rome with a wax effigy. Thus, she had learned that it was a good tactic to use a wax effigy. She employed this for IC too, leaving his corpse laid out on a bier. (However, after the rousing speeches, the people burned the senate building anyway, see Appian 2.147.)
See Carotta’s eulogy on Fulvia’s role in the creation of Christianity. Carotta suggests that IC’s wax effigy was put onto a tropaeum, so that the whole crowd could see it, and the stabbing wounds, and that also some mechanism was used to turn it around for all to see. My suggestion is that it suffices that there were some soldiers who lifted the tropaeum and who turned it around (or turned around themselves while holding it). This would also explain the presence of Roman soldiers at the foot of the cross in the gospels. While Asinius Pollio’s history was the later “official account”, I image that there were scribes present at the funeral, and that reports were sent out to the legions, creating the script for the passion play, now still in the Stations of the Cross. Note that this ritual survived, in a parallel existence apart from Scripture.
Carotta suggests a topos of Pompey (who could not offer land to the soldiers) ~ Moses (who could not enter the promised land), and IC (who offered land to the soldiers) ~ Joshua (who entered the holy land): “The Roman High Priest Caesar, however, who had finally led them into the promised land, had to appear as a new Jesus thus the name of Joshua used in the Greek bible translation, the Septuanginta.” It seems to me that this topos would be sufficient for any playwright to make the transformation from the name of Gaius Julius Caesar to the name of Jesus. Carotta in addition investigates whether there could be a literal transformation of the words & letters Gaius Julius > Gai us (Juli) us > Gei s us > Iesous. I am no linguist and wonder whether the latter is needed. When a person in a play is called Fred, you might call him Fred Johnson for five years, and then Johnson for five years, and then Charles Johnson for five years, and then Charles, so that after four steps Fred has become Charles. (Here is a website on changing names.) It need not be via the perhaps more natural manner how Caesaraugusta > Zaragoza or Ultraiectum > Utrecht.
At some point in this piece on Fulvia, I cannot find clarity: Carotta seems to allow for a first phase of transformation under Herod the Great, with Roman soldiers already stationed in colonies in the holy land, and a second phase under the Flavians. Potentially there was already a corroding of words and concepts from 44 BC to 70 AD. But in matters of religion, there would be supervising managers to maintain adherence to proper texts. Thus to me, the relevant change was by the Flavians.
Indeed, the Divus Julius cult was rather quickly replaced by the Divi Filius cult, when Octavian became emperor Augustus in 27 BC. That said, it may still be that Augustus only succeeded into adapting the Divus Julius cult during his reign, and this would tend to involve the Latin and Greek texts, and no transformation to a Judean setting, i.e. one would presume, because there would be no real need. His successor Tiberius had some objections to the worship of emperors: “Tiberius allowed the worship of his divine Genius [Gens Claudia] in only one temple, in Rome’s eastern provinces, and promoted restraint in the empire-wide cult to the deceased Augustus.” (wikipedia). Remarkably it were descendants of Mark Antony who became emperors, and who restored IC’s memory against Augustus, and those might be more inclined to re-support the Divus Julius cult (though Augustus might already have destroyed all copies of Asinius Pollio’s account).
A potential role for Philo
It was Caligula, who wanted to have his statue in the Temple, while Moses forbids images. There was the embassy by Philo to avoid disaster. Here, I can see an objective by Philo to begin to transform the Divus Julius cult into a Judean version, such that it would become more Judean than Roman, so that Romans might accept that they should not allow a statue of a Roman emperor within the Temple. Philo could do some rewriting and experimenting with passion plays in Alexandria, but such an overall objective for Rome itself would be a mission impossible, when the Roman managers of religious affairs would not allow it. If Philo tried anything, it clearly failed, when the Temple was destroyed in 70 AD. The destruction of the Temple remains the major case, to make a shift from IC to IX understandable, i.e. not merely on content, but also w.r.t. the rapid rise within the Roman empire.
Priests without a Temple
Alternatively, remaining Jewish priests after the destruction of the Temple, might have been willing to rewrite the OT into the NT, in which the NT is adapted to the Roman period, and in which the OT remains part of the set of holy books.
Given the outcome, we must assume that they accepted that the framework, and in particular the rituals, of the Divus Julius cult would be preserved, in trying to make it all acceptable to the Romans. Thus, such priests would do voluntarily, from a background in Judaism, what the alternative analysis presumes was done by the Romans to arrive at syncretism. However, it does not seem likely that such priests without a Temple would have the means and funds to undertake such a project. On the other hand, a Roman office with the mission to syncresize a new creed, could explain, overall, the missionary character of Christian churches, and the repressive tolerance shown in “okay, we accept that it is called Wodan’s day, but we change the name into Wednesday, and you worship Wodan by calling him God the Father”.
Virtue ethics
It is not a mere transformation of the Vitae Caesaris into a NT storyline. In virtue ethics there is a distinction between a “warrior ethic” as the Roman’s had (a warrior sacrifices for family and tribe, or city), and an (Egyptian) “ethics of sins”, in which the personal future is at stake, and the personal relation to some god. Indeed, there is already a subtle distinction between “paying for sins” and “being held ransom” (guilty by association) in some texts. Frazer in The Golden Bough p 277-8 on the Roman acceptance of (Oriental) Christianity:
“Thus the centre of gravity, so to say, was shifted from the present to a future life, and however much the other world may have gained, there can be little doubt that this one lost heavily by the change. A general disintegration of the body politic set in. The ties of the state and the family were loosened: the structure of society tended to resolve itself into its individual elements and thereby to relapse into barbarism; for civilisation is only possible through the active co-operation of the citizens and their willingness to subordinate their private interests to the common good. Men refused to defend their country and even to continue their kind. In their anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were content to leave the material world, which they identified with the principle of evil, to perish around them. This obsession lasted for a thousand years. The revival of Roman law, of the Aristotelian philosophy, of ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle Ages, marked the return of Europe to native ideals of life and conduct, to saner, manlier views of the world. The long halt in the march of civilisation was over. The tide of Oriental invasion had turned at last. It is ebbing still. “
Thus, indeed, there is an element of psychology involved, that works the angle of personal conviction, rather than state management. But it seems to be too simple to hold that it would just be “fashion”. There are always priests who have to prepare mass, and so on. It is also hard to believe that the professional managers of religion would not know about the shift in virtue ethics. Rather, they saw some temporary gain to proceed, and sell people the opium of a redemption of sins. Such a hypothesis would require well defined terms and theories about human psychology and culture, and subsequently the study of church history to try to determine the actual logistics of religion management. Well, perhaps at some point there could be a supercomputer.
Mathematics
In the piece on Fulvia, Carotta concludes about the difference between Divus Julius and the Torah: “Because their respective ethics are fundamentally different: clemency, forgiveness, love, liberation on the one hand, and, on the other hand, merciless vengeance, legacy-hunting, the inability to love and oppression.”
In my “The simple mathematics of Jesus” (SMOJ) I suggest that Alexandria had a strong base of priests, scripture writers, playwrights for passion plays for Serapis, and such. Around 300 BC there was also Euclid reducing the corpus of geometric knowledge by the axiomatic method. Jesus in the NT in axiomatic fashion reduces the OT to two commands: (1) honor the Father in heaven, and (2) love thy neighbour as thyself. This pair is the age-old Egyptian insight about the tension between The Law (Thoth, record keeper, with wife Maat) versus Love, mercy (Isis-Mery). There is also the distinction between theory for the educated and the rituals and rules for pastoral work for the daily life events of birth, marriage and death. Looking at these elements, it seems more likely that the Vitae Caesaris has been used as a framework for the passion play of a prophet of the new syncretism, because a framework really helps. The persons in the gospels move around as cardboard figures in such a passion play. The alternative passion play that Atwill has proposed, using only the campaign by Vespasian and Titus themselves, or its account given by Flavius Josephus, somehow seems less convincing. Note that the Divus Julius cult could not be fully revived, because it highlighted that the Flavians were no Julians. A transformation to an Eastern setting served more purposes.
Intermezzo on symbolism
Icons can be early “comic books”, stories told by means of pictures. A key example are Egyptian murals and our own figural paintings (Guernica). Meanings are often lost and then provide for more puzzles. Writing originated from drawings. The letter A is an inverted icon of a bull’s head. The letter B is the floor plan of a house with two chambers, beth = house, but became your bed. Recently, an interesting suggestion (minute 27) relates the swastika to the groma, with the sides representing the hanging lines. The “handbag” in ancient depictions, even in the Americas, gets a good discussion by David Miano, and would actually be a bucket in Assyria or a dome in Göbekli Tepe (as there is e.g. no carrying). Each culture can invent a bag. Here is a useful interview with dr Miano.
For the Hittites, it might actually be a hunting bag, a kursa, perhaps related to the “golden fleece”. Ilya Yabukovich in his 2008 thesis: “{…) the small stock of likely lexical borrowings from or via Hittite into Greek, such as Hitt. eshar ‘blood’ vs. Gk. ἴχwr ‘blood of the gods’, Hitt. huhubal ‘a percussion instrument’ vs. Gk. κύμβαλον ‘cymbal’, Hitt. kuwanna(n)– ‘copper ore’ vs. Gk. κύανος ‘dark-blue enamel, lapis lazuli etc.’ [our cyan], Hitt. kubahi- ‘a head gear’ (< Hurrian) vs. Gk. κύμβαχος ‘crown of a helmet’, Hitt. kursa- ‘hunting bag’ vs. Gk. βύρσα ‘leather, hide’.” The latter relates to French bourse, Dutch beurs, English purse. The Dutch beurs relates to the “stock exchange”. Perhaps the Hittite kursa contained stock options.
Below picture, with the stone carving of groma and handbag together, and the symbol on the side of the handbag, remains intriguing. JJ Ainsworth suggests that this handbag might indicate “knowledge” (from measuring) … It is speculation. JJ is at times difficult to hear. She speaks about the Egyptian goddess of knowledge Seshat, related to the invention of writing, depicted in leopard skin, potentially referring to the stars. It is somewhat difficult to imagine why the groma would already be important e.g. at Göbekli Tepe around 9000 BC. For the Nile, annual inundation required annual re-allotment of farm lots.
Tropaeum, stake and XP result into a cross ?
Mark 15:24 “And they crucified him” was Greek, Καὶ σταυροῦσιν αὐτὸν, thus a stake rather than a cross. While Valliant & Fahy indeed allow for a cross, Carotta clearly links the “stake” to the tropaeum used in the funeral of IC, when IC was already dead.
Carotta has the brilliant observation that IC could not speak at the supposed interrogation, and that Augustus took his place, when the question was posed, in Mark 14:16: “Again the high priest questioned Him, “Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?”” With IC being the blessed one, Octavian was his son, and became anointed = christos, with augustus = sebastos = venerable. Indeed the gospel of Mark is rather ambiguous on that IC was already dead and the possibility that IX died on a stake. One infers from this ambiguity that it could have been an objective of the Flavian transformation that Jewish zealots would feel humbled (“we did not say it but they draw the conclusion themselves“, in case a lawyer would argue that the Roman state allowed for false reports): that they caused their own prophet to end like a criminal.
One wonders where the cross comes from. The tropaeum invites the form of a T. However, if Chi-Rho or XP is used for Christos, then the X seems like a cross, and this may invite to replace the tropaeum by a cross. Also, Plato already indicated a cross in heaven, indicating that the sun is restricted in its movement along the North – South and East – West axes.
Poloczek’s review of Creating Christ
The Valliant & Fahy book got a review by Poloczek. An evaluation of this is in the Appendix.
Concluding
(1) The identification of the Flavian coin with the anchor & dolphin is hugely important, since it links the Syrian connection of the Flavians to the use of the same symbol by early Christianity in 100-330 AD. It remains a piece of evidence that must be weighed with other information.
(2) In combination with findings on the scriptures and other texts themselves, the whole proves that the Flavians started with syncretism, which developed into Christianity (in the various flavours over time).
(3) Authors who are critical of this proof, should apply strong norms of academic criticism. There now is a sound theory, and treating this with straw men and fallacies will create needless verbiage and distraction. Personally I am in favour of Carotta’s approach, that even in critical circles still does not get sufficient attention, and others are invited to give it a proper chance.
(4) The theory explains a whole set of phenomena, from the importance of religion in Roman politics, to the role of Egypt and passion plays, to the virtue ethics and collapse of the Roman empire, and the meaning of the Renaissance.
(5) The research community has the task to handle this properly instead of goofing as has happened so much. Historians should first learn a proper science field so that they learn the discipline of the scientific method. Subsequently, they can train on the history of their scientific field. Only later, with this experience, would they tackle these issues that we have looked at, with issues ranging from anthropology to astronomy to linguistics to statecraft and so on. It is no option to start from zero, and a younger generation trained in such methods would critically re-evaluate what the earlier generations concocted.
(6) The humanities would look into a society that meets a great disillusion on IX. There need be no basic worry because there are plenty of organisations that people can join to do what humans do, but informed guidance will help. Obviously education features strongly in all of this. Recommended is Richard Dawkins, “The god delusion“, 2006, how young children absorb uncritically what they are told, so that they can be indoctrinated to neglect the absurdities in religion and can develop a split mind on this. It makes sense to speak with parents about how they want to raise their children.
(7) This discussion will be with us for perhaps more than a century. Mankind cannot neglect the last 2500 years. Various distortions must be corrected in decent manner, which means that they must be discussed, studied, and evaluated. Perhaps that in a century the major collective trauma can be overcome, and that mankind can travel to the stars that caused so much gazing.
Appendix on the “Review” by dr Poloczek
The book by Valliant & Fahy got this review by Slawomir Poloczek. He is at the department of ancient history at Warsaw University. His 2017 thesis, in Polish, google-translates as: “The theme of the resurrection and resurrection of the dead in pagan literature of the Roman Empire period”, suggesting that Google and/or Poloczek himself make a distinction between resurrection and resurrection of the dead The review was published in the Journal of Higher Criticism. This journal was edited by Robert M. Price, existed in 1994-2003 and was apparently revived in 2018 via an Amazon channel. The review is 41 pages of A5 and I concentrate on the anchor and dolphin first of all.
Poloczek’s conclusion is: “Conclusion. Also in the case of Hadrian the theory of Imperial prompting of the new, loyalist religion against the Jewish thread [threat] seems to be flawed. Final remark. The book is undoubtedly a very brilliant and well-written study of the origins of Christianity. It draws attention to neglected issue of Roman cultural and political circumstances of the birth of the new religion. The Authors accurately show how deeply the Jesus’ movement, or rather the thought of the New Testament writers, was rooted in the imaginary [imagery] and phraseology of Imperial Cult. But it seems to me, that Jesus on the charts of the gospels was more often created as counter-emperor than supporter of the Roman rule, which he saw as necessary but only temporary order of the world. Also his followers tried rather to avoid any political disturbances than deliberately engage in Imperial propaganda. There was probably also no such desire on the part of emperors. At least not by the end of 1st century.”
(1) It is correct to observe that IX claimed, in John only, that his kingdom was not of this world: in that sense he is a counter-emperor. The claim in John might not be strong since the other gospels don’t have this. One witness is no witness. But they all have the reference to the Son of Man. Mark 14:62 states that the Son of Man will be seen, and does not state that this is Jesus himself: “And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” Be that as it may, IX does not present a political threat to the Romans: and in that sense IX clearly is no counter-emperor. The latter is the point made by V & F (Valliant & Fahy). Thus Poloczek missed the message of book. He coined the term “counter-emperor” without clearly defining it first, and in that manner it is easy to write reviews. (2) Similarly the term “loyalist” is undefined. Christians would be loyal to the Roman state by obeying its laws, but would not need to be loyal to the Flavians in the sense of fully supporting the Flavians in all that the Flavians did. (Even if an emperor was drunk one day, then one could appeal to the same emperor the next day when he was sober again.)
Poloczek gives criticism on 9 points, and I look only at point 1, the anchor & dolphin. His manner of “reasoning”, of misrepresenting the argument, creating a straw man and cutting it down, and use of the fallacy that a multitude of alternatives would imply the non-existence of some particular case, and overall lack of anything insightful, destroy all appetite for looking at the other 8 issues. Perhaps I am throwing away the baby with the bathwater though.
Perhaps the V & F book is flawed (see some criticism above), but Poloczek’s criticism on the anchor & dolphin theme appears to sin against academic correctness. He is advised to first revise his review critically himself. As said, I now concentrate on the issue of anchor and dolphin in the “review” only.
Fish vs cross
p191-192 discusses the fish versus the cross. This discussion is confusing. It is not clarified whether antiquity made a clear distinction between dolphins and fish. The stylised ichthus might look as both.
p188: “1) It is difficult to consider dolphin-anchor symbolism in its Christian context as the open declaration of the political loyalty of the Christians to the imperial dynasty.”
This is not what Valliant & Fahy stated, that the Christians would be loyal to the Flavians, in undefined manner. Such an idea is the creation of a straw man by Poloczek. Instead, the thesis is that the Flavians started a syncretism to pacify the Jews, which syncretism ended up in Christianity (with all its flavours over history and also today).
To use our modern distinction between dolphin and fish to argue a case is dubious. This paper clarifies that Aristotle clearly distinguished dolphins and fishes, but also lumped them together on the notion that they swam in water: “He held that cetaceans are not fishes because they have hair, lungs (HA 489a34), lack gills, suckle their young by means of mammae, they are viviparous (HA 489b4), and that their bones are analogous to the mammals, not fishes. Still they he calls them “fishes” (HA 566b2-5). (…) Yet the fact that Aristotle saw the natural world as fixed in time with no room for evolution and that he kept calling cetaceans “fishes,” would delay intellectual progress for many centuries when it came to the classification of these animals.”
Besides these learned men, popular iconography sometimes clearly distinguished fish and dolphins, but not always, and the stylised ichthus, as said, might look as both.
P192 states about the lack of cross-icons and dominance of fish-icons: “This fact is most often explained by the remark about crucifixion as a still-functioning and very humiliating method of execution. The sign of the cross had to evoke a very negative (and “criminal”) associations in Roman society before Constantine.”
The argument that such an explanation had often been used, is no ground to reject that a much better explanation has been found. The new finding does not exclude the earlier explanation. Instead, the origin of the cross rather must be found elsewhere, see above on Mark 15.
p193 kicks in an open door: “That’s already an important observation that should make us skeptical while comparing the images on the basis of typological descriptions and finding similarities among them.”
Above we already saw this, when the anchor & dolphin symbol was interpreted as festina lente, oblivious of the Seleucids, showing the multiplicity of interpretations of symbols. (Another example has been the search for an interpretation of the handbag in ancient pictograms.)
P193: “The cross therefore was neither an original emblem of Christianity nor a symbol intended for public use, but certainly was included in the (inner) Christian symbolism from the 2nd century at least.”
It is awkward how Poloczek introduces the distinction between internal (policy) discussion (nowadays e.g. a concilium at the Vatican) and public presentation (propaganda) without clarification of his sources. In a grassroots view on the rise of Christianity, it might well have been anonymous converts who introduced the icon of the cross. Eventually, the church would have to have some internal discussion, of course. Anyway, the reference of the period after 100 AD is less relevant for the argument of the Flavians in 70-100 AD. At this point one begins to surmise and fear that Poloczek may be an academic historian of antiquity, but hasn’t learnt the basic skills of academic correctness.
P193 is fine: “I agree with the Authors that early Christian avoidance of the cross-symbolism was not due to the fear of persecution or the risk of overexposing the faith (CC, pp. 14–21).”
p193: “According to Dölger the Christological significance of the fish did not appear before the end of the second century. [ftnt] There is an ongoing discussion about the question. (…) The literary sources are too late to establish the direct link between the image of fish and the Christian faith already in the Flavian period (although this possibility cannot be excluded).”
It is awkward to refer to earlier authors who have had no access to the new finding, to argue that the new finding might not be relevant. Aristotle did not write about this, thus Newton might not be relevant. Also, the finding refers to iconography, and not to literary discussion.
Anchor & dolphin
p195 repeats “(…) or even be a sign of Imperial loyalty”, without reference to the book where such would be suggested, repeating the reviewer’s wrong representation of the book.
p195: “The Authors are probably right that the inspiration of Christian anchor-dolphin symbolism comes directly from the Flavian coins distributed throughout all the Empire. It is very difficult, however, to agree with the thesis about borrowing of the original religious or political meaning of the symbol together with the image itself.”
Poloczek is in the frame of mind that there would already be Christians who had to decide whether or not to adopt the Flavian symbol. V & F have made their position weaker, by allowing for a pre-70 Paul, who indeed might be considering what emblem to use to muster his converts. Carotta is clearer, at least in my reading: there were no Christians before, and when Christianity was created, it came with the birthmark of the anchor & dolphin.
Still, Valliant & Fahy don’t describe the situation that the Christians are looking for a proper symbol. So why suggest that they do so ? Instead, V & F describe the situation that the Flavians did what they did using their symbol, which evolved into Christianity. P read but did not understand V & F. A PhD in ancient history written in the Polish language is no guarantee for the ability to read critically, even though Copernicus set a good example for the country already a long time ago. The following is a repeat of the fundamental misconception by Poloczek, though he has raised a proper point of criticism w.r.t. V &F, i.e. that they allow for an earlier Paul.
P195: “In the earliest period the distinction between Christian and Pagan art was almost entirely in their different interpretation by the “recipients” or “customers”. [ftnt] The fish and bread motif on the wall of a Roman tomb might have been painted either for a Pagan or for a Christian client.”
This would still be in agreement with V & F who allow an earlier Paul. For Carotta, in the earliest period, there was no Christianity. After the gospels had been created and the Roman ministry of religious propaganda started to have some success, then, indeed, the early converts read the same symbolism in the light of the new teachings. (And perhaps thought that Christianity was larger than it was.)
p195: “But more important was the possibility of relatively easy adaptation of non-Christian symbolism to the Christian context and meaning: the „Christianization” of the Pagan iconography.”
Again: V & F with their earlier Paul would indeed require some logistics how Paul and his followers accepted the Flavian creation of the gospels and symbolism. For Carotta, the story is that the early Christians were created, i.e. converted from DIvus Julius, while the Flavian symbols were used and while those were (gradually) given a new interpretation when the Roman ministry of propaganda created the gospels.
Assimilation of Christians
p195-196: “Mosaic from the Vatican Necropolis (mausoleum M, tomb of the Julii) depicts Jesus as Sol Invictus riding in his chariot (comp. CC, p. 70), which in the Christian sense, indicated by the exegesis of biblical texts, had to symbolize the Christ as the “rising sun” “for the enlightenment of the Gentiles”. (Luke 1.78-79, 2.3) or the “Sun of Justice” (Malachi 3.20), not the assimilation of the figure of Christ with Helios or Apollo!”
Poloczek is sure that he knows this, but does not explain where his certainty comes from. He assumes that there is already a IX who would be “assimilated” with Helios or Apollo. Potentially, V & F might answer this by saying that there is no real harm or problem with such “assimilation”. It might be blasphemy for a true believer of IX to compare him with Apollo, but not for a clerk at the Roman ministry of propaganda who uses existing imagery to create some IX. For Carotta, the deduction on the creation of Christ is that there was no IX, and that the image of Apollo, or the funeral of IC with his rise to the heavens, was used to create, first a Divus Julius cult, and secondly a IX, with use of the OT and creation of the NT.
p196: “In the Greco-Roman environment symbolism of the dolphin was associated with the figure of Neptune, and to a lesser extent with Apollo and Venus (in a clear connection with Apollo the dolphin clearly appeared in the iconography and coinage of Augustus. [ftnt]”
Well, for Titus and the Seleucids it sufficed that the anchor and dolphin had an association with Apollo, which P does not deny. Why argue that there were also plenty of associations with Poseidon / Neptune, if it suffices to accept that the dolphin was also the sacred symbol of Apollo ?
p196: “The fact of the short duration of the dolphin-anchor motif on the Flavian coins clearly suggests the reference [sic] to the commemoration of the particular event, [reference here too ?] not the general program of Flavian propaganda.”
First, while Titus ruled shortly, I have no knowledge about Roman conventions on minting coins, but I can imagine that coins with Titus were still minted alongside those of Domitian. Wikipedia: “In demanding times, (…) [coin] dies were still used even when they became very worn or even when they cracked.” Secondly, while a particular event is commemorated, i.e. that Titus became alike the god Apollo by forces from Syria and by succession of the Seleucids (and had succeeded in conquering Judea where they had failed), it does not invalidate the observation that Titus proceeded with other things. It was not stated or claimed by V & F, that the emblem was chosen to refer to a general program of propaganda. Poloczek erects a straw man and cuts it down. Kudos for Poloczek for his chopping, but it is misdirection in reviewing a book. The authors V & F hypothise such a general program, and see the use of Flavian symbolism by early Christianity as a consequence of this program. (Here I gave a formal representation of the argument, which has been put up-front.) Indeed, the V & F position is weaker, since they allow for an earlier Paul, so that another argument is required why Paul’s followers accepted the Flavian symbolism. With Carotta, at least in my take of this, there were no Christians yet, and the question does not arise.
Forget Syria, there is only Neptune
p196: “The dolphin coiled around the anchor most probably symbolized the god Neptune (not, as the Authors suppose, Apollo, cf. CC, p. 108). ”
This “probability calculus” contradicts the evidence on the Syrian origin of the symbol. Where oh where is a story about Neptune, that is related to this symbol, in a more convincing manner than that it would represent festina lente ?
p196-197: “Exactly like the dolphin on the tripod, in the case of another emission of Titus’ coins from the same period – the god Apollo, or the lightning on the throne – Jupiter. [ftnt] The coin with the anchor and dolphin motif thus belongs to a larger series of the coins from the period 79–81 (stylistically similar to each other) related to the celebrations that took place in Rome at that time, and commemorating – in a similar way – a whole group of tutelary deities, without any particular distinction of one of them.”
Observe that V & F never implicated that there were no other coins: in fact, they attest that they had been searching for 30 years amongst all the coins. Observe that Titus or the Flavians were free to use various symbols. It is useful to play into the people’s preferences for their own favourite gods. Given such other coins, at issue is why Christianity adopted the anchor & dolphin icon that Titus took from Syria. Saying that there were more Flavian icons does not answer the very question about the overlap. Poloczek is very apt at giving answers to questions that have not been posed because they were not relevant. That there were more coins in fact highlights the typical character of the overlap.
The following reconstruction is implicit in the Carotta and V & F schemes: that when the project was started, and symbolism was required, the bureaucracy chose the symbol used by Titus at that time, and stuck to this symbol, for this particular project. The objective for each coin was to target a particular audience (e.g. the worshippers of Neptune, or Mars, or Venus, or …), and the anchor & dolphin happened to be selected for the project on the East. For Neptune, the icon of the trident was used, for Jupiter a lightning bolt, and so on, and the anchor & dolphin nicely fitted this particular project on the East.
False prophet: forget Syria, no link to Judea
p197: “Contrary to the Authors’ suggestion they cannot be linked with the suppression of the Jewish uprising in any way (CC, pp. 75; 76: (…)”
Again a misrepresentation of what V & F do. Again the logic is gone. Poloczek assumes, without evidence, that the anchor & dolphin relates only to the Roman god Neptune, and he refers to coins with all kinds of Roman symbolism, and then throws out the connection with Syria, to argue that all of this only concerns Rome. This is entirely his own fabrication, which amounts to a deliberate neglect of the Syrian connection.
p197: “The campaign against Judea was commemorated by completely different, easily distinguishable types of emission of Titus and Vespasian, clearly indicating to what they refer (Iudea capta, Iudea devicta, Iudea, de Iudaeis).”
The fact that there were also other coins (V & F had to search for 30 years) does not eliminate the existence of this particular coin. The fact that there all kinds of women does not prove that there is no Kim Kardashian.
p197: “Supposed reappearance of the dolphin-anchor image on Hadrian’s coins is a mistake. The symbol occurs only on one bronze local emission from Alexandria, of a very low value (Milne 1230, obol with legend: AVT KAI TΡAI AΔΡIA CEB [ftnt]. It has never been used in any official Imperial coinage of Hadrian. [ftnts]”
The coin is here or P’s link (search on dolphin). Again, a multiplicity of others doesn’t prove the non-existence of one. The low denomination of the coin suggests that the coin is targeted at the use by the poor, who might be looking for a saviour. The suggestion by V & F is that the Flavian Propaganda Hypothesis (FPH) (Hyp0: FP > IX) still finds some corroboration in this trace of evidence on Hadrian as well. Clearly I am no expert on Numismatics (had to look for the proper word, and understand above inscription as something like “autokratos kaisar Traianus (H)adrianus sebastos” (augustus)), so I am in the dark whether the existence of the coin with the head of Hadrian would be “official” or not. This is clearly an important issue, as also DNA can be planted. Poloczek provides this link to likely fake coins of Hadrian with anchor & dolphins, but he overlooks the point that the fake minter presumed that a coin of Hadrian with an anchor & dolphin could have credibility.
p197: “Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that Christians could adopt the original political or religious content of the anchor-dolphin image.”
Again, this presumes an existing Christian community, that had a choice what symbolism to adopt. Even for V & F, who have the weaker position of an earlier Paul, this “therefor” hangs in the air. In the stronger analysis, such community was only created while that symbol was used since it existed at the time of creation. The reference to “original political or religious content of the anchor-dolphin image” has not been defined by Poloczek. What Titus intended with his choice of the image, was not what it later became to mean for the IX community.
Bunch of straw men
p197: “Neither was it a specific dynastic emblem of the Flavians that could be read as a declaration of loyalty, (…)”
No one claimed that it was such. The notion of loyalty has been inserted by Poloczek as a straw man.
p197-198: “(…) nor was it a symbol of the message directed specifically against rebellious Jews (or: against anyone), (…)”
Again a straw man. The term “symbol of the message” is vague. What Titus likely intended with his choice has been stated above (in italics). That message above was a message to all, including the zealots. The special message to the zealots was created later, when the gospels were created: and the symbol came along.
p198: “nor could the aim of such borrowing be to identify the figure of Christ with Neptune.”
Poloczek must have had fun writing this. Haha, he must have thought: V & F thought that they identified IX with Apollo, but they goofed, because they identified IX with Neptune ! This is great fun, and I must tell the world about this ! Of course, the link of the anchor & dolphin with Syria has been established above, and any possible association with Neptune is irrelevant to the argument. (But there might be a Christian sect that does precisely identify IX = Neptune, because of all the fish.)
p198: “This implies that Christians had to give to the popular image a completely different and a new meaning.”
This presumes the existence of a community of Christians who had to choose their symbol. For V & F, the Flavians themselves gave a new interpretation, and they must assume that their early Paul went along with this. It really is not hard to read the same symbol in the light of a new interpretation. (The West still has problems though with seeing the swastika as an ancient symbol, abused by nazis.) However, for the strong reading of Carotta, there were no Christians yet, and the sect was created with the symbol as its birthmark.
The symbol may have been used to create scripture, rather than rely upon scripture to accept the symbol
p198: “And they should find a biblical justification of that meaning. This justification could be provided by the Letter to the Hebrews 6.17-20, in which the anchor is allegorically understand as a symbol of hope for the soul. The meaning of the dolphin could refer to the above mentioned symbolism of God’s salvation, described by Beaulieu also in the Greco- Roman context. The biblical justification of the dolphin could also be found in the story of Jonas (the dolphin was considered to be a big fish!). The dolphin around the anchor in its Christian context therefore would not be any declaration of political loyalty, but simply the symbol of the eschatological hope of posthumous salvation, which would well explain its popularity in Christian funeral art.”
It has been said often enough that Poloczek invents an argument about a non-defined notion of loyalty. Subsequently, perhaps V & F agree that their earlier Paul might accept such a reference to scripture (perhaps by himself) for adopting the symbol. Alternatively, in the strong reading of Carotta, the existing symbol gave cause to create those texts to “explain” the symbol. Even today, dogmatic writers try to explain the symbol with their own inventions, see above on Domitilla.
Three Clemenses that might be two
p198-199: “Finally, Clement’s of Alexandria (…)”.
Here the name of Domitilla helps. Her husband was Titus Flavius Clemens, who served as consul in 95 AD and is said to have died shortly after that. It is suspected that the Church counts him as Pope Clement of Rome who is said to have died in 99 AD. Thus, the historians might have to revise some points due to the new findings. Subsequently, Clement of Alexandria is also called Titus Flavius Clemens (c 150 – 215 AD).
(….) permission to wear rings with symbolism of non-Christian origins (Clem. Paedag. 3) was not due to any particular preference for it, but for practical reasons, which he gives himself. On the one hand, it allowed to avoid breaking the old biblical taboo on human images (still persisted in the Clement’s times), and retained the possibility of using the ring functionally as a signet, used, for example, to seal documents or to confirm transactions. It is worth to note that a large part of the early Christian artifacts with the dolphin and anchor presented by the Authors had exactly this practical function (CC, pp. 43–49)! In addition, Clement expressly allowed only a very small set of symbols on the rings: only those that could be somehow reinterpreted by the biblical symbolism (dove, fish, ship, Polycrates’ lyre, associated with the instrument of David). This makes me seriously question the theory proposed by the Authors, that Clement – writing almost a century after the times of the Flavians! – could deliberately refer to the Flavian context of the dolphin-anchor symbolism, even due to his own family origin (comp. CC, p. 107: It is quite possible that Clemens assumed the dolphin-and-anchor association with his own “Flavian” ancestors).”
The argument by V & F on this point indeed is not strong, but apparently they were forced to study some Christian symbolism, and ended up in 200 AD for events in 70-100 AD. This is what it is.
Carotta’s 1999 theory of the Divus Julius origin of Christianity apparently isn’t much researched yet by historians of religion. How can this be ? I myself haven’t finished reading Carotta’s book too, but I am no professional researcher on this topic. For professionals, there can be a barrier against Carotta’s method of cryptic decoding: but that doesn’t seem to be a valid excuse, since cryptic crossword puzzles are an accepted way to play around with language.
A concilium of 70 scholars ?
Perhaps it might be a suggestion to follow Ptolemy or the Council of Nicaea, and collect 70 scholars to review Carotta’s work ? When a scholar is trained in Carotta’s method, perhaps he or she discovers an own gem in the transformation of Divus Julius into Jesus Christ.
There was a Divus Julius cult
At least the Divus Julius cult is accepted by the Oxford Reference in terms of an “Imperial Cult“:
“Worship of the Roman Emperor as a god. [Thus in general manner and not only Julius Caesar.] During his lifetime, in 44 bc Julius Caesar allowed a statue of himself to be erected with the inscription Deo Invicto (to the unconquered god) and declared himself dictator for life. His nephew and adopted son, Augustus (ruled 30 bc–ad 14), constructed a temple in Rome which he dedicated to Divus Julius (the divine Julius) and titled himself Divi filius (son of a god). Augustus and Tiberius each allowed a single temple to be dedicated to them during their lifetimes, the former in Pergamon and the latter in Zmyrna. Subsequent emperors gradually increased the influence of the Imperial Cult so that, after Hadrian (ruled ad 117–38), their power had become so absolute and so consolidated that the cult was effectively a civil religion and a test of loyalty. It was abolished by Constantine I (ruled ad 306–37), who adopted Christianity as the official religion.”
PM. The title Divus Julius was given in 42 BC, i.e. two years before his death in 44 BC. For the use of terms in this weblog entry, notably on the notion of “son of (a) god”, see here.
The fast rise of Christianity is remarkable
Joseph Bryant (1988), in a book review “Christians and the Roman Empire, by Marta Sordi“, covers the core of Carotta’s problem: “Few subjects hold greater interest than the extraordinary rise of Christianity from its sectarian beginnings within Judaism to its status as the official religion of the Roman Empire. (…) the actual logistics of ascendency of the Christian movement continue to present a range of problems for both historian and sociologist alike.”
Bryant suggests that the Roman way of life was polytheistic, with a pax deorum, so that there would be common resistance against monotheism. Such resistance should not be overrated though. A nation with 10 gods might have 10 sub-peoples each having 1 god, rather than all the people sacrificing to all the gods. Christianity still has Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Virgin Mother Mary, and a pantheon of Saints, angels – and, oh yeah, there might be The Devil: it is rather silly to call this monotheism, and it is rather mono-church-bureaucracy – till the split into East and West, Coptic church, Henry VIII, and the Reformation. Christians might say that Jove was a false god, but they also incorporated such gods as saints, compare Virgin Mary with Venus and Diana. (PM. See the King James Purple Letter Edition for an effort to distinguish deities in different forms in the NT. )
Rome managed religion
Important for us is that Bryant recognises: “Romans regarded religion as the very foundation of their state, with religious concerns and political interests inextricably interwoven.” This supports the notion that the Divus Julius cult came with some management. He concludes: “In short, any analysis which fails to appreciate the distinct civic-based religiosity of the pagans can hardly do justice to the complicated story of how, in Gibbon’s words, the Christians “finally erected the triumphant banner of the Cross on the ruins of the Capitol”.” Thus a feature in this whole should be a proper account of the Divus Julius cult and how it turned into Christianity.
Academic resistance to the cryptic crossword puzzle
Carotta, see the former weblog entry, introduced what may be called the “cryptic crosswordstyle of text editing for the gospels“. This approach in text analysis can look at changes at the level of letters, compare the saying: Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi.
Perhaps academic researchers dislike its “simplicity”, or even “vulgarity” (folksy way). For clarity, let us use IX = Jesus Christ, and IC = Julius Caesar, to make it easier to link up to their original names. Thus we do not have IX = IC by merely looking at the letters.
Common research allows for traditional theological “methods” like the midrash (exegesis) with complicated double-entendres. For example, the Old Testament (OT) has Zech. 9:9 about the Coming King of Zion riding a colt, the foal of a donkey. The story of Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey can and could be understood by learned Jews as the fulfilment of this OT prophecy. It can also be enjoyed by Bible researchers as that a notion in the New Testament (NT) has actually been copied from the Old Testament (OT). The NT can be seen as a summary of the OT, and as a discarding of it, as prophecies have been fulfilled. Common research also allows for translation issues between Greek, Latin, Aramaic.
Common research does not know and does not accept the deliberate cryptic transformation as Carotta presents, like when he turns Caesar’s supporter Gaius Asinius Pollio into this ass or donkey merely because Asinius sounds like Latin asinus for ass, donkey – while it actually indeed is derived from it. (It is not uncommon to be called after a donkey, e.g. the Dutch (indeed quite confused) politician Thierry Baudet is of French descent, and Baudet is French for a male donkey.) This cryptic puzzle method, e.g. on Asinius, flies in the face of sophisticated Biblical Studies.
Such researchers perhaps rather prefer a mythicist explanation, e.g. that the ox and ass in the (created much later) Nativity scene stand for Babylon (bull, Marduk) and Egypt (ass, Seth), an iconography that would not be unknown to the writers of Zechariah. (Search Acharya S on donkey. The reference there to the Roman deity Pales, apparently from Etruscan, need not be related to the Palatine Hill, and it need neither be linked to Palestine which would be derived from the Philistines: such would be an error or deliberate cryptic link. But it is not known whether the Romans knew this. Apparently the word Palaistinê was already used in the 5th century BC, see the timeline. For some Romans, Palestine might be seen as the region of the donkey worshippers, see onolatry.)
Yet the cryptic method might actually be the true fashion how the Gospels have been created, that is, if the original editors had that frame of mind. Some evidence would be in the high rate of success in explanation. A weakness is that almost anything can be achieved once we allow for this method of cryptic transformation. But the question is: is it a weakness, when it can explain the creation of a world religion ? I dislike this cryptic method too, but nothing succeeds like success.
And we should allow for the possibility that the creator of Mark would have to look for a spot to refer to Gaius Asinius Pollio anyway. The entry in Jerusalem was perfect, since it fitted a midrash on Zech. 9:9 as well. It is not the one or the other. (Alternatively, there are asses in all texts, with much freedom of choice.)
Let us first consider an example of a cryptic crossword puzzle. Let us then look at the example of baptism that uses the cryptic puzzle method with some success. Let us then consider some criticism on Carotta.
An example of a cryptic crossword puzzle
Please observe that a tragedy is a type of play – with key example Oedipus – such that the audience can see it coming that the hero meets a dismal fate, but the hero himself or herself isn’t aware of this till it is too late. Wikipedia (no source but a portal) has the following example of a cryptic puzzle by “Shed” (Guardian, 2002-08-06). I mostly copy the explanation from wikipedia:
15D Very sad unfinished story about rising smoke (8 letters)
15D indicates the location and direction (down) of the solution in the grid. One solution is “tragical”:
“Very sad” is a possible meaning of “tragical”. (This doesn’t hold by necessity.)
“unfinished story” gives “tal” (“tale” with one letter missing; i.e., unfinished)
“rising smoke” gives “ragic” (“cigar” associates with smoke, and when a word is written downwards then “rising” means that “cigar” is read backwards)
“about” means that the letters of “tal” should be put on either side of “ragic”.
This cryptic way of thinking is unnatural to me. I am trained to look for proper cause and effect. However, this cryptic method appears to be a way of creating and solving puzzles that appeals to many readers (at least of The Guardian). Apparently it tests one’s knowledge of words, and generates some joys of discovery and competence (in solving cryptic puzzles).
Setting in Egypt and Alexandria
In antiquity, Egypt had annual passion plays for Osiris, who was murdered by Seth and rose again. The Greek had theatre plays. These two traditions joined in Alexandria. There was a pool of playwrights who had some challenge of entertaining a crowd with plays. They tended to solve this, like nowadays in Hollywood, with a plain spectacle for mundane enjoyment e.g. for children, and with the elicitation of double-entendres (midrash) for the more educated who would be bored by plainness. Thus, we can assume a pool of writers who can do all of this theological editing, and a tradition of doing so.
With Julius Caesar (Divus Julius) and his adopted son Octavianus, later emperor Augustus (Divi Filius), there is a model for “the son of god”. This fits the Egyptian model of Osiris and his son Horus. The Ptolemaic construction of Serapis (syncretic Osiris – Apis) came with the less impressive male child Harpokrates. Some researchers claim that a Jewish messiah who would present himself as “son of Yahweh” would be quite problematic to traditional Jews, and that any such effort to “appease the Jews” would be a mission impossible. However, here is an overview of statements in the OT and NT about the “son of God”, or for Jesus being the son of his Father in Heaven. For the OT: “The term “son of God” is rarely used in the sense of “messiah, or anointed one” in the Jewish scriptures. Psalm 2 refers to God’s appointed king of Zion as both God’s messiah (an anointed king) and like a son of God.” The notion of “son of God” is not wholly unknown in Judaism, but a highly specific one. Psalm 2:7 has: ““I will announce,” says the king, “what the Lord has declared. He said to me: ‘You are my son; today I have become your father.””
Carotta calls attention to the iconography of the lion (Marcus Antonius, evangelist Mark) and eagle (Augustus, evangelist John / Ioannus) with the suggestion that iuvenis (young) → Ioannus. In 70 AD, one group of text editors could have concentrated on the book by Gaius Asinius Pollio, written under the protection of Mark Antony, and another group could have worked with the sources that included Augustus. That Pollio’s book is no longer available might also reflect that there were only few copies left in 70 AD, as Augustus (Divi Filius) eventually found himself more important than Divus Julius.
(Another hypothesis for the creation of the gospels is that when in 39 AD Philo had his interview with Caligula, who wanted a statue of the Roman emperor in the Temple in Jerusalem – in line with either the Divus Julius cult or the Imperial cult – that Philo anticipated a military conflict, and, in this hypothesis, decided to adapt Roman religion towards the worship of his own concoction of Yahweh and a Platonic tekton … and Philo had his playwright contacts in Alexandria.)
(The claim of being Yahweh would be silly, but “son of Yahweh might be considered. Carotta: “Paul-Louis Couchoud brought attention to the fact that the very assumption that a person presented himself as Jahweh within a Jewish milieu and was worshipped as such, not after many generations, but—as rational criticism itself has demonstrated—only a few years after his disgraceful death, means ‘knowing nothing about a Jew, or forgetting everything’. Jesus would be the only Jew that the Jews have ever worshipped in almost thirty centuries of religious history.[311] A resonance of Couchoud’s critique of the critical school is also found in Jesus, Son of Man by Rudolf Augstein. Like Loisy, he grants Jesus a faded remnant of an historical existence, but adds with Couchoud: ‘We can almost completely reject the notion that any Jew at this time in Galilee or Judea would have thought himself exclusively to be the Son of God or that he would have passed himself off as such, unless he had gone mad.’[312] This would mean that either Jesus did not exist or that he was not a Jew.” But Psalm 2 has a “son of god”.)
The issue of circumcision
Judaism has circumcision, baptism in blood, which abhorred Romans (and me).
If one holds that Judaism was first, and that Christianity developed from there, then we must say: “Christians replaced circumcision with baptism”. This assumes that there was a movement within Judaism that was strong enough to withstand the dominating and holy convention of circumcision.
It makes more sense however that the Romans already had their baptism ritual, also in the Divus Julius cult. Jews who joined up relinquished their own bloody ritual. (This is not “replace”.)
Another great divide: Carotta mentions that the Romans (after Caesar) used codices, books with sheets, while Judaism used scrolls, and that there are no (surviving) Christian texts on scrolls.
Let us consider Carotta on baptism.
Carotta on baptism
The Roman word lustratiorefers to a ritual for babies (girls 8 days, boys 9 days), and also to the purification of objects and buildings, even cities, crops, new colonies, all Roman armies going into battle. See also lustrum. The lustratio deters some evil spirits. There need not be the theological notion of resolving sins. The latter may be a peculiar interpretation of some religions.
Subsequently, organisations may have an initiation ritual, a.k.a. hazing, deposition or baptism.
It might suffice that Christian baptism comes from the Roman lustratio of babies, but Carotta suggests that the link is stronger from a military origin, i.e. from the Roman recruiting of soldiers. Recruits were properly inspected and washed. Going into battle, their weapons got the blessings from the gods – or from Divus Julius.
The corresponding Greek word for lustratio would be κάθαρσις, not necessarily applied to babies. The metaphor catharsis is used for the spiritual cleansing that the audience in a theatre can experience, when the hero or villain meets his or her fate.
William Smith in “A School-dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities: Abridged from the Larger Dictionary“ (1845) clearly states: “Lustratio (κάθαρσις), was originally a purification by ablution in water.” For lustrum, Smith gives the original luo, Greek λούω, (1) to wash, bathe, (2) to purify, cleanse, (3) (middle) to bathe oneself, take a bath. Compare Greek λύω, with some 11 meanings, from loosen to discharge.
Carotta now focuses on the “washing”, and relates this to (wikitionary): βαπτίζω (baptízō, “to dip, plunge, draw wine”), from βάπτω (báptō, “to dip, dye, imbue”)”. When doing the dishes, merely dipping the plates into the water does not wash them. We are dealing with magic here, metaphors, theological issues. One might criticise Carotta that he selects a particular association from the various meanings indicated above. However, when solving a cryptic crossword puzzle, the very idea is selection. There may be more solutions but there would be one that suits the objective of the puzzle creator or playwright (which objective is presumed here).
PM 1. There are some distracting references. The Oxford Classical Dictionary relates lustratio with lustrare “to move around something”, for example wave your hand three times around something like a magician might do. Wikionary relates it also to polishing and making bright, illumination, or a military examination. The Dutch word “lus” means a loop, potentially related to lasso. It seems however that the gesture of moving itself was not sufficient, but that something was moved, i.e. a maginal object, or some water or wine droplets. Thus, the cleaning with water was the basic notion, and the waving around was only suggestive of the washing procedure.
PM 2. Apparently, the purification ritual could be done with animal blood, with young animals having pure blood, with priests looking for lambs (or recently young boys), see Hitch & Rutherford on “Animal sacrifice in the Ancient Greek World” (CUP 2017). They comment (p132): “We could say that the most interesting and exciting aspect of studies on ancient Greek religion is precisely its polysemy [multiple possible meanings].” These authors seem to like puzzles while we would like to see a solution, at least on Jesus. (And “solution” relates to λύω, loosen, untie, PIE *se-lu-, (ab-) solve, like by stirring the water to dissolve something.)
The solution on baptism extended or tested
Once this hypothesis for the origin of baptism in Christianity has been developed, see how it might explain more. According to the Bible the (beheaded) head of John the Baptist was presented to Herod, the caesar of Judea, and adopted grandson of Julius. Historically, Pompey’s head was presented to Julius Caesar. It is child’s play to take Pompey as the model for John. Both Caesar and Pompey had been baptizing, i.e. recruiting soldiers.
Caesar marched towards the Rubicon, taking his troops along, potentially for a victory parade in Rome, but potentially also since he did not trust the senators in Rome. Pompeius in Rome started recruiting soldiers for defence. This only proved to IC that he was not trusted in Rome. Metellus (Scipio), father-in-law of Pompey, demanded that Caesar would lay down his arms and dismiss his soldiers.
Plutarch, Life of Caesar, 30:4, the English translation from the Greek:
“But in the senate, Scipio, the father-in‑law of Pompey, introduced a motion that if by a fixed day Caesar did not lay down his arms he should be declared a public enemy.”
Let us pose the puzzle: If recruiting soldiers is depicted as baptism, and if Pompey is used to create a passion play figure of John, then how can the passage on dismissal of arms be transfigured into some theological phenomenon related to baptism, using words of different languages that somewhat sound the same, or playing with some letters ?
Carotta suggests this parallel:
Mark 1:4 (King James Version): “And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”
According to Carotta, the Latin translation of Plutarch has this phrase (Carotta suggests that Mark’s original was in Latin, but we will mostly look at the Greek version here):
“(…) a Caesare postulabat Metellus dimissionem armorum (…)”
Carotta suggests that above phrase might become, in cryptic crossword fashion, the Greek:
Carotta suggests these steps in solving this cryptic word puzzle:
1. The Greek dismissal of sins (ἁμαρτιῶν) would rather be Latin dismissal of weapons (armorum).
2. Metellus would associate with metanoias, ‘of repentance’. (Not very strong, only equal “met“.)
3. baptisma sounds like postulabat, ‘demand’: and demanding is like kêryssôn, ‘preaching’, while the latter word has letters from “Caesar” (Kaisar, Latin doesn’t have a k).
4. Roma → ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ (in the wildernis). Carotta observes that after the start of the civil war, IC came to Rome five times, and that Mark rewrites more often to the desert than John who rewrites to Jerusalem.
Let me throw my own crypto coins in the basket in order to strengthen this association:
5. Instead of 2 above: repent, Latin poenitire, see penitentiary, and Greek πενθερὸς, father-in-law. Thus, pentheros sounds like poenitire, from there is the relation to metanoias “regret for sins, crimes, or omissions”, and sins would be something relating to a cleansing process, especially for a god that can forgive your sins.
6. Strengthening 5: the combination Πομπηΐουπενθερὸς ~ βάπτισμα μετανοίας
7. There is also the possibility of ἂνἐνἡμέρᾳῥητῇ associating in letters with ἁμαρτιῶν. This still leaves the option of the additional midrash on armorum.
It is not beautiful. This approach assumes the hypothesis that there is a playwright (or even a group of them !) with a convoluted mind who likes cryptic associations. A patron might have given the instruction to make a forgery (syncretism) by all means. This cryptic puzzle approach succeeds in transferring the civil war between Caesar and Pompey towards Judea. There is some consistency in associating baptism with recruiting soldiers. Linguist and decoder Carotta apparently likes to untangle these cryptic knots. The only fun is that the code has been cracked, but it doesn’t come with catharsis in the sense of “academic fulfilment of all effort at study”. (Imagine going to university, and study ancient history and languages, and then end up in having to solve crossword puzzles.)
A system in the madness
This decoding suggests that the gospels of Mark, Matthew and John would be written at somewhat the same time, and with some communication. Mark for the plain soldier, the most involved ones in the Divus Julius cult. Matthew to entice the Hellenised Jews, John perhaps also to entice the Mithras cult of light and darkness. Matthew and John took up issues in the Vita Caesaris that simple Mark did not develop. Luke could be a later development for the educated Roman civis, the more sophisticated gentiles with questions about church development. This is only an impression. Conventionally, John is seen as the latest, but the criteria for ordering are shifting now. It will be tedious work to compare the Vita Caesaris and the gospels: what Carotta claims to have done requires evaluation by others too – that is, for those who have the interest to do so, and, that is, if it still would have any other relevance than guessing at what some group of cryptic puzzle makers (likely in Alexandria) have been inventing. If someone isn’t convinced yet that above cryptic puzzle method works, how many more examples would be needed to get it accepted ? And if you accept it, why repeating the proof ?
(PM. The following is a new angle for me. Wikipedia reports: “According to Zosimus, the pagan historian of late antiquity, after Constantine the Great had his son Crispus and his own wife Fausta killed, he approached priests of the old religion, and finding that they were unwilling to offer him lustration for these deeds, went over to the Christian religion after theirs offered him absolution.” Whether this is true or not (some historians state that we will never know the truth of this matter), the deaths did happen. It reminds of Henry VIII, who wasn’t allowed to divorce his wife, and started his own Anglican Church. Note though that Crispus died in 326 and the first council of Nicaea was in 325.)
Criticism on Carotta
A weblog (AP), named after emperor Antoninus Pius, by an unknown author, had an exchange on Carotta’s ideas that apparently resulted into disappointment on both sides. AP 2012-91-28 “Three strikes, and Carotta is out!” Apparently the communication by AP had been with the moderators of the Divus Julius weblog.
AP objects to Carotta’s method: “And Signor Carotta believes that he has proved this by twisting the names and the events of the Gospels until they supposedly resemble features from the latter part of Caesar’s life.”
Well, indeed, this is the method of solving a “cryptic crossword puzzle“.
A critic will not deny that cryptic puzzles are solved in this manner, daily.
A critic will be hard pressed to prove that the New Testament would not be a cryptic puzzle.
What counts are the results, see the former weblog entry, and see the above on baptism.
One cannot demand from Carotta full proof, e.g. an account by reliable witnesses, perhaps a secret order of notaries existing over two millennia, that some playwrights concocted these stories that, with support by the Roman emperors, resulted into Christianity. It suffices that Carotta provides a relevant hypothesis that promises relevant research. (While J.P. Meier said “Relevance is the enemy of history”, I use the term “relevance” here in terms of history writing, with the proviso that historians have first been trained in science and its methods.)
It is a pity that Carotta isn’t perfect and makes errors.
When Carotta expresses that his interest was triggered by a bust in the Torlonia Museum that perhaps might be attributed to Caesar, AP explains that Carotta is basically speculating about this bust. Both may be true. Carotta likely has been motivated by those speculations. As a critical reader I noticed the “might” and the lack of references, and recognised the hypothetical nature of his conjecture. AP correctly identifies uncertainties, but they do not invalidate Carotta’s conjecture. It would have been stronger when Carotta had identified the uncertainties himself, rather than focusing on his conjecture, but this might be the weakness of an author who explains where his inspiration came from. I did not have the same inspiration, and found the discussion somewhat distracting, but accepted the author’s time on this.
While Carotta refers to Decimus Junius Brutus, AP points out that the actual “son” and murderer of Julius Caesar is Marcus Junius Brutus. The wikipedia article mentions that they are often confused, and perhaps Carotta used such a confused source. Carotta’s confusion does not invalidate his decryption of Junius → Iounas → Judas. (Latin Lucius → Greek Lukas. Modern singer Giorgos Dalaras writes his name as Ntalaras.) Carotta mentions that changing Greek N → Δ requires only the change of the upstroke into a backstroke, thus IOUNAΣ → IOUΔAΣ. The name of Brutus’s brother-in-law Gaius Cassius Longinus, and fellow assassin, might have survived in “Christian writings” (stories produced by the Roman bureaucracy), see here.
Being a linguist, Carotta might stretch the relevance of historical changes in names. Undeniably, for cities we have e.g. Ultraiectum → Utrecht, and Caesaraugusta → Zaragoza. While Carotta suggests that archiereus megistos → christos, I have my doubts. The linguistic environment for city names may be more flexible than the linguistic environment for liturgy. Priests are trained to perform rituals in a precise manner. Written texts in the Divus Julius cult over 100 years (later destroyed by the church) could have maintained proper Latin and Greek up to the Flavian reconstruction. The pronunciation of city names over 2000 years was subject to many forces. Still, when rewriting texts in cryptic fashion, an editor might take advantage from how words already have been evolving in popular usage.
Not necessarily a criticism: at one point Carotta apparently has been tempted to suggest that chrestos (useful, good, worthy) →christos, but at another point he more correctly decodes chrestes (usurer) → (also used by Romans as chrestos or chrestiani). The decoding is supported by that Nero applied punishment in kind (lex talionis), i.e. that people accused of burning the city were burned and others (chrestiani, usurers, Carotta suggests also speculators) torn to pieces by dogs. See here for Carotta and the quote by Tacitus. (I wrote on this issue before, with a similar implication that there is no proof for Jesus Christ, see here.)
χρήστ-ης (written χρείστης SIG364.40 (Ephes., iii B. C.)), ου, ὁ: gen. pl. χρήστων (not χρηστῶν, to distinguish it from the gen. pl. of χρηστός, Hdn.Gr.1.425): (χράω (B) A):—one who gives or expounds oracles, prophet, soothsayer, Hsch., prob. in Milet.7p.50 (Didyma, i B. C.).
II. (κίχρημι) creditor, usurer, Ps.-Phoc.83, Ar.Nu.240, 434 (anap.), Lys.32.29, Lycurg.22, etc.
2 . (χράομαι, κίχραμαι) debtor, Phoc.16, D.30.12, 32.12, IPE12.32B84 (Olbia, iii B. C.), cf. Harp. s. v.: c. gen., κακοῦ ἀνδρός Phoc. l.c.; χρημάτων D.36.6.
PM. Here is a curious discussion in 2008 between Carrier and Carotta on the issue. Not all of Carrier’s arguments are to the point and one starts suspecting that his main concern is to maintain his academic credentials and avoid an association with the cryptic crossword puzzle method.
PM. There is some mockery by Damien F. Mackey, here, with Virgil’s Aeneid taking from the Torah (but the Torah might take from Homer), and supposedly Roman emperors taking elements from Christ.
PM. Wikipedia: In pre-Christian times, the Chi-Rho symbol χρ or ☧ was also used to mark a particularly valuable or relevant passage in the margin of a page, abbreviating chrēston (good). Some coins of Ptolemy III Euergetes (r. 246–222 BC) were marked with a Chi-Rho.
PM. The Greek χριω (chrio), to anoint, does not need to mean the anointment for kingship, it may also be for wrestling. Romans have the verb inunguere(that gave the word anoint), but it is unclear to me whether it was used for blessing of officials (Rome was a republic). S.E. Thompson 1991 / 1994 sees no evidence of anointing for offices in Egypt. Apparently Babylonian astrology did some anointment, perhaps a custom adopted by the astrologer-priests in Jerusalem. Discussion of anointment of Cyrus is dominated by researchers who quote Isaiah. One is hard put to think that anointment of kings is a Hebrew thing. (There are self-anointing animals, with a disturbing photograph of a hedgehog doing so.)
Criticism on Carotta on Capitol → Golgotha
AP criticises how Carotta transforms Julius Caesar’s funeral with a pyre into the crucifixion scene on Golgotha. The criticism boils down to the rejection of the method of solving cryptic crossword puzzles. Carotta suggests that myrrh is coded from pyre. Well, with puzzles, it might be.
Of the many surprises in Carotta’s book, it was one, see here, that Capitol or Roman Capitolium would derive from the head (caput) of an Etruscan king Olus (Aulus) (Vulcentanus). Apparently, the issue hasn’t got much attention from wikipedians since 1999. We find Aulus in the German Wikipedia but not in the English one. NB. Latin caput means head, while English skull is Latin calvaria. In Greek, the head is κεφᾰλή, and skull is κρανίον (Latinized cranium).
It took some digging, but in Livius 1.55.5 there is mention that the temple on the capitoline hill, was blessed with some firmness and steadfastness: “When this auspice of permanence had been received, there followed another prodigy foretelling the grandeur of their empire. A human head, its features intact, was found, so it is said, by the men who were digging for the foundations of the temple.”
The English Wikipedia has an entry on Serenus Sammonicus, with a reference to Arnobius, with this footnote: “Arnobius repeats the derivation of the placename Capitolium from an ancient tomb there of one Olus Vulcentanus, of whom the head was recovered, as Caput Oli (noted by Champlin 1981:193, who remarks, p. 194, “One other characteristic distinguishes Serenus Sammonicus: he is exceptionally silly.”).” The latter qualification is on Serenus and not on Arnobius.
Then Mark 15:22 KJV: And they bring him unto the place Golgotha, which is, being interpreted, The place of a skull.
A key issue is that ferousin = carry rather than lead. (E.g. Christopher is carrier of Christ.) Carotta calls attention to the point that Julius Caesar is already dead, and thus his body had to be carried. On the other hand, Christ is supposed to be still alive, for must die on the cross (at least in later versions of Christianity), and thus might have been led there (with Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross for him).
Secondly, Mark changes head into skull. As Caesar was carried, and already dead, then skull might seem to be more appropriate, in cryptic fashion, to indicate death. (Alternatives: Potentially Mark did not care, or potentially he wanted to distract us. Or he hadn’t read Livius, and merely knew a reference to a head that had been found, and he might have presumed that this would have been a skull. Alternatively, for Mark, text editing is rocket science, and all this requires fine-tuning. He might have read Livius and then have considered that “The place of a head” would be too much of a give-away.)
Thirdly, the place had a name, and the name Capitol cannot be used. Aramaic for skull is gulgulta, which becomes Greek Golgotha. (This is not the other way around, since, apparently, there are no independent references to Golgotha before Christian times.) Now, is Golgotha (skull) the name or is “Kraniou topos” the name ? Mark writes: “Golgothan topon”. The KJV uses a first capital T in “The place of a skull”.
For a midrash between Caesar and Christ, it suffices that kraniou topos associates with Capitolium, i.e. a place of a skull versus a place of a head. The name of Olus has no role here. It suffices that the scene is relocated from Rome to some place where Greeks transform Aramaic. The midrash is somewhat sloppy, since it allows a “grand gesture” to generate the transformation.
Carotta invites criticism by trying to reconstruct a manipulation at the level of letters: (1) Capi → Kraniou; (2) tolium → τολίον → τοπον, in capitals ΤΟΛΙΟΝ → ΤΟΠΟΝ, again a single different stroke, turning the downstroke in Λ into the horizontal stroke for Π. Carotta diligently informs us that the Greek language doesn’t allow words to end with a t, so the break must be made at Capi. Since Capitolium is the proper name, the expression “Kraniou topos” must be the proper name of the place too. The KJV properly has a capital T. The cryptic puzzling mind requires some transformation from one name to the other.
I don’t think that all this is needed. My impression is that (the group of editors) Mark knew that Capitolium had an origin in “the place of a head / skull”, and that he merely wanted to enhance the “couleur locale” by providing Golgotha. There is some convention to record the place of death. But this is merely my approach. It is remarkable though that the KJV recogised the use of a name. Mark might well have had a cryptic puzzle approach, and then Carotta seems to have reconstructed it.
Mark might have been motivated by the notion that he shouldn’t really lie in a document that pertains to a god, and that he had to take little white lie steps that retrace to the origin.
Then Luke 23:33 KJV: “And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left.”
This might be improved Greek, suitable for the Roman civilian not stationed at a Roman military camp, but: (1) the carrying is gone, (2) the name has become “Skull” and not “the place of the skull”. Thus Luke does no longer allow for the more direct cryptic reconstruction of the original report. A midrash from Skull to Capitol and that Caesar actually was already dead remains, but requires more knowledge outside of the text itself. One must know from other sources (e.g. Mark) that it is not true that the place is called Calvary, for the place would be called “place of the skull”, and one must know that skull refers to the fact that the true person was already dead, so that the better name was “place of the head”. Etcetera. Well, imagine what would happen to a cryptic crossword, if it would be rephrased by someone with little respect or awareness of the constructions ? A Lukean version of “Very sad unfinished story about rising smoke (8 letters)” might become “Very saddening draft text about a whirl of dust (8 letters)”.
Another issue: Both Mark and Luke use the word σταυροῦσιν or ἐσταύρωσαν, which derives from σταυρός, ὁ, upright pale or stake, which better associates with Caesar’s Tropaeum(according to Suetonius there was one “with the clothing in which he had been killed”) rather than the cross of later Christian writers (perhaps influenced by Josephus’s story about saving a friend from the cross). Since the crucifixion is so crucial for the Christian church, namely the abstraction of human sacrifice to redeem Adam & Eve’s Original Sin, this obviously is a core issue. I find Carotta’s reconstruction of Caesar’s funeral and the transfer to the Gospel of Mark quite convincing. The film by Jan van Friesland about actual rituals, that exist apart from official church texts, provides other important evidence.
Criticism on Carotta on many other issues
AP, mentioned above, criticises many other points. Well, any time when Carotta applies the cryptic puzzle method, one can criticise its application. Anyone is free to invent decodings till one is satisfied.
How Gallia → Galilea ? There are independent sources for the existence of Gallia and Galilea (“The District”). There might be a cryptic transfer that hasn’t been discovered yet – or there might not be. What with “Alea iacta est” ? Plutarch claims that Caesar spoke Greek and said: Ἀνερρίφθω κύβος, Let a die be cast.
Mark 1:16 KJV: Now as he walked by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew his brother casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers.
For Carotta, the cryptic decoding generates: (1) Something is cast close to water or into the water, either a die or a net, (2) Alea → ἁλιεῖς (fishers). (3) Caesar had his Legio III Gallica → Galli Legio → Γαλιλαίας. (4) it is possible to associate Peter with Mark Antony and Andrew to Curio. In the civil war, Mark Antony switched sides some times, like Peter denying that he was a follower of IX. In our times we would say that he was a turncoat. Carotta suggests the cryptic trick that Antonius reversed → Suinotna → Sumotna → ΣΥΜΟΤΝΑ → ΣΥΜΩΝΑ → Simona. For the latter, Curio → Curia → co-uiria ~ (meeting of men) ~ co-viri and then VIR → Andras → Andreas, and co → brother. Carotta suggests that the reversal of Anthony relates to the phenomenon that text could be written in both directions. My suggestion is that it rather reflects Anthony’s opposition to Octavian, and perhaps his switching of sides. When IC had been murdered, Mark Antony protested that Octavian called himself Divi Filius, or perhaps even Divus Filius, since divinity granted by the senate was no hereditary title. In 43 BC Mark Antony agreed to participate with Octavian in the 2nd triumvirate. Subsequently he annoyed Octavian again, who then had him, Cleopatra and Caesar’s actual son killed. It takes a while to get used to this cryptology, but it appears that one can get used to it. One wonders whether there might be particular rules though. And everyone is warned that if you ever do something displeasing, then a cryptographer might write your name backwards.
(It might be a suggestion that Wikipedia inserts a paragraph for people in antiquity how they link up in cryptic fashion to the Gospel of Mark. But there might be too many cryptic possibilities, and there ought to be some rules.)
PM. Observe that the “cryptic midrash” on alea is so strong, that it puts a stamp of fishermen upon the gospel, rather than Pharisees, soldiers, farmers, carpenters, smiths, traders, and so on. If Peter and Andrew in the remainder of the gospel have little characteristics of fishermen, then this might be explained by that they only happened to be fishing this particular day.
PM. Caesar is said to have crossed the Rubicon around January 10. Greek orthodox priests on “epiphany” (the rising light) on January 6, still cast something into the sea (conventionally a cross rather than a die). Obviously such a custom, of verifying and celebrating that the Winter solstice really had happened, has existed long before the crossing of the Rubicon.
Testing of hypotheses
There is a plethora of issues. Potentially, we are at the phase, when hypotheses must be developed, and then tested, to see whether this approach indeed proves aspects. For example, in what way, specifically, does the cryptic transformation differ from the commonly accepted methods of exegesis ? Might there be other works of literature or plain texts that have been transferred like this, over time: and might there be a development in this ?
There are also other types of questions. What might be required, to invite historians to take notice and look into the matter ? And what to do with the 2.2 billions of registered Christians who discover that their minds have been abused as if they were little boys ? It would be somewhat improper when the beautiful buildings and properties collected by the church over the millennia would fall in the hands of the very few remaining “believers”, when billions of apostates vote with their feet.
Nazareth
Remarkably, Carotta suggests a cryptic solution of the existence of Nazareth in the gospel of Mark. It might be derived from IC’s stay in Ravenna > RVN > NVR > na-ve-ra > na-ze-ra, according to Carotta, and my insertion that Hebrew doesn’t used vowels. Earlier, I referred to René Salm, stating myself: “The bone of contention is that Nazareth may not have a community around 30 AD but became a community only after 70 AD, starting with fugitives from destroyed Jerusalem. Thus it would be historical nonsense that the Gospels allocate Jesus to Nazareth.” My hypothesis is that, if Mark was based upon Asinius Pollio’s Vita Caesaris, that Mark potentially had a different attribution, and that Nazareth was introduced as an interpolation from another source, e.g. a midrash on the Judaic phenomenon of a nazir (type of preacher) or the nezer(crown of the high priest).
Potential inconsistencies
It might be an inconsistency that Caesar occurs in Mark, while Mark would be the transmuted Vita Caesaris. Mark 12:17: “Then Jesus told them, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” And they marveled at Him.” Obviously a text editor can handle this kind of issue.
Note the following. Carotta states that Caesar himself chose divus above deus, with a difference between an original god and a human becoming god. Caesar’s family claimed descent from Venus, like all Romans who claimed to descend from Aeneas. Caesar never claimed to be the son of Jupiter. For him, it sufficed to be Divus rather than Rex. It is only Octavian who made the “son”-part a formal issue, with the title “Divi Filius”. Apparently this generated the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that evidently is inconsistent, except that people are trained to neglect the inconsistency. There already was a sound Egyptian trinity in Horus (morning), Ra (afternoon) and Atum (evening), making a full day, which gives consistency.
This might be an inconsistency though: (1) IC becoming Divus Julius is supposed to be model for IX. (2) IX would be the “son of god” (like Horus). (3) Thus IX would be the “son of IC”. (4) The latter is like Octavian, who was the adopted son of IC, and who indeed calls himself “Divi Filius”. (5) Ergo, IX = Octavian, and not IX = IC. So, modeling IX’s life after IC is an error of composition. The gospel of Mark should have been modelled after Octavian, i.e. emperor Augustus.
We may try to resolve the latter inconsistency by looking deeper into the “son of God” issue.
The son of God
Recall the above on Psalm 2. The anointment (Christ) could potentially be for kingship, or for becoming a high priest of Jerusalem, and thus eradicate Judaism, and not for being or having become the son of God.
For this, Daniel 7:13-14 about the Son of Man is important: “13 During this vision in the night, I saw what looked like a human being. He was approaching me, surrounded by clouds, and he went to the one who had been living forever and was presented to him. 14 He was given authority, honor, and royal power, so that the people of all nations, races, and languages would serve him. His authority would last forever, and his kingdom would never end.”
The messiah’s role is for a kingship, not being the son of God, though the latter follows eventually, according to Psalm 2. Thus, while IC rejected being Rex and accepted being Divus Julius, and while his life was transferred to Judea, the Jews there wanted a messiah for a kingship, at first with a rejection of a godlike status. This is an inversion, and no inconsistency yet.
In some remaining copies of Mark, IX does not claim to be the son of God. There is no inconsistency as if IX = Augustus. If the other gospels hadn’t existed, then we might have had a form of Christianity in which IX would have been a godlike IC, son of a holy Virgin Mary, but not the son of God. IX might be like a godlike prophet, perhaps like Mohammed for Allah. However, said inconsistency has been created by Matthew, John and Luke. Perhaps Mark in 70 AD focused upon his copy of the Vita Caesaris, while the other evangelists were open to what Augustus had done by becoming Divi Filius.
Mark 1:1 KJV: The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God;
Mark 1:1 LEB: The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.[a = Some manuscripts add “the Son of God”]
There are manuscripts of Mark that do not mention “the Son of God”here in Mark 1:1. Online versions of SBL and WH do not show the phrase either. The Lexham English Bible (LEB) is based upon SBL 2010. (Carotta has a suggestion why the phrase is not present sometimes.) PM. A list of omitted verses in the gospels is here.
The issue comes to the fore when Jesus is interrogated by the high priest and Pilate. The evangelists are eyewitnesses, like flies on the wall, or have access to reliable reports about the proceedings.
In all four gospels Pilate asks IX: “Are you the king of the Jews ?” Mark 15:2, Matthew 27:11, and Luke 23:3 have IX say: “You say so.” or “You have said so.” It is rather evasive. Not actually answering fits with with a dead IC. In John 18 the high priest brings Jesus to Pilate to ask for permission to execute him. Jesus confesses: “My kingdom is not of this world.” In all cases, Pilate sees no reason for execution. The Roman law has no problem with a local king or a local priest-king, as long as Roman law is observed. It is the sanhedrin who sees a problem. Pilate allows the high priest to have his way.
It fits the model that the Roman people supported IC and that the problem was with the murderous senatus. (Remember SPQR = Senātus Populusque Rōmānus, a founding notion of Rome.)
Tricky passages are Mark 14:61-62. Supposedly IX is silent, which can be explained by that IC is dead. The high priest must continue, for legal reasons in order to be able to convict IX, and asks him whether he claims to be the “son of the blessed”. It is not defined who “the blessed” is. The vagueness might allow to say, for legal reasons, “yes”. Then there is the passage on the “son of man” (likely referring to Daniel 7:13). Jesus does not claim to be the “son of man”, only that this son of man will be seen.
Mark 14:61 Study bible: But [Jesus] remained silent and made no reply. Again the high priest questioned Him, “Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed [One]?”
Mark 14:62: “I am,” said Jesus, “and you will see the Son of Man sitting at [the] right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.” [would be a reference to Daniel 7:13]
IX only admits of being the “messiah and the son of the blessed one”, whomever that might be. It is only by assumption, that IX refers to a Son of God (Psalm 2), that the high priest can decide that this is blasphemy.
The other evangelists have less evasion. Matthew 26:63 has the direct question whether he is “the Christ, the Son of God”, but IX again is evasive: 26:64: “Jesus said to him, “You have said it. (…)” Luke 22:70 has the direct question whether IX claims to be the Son of God, on which Jesus replies: “I am.” John 19:7 has: ““We have a law,” answered the Jews, “and according to that law He must die, because He declared Himself to be the Son of God.””
The gospel composers had to have a sound reason to let IX die, for their model IC had died too. The reason of death ought to be similar to IC. It is rather the kingship of IC that was the problem, not the divinity of Divus Julius. All gospels are clear that IX = IC stayed away from kingship. By circumstance, the OT had Psalm 2, that allowed a link to the notion of “son of God”. It was a valid reason within Judaic theology to allow the sanhedrin to depose of IX. The passage in Mark might be an interpolation of the other writers who were more in agreement with Divi Filius.
Carotta’s ingenious interpretation of the interrogation
Carotta’s take on the interrogation is quite ingenious. When IC had died Octavian took over as Divi Filius, and Carotta suggests that this actually happens in Mark too, i.e. that the interrogation continues with Octavianin the role of IX, whom is asked: “Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed [One]?” The answer by IX refers to the Son of Man, which fits Mark Antony’s view that Octavian cannot claim to be Divi Filius, since the title cannot be inherited. It would seem to be fitting that the gospel of Mark reflects Mark Antony’s view, but it might be a bit overdone here, since it diminishes the divine status of all Roman emperors. Perhaps this was actually the objective of the Flavians who ordered the rewrite of the Vita Caesaris.
Concluding
My 2012 book “The simple mathematics of Jesus” (SMOJ) has the basic diagnosis, a suggestion with corroborating evidence, that the Bible (OT and NT alike) is an astrological book, and that stories about celestial events were turned into dealings by gods, supplanted onto earth. Agricultural society required a calendar. The ancients could not use photographs of the sky and had to rely upon story-telling, and those stories could well be misunderstood as being about proper gods and not just celestial events. The whole merges with other aspects of organised society: politics, law, marriage, war, and so on. For SMOJ, the framework suffices that the NT is seen as a summary of the OT adapted to Roman times. E.g. Bethlehem is “the house of bread”, giving the astrological house of Sagittarius, the month of november/december when in Israel seeds are sown, later turned into bread – while bread is a metaphor for knowledge. When someone dies then one takes three days to ascertain death. When Sagittarius ends on December 21, and the old sun thus dies at midwinter, then three days gives the eve of December 24, and in the old accounting a new day started in the evening. And so on. For SMOJ, there is no need to explain why it took the cult of Jesus Christ only some 250 years, from the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD to Constantine around 320 AD, to become the state religion. SMOJ doesn’t mention Carotta’s theory of the Divus Julius origin of the gospels. In 2012 I had not processed it yet. Needless to say that the gospel of Mark doesn’t mention Bethlehem.
SMOJ:98 has: “The murder of IC on the idus [English Ides] of March 44 BC caused a shock throughout the Empire. The Roman senate, with many involved in the murder, raised IC to divine status, and the emperors have been calling themselves after him. The image of a king who dies in his own blood but who rises as a god causes some to think of Jesus. Perhaps it inspired some playwrights to create a Jewish counterpart, who then dies on 14 / 15 Nisan of April 3, 33 AD.” It is the core of an idea that suits Carotta, but I only started looking into discussions on his work in 2014, see e.g. here. It is only now that I found more time to look into his book. I still haven’t completed it.
He makes very good points. Many points can be accepted when one can accept that people make and solve cryptic crossword puzzles, and when one is willing to consider the hypothesis that some playwrights in antiquity had the same frame of mind. Much depends of course upon one’s knowledge of the actual texts, languages and true and/or claimed historical events.
In 2015 I wrote that the Dutch mind is closed on Jesus as well. This can be extended with being closed on Carotta’s theory. I saw some articles in Dutch by the same “historians” on the Divus Julius theory now too, and they again show bad reading and the expounding of fallacies. The world has lost close to 25 years merely because academics are afraid of the cryptic crossword puzzle.
Francesco Carotta came with the eye-popping suggestion that Jesus Christ had been modeled after Julius Caesar, in his book Jesus was Caesar 1999. Again, the reader must invest in learning (potential) history that is not in the standard books, and allow for many suggestions and hypotheses that each apart cannot be proven exactly, but that together develop into an analysis that at its core seems rather convincing. Carotta succeeds in two main fundamental explanations:
It explains the spread of Christianity within the Roman empire before Constantine around 330 AD. The basic spread within the empire was in the format of the Divus Julius cult in 44 BC – 69 AD (i.e. more than 100 years before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD), as something that was close to Roman beliefs. The Roman historian Appianus (c 95- c 165) reported about Caesar’s funeral: “[2.147] When the crowd were in this state, and near to violence, someone raised above the bier a wax effigy of Caesar – the body itself, lying on its back on the bier, not being visible. The effigy was turned in every direction, by a mechanical device, and twenty-three wounds could be seen, savagely inflicted on every part of the body and on the face.” Like the Osiris cult in Egypt had annual “passion plays” of the death and resurrection of Osiris, Divus Julius cult likely came with the annual “passion play” of a wax figure of Julius Caesar, not lain on the floor where the audience cannot clearly see the effigy, but lifted up on a tropaion – the tropaeum, a trophy-standard, alike a cross – so that everyone could see his wounds, and could see what horrible act the murderers had done to the founder of the empire. This image eventually evolved into the image of Jesus on the cross, and in Christian passion plays, there could also be such a mechanism for turning the cross. On the funeral pyre Caesar rose to the heavens to become Divus, different from Jesus who did so by actual dying. We must distinguish physical similarities and theological differences.
The major problem of Christianity is that Romans accepted a religion from the Middle East, originating from a people that they had fought some major wars with. The transformation started when the Julian dynasty ended with the death of Nero and when, in the year of the four emperors, Titus Flavius Vespasian triumphed in 69 AD. The Flavian dynasty had a vested interest in transforming the Divus Julius cult, since it undermined their authority as they were not of Julian descent. Vespasian has a reputation of being a traditional Roman, and likely he would not touch the Divus Julius cult. But his successors could think otherwise. Since Vespasian had originated his claim to power in Judea, it apparently was acceptable to allow for a diversion towards the East. A transformation still was not a done deal, and it could also have become Wodan or Mithras, but without this key support by the emperors and Roman officialdom, a transformation would have been rather unlikely. (PM. This assumes that the Divus Julius cult still was strong at the time of Nero.)
Though Julius Caesar did not plan this (though likely was aware of some risk), his death caused his supporters to rally around his legacy, punish the murderers, and eventually end the civil war. In hindsight, he became the human sacrifice, the sacrificial lamb, whose death allowed the foundation of the unified empire. It is stuff from which legends are made, and, in the age of writing, histories.
In theology, Jesus is the human sacrifice, the sacrificial lamb, sent by the Father to save mankind from the original sin in the garden of Eden. Nothing is required to be saved, only the belief in Jesus itself. At issue is now, how the Divus Julius cult got replaced by Christianity exactly. The starting point is, see here, the Torah and original sin in this Hebrew bible. Apart from theology, there is also the practical matter that circumcision can be replaced by baptism. While Euclid in Alexandria around 300 BC reorganised the logic of the measurement of space, other scholars there tried to create some logic in theology and law.
A fundamental insight for the notion of our civilisation
A fundamental notion since the rise of agriculture is that organised society comes with religion as a state-controlled enterprise. Religion may be a chequerboard of sects, with each village worshipping a sacred well or tree – and two persons with the same belief may form a church with a third causing a schism – but, as soon as there is shaman who can rabble-rouse a crowd then the magistrates want some crowd control (see the priest versus the prince). This comes with rules and regulations, clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, taxes to pay for control of who pays taxes, and punishment of who doesn’t pay taxes or speaks such blasphemy,
There was, in other words, a theo-bureaucracy behind the Divus Julius cult, and this bureaucracy could be redirected into another direction. There had been a theo-bureaucracy in Alexandria behind the Serapis cult in Egypt, with Cleopatra as the mother Isis of Egypt, and after her demise it had been redirected into the Divus Julius cult. There had been a theo-bureaucracy in Jerusalem, until the Temple had been demolished by Vespasian in 70 AD. The Roman empire had employment for scribblers who could create a religion that invited you to pay your taxes to Caesar as long as it no longer was Julius Caesar.
A key example of organised religion-building is the creation of the Septuagint and Serapis. In current history writing, the Septuagint is the Greek version of the Hebrew bible (Torah). It is suggested however that the Greek version actually predates Hebrew texts, see the story that it contains no rabbits, here. Septuagint is 70 in Greek, and is often denoted by the Latin number LXX. The story is that when Alexander died and Ptolemy got Egypt, that his son asked 70 Jewish priests to record their (perhaps mostly oral) stories in Greek. Presumably, the syncretic god Serapis was later created as a mixture of Egyptian and Greek beliefs, with perhaps also some input from LXX. Potentially, some texts in the LXX may have a Greek origin, in order to have some theological management of the Jewish section in their population in Egypt. However, given the fanatism of some Jews w.r.t. the Torah, leading to the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, it seems that the focus of LXX in 270 BC was to first get the story of the Jews before developing the syncretic Serapis.
Carotta proposes a similar editing process. Gaius Asinius Pollio wrote the Historiae that reported on the murder of Caesar and the funeral, which report was used by historians Appian and Plutarch. Remarkably, his work is lost, potentially because later powers had no use of a description of events that were so similar to what happened to Jesus. What remains are implied quotations by those other historians.
Carotta also refers to rituals that are still used in the Roman catholic church, which rituals have no base in the official writings, like the Stations of the Cross, similar to the festivals that were organised in Egypt for Osiris and later Serapis. The documentary “The Gospel of Caesar” 2007 by Jan van Friesland brings us to a remote part of Spain, where, far from the attention from the church, the local ceremony differs from the official church storyline: which could well reflect the original Divus Julius cult.
Carotta suggests that there was a beautified description of the life of Julius Caesar, supposedly written under the direction of Fulvia (83 – 40 BC), the third wife of Mark Antony, that was subsequently used by others to create the Gospel of Mark. One is reminded of the Q Gospel (though this is supposed to contain only quotations of Jesus).
All said, it remains important to keep in mind, that the above is only one development in an otherwise pluriform reality. While the Flavians (supposedly) started editing the Divus Julius cult, there still were developments outside of their control. There were the scribes and the sophists with their comments. Christianity is much like the Egyptian (risen Osiris) and syncretic Serapis belief. Alexandria had its playwriters for religious plays. There were the sects like the Therapeutae. There were the followers of Philo of Alexandria who tried to steer away from violence and potentially towards the adoption of an universal tekton, creator of the world. There were the Jews in Judea who abhorred the violence, not only the destruction of the Temple but also how rebellious compatriots had caused the onslaught. There was the Book of Sirach, with quotes from the Torah (LXX), much used for teaching purposes (Ecclesiasticus), composed by Jesus son of Sirach, and for some it might seem as if there was a Jesus who stated those teachings himself.
Testimonium Flavianum 2021
Flavius Josephus had the task to write a history of the Jewish wars. He also tried to explain to Romans the views and religion of the Jews. Carotta and others suspect that he was involved in the creation of Jesus Christ, and that he himself actually became a model for Paul.
Gary Goldberg works in more traditional lines, and recently analysed the Testimonium Flavianum (around 93-94 AD). Flavius Josephus had the habit of paraphrasing texts, so that he was no mere copycat but still had some original formulation. Goldberg suggests that Josephus similarly paraphrased a Christian source, rather than that a Christian editor directly inserted the paragraph. Goldberg’s analysis is a novel step forward in a tedious discussion. One wonders though whether such a Christian editor, at least as smart as Golberg, had already recognised Josephus’s style, and inserted that paragraph in a paraphrased manner, to enhance credibility. In those days, editors were trained in techniques like the midrash, and they would be aware of those other sources that Josephus paraphrased, so that they might recognise his habit. Thus there still need be no implication for an early Christian text close to AD 100.
Valliant & Fahy 2018 on the emperors
James S Valliant, with degrees in philosophy and law, and practice as deputy district attorney, and author on Ayn Rand, collaborated with writer Warren Fahy, for the 2018 book Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity. A discussion is here. I haven’t read the book, and from the credentials and the apparent critical minds of the authors I surmise that it must have value. I mention the book to indicate that there is growing criticism on the emperors – and the association of the catholic church with the emperors. Even the suggestion that the apostle Paul actually was a spy for the Romans deserves attention; this got also attention by another author Thijs Voskuilen. Such ideas caused me in 2015 to suggest some bedrock certainties for authors in the field. (The reader is also alerted to Ralph Ellis.)
Earlier on Carrier 2014
When I was reading Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus 2014 (already 8 years ago), I made some comments, see first, second, a third, and said bedrock certainties. Overall, I think that a historian should first learn a field, e.g. biology, and only then look into the history of the field. Knowledge about the field with a training in scientific methods helps one from running astray. Purely studying “ancient history” or “the history of religion” comes with too few anchors into science.
Carrier 2013 on Atwill’s “Caesar’s Messiah”
Joseph Atwill has an interesting documentary “Caesar’s Messiah“, arguing that it is the military campaign by Vespasian and Titus that is used as a model to create the Gospels, and thus Christ. The fishermen of the See of Galilee would be actually “fishermen of men”: Roman soldiers using their lances to kill Jewish rebels. Atwill arrives at the same notion of a Flavian effort of creating Jesus Christ, but the pure objective now is to pacify the Jews, rather than divert attention from the Divus Julius cult (that Atwill doesn’t look into).
Within the Divus Julius framework, the Flavians would be so cynical as to transform the beautified life of Julius Caesar into the life of a Jew. Perhaps in the originally transformation Jesus was still a Roman, son of a Roman soldier and Jewish Myriam, but only later became fully Jew. In Atwill’s view the editors are even more cynical, in presenting the Jews with their conqueror Titus as supposedly their compatriot saviour. For a theo-bureaucracy, cynicism is the bread & butter. Still, the likelihood seems larger that Julius’s life has been used rather than Titus’s campaign. That said, it is still possible that any model was used to rewrite the Divus Julius cult, and that other authors, once they noticed that such rewriting was done, inserted their own rewrites. There is no objection to presume that there arose a grab bag of possibilities. The result of the Council of Nicaea only gives a semblance of some coherence, i.e. some semblance in our eyes since we are used to its tradition, but it still constitutes a concoction of absurdities, less coherent than the average book with fairy tales.
Richard Carrier doesn’t buy Atwill’s scheme. Some of Carrier’s arguments are strong, but there are some that require a comment. Some of his arguments are more general and also apply to Carotta.
Carrier’s general points
(1) The Roman aristocracy was nowhere near as clever as Atwill’s theory requires. They certainly were not so masterfully educated in the Jewish scriptures and theology that they could compose hundreds of pages of elegant passages based on it. And it is very unlikely they would ever conceive of a scheme like this, much less think they could succeed at it (even less, actually do so).
The Flavians could instruct the theo-bureaucracy in Alexandria who had this knowledge. Those could hire some Sadducees and Pharisees who had lost their job because of the destruction of the Temple and who accepted that Roman rule would bring a much desired peace. They could write a New Testament that was a summary of the Old Testament, replacing the stern Rule of Law with the notion of Clemency. Overall, Carriers seems to underestimate the management of religion by organised society, also in those days, and assumes too much scope for the free press.
(2)We know there were over forty Gospels, yet the four chosen for the canon were not selected until well into the 2nd century, and not by anyone in the Roman aristocracy. Likewise which Epistles were selected.
The selection was done by the Church, that had been developed within the theo-bureaucracy of the Roman empire. Thus it is not quite relevant that much of the Roman aristocracy around the time of Titus was not involved. An analysis of the selection process might show that the Gospels based upon the beautified life of Julius Caesar had more coherence than the other ones. In any race over some 200 years, the winners might still be present at the start. PM. As the saying goes: one witness is no witness. It is better to have say four witness accounts, even when they contradict each other at points, when they agree on the main point: Christ existed, and he died at the cross to save our souls from the eternal sin committed by Adam and Eve (well, she started and tempted him).
(3)The Gospels and the Epistles all contradict each other far too much to have been composed with a systematic aim in mind. (…)
Such contradictions obscure the success: that attention is distracted from Divus Julius. There need only be some systematic aim in the first setup. Putting this out within the world of religious writers then created the buzz, and the many alternatives. Subsequently the council of Nicaea cleaned up the mess, and got rid of the evidence. (See a debunking on burning ancient libraries.)
(4)The Gospels and the Epistles differ far too much in style to have come from the same hand, and many show signs of later doctoring that would problematize attempts to confirm any theory like Atwill’s. For example, Mark 16:9-20, John 20 vs. 21, the hash job made of the epistle to the Romans, etc. Even the fact of how the canon was selected creates a problem for Atwill’s research requirements–for instance, the actual first letter to the Corinthians is completely missing, yet Paul refers to its existence in “our” 1 Corinthians.
See the answer to (3) and then (2).
(5)Christianity was probably constructed to “divert Jewish hostility and aggressiveness into a pacifist religion, supportive of–and subservient to–Roman rule,” but not by Romans, but exasperated Jews like Paul, who saw Jewish militarism as unacceptably disastrous in contrast with the obvious advantages of retooling their messianic expectations to produce the peaceful moral reform of society. The precedents were all there already in pre-Christian Jewish ideology and society (in Philo’s philosophy, in Essene and Qumranic efforts to solve the same problems, and so on) so we don’t have to posit super-genius Aryans helping the poor little angry Jews to calm down.
This argument follows the more traditional view that Christian religion, even while contradictory, was so powerful that it conquered the hearts and minds of the Romans, so that they converted, with Constantine the final touch, who only knew what he believed in after the Council of Nicaea. In this view, the theo-bureaucratic powerhouse at the core of the Roman empire failed – with Nero trying to burn them all – to stop Christianity. The religion was so remarkably strong in Rome only some 35 years after Jesus’s death but not enough in Judea to stop the destruction of the Temple. This view gives all power to ideas (a notion that appeals to writers who deal with ideas) and reduces the power of the theo-bureaucracy. This reasoning is not so convincing, since a key historical lesson is that organised society comes with religion as a state-controlled enterprise. Yes, the world is ruled by ideas, but the rulers try to manage the ideas and tend to succeed. (A ruler may lose, but then from another ruler.) (PM. Carrier’s reference to Aryans is similar to Voskuilen’s macabre parallel.)
PM. Julius Caesar was the Roman pontifex maximus (supervising the priests from specific deities), and had dealt with religious affairs from early on in life. He knew about clemency, and about trying to stop a civil war by forgiving enemies. Philo is two generations later. Clearly, Philo’s works are more developed than De bello Gallico, but Philo did not have the theo-bureaucracy to implement his ideas. Philo’s nephew Tiberius Julius Alexander was second in command next to Titus in the destruction of the Temple. It is only with the Flavians that Philo’s followers got their chance. (And Paul might well be modeled on Flavius Josephus. Joseph ben Matityahu was a Sadducee and descendant of the famous priest Matthias Curtus (“short, humpback”). Wikipedia (no source but a portal) about the name Paul: “It derives from the Roman family name Paulus or Paullus, from the Latin adjective meaning “small” or “humble”.” At Jotopata, in chains, he may have been lowered from his cave in a basket – tarsos – like Moses bringing a new belief.)
(6)Pacifying Jews would not have been possible with a cult that eliminated Jewish law and accepted Gentiles as equals, and in actual fact Christianity was pretty much a failure in Palestine. Its success was achieved mainly in the Diaspora, where the Romans rarely had any major problems with the Jews. The Jewish War was only fought in Palestine, and not even against all the Jews there (many sided with Rome). How would inventing a religion that would have no chance of succeeding in the heart of Palestine but instead was tailor made to succeed outside Palestine, ever help the Romans with anything they considered important?
The key point is: it was a success outside of Judea. If many Jews outside Judea hadn’t adopted the Divus Julius cult transformed into Christianity (that maintained the Torah as the Old Testament) and had remained radical sicarii, then the Roman empire would have had terrorist attacks all over. (Perhaps with local rebels joining in, like the attack on the WTC in 2001 has some link in violence to American “patriots” storming the Capitol in 2021.)
Note that Carrier directs this argument towards Atwill’s objective to pacify the Jews. For Divus Julius, the objective was primarily, at least that is the hypothesis, to distract the attention away from Julius Caesar and the Julians. Once the cult was transformed, with the rituals basically the same but with another context, the mission had been accomplished.
(7)If the Roman elite’s aim was to “pacify” Palestinian Jews by inventing new scriptures, they were certainly smart and informed enough to know that that wouldn’t succeed by using the language the Judean elite despised as foreign (Greek).
The Jewish elite used Greek as other elites. Priests could translate to the local audience. As said, diverting Divus Julius had another objective.
(8) The Romans knew one thing well: War. Social ideology they were never very good at. That’s why Rome always had such problems keeping its empire together, and why social discontent and other malfunctions continued to escalate until the empire started dissolving. Rome expected to solve every problem militarily instead–and up until the 3rd century Rome did so quite well. The Jewish War was effectively over in just four years (any siege war was expected to take at least three, and Vespasian was actually busy conquering Rome in the fourth year of that War). So why would they think they needed any other solution?
For the point directed at Atwill, see under (6).
For Divus Julius, the very problem was that the authority of the Flavians was undermined by the empire’s cult of Divus Julius, since they themselves were no Julians. It was already somewhat tricky that they adopted the title Caesar, but they had to, since it had become rather synonymous with imperator. As soon as Titus would suggest that he was somewhat like a Julian, similar to Divus Julius, then every civilian in Rome would be reminded that he was not. The only solution for the emperors was to change the cult. The religious rituals and practices could not be much changed, compare the difficulty of hypothetically moving Santa Claus from December 25 to say January 6, but contexts and words could be changed. Subsequently, once the Divus Julius cult was rewritten into something else, and the something else was given more prominence than the Divus Julius cult, there remained the earlier objective to keep on managing the religions in the empire, since this is what organised society does.
Concluding
I am no expert on Julius Caesar or religious studies. I only claim some expertise on the education in mathematics. My impression is that there is a good project on “the simple mathematics of Jesus“: starting with astro-agricultural theology and the human need for storytelling, leading to the observation that the bible is an astrological book, i.e. the science of its time. On the origin of Jesus, I try to read critically. The above are such comments.
The Divus Julius origin of Christianity is a strong hypothesis because of the two arguments mentioned at the start. The above did not generate strong counterarguments. It cannot be said that Christ was historical because he was modeled after historical Julius Caesar. Other supposed evidence that there was a historical Jesus is less convincing: there has been too much editing by Christian authors, and destruction of evidence. The very result of such studies is the awareness of the uncertainties in all such conjectures.
In itself it doesn’t matter much what is really the case, since, with the uncertainties, we will never know the truth. The decision to support, or not, an existing institution like a church would be based upon current considerations that we can judge upon.
There is for example patriarch Kirill of Moscow, lauding the invasion of the Ukraine with the war-crimes against the Ukrainians of the same belief in the same Jesus and Maria in 2022. It so happens that the Moscow patriarch owns many of the church buildings of settlements outside of Russia. Those parishes are relatively silent in their protest, see archpriest Denis Bradley “on the dubious silence of the shepherds”, here, and: “The war in Ukraine has exposed that, as in the Communist and Tsarist periods, the ROC is a compliant organ of the Russian State and that the OCA presently is at grave risk of becoming a compliant ancillary organ of the ROC.” The Amsterdam orthodox Russian church however owned its own ground and building: they executed their protest by leaving the Moscow patriarchate and joining the ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople. It probably would not do for other nations to transfer the ownership from the Moscow patriarch to the local parishes: they better use their own feet where their conscience leads them.
Currently I tend to think that containment / suppression / eradication of the virus (with testing and source and contact tracing (SCT)) likely is a better policy than trying to mitigate (while protecting the vulnerables).
The key argument is that the virus appears to have nasty properties that also affect the younger and healthier persons. My impression is that this aspect requires more attention in the discussion. The WHO already advises to containment / suppression but the WHO does not yet advise to eradicate the virus. The latter would be an important decision.
For Dutch readers there is this clear discussion by John Jacobs, a researcher in microbiology and former chair of the federation of medical research associations in Holland. English readers might look here.
Redesign of didactics of some epidemiological models
The redesign only transforms what is already known into a new format. There is no new model. There are no new data. The only idea is that aspects are presented in a clearer fashion.
However, this redesign caused me to reconsider notions of herd immunity, see section 1.5.5. (page 26) and section 6.11 (page 105). The standard formula for herd immunity, via the proportion of infected and recovered persons of 1 – 1 / R0, appears to be much abused in the discussions about SARS-CoV-2. A commonly mentioned percentage is 60% relating to a value of R0 = 2.5. The formula applies to a steady state, but the problem with a steady state is that infections continue: whence there is not really the protection that is supposed to be offered. A herd may have a stable size while youngsters are born and elderly fall victim to predators, but there are still such victims. The basic S(E)IR(D) models do not have a steady state but only an asymptomatic end state. For those models, the limit values are relevant, but those have a quite different formula. For R0 = 2.5 the limit value is almost 90%, whence there is an “overshoot” of 30%. If you promise herd immunity at 60%, with protection for the remaining 40%, while there are still 30%-points unprotected, then you are off by 3/4 and your promise of protection (“immunity”) doesn’t make sense. My diagnosis is that many persons who have been speaking about herd immunity for the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic actually did not know very well what they were speaking about.
The latter actually also applies to a large degree to my weblog of April, in which I used the formula 1 – 1 / R0 = 75% for the value of R0 = 4. I did not claim that this was sufficient since the vulnerables were also submitted to a protective regime of quarantine. But I did not explain the situation with adequate clarity, and this has now been revised in this redesign of the didactics of those models.
It remains to be seen whether epidemiologists will be open to such redesign of these elementary models, which they have been using and teaching for the last 50 years. The proof is in the eating of the pudding.
Revision of the rejected scenario for using the virus as its own vaccine
While I changed my viewpoint, the earlier viewpoint, now scrapped, still can be updated to the news. Earlier in April I suggested:
to segment society in vulnerables (elderly and younger with comorbidity) and less vulnerables
to protect the vulnerables with systems of quarantine
to deliberately infect the less vulnerables, using the virus as its own vaccine, albeit in cohorts in order to remain within the capacity of the ICU system.
This scheme can be updated with the following main points:
Earlier I counted only the 60+ as the vulnerables (4.4 million) but now I have found data on comorbidity in the younger age groups as well (3.4 million in 2011, say 3.5 in 2020). Unfortunately, the infection fatality factor (IFF) for the latter are not given. I take the same value as the IFF as for the 60+, in below table 5.1%.
For the less vulnerables, the target now is no longer 75%. We rather take the limit value for R0 = 4. However, a limit is never reached, and let us settle for 95% of the limit value of R0 = 4, which is 95% * 98% = 93.1%.
The testing and SCT capacity in Holland has been much improved. The quarantine status of the vulnerables can be improved so that the larger group still has only a 1% failure of quarantine with infection by the less vulnerables.
The excel sheet is here. The relevant table is below. It would take 10.2 months to infect some 8 million less vulnerables, using the virus as its own vaccine, in cohorts of size 323,801 every 1.5 weeks, spread out over the different hospital service areas. The mortal cost would be 9,335 deaths, of which 4,005 in the vulnerable group and 5,330 in the less vulnerable group. This compares to the 9,000 deaths that actually occurred in the first half of 2020, in chaotic manner and without the building up of this immunity by the less vulnerables. However, we may actually be better off by not having had this scenario, because the table below does not mention the nasty effects of the virus also for the less vulnerables.
As said, I no longer propose to investigate this scheme for actual implementation, at least for Holland. It still seems useful to have it available, in case testing and SCT would actually not work (perhaps in other countries too).
Today, January 31 2020, at midnight Central European Time, Brexit will happen, even though it is unclear what the British voters think about it. Brexit is neither “by the will of the people” nor “against the will of the people” but merely “without the will of the people“.
A proto-democracy generates uncertainty
The UK is only a proto-democracy and no proper democracy, see this evaluation in the APS Newsletter Physics and Society, January 2020, p18-24, which looks at the USA but the argument for the UK is quite similar.
On Brexit, uncertainty abounds:
The Brexit Referendum Question of 2016 was a political manipulation and unacceptable for a decent statistical questionnaire, see here p14. The situation was “garbage in, garbage out”, with ample opportunity for populism.
The UK preferences were rather dispersed about the options for Leave or Remain, see here p6.
The UK election of December 12 was for the House of Parliament and not about Brexit. Boris Johnson had all candidates for the Conservative Party pledge to support Brexit, which runs against the principle that members of the House must represent their district. These elections thus violate the very principle of the UK proto-democracy.
The UK proto-democracy has “district representation” with “first past the post“, which means that a party may get a majority in the House of Parliament without a majority in the electorate. In the UK 44% voted for the conservatives but they still got 56% of the seats. Thus 56% of the UK voters do not want a government by the Conservatives.
Thus we still do not know what voters think about Brexit too. While Brexit was much discussed, and caused voters to switch to the Conservative Party, it still was not the only issue on the table, and it still is unclear what voters think about Brexit on balance.
The UK has the curious phenomenon of the “Re-Leavers”. These voters chose Remain in 2016 but now switch to Leave merely because this was the majority outcome in the referendum, and they “want to respect the outcome”. However, this is not how democracy works. A vote is about what you think yourself and not about what the former outcome was. Obviously these Re-Leavers are free to exercise their democratic right to think whatever they want, but this kind of thinking destroys the possibility to determine what people actually want.
YouGov tracker
The YouGov tracker is the best summary information about the general sentiment on the issue, but it is a poll and no electoral statement. Let me quote the tracking at this moment, because it always changes:
Between party dynamics
Adam McDonnell and Chris Curtis of YouGov discuss a post-election survey of December 17 2019, and here are their underlying data (for us page 3). The dynamics between the UK parties are remarkably large. Their key graph for our purposes is the following. For example 27% (figure not printed) of the Conservatives voted Remain in 2016: 22% (shown) of those switch to the LibDem, likely because LibDem are Remain. However, 65% of the Remain Conservatives stick to their party, perhaps because they regard the issue less relevant than other issue of the Conservatives, or perhaps they are ReLeavers. Of the LibDem who voted Leave in 2016 still 46% voted LibDem though it had become a Remain party, perhaps because they thought that LibDem would not gain power anyway.
Labour and LibDem could have made a deal to oppose the Conservative candidates with only one candidate from Labour / LibDem, in proportion to the forecasted vote shares. In that case, the LibDem could have assured a referendum on Brexit. During the elections, Jeremy Corbyn was criticised that he did not take a stand on Brexit, but his party was clearly divided, and his offer of a referendum was a fair option. At most five years from now there will be new elections. These are the Conservative “battlegrounds“, where this party could lose a seat by small number of voters.
“This is pretty much a binary election. Hung parliament, then we’re almost undoubtedly heading towards an extension and a second referendum, and lord knows what the outcome of that will be. Or we get a majority and we go out on January 31 and Boris is charged with the task of negotiating an alternative outcome. Ironically at the end of the day we’ve kind of stumbled into this election, but as the way it’s turning out, it’s actually providing us with a fairly clear binary choice.”
The latter is clearly nonsense, already before the election outcome. Above dynamics of UK voters shows that voters did not see a binary vote on Brexit and clearly had various considerations other than Brexit.
John Curtice is a renowned professor who on Election nights predicts the district outcomes with amazing accuracy. The problem however is that Curtice doesn’t see or explain that the true problem for the UK lies in the lack of equal proportionality in the general election. Curtice is locked in his electoral worldview like a hamster in a running wheel. Whatever he thinks and says here is in service of the current disproportionate electoral system in the UK, and then still produces nonsense.
In sum, it is the current electoral system that created the mess on Brexit and its misleading referendum question in 2016. If the UK had had equal proportional representation (EPR) like in Holland to start with, then Nigel Farage could have gotten his 12,5% of the seats in the House, and then the political discussion would have had greater restraint on the truth of the matter.
Brexit is still a mess, and now the eggs are scrambled
The solution for the present mess lies not in a new referendum on Brexit, as Curtice accepts, but in equal proportional representation (EPR). Referendum questions are manipulative, and voters cannot negotiate in polling stations. With EPR, representatives in the House can deconstruct manipulation and can negotiate. The current UK system gives only district winners, and they may be locked to a party line and cannot represent the diversity of views within their districts. The latter was already a fairy tale in 1900 and even more in 2020. Again, see my evaluation in the APS Newsletter Physics and Society.
Let the UK reboot itself. A big problem for UK voters now is: if the UK would rejoin the EU then it would have to accept the euro.
In The Guardian, 2018-12-13, historian Timothy Garton Ash asks the EU27:
“(…) all we need from you, my friends, is a clear, simple, positive message, without ifs or buts: “We want you to stay!””
The EU27 already said this, before this plea actually. Yet, let me offer my fellow citizen apologies to the British people for the misconduct by the EU27 leadership. The EU27 has not been clear enough. It has allowed itself to get infected by the irresponsibility by the UK leadership.
An issue between Member States
The EU is a union of Member States and an arrangement between governments. The EU is no usual democracy with a direct relationship between EU citizens and their collective EU government. The EU27 regard Brexit as an internal affair of the UK. EU President Donald Tusk chairs meetings of government leaders, and would see himself entirely out of place when he would tour the UK and have Town Hall sessions trying to resolve misunderstandings and pleading the common cause. Brexiteers would accuse him of meddling in internal affairs, and Tusk could only confirm this. Many Britons would see him as another Pole who should depart as soon as possible, even when he would be excellent at taking care at hospital beds or fixing the plumbing.
Clear and convincing evidence that the UK is under the spell of populism
The 2016 Referendum is clear and convincing evidence, acceptable in a decent criminal court, that the UK is under the spell of populism. In proper democracy it is Parliament that decides such issues. Who studies the mathematics of democracy can better appreciate the history that it are mostly demagogues and incompetents who resort to referenda to create the illusion as if the “will of the people” has been called upon. The 2016 Referendum was an exercise in populist lunacy and the UK government has been irresponsible concerning it. Prime Minister Theresa May clearly doesn’t have the background to understand this. In this particular respect she is no better than Silvio Berlusconi though with a feeling for understatement and a stiff upper lip, and she rather follows populism in the UK instead of steering her country out of it.
Stab-in-the-Back Myth
In this political setting, anything that the EU27 says can and basically will be used against it. The EU27 has been cautious about the risk of a Stab-in-the-Back Myth that the EU27 would be at fault for the mess that the UK is in and could be in for coming decades. When the EU27 would state with more emphasis that it would rather have the UK remain, like Garton Ash suggests, then this would likely be misrepresented as a ploy to lure the virgin UK into a place of darkness and unspeakable horror.
Take the bull by the horns
In real politik the EU27 accepted that a Member State succombed to populism. They should have been wiser. Alongside the unavoidable negotiations, the EU27 should also have discussed How to Deal with Populism in a Member State. EU scientists with basic impartiality in Town Hall meetings could have invited Britons to see this true diagnosis and monster eye to eye. It is still not too late. I myself have looked into the deeper causes of Brexit. My finding is that Britons think that they have democracy while the UK has only proto-democracy. The UK has district representation instead of equal proportionality. The UK system has been causing problems in the UK for a good part of last century, and Brexit is only a culmination.
A second referendum is populism all-over again
Garton Ash’s second referendum is populist irresponsibility all-over again. He neglects the evidence of the 2016 disaster and believes in a heaven of well designed referenda that disclose the “will of the people” like an Oracle of Delphi. His world view is locked in proto-democracy, and he doesn’t even notice the prison walls.
The advice is a moratorium
My suggestion is a Moratorium on Brexit of two years, so that the UK can discuss and improve its democracy. See the former weblog entry.
A Brexit moratorium of two years is the best advice today that econometrics can offer the UK and EU. Two years are only a short period with respect to the long future ahead. After two years of misinformation the UK and EU better make room for two years of proper information.
The difference between a flat Earth and a sphere
My background is in econometrics, Political Economy and Public Choice, and the latter is “the use of economic tools to deal with traditional problems of political science” (Gordon Tullock 1987). The Brexit referendum outcome in 2016 caused me to look deeper into its causes. In August 2017 I discovered that “political science on electoral systems” (including referenda) still is locked in the humanities and thus pseudo-science. For its claims on reality this branch is comparable to astrology, alchemy and homeopathy. This branch has been misinforming the world for a good part of last century.
The Great Depression in the 1930s came about because economists had confusions about the gold standard and such. Now we have a similar situation with respect to this branch of political science. This discovery on “political science on electoral systems” compares to the distinction between a flat Earth and a sphere. It means that all evidence must be re-evaluated.
If you wonder where failing government in the USA, UK or France comes from, then include this misinformation and miseducation as a fundamental factor. Brexit is an example of a democracy running astray because of this misinformation. The deeper cause of Brexit is that the House of Commons and the electorate are misinformed by the academia. There is a grand scale of misinformation by famous UK scholars like Iain McLean, John Curtice, Simon Hix, younger Alan Renwick, and (other) members of the UK Political Studies Association and lack of critique by the UK Royal Statistical Society.
For the National Academia of Sciences and Humanities of the world I propose that they set up their own national buddy systems, consisting of both scientists and scholars on democracy and electoral systems. Scientists tend to be less interested in democracy and scholars are at a distance from empirics, so that buddies can support each other in commitment to study and in bridging gaps of understanding.
Many Britons are dead-tired of the Brexit discussion and want a clean break of it. The term Cold Civil War has been used. Rather than force a decision down each other’s throat on the three available options, it is better to kick the can down the road, and have a time-out to reconsider how the UK got where it is now. The UK better changes the discussion to another topic, away from Brexit, on which the three options are rather clear, and instead onto the foundations, structure and workings of UK democracy itself. The UK appears to be horribly confused on both democracy and statistics, and the people in the UK will gain new energy when they finally would get proper information.
All three options have the risk of a Stab-in-the-Back Myth
Both the EU and prime minister Theresa May have emphasized that there will be no more negotiation. There are three options on the table. Firstly the EU-May deal, secondly the Crash out of the EU, and thirdly a Bregret and return to the Status Quo Ex Ante. All three options come with the risk of a Stab-in-the-Back Myth.
Many UK voters have been dreaming and have been misinformed by all sides. It will be easy for many Britons to blame the EU as the villain who abused virgin Britannia. It will be hard for them to admit that they themselves have been dreaming.
A stagnation or even a drop in income can be portrayed as punishment by the EU.
The May-EU deal would fail on the sovereignty a promised by many Brexiteers.
Bregret would be seen as a betrayal of the referendum outcome.
Cognitive dissonance can be resolved by finding scapegoats, and butchering them in cleansing rituals. The Stab-in-the-Back Myth would not only affect the UK and future EU-UK relations, but Pied Pipers of Hamelin within the EU would also use UK resentment as ‘proof’ that the EU is devious indeed.
This lose-lose outcome exposes the weak spots of international governance. Basically, though, the irresponsibility in the UK has infected the EU. EU policy makers should have known better. They treated Brexit as an issue between Member States but they rather should have cared for EU citizens too, also in the UK, even when this notion of EU citizenship has little legal status. This present discussion provides a solution approach.
Two past years of misinformation, two new years for information
The last two years were burdened by misinformation around the 2016 Brexit Referendum and then there were both secrecy and some open chaos in the subsequent UK-EU negotiations. Voters in the UK are only dimly aware about the logic of the Irish border and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 in this balancing act on national sovereignty and international treaties. Yet the greatest problem lies at a more fundamental level on democracy itself.
Another two years of uncertainty might play into economic stagnation, yet there are many no-regret investments waiting to be done. It really is wisest to take a time-out. This armistice of two more years gives breathing space and appears crucial to clear the fog of war and prevent a Stab-in-the-Back Myth that would play into rancuous backlash in both UK and EU and that could wreak havoc in the future.
How this moratorium can be achieved
The current House of Commons was elected in 2017 and thus after the referendum of 2016, and it would have a mandate to reconsider the situation, even if it would mean breaking promises to voters, which promises clearly cannot be kept with only the present three options on the table. Potentially the EU27 would allow the UK time for such a reconsideration of it is democratic foundations. The recent advice by the ECJ Advocate General provides scope to unilaterally revoke the withdrawal notification (ECJ press release 187/18). However, the EU27 would tend to regard this correct unilateral act with suspicion, and fear for instability in the UK. If the UK would revoke and clarify that it would use a moratorium of two years for a reconsiderations of its democratic foundations, then fears in the EU27 about UK instability and risk about a Stab-in-the-Back Myth against the EU would be assuaged.
After this moratorium of two years, the UK may still leave the EU perhaps in 2021 but at least then this decision would be based upon a clearer understanding in the UK about democracy and statistics.
Not “populism” but kindergarten politics
The 2016 Brexit Referendum Question itself was simplistic and doesn’t fit the requirements for a decent statistical questionnaire. It was political manipulation pure and simple. The Leave vs Remain outcome was 52-48%, but some 17% of voters had Remain between different options of Leave, and thus had to gamble what would be the likely outcome. (RES Newsletter 2018-10) Referenda are mostly dumb and risky, and an instrument of populism instead of deliberative democracy. With this lesson learned, the UK better avoids a second referendum.
Let me quote Cas Mudde who “defined populism as an ideology that considers society to be separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” (Guardian 2018-11-22) The term “populism” is distractive though, as if there would be a core of truth in going back to the people, as “ideal democracy”. Cas Mudde struggles with the dictionary and is less observant of what is really happening here, namely kindergarten politics. A division between Us and Them is what kids in kindergarten understand, with a saviour prince on a shiny horse, and it is a core element in blockbuster Hollywood movies. This is what Donald Trump is comfortable with and what his analysts are feeding him with.
The proper answer to this kind of politics is to explain that issues are more complex, and Cas Mudde suggests this too. Complexity however requires time. Both UK and EU can use a moratorium of two years to come to terms with the complexity that we now see on Brexit. The key point is to use this time in an educational manner beyond kindergarten, and thus in a fundamentally different manner than we have seen in the last two years. The misinformation about Brexit not only concerns mere mundane points like on the NHS but also concerns some fundamental aspects by professors from the academia as well.
Weimar and equal proportional representation
This discussion now meets with Godwin’s law. In 1941, Ferdinand Hermens (1906-1998) fled from nazi Germany, found refuge at Notre Dame, Indiana, and published his “Democracy or Anarchy” that argued that the Weimar Republic collapsed because of (equal) proportional representation (EPR). After winning WW2, the USA and UK assumed that their electoral system of district representation (DR) would be superior too. Later research by political scientists has essentially repeated the bias, introducing ever more fallacies.
Historians have debunked Hermens’s analysis. Hitler seized power by using the fire in the Reichstag to arrest communists, eleminating such parliamentarians from voting committees. (Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian 2017) EPR was hindering the nazis, not helping them. Anyway, the choice of electoral system must be made for its own optimality, and other rules would be relevant for such stress tests. Above, I have mentioned the evidence.
A solution for the UK is to switch from DR to EPR
The two year moratorium then could have two phases. When the proposed buddy-system of the Royal Society and the British Science Association (science) and the British Academy (humanities) has generated results and has started informing the general public about their findings, in a first phase, then in a second phase the UK can consider switching from DR to EPR, and have proper elections so that all voices in the UK are duly represented, finally for the first time in history. Parties can split along their Brexit views in order to offer voters the full spectrum. The Stab-in-the-Back Myth has less risk of developing when all people can see the true proportions of the different views on Brexit. With new elections, the House of Commons can finally start from proper proportions to negotiate between parties for a compromise. Compromises would focus on internal UK affairs, since there are no more negotiations with the EU on Brexit.
With this advised solution approach provided by econometrics, it may still be, as said, that the UK leaves the EU perhaps in 2021 but at least then all UK voters have been treated properly, with prudence, justice, dignity and compassion, in equal proportion.
Disclaimer: I did not read “Democracy or Anarchy” and the EU-May Deal, but looked at abstracts. Parts of this text have been used earlier.
“Selling natural assets and including the proceeds in the gross domestic product, GDP, is wrong on both economic and accounting grounds.”
Even though NDP is rarely estimated, depreciation of produced assets is fairly small and predictable. Declines in natural assets, on the other hand, may be large and volatile, and are not reflected at all in the estimates of GDP commonly used for macroeconomic analysis.”
“For economic purposes, a better approach would be to calculate the user cost component of resource declines, and either subtract this from GDP as capital consumption or (much better) exclude it from the gross product altogether.”
The term “user cost” merely indicates the investments that are required to maintain the resource level and quality.
“Exploiting finite natural resources without replenishment is akin to mining and Marshall had taken pains to explain that the surplus realized in mining, often miscalled rent, should be split into proper ‘rent’ which is income and ‘royalty’ which is capital.”
George Santopietro (1998) summarized El Serafy’s position as:
“El-Serafy (1989) argued that the surplus for a depletable resource represents two values: (1) a true income component which can be consumed; and (2) a separate depletion cost. The depletion cost is the amount that needs to be reinvested in order to sustain the economy’s ability to provide future generations with the ability to enjoy a non-declining level of consumption. In this line of thinking, the net price method overstates the true depletion cost. Von Amsberg took El-Serafy’s method and applied the strong sustainability criterion to it by calling for a depletion cost sufficiently large that when invested in the production of a substitute, future generations will be able to enjoy a non-declining flow of similar services.”
It was actually John Hicks who distinguished fundist and materialist capital in accounting. In both cases there is Hicks’s accounting principle of keeping capital intact for income estimation purposes. El Serafy puts emphasis on fundist capital, thus with monetary value. A depletion of a natural asset can be compensated by a gain in other capital. The alternative is to look at the physical stock of goods. El Serafy: “damaged or depleted natural capital cannot easily be replaced with manufactured capital.”
A small model
Wondering what to make of this, I came upon the following small model. When you sell your house then the proceeds are not your income, so much is obvious. You might rent out a room to pay for the maintenance costs. Farmers sell the proceeds from their crop but keep some seeds for next year.
Since Keynes, macro-economics has tended to link consumption to income but let us now relate it to the capital stock that might be depleted.
Assume that the price of a depletable resource is p = 1, and that the resource stock K is capital too: K ~ p K. The first is in physical units and the second would be in money, but let us take the resource as the numeraire, so that K = p K.
For investment: Let physical investment J = b K. Let g be the physical return factor on physical investment. Then economic (gross) investment I = r K = (i + d) K with d depreciation and i a rate of interest. We also have I = g J = g b K so that r = g b.
For consumption: Let w L be services without use of capital. For consumption of the depletable resource we distinguish a fraction s that is sustainable and a fraction u that is unsustainable. Total consumption is C = (s +u) K + w L, and we have sustainability when u = 0. Below relations allow us to deduce that s = (g – 1) b, so that sustainable consumption is determined by the physical return factor of physical investments.
From these two: u K are the user costs or investment that are required to keep the resource intact. When consumption is sustainable u = 0 then such costs are not incurred.
In accounting of expenditure flows, it may happen that u currently is not even included in D, so that also NDP is off-track.
If u is in D then we find: NDP gives substainable consumption s K + w L, while the figure of GDP will be polluted by unsustainable depletion u.
Physical, sustainable if u = 0
Nominal, with p = 1
C = (s + u) K + wL
C = (s + u) K + wL
J = bK
I = rK = (i + d) K (gross investment)
K[t+1] = (1 – s – u – b) K + gJ
K[t+1] = (1 + r) K – D
K[t+1] = (1 – u) K
D = dK = (s + u + b) K = (r + u) K
s = (g – 1) b
r = s + b = gb, 1 – u = 1 + i
d = s + u + b
GDP = Y = C + S = C + I = (s + u + r) K + wL
0 ≤ s + u + b ≤ 1
NDP = Y – D = sK + wL = (g – 1) b K + w L
El Serafy rather wants to see that also GDP is income, which can be achieved by a separate deduction from the stock:
Physical, sustainable if u = 0
Nominal, with p = 1
C = (s + u) K + wL
C = (s + u) K + wL
J = bK
I = rK (gross investment)
K[t+1] = (1 – s – u – b) K + gJ
K[t+1] = (1 + r) K – D* – Δ with Δ = u K as user cost
K[t+1] = (1 – u) K
D* = d*K = (s + b) K = r K (without user cost)
s = (g – 1) b
r = s + b = gb, and r = i* + d* means i* = 0
d = s + u + b
GDP* = Y* = C + S = C + I – Δ = (s + r) K + wL
0 ≤ s + u + b ≤ 1
NDP = Y* – D* = sK + wL = (g – 1) b K + w L
An example is selling the natural resource, putting the proceeds into a bank, and live from the perpetuity. With i the money rate of interest, then sustainable income is s K = i K, so that s = i. Then b = 1 because all money is in the bank, and g = 1 + i=r. It follows that GDP = (1 + 2 i) K + w L and NDP = i K + w L. Normally we do not regard the whole capital as the investment but for money it makes sense. In practice money in the bank is only a financial arrangement and the true return must still come from productive investments.
Environmental sustainability
Above model can be extended with environmental sustainability by replacing s + u with es + eu, with es ≤ s and eu ≥ u. For example, the home owner must put aside additional investments for an extension to the house to make room for solar panels or heat pumps, or to relocate it because of flooding. Sustainability and environmental sustainability have the same model here, and only different data. However, practical modeling can be different. Mere sustainability might rely on actually observed values of the going rate of depleting, while environmental sustainability with es and eu would require more involved modeling to come to grips with the current (conservative) expectations on future development.
Intermediate conclusion based upon this small model
I tended to favour GDP as based upon expenditure flows, since depreciation of produced capital tends to use accounting schemes that seem rather arbitrary. Now, however, it is clearer to me that depletion of natural resources may pollute these GDP data. Now I am starting to think that NDP would tend to be a better yardstick, provided that statisticians find adequate estimates of depletion of course. If those estimates are deficient then the use of NDP provides only the illusion of improvement though.
PM. This simple model seems quite tricky. A one time deviation from sustainability causes a one time GDP growth, but also forces to continue to deviate from sustainability for ever more, with K[t] = (1 – u)^tK[0] merely to maintain the income level without any growth. It is only a simple model to clarify a basic idea. Salah el Serafy has more sophistication with the user cost.
Salah el Serafy again
El Serafy (2014) however advises that resource depletion is removed from income altogether (with my comments):
“Any presumption that removing ‘royalty’ (the capital element) from GDP entries relating to natural resources might be taken care of at the level of estimating NDP cannot be accepted for more than one reason.
First, NDP is not often reckoned at all, and if reckoned there is no unanimity over the amount to be used for the capital consumption involved. (TC: But would there be unanimity for correction at the level of GDP ?)
Second, natural resource deterioration due to commercial exploitation is not ‘depreciation’ in the accepted sense; it does not conform to standard wear-and-tear allowances applied at year-end to asset categories, and may in fact amount to as much as 100 per cent of the asset. In the latter case proceeds of the asset sale will all be a User Cost and must be exiled altogether from GDP. (TC: This is a matter of definitions. If Gross is taken as expenditure flows, then Net can be taken as depletion and standard depreciation. However, expenditure flows are not income indeed.)
Third, if stock erosion is viewed correctly as Marshall advised as emanating from ‘Nature’s store’, accounting conventions dictate that using-up stocks must be dealt with at the gross income estimation stage. Clearly natural resources are not ‘fixed capital’ but inventories, and the User Cost implicit in using them up should be recognized for correct accounting. (TC: But the situation becomes blurred, when the stocks can be used for investments to maintain the stocks, see above small model. In that case it makes some sense to define Gross as the expenditure flows, and deduct depletion with depreciation. However, expenditure flows are not income indeed.)
Such economic reasoning appears to escape the concerns of the estimators who have taken charge of the accounts resisting the economic logic behind the ‘greening’ quest.”
Conclusion
El Serafy did his doctorate in economics at Oxford in 1957, supervised by John Hicks, one of the giants in economics, and also famous for his insistence on proper accounting. El Serafy laments that this heritage has gotten lost:
“However, as the economists’ interest in studying social accounting faded the accountants and statisticians have taken over, often disregarding the concerns of economics, and disclaiming any hint that the national accounts should be estimating income.”
“Their message in brief is that no adjustment for environmental losses can be expected within the mainframe of the national accounts. This in effect is a death sentence on ‘green accounting’.”
Salah el Serafy has a point. The point has also been made by Tinbergen & Hueting.
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Boycott Holland 
