A Jewish Death Sentence for the Emperor

“Let this be the new policy of victory that we arm ourselves with mercifulness and liberality.”
-Julius Caesar

“I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
-Jesus Christ

Not only does the biography of Caesar rhyme with the gospel of Jesus Christ, but there are four Julius Caesars who share much more in common than just their names. First is Gaius Julius Caesar, aka Julius Caesar or Caesar, the unwilling King of Rome who was betrayed by Brutus and transformed into a god. Second is Gaius Julius Caesar, aka Octavian or Augustus, the legendary and benevolent first emperor of Rome, who followed in Caesar’s footsteps after taking his name and calendar. Then came Gaius Julius Caesar, aka Caligula, the famous young emperor who fancied himself a god before he was betrayed and stabbed to death in a theater just like his original namesake. Then centuries later came Constantine’s son Flavius Julius, who was made Caesar on December 25, 333 AD and betrayed and murdered at a young age.

Julius Caesar is the elder of these corpses at 56; Jesus was supposedly about 33, Caligula 29, and Constans 27. Only Augustus lived a long natural life and enjoyed his imperial authority. So which “king” is the real McCoy? Julius Caesar or Caligula, whom Josephus turns into twins, one reigning for a month longer than the other? Julius Caesar or Constans I, who was also a Julius Caesar, who was betrayed and assassinated by one of his generals after becoming emperor and close ally of Gallia? Or was that Jesus Christ, from Galilee, betrayed by a kiss from one of his boyfriends, even as Constans I and Caligula were accused of homosexuality?

Francesco Carotta wrote a book called Jesus was Caesar arguing that Christianity derives from the Imperial cult worship of Rome, which in turn derives from the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. Carotta regards Caligula as yet another recapitulation of the death of Julius Caesar. But I suspect the chain of identity may go from Caligula—>Christ—>Julius Caesar and not the other way around. Carotta notes that the imperial cult statues of the divine emperor did not actually bear the likeness of Julius Caesar, but rather an idealized youth. One major advantage of treating Caligula as the true historical man/god is that Philo offers a very clear motive for his assassination: Caligula desecrated the law and temple of the Jews. Philo openly and repeatedly implies that the emperor deserves to die for his blasphemy.

The gospel of Mark, our oldest biography of Christ, emphasizes that the lessons of Heaven are taught in parable. One parable that stands out is the walled vineyard. In this tale, a man builds a vineyard and leases it to some farmers, but when he sends his servants to collect rent, they are beaten and or killed by the ungrateful tenants. Finally the vineyard builder sends his own esteemed son, but he too is murdered and thrown out. Jesus asks, “What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others” (Mark 12:9). Only a few lines later comes his famous admonition: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Mark 12:17).

If we take the parable of the walled vineyard as a metaphor for imperial rule, we might conclude that somebody actually did murder someone - or if they were to do so, they would have their kingdom repossessed. This is exactly what happened in 70 CE, when the Flavians won the Roman civil war and destroyed Jerusalem after a brutal siege. This event could stand as divine retribution for the unjust execution of Christ, as argued by Eusebius centuries later, but Christ may be a metaphor for somebody else. Could the Jews have been responsible for the death of Caligula? Certainly, to judge by the writings of Philo, they hated his guts and felt him deserving of capital punishment.

Consider, for example, the words of Mara bar Serapion, who wrote to his son some time after the fall of Jerusalem: “What did the Jews get from the execution of the wise king, as the empire was taken away from them from that time on?”

Judaism was intertwined with Hellenism ever since the Jewish bible was published in Greek in Alexandria circa 250 BC. Judea was made a Roman province by Augustus circa 6 AD, while the Jewish Roman war may trace its roots to the anti Jewish riots in Alexandria officially dated to 38 AD, which are described in Philo’s letter Flaccus. Philo says the Jews of his day were spread throughout the Roman empire, their population and influence established among every nation. Philo praises Augustus lavishly for his civilizing benevolence and never mentions Julius Caesar.

According to Flaccus, the Romans in Alexandria became especially anti Semitic after Caligula sent the new King of the Jews (Herod’s grandson Agrippa) to visit the city. The Romans persecuted the Jews unto the point of genocide, with Philo warning that if the riots were not stopped in Alexandria, they would spread throughout the Roman Empire, and Jews worldwide would be hunted in the streets like dogs. These Alexandrian riots described (solely) by Philo are accepted as historical. The conflict escalated until 70 AD with the siege and fall of Jerusalem and the victory of Titus Caesar, the topic with which Josephus mainly concerns himself in War of the Jews.

Flaccus has a happy ending for the Jews, with Philo smacking his lips as the Roman governor ends up alone on the island of Andros, hunted down by Caligula’s assassins and flayed alive. But history turned out differently. Caligula fell to assassins of his own, and Rome besieged and ruined Jerusalem 20 years after Philo’s death, causing the same starvation and suffering that he describes in Alexandria. The fall of Jerusalem dates only 32 years after the riots described by Philo. Our primary source for the fall of Jerusalem is Josephus, who like Philo was an eminent Jew.

Along with Flaccus, Philo has another paper concerning Caligula (and, for that matter, the elusive Pilate) called Embassy to Gaius (Gaius being Caligula). It is more than interesting that Josephus and Philo both mention similar scandals caused by Pilate without mentioning Jesus Christ. In Embassy, Pilate introduces inscribed shields in Herod’s palace which deeply offend the Jews. The Jews cry out to Pilate: “Do not cause a sedition; do not make war upon us; do not destroy the peace which exists”. Pilate’s actions in Embassy appear to be modeled on an episode from Flaccus, where the Romans set up signs under the name of Caesar in the synagogues. In Josephus, Pilate similarly introduces images of Caesar to Jerusalem.

Philo excoriates Pilate for “his corruption, and his acts of insolence, and his rapine, and his habit of insulting people, and his cruelty, and his continual murders of people untried and uncondemned, and his never ending, and gratuitous, and most grievous inhumanity.” To get rid of the shields in their temple, the Jews go over Pilate’s head to the emperor Tiberius, and Tiberius commands they be taken down. The scandal caused by Pilate in Jerusalem dates only a few years before the scandal caused by Flaccus in Alexandria - and it’s the same scandal with the same implied fallout for world Jewry, fallout which apparently came to pass decades later. Fallout which was precisely predicted by Jesus Christ in the gospel of Mark.

Philo’s Embassy to Gaius vilifies Caligula extensively for his divine pretensions. Philo says Caligula “no longer chose to remain fettered by the ordinary limits of human nature, but aspired to raise himself above them, and desired to be looked upon as a god”. According to this document, Caligula ran around dressing up as demigods with his bloodthirsty followers, before placing a gargantuan statue of himself in the Jewish temple. Embassy is a clear mockery, as Caligula is said to be “effeminate and broken down”, to make people ill wherever he travels (an inversion of Christian mythos), and in a nod to the obvious fantasy of it all, Caligula “like a mummer transforming himself on the stage, putting on all sorts of masks one after another, sought to deceive the spectators by a series of fictitious appearances.”

Philo says that Caligula sought to be deified in Alexandria “with all imaginable haste”. He says, “beginning in Alexandria he took from them all their synagogues there, and in the other cities, and filled them all with images and statues of his own form”. Finally Caligula introduces an obscenely large statue of himself into the Jewish temple, demanding to be treated like a god. Philo is sure to note that any gentile who sets foot in the holy of holies is “subjected to inevitable death for his impiety”. And again, “death is inexorably pronounced against all those who enter into the inner circuit” of the temple. Meanwhile Caligula tells the Jews, “You are haters of God, inasmuch as you do not think that I am a god, I who am already confessed to be a god by every other nation, but who am refused that appellation by you.”

Philo provides several examples of Caligula’s “great desire to be declared a god, in which desire he considered that the Jews were the only people who did not acquiesce”:

“Like an actor in a theatre, he was continually wearing different dresses at different times, taking at one time a lion's skin and a club, both gilded over; being then dressed in the character of Hercules; at another time he would wear a felt hat upon his head, when he was disguised in imitation of the Spartan twins, Castor and Pollux; sometimes he also adorned himself with ivy, and a thyrsus, and skins of fawns, so as to appear in the guise of Bacchus.”

“When he thought fit to do so, he laid aside these ornaments, and metamorphosed and transformed himself into Apollo, crowning his head with garlands, in the form of rays, and holding a bow and arrows in his left hand, and holding forth graces in his right, as if it became him to proffer blessings to all men from his ready store…”

“He would clothe himself with a breastplate, and march forth sword in hand, with a helmet on his head and a shield on his left arm, calling himself Mars, and on each side of him there marched with him the attendants of this new and unknown Mars, a troop of murderers and executioners who had already performed him all kinds of wicked services when he was raging and thirsting for human blood; and then when men saw this they were amazed and terrified at the marvellous sight, and they wondered how a man who did exactly the contrary to what was done by those beings to whom he claimed to be equal in honour, did not choose to imitate their virtues, but assumed the outward character of each…”

-Philo, Embassy to Gaius

Josephus is very strange; he criticizes other writers and historians for belittling Judea and aggrandizing Rome, while at the same time blaming the impiety of his fellow Jews for the war and extolling the victorious Titus Caesar as the savior of the Jewish law and prophecy. Josephus gives Titus Caesar the same treatment that the gospels give Jesus Christ, implicating him as Messiah and a second Cyrus. In fact, unless you believe Jesus was literally psychic, his description of the coming destruction of Jerusalem draws explicitly from Josephus’ description of the fall of the city in 70 AD.

Francesco Carotta notes of Josephus’ work:

“All of it was commissioned by the Flavii—Vespasianus, Titus, and Domitianus—whom he served in Rome from the year 70 till past 100 AD. And that was also his curse. For he had been one of the leaders of the Jewish rebellion and had switched sides to Vespasianus under suspicious circumstances, in order to prophesy, allegedly on God’s behalf, that Vespasianus was the awaited Messiah from Judaea: that he should become Emperor and his son Titus as well.” (Jesus was Caesar p.153)

Both Herod’s family and Philo’s had Julian names, as for example Tiberius Julius Alexander, Philo’s nephew, who helped command the siege of Jerusalem for the Romans decades after his uncle’s death. Herod was also named Julius and the holy land was or became the epicenter of Caesar’s cult. Christianity was later grafted onto this imperial religious infrastructure. And as Carotta notes, “All the volumes of Josephus served the special task of promoting the integration of the Jews who lived in the Roman Empire after the fall of Jerusalem”. Sometimes it seems as if the Jews actually won the civil war. Vespasian was even acclaimed emperor in Judea.

Remember that Caligula was the first Emperor subject to the “damnatio memoriae” which wikipedia defines as “the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history”. Thus the assassination of Julius Caesar could be a Flavian era rewrite of the assassination of Caligula. Caligula himself may be a rewrite - the real nature and identity of Gaius Julius Caesar may be really destroyed and forgotten. But where there is smoke there is fire, and the life of Christ overlapping with the life of Caligula is a powerful indication that Christianity is ultimately about Caligula. Writing in code and parable is one way to discreetly keep an important memory alive.

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