CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS POST
So, how does Pustogarov explain the invention of the year 1500? He approaches it from a completely different point of view than Tamansky. His fundamental insight is that the MD in Roman dates such as "MDXIX" (for 1519, the date of the second edition of Erasmus' Bible) actually must be read "MD XIX", with MD standing for "Mortiri Domini" or "Death of the Lord". Of course! And indeed, the letters "MD" are often set off from the other Roman numerals.
But why?
The explanation is simple. After the formation of the Ottoman Empire as a rival power bloc, the Habsburgs immediately declare war on them, and invent the story of the crucified Jesus Christ as atrocity propaganda justifying war. Several real people serve as models for the Jesus character, including Sabbatai Zevi, Ignatius Loyola, and Thomas More. Perhaps we could add Atwill's Flavians to this list. Erasmus writes the New Testament in Latin and translates it into Greek in 1516. It is pure propaganda. The original date, MD XVI, is a call to arms. "Sixteen years have passed since they killed God, and we still haven't retaken Jerusalem [Constantinople]! Crusaders, get off your asses!"
Pustogarov thinks that the 16th century may also be a phantom double of the 17th century. (Marfull thinks something like this as well.) I now find myself wondering if the C in MDC dates always meant "100" or if it also originally stood for Christ. If so, "MD" and "MDC" would originally be identical. He also mentions an illustration in the Erasmus Bible with a date of IS17" which he translates as "IesuS 17".
Note that Fomenko also shows that there was some confusion between the numbers 5 and 6 at some point.
HOW IT WAS IN REALITY
Pustogarov believes that over the course of the 16th century (which may therefore also be the 17th century), relations between the Habsburgs, the Protestants, the Popes, and the Ottomans are normalized, with the result being the Bible as we know it. They are forced to invent some system that would explain the dates on all these books. Some say AD, some say IS, some say JS, some say MD, some say MDC. If Fomenko is correct, the numbers 5 and 6 are not yet fixed.
I can even imagine how they did it. The first thing to do would be to establish an equivalency between the IS/JS inscriptions and a number. Well, I and J can only be one. That leaves S, which looks kind of like a five or a six. So, either 15 or 16. From here, it's easy enough to explain "MD" as signifying 1500 in Roman numerals. Perhaps before this moment, Roman numerals only used I, V, and X, and were never used for mathematics or dating, simply for counting logs as Fomenko suggests. So, M, D, and C (?) were magically transformed into 1000, 500, and 100. Perhaps this is where 6 was made into 5. Considering that we already have Roman numerals for 1, 5, and 10, it would make sense that we would also have numerals for 50, 100, 500, and 1000, but NOT 600. So "D" cannot be 600 for reasons of logical consistency. It has to be 500.
Presuming that this is how it happened, the people trying to figure out this problem have now ALMOST streamlined everything. The problem is that they can't make 5=6 and MDC=MD. Meaning that one century's worth of dated printed books suddenly must be split into two separate centuries based on whether or not the printer chose to use "JS" or "MD" or "MDC". Presumably this entailed some serious complications. Maybe this is why so many books were printed claiming that Columbus sailed to the New World in 1592, not 1492.
(Please note that Pustogarov does not speculate about C meaning Christ, that is my own guess.)
The advantage of this theory is that it doesn't require us to base our whole argument on the rabbinical tradition of one Creation Day equaling a thousand terrestrial years. Here is where, in my opinion, Tamansky and Pustogarov's theories meet. (Tamansky barely mentions the Ottoman Empire, and Pustogarov barely mentions the Roman Empire.) Mathematically, or rather graphically, they have no choice but to add 1500 years, since there is no other coherent way to fit IS, JS, MD, and MDC together. Suddenly they have to deal with the embarrassing and inexplicable addition of 1500 years to the calendar. Perhaps it was at this point that the story of one Creation Day equaling 1000 years was created as well, with Jesus being a New Adam. In other words, Tamansky is right that there is a connection, but he has the causality backwards.
Presuming that this event occurred around the time of the Peace of Westphalia as Tamansky claims (1648), we would actually be correct to say that 48 years have passed from the supposed crucifixion of Christ and the launching of the propaganda campaign against the Ottomans. Logically, if we have just transformed one century (or one half-century) into two, then the current date must be set at 1648, not 1548, because otherwise half the books would have been written in the future. This would also allow the conspirators to conveniently send certain recent events, such as the Council of Trent or the founding of the Jesuit Order, back to the middle of the just-invented 16th century. This might also explain the discrepancy between South America being colonized in the 1500's and North America being colonized in the 1600's. Maybe this is simply because the Catholics and the Protestants used two different fonts for the letter S, with the Spanish S more closely resembling a 5 and the British S more closely resembling a 6.
Is this why the Big Bang events which jump-started history, namely the discovery of the New World and the expulsion of the Moors/Jews from Spain, were sent back to just BEFORE the crucial year 1500? The only way to get around the 15/16 confusion and make sure these events were "at the beginning" was by putting them before that crucial 15/JS/MD. To do this, they would ALSO have to backdate the invention of the printing press. This would mean that any book with a pre-1500 date was printed after 1648 (which, remember, is also 1548) and artificially backdated.
Pustogarov points out the absurdity of the Gutenberg Bible being the world's first printed book. First of all because it's a masterpiece of technical complexity (imagine a 747 being invented before a simple biplane) and second of all because it coincidentally includes only the Biblical books approved in the Council of Trent despite appearing almost a hundred years earlier.
This would also mean that the second half of the 16th century "never happened".
So, to put Tamansky with Pustogarov: Ancient Rome was created by the Habsburgs as another front in their propaganda war against the Ottomans. Remember, Constantinople was the original Rome. Did the Habsburgs use the history of their allies, the Popes, as a template for the creation of a fictional ancient Roman Empire in order to usurp the historical authority of Constantinople? Remember, the Habsburgs sacked (Jewish) Rome in 1527, and the papacy only turned against the Jews in 1555, presumably under pressure from the Habsburgs in Vienna to get on board with their new religion. Pustogarov also believes that "Ancient Greece" was a propaganda creation of the West and that most of the "Ancient Greek" texts we know were originally written in Latin (in France and Italy) before being translated into Greek. But why? Simple: the original masters of Constantinople were Greek-speaking Romaniote Jews. When the expelled Sephardim from Spain arrived en masse in Constantinople, the native Romaniote Jews were pushed out of power, with some of them fleeing to the coast of the area we now call Greece. As part of their propaganda war against the Ottomans, the Habsburgs created the twin myths of the enlightened Christian Byzantine empire and the philosophically enlightened "Ancient Greece", with Cardinal Bessarion being the point man. Isn't this amazingly similar to what is happening today with Ukraine? We see the United States and Europe pouring huge amounts of money into Ukraine as part of a propaganda war against Russia. We see what was once a Slavic dialect among others (Ukrainian) being elevated into the status of a language proper. I've met several Ukrainian refugees, whose native language is Russian, who never spoke Ukrainian at home before the war, and who today refuse to speak Russian. We even see a new history for Ukraine being created, one in which it was always independent and distinct from Russia. All it takes is one generation for a new country and a new language to be "invented". How many nations were created in this way? Pustogarov would say...all of them.
I used to have a Greek friend whose family name was Pavlogianis. They were from northern Greece. She told he her great-grandfather was originally named Pavlovsky. One day he was informed by the state that he was not Macedonian as he had believed but Greek. Fast-forward a few generations and everything is forgotten.
It makes intuitive sense to me that Periclean Athens never existed. I imagine it as a fantasy universe into which utopian, pagan-Jewish "Renaissance Humanists" in pre-Christian Florence projected their wildest political and philosophical ideas. Like Star Wars nerds writing fan fiction today.
To conclude: for Tamansky, the Popes were motivated to add 1500 years to the calendar by a desire to extend their authority to hoary antiquity as well as launder their pagan-Jewish past into a Christian present as part of a truce with the Protestants. Pustogarov places these events in a larger context, namely the all-out propaganda war between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. For Pustogarov, Rome is a brilliant but fleeting empire, only taking off in 1463 with the discovery of alum in the region and losing their independence in 1527 with the sack of Rome and absorption by the Habsburgs. I see no contradiction between these two versions, simply a recontextualization.