As I was reading Francesco Carotta’s Jesus was Caesar, my grandmother caught a glimpse of the cover and recoiled in horror. Remarking on the juxtaposition of Jesus and Julius, she said “I don’t like that at all” despite having no religious bone in her body. This placement of a “wise teacher” and a “brutal dictator” side by side was enough to bring a strictly secular woman to the point of visceral disgust.
But I think Carotta got it backwards: Julius was actually Christ. All signs point to both Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ being entirely mythical characters. And if Caesar was created in imitation of Christ, it revolutionizes our understanding of history.
The parallels between Jesus and Caesar are legion. In his campaign against the Roman Republic, Caesar comes out of Gaul, crosses the Rubicon, rides into the capital on a horse, challenges the authority of Senate, is betrayed, killed and deified. Likewise Jesus comes out of “little Gaul” (Galatia or Galilee), crosses the Jordan, rides an ass into Jerusalem, challenges the Sanhedrin, is betrayed, killed and deified. They have the same initials in Latin, which is odd because Christ and Caesar start with different letters in Greek. Carotta also notes, “Both die on the same respective dates of the year: Caesar on the Ides (15th) of March, Jesus on the 15th of Nisan”.
Here’s another strange likeness I picked up last Christmas: Jesus was supposedly born at the winter solstice, a time of year known to the Norse as “Yule” and the Anglo Saxons as “Giuli”. Now wouldn’t you know it, Julius Caesar was supposedly born in the month of July near the time of the summer solstice. Just as his birth year being placed 100 years before Jesus, the birth date of Caesar shows that someone wanted to distance these two doppelgangers. But someone fucked up by naming the high month of summer after the northern European word for wintertime.
Perusing the history of the Julian calendar, the falsity peels off in huge layers. To begin with, the veracity of the old 10 month Roman calendar is challenged by scholars; as wikipedia says this particular calendar “is only attested in late Republican and Imperial sources and supported only by the misplaced names of the months from September to December.” Supposedly, July was originally named Quintilis and was originally the 5th month, but was renamed in honor of Caesar’s death in 44 BC.
The 365.25 day calendar itself is named after Julius Caesar and he is credited with inventing it. Mythological founders are often credited with the inventions of other people. The “Julian” calendar was apparently created by a Hellene named Sosigenes in Alexandria, who “advised” Caesar, according to Plutarch. It was used by Western institutions until 1582 when it was replaced by the Gregorian calendar for better solar accuracy. The Julian calendar continues to be used by the Orthodox church. In this calendar, Jesus is born on January 7, about 18 days after the winter solstice. Caesar is born on July 12, about 22 days after the summer solstice.
What can we conclude about “Christmas in July”? I have long argued that the Latin JU- is synonymous with the Greek IE- and the Hebrew Y-. This would make Julius and Jesus identical names. Indeed the JU- sound signifies the highest god, as in Jove or Jupiter. This would link it to the hypothetical root DJU, defined as “sky”. The Norse and Anglo Saxons were using the words Yule and Giuli as early by the 5th century CE, before they were Christianized. In 726 CE, Bede cited Yule or Giuli as occurring on the day the winter sun begins to increase again - i.e. December 25th.
Hippolytus of Rome supposedly claimed December 25th as the birth date of Jesus in the 3rd century CE, but this source is dubious, like all Latin sources. It’s important to remember that the “high” Latin language of Roman history bears little resemblance to the “vulgar” Latin actually used locally in Italy. The ruins of Pompeii, preserved by volcanic eruption in 79 CE, show vulgar Latin graffiti atop rich mosaic scenes of Greek myth. One of the finest mosaics at Pompeii is believed to represent Alexander the Great battling the Persian emperor Darius III. Neither evidence of ancient Roman history nor high Latin language can be found in Pompeii.
Apparently the birthday of Jesus was pasted on top of the birthday of Sol Invictus in the 4th century CE as Christianity became a state religion. The birth year of Jesus Christ was not set until 525 CE by Dionysius Exiguus. But the birth year of Jesus is chronologically anchored to the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 CE, which fulfilled the prophecies of Jesus promised to take place within a generation. Menawhile the birth year of Caesar is exactly 100 years before the birth of Jesus. The birth of the Roman empire is also exactly 100 years before the Flavians triumphed at Masada, thus concluding their civil war against Rome and Jerusalem.
Flavian history anchors the biographical timelines of both Jesus and Caesar. But it seems that Caesar was invented much later, after the birth of Christ had been associated with the pagan dates of Yule or Giuli. “History is written by the victors”. When you have a series of victors in a literary tug of war, history gets messy very fast.
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Wouldn't "JU" in Greek be IY (upsilon, not epsilon)? Anyway, it seems our history and religious history owes a lot to the Flavians, heavily influenced by Josephus. Very interesting.