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Caesar’
http://www.carotta.de
Reading Francesco Carotta’s book has
fascinated me, as would a novel, leading the
mind of the reader step by step to the solution
of an obscure intrigue. This voyage was like a
liberating and exhilarating breath of fresh air
which progressively swept away prejudices and
received ideas. But if this push towards my
illumination succeeded—even beyond the
author’s contribution to any number of
methodological presuppositions concerning
philology, social psychology, ethnology and the
connection of political history with theology—it
was because of his audacity to attack the
words themselves of the Gospels in order to
map out their hidden side: not simply their
history but especially the irresistible dynamics
of their dislocation.This is not to say that
Saussure had not prepared me, in theory, for
this shock. The linguist who had worked
extensively on anagrams and who had warned
well about what can happen to a tradition in
the course of its transmission, writes in one of
his notes: ‘Imagining that a legend commences
with a meaning, has still the same meaning
since its first inception, or even to imagine that
it cannot have had any meaning at all, is an
operation beyond my comprehension.’It is the
opposite of what the savants have done with
the texts originating from oral traditions by
superposing on the logic and economy of the
oral productions their identitary vision of the
edition of written texts. It is the case for the
Homeric oral tradition where the entirely
natural variations in every oral recitation by
every bard, are traced back to a single
invariable text that is supposed authentic.
According to the working hypothesis of the
book, that is also the case for a Hellenistic text
coming from a certain manuscript tradition,
like the Gospel of Mark, whose Latin origin
would be incompatible with the idea of a text
transmitted once and for all by the deity.
Actually, here philology and theology find their
common limits and point of departure: the
truth of meaning, be it that of the order of
mythology or of religious revelation can only
be guaranteed in the closed universe of a
controlled scripture. Scripta manent …The
presentation of Mr. Carotta has the advantage
of recognizing the major importance of
dislocations and slips from one form to another
and from one meaning to another in the
transmission of an ancient oral or written text.
The fault that was opened due to technical
failings of the means of oral transmission, has
allowed, e. g. in the dynastic courts of Ionia of
the eighth century BC, the appropriation of
ancient Mycenaean oral poetry and from it the
making of those Homeric poems that glorify
the ancestors of the princes and even the
colonization of Ionia; the failings in the
transmission of manuscripts would have
allowed certain dominant groups in the orient
at the time of the Imperium Romanum to make
the cult of Caesar a Judaizing and Hellenizing
religion.Now Mr. Carotta demonstrates that this
process can only take place upon a
background of puns, lapses and
misapprehensions mixed together. It is the
same process that creates the argots of
particular social groups but also our own
idiolects and which, more widely, makes the
languages evolve over the course of time.
From this point of view etymology (which
means ‘true origin’) is just the search for
conscious or unconscious mistakes occurring
with the speakers that have primarily altered
the form and/or meaning of the words. On the
basis of this book, one can ask oneself whether
it would not also be interesting, instead of
going backwards towards whatever origin of
the words, to illustrate the processes of their
deformation and reshaping which are carried
out by the speakers again and again as time
goes by.In any case, Carotta’s book, while it
presents itself as a research into the ‘true’
Gospels, produces before our eyes a series of
puns and misunderstandings, the genitors of
another text, a text far away from its origin (as
seen by the output). This last one, however,
has arisen from a ‘false’ conviction that by
demolishing its philological supports nullified
its theological essence. Now, after the
reconstructions of the author, one observes,
that even there (or particularly there?) where,
as with Mark, it can be a matter of transition
from one language to another and not only
from one epoch to another, the roads taken by
the authors and copyists remain those of the
evolution of all speaking; that the life of
spoken language creeps in between the words
of the text and furnishes them with a
completely new meaning and poses a
completely new series of questions to the
exegetes.
Fotis Kavoukopoulos
Athens