Francesco Carotta (born 1946 in Veneto, Italy) is an Italian writer who developed a theory that the historical Jesus was based on the life of Julius Caesar, that the Gospels were a rewriting of Roman historical sources, and that Christianity developed from the cult of the deified Caesar. This theory is generally ignored in academic circles. Biography Francesco Carotta was born in 1946 in Veneto, Italy. Carotta studied philosophy in France and linguistics in Germany. In the 1970s he was active as a writer in the cultural-political movements in Frankfurt, Bologna and Rome. In 1980 Carotta headed the Frankfurt-based Casa di Cultura Popolare as director. As executive director and publisher he supported Kore, a Freiburg publisher of feminist books and women's literature. He first published his theories in the late 1980s. In 1999 he presented his theory in the book Was Jesus Caesar? Since then he has continued his research and written several articles. He 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. Carotta lives in Kirchzarten near Freiburg. Caesarian origin of Christianity Francesco Carotta's theory runs contrary to all established theories on the historical Jesus. Carotta postulates that the historical person behind the Biblical figure Jesus Christ was not Jesus of Nazareth, but the Roman statesman Gaius Julius Caesar, from whose cult Christianity developed over the course of several generations. Jesus was Caesar The thesis of Carotta's book Jesus was Caesar is based on a comparison of the gospels, especially the earliest Gospel of Mark, with the ancient sources about the last years in the life of Caesar and his immediate legacy. 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 Carotta might constitute the "Latin Ur-Gospel". This is augmented by comparisons from archaeology, numismatics, iconography, liturgy, and ritual traditions. 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 Christ is based on the deified Julius Caesar, transformed and mirrored in the eastern Hellenistic and judaizing regions of the Roman Empire. Within Carotta's theory the gospels are hypertexts after a diegetic transposition of Latin and Greek Roman sources (hypotexts) on Caesar's life from the beginning of the Civil War,