Francesco Carotta

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Francesco Carotta (2007)

Francesco Carotta (* 1946 in Ca'Zen di Lusia, Italy ) is an Italian author. It was first introduced in 1999 by the book Was Jesus Caesar? known, in which he advocates the thesis that Jesus of Nazareth was a fictional person whose New Testament depiction was modeled on the life of Gaius Julius Caesar and after the cult of the deified Divus Julius . The Quest for the historical Jesus ignored the thesis.

Life

Francesco Carotta was born in Ca'Zen near Lusia ( Province of Rovigo / Veneto , Italy ) in 1946. His mother Margherita was a dressmaker from a peasant family. His father Rodolfo (* 1913; † 1998), a trained painter, came from an entrepreneurial family and was socialist mayor of Lusia from 1948 to 1951 .

Carotta first entered a seminary of the Redemptorist one, but was released. He then attended a technical college and graduated as Perito Industriale Capotecnico in technical chemistry . He first worked as a laboratory technician and then moved to France , where he worked as a medical technician , studied philosophy in Dijon at the University of Burgundy and graduated with an ès-Lettres license . After 1968 he studied polemology in Strasbourg and taught philosophy in Mulhouse . He later moved to Germany to study linguistics , Romance languages and German-language literature at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main , where he graduated as a state-certified interpreter and translator .

Carotta initially stayed in Frankfurt, where he worked as a language teacher, translator and tutor at the university. During this time he founded or directed social programs, educational initiatives for guest workers and Italian cultural centers. He was active in the political left and the 1968 movement and worked as a freelancer for alternative publishing houses such as Stroemfeld Verlag , a municipal cinema and the ID information service . In the 1970s he first returned to Italy, where he worked as a journalist for several magazines and newspapers. In Bologna he was a co-founder of Radio Alice .

In 1980 Carotta helped set up the Gallus Center for Youth Culture and New Media in Frankfurt and then worked as director of the Casa di Cultura Popolare . He later moved to Freiburg im Breisgau , where he founded the company Legenda Informationssysteme for text recognition and IT . He also worked in Paris for Cora , a company specializing in linguistic software and artificial intelligence . As managing director and editor, he supported Kore , a Freiburg publisher for feminist books and women's literature . He taught Italian language and diction at the Karlsruhe University of Music .

Carotta later studied ancient history , archeology and classical philology at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg . His original focus on Lorenzo Valla shifted to the cult of Divus Iulius and the possible influences of Roman religion on early Christianity. In the 1990s he left Kore and his company to pursue his research, on which he had already published preliminary studies in the 1980s. Carotta lives in Kirchzarten near Freiburg.

Thesis on Jesus of Nazareth

In 1999 Cartotta published his book Was Jesus Caesar? He advocates the thesis that Jesus of Nazareth is not the Jew from Galilea, as the early Christian sources portray him as, but the Roman statesman Gaius Iulius Caesar, from whose cult Christianity developed over several generations .

The centerpiece of Carotta's book is a philological comparison of the Gospel of Mark with ancient sources about the last years of Caesar and his immediate afterlife, including primarily with the historiographical works of Appian , Plutarch and Suetonius , which to various extents referred to the lost historiae of Gaius Asinius Pollio . Carotta suspects that the historical work of Pollio was a Latin original Gospel and that the life and cult of Julius Caesar described in it was subsequently translated into Greek, transferred to the fictional person Jesus and transferred to Galilea and Judea. In 2008 Carotta expanded his thesis on Jesus to include Genette's theory of “diegetic transposition”.

In 2009 he examined the Orpheos Bakkikos for the Theological Academy of the Archdiocese of Seville , an allegedly forged syncretistic- Christian artifact that is said to represent the crucifixion of Christ.

Since then, Carotta has written several specialist articles and translations of his book. He worked on documentaries about Caesar and Jesus, gave university lectures and reconstructed Caesar's funeral ceremony in Spain based on historical sources.

reception

In Germany in 2000, some reviewers in daily newspapers discussed the German edition of Carotta's book. Arno Widmann saw it as a "science parody", Albert Christian Sellner a large-scale "upheaval in history".

In the Netherlands , the historian Anton van Hooff described Carotta's thesis in 2002 as a “new pseudoscience ”. Roberto Lobosco found in 2010 that churches and university theologians referred Carotta's thesis to the "realm of fables" and classified the author as a "fantasist". In Italy, the ancient historian Luciano Canfora called Carotta's book “original” and saw a possible parallel in the apotheosis of Caesar and Jesus after their death.

Publications

  • Was Jesus Caesar? 2000 years of adoration of a copy. Goldmann, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-442-15051-5 .
  • Was Jesus Caesar? - Articles and lectures. A Search for the Roman Origin of Christianity. Ludwig, Kiel 2012, ISBN 978-3-937719-63-4 .
  • with Holger Heide : Bologna. Notes on a model of reformed rule. In: Barbara Herzbruch (Ed.): Yearbook Politics 8 - The Red Army Fraction and the Left. Vol. 8, Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 1978, ISBN 3-8031-1082-3 .
  • Revista de arqueología. No. 348, vol. 31, Zugarto (MC Ediciones), Madrid 2010, ISSN  0212-0062 , pp. 40-49.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Luciano Capelli, Stefano Saviotti (ed.): Alice is the devil. Practice of subversive communication - Radio Alice (Bologna). Merve, Berlin 1977, ISBN 3-920986-91-1
  2. ↑ Horst Gerhard Haberl: Up and away: a nomadology of the nineties. Droschl, Graz 1990, ISBN 3-85420-193-1 , p. 178.
  3. ↑ Frank Niederländer, Gabriele Schulz (Ed.): Das Literaturbuch 1993/94. Literary life in the Federal Republic of Germany. German Cultural Council. Nomos, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-7890-3106-2 , p. 183; RR Bowker Publishing: International Literary Market Place 1994. Reed Reference, New Providence 1993, ISBN 0-8352-3347-2 , p. 165.
  4. ↑ U. a. Cam (Francesco Carotta): Madonna mia. In: Cam (Ed.): BellaMadonna / Memoria 2089. Almanach from Kore Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau 1988, ISBN 3-926023-75-9 , pp. 9-15; Cam: Annunciation: Caesar's Crucifixion - The Gospel According to Cleopatra. In: Cam (ed.): BellaMadonna / Memoria 2090. Kalenden and Iden. Almanac from Kore Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau 1989, ISBN 3-926023-76-7 , pp. I – ix.
  5. ↑ Irina Strohecker: There is nothing more annoying for a researcher than fiction . In: Badische Zeitung , October 15, 2007, p. 33.
  6. ↑ Francesco Carotta, Arne Eickenberg: Orfeo Báquico: la cruz desaparecida (PDF; 5.7 MB). In: Isidorianum. Vol. 35, Vol. 18, Centro de Estudios Teológicos de Sevilla, Sevilla 2009, ISSN  1131-7027 , pp. 179-217. German version: Orpheos Bakkikos: the lost cross (PDF; 8.8 MB).
  7. ^ Arno Widmann (Berliner Zeitung, June 28, 2000): JESUS-JULIUS
  8. ↑ Albert Sellner (Badische Zeitung, March 20, 2000): A piece of world puzzle solution
  9. ^ Anton van Hooff (Bron: Skepter 15 (4), December 2002): Atheïtisch bijgeloof: Caesar aan het kruis in Buitenhof
  10. ^ Roberto Lobosco (Quest NL, June 14, 2010): Jezus Caesar of Julius Christ? ( Memento from July 4, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ Luciano Canfora: Quando il tiranno finiva nel Tevere . In: Corriere della Sera of November 2, 2008, p. 15.
personal data
SURNAME Carotta, Francesco
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cham; Cam
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian ancient historian and religious historian
DATE OF BIRTH 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Ca'Zen near Lusia, Badia Polesine , Province of Rovigo, Veneto, Italy