Toto

If the excerpts are clearly nonsense, why would someone invest time in reading the entire book? Is there something that would cure the defects? There are so many books that most of us will never have time to read.

We know what you are doing here. A simple google shows that there is a net publicity campaign to push this book using every message board you can find. You are bordering on violating our rules for commercial spam. If you really want to discuss the book, please provide some answers to the questions that have been raised, based on the published excerpts.

The usual method of publicizing a book is to provide review copies to reviewers, not just raise questions that can only be answered by buying a copy of the book.

Zeichman

What's worse is that the Corotta apologists are unable to defend the claims nor answer the basic questions of such critics. You'd think that those who had read the book would be able to say something to the effect of "well, Corotta elaborates on this potential weakness and says..."

Alas.

Vorkosigan

Carotta's work is baaaaaad. As I have amply proved.

You know, if you hadn't insulted me, I wouldn't have ripped him apart.

There are 150 citations of scripture in Mark, at least. Can you show that these scripture citations do not exist? How would you go about refuting that claim? For example Mk 1:2

Here is my herald whom I send on ahead of you
Idou, apostello ton aggelon mou pro prosopou sou

taken directly from the Greek of the Septaugint version of Exodus:
Idou, apostello ton aggelon mou pro prosopou sou

Is this incorrect?

Vorkosigan

Juliana

Maybe I should "insult" you a little more, did I? So you can "rip him apart" a little more thus demonstrating your "expertise".

I don't believe it, are you serious? Yes, that is correct, but what does that prove???
Of course there are references to the Jewish scriptures that's how the vita Divi Iulii became the gospel and the biblia judaica became the so-called Old Testament.
If you want another nice example of this read on page 61:

If we take an objective look at the corpse of Jesus, we have to observe that it bears a very unusual feature for someone who was crucified, namely a stab-wound in the side, and one so open and fresh that blood ran out of it. Very peculiar indeed, so much so that John, who quotes this detail, feels himself obliged to provide us with an explanation for the inexplicable:

‘But when they came to Jesus ... one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water.’[109]

And because it was apparently unheard of, John fiercely swears that it is true:

‘And he that saw it bare record, and his record is true: and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe.’[110]

And because still no one believes him John explains why he should be believed:

‘For these things were done, that the scripture should be fulfilled… (Zach. 12:10): “They shall look on him whom they pierced.�’[111]

Critical biblical critics smirk here and say that the passage obviously has been invented to ensure that the prophecy is fulfilled: and they are right, but only partly.

Here we are dealing with a so-called midrash, a very formalized method for interpreting something inexplicable. The idea is that everything must already be present in the biblia iudaica; if an unusual event takes place and one has to justify it, then at least one passage has to be found in the Jewish books that can serve as a vaticinium ex eventu, a prophecy after the event. Some Gospel critics even deem the events in the Gospel text eventus ex vaticiniis, which would mean they are entirely invented on the basis of the prophecies. They thus misjudge intention and mechanism of the midrash. For, one sees immediately that the unexplainable must already be present so that the corresponding passage can be sought, otherwise simply any passage could be sought to justify anything. But the Gospels do not contain just anything but something definite, and very precisely defined at that."

The Jewish scriptures are quite voluminous, you can find a passage for almost anything if you search long enough.
Carotta proves that the gospel story is a corrupted version of the vita Divi Iulii. E.g. he can explain many inconsistencies that have not been not understood, e.g. p. 172

However, this passage also contains a notorious and even severe case
of incongruity within the Gospel. Here Jesus supposedly crossed Lake Gennesaret. Yet the Gospel writers do not speak of a lake, but of the sea. For example, when Jesus calms the storm, ‘He speaks to the sea: be still and cease!’ To the ‘sea’:thalassa.
But here it is about an inland lake, a fresh water lake. Therefore the correct word would be limnê, but that is not what is written. Only Luke, who tells a shortened version of the incident, uses limnê.
There has been no explanation up to today as to why Mark and Matthew systematically and repeatedly use thalassa.
Thalassa only fits in the Caesar story because he crossed over a real sea: the Ionian.
Thus our first test not only highlights the fact that the parallels between Caesar and Jesus are systematic, but also demonstrates that perplexing vocabulary of the Gospel can be explained when traced back to that of the history of Caesar.

There are umpteen examples of that also in the pages which are online. Of course you don't find them, but only those which "prove" the gospel of Mark is "thoroughly Jewish". This is what you want to prove and so you have proved it. Bravos!
Maybe you could also show your "expertise" on some of the examples in the above summary? E.g. the words of Caesar, which miraculously appear in the Gospel in the structurally significant places.
The book contains a complete synopsis of Mark and the story of the civil war from the Rubicon to Caesar's assassination and apotheosis (Jesus from the Jordan to his "crucifixion" and resurrection). It shows they are one and the same story, more or less mutated, yes, but clearly identifiable.
You could learn a lot, but you don't have to, because you know already that
"Carotta is baaaaad".
I better not write here what I think of you, you might feel insulted.

Juliana

Vorkosigan

It was routine to portray kings and generals in the iconography of savior figures, all across the Mediteranean. Thompson's recent work The Messiah Myth has a huge collection of material on this practice.

Incorrect. Caesar's public career began in Asia Minor, where at his own expense he raised a scratch army to fight the invasion of Mithridates of Pontus in 74. Caesar became a war hero when his forces were able to hold out long enough to let a real army arrive and save the day. Then he was a magistrate in Spain, then he was aedile, in charge of the bread and circuses (made himself popular), and then he was made pontifex maximus. It was only after he had become famous that he was governor of Gaul. Does Carotta not have an ADSL line in his home?

But that's still a parallel. After all, you could say their public careers began in the East. :rolling:

Please name an inhabited area of the Med basin where travel was possible without crossing any rivers. Also, in Mark, the earliest account, Jesus never crosses the Jordan prior to entering Caphernaum. So....no parallel.

Imagine ending a journey in a city, eh? That would be weird. But then, Jesus doesn't enter a city. He walks along the sea of Galilee, collects some disciples..... oh, and Caesar's first stop was Ariminum, follow by Iguvium and Auximum, and then Camerinum and Asculum, not Corfinium. Yes that's right, there were five cities prior to Corfinium. But why let facts get in the way of a good parallel? I mean, if we can play language games, I see no reason why we shouldn't adjust history to suit our needs either!

Whereas Jesus casts the demon out, Pompey's troops in Corfinium revolted and joined Caesar. But why should we let facts get in the way of a good story?

What a shame Mark was written in Greek, eh? I mean, the words are the same in Chinese too. Do you think Mark was working off a Chinese exemplar? In fact, occupy can be used to describe both military and demonic possession in English as well. Could it be that this is a common human metaphor?

No kidding. It's a universal metaphor.

This is the only true one.

Please show me in the Gospel of Mark where Judas "betrays" Jesus. It's not clear that "betrayal" occurs in Mark. Mark never uses that word, "betray." All occurrences of "betray" in Mark are "handed over." Also, Brutus killed Caesar, Judas handed him over. And of course, Judas is demonstratably an invention off of the Old Testament. Spong did a wonderful presentation on this to the Jesus Seminar, which you can find summarized in a post by Ted Weeden on GMark a while back.

Mary magdelene had no special relationship with Jesus in the earliest gospels.

Corfinium is the seventh or eighth city Caesar occupies. As we saw above, Caesar occupied several cities prior to Corfinium, and a couple more during the siege.

The Jeruselam-Rome echo is part of Mark's gospel. Did you track down TE Schmidt's article yet? it's quite good.

This relationship has already been spotted by recognized scholars. Think how much stronger he could have made his case if he had actually bothered to read modern scholarship.

LOL. The meaning is the exact opposite.

You know.....never mind. It's too obvious.

LOL. The two meanings are not parallel at all.

LOL. It's from Jer 16:16. Do we not read the scholarship around here? Jeremiah 16:16 offers a reference to "fishers of men" which, as Donahue and Harrington (2002, p75) and Meier (2001, p194n122) point out, occurs in an eschatological context:

Lo, I am sending for many fishers, An affirmation of Jehovah, And they have fished them, And after this I send for many hunters, And they have hunted them from off every mountain, And from off every hill, and from holes of the rocks.(YLT)

Meier (2001, p194-195n122) observes that Mark uses the same term for "fishers," haleeis, as the LXX. In the OT, he further notes, fishing for humans is a regular metaphor in the context of judgment and destruction (Habakkuk 1:14-17, Amos 4:2).

Not only is it from the OT, it is from the Septuagint, which Carotta claims Mark does not use very much.

LOL.

No, as we have seen, Carotta has rewritten history to accomdate his thesis.
Actually, they are the miracles of Elijah and Elisha. Do we not read the scholarship around here?

From Isa 35. The healing of the blind, lame, and crippled is a common eschatological/savior trope found throughout the Middle East. Look at the way your example doesn't work -- Carotta has to change the last word. Whenever something doesn't work, he slips it in as "a mistake".

LOL. Mark wrote in Greek and based his story on the Jewish scriptures, which he cites at a rate of about 1 every 4 verses or so. His story is also framed from the Jewish scriptures. Mark had other sources, but a report of Caesar's life was not among them.

That means diddly, even if true. Think about it.


The explanation is above.

You're wasting your time with this book, and I have wasted enough of mine. Let's replay our Parable of the Sower:

• Carotta: * focate—whether under thorns or under the temple roof. And in spite of this they shot up as if on good land. Perhaps not one hundred percent, as on fertile land, but still sixty, or thirty percent.
  
  Earth to Carotta: The thirty, sixty, and hundred on the end of this parable are not PERCENT but -FOLD! Jesus is talking about fantastic multiplication, not reduced output.

Ah. Felt good.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

Let's replay our Parable of the Sower:

• * Carotta: * focate—whether under thorns or under the temple roof. And in spite of this they shot up as if on good land. Perhaps not one hundred percent, as on fertile land, but still sixty, or thirty percent.
  
  Earth to Carotta: The thirty, sixty, and hundred on the end of this parable are not PERCENT but -FOLD! Jesus is talking about fantastic multiplication, not reduced output.

Ah. Felt good.

Vorkosigan

Aquitaine

V,
1.) Re: this point of yours. It doesn't convince me of anything definite. It certainly does not convincingly prove that the gospel of Mark is Jewish.
It appears more like a literary convention of formality. In both examples, we are talking about Greek phrases.
Are you familiar with the background; (I'm not.) Was this phrase ("Here is my herald whom I send on ahead of you", etc) a phrase used ONLY by Jews? My guess is that it was not Jewish but a Hellenistic convention.
Quite possibly: The existence of it in the Septuagint and in the book of Mark only proves that they were both written in Greek, for a Greek speaking audience!

2.) Here I would like to share some of my (perhaps faulty) understanding of Carotta's ideas. Maybe it would help to answer some of your questions, or at least make Carotta's book and ideas more palatable to you...

Most of the Jewish scriptural citations entered the gospels AFTER the initial mistranslation phase. They were later additions, interpolations, etc. Most of them, anyway, although perhaps quite a few may have entered even during the initial phase, because the phase took place in Judaea/Galilee area, during the time of King Herod.
Because, after Caesar's death, (and again, more came after Octavian/Augutus's defeat of Mark Antony), legionaire veterans were relocated in colonies in Galilee (of all places) under the control of King Herod, who had excellent relations with the Roman rulers and was even considered a member of the Julian family.
These veteran legionaires were the worshipers of Divus Iulius (deified Julius Caesar) from whom the beginnings of 'Christianity' would eventually come, through their children or their grandchildren.
The veterans themselves would have known exactly who they worshipped and why, so there was not mistakes or mistranslations while they were alive. But their children, as most are first generation descendents, were not very interested in recording or preserving the details of the cult worship practiced by their fathers, and not so interested in learning Latin either, since Aramaic or Greek was what was spoken in their everyday lives. Many of the veterans were actually from Gaul, and would have only known Latin from military need; it was the language of their military camp, and almost certainly not spoken at home.
As the veterans died out, their grandchildren probably had some interest in understanding the cult, and felt an interest or a need to preserve and continue the traditions of their grandfathers. Unfortunately, too much time had passed and not enough knowledge was passed-down, and there was no one around truly knowledgeable to ask.
So they set to work trying to preserve and recover what they could, by themselves. They tried to translate the Latin scriptures (which were historical accounts of the Roman civil war, beginning when Caesar crossed the Rubicon till his murder and of all things, the story of his resurrection) used in Divus Iulius worship, into Greek. But they knew very little of Latin and they were not very good speakers readers/writers of Greek either! Combine this with the confusing practice of ancient manuscripts: no spaces between the words, and no punctuation. And also, the fact that there was no set convention as to which direction to read! (Right-to-left, or left-to-right... it could go either way!)

Then, mix-in their almost total lack of real understanding of the political nuances and details of Rome during the Late Republican era, and how could they ever possibly make an accurate translation?

From this confusion came the first gospel: not the gospels as we know them, but from this beginning the tales of "Jesus Christ" would eventually evolve...

GakuseiDon

:notworthy :notworthy :notworthy Now that's funny!

andrewcriddle

IIUC PRO PROSOPWN SOU literally 'before your face' ie 'ahead of you' is unusual with this meaning in ordinary Hellenistic Greek and occurs in the Septuagint to render a Hebrew idiom.

Andrew Criddle

Vorkosigan

Aq, Greek is not the issue. The issue is that Carotta says that Mark has "few" Septuagintisms" when in fact there are 150-160 citations and allusions, and always to the Septuagint, in ~660 verses. Carotta clearly doesn't understand Mark. At all.

Totally incorrect. There are an integral part of the Gospel's composition. For example, the raising of Jairus' daughter is drawn directly from the Septuagint Kings and cites it at the end. Details in the Crucifixion are taken directly from Psalm 21 LXX. Etc. As Burton Mack (Myth) notes:

"The symmetry of threes is obvious, as is the correlation of the crucifixion events with those transpiring in the natural and institutional orders of things. The schema is mythic. There is no "earlier" report extractable from the story, no reminiscence. This is the earliest narrative there is about the crucifxion of Jesus. It is a Markan fabrication."(p296)

In other words, if Carotta wants to make this claim he is going to have to substantiate it verse by verse. This will be impossible in the case of the Crucifixion, because the Crucifixion has clear and beautiful structure that proves beyond question that its details are integral to its construction AND that it is a Markan construction. Further, it is back-integrated into Mark 13, again demonstrating that the details are part of the writer's forethought.

Herod the Great? Herod Agrippa? Judea and Galilee do not constitute "an area" being separate by places in between.

Mark's connection to Galilee is midrashic, from Isa 9:1. The writer has never been there in his life and knows nothing about Galilee. Can you see the problem with Carotta claiming that Mark composed his gospel in Rome but retaining this Galilee connection? For Carotta has claim that Galla = Galilee, so there is no real connection to Galilee. It is all a misreading. So why would the phantom legionaires ever enter into the picture? On Carotta's thesis there can. be. no. connection. to. Galilee. None.

Aq, here's a bit of wisdom for the future: anyone who tells you that the composer of Mark was incompetent is working on some apologetic. The composer of Mark was brilliant and placed each word with exactitude. Ed Hobbs, a leading scholar of Mark, notes:

• Mark writes with remarkable attention to his wording! He is often accused of writing poor Greek, and/or of woodenly reproducing his sources. On the contrary, IMHO, he builds theme after theme upon careful choice of words, a characteristic which is usually missed. The commonest reason for missing it, I believe, is that most readers today know Mark in their own language (English or whatever), and then when they read Mark in Greek, are constantly "translating" in their minds, missing the distinctive features of his Greek text. One aspect of this arises from the fact that few of us grow up reading the LXX as our OT--we read it in English, and then some of us learn Hebrew and read it in that language, but ignore the OT in the language used by Mark. Hence, we seldom catch the frequent-in-Mark quotations, allusions, and hints of the OT text, all of which are essential to understand his full meaning.

As I said before, Carotta doesn't get Mark.

The problem is that Mark's gospel has several latinisms, all translated correctly. Carotta depends on selective stupidity for the Gospel writers.

No, Jesus springs from the second temple polytheistic notions of the Two Powers in Heaven, that crops out in some apocryphal writings, and in some OT writings, notably Psalm 110, as I recall (among many other roots). Go toThe Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism and read the wonderful articles by Margaret Barker, especially the one on the Temple Roots of the Liturgy, and read Alan Segal's piece on the Two Powers heresy.

Now, it is entirely possible that Jesus really is some offspring of Julius Caesar's cult. In principle that is possible. But the fact is that in order to demonstrate that everyone has been completely wrong for 2000 years, you need to analyze every single problem with your case, and understand what the scholars say and incorporate that into your analysis. Further, you have to be able specify clear rules for what you are doing, and why.

Just go and hunt down a copy of Joseph Atwill's Caesar's Messiah. Similar and equally revolutionary. Difference is, they know the scholarship on the texts, and cite from it. Carotta doesn't do either.

But let me ask you something. What scholarship are you familiar with? Have you ever read a scholarly introduction to the New Testament? Have you read a commentary on the Gospels?

Vorkosigan