by
Damien F. Mackey
In 2004 I wrote an article, “The Lost
Cultural Foundations of Western Civilisation”, from which this site has
developed: (http://westerncivilisationamaic.blogspot.com.au).
Towards the end of this article I included
a section titled, “Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar”, showing what I believed to
be Roman plagiarisation of the New Testament – Greco-Roman appropriation of
Hebrew-Israelite (Jewish) culture in its various forms being the subject matter
of this article and of this site.
Here is that brief and not yet fully
developed article:
….
2. Jesus Christ
and Julius Caesar
We read at the very beginning of this article that
Virgil’s Aeneid “is an immortal poem at the heart of Western life and culture.”
But it too appears to have been inspired by the Hebrew Bible. According to C.
McDowell [“The Egyptian Prince Moses”, Proc. Third Seminar of Catastrophism and
Ancient History (C and AH Press, CA,
1986), p. 2]:
“The Romans, with the advent of the creation of their
empire, wanted to give great antiquity to their patriarchs. The first major
effort along this line was put forth by Virgil in his Aeneid. This Roman
“bible” portrays the imperial city as having been founded and enhanced
according to a divine plan: Rome’s mission was to bring peace and civilization
to the world. Cyrus Gordon has compared Virgil’s accounts of the royal house of
Rome with the New Testament account of the Messianic office as expressed in Jesus
of Nazareth. Both Roman and New Testament writers drew upon the Old Testament.
Virgil used the Old Testament account of Israel’s national experience as a
literary model to recount Rome’s history. But he went much further. He drew
upon the saying of the Hebrew prophets concerning the coming Messiah and
applied them to Augustus, the first emperor, to make him “scion of a god”. The
divinely sired ruler who descended from an ancient line was to rule the world
in a golden age. Thus the new theology of Rome was set forth. It was heavily
infused with theology appropriated and adapted from the Old Testament of the
Jews”.
This explanation by McDowell may, in part, help to
account for the distinct parallels now to be discussed between history’s most
famous J.C’s – Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar – both referred to as the
greatest man the earth has ever produced [Grant, M., Julius Caesar (Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, 1969), Foreword
p. 15: “A hundred or even fifty years ago, Gaius Julius Caesar (J.C.) was
variously described as the greatest man of action who ever lived, and even as
‘the entire and perfect man’.”].
Whilst in most aspects Jesus and Julius could not be any
more different, there are nevertheless certain incredibly close likenesses,
especially in regard to their violent deaths.
Both Jesus and Julius were born into poor circumstances;
but their ancestry was one of blue blood: Davidic in the case of Jesus,
Patrician in the case of Caesar. Their births were notable, a miraculous Virgin
birth for Jesus, Julius’ birth giving rise to the term ‘Caesarian’.
Julius belonged to the populares, and Jesus was likewise
for the common people.
“The tax collectors”, said Cicero, “have never been
loyal, and are now very friendly with Caesar” [as cited ibid., p. 161]. Likewise, the Pharisees were critical of Jesus for
eating with “tax collectors and sinners” (Matthew 9:11).
Trial and Death
Both Jesus and Julius had spoken of an early death. Both
had entered their capital city (Jerusalem, Rome) in triumph, on an ancient
feast-day (Passover, Lupercalia), shortly before mid-March, and had been hailed
as “king”. This had caused anger and had the plotters conspiring. But there was
also an ambivalence about the kingship. Caesar, though a king in deed, had
rejected the diadem thrice. And Pilate had tried to get to the bottom of Jesus’
kingship: ‘So you are a king, then?’ (John 18:37); eventually having written in
three languages: “Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews” (19:19).
The prime mover of Caesar’s fatal stabbing was the
soldier, Gaius Cassius Longinus, the last name (Longinus) being the very name
that tradition has associated with the Roman soldier who rent Christ’s side
with a spear (19:34).
The zealot amongst the conspirators was the intense young
Brutus, in whom Dante at least had obviously discerned a similarity with Judas,
having located “Brutus and Cassius with Judas Iscariot in Hell” [as cited by
Grant, op. cit., p. 257]. Even
Christ’s words to Judas in Gethsemane, ‘So you would betray the Son of Man with
a kiss?’ (Luke 22:48), resemble what is alleged to be Caesar’s anguished last
cry: re-made by Shakespeare as ‘Et tu Brute?’.
There is the premonitory dream warning by the woman (cf.
Matthew 27:19).
There may even be a confused reminiscence of Barabbas:
“Caesar … staged an elaborate legal charade against an old man called Rabirius
[Barabbas?] … [who] had been allegedly implicated in … murder … not interested
in having the old Rabirius actually executed” [ibid., p. 51]. (Cf. Matthew 27:15-23).
On the Ides of March Julius Caesar is supposed to have
died, like Jesus, riddled with wounds.
The ‘heretical’ question must now be asked: Did Julius
Caesar really exist? Or was his ‘life’ merely a mixture of his nephew Augustus,
who also bore the name Julius Caesar, and aspects of the life of Jesus Christ
according to Virgil’s biblical borrowings? And perhaps other composites as
well? “Portrait busts are not a safe guide to [Julius Caesar’s] appearance,
since they may or may not date from his life-time” [ibid., p. 245].
Do we thus have any primary evidence for Caesar, as
apparently we do not for Socrates?
Do we have anything for Jesus Christ for that matter? I
believe that we do have a most precious artifact of his in the enigmatic
‘Shroud of Turin’ [See outstanding article “The Mystery of the Shroud” in National Geographic, June 1980, pp.
730f. Ian Wilson has disputed the 1988 carbon dating of the Shroud in The Blood
and the Shroud (Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, 1998), and has traced the
Shroud back historically to the early Christian centuries].
[End of
article]
Further concerning the Shroud, see my
recent:
Resurrection and the Shroud: ‘a New Dimension’, ‘a New
Science’.
Regarding those “perhaps other
composites as well” referred to above, from which the character of ‘Julius
Caesar’ may have borrowed, I can now add that one of these “composites” could
well have been Alexander the Great. Consider the following compelling comparisons
(taken from: http://www.livius.org/aj-al/alexander/alexander_t65.html):
Alexander and Caesar
In Antiquity, a boy who wanted to play
a role of some importance in his town, had to visit a rhetorical school, where
he learned how to speak and behave in public. Often, a teacher would ask his
pupils to make a speech on a historical theme, so that they could show their
skills as a rhetor and their ability to deal with historical sources. A
well-known theme was the comparison of Alexander the
Great and the Roman commander Gaius Julius
Caesar (100-44).
The following text was written by the Greek historian Appian of Alexandria (c.95-c.165) and is a part of his History
of the Civil wars (2.149-154). It is the end of his description of Caesar's career,
and Appian, a Greek, gives the Roman the ultimate compliment: he was comparable
to Alexander.
The translation was made by John Carter.
Thus Caesar died on the day they call the Ides of
March, about the middle of Anthesterion, the day which the seer said he would
not outlive. In the morning Caesar made fun of him, and said, 'The Ides have
come.' Unabashed, the seer replied, 'But not gone', and Caesar, ignoring not
only the predictions of this sort given him with such confidence by the seer,
but also the other portents I mentioned earlier, left the house and met his
death. He was in the fifty-sixth year of his life, a man who was extremely
lucky in everything, gifted with a divine spark, disposed to great deeds, and
fittingly compared with Alexander.
They
were both supremely ambitious, warlike, rapid in executing their decisions,
careless of danger, unsparing of their bodies, and believers not so much in
strategy as in daring and good luck. One of them made a long journey across the
desert in the hot season [1]
to the shrine of Ammon,
and when the sea was pushed back crossed the Pamphylian
gulf by divine power, for heaven held back the deep for him until he passed,
and it rained for him while he was on the march. In India he ventured on an
unsailed sea. He also led the way up a scaling-ladder, leapt unaccompanied on
to the enemy wall, and suffered thirteen wounds. He was never defeated and
brought all his campaigns to an end after one or at most two pitched battles.
In Europe he conquered much foreign territory and subdued the Greeks, who are a
people extremely difficult to govern and fond of their independence, and
believe that they had never obeyed anyone before him except Philip,
and that for only a short time on the pretext that he was their leader in a
war. As for Asia, he overran virtually the whole of it. To sum up Alexander's
luck and energy in a sentence, he conquered the lands that he saw, and died
intent on tackling the rest.
In
Caesar's case, the Adriatic yielded by becoming calm and navigable in the
middle of winter. He also crossed the western ocean in an unprecedented attempt
to attack the Britons, and ordered his captains to wreck their ships by running
them ashore on the British cliffs. He forced his way alone in a small boat at
night against another stormy sea, when he ordered the captain to spread the
sails and take courage not from the waves but from Caesar's good fortune. On
many occasions he was the only man to spring forward from a terrified mass of
others and attack the enemy. The Gauls alone he faced thirty times in battle,
finally conquering 400 of their tribes, who the Romans felt to be so menacing
that in one of their laws concerning immunity from military service for priests
and older men there was a clause 'unless the Gauls invade' - in which case
priests and older men were to serve. In the Alexandrian war, when he was
trapped by himself on a bridge and his life was in danger, he threw off his
purple cloak and jumped into the sea. The enemy hunted for him, but he swam a
long way under water without being seen, drawing breath only at intervals,
until he approached a friendly ship, when he stretched out his hands, revealed
himself, and was rescued. When he became involved in these civil wars, whether
from fear, as he himself used to say, or from a desire for power, he carne up
against the best generals of his time and several great armies which were not
composed of uncivilized peoples, as before, but of Romans at the peak of their success
and fortune, and he too needed only one or two pitched battles in each case to
detect them. Not that his troops were unbeaten like Alexander's, since they
were humiliated by the Gauls in the great disaster which overtook them when
Cotta and Titurius were in command, in Hispania Petreius and Afranius had them
hemmed in under virtual siege, at Dyrrhachium
and in Africa they were well and truly routed, and in Hispania they were
terrified of the younger Pompey. But Caesar himself was impossible to terrify
and was victorious at the end of every campaign. By the use of force and the
conferment of favor, and much more surely than Sulla and with a much stronger
hand, he overcame the might of the Roman state, which already lorded it over
land and sea from the far west to the river Euphrates,
and he made himself king against the wishes of the Romans, even if he did not
receive that title. And he died, like Alexander, planning fresh campaigns.
The
pair of them had armies, too, which were equally enthusiastic and devoted to
them and resembled wild beasts when it came to battle, but were frequently
difficult to manage and made quarrelsome by the hardships they endured. When
their leaders were dead, the soldiers mourned them, missed them, and granted
them divine honors in a similar way. Both men were well formed in body and of
fine appearance. Each traced his lineage back to Zeus, the one being a descendant
of Aeacus and Heracles,
the other of Anchises and Aphrodite. They were unusually ready to fight
determined opponents, but very quick to offer settlement. They liked to pardon
their captives, gave them help as well as pardon, and wanted nothing except
simply to be supreme. To this extent they can be closely compared, but it was
with unequal resources that they set out to seek power. Alexander possessed a
kingdom that had been firmly established under Philip, while Caesar was a
private individual, from a noble and celebrated family, but very short of
money.
Neither
of them took any notice of omens which referred to them, nor showed any
displeasure with the seers who prophesied their deaths. On more than one
occasion the omens were similar and indicated a similar end for both. Twice
each was confronted with a lobeless liver. The first time it indicated extreme
danger. In Alexander's case this was among the Oxydracans, when after he had
climbed on to the enemy's wall at the head of his Macedonian
troops the scaling-ladder broke, and he was left isolated on top. He leapt
audaciously inwards towards the enemy, where he was badly beaten around the
chest and neck with a massive club and was about to collapse, when the
Macedonians, who had broken down the gates in panic, just managed to rescue
him. In Caesar's case it happened in Hispania, when his army was seized with
terror when it was drawn up to face the younger Pompey and would not engage the
enemy. Caesar ran out in front of everyone into the space between the two
armies and took 200 throwing-spears on his shield, until he too was rescued by
his army, which was swept forward by shame and apprehension. Thus the first
lobeless victim brought both of them into mortal danger, but the second brought
death itself, as follows. The seer Peithagoras told Apollodorus, who was afraid
of Alexander and Hephaestion
and was sacrificing, not to be afraid, because both of them would soon be out
of the way. When Hephaestion promptly died, Apollodorus was nervous that there
might be some conspiracy against the king, and revealed the prophecy to him.
Alexander, smiling, asked Peithagoras himself what the omen meant, and when
Peithagoras replied that it meant his life was over, he smiled again and still
thanked Apollodorus for his concern and the seer for his frankness.
When
Caesar was about to enter the senate for the last time, as I described not many
pages back, the same omens appeared. He scoffed at them, saying they had been
the same in Hispania, and when the seer said that he had indeed been in danger
on that occasion, and that the omen was now even more deadly, he made some
concession to this forthrightness by repeating the sacrifice, until finally he
became irritated by being delayed by the priests and went in to his death. And
the same thing happened to Alexander, who was returning with his army from
India to Babylon
and was already approaching the city when the Chaldaeans begged him to postpone
his entry for the moment. He quoted the line 'That prophet is the best, who
guesses rightly' but the Chaldaeans begged him a second time not to enter with
his army looking towards the setting sun, but to go round and take the city
while facing the rising sun. Apparently he relented at this and began to make a
circuit, but when he became annoyed with the marshes and swampy ground
disregarded this second warning too and made his entrance facing west. Anyway,
he entered Babylon, and sailed down the Euphrates as far as the river
Pallacotta which takes the water of the Euphrates away into swamps and marshes
and prevents the irrigation of the Assyrian
country. They say that as he was considering the damming of this river, and
taking a boat to look, he poked fun at the Chaldaeans because he had safely
entered and safely sailed from Babylon. Yet he was destined to die as soon as
he returned there. Caesar, too, indulged in mockery of alike sort. The seer had
foretold the day of his death, saying that he would not survive the Ides of
March. When the day came Caesar mocked the seer and said, 'The Ides have come',
but he still died that day. In this way, then, they made similar fun of the
omens which related to themselves, displayed no anger with the seers who
announced these omens to them, and were none the less caught according to the
letter of the prophecies.
In
the field of knowledge they were also enthusiastic lovers of wisdom, whether
traditional, Greek or foreign. The Brahmans, who are considered to be the
astrologers and wise men of the Indians like the Magians
among the Persians, were questioned by Alexander on the subject of Indian
learning, and Caesar investigated Egyptian lore when he was in Egypt
establishing Cleopatra
on the throne. As a result he improved much in the civilian sphere at Rome, and
brought the year, which was still of variable length due to the occasional
insertion of intercalary months which were calculated according to the lunar
calendar, into harmony with the course of the sun, according to Egyptian observance.
[End of quote]
Carotta’s Extraordinary Claim
Such apparent close similarities
between Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar has a scholar named Francesco Carotta
perceived that he has gone so far as to claim that: Jesus was Caesar.
Whilst this is not
my own view, which is rather that “Jesus Christ was the Model for some legends
surrounding Julius Caesar”, the similarities found by Carotta are indeed
intriguing.
Some of these I have already listed above.
Carotta, not failing to notice the same sorts of stunning parallels
between the two lives, has written a book which is the other way round to my
article, that Julius Caesar was, in part, based on Jesus Christ. For Carotta,
Jesus Christ was instead based on Julius Caesar.
Whilst I
believe that Carotta is wrong, I am intrigued that he, too, has attempted to
fuse the two lives. Here is one review of Carotta’s fascinating book:
– Carotta: ‘Everything of the Story of Jesus can be Found
in the Biography of Caesar.’
The Italian-German linguist and philosopher Francesco
Carotta proves in his book Jesus was Caesar that the story of Jesus Christ has
its origin in Roman sources. In more than fifteen years of investigation
Carotta has found the traces which lead to the Julian origin of Christianity.
He concludes that the story of Jesus is based on the narrative of the life of
Julius Caesar.
….
Carotta’s new evidence leads to such an overwhelming
amount of similarities between the biography of Caesar and the story of Jesus
that coincidence can be ruled out.
– Both Caesar and Jesus start their rising careers in
neighboring states in the north: Gallia and Galilee.
– Both have to cross a fateful river: the Rubicon and the
Jordan. Once across the rivers, they both come across a patron/rival: Pompeius
and John the Baptist, and their first followers: Antonius and Curio on the one
hand and Peter and Andrew on the other.
– Both are continually on the move, finally arriving at
the capital, Rome and Jerusalem, where they at first triumph, yet subsequently
undergo their passion.
– Both have good relationships with women and have a
special relationship with one particular woman, Caesar with Cleopatra and Jesus
with Magdalene.
– Both have encounters at night, Caesar with Nicomedes of
Bithynia, Jesus with Nicodemus of Bethany.
– Both have an affinity to ordinary people-and both run
afoul of the highest authorities: Caesar with the Senate, Jesus with the
Sanhedrin.
– Both are contentious characters, but show praiseworthy
clemency as well: the clementia Caesaris and Jesus’ Love-thy-enemy.
– Both have a traitor: Brutus and Judas. And an assassin
who at first gets away: the other Brutus and Barabbas. And one who washes his
hands of it: Lepidus and Pilate.
– Both are accused of making themselves kings: King of
the Romans and King of the Jews. Both are dressed in red royal robes and wear a
crown on their heads: a laurel wreath and a crown of thorns.
– Both get killed: Caesar is stabbed with daggers, Jesus
is crucified, but with a stab wound in his side.
– Jesus as well as Caesar hang on a cross. For a reconstruction
of the crucifixion of Caesar, see:
– Both die on the same respective dates of the year:
Caesar on the Ides (15 th) of March, Jesus on the 15 th of Nisan.
– Both are deified posthumously: as Divus Iulius and as
Jesus Christ.
– Caesar and Jesus also use the same words, e.g.:
Caesar’s famous Latin ‘Veni, vidi, vici’-I came, I saw, I conquered-is in the
Gospel transmitted into: ‘I came, washed and saw’, whereby Greek enipsa, ‘I
washed’, replaces enikisa, ‘I conquered’. ….
[End of quote]
To which we
find this rejoinder: “Good try, boys. But I think that our site provides
copious evidence for the fact that the Greeks and the Romans tended to be the
plagiarisers”.
And I would
fully agree with this last observation, having by now written several articles
on what I consider to have been the Greco-Roman appropriation of Hebrew
(Jewish) culture and civilisation at various levels.
To give but two
examples of this:
Joseph as Thales: Not an "Hellenic Gotterdamerung" but Israelite
Wisdom
and
Re-Orienting to Zion the History of
Ancient Philosophy
