There’s something decidedly false about the dawn of the Roman empire, and the more you look for an unbreakable link to the past, the more everything falls apart.
Using the Latin alphabet as it existed in the day of Julius Caesar (100 BC – 44 BC) (i.e., without lower case letters, "J", or "U"), Caesar's name is properly rendered GAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR /C. IVLIVS CÆSAR./ In Greek, during Caesar's time, his name was written Καῖσαρ, Where 'Caesar' denoted him as a member of the 'Caesarian' family branch of the 'Julius' clan or gens Julia in proper Latin, and Gaius' was his personal name.
Throughout Roman history, Gaius was generally the second-most common praenomen, following only Lucius. Although many prominent families did not use it at all, it was so widely distributed amongst all social classes that Gaius became a generic name for any man, and Gaia for any woman. "Look at that guy" or if you prefer the Jew version "goy"
If you read the Gospel of Mark in the context of the religious and political world in which it was written, it strongly resembles a biting satire aimed at deflating precisely the people with whom the Romans were struggling, namely the Zealots.
Mark’s gospel, which is also to say the Flavian attempt at deradicalization, more or less worked, too. At least at first. Quite a few Jews abandoned Judaism and converted to Christianity; or, given the context of the age, it may be more accurate to say they converted from one form of Christianity (which recognized Judas of Galilee as the Messiah) to another (the Caesar-Paul fusion of Jesus as Messiah). I’ve often found it interesting that the descendants of those who didn’t convert seem to nurse a grudge against Christianity to this day, seeing it as a false religion that wrecked their people by dissolving the religious cement of their societal solidarity. You can’t really blame them, as they’ve got a point on both counts.
Unfortunately for Christianity, over the years many of the new converts – primarily drawn from the Judean population – tried their best to turn the religion back into something more strongly resembling Judaism. Old habits die hard. Thus, for instance, you get the later gospels, which introduce more Judaic elements into the Jesus narrative, and try to rehabilitate the image of the apostles (except for Judas, who even they had to accept was never going to be anything but the villain of the story, and not even in the cool antihero way ... he was just a trash human being). The later gospels also established all the nonsense about how the Old Testament is actually one long extended prophecy predicting the birth and life of the Saviour, which frankly no straightforward reading of the Old Testament really demonstrates. At all. Even the deity celebrated by Jesus – a creator God of peace, love, and forgiveness – has nothing in common with the narcissistic, jumped up volcano demon worshipped by the Israelites. The gnostic Christians, who seem to have been inspired by Paul ‘The Father of All Heresies’ of Tarsus, were bitterly opposed to the inclusion of the Old Testament in the Bible, on the grounds that it had nothing at all do with the story of Christ.
So, you had something like a power struggle inside the Church, between gnostics who wanted to preserve its original intent, and Judaizers who wanted to go back to being Jewish. Ultimately the Judaizers won. They succeeded in getting the Torah awkwardly grafted onto the New Testament in order to make the Bible, in excluding the more obviously gnostic of the various gospels on the grounds that they weren’t consistent with the other (equally fictitious) gospels (of which they’d written), and in editing Paul’s letters to make them less obviously opposed to the Judaizing influence. They couldn’t get rid of Mark, because it was the book that got the ball rolling and everyone knew it, but they did their best to water it down by re-writing the story in the other, longer, gospels, and then lying that Mark was a derivative later work.
Still, the core mission – separating the Jews from their xenophobic, genocidal faith and incorporating them into the empire by means of a more cosmopolitan, pluralistic religion – had been successful.
The next question is how, or really more precisely why, this mutated version of the imperial cult ended up replacing the OG version.
Again, I think the reason was basically political.
By around the 3rd or 4th century, the Empire was entering a terminally rocky period. There were constant, exhausting wars draining the imperial treasury; the economy was going to pot; the common folk were groaning under increasingly onerous taxation that they got increasingly little for nd with a succession of increasingly unimpressive degenerates declaring themselves emperor and therefore just as divine as Gaius Julius Caesar the imperial cult itself was looking moth-eaten. The empire needed something with which to stabilize an increasingly restive population.
I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. When faced with a problem, you solve it with the tools at hand. Christianity had already been used very effectively to pacify the population of Judea, and since then it had spread around the empire a bit as one of several mystery cults (along with Mithraism, the worship of Osiris, and so on). Christianity had been based on the imperial cult in the first place, so it was already fairly compatible with the existing social order. Better, in contrast to the imperial cult – which was ultimately based on veneration of a man who had forced the ruling class to submit through sheer force of will, and whose good works were aimed at tangibly improving the material lives of commoners in this world – Christianity advocated for its adherents to meekly submit to the will of the temporal authorities, to accept their lot in this world, and to expect their reward in the next world, where their saviour reigned. Seen from the point of view of an increasingly unpopular aristocracy trying to hold onto their positions in a decaying imperium, it’s a no-brainer.
So, that’s pretty much the story as I see it. The true Messiah, the Christos, the Saviour, the Redeemer, was one Gaius Julius Caesar. He made such a deep impression on the world that after his shocking murder he was immediately worshipped as a god. After his death, his official cult was gradually perverted by the sociopaths running the empire until it became an unrecognizable parody of itself, with the core messages twisted beyond recognition – what had started as honouring the memory of a man whose example showed that it was possible to run the bastards out of town and make a society that actually works for everyone, was turned into a tool of social control, first to subjugate a troublesome colony, later to subjugate the entire empire. Meanwhile, the memory of the man himself, which couldn’t be erased, was instead dragged through the mud to the point that he is now remembered mainly as a brutal tyrant ... the precise opposite of his true nature. Meanwhile, a mutated version of the imperial cult was combined with Jewish themes and used to pacify the Jewish population by luring them away from more violent forms of fanaticism; later, this new version of the cult was imposed across the empire as a last-ditch attempt to maintain social control.
It wasn’t entirely, or frankly speaking even primarily, a net negative. Re-reading the above paragraph I suspect that outraged Christians will be under the impression that I’m deeply hostile to Christianity – which I’m not, at all. At the same time that Christianity was warped by Judaizers and later by the institutional church in alliance with the failing Roman state to become a societal control mechanism, the ineradicable memory of Caesar, as transmitted through Paul’s poetic gnosticism and Mark’s polemics and parables, was inextricably woven through the religion – the two influences twining about one another like the two snakes of a caduceus locked in deadly enmity. The result was the Church’s schizophrenic character: narrow-minded religious bigotry on the one hand, transcendent gnosis on the other; authoritarian demands for submission, alternating with benevolence and charity. By and large I think that it’s the Pauline strain that has tended to prevail, and has led to Christianity being a force for the promotion of logos – of love, knowledge, truth, and life – far more often than not.
The idea of faking a religion for social engineering purposes isn’t quite as nuts as it sounds5. This is precisely the strategy Plato advocated in his Republic, and Russell Gmirkin has written several books laying out the evidence that the Jewish religion as we know it was itself entirely fabricated by priests inspired by reading Plato, who successfully ran exactly that psyop on their own people. Briefly, Plato’s idea was to put all of a society’s laws in a sacred book, which comes packaged with a manufactured history in which, crucially, the laws come from a divine source. After a generation or two of lethally shushing anyone who publicly questions the veracity of this new book, and raising the children to believe it to be ‘God’s honest truth’, cultural memory of the real history will be extinguished, and the religious laws will be firmly embedded in the social fabric, thus resulting in an extremely stable theocratic republic. The real power would held by the philosophers, who knew the real history, and would initiate a carefully selected few into those mysteries; Gmirkin’s take is that the Judean priests realized that they didn’t really need the philosophers once the system was implemented, and so their particular experiment in creating the Republic failed (at least from Plato’s perspective). If Gmirkin is right about the origins of the Jewish Torah, there’s a good bet that this was known to at least some of the empire’s more educated philosophers, who would be aware that it had worked quite well. If it had worked well once, why not try it again? Especially when you’re just replacing one fake religion with another.
Using the Latin alphabet as it existed in the day of Julius Caesar (100 BC – 44 BC) (i.e., without lower case letters, "J", or "U"), Caesar's name is properly rendered GAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR /C. IVLIVS CÆSAR./ In Greek, during Caesar's time, his name was written Καῖσαρ, Where 'Caesar' denoted him as a member of the 'Caesarian' family branch of the 'Julius' clan or gens Julia in proper Latin, and Gaius' was his personal name.
Throughout Roman history, Gaius was generally the second-most common praenomen, following only Lucius. Although many prominent families did not use it at all, it was so widely distributed amongst all social classes that Gaius became a generic name for any man, and Gaia for any woman. "Look at that guy" or if you prefer the Jew version "goy"
If you read the Gospel of Mark in the context of the religious and political world in which it was written, it strongly resembles a biting satire aimed at deflating precisely the people with whom the Romans were struggling, namely the Zealots.
Mark’s gospel, which is also to say the Flavian attempt at deradicalization, more or less worked, too. At least at first. Quite a few Jews abandoned Judaism and converted to Christianity; or, given the context of the age, it may be more accurate to say they converted from one form of Christianity (which recognized Judas of Galilee as the Messiah) to another (the Caesar-Paul fusion of Jesus as Messiah). I’ve often found it interesting that the descendants of those who didn’t convert seem to nurse a grudge against Christianity to this day, seeing it as a false religion that wrecked their people by dissolving the religious cement of their societal solidarity. You can’t really blame them, as they’ve got a point on both counts.
Unfortunately for Christianity, over the years many of the new converts – primarily drawn from the Judean population – tried their best to turn the religion back into something more strongly resembling Judaism. Old habits die hard. Thus, for instance, you get the later gospels, which introduce more Judaic elements into the Jesus narrative, and try to rehabilitate the image of the apostles (except for Judas, who even they had to accept was never going to be anything but the villain of the story, and not even in the cool antihero way ... he was just a trash human being). The later gospels also established all the nonsense about how the Old Testament is actually one long extended prophecy predicting the birth and life of the Saviour, which frankly no straightforward reading of the Old Testament really demonstrates. At all. Even the deity celebrated by Jesus – a creator God of peace, love, and forgiveness – has nothing in common with the narcissistic, jumped up volcano demon worshipped by the Israelites. The gnostic Christians, who seem to have been inspired by Paul ‘The Father of All Heresies’ of Tarsus, were bitterly opposed to the inclusion of the Old Testament in the Bible, on the grounds that it had nothing at all do with the story of Christ.
So, you had something like a power struggle inside the Church, between gnostics who wanted to preserve its original intent, and Judaizers who wanted to go back to being Jewish. Ultimately the Judaizers won. They succeeded in getting the Torah awkwardly grafted onto the New Testament in order to make the Bible, in excluding the more obviously gnostic of the various gospels on the grounds that they weren’t consistent with the other (equally fictitious) gospels (of which they’d written), and in editing Paul’s letters to make them less obviously opposed to the Judaizing influence. They couldn’t get rid of Mark, because it was the book that got the ball rolling and everyone knew it, but they did their best to water it down by re-writing the story in the other, longer, gospels, and then lying that Mark was a derivative later work.
Still, the core mission – separating the Jews from their xenophobic, genocidal faith and incorporating them into the empire by means of a more cosmopolitan, pluralistic religion – had been successful.
The next question is how, or really more precisely why, this mutated version of the imperial cult ended up replacing the OG version.
Again, I think the reason was basically political.
By around the 3rd or 4th century, the Empire was entering a terminally rocky period. There were constant, exhausting wars draining the imperial treasury; the economy was going to pot; the common folk were groaning under increasingly onerous taxation that they got increasingly little for nd with a succession of increasingly unimpressive degenerates declaring themselves emperor and therefore just as divine as Gaius Julius Caesar the imperial cult itself was looking moth-eaten. The empire needed something with which to stabilize an increasingly restive population.
I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. When faced with a problem, you solve it with the tools at hand. Christianity had already been used very effectively to pacify the population of Judea, and since then it had spread around the empire a bit as one of several mystery cults (along with Mithraism, the worship of Osiris, and so on). Christianity had been based on the imperial cult in the first place, so it was already fairly compatible with the existing social order. Better, in contrast to the imperial cult – which was ultimately based on veneration of a man who had forced the ruling class to submit through sheer force of will, and whose good works were aimed at tangibly improving the material lives of commoners in this world – Christianity advocated for its adherents to meekly submit to the will of the temporal authorities, to accept their lot in this world, and to expect their reward in the next world, where their saviour reigned. Seen from the point of view of an increasingly unpopular aristocracy trying to hold onto their positions in a decaying imperium, it’s a no-brainer.
So, that’s pretty much the story as I see it. The true Messiah, the Christos, the Saviour, the Redeemer, was one Gaius Julius Caesar. He made such a deep impression on the world that after his shocking murder he was immediately worshipped as a god. After his death, his official cult was gradually perverted by the sociopaths running the empire until it became an unrecognizable parody of itself, with the core messages twisted beyond recognition – what had started as honouring the memory of a man whose example showed that it was possible to run the bastards out of town and make a society that actually works for everyone, was turned into a tool of social control, first to subjugate a troublesome colony, later to subjugate the entire empire. Meanwhile, the memory of the man himself, which couldn’t be erased, was instead dragged through the mud to the point that he is now remembered mainly as a brutal tyrant ... the precise opposite of his true nature. Meanwhile, a mutated version of the imperial cult was combined with Jewish themes and used to pacify the Jewish population by luring them away from more violent forms of fanaticism; later, this new version of the cult was imposed across the empire as a last-ditch attempt to maintain social control.
It wasn’t entirely, or frankly speaking even primarily, a net negative. Re-reading the above paragraph I suspect that outraged Christians will be under the impression that I’m deeply hostile to Christianity – which I’m not, at all. At the same time that Christianity was warped by Judaizers and later by the institutional church in alliance with the failing Roman state to become a societal control mechanism, the ineradicable memory of Caesar, as transmitted through Paul’s poetic gnosticism and Mark’s polemics and parables, was inextricably woven through the religion – the two influences twining about one another like the two snakes of a caduceus locked in deadly enmity. The result was the Church’s schizophrenic character: narrow-minded religious bigotry on the one hand, transcendent gnosis on the other; authoritarian demands for submission, alternating with benevolence and charity. By and large I think that it’s the Pauline strain that has tended to prevail, and has led to Christianity being a force for the promotion of logos – of love, knowledge, truth, and life – far more often than not.
The idea of faking a religion for social engineering purposes isn’t quite as nuts as it sounds5. This is precisely the strategy Plato advocated in his Republic, and Russell Gmirkin has written several books laying out the evidence that the Jewish religion as we know it was itself entirely fabricated by priests inspired by reading Plato, who successfully ran exactly that psyop on their own people. Briefly, Plato’s idea was to put all of a society’s laws in a sacred book, which comes packaged with a manufactured history in which, crucially, the laws come from a divine source. After a generation or two of lethally shushing anyone who publicly questions the veracity of this new book, and raising the children to believe it to be ‘God’s honest truth’, cultural memory of the real history will be extinguished, and the religious laws will be firmly embedded in the social fabric, thus resulting in an extremely stable theocratic republic. The real power would held by the philosophers, who knew the real history, and would initiate a carefully selected few into those mysteries; Gmirkin’s take is that the Judean priests realized that they didn’t really need the philosophers once the system was implemented, and so their particular experiment in creating the Republic failed (at least from Plato’s perspective). If Gmirkin is right about the origins of the Jewish Torah, there’s a good bet that this was known to at least some of the empire’s more educated philosophers, who would be aware that it had worked quite well. If it had worked well once, why not try it again? Especially when you’re just replacing one fake religion with another.
I would to hear you and Laurent Guyenot talk ancient history. What a fascinating article. This will be rooting around in my head for a couple days.