10 Facts About Francesco Carotta

In 1980 Carotta headed the Frankfurt-based Casa di Cultura Popolare as director.

Francesco Carotta first published his theories in the late 1980s.

Francesco Carotta has participated in documentary films on Caesar and Christ, given academic lectures, and reconstructed Caesar's funeral ceremony in Spain, based on the historical sources.

Roman sources include Appian, Plutarch, and Suetonius, who all relied to some extent on Caesar's contemporary Gaius Asinius Pollio and his lost Historiae, which according to Francesco Carotta might constitute the "Latin Ur-Gospel".

Francesco Carotta argues that the multiple parallels he sees between the lives and cults of Caesar and Jesus can best be explained by his theory that Jesus is based on the deified Caesar, transformed and mirrored in the eastern Hellenistic and judaizing regions of the Roman Empire.

Except for few feuilleton write-ups the first German edition of Francesco Carotta's book was not reviewed.

The discussion was revived briefly when a feature documentary about Francesco Carotta's research was released in 2007.

Spanish philologist Antonio Pinero called Francesco Carotta's reading of the gospels as a diegetic transposition an "ingenious exercise" but noted several methodological shortcomings which made the theory "completely implausible".

In 2009 Francesco Carotta wrote an article in which he supported the arguments for the authenticity of the so-called Orpheos Bakkikos, a supposedly syncretistic early Christian amulet showing the Crucifixion of Christ.

Francesco Carotta argues that the number 666 in the Book of Revelation refers to Cleopatra.