Psychedelic Apes

by Alex Boese

  This would seem to vindicate Schliemann on the question of Troy’s existence, but, despite this, his reputation hasn’t actually fared that well. In fact, it’s pretty much in tatters, because it turns out that the story just told, of his lifelong dream to find Troy and how he defied the cynics to do it, is itself a mixture of myth and reality. As historians began to look more closely at his life, examining the diaries he kept compulsively, they concluded that he was an inveterate liar, given to self-aggrandizement. Yes, he did excavate at Hisarlik even though classical scholars insisted Troy was a myth, but it has since become clear that he stole the credit for the discovery of the city from a mild-mannered British expatriate named Frank Calvert.

  The reality seems to be that Schliemann, despite what he often claimed, never had a childhood dream of finding Troy. That story was pure invention, part of the myth he constructed around himself following the discovery. He had only developed an interest in archaeology during the early 1860s, after retiring from business, when he was experiencing a midlife crisis, searching around for something to do that would earn him cultural prestige to match his wealth. He initially flirted with the idea of becoming a writer, but then he fastened upon archaeology after attending some lectures on the subject at the Sorbonne. It wasn’t until he happened to meet Calvert in Turkey in 1868 that he fixated upon Troy as his life’s great work.

  It was Calvert, not Schliemann, who had nursed an obsession for years of finding Troy. Long before Schliemann showed up in the eastern Mediterranean, Calvert had already identified Hisarlik as the probable site of Troy. He had even purchased half the site to acquire the digging rights, and he then tried to interest the British Museum in financing a dig there, but they turned him down. He had started excavating on his own, but he had made little progress due to a lack of free time and funds.

  When Schliemann showed up in Turkey in 1868, Calvert thought it was his lucky day. Here was a wealthy businessman interested in archaeology! Calvert shared everything he knew about Hisarlik, and Schliemann eagerly listened.

  To Schliemann’s credit, he instantly realized the opportunity Calvert had handed him, and he seized it. But, having no further need for Calvert, he proceeded to bulldoze him to the side. Calvert lacked the temperament or resources to fight back effectively. As a result, by 1875, Schliemann was basking in the public glory of being the discoverer of Troy. He published another book, Troy and its Remains, triumphantly recounting his work at the excavation. In it, he didn’t even mention Calvert at all.

  The discovery of Troy does, therefore, offer an example of academic experts being proven wrong, but not quite in the inspirational way you would hope. Instead of being a lesson about pursuing your dreams even if cynics say they’re impossible, the moral of the story is more like, be careful who you share your dreams with, because a rich businessman might steal them and take all the credit when they come true.

  What if Jesus was Julius Caesar?

  Around 33 AD, Roman forces in Judea executed a messianic Jewish preacher named Jesus. For them, the execution was a minor event. Certainly, none of them would have predicted that his death might have any long-term impact on their empire. But, of course, that’s exactly what happened. His followers, the Christians, fanned out across the Mediterranean, preaching their leader’s message to whomever would listen, and their numbers grew at a remarkable rate, eventually displacing the pagan religions of the empire altogether. Today, approximately one third of the population of the entire world is estimated to be Christian – over two billion people.

  How did the early Christians manage to pull off this feat? How did an obscure sect founded by a carpenter from the backwoods of Galilee manage to end up wielding such vast global influence and power? According to the Church, it was the bravery of Christian martyrs in the face of persecution that inspired mass conversions among the Roman people to the faith. Secular scholars point to a variety of other factors, such as the ceaseless evangelism and missionary work of the early Christians, as well as the strong cohesive social networks they built.

  In the 1990s, an Italian linguist named Francesco Carotta came forward with a far stranger answer. According to him, mainstream historians were starting from the wrong premise. They assumed that Christianity really had begun as an obscure Jewish sect, whereas the reality, he argued, was very different. He believed that Christianity actually originated at the highest level of the Roman Empire, and so it had enormous imperial resources behind it from the very beginning. And how could this be? It was because Jesus wasn’t the man everyone thought he was. In fact, he was the product of the greatest case of mixed-up identity in history. Jesus, insisted Carotta, was really Julius Caesar.

  The revelation of Jesus’s true identity first occurred to Carotta in the 1980s, as he was looking at pictures of statues of Caesar. Although Caesar was a great military leader, who, in the first century BC, almost became Rome’s first emperor, Roman artists often portrayed him with a soulful, spiritual expression – one that seemed very Christlike to Carotta. That was when the idea popped into his head. What if the face of Caesar was the original face of Christ?

  Carotta became so obsessed by this idea that he eventually sold the software company he had founded and devoted himself full-time to researching the Caesar–Christ connection, drawing upon his previous academic training in linguistics and ancient history. The result was the publication, in 1999, of a massive 500-page book detailing his discovery. The original German title posed his thesis as a question, War Jesus Caesar? (Was Jesus Caesar?), but the title of the 2005 English translation was more definitive: Jesus Was Caesar.

  Carotta’s argument rested principally on a fact that’s well known to classical historians, but which isn’t well known by the public: Caesar was worshiped as a god. A group of Roman senators killed Caesar in 44 BC by stabbing him to death, claiming they did so to stop him from transforming the Roman Republic into an empire, with himself at its head. His assassination failed to stop the imperial transformation of the Republic, however. It merely delayed it for seventeen years, until Caesar’s adopted son Octavian (subsequently given the title Augustus) succeeded in his place, becoming the first emperor. But, meanwhile, Caesar’s followers had promptly declared their fallen leader to be a divinity, equal in rank to Jupiter, the supreme god of the Roman pantheon. They built temples and monuments around the Mediterranean to honour ‘Divus Julius’, the ‘Divine God Julius’. Caesar became the first Roman leader ever elevated to the status of a god, although not the last. Subsequent Roman emperors, such as Augustus, were also considered to be gods.

  This cult of Caesar worship, Carotta contended, was the original form of Christianity. All the symbols and stories that we associate with Christ emerged there first. Divine Caesar was swapped out for Divine Jesus.

  Carotta built his case, first and foremost, on a series of linguistic and narrative similarities between the lives of Christ and Caesar. Whatever was in the life of Christ, he insisted, could be found earlier in the life of Caesar, as if someone had merely tweaked Caesar’s biography, changing names and details slightly, to transform it into the story of Christ.

  The most obvious similarity was the identical initials, J. C., shared by the two men. Then there was the fact that Caesar rose to power as a general in Gaul (or Gallia, to use the Latin spelling), whereas Jesus began his ministry in Galilee. Gallia and Galilee. A coincidence? From Gallia, Caesar travelled south to a holy city (Rome), where he was killed by Roman enemies who feared that he desired to become a king, and afterwards he ascended to heaven as a god. Likewise, Jesus travelled south from Galilee to a holy city (Jerusalem), where he was killed by Romans who claimed he desired to become a king (the King of the Jews). Afterwards, he too ascended to heaven as a god.

  The senator that delivered the fatal dagger wound, killing Caesar, was Gaius Cassius Longinus. And, according to a legend that dates back to the early centuries of Christianity, as Christ hung on the cross, a Roman centurion named Longinus stabbed him in the side with a s
pear.

  Both Caesar and Christ had a traitor. Brutus betrayed Caesar, and Judas betrayed Christ. The names aren’t similar, but Carotta noted that Brutus’s full name was Decimus Junius Brutus. Junius, his family name, is written in Greek as ‘Junas’, which is similar to Judas.

  Then there were the tales of miracles attributed to Jesus, which, Carotta argued, closely resembled the tales that circulated of Caesar’s various miraculous feats during military campaigns. In the writings of the Roman historian Appian, for example, we find a story about Caesar ordering his troops to cross the sea by Brundisium at night. To help his men, he slipped incognito into the boat with them, but the crossing grew rough, and his men grew afraid. This prompted Caesar to reveal himself and say, ‘Do not fear, you sail Caesar in your boat, and Caesar’s luck sails with us!’ They made the crossing safely.

  This seems oddly similar to the tale of what is perhaps Jesus’s most famous miracle, when he walked on water, which was said to have occurred as his disciples were trying to cross the Sea of Galilee at night. Caught in a storm, they feared for their lives, when suddenly they saw Jesus walking on the water, through the waves. He approached them and said, in words like those spoken by Caesar, ‘Be of good cheer: it is I; be not afraid.’ And his disciples made the crossing safely.

  Carotta dug up many more similarities between Christ and Caesar. His ultimate goal, in fact, was to trace everything in the gospels back to the life of Caesar. All these possible parallels, however, seem to overlook the very basic difference between the two men, which was that Christ was a poor carpenter who preached a message of peace, whereas Caesar was a ruthless, powerful general. How could the lives of two such diametrically opposed figures possibly have got mixed up?

  The process began, according to Carotta, with the rise of the Caesar cult, because it contained within it many of the elements that would later be associated with Christianity.

  For a start, there was Caesar himself. While he was indeed a general, Carotta pointed out that he also had a reputation among the Roman people as a champion of the poor, celebrated for his compassion and charity. These were the same qualities later attributed to Jesus.

  Thousands of people attended Caesar’s funeral to mourn the loss of the great leader, and Carotta argued that a curious theatrical device featured at the service laid the basis for the Christian symbol of the cross. The device was a cross-like apparatus, attached to which was a wax figure of Caesar showing him as he lay in death, arms spread out. This was then lifted upright so the entire crowd could witness Caesar’s wounds. The sight of it was said to have so inflamed the crowd with grief that they rose up en masse and spilled out into the streets of Rome to hunt for Caesar’s murderers.

  After Caesar’s funeral, his cult spread throughout the empire, which at the time stretched from northern France all the way down to Egypt and encompassed the entire Mediterranean region. Both his son Octavian and Mark Antony, Caesar’s former right-hand man, promoted the worship. It took root, in particular, among the veterans who remained intensely loyal to the memory of their former leader. He had won their allegiance by granting them plots of land throughout the empire in return for their service. As the retired veterans settled on this land, they served as the evangelists who disseminated the faith. According to Carotta, they took with them a holy text – a biography of Caesar written by one of his followers, Asinius Pollio, soon after the general’s death. Carotta imagined the veterans using this text as a kind of Gospel of Caesar, learning from it stories of Caesar’s virtue, compassion and miraculous life.

  Carotta noted that, if these army veterans were the first evangelists of the faith, it might explain why Christians began referring to non-believers as ‘pagans’. The word derives from the Latin ‘pagus’ meaning ‘village’. The veterans’ camps were usually located on the outskirts of villages, so it would have been natural for the retired soldiers to differentiate between themselves, worshipers of Caesar, and the local villagers (pagans) who weren’t.

  And the veterans as evangelists might solve another mystery: why early Christian writers showed a marked preference for the codex format, as opposed to continuous scrolls. A codex is the scholarly term for a book made from stacked and bound sheets of paper. Which is to say, it’s the style of almost all books today (not counting e-books!). The first codices began appearing around the first century AD, and Christians were immediate and enthusiastic adopters of the format, whereas non-Christian writers persisted in using scrolls for centuries.

  Scholars aren’t sure why this was the case. Why did Christians care whether they wrote on codices or scrolls? To Carotta, the reason was obvious. It was because the inventor of the codex was widely believed to be none other than Julius Caesar. The story goes that, during military campaigns, he started folding his scrolls, concertina style, finding them easier to read that way, and this subsequently inspired the creation of the codex. Therefore, it would have made perfect sense for his followers, the veterans, to prefer this format. It was a way to imitate and honour him.

  In Carotta’s revisionist history, many of the elements of Christianity, such as the cross, holy text and a community of worshipers, were now in place. The religion had also spread throughout the empire. Caesar, however, remained the central figure of worship. How did he get switched out for Jesus? Carotta believed this involved deliberate deception. It was a plot concocted by the Roman emperor Vespasian, around 75 AD, with the help of a Jewish historian in his court, Flavius Josephus.

  Before becoming emperor, Vespasian had risen to power as the general who put down the Jewish uprising in Judea – a long, bloody war that took place between 66 and 73 AD. After the conflict, Carotta speculated, Vespasian sought for a way to integrate the Jews into the empire, to ensure they wouldn’t revolt again. From the Roman point of view, the problem with the Jews was their religious zeal, so Vespasian’s idea was to weaken their religiosity by converting them into emperor worshipers. He recognized, however, that in order for this to happen, the emperor cult had to be translated into a form that would resonate with them. It had to be Judaized. Vespasian tasked Josephus with the job of implementing this plan, and he duly set to work.

  His strategy was to create a Jewish version of the cult of Caesar. He used Pollio’s biography of Caesar as a base, and he basically took the story of Caesar’s final days and transplanted it into Judea, replacing Caesar with an imaginary Jewish preacher named Jesus. The text that resulted from these transformations, claimed Carotta, was the Gospel of Mark. Historians believe this gospel was written around the time of the Jewish War, so the timing is about right for Josephus to have authored it. And here we encounter yet another of Carotta’s curious links between Christianity and Caesar, because scholars don’t actually know who the Mark was who wrote the Gospel of Mark. It’s always been a mystery. But it wasn’t to Carotta. He believed it was a reference to Mark Antony.

  With this gospel in hand, Josephus then set out to promote the new religion, using the veterans’ camps as his base of operations. His refashioned version of Caesar’s life turned out to be a smash hit, and the rest is history. Josephus himself, Carotta claimed, would later have his own identity transfigured, turned into none other than the Apostle Paul, the Roman Jew who played a pivotal role as a leader of the early Church.

  Is that it, then, for Christianity? Will its followers have to acknowledge that they’re really Caesarians? Will Christmas have to be changed to Caesarmas?

  Carotta’s theory has gained a small but passionate group of supporters who evangelize on its behalf. With their help, Carotta’s book and articles have been translated from German into a variety of languages: Dutch, English, Italian and French. But, of course, Christianity is in no imminent danger. Negative reactions to Carotta’s theory far outnumber the positive ones. Critics have denounced it as pseudoscience, eccentric, a bad joke, the work of a charlatan, utter lunacy and (best of all) ‘monkey cabbage’. No academic journal has ever even bothered to review his book.

  The
most frequent criticism is that the similarities Carotta finds between Caesar and Christ are trivial and most likely accidental. And, really, his detractors ask, how could the cult of Caesar have transformed into Christianity without eliciting comments from anyone in the classical world? It seems mind-boggling that no one would have mentioned anything. And, by reimagining Christianity as a Roman cult that was Judaized, rather than a Jewish sect that was Romanized, Carotta simply brushes aside the huge body of scholarship that has mapped the deep connections between the ministry of Jesus and the Jewish culture of the first century AD.

  So perhaps Carotta’s theory can be dismissed as ridiculous and absurd. And yet, in its defence, if you were to strip his argument down to its essence (ignoring the part about Caesar actually being Jesus), what he’s suggesting is that there’s a deep link between emperor worship and Christianity. He imagines that, without the former, the latter may never have arisen. Phrased in this way, his theory isn’t that crazy. In fact, it’s close to being in line with a great deal of recent scholarship.

  For a long time, scholars assumed that emperor worship wasn’t a true religion – it was mere politics, little more than an elaborate sham and a kind of imperial contrivance worked up by Rome to force its provinces to show deference.

  These assumptions began to be challenged in the 1980s due to the work of Oxford historian Simon Price, who found evidence that emperor worship was very much a sincere form of belief. He demonstrated that the emperor cults were typically grass-roots movements that sprang up spontaneously throughout the empire, rather than being top-down creations of Rome. Emperor worship, Price argued, provided people with a way to come to terms with the empire itself. From their point of view, the emperor genuinely had as much power over their lives as a god, so it seemed natural to them to worship him as one would a divine being.