Religious holidays predictably give rise to theological theories. Amongst Balkan communities there are two rather specific ones: Was Jesus Croat? Or was he a Serb. Balkan Stories has looked into these theories and gives you the truth about Jesus.

There will be a long line of costumers in front of a butcher’s stand on my local market in Vienna the upcoming weekend. They want to get some piglet to roast tomorrow, or perhaps a nice slab of pork.

These people are members of the Yugoslav dijaspora in Vienna, that’s more than a 200.000 people strong. This weekend will be Easter, the highest religious holiday for Christians. This year, it falls on the same day for Orthodox and Catholic Christians alike.

The vast majority of the butcher’s customers are considered Serbs or Croats, respectively.

That many of them from the neighorhood have chosen to get their provisions for tomorrow’s feast from this stand is no coincidence. The butcher is the only one serving pork on the entire market, and he’s a Serb himself. So he knows which cuts Balkan customers prefer for a traditional roast or barbeque.

For some in the line, there is a theological theory lingering in the air that has been popping up every now and then for about a decade, and that seems to be gaining some traction in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia respectively.

And while most of the people lining up would just shake their heads in amusement or disbelief, it is likely that there are some people who believe it.

Was Jesus a Croat? Or was he a Serb? Those are the theological theories in question. As unlikely as it may seem, both have their adherents.

Why Jesus Was A Croat – According To Some.

I could trace the origins of the first theory back to the year 1999, and it likely has started it all. That year, author Tihomir Mikulić published the first volume of his series Otvoreni pečati (Opened Seals). It has reached seven volumes so far, in which Mikulić proposes a version of Croatian history that somewhat differs from what even the most nationalist Croatian historians would subscribe to. To put it mildly.

A key theory of his is that modern day Croats originally hail from Judea. His evidence are some toponyms he says are really ancient Croatian, and the names of some groups or ethnicities of Israel and Palestine in Antiquity. Jesus was one of them, and Croats were the first Christians, he concluded.

They ended up in modern day Croatia and Bosnia, and particularly on the Adriatic coast, in several waves and by somewhat obscure means via the shores of the Black Sea. Some of them had been settled there by Emperor Diocleatian as Manicheans who were supposed to erase the Illyrian character of the inhabitants of ancient Dalmatia.

In Mikulić’s view, that fact that Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus and the Jews in ancient Israel and Palestine, is a Semitic language and Croatian is the idiom of an Indoeuroepan language, and that the first Christian texts were written in Greek, do not disprove his hypothesis at all.

Croats aren’t Slavs at all, he says. Rather they had been forcefully assimilated by Slavic tribes who conquered the Balkans in the early Middle Ages.

According to his fans, this is further evidence that Mikulić’s claims must be true. After all, the world had always been out to get the Croats, and the forceful assimiliation into Slavhood was just another episode of historical Anticroatism.

Besides these points, Mikulić also puts forward some argument that can only be described as the belief in the magical power of names. He points out that Jesus‘ temporal father had been called Josef, which is after all a very popular name among Croats.

Somewhat contrary to, yet in line with, these arguments Tvrtko Dolić, one of Mikulić’s fans, writes in a commentary for the Croatian tabloid Dnevnik that Josef Stalin and Josip Broz had „committed genocide against the Croat people“ and this had been „the greatest massacre in history“.

Mikulić’s hypothesis are outside the realm of scientific consensus among historians, to put it rather charitably.

At least he doesn’t claim to be a historian, which is something in the world of fringe theories, and even expresses his respect for Croatian historians. He just thinks they are a bit confused.

Serb friends of alternative theories about the history of everything are just begging to best this theory.

Why Jesus Was Actually A Serb – According to Some

In Serbia, it is several people who put forth the hypothesis that Jesus had actually been a Serb.

As far as I could see, the first time this claim went public was in a video in 2016 that has since been deleted – this is considerably later than Mikulić’s hypothesis and may or may not have been a reaction to it.

In this video, an unnamed Youtube user claimed that Jesus had not been born in Israel or Palestine respectively, but in Kosovo. His real name had been Manojlo Nemanjić, she claimed.

That would make Jesus the progenitor of the House of Nemanjić, a Serbian royal dynasty of the High Middle Ages.

Its historical founder, Stefan Nemanja, the first king of Serbia, just recently was honored with a rather kitschy statue in front of Beograd’s former Central Train Station – sporting rather obvious religious-nationalist symbols. (Read here for more)

Since then, the hypothesis of Serb Jesus seems to have split up in several currents. Their arguments differ considerably.

Proponents of one of these currents for instance argue that Maria was really a Serbian name. Aramaic, the lingua franca in much of the Near East in antiquity, was identical with the Serbian idiom.

That the former is a Semitic language and the latter Indoeuropean, is probably just misinformation propagated by historians and linguists who have conspired to destroy Serbdom in and of itself.

The champions of Serbdom and Truth – rather synonymous according to the believers in Serb Jesus and similar theories – have finally gotten together to fight for truth and justice, and they know the true sources like no one else does.

Slobodan Filipović is one of these champions. According to himself he is an ethnologist. He claims that a Serbian calender is the oldest calender in the world, sadly forgotten, ignored and oppressed by a cabal of historians and archeologists out to get the Serbs.

(Readers of this blog have already encountered this theory as put forth by a certain Milan T. Stevančević.)

All Has to Do with Cleopatra And Alexander The Great – And Tibet

Filipović supports the hypothesis that Jesus was the progenitor of the Nemanjić dynasty, which in fact even originates from Biblical Adam – which would make them hardly unique to a devout Christian, though.

Like many medieval and early modern dynasties, the House of Nemanjić sought legitimization in a noble and ancient lineage. They seem to have claimed descendance from Augustus and Constatine the Great at various times.

Somehow this is related to aliens, which feels reminiscent of the „Pyramids“ of Visoko in Bosnia.

To Filipović, this proves the Great Antiserb Conspiracy since the beginning of time, or at least since the beginning of his beloved and arcane Serbian calendar.

In a live discussion on the Serbian TV channel Happy TV, Serbian journalist Dragan Jovanović throws in Cleopatra and Alexander the Great for good measure. They had been married, Jovanović claims, and in order to hush this up, historians made up 297 years of history out of whole cloth.

And since they made up 297 years of history, they also hid the Serb origins of Jesus, while they were at it, Jovanović claims. In his eyes, this is rock solid evidence for the hypothesis of Serb Jesus.

„I don’t care at all if anyone other than Serbs believes Jesus was a Serb. He was“, he says.

Amidst all of that there is the story of Jesus’s trip to India where he died at age 120. The records are apparently kept in a Tibetan monastery called Hilandar.

A Defrocked Priest and Geocentrist as the Voice of Reason

In this discussion, Dejan Lučić’s expertise is rather crucial. He is an author of spy novels and poses as expert on geopolitics on Serbian television.

Amidst all of this, theologian Nikodin Bogosavljević comes across as the Voice of Reason, as journalist Tomislav Marković remarks fittingly in his review of this live discussion on Happy TV.

Bogosavljević counters the hypothesis of Serb Jesus with the remarks that the Bible was the inerrant word of God, and that anything else was just naught.

Bogosavljević is a defrocked Orthodox priest who insists that Earth is the center of the universe, around which the sun and the planets circulate.

Happy TV gives the discussion whether or not Jesus was a Serb an hour and a half of air time. If you don’t believe me, see for yourself.

The Youtube Channel Isus Xristos takes it somewhat slower. It shows excerpts of some Bible show in Serbian dubbing. The actor playing Jesus looks quite a bit like young Jürgen Prochnow who had played Jesus alongside Demi Moore in the Hollywood production „The Seventh Sign“ in 1988.

The video has been viewed more than 32.000 times since it was put up eight years ago.

I could not determine which production the original video was from.

Also, it isn’t clear whether this video was a serious attempt to propagate the hypothesis of Serb Jesus. Some viewers expressed their conviction that Jesus was a Serb in their comments nevertheless.

Why This Fringe Is No Laughing Matter

The adherents of both theories are obviously part of the lunatic fringe. This doesn’t make the whole thing a laughing matter, however.

Both theories are out there to prove that Serbs and Croats are of holy lineage. This is important in and of itself in the clerical-nationalist discourses in former Yugoslavia ever since capitalist restauration.

And both hypothesis‘ are to make the respective peoples or ethnicities look older than they are according to scientific consensus. Both serve the narrative „We were there first“. And from this, territorial claims or claims of cultural or other supremacy are made. This is classic nationalist discourse.

It’s like many modern day Macedonians claiming that they are descended from Alexander the Great and the ancient Macedonians – and have no qualms about making those claims manifest in city architecture. (Read more here.)

Likewise, Albanian nationalists tend to play language games like their Serb counterparts do. Some of them claim that ancient Etruscan was a dialect of the Albanian idiom Tosk.

This is not according to scientific consensus amongst linguists.

Others declare that Albanian is Europe’s oldest language. This, too, contradicts science.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if some Albanian nationalist propagated a hypothesis of Albanian Jesus. It may in fact have happened already. As I do not speak Albanian, I could not meaningfully investigate this question.

On the other hand, the mere 2.000 years ago that Jesus lived would look like a paltry origin story compared to the 8.000 year long history some Albanians claim their people and their language have.

It is owed to mental health considerations that our trip into the lunatic fringe ends here.

The Truth About Jesus

Let’s finally get to the question the title of this piece poses. What do we know about a or the historical Jesus?

According to unanimous consensus among sane historians and bible scholars, Jesus was a Jewish preacher who lived at around the beginning of the 1st century of the Common Era. He was preaching that the end of the world was nigh and demanded that his fellow Jews undergo a radical religious awakening.

Around the year 30, the Romans crucified him as a supposed or actual insurrectionist.

Some of Jesus‘ early followers reinterpreted the crucifiction into a resurrection and started worshipping Jesus as Messiah, or Christos in Greek. This term means „the Anointed One“.

Over the next centuries, this developped into the conviction that Jesus was the son of God, and most Christian groups finally broke with Judaism.

In the end, those groups prevailed that we know as the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches today.

If you want to learn more I can refer you to the blog of Bart Ehrman and his Youtube channel. Both are easily accessible ressources from one the world’s most renown experts for the history of the New Testament and early Christianity.

*Croat and Serb are terms of ethnical distinction. In common understanding, they are synonymous with membership in the Catholic and Orthodox Church respectively. As Croats and Serbs speak the same language, this is the only meaningful distinction between these ethnicities. Both terms cover a wider group of people than the terms Croatian and Serbian respectively. The latter describe people living in Croatia and Serbia, regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation.

If You Like This Piece

If you like this piece and want to support my work on this blog, please consider liking and sharing it on social media, or leaving a comment. All of this helps this blog to get more attention. You can also support me with a donation on Buy Me A Coffee.