Bede

Cweb,

If you are happy that the passage is not an interpolation then we can rest this matter now and waste no more time. Spin will keep spinning but that is his privilege. I wanted to know where Lucretius got his rather idiosyncratic idea that the line didn't feel right. Clearly it isn't based on much. As I have made no claims my qualifications are irrelvant.

B

Chris Weimer

Actually, Bede, as only a iunior in Latin studies, I'd rather defer my position to the guy who majored in it and did an intensive study on the the author in question than try to formulate my own opinions based on personal feelings of "I don't think that's good enough information."

And who is saying that the Paul letters are interpolations?

Toto

Christian sites seem to try to argue that prefect and procurator were sometimes used interchangably, or that Tacitus' mistake was understandable since the name changed in 41, well before he wrote.

Stephen Carlson has an interesting comment on his blog that contains comments from some names that are familiar around here:

Tactius, Josephus, and Eusebius

In a previous blog entry pre-Eusebian eyewitness to the Testimonium

spin

I know that desperate conviction leads to desperate beliefs. If Bede is prepared to say that Tacitus, demonstrating his knowledge of the situation in Judea including Judea's change of status under Claudius, would, in some unaccountable lapse, use the wrong terminology despite that knowledge, then he demonstrates the desperateness I refer to. :wave:

A procurator was an imperial administrator of a province and, as Judea wasn't -- according to Tacitus's own indication -- an imperial province until the time of Claudius, one has to rely not only on the hope that Tacitus was simply in error in using the term "procurator" for Pontius Pilate, but that he unwittingly contradicts himself.

Here we get the big lie.

Or at least the ostrich approach of sticking one's head in the sand in order not to see what one doesn't want to see.

To repeat some of the problems on the passage under review:

1) The interpolation changes the emphasis of Tacitus's subtle invective by taking the focus off Nero and turning the narrative into a sob story about Christian martyrs; what should have ended with the aspersion that Nero was responsible for the fire goes off with Christians burning into the night, the harshness of such treatment caused "a feeling of compassion" for the "criminals".

2) The grossness of image and sentiment is totally unlike any passage in Tacitus; many people assume that the word "taciturn" is derived from his name because of his "austere" style.

3) The blunder in nomenclature regarding Pontius Pilate cannot be accounted for in any simple manner. Not just an error, it has to be a self-contradiction at the same time, one that doesn't take into account the differences of social status implied by the terms.

4) The anachronism based on Nero, like the Roman populace, knowing about and being able to recognize Christians circa 62 CE (when even the term "Christian" was only supposed to have been coined in Antioch some years earlier, though this is also preposterous) cannot be explained by Tacitus himself retrojecting the term based on his knowledge circa 110 CE.

I debated the case on the Ebla forum and Bede was incapable of providing any evidence based response, merely relying as so many apologists do on received wisdom. It comes therefore as no surprise that Bede has no evidence to back up his assertions.

His chief tool in response is obfuscation:

Wrong. Doh! Bede has no serious argument so he creates a straw man to try to beat. He knows that I am not a "Jesus Myther" and still he makes such ludicrous statements. We can't expect anything better from a person who has no arguments of his own.

How can one take this seriously? Origen's Celsus is extremely rude about Christians, so obviously Origen wasn't Christian, right? Doh! Bede read the text and stop projecting your prejudices into it.

As to Bede's claim of exaggeration about Tacitus's use of "multitudo" referring to the multitude of Christians supposedly in Rome, he can check out this Perseus search for the term for Tacitus's usage and see if he can find examples of Tacitus's exaggerated use of it.

I for one get tired of seeing this subject reappear as though nothing has been said on it before and without any new information to justify the resurfacing (and I can't take Andrew's attempt, with the hilarious reference to terrorism, seriously). :down:


spin

JoeWallack

JW:
Psst, spin, you must mean Justin's Trypho. Celsus was a real person. Maybe Vorkosigan can write an interpolation here before Bede sees this and if Bede is suspicious about a change all us Skeptics here will swear that "Trypho" is original.

Notsri

Spin, with all due respect, your response to Bede’s statement at this point seems a bit of a non sequitur, not to mention the fact that you’re apparently attempting a bit of a straw man here. Bede has not suggested that Tacitus quotes directly an outside source (as Origen does in the Contra Celsum). He’s not confusing the sentiments of Tacitus (or Origen) with those of another author (Celsus, in Origen’s case) named in the text of Annals. In short, Bede's position doesn't require or even suggest such an inference concerning Origen and Contra Celsum; you misrepresent his view by implying it does. By the same token, the sentiments expressed in the Tacitean pericope are generally those of a non-Christian, as are the views expressed in Origen’s excerpts from True Doctrine. On the face of it, the obvious deduction is that both the author of True Doctrine and the author of the Tacitean passage were non-Christians, the latter being exactly the point Bede is getting at in the above comment.

Sincerely and with the utmost regard,
Littleshit

spin

Hey, it's alright. I've been known to make a few mistakes. It does happen. And you're right it was Trypho.


spin

spin

Joe picked it. I had Justin's Trypho in mind.

I think it is a non sequitur to claim that xians were necessarily incapable of writing things against xianity especially for edificational purposes.


spin

Lucretius

To clarify my statement that

didn't "feel right" I feel I was rather lazy in phrasing it this way.
Without going too deeply into Latin Stylistic Analysis, which was a major part of my degree course for all 3 years ,as this is not the right forum for detailed analysis,I will try to explain this in a better manner while still using layman's terms.
While Latin prose does not by definition have the same sorts of fixed metres that Latin poetry does,it still does have a noticeable rhythm.
This comes about because prose was not only meant to be read from the page in personal reading , but also meant to be heard in public ,normally in small private gatherings.
This rhythm was used by authors to emphasise different aspects of the passage (Slow for sad, quick for action as 2 basic examples)
In the passage in question the sentence I quote, that I have a problem with ,has a tendency to break up the flow of the rest of the passage and is not really in the same tone as the rest ,in fact it reads to me exactly like a footnote(footnotes will ALWAYS be later additions to a copy of the text )that has been erroneously included in the main text ,something that you would not normally expect from an author of Tacitus' standing.
I could if necessary do a full Stylisitic Analysis of this passage if I had the time or the inclination, but as I stated earlier this is not the right kind of forum for this .

Vorkosigan

Yes, it is!