Video: Francesco Carotta on the Gospel as a diegetic transposition

by DIVVS·IVLIVS

The video of an interview held with Francesco Carotta in German, which is embedded below, is apparently an outtake from the documentary feature film The Gospel of Caesar. Here is a paraphrased English transcript of Carotta’s statements on his theory that the Gospel is a diegetic transposition of the Roman sources on Julius Caesar’s Civil War:

Two cities occur in the text of the Gospel of Mark: Tyrus (Tyre) and Sidon. They are en route of a meaningless and inexplicable detour that Jesus takes via the Decapolis, only to go from one village to another that are situated very close to each other on the shores of the Mare Galilaeae, which doesn’t make any geographical sense. But Tyrus and Sidon are two important regional cities which were also visited by Julius Caesar, so they constituted anchor points for the Markan diegetic transposition of the Caesarian geographical framework, projected into the geography of Palestine. (Later evangelists managed to sneak this inconsistency out of the narrative.)

Two famous diegetic transpositions are James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is based on the Odyssey, and The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is based on Goethe’s Faust, which in turn is a diegetic transposition of the original Faust legend. Everyone will immediately realize and acknowledge that there is a connection between these hypertexts and the earlier texts from which they were derived. For example, this is shown by the chapter titles in Joyce’s novel or the name Margarita, which is a variant of the German Gretchen from Faust:

Gretchen > Margaretchen > Margarete > Margarita

These connections and linguistic transitions are commonly accepted. But as soon as it is revealed that the centurion Longinus in Christian tradition is a transposed figure based on Caesar’s assassin Cassius Longinus, or that Galilaea is a misspelling of Gallia, or that Corfinium was transposed to Cafarnaum—

LONGINVS > LONGINVS
GALLIA > GALILAEA
CORFINIVM > CAFARNAVM

—these connections and linguistic transitions are not acknowledged, although they are much more obvious, because it is difficult for most people to accept the theory that the Gospel itself is a diegetic transposition. (Very often they simply don’t want to accept it, for whatever reasons.) However, this theory of a diegetic transposition is the only theory that can fully explain the internal contradictions and inconsistencies of the gospels.

Direct link: YouTube