the crossing of the Rubicon, until his assassination, funeral and deification, conforming to Jesus' mission from the Jordan to his arrest, crucifixion and resurrection. Textually transformed from Rome to Jerusalem in Caesar's eastern veteran colonies, the Gospel narrative with its altered geography, dramatic structure, its characters and newly adopted cultural environment, would therefore have been written neither as a mimetic approximation of Caesarian attributes nor as a mythological amalgam, but as a directly dependent, albeit mutated rewriting (réécriture) of actual history. He argues that, following this initial transposition, there was at first a redaction of the Caesarian Ur-Gospel inspired by Augustan history and theogony, whereby the later synoptic gospels by Matthew and Luke incorporated (among other pericopes) the Nativity of Jesus, originally transposed from the nativity of Augustus, and the resurrection narrative, according to the chronological-biographical structures in the historical account by Nicolaus of Damascus. Later generations produced more discrete traditions like the Gospel of John, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Book of Revelation. According to Carotta, the ultimate early Christian metamorphosis of the eastern Caesar-religion, which was to reinterpret the foundational cult of the Julian imperial dynasty with regard to the contested Palestine, was provoked by the new Flavian theopolitical ideology, which also induced the rewriting of the vita of Vespasian's court historian Flavius Josephus into the hagiography of Saint Paul in the second part of Acts. Reception Carotta's book and its translations have drawn little serious academic attention. Except for few feuilleton write-ups the first German edition of Carotta's book was not reviewed. Outside of Germany his theory drew little response, while the 2003 Dutch translation caused a controversial and at times heated debate in the Dutch media: historian Thomas von der Dunk, philosopher Andreas Kinneging and philosopher Paul Cliteur were among those who supported Carotta's theory, while philosopher Willem J. Ouweneel, theologian Matthijs de Jong, historians Marc van Uytfanghe and Anton van Hooff, and the Dutch Bible Society dismissed the book. The discussion was revived briefly when a feature documentary about Carotta's research was released in 2007. In an issue of the Dutch magazine Quest Historie dealing with conspiracy theories, theologian Annette Merz, while acknowledging the similarities between the lives of Jesus and Julius Caesar, was quoted as arguing that Carotta would have to refute the non-Christian sources for the existence of Jesus. Dominican priest Jerome Murphy-O'Connor criticized Carotta for avoiding explanations on why the