The Jesus Joke - Part 1 By Seamus Breathnach

THE JESUS JOKE : Part 1 by Seamus Breathnach

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THE JESUS JOKE OR, FAREWELL TO THE MEDITERRANEAN MYTH It happened a long time ago. America hadn’t been invented. Neither had Islam, Jesus, the Papacy or any of the nation states we have come to recognise. 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. He was born about 100 years before one even heard about Jesus Christ or Christians. Some say he was born by way of Caesarean operation, to 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.

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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 Jesus-Joke 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’. ‘Heretics’, of course, with the Church’s expansion in the world, mutate into ‘pagans’, ‘witches’ , ‘women’, ‘Donatists’, ‘Cathars’, ‘Albigensians’, ‘Jews’, ‘Protestants’ , ‘Reformers’, ‘Fratecelli’, ‘Socialists’, ‘Atheists’, ‘Universal Communists’, ‘Vietnamese’, ‘Universal Secularists’, ‘Homosexuals’ and , more recently, those who fight back -- ‘Terrorists!’ 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, 2

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 3the 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 is 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-othercheek 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 3

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. Perhaps, it might be pointed out that when we are discussing the Roman Empire, the role of Julius Caesar ( or his alter ego, ‘Jesus Christ’) , the Godhead or the origins of Christianity and the role of the Papacy (God’s vicar on earth), we are essentially talking about ‘corporate time’. Corporate time is a concept which attracts very ordinary people -laymen -- to become extraordinary men -- priests, bishops , cardinals and Popes: and , unlike the secular empires, like Tiberius or Caesar, they do not have to go to war. But, of course , all the bishops and popes did go to war (witness the crusades), until they found a way to get others -the secular world of the gladiators and the emperors -- to go to war on their behalf. In this context, thinking the Godhead is shorthand for thinking ‘corporate time’, ‘corporate management’, ‘forward planning’ and ‘eternal as well as universal control’. Long before Apple, Dell, or Coca Cola there was Caesar, the Roman Empire, and then, the Papacy and the Christian Universal Conquest. And it is in this vein corporate and world-wide sense that we should think , when we think of Jesus and /or Carotta’s profound discovery. In a way, we are trying to re-think our very selves and who we really are as opposed to who we were told we were! 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 -- and much further back -- had always suspected that there was something wrong with the New Testament, that, in fact, they had been compiled by Romans. Gradually, 4

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.

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*** 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 the Piso Family and confirmed by 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 to each other, Caesar’s hard won victories become Jesus’ miracles. 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 6

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 , considering that his own country had never conquered by real Romans , to write : Oh Ireland my first and only love Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove. The ‘Caesar’ Joyce is referring to is the substitute Papal succession -which, with the aid of the Normans and Anglici Catholics, after much bloodshed and the burning of Druids, Gaelic Chieftains and pagan folklore, turned Ireland into a perfect imperialist instrument of the Mediterranean Myth.

And whatever versimilitude the Myth of Christianity imparted to the longest litany of wars, conquests and cultural repressions, from the paradigm of Ireland, the least Roman land in Europe in antiquity to the Christian war-effort in East Timor, its magic has suddenly disappeared. Nothing could be clearer: the whole unmistakable upshot of Carotta’s work is that THE CULT SURROUNDING JESUS IS AND ALWAYS WAS THE ACTUAL CULT OF DIVUS JULIUS It now appears that the God, who made the world -- remember the God of births and deaths (born immaculately and died on a cross to redeem the lot of us, whether we wanted it so or not) -- well, this God was none other than Julius Caeasar. Now Julius may have been a great warrior -he is reputed to have butchered at least a million Frenchmen (Gauls) with catapults and other superior ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ And this is why the Romans loved and defied him: he kept them safe to play their gladitorial games. But killing Frenchmen is a far cry from being the author of the universe.

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Although the Romans were inclined to make Gods of their heroes, not unlike our own propensity to cosset soccer stars, they were, at the same time, clever enough to assure themselves that they were ‘murderable’ Gods. In other words, the Godhead was OK as a concept made by them; they could call a dead man ‘immortal’, even after their senate skewered him to death (Mediteranean History) . But with the newfangled Jesus, things were violently altered. The God of christianity (the Mediteranean Myth) may not have protected the homeland, but he was made author of the universe. In other words, while men made Divus Julius, Jesus made all men. How Christianity, red in tooth and in claw -- and from such modest Julian beginnings -- managed to persuade the world that there was only One God with one Infallible Vicar and One World Order, is simply beyond the grasp of most rational men. What they are now calling ‘the historical Jesus’ is apt to be echoed in the same vein as ‘the historical Harry Potter’, ‘the historical Humpty Dumpty.’ According to Fancesco Carotta, the world has been deceived entirely. Like the Bankers (and their governments) -- the authors of the present world economic crisis -- the rogues in the Vatican and the other less culpable Christian churches who have unconscionably peddled their myths, lies and half-truths upon an unsuspecting public -- what do they call the public, ‘our flock’ -- they all still live in their respective glass houses. Consider it. In all those acres of Vaticanal concrete, amongst all those legion of Cardinals, bishops and priests and nuns, there is not one child to be washed on any Saturday night. The Vatican does not do ‘nappy changes’ or sex. The point is that alll these cardinals of Christianity have not only abjured and , in most cases, betrays their own native or national culture, but have abjured more than half the world of women , and in abjuring their children, deny the entire natural world order. Why? To fasten themselves to the most narcissistic construct of power the world has ever known. But we shall come to this anon. For the moment we have to realise what Francesco Carotta has discovered. If Jesus and the three divine persons never existed, then they never made the world. If Jesus was really Julius Caesar in a literary disguise, then we know he never made the world and little else besides. So, where does that leave the Vicar of Julius Caesar? More importantly, where does that leave all those uninformed Catholics who support the Infallible One in Rome and the other millions of Orthodox Christians, not to mention the unaccountable others , 8

monasteries, convents, dioceses, parishes, priests and lay people, individuals, families, groups, nations across the world who have taken the Divus Julius to their heart? As one can appreciate, Carotta’s work is truly momentous! But what questions must it give rise to in the Christian breast? Can Christians 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 and missleading history? And what of those Papal Crusades? The Pacelli-Hitler-Mussolini Triumvirate, and after the Atomic Bomb, the JP11-Thatcher-Reagan Triumvirate against Vietnam, Russia and South America and all those hateful communists, who predicted the banking crisis long before it happened? And what about the Benedict XVI-BlairBush Triumvirate and all that hate and violence released against the oldnew enemies, only now called ‘Terrorists’ , ‘Secularists’ ‘Homosexuals’, etc. ? And what about the entire two millennia practically of spreading the Gospel of the cross/sword 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 under the guise of helping the poor? Everywhere they have ensconced themselves, their infinite armies of nuns, priest and secondorder secular spies, plants and agents provocateur occupies all countries? 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 halfheartedness 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’s fire!) -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, hopefully, to return? 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 9

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? The Christian joke was not laid by Caesar or, indeed, the Roman people; it was laid by a clique who gathered in Rome, who sidled up to the secular side of the Roman Empire, and who have, through successive centuries, promoted themselves as ‘the alternative civil service’. In every Catholic-run state , the Pope’s legions have taken the advice of Machiaevelli and ensconsed themselves as the advisers to all the Western powers. From their ‘universities’ and advisory positions, they advise , for good or ill, but always in their own Roman interests, govermnents as disparate as the US and East Timore. The Church claims universal privilege and seeks a special place in all constitutions -- and yet they never once put themselves before the people and have never received one secular vote. When one imagines the absolute power of the Church’s tentacles around the world, one begins to see the absolute enormity of their power. While men and arms and would-be secular politicians rant and rave about democracy, this church, which holds elections in contempt, constitutes the unflinching civil service to the world’s independent states. Is this the Jesus Joke? That the world was caught and bound by christianity, on the virtual comic history of a nonentity? Were all the religious wars for nothing but the contents of a comic book, promoted so expertly by the celibate Romans? The origins of the Papacy conceal the real Joke which Christians have used to enslave more noble and freer peoples than themselves. The Joke has no end… it grows in universal dimensions daily... Isn’t it time for the honest atheist who took the Christian whip for so long, especially the Catholic whip, to come into the light and point out their accusers? To comprehend the enormity of the recent discoveries, one might very profitably break down any relevant enquiry into at least three further parts: 1. The enormity of the RCC in the world today -- Part 11 2. The centrality of Carotta’s discovery -- Part 111, and 3. The consequences of dismantling the Christian Empire -- Part IV.

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IN THE MEANTIME ONE MIGHT WELL ASK ONESELF THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS: 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

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