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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   31929 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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Imagine telling a Roman in 100 AD that 1500 years in the future, the world's best scientists would be from Britain and Germany. Or telling him that for much of the next 2000 years, Europe would be dominated by a religion created by Jews.

That's what they want you to think. But there's a some amount of evidence Christianity is just disguised Imperial Cult that went a bit astray. Of course we as a civilization and especially academia cannot possibly acknowledge the truth of it, that'd be unthinkable.

See:

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-gospel-of-mark-antony-2-parallel

So, Christianity was supposedly a psyop ran on the Jews by Romans, although they kind of fumbled it at the end by not managing to deprecate the old testament entirely.

Christianity was supposedly a psyop ran on the Jews by Romans

Yeah, sure, that really works out, given the support of the Hasmodeans by the Romans. They invented a new religion to convert the Jews. Instead of, you know, stomping all over them as per usual practice when conquering a new province.

Excuse me while I stoop down to pick up my eyeballs, they fell out of their sockets after rolling too hard.

I was really hoping he wasn’t channeling Joseph Atwill’s thesis. It’s a historical conclusion that’s ‘very’ far reaching and implausible.

I’m not impressed by these sorts of coincidences. If you take any events that look similar between two famous figures, you can make just about any myth into a retelling of another.

A hero character who loves the poor isn’t that uncommon, in fact Buddha fits this fairly well too. Buddha is a prince who essentially renounced his throne to become a religious aesetic. He had disciples, was a traveling preacher, and so on. So you can put this “character” onto both Jesus and Buddha and if memory serves Krishna as well.

As to the specific events, they only fit if you take very vague descriptions of the events themselves. Jesus was Baptized in the Jordan, he wasn’t crossing as a conqueror. Jesus didn’t just say “don’t be scared,” he calmed the storm. The Sanhedrin had mostly theological disputes with Jesus, and not that he was looking to establish a kingdom or something.

The other part is that Jesus is very interested (mostly in Mathew, though he teaches the Law in other places) in Judaism itself. The Shema quote (this is the most important credal statement in Judaism— Hear Oh Israel, the Lord year God, the Lord is One), concerns over Jewish temple sacrifices, and the Jewish Sabbath are things that just don’t fit. Roman’s were polytheistic and their sacrifices were not identical to Jewish sacrifices, and Romans don’t keep any sort of Sabbath. It simply doesn’t make sense to insert Jewish ideas into the mouth of a character invented to absorb the imperial cult.

I’m not impressed by these sorts of coincidences. If you take any events that look similar between two famous figures, you can make just about any myth into a retelling of another.

You're telling me that Julius Caesar and Jesus both just happen to have crossed a river at some point in their lives? That's stretching it too far to be a coincidence, it must be a secret code.

My God, we're overlooking the most obvious piece of evidence literally staring us in the face!

JC!

JC - Julius Caesar/Jesus Christ.

They told us what they were doing right from the start!

If you take any events that look similar between two famous figures, you can make just about any myth into a retelling of another.

Try it.

Someone already did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Kennedy_coincidences_urban_legend

Here you go.

Did you never hear of folktale classification? This is breaking down story elements into what we'd now call tropes which are commonly shared by different stories from different places. It's how Jung gets his notion of the Collective Unconscious and the Archetypes:

A quantitative study, published by folklorist Sara Graça da Silva and anthropologist Jamshid J. Tehrani in 2016, tried to evaluate the time of emergence for the "Tales of Magic" (ATU 300–ATU 749), based on a phylogenetic model. They found four of them to belong to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stratum of magic tales:

ATU 328 The Boy Steals Ogre's Treasure (= Jack and the Beanstalk and Thirteen)

ATU 330 The Smith and the Devil (KHM 81a)

ATU 402 The Animal Bride (= The Three Feathers, KHM 63 and The Poor Miller's Boy and the Cat, KHM 106)

ATU 554 The Grateful Animals (= The White Snake, KHM 17 and The Queen Bee, KHM 62)

There's an entire cottage industry from the 19th century of dismissing Christianity as just another Middle Eastern mystery cult (the dying and resurrected saviour motif from Osiris to Dionysius), as well as the valiant attempts of Frazer and others to reduce all mythology ultimately to the Solar Myth and fertilty myths. Comparative religion is the field for "hey DAE the resemblances between X and Y?"

Frazer based his thesis on the pre-Roman priest-king Rex Nemorensis at the fane of Nemi, who was ritually murdered by his successor. The king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the Earth. He died at the harvest and was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend of rebirth was central to almost all of the world's mythologies.

...Girard's "grievances" against The Golden Bough were numerous, particularly concerning Frazer's assertion that Christianity was merely a perpetuation of primitive myth-ritualism and that the New Testament Gospels were "just further myths of the death and resurrection of the king who embodies the god of vegetation."

We also get 19th ethnographers trying to classify 'primitive' beliefs according to that sort of schema, and the euhemerists culminating in the philogist Max Müller and his famous phrase that "mythology is a disease of language":

He saw the gods of the Rig-Veda as active forces of nature, only partly personified as imagined supernatural persons. From this claim Müller derived his theory that mythology is "a disease of language". By this he meant that myth transforms concepts into beings and stories. In Müller's view, "gods" began as words constructed to express abstract ideas, but were transformed into imagined personalities. Thus the Indo-European father-god appears under various names: Zeus, Jupiter, Dyaus Pita. For Müller all these names can be traced to the word "Dyaus", which he understood to imply "shining" or "radiance". This leads to the terms "deva", "deus", "theos" as generic terms for a god, and to the names "Zeus" and "Jupiter" (derived from deus-pater). In this way a metaphor becomes personified and ossified. This aspect of Müller's thinking was later explored similarly by Nietzsche.

That article is the lowest form of conspirational thinking.

Caesar went north into Gallia; Jesus went north into Galilee.

Caesar went to SPAin to cleanse it of pompeian forces; Jesus went to a SPA to cleanse his feet.

This is the equivalent of "American historians in the 19th century noticed they had no Great Military Leader for the Revolution, so they copied the Duke of Wellington and instead called him George Washington".

WASH-ING-TON, WELL-ING-TON, I mean they're practically the same name! And you WASH with water that you get from a WELL. Could they have made it any clearer?

There are so many plums to pluck out of it, like the following:

It may also be notable that the dove was a symbol of Venus, and plays a prominent role in Christian symbolism.

Sparrows were also symbols of Venus, more so than doves. And didn't Jesus say something about sparrows?

29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. 30 But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.

Caesar had an infamous love affair with Cleopatra, widely regarded by Romans as a whorish seductress; Jesus had an affair with the prostitute Mary Magdalene.

Our boy is clearly not up on scholarship which denies that Mary of Magdala was a prostitute, how un-feminist of him! 😁

He also contradicts his own point, where he says something, adds a quote to demonstrate it, and doesn't see that the quote doesn't say what he just said:

His funeral, however, was rather interesting. Mark Antony had a wax effigy of Caesar created, in the pose in which Caesar had been found dead, wounds and all, which for the purposes of display was affixed to a cross together with his bloody robes. The effigy was raised in front of the crowd so that the plebs could see for themselves what had been done to their champion. Antony was a showman that way. From Appian (amusingly, at the link, it says the translation was done by none other than John Carter):

When the crowd were in this state, and near to violence, someone raised above the bier a wax effigy of Caesar - the body itself, lying on its back on the bier, not being visible. The effigy was turned in every direction, by a mechanical device, and twenty-three wounds could be seen, savagely inflicted on every part of the body and on the face. This sight seemed so pitiful to the people that they could bear it no longer. Howling and lamenting, they surrounded the senate-house, where Caesar had been killed, and burnt it down, and hurried about hunting for the murderers, who had slipped away some time previously.

There's nothing there about bloody robes or the effigy being affixed to a cross (certainly not, the cross was a shameful method of execution for slaves and the worst criminals, you're not going to put your murdered hero on a cross) but "a mechanical device" used to raise it up because it couldn't be seen as it lay on the bier.

He covers himself by saying it was a tropaeum and then illustrates it by a really dumb picture (famously balding and vain about it Caesar with long hair in the wax effigy?) which is a repurposed version of a crucifix:

The mechanical device in question was a tropaeum, a cruciform device on which things were hung for display. Caesar was known for showing off his various war trophies on tropaea, and often placed the device on his coinage, to the degree that tropaea became symbolically associated with him

Wikipedia has a handy article on this, and depictions of historical tropaions. While they might (and I emphasise might) have hung Caesar's bloody garments on such, they wouldn't have done the same with an effigy. Because tropaions were trophies, indicating the conquest and vanquishing of an enemy. Putting up the clothing, much less the funeral effigy, would have been annoucing "Caesar has been beaten by his victorious enemies". It would be like using images of George Floyd for BLM marches depicting him sitting on the toilet: not the associations you want to invoke in the outraged onlookers.

"But wouldn't Caesar's bloody garments be like the photos of Floyd with Chauvin kneeling on him? Wouldn't that show the same 'he was murdered unjustly' imagery to get the mob up in arms?" Perhaps, but the associations of trophies is probably too strong - it would be showing 'Caesar was killed rightly as a just punishment and is a loser', which is not what Antony wanted.

Anyway, see for yourself: compare John Carter's alleged "Reconstruction of Caesar’s wax effigy, hanging on a tropaeum, as it would have appeared at his funeral" with what genuine ancient Roman depictions of tropaeum look like, and judge for yourself. That's not even getting into the history of depictions of the crucifixion, which would have come much later.

(God damn it, anyone with a cursory knowledge of history and five feckin' minutes on Google can do the work, this is why I rant and rave about historical illiteracy).

EDIT: We have Suetonius' account, where he says that the robe was hung on a pillar:

When the funeral was announced, a pyre was erected in the Campus Martius near the tomb of Julia1, and on the rostra a gilded shrine was placed, made after the model of the temple of Venus Genetrix; within was a couch of ivory with coverlets of purple and gold, and at its head a pillar hung with the robe in which he was slain.

There's the account by Appian, which John Carter quotes for the wax effigy, which again tells us about the bloody robe, this time it is Mark Antony who puts in on a pole and waves it about:

Then, swept very easily on to passionate emotion, he stripped the clothes from Caesar's body, raised them on a pole and waved them about, rent as they were by the stabs and befouled with the dictator's blood.

Appian then goes on to the part about the wax effigy and the mechanical device, but as I said, I'm not convinced this was a tropaeum or anything that looked like a body on a cross.

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