Jtucker
Jedi Master
This whole issue drives me crazy as well, and I think about it way too much.
I think that reviewing the actual session reveals some clues we haven't fully explored. There are three key points confirmed by the C's, that in my opinion, can help narrow the search. At least partially....
1. The C's confirmed that there was no Latin Vulgate written language. (IE: a degraded later empire version of Classic Latin). This means that likely everything written in Vulgate is bogus or at least heavily interpolated from some unknown original source. A HUGE amount of early and KEY Christian literature that establishes the chronology of the church, Roman Catholic Patristic tradition, and therefore the late empire is in Vulgate and has no precedent source copies in Classical Latin.
2. The C's also confirm in that session that western Europe and the City of Rome were wiped out completely before the Eastern Empire was. So there has to be hard cut off date for a Western Roman emperor. My guess is Vespasian or immediately after.
3. The timeline backwards from Caesar that describes the Republic as we know it, is relatively accurate.
So then the later western Empire and its Vulgate Christianity are all added/constructed or interpolated from records that no longer exist. Or never existed. I think this is where those authors of the added years show their hand. Our entire modern chronology of those added years comes from the early middle ages in Western Europe. We're working with records that have no original source physical copies existing before this. Almost all of them are from France or Northern Italy. The complete copies don't exist before Carolingian (Holy Roman Empire) times.
But if we go east, the C's confirmed that the final Eastern Emperor was Justinian. The main contemporary writings of the true condition of the Empire we have left from that time are from Procopius. In Greek. Not Latin. Or Vulgate. How much of the Secret History by Procopius is genuine we don't know. But quite a bit would be my guess.
So did all these hundreds of years of Vulgate writings and late empire history get concocted in Constantinople at the time of Justinian or slightly before? Unlikely. The C's say that there is probably less than 100 years between the final fall of the Eastern Empire and Caesar's death. So if that's the actual case, then it's practically impossible the added years were written in Greek, the original sources lost, and then translated by Carolingian's into Vulgate? Not likely. Until the monk Eriugena arrives on the scene in the 9th century (note that he's Irish - back to that later) under Charles the Bald is there some sort of ability to translate Greek.
The actual writings we have left of the added years can only be from the Holy Roman Empire and the Carolingian Renaissance sometime from the late 8th century to the 10th. This may have been a very long period of discovery and construction. They may have started their narrative of "record history" with some mythical Gregory of Tours chronologically almost right after the complete and final destruction of the Eastern Empire. Gregory is either a composite character or a catch all for how the 8th or 9th century Carolingian's assembled their "fake" history of the added years of the late Empire. He's the authority, but there's no way he was 6th century. Archeology, writing style and "theological concerns" push him way up the time line into Carolingian times.
As @BHelmet mentioned, could this whole missing year period be a 4D STS Time Loop insertion? Great question. The only thing I would say, is that if 4D can shift timelines for events by going back and assassinating someone or destroy records that contradict their new timeline's authority, that completely makes sense. But what we have is added centuries with so much literary documentation and very little coherent stratigraphic or archaeological cohesion to back them up. Also I don't think 4D STS likes to write long theological tomes that could possibly be interpreted as the opposite of their mission. Which much of the early Christian writings that may be "fake' pursue - despite the intentions behind creating them.
If the C's put the destruction of the empire as final - it most likely was. I don't think the Carolingian added years happened outside of their political, religious and literary constructions. I think it also took decades to create this literary construction of hundreds of years. Yes, monuments, statues and coins exist, but we never know their original context. And as others have mentioned above, it's completely possible famous generals, pretenders and local leaders were interpreted by the early historians as certain emperors that had to match the constructed Carolingian late empire literary narrative that already existed. All of these statues, coins and monuments are completely capable of being built between Caesar and Justinian - but attributed wrongly.
As for the "two chunks", the most obvious guess would be that there's a "Rome" chunk after Augustus until Rome's destruction. Then the second "chunk" would be the Eastern Chunk in Constantinople from its founding as Nova Roma (as Procopius referred to it) until the final end at Justinian and possibly the chaos right after.
Leaving aside the Empire aspect - the much bigger literary bulk is the continuity of Christianity from the Gospels to the Carolingian's. These literary narratives are vast and take up much more complex theological and historical space.
What I think is most likely is that the continuity of literary Christianity after the fall Justinian probably only existed in the Christian communities of Syria and Eastern Anatolia - at least in a connected community sense inherited from the days of Paul. Many of the saints and their actions of the east probably did happen in some form before the time the Carolingian's. But the chronology could be totally out of whack as to how it is constructed now.
Likely the New and Holy Roman Empire's agents of the Carolingian's struck out to Syria and captured these fragment account stories secondhand (if they couldn't read Greek, there's no way they could read Syriac) from whatever was left there after the Muslim Conquest. But with them went the specific plan to justify their new Frankish dominance of both the faith and of creating a new Empire in the fashion of Rome.
So did the Syrian and Eastern Church have a consistent chronology going back to the Roman Republic? Probably not - Rome was pagan and for much of history, Rome was only one player in the struggles of that area. So they have their own histories, but the order of the events and the years they happen are irrelevant in the chronologies of Rome or the Carolingian's.
So possibly the Carolingian's tried their best to reconstruct a late western Roman empire complete with heretics and saints in Vulgate based on what they gleaned from the controversies, miracles and tribulations of the eastern Church? Then with an eye of authenticating their history, dominance and legitimacy, they sent those narratives back in time to western empire for their own purposes?
Or were certain cohorts or Gregory of Tours or his literary creators "divinely inspired" by 4D STS "angels" to automatically write his history much like Joseph Smith with the Book of Mormon? Possibly. But that's a library full of a mess of volumes with different messages and controversies.
Possibly there were more accurate Syrian records originally. But over the years of Muslim conquest and the destruction and shrinking of the Christian communities in the east, these records were lost, stolen or suppressed. All that's left is the Carolingian re-creations of the Church of Rome.
For this Holy Roman Empire to exist in its political and religious context, it needed an unbroken line from the Bishop of Rome (Peter) AND the Empire.
Why would the religion of Augustine of Canterbury (sent by Carolingian's) be so different when he arrives in England and encounters the Irish Church? Back to Eriugena - how was it that he "figured" out Greek before any of the Franks could? Possibly because there were still communities in Ireland that had Greek texts?
Celtic/Hibernian/Irish Christianity is clearly different than Augustine's Holy Roman Catholicism. Why? Because Celtic Christianity had to be essentially the original Orthodoxy - founded at the same time or shortly after as eastern orthodoxy. While Roman Catholicism is a newly constructed faith by the Carolingian's to be imposed imperially on the previous Christians and pagans. Hence the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy that seems to be present long before the Schism.
My working hypothesis on these missing years would be that our current western chronology of history starts with the Carolingian's construction of history - simply because no one else could be the author of those added years. No one else had a new empire that needed to create the years, and no one else had a strong motive to create a continuity in those years from Paul to Charlemagne. As the Catholic Church (which is actually the Holy Roman Empire Church) gained prominence and power over the centuries, that chronology was synced/imposed on other communities because all of those wanted legitimacy to the age of the apostles. This history was the only authoritative one that existed. Scholars later could point to holes and inconsistencies in this history, but couldn't propose any alternative - because there was nothing there hiding. The year's simply didn't exist.
After the discovery of the Pharaoh's tombs during the French conquest of Egypt in 1800, this just added fuel to the fire for universal "Frankish" chronology. Now Egypt's history would be synced with the Old Testament. By the height of 19th century European colonial project, most of the world's government administrations would be adopting BC/AD year dating by force or by convenience. Older cultures like China or India just had to match up some point in the past with year 1 and the calendars were fine. Nobody would really care and it made legal documentation as well as government historical propaganda on an agreed universal time scale more viable.
I don't think until the rise of industrialization, chronology even mattered to most people. Factory hours and paychecks changed that. If someone said Constantine founded Nova Roma in 335 and Charlemagne founded the Holy Roman Empire in 800 - would anyone even care about the numbers? Chronology as a universally accepted means of measurement is relatively recent, and you can argue it has little meaning cross-culturally beyond a certain point in the past.
If there were key questions to answer that would clear up the Roman/Christian element of these added years (which is specifically what the original session focused on - not global chronological synchronicity), I'd say these would come to my mind first:
Is the Constantine that is declared emperor in Britain in the early 4th century and becomes the founder of the Eastern Empire, the same Constantine Gildas describes in the 6th century as abandoning Britain with his legions leading to its ruin? Both of them seem to have some sort of important Christian element to them. Gildas seems more likely to be an original "Justinian" era source than the later Carolingian creations of the 4th century Constantine.
Was the physical destruction of Rome the trigger for both Constantine to leave Britain and form the Eastern Empire in Nova Roma/Constantinople? Was this almost exactly right after the Gospel of Mark was written, therefore giving Christianity legitimacy as well Paul's version of Christianity supremacy? IE - everything predicted by Paul to happen if things weren't cleaned up and righteousness was found - Rome would be destroyed? Therefore Christianity was "right" and Constantine could create a New Rome in Byzantium with a Christian foundation (possibly cynically or opportunistically)?
Who was the Emperor in Rome when it was destroyed?
How many years elapsed between the physical destruction of Rome and the Plague of Justinian?
Where did the Carolingian's get all their texts? Did they construct the Vulgate writing language? Was there direct 4D STS help?
Is there one text that we've overlooked that we should study closer for more understanding?
I think that reviewing the actual session reveals some clues we haven't fully explored. There are three key points confirmed by the C's, that in my opinion, can help narrow the search. At least partially....
1. The C's confirmed that there was no Latin Vulgate written language. (IE: a degraded later empire version of Classic Latin). This means that likely everything written in Vulgate is bogus or at least heavily interpolated from some unknown original source. A HUGE amount of early and KEY Christian literature that establishes the chronology of the church, Roman Catholic Patristic tradition, and therefore the late empire is in Vulgate and has no precedent source copies in Classical Latin.
2. The C's also confirm in that session that western Europe and the City of Rome were wiped out completely before the Eastern Empire was. So there has to be hard cut off date for a Western Roman emperor. My guess is Vespasian or immediately after.
3. The timeline backwards from Caesar that describes the Republic as we know it, is relatively accurate.
So then the later western Empire and its Vulgate Christianity are all added/constructed or interpolated from records that no longer exist. Or never existed. I think this is where those authors of the added years show their hand. Our entire modern chronology of those added years comes from the early middle ages in Western Europe. We're working with records that have no original source physical copies existing before this. Almost all of them are from France or Northern Italy. The complete copies don't exist before Carolingian (Holy Roman Empire) times.
But if we go east, the C's confirmed that the final Eastern Emperor was Justinian. The main contemporary writings of the true condition of the Empire we have left from that time are from Procopius. In Greek. Not Latin. Or Vulgate. How much of the Secret History by Procopius is genuine we don't know. But quite a bit would be my guess.
So did all these hundreds of years of Vulgate writings and late empire history get concocted in Constantinople at the time of Justinian or slightly before? Unlikely. The C's say that there is probably less than 100 years between the final fall of the Eastern Empire and Caesar's death. So if that's the actual case, then it's practically impossible the added years were written in Greek, the original sources lost, and then translated by Carolingian's into Vulgate? Not likely. Until the monk Eriugena arrives on the scene in the 9th century (note that he's Irish - back to that later) under Charles the Bald is there some sort of ability to translate Greek.
The actual writings we have left of the added years can only be from the Holy Roman Empire and the Carolingian Renaissance sometime from the late 8th century to the 10th. This may have been a very long period of discovery and construction. They may have started their narrative of "record history" with some mythical Gregory of Tours chronologically almost right after the complete and final destruction of the Eastern Empire. Gregory is either a composite character or a catch all for how the 8th or 9th century Carolingian's assembled their "fake" history of the added years of the late Empire. He's the authority, but there's no way he was 6th century. Archeology, writing style and "theological concerns" push him way up the time line into Carolingian times.
As @BHelmet mentioned, could this whole missing year period be a 4D STS Time Loop insertion? Great question. The only thing I would say, is that if 4D can shift timelines for events by going back and assassinating someone or destroy records that contradict their new timeline's authority, that completely makes sense. But what we have is added centuries with so much literary documentation and very little coherent stratigraphic or archaeological cohesion to back them up. Also I don't think 4D STS likes to write long theological tomes that could possibly be interpreted as the opposite of their mission. Which much of the early Christian writings that may be "fake' pursue - despite the intentions behind creating them.
If the C's put the destruction of the empire as final - it most likely was. I don't think the Carolingian added years happened outside of their political, religious and literary constructions. I think it also took decades to create this literary construction of hundreds of years. Yes, monuments, statues and coins exist, but we never know their original context. And as others have mentioned above, it's completely possible famous generals, pretenders and local leaders were interpreted by the early historians as certain emperors that had to match the constructed Carolingian late empire literary narrative that already existed. All of these statues, coins and monuments are completely capable of being built between Caesar and Justinian - but attributed wrongly.
As for the "two chunks", the most obvious guess would be that there's a "Rome" chunk after Augustus until Rome's destruction. Then the second "chunk" would be the Eastern Chunk in Constantinople from its founding as Nova Roma (as Procopius referred to it) until the final end at Justinian and possibly the chaos right after.
Leaving aside the Empire aspect - the much bigger literary bulk is the continuity of Christianity from the Gospels to the Carolingian's. These literary narratives are vast and take up much more complex theological and historical space.
What I think is most likely is that the continuity of literary Christianity after the fall Justinian probably only existed in the Christian communities of Syria and Eastern Anatolia - at least in a connected community sense inherited from the days of Paul. Many of the saints and their actions of the east probably did happen in some form before the time the Carolingian's. But the chronology could be totally out of whack as to how it is constructed now.
Likely the New and Holy Roman Empire's agents of the Carolingian's struck out to Syria and captured these fragment account stories secondhand (if they couldn't read Greek, there's no way they could read Syriac) from whatever was left there after the Muslim Conquest. But with them went the specific plan to justify their new Frankish dominance of both the faith and of creating a new Empire in the fashion of Rome.
So did the Syrian and Eastern Church have a consistent chronology going back to the Roman Republic? Probably not - Rome was pagan and for much of history, Rome was only one player in the struggles of that area. So they have their own histories, but the order of the events and the years they happen are irrelevant in the chronologies of Rome or the Carolingian's.
So possibly the Carolingian's tried their best to reconstruct a late western Roman empire complete with heretics and saints in Vulgate based on what they gleaned from the controversies, miracles and tribulations of the eastern Church? Then with an eye of authenticating their history, dominance and legitimacy, they sent those narratives back in time to western empire for their own purposes?
Or were certain cohorts or Gregory of Tours or his literary creators "divinely inspired" by 4D STS "angels" to automatically write his history much like Joseph Smith with the Book of Mormon? Possibly. But that's a library full of a mess of volumes with different messages and controversies.
Possibly there were more accurate Syrian records originally. But over the years of Muslim conquest and the destruction and shrinking of the Christian communities in the east, these records were lost, stolen or suppressed. All that's left is the Carolingian re-creations of the Church of Rome.
For this Holy Roman Empire to exist in its political and religious context, it needed an unbroken line from the Bishop of Rome (Peter) AND the Empire.
Why would the religion of Augustine of Canterbury (sent by Carolingian's) be so different when he arrives in England and encounters the Irish Church? Back to Eriugena - how was it that he "figured" out Greek before any of the Franks could? Possibly because there were still communities in Ireland that had Greek texts?
Celtic/Hibernian/Irish Christianity is clearly different than Augustine's Holy Roman Catholicism. Why? Because Celtic Christianity had to be essentially the original Orthodoxy - founded at the same time or shortly after as eastern orthodoxy. While Roman Catholicism is a newly constructed faith by the Carolingian's to be imposed imperially on the previous Christians and pagans. Hence the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy that seems to be present long before the Schism.
My working hypothesis on these missing years would be that our current western chronology of history starts with the Carolingian's construction of history - simply because no one else could be the author of those added years. No one else had a new empire that needed to create the years, and no one else had a strong motive to create a continuity in those years from Paul to Charlemagne. As the Catholic Church (which is actually the Holy Roman Empire Church) gained prominence and power over the centuries, that chronology was synced/imposed on other communities because all of those wanted legitimacy to the age of the apostles. This history was the only authoritative one that existed. Scholars later could point to holes and inconsistencies in this history, but couldn't propose any alternative - because there was nothing there hiding. The year's simply didn't exist.
After the discovery of the Pharaoh's tombs during the French conquest of Egypt in 1800, this just added fuel to the fire for universal "Frankish" chronology. Now Egypt's history would be synced with the Old Testament. By the height of 19th century European colonial project, most of the world's government administrations would be adopting BC/AD year dating by force or by convenience. Older cultures like China or India just had to match up some point in the past with year 1 and the calendars were fine. Nobody would really care and it made legal documentation as well as government historical propaganda on an agreed universal time scale more viable.
I don't think until the rise of industrialization, chronology even mattered to most people. Factory hours and paychecks changed that. If someone said Constantine founded Nova Roma in 335 and Charlemagne founded the Holy Roman Empire in 800 - would anyone even care about the numbers? Chronology as a universally accepted means of measurement is relatively recent, and you can argue it has little meaning cross-culturally beyond a certain point in the past.
If there were key questions to answer that would clear up the Roman/Christian element of these added years (which is specifically what the original session focused on - not global chronological synchronicity), I'd say these would come to my mind first:
Is the Constantine that is declared emperor in Britain in the early 4th century and becomes the founder of the Eastern Empire, the same Constantine Gildas describes in the 6th century as abandoning Britain with his legions leading to its ruin? Both of them seem to have some sort of important Christian element to them. Gildas seems more likely to be an original "Justinian" era source than the later Carolingian creations of the 4th century Constantine.
Was the physical destruction of Rome the trigger for both Constantine to leave Britain and form the Eastern Empire in Nova Roma/Constantinople? Was this almost exactly right after the Gospel of Mark was written, therefore giving Christianity legitimacy as well Paul's version of Christianity supremacy? IE - everything predicted by Paul to happen if things weren't cleaned up and righteousness was found - Rome would be destroyed? Therefore Christianity was "right" and Constantine could create a New Rome in Byzantium with a Christian foundation (possibly cynically or opportunistically)?
Who was the Emperor in Rome when it was destroyed?
How many years elapsed between the physical destruction of Rome and the Plague of Justinian?
Where did the Carolingian's get all their texts? Did they construct the Vulgate writing language? Was there direct 4D STS help?
Is there one text that we've overlooked that we should study closer for more understanding?