The Pope: Fundamentalist Relativism

Hi Laura,

The previous pope was named John Paul II. I am not a Catholic, but I will say that I liked him a lot better (maybe he just had more charisma, but I felt he had more "agape" even though he was pretty conservative). I think he was more interested in truth than doctrine, whereas Benedict seems pretty legalistic.

In the same statement where he said nothing good came from Islam, he also said that Jews got the idea of reason from their contact with the Greeks, which I think is beyond preposterous. I know we Christians mostly only have the Tanakh to go on, but it seems to me that reason has been a Jewish value from the beginning of the written tradition. (Please correct me if I'm wrong about this.)

I thought there was still a Prayer for the Jews in the post-Vatican II pass for the Good Friday Liturgy (at least I see it in my St. Joseph Sunday Missal). I haven't read the Latin Mass version of the prayer, but I'm assuming that the Novus Ordo version is simply a more compassionate way of praying for the Jews. If that is so, then this tradition has never really died or went away. The text of the prayer is this:

"Let us pray for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant. Almighty and eternal God, long ago you have your promise to Abraham and his posterity. Listen to your Church as we pray that the people you first made your own may arrive at the the fullness of redemption."

I think the "fullness of redemption" part is a gentle nod towards their conversion.

So what is the big deal that's making people say the Catholic Church "going back to the stone ages" type of talk?

I understand the concern of Jews and certain Catholics about a return to anything truly anti-semitic, but I think people have been more likely to overreact because this current Pope is not as charismatic or philosophical as Pope John Paul II, is German, is scholastically-oriented to a fault, was forced as a kid to join Hitler Youth (like a kid has a choice to fight against the Nazis), and does not like rock 'n roll.

If the 'only true church' is the Catholic Church, then it appears that unlike its bloody rise over two millenia, it has fallen unnoticed from grace. Not only that , but it appears that the true church , when it fell, was sitting on the very same wall upon which Humpty Dumpty used to sit. It all happened so suddenly that the full extent of the damages have not been assessed, and people in the know seem to think that the fall might even be fatal.

What do your readers think?

THE JESUS JOKE

OR,

FAREWELL TO THE
MEDITERRANEAN MYTH

It happened a long time ago. America hadn’t been invented. Neither had Islam.
But in the mediterranean there was a bit of stir by a chap calling himself Julius Caesar. Caesar by all accounts was a canny Roman. Around 100 he was born, some say by way of Caesarean operation, of Aurelia and a praetor suitably called Gaius Julius Caesar, His family were of patrician stock, and his aunt Julia was the wife of Gaius Marius, the boss-man of the Popular faction.

As we all know, Caesar was his own man -- or as much of one as was permissible at that time. He scaled the heights and was more intelligent and less brutal than his rivals, Sulla and Pompey and Pompey’s sons. In 45 BCE, when he returned to Rome, he celebrated his triumphs over Gnaeus Pompey. The Romans would have preferred if he celebrated his conquests over less home-spun enemies: but in the end Romans were less squeamish over the shedding of blood (whomsoever' blood it happened to be) more than most.

On February 15 44 BCE, even as he was named perpetual dictator, at the feast of Lupercalia, Caesar donned himself in purple and paraded himself in public, not unlike what a modern Pope , as Pontifex Maximus (highest priest), might do in the Vatican. The difference was that Caesar was preparing to lead a military campaign against the Parthians, the same who had killed Crassus, and taken his legionary eagles from him. But when Caesar came to attend the Senate, no less than sixty conspirators, who came to the same assembly, each one with a dagger stuck up his toga. At least 23 of them found their way into Caesar’s flesh at the proverbial base of Pompey's statue. One can only imagine what happened after the assassination.

The Senators fled in all directions. It was left to three slaves to pick up the dead Caesar and carry him home to his wife, Calpurnia. There was a lull before the storm, and a bit like the Anglo-Americans in modern day Iraq and Afghanistan, it soon became apparent that the conspirators had no plan beyond the initial assault. Part of their oversight included Mark Antony: they forgot to execute him with Caesar. Moreover, Mark Antony had a legion under his command, as well as Caesar’s Last Will and Testament, the senators had to fall back on the good offices of some gladiators and their inimitable oratory. And as Mark Antony heads for Egypt, to Cleopatra and to Caesarea, Caesar’s son by Cleopatra, the world of the Roman Empire opens up into two irreparable halves.

But it is here, at Pompey’s statute, at the death-place of Caesar, where the Trick of Jesus is first conceived. After Caesar's assassination, a bloody civil war ensues throughout the Roman Empire. The long-term competing ambitions of Octavian (in the West) and Mark Anthony supporting Caesar’s son by Cleopatra (in the East) erupted into open antagonism. The Empire was at stake and both parties coveted the moral and religious mantle left behind by the deified Caesar, about whose life and death there had arisen a cult known as Divus Iulius. The Pagan Empire in schism became localised oppositionally with Octavian in Rome and Anthony in Alexandria -- an arrangement which created the structures upon which Christianity later built its own schism as between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

More importantly, when Octavian got the upper hand of Anthony and Cleopatra, he consolidated his control over the Eastern Empire and thought to secure it by persecuting the cult of Divus Iulius in all its forms and aspects, especially where they stood as mementoes of Anthony and Cleopatra and derivatively to the realm of Julius Caesar, whose long shadow had by no means left the psyche of either Rome or the mediterranean. Perhaps this imperial hatred explains to some extent the persecution of the early christians as well as the inveterate hatred of the Church triumphant against ‘heretics’.

As one might expect, the cult of Divus Iulius changed over time and localization, but along the shores of Galilee, however, it left an indelible impression. When we fast forward slightly to Vespasian and his sons, Titus and Domitian, we find that they maintained the Flavian Dynasty from 69 - 96 CE, which period parallels both the rise of the Christian movement and the tenure of Flavian Josephus as court historian.

Since the Vespasians had little or no claim by way of blood to the Iulian family, their first aristocratic concern was their need to legitimate their claim to the throne left vacant by the defied Caesar and more recently by Nero. As it happened, Vespasian the Elder left young Titus to prosecute the war against the Jews in Judea. It was a long, brutal, cruel and devastating war, culminating in Massada and the eventual destruction of the Jews in a way that is not identifiable throughout the destruction of the pagan Gaels. Out of their Generals the captive Josephus impresses himself upon the Vespasians and becomes friends with Titus. And in due course when Titus becomes Emperor, Josephus becomes the empire’s scribe. And it is at this time -- in the 70s, 80s and 90s -- that the Bibles are written: a time which seems to have a particular interest for the latest biblical scholars.

Some say the Bibles are merely a weapon in the war between the factions spawned by Caesar’s death, others that they are a disguised record of Caesar as Pontifex Maximus, and others still -- but in the same vein -- that they (or part of them) are a record of the military exploits of Titus Flavius Vespasian. In this, the Gospels are also a fictional version of the character Jesus which are presented to the warlike and messianic Jews, in an attempt to mollify their desires for a Messiah. The Messiah the Jews want, of course, is an avenging angel of death, who would repay Massada and the other indignities of the Roman conquest. What the Bibles offer -- a la Joesphus and Titus -- is a whining turn-the-other-cheek Messiah: one that can present no real threat to the future of the Roman Empire (or, by curious derivation, to the fascists of WW11 -- Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, Ante Pavelic , Pinochet, etc, etc. ). As such, then, the JC of the Christian Bibles amounts to a sustained satire upon the divinity of Julius Caesar and an acclamation of the divinity of Titus. Even more: the Bibles sustain an invented God, a Christian Jesus, who is meant to appease the residual longings in the defeated Jews for a Messiah. In fact as well as in history, however, the only people that Jesus, the Roman marionette, fools is the splinter group-- those who now call themselves Christians, those who have hitherto never mentioned their leader/founder by name.

The Bibles are meant to announce to a defeated, militant, messianic Judea, the epiphany of their long awaited Messiah, his life and immortal death, as well as his most important renunciation of violence. In this way, had the Jews accepted the marionette, they would have all become Christians, laid down their arms, surrendered to the connived change in their identity, and accepted the wonderful embrace of the Roman Empire. Talk about Greeks bearing gifts! Unlike the Gaels, the hardcore Jews never faltered: they never gave up their Messiah or their own identity.

But another crowd, a faction calling themselves Christians, saw a wonderful opportunity and turned Josephus’ parody into a world religion that would make them all the richest wasters in the world. For two millennia, practically, they would fight with Emperors, forge documents, bully kings, muscle into the palaces of the nation states, preach crusades about whom to love and whom to execute; they would scatter their frivolous banter like the possessors of a great truth right across the world, at first on the back of other nations, dividing and amalgamating themselves into groups everywhere supportive of a world vision. Truth everywhere gave way to Faith , and faith was the very thing that the Romans wanted to control!

So, What Is It You Always Wanted To Know about JC But Were Never Told?

Some nineteenth century authorities (mostly German) had always suspected that there was something wrong with the New Testament, that, in fact, they had been compiled by Romans. Gradually others became bold enough to declare that they had been compiled by the PISO Family.

The True Authorship of the New Testament

A Short Synopsis of Piso History

The Roman Piso Homepage

No less serious are a couple of other works , which have an enormous bearing on the matter at hand, but which are apt to empty all the churches in Christendom when they are read, With these works, one is not so much talking about authorship of the New Testament or about forgeries or anomalies or injustices or incompatible ethical positions within the ‘Christian tradition’ or within the Catholic Church -- we are talking about the validity of Christianity itself, its status as a religion, as a cult, and all its world-wide ramifications as well as its ubiquitous influence over national and international life.

One of these books is by Francesco Carotta and is entitled Was Jesus Caesar? And a second more recent book by Joseph Atwill is entitled Casear’s Messiah . If you ever felt that the Jews knew more than anybody else about their boy, Jesus, then both these books can only reinforce your suspicions. While the subtitle to Atwill’s work is aptly called ‘The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus’, it informs us plainly what the book is about. But one should not be misled by its apparent comic simplicity.

For Francesco Carotta

Francesco Carotta is an Italian linguist and philosopher. After ten years of study he brought his findings together in ‘Was Jesus Caesar?’ (1999). Though not always seens as a continuation of the skeptical findings of the Germans in the nineteenth century respecting the implausibility of the New Testament, what Carotta has done is to add a sociology to the whole JudeoRoman period and thereby clarify some resplendent aspects of our knowledge of it.

***

According to Carotta JC stands for Julius Caesar -- not Jesus Christ. There is no Jesus Christ and there never was one. He is purely the figment of the Rome’s imagination as depicted by what other authors are anxious to demonstrate was the Piso Family. In some respect Joseph Atwill confirms this thesis and focuses on Flavian Josephus, a captured Jewish General, who turned ‘Queen’s evidence’ on his own people, the Jews.

According to Carotta Jesus looks like Caesar, their lives are congruent, their families are the same, their respective kinfolk are peopled with parallel personages whose names and locations are the same or similar. Caesar’s celebrated victories become Jesus’ miracles (the conversion of savagery into piety!). Caesar’s Pompey is Jesus’ John (the Baptist), Caesar’s Antonius is Jesus’ Simon etc.. Caesar’s Senate is Jesus’ Sanhedrim, Caesar’s Gaul is Jesus’ Galilee, Caesar’s Rubicon is Jesus’ Jordan, Caesar’s Rome is Jesus’ Jerusalem, etc..

And if Julius had his moll in Cleopatra, Jesus had his moll in Mary Magdalen.

Names resemble each other in writing as well as phonetically, ‘Gallia’ isn’t that different from ‘Galilaia’, ‘Nicomedes of Bithynia’ isn’t that different from ‘Nicodemus of Bethania’, and ‘Brutus’ the murderer is not that different to ‘Barabbas’ the murderer, etc.

Moreover, Caesar’s quotations are lifted by Jesus: He who does not take sides is on my side becomes For he that is not against us is for us. Or, again: I am not King, I am Caesar becomes We have no king but Caesar.

Even in death the two JCs are the same. Caesar’s death on the Ides of March , two perishing days before St Patrick’s day, becomes for Jesus the 15th day of Nizam, which in turn confirms the Easter Vigil.
Reading Carotta one has to pinch oneself every so often to reassure oneself that one is not reading an extract from James Joyce’s Ulysses...

If one had not already become familiar with the literary techniques employed by Joyce, one might imagine that one was revisiting the same or a similar work of art. We are used to the Joycean device of identifying some scavenging Seagulls over the Liffey as a reference, also, to Homer’s Harpies. In much the same way Francesco Carotta’s indescribable expose has unearthed a vast array of parallel references, especially between those few momentous years in Rome’s civil war from the time when Caesar crosses the Rubicon (49 BC) to his assassination (44 BC), a period that is meant to mirror the Jesus narrative from the Jordan to his crucifixion. In this sense the Gospel is a re-written history of the Roman Civil War.

“What emerges from the comparison”, says Carotta, “ is the fact that no matter what the comparison the same structures and sequences are found and differences are reduced to the simple mix up of letters. What really changes is the perception.”

How apt of Joyce, then ,when considering his own country as a perfect instrument of the Mediterranean Myth, he writes:

Oh Ireland my first and only love
Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove.

Nothing could be clearer. The whole unmistakable upshot of Carotta’s work is that

THE CULT SURROUNDING JESUS IS ACTUALLY THE CULT OF DIVUS JULIUS

Now where does that leave the Catholics who support the Infallible One in Rome and the other millions of Orthodox Christians, not to mention the unaccountable others , monasteries, convents, dioceses, parishes, priests and lay people, individuals, families, groups, nations across the world who have taken the Divus Julius to their heart?
The work is truly momentous! But what questions must it give rise to in the Christian breast? Do they still believe in Jesus? Do they still believe in those miracles: the resurrection (of Caesar), the immaculate conception, the Last Supper, the changing of water into wine, the walking on water? Surely not! And what of their lying history, two millennia practically of spreading the Gospel according to their own rash, unquestioning and unquestionable desires? And what of all the wealth they have stored up for themselves in all the lands where they have ensconced themselves, their infinite armies of nuns, priest and second-order secular spies, plants and agents provocateur? What of their present obdurate position and those insulting statements of the Papacy concerning the nature of Jesus, the disposition of other religions, Christian and non-Christian alike? What of these imperial ‘moral’ statements of the Papacy, his Infallibility, his concordats, his half-heartedness about war and his cultural ignorance of other peoples? Moreover, what now with all those world-wide investments in the future of Christianity, in the colonizing educational establishments across the world? The Jesuits alone boast of some 4,000 educational institutions (and JC alone knows what other pokers they have in the world pie!) -- all premised on spreading the faith (in Julius Caesar). Should all these institutions not pack their bags and simply get out of education at all levels -- never to return, I might add. And what about all those Christian appointments in political establishments with less rabid convictions than the Poles, the Irish, the Spanish, the Austrians, the Philippines, East Timorese, the Americans, North and South, Australians, Asians, etc.? And what about all those diplomatic, senatorial and judicial appointments everywhere in the world? Should they not in honesty resign from their ill-gotten posts? Should they not renounce their secret societies, like the Opus Dei, the Illuminati, etc.. Should they not be pointed out in the streets as the purveyors of lies and deceits and the inheritors of false witness? Isn’t it time for the honest atheist who took their whip for so long, especially the Catholic whip, to come into the light and point out their accusers?

ONE THING YOU MIGHT ASK YOURSELF BEFORE LEAVING THIS SUBJECT IS THIS:

DID THE PAPACY ALWAYS KNOW THAT JESUS CHRIST, THE SON OF GOD, WAS IN FACT JULIUS CAESAR, DIVUS JULIUS, SON OF VENUS AND FOUNDER OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE ?

DID THE PAPACY, FULLY KNOWING THE CHURCH’S ORIGINS, CONSCIOUSLY DECIDE TO CONVERT THAT CULT- MEMORY INTO THE ONE TRUE HOLY ROMAN CATHOLIC AND APOSTOLIC CHURCH?

Seamus Breathnach

www.irish-criminology.com