Ancient Christian Imperial Images

[Demosophist]

Here's a picture of an inscription from the catacomb of “Saint Flavia Domitilla” in Rome, which is the oldest known Christian burial site. This inscription identifies it as the Flavian family sepulcher. St. Domitilla was the niece of Emperor Titus as were a number of other early Christian saints. There is actually something like a cross depicted, but it's a standard part of an anchor called the transom. The Anchor/Fish symbol depicted is used interchangeably during the 1st Century CE as both an imperial symbol of the Flavian Dynasty, and simultaneously as a Christian symbol. Richard Valliant suggests, in his book Creating Christ, that this convergence is evidence that the Flavians commissioned the creation of the Gospels as part of a propaganda strategy to “tame” the violent Jewish Messianistic cults of the Sicarii and Zealots who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. These cults were also called “Christian” and had messianic figures named Jesus and James. In other words the entire first century of the common era involves multiple religious overlays of different sacred symbols, names, and groups that have been conflated into a Graeco/Roman "consensus"--a process that began with the Flavian emperors: Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian.



However, what I didn't notice it at first about the image was that in the upper right of the Domitilla inscription is what appears to be a slightly modified Tanit, which is an extremely ancient symbol depicting the conjunction of Saturn and Venus. Yikes! The Tanit is often depicted with a crescent shape which led people to mistakenly identify it as a “moon goddess.” But the crescent is nearly always horizontal, so the notion that it's the moon is simply a misidentification. The crescent moon is never horizontal, nor does it ever contain a star, as the Tanit symbol sometimes does and as it does on David Talbott’s book cover of The Saturn Myth!

[Demosophist]

OK, the links to the images are broken and it won't let me edit the page to fix them. Very very very irritating.

And I can't even delete it and start over.

Sorry, but this forum is just too user unfriendly to use. No wonder hardly anyone posts here.

[Arcmode]

It does suck, maybe by design, all will be revealed in time. What is the evidence that the fish symbol was associated with the Flavians? Did you check the book's sources? A lot of these 'excuse for Christianity's success' narratives can be tricky. There are a lot of them around, and the ones I've checked don't hold true.

In my opinion the symbols are only superficially similar.

I hope I found the right inscription.

[Arcmode]

I use this site:

freeimage.host

You can drag from folders onto the page to upload. Once its uploaded, don't use the link it immediately displays. Instead, go to your uploads, the first link in the sentence under the words: Upload Complete. Your images should appear in a grid. Click the image and copy the second link it displays called 'Image URL.' Paste it inside the image tags in the forum editor. These links have been working for me. Good luck.

[Lloyd]

I'm not certain, but I think they prefer not to have many images on the forum because of the extra storage involved.

I sidestep the problem by having a Substack at substack.com where I can post unlimited images and text equally for free. You can even do podcasts there, but I'm not interested in that, at least so far.

By the way, it's not a problem on this forum to post links to images for readers to click on.