Juliana

Of course, 'Jesus was Caesar' is nothing for small minds.
So maybe it's not for you and you better not read it.

Regards,
Juliana

Peter Kirby

"They laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Darwin, but they also laughed at Bozo the clown."

sincerely,
Peter Kirby

kaas

Sorry Joseph. Sick games? I never made a secret of my identity. Always added my full name and even my email on my first entries to the Carotta foum. Only Carotta had a little bit more difficulty in identifying me than Caesar. Even had to create a pseudonym to convince him that I was not Anton. And I don't warn people NOT TO READ Carotta - because if you like crap like Von Daeniken, The Bible Code, Hancock etc. it's great stuff - I warn people for so called intellectuals like "professor" Paul Cliteur, who take this crap serious.
The bottomline is that Carotta is afraid of being exposed for the fool he is, removed most of the negative texts about his book from his site and starts scolding like a fishwife whenever somebody says something negative about his book.
I was hoping you would do that for me. Only out of context this Warning headline can easlily be misunderstood by nincompoops like you. "Announcement" would have been better.
Fine with me. Anything better than watching Foxnews.

But serious. Spoiled my entire evening yesterday by this and I don't have the time to be on the internet all day. So if anyone would like to know more about Carotta and Cliteur, mail me (brojan20@hotmail.com) and I'll send you all texts that were removed by Carotta (English, Dutch and/or German).

Lucretius

Another parallel between Caligula and Jesus :-
Caligula parading round the army camp wearing a miniature soldiers uniform (including the caligulae small boots from which he got his nickname) and Jesus showing his precociousness in debating with the Rabbis
Definitely think now that Jesus was actually Caligula

exile

So

lived at the same time

thought he was divine

was considered mad by his enemies

was killed by his enemies

died young

precocious

met Pontius Pilate

Anything else?

Lucretius

As I posted earlier in this thread Caligula wanted his statue placed in the Temple in Jerusalem thus effectively proclaiming himself as the God/King of the Jews .

Amaleq13

Do not drag outside, personal conflicts into this forum. Discuss the evidence/argument like rational adults and keep the personal baggage somewhere else. We are only interested in good reasons to accept or reject the offered conclusion.

kaas

OK, here we go.

I mailed an English text yesterday to several people who asked for it. It was written long ago for Carotta’s own forum (and immediately removed from it), but while rereading it, I noticed it was too much written for those involved in the discussion over there and therefore not always comprehensible for outsiders, nor build up in the most logical sequence (as if you fall in the middle of a discussion).
So I decided to reshuffle and summarize it and put it on the two forums I got most response from: christianforums and IIDB, thus covering most of the spectrum. Only missing a Muslim site (Allah = Julius) and a Buddist one (Gaudama Siddhatta = Octavianus Sebastos) (Yes, Lucretius and exile, you can still learn a lot from our friend Francesco).
I will not spend more than half an hour per day on it, so you will get it in peaces.
I’m Dutch and my English is far from perfect. Sorry about that. Hope it won’t be too bad.
Well, Joseph told you I had no ad rem arguments, so let’s start and see.
Bernard


To summarize ‘Jesus was Caesar’ is almost impossible. It would mean you have to find some logic in a book that possesses none. Carotta’s book is so chaotic and many pages show such a staggering pile of nonsense that it is almost impossible to know where to start. The moment you try to find some structure in Carotta’s thinking, the moment you try to find logic in his sea of illogic, you will be trapped in the whirlpool of his circular reasoning.

In Matthijs van Boxsel’s, ‘Encyclopedie van de domheid: Morosofie; dwaze wijzen en wijze dwazen in Nederland en Vlaanderen’ (Amsterdam 2001) [Encyclopaedia of stupidity: Morosophy; foolish wise men and wise fools in The Netherlands and Flanders], authors like Carotta are characterized as follows:

“The morosopher creates a world that is held together by sophisms. It is impossible to systematize all errors of thought. What order do you have to follow when describing disorder? …… There are roughly three categories of sophisms: [1] errors of judgment (errors that are made during the collecting and ordering of the material), [2] emotional tricks and [3] logical sophisms. (1) Morosophy shows a festive parade of rash generalizations, post-hoc arguments, wrong comparisons, vague classifications and wordmagic. The morosophers sin against all scientific rules: they formulate a hypothesis by drawing general conclusions from existing facts (induction); on the basis of this hypothesis they make specific predictions (deduction); guided by their hypothesis they collect their data (observation); they test their predictions by further observations (experiments) to confirm or falsify their hypothesis ……(3) Finally we recognize in morosophy all logical sophisms: non sequitur, petitio principii, circular argumentation, etymology, simplification and ambiguity.�

Of coarse, whether this description fits Carotta has to be shown first. I’ll try to concentrate on some central themes.

Carotta’s initial idea for his book came, as he writes at the beginning of his introduction, from a Caesar portrait:

â€?The triggering factor for the book in hand was the sight of Caesar’s portrait in the Torlonia Museum… In function and expression the Torlonia head resembled the sorrowful face of Christ in the PietÃ* and since PietÃ* representations are typical for Jesus Christ but not for Julius Caesar, the question arose whether the later Jesus borrowed other elements from the earlier Caesar.â€? (p.11)

This already is a very puzzling opening. First of all Carotta is not referring to PietÃ* representations (where Mary holds the dead body of Christ, as in Michelangelo’s famous PietÃ*), but to images called 'Man of Sorrow' or 'Ecce Homo'. But that is, though typical for Carotta’s knowledge of art, only a minor detail. More important is that depictions of a sorrowful Christ only appear, roughly speaking, in the second millennium, so how can mediaeval artists, not knowing of the Caesar-origin of Christianity, be influenced by representations of Caesar? But most puzzling of all is that this specific representation of Caesar is an a-typical one:

“…since [!] Pietj representations are typical for Jesus Christ but not for Julius Caesar, the question arose whether the later Jesus borrowed other elements from the earlier Caesar.�

“Since�? “Since�? If a sorrowful representation is not, repeat: not typical for Caesar, then how could it influence the representation of Christ at all? And what about those “other elements�? Other elements as well, or other elements nevertheless, or what?
What the Hell does this mean?

At this point, halfway Carotta’s first page, every clear thinking person should get the first uncomfortable feeling that there might be something very, very wrong with this book.

But, true, an initial wrong brainwave can lead to a very satisfying and fruitful result.
Well, we will see about that the next time.

Juliana

Not very convincing yet. Please continue, we're eager to hear more from the fundamentalist Christian camp.

Juliana

kaas

We're? Is that a pluralis majestatis or are you talking on behalf of Francesco as well? As you know, I'm as Christian as the pope is atheist and sorry that you'll have to wait, but I have other things to do at the moment.
Bernard