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Veteran Member
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Ontario, Canada
Posts: 1,435
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Originally Posted by Ben
BTW, Earl, still no comments on Revelation and the Ascension of Isaiah?
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I hate to leave loose ends, and I did promise myself that once I was finished my book section on the non-Christian witness to Jesus, which included addressing a couple of further points such as the above documents in regard to Tacitus, I’d get back and not leave Ben hanging. So here are a couple of sections from my finished draft. Ben will find that I’ve also come across another document we had both overlooked, the Acts of Peter, which offers a slam dunk indication that no general Neronian persecution was envisioned by early Christians—those little “hints” Ben tried to lay so much emphasis on notwithstanding.
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The Acts of Paul and Peter
It has been suggested that the Acts of Paul (an apocryphal work written before the end of the 2nd century) contains an allusion to the Neronian persecution as a result of the great fire. Section 11 tells the tale of the martyrdom of Paul. After a dramatic miracle in which Paul raises a dead boy, Nero finds that many of those surrounding him are Christians, which leads him to seek out other Christians in the city; he has them all imprisoned along with Paul. Paul boldly tells the emperor that one day Christ will destroy the world with fire. An enraged Nero decrees that all the prisoners will themselves be executed by fire, though Paul will die by beheading. There is no mention of the Great Fire itself, or of Christians punished for setting it. The whole proceedings have grown out of the legend of Paul’s own martyrdom. Actually, by the author of the Acts of Paul describing this 'round-up' of other Christians as proceeding out of Nero’s contact with Paul, he is showing his ignorance of the round-up of Christians as a result of the fire and Nero’s attempt to put the blame on them. We have no indication that this enlargement on the legend about Paul has been inspired by knowledge of a persecution by Nero such as Tacitus describes. In any case, the latter scene would hardly have been so gutted in scope and intensity, with its historical essence eliminated; it is much more likely to have worked in the other direction, that enlargements on the legend of Paul’s martyrdom such as we find in the Acts of Paul eventually led, with the help of other factors, to imagining the much more extravagant scene we now find in Tacitus.
We happen to have a rare attestation to the author of this apocryphal work. Tertullian tells us in De baptismo 17 that “the presbyter in Asia who produced this document…was removed from his office after he had been convicted and had confessed that he did it out of love for Paul.” This reveals that such forgeries were done by individuals surreptitiously, seeking to foist false documents on their communities.
Around the same time, probably in the 180s, another forger was busy with the Acts of Peter.5 In the chapter on Peter’s martyrdom (9), the writer speaks of the “mass of people” who were daily converted to Christ by the Apostle—and of women to renouncing the marriage bed, falling “in love with the doctrine of purity,” much to the distress of their husbands who saw to Peter’s arrest and crucifixion upside down. Nero, angry at being denied the opportunity to punish Peter personally, was about to attack those Christian converts, “for he sought to destroy all those brethren who had been made disciples by Peter” (41/12). He was prevented from doing so by a dream in which he was being scourged and told: “Nero, you cannot now persecute or destroy the servants of Christ. Keep your hands from them!” The writer tells us: “And so Nero, being greatly alarmed because of this vision, kept away from the disciples [the converts in Rome] from the time that Peter departed this life. And thereafter the brethren kept together with one accord, rejoicing and exulting in the Lord.”
No writer who knew of a general persecution and killing of Christian brethren in the city of Rome by Nero could possibly have constructed this scene which effectively ruled out the occurrence of any such persecution. After the martyrdom of Peter, he is saying, the brethren in Rome were safe from Nero’s depredations. Thus we have what amounts to a denial of the Tacitean event—even though the writer would have been unaware of any such event having been envisioned. (We can presume he was a different writer from that of the Acts of Paul, who did create a scene of Neronian persecution of Christians, this time as an adjunct to the martyrdom of Paul, involving a limited number of victims and no connection to the fire. Since the latter has thus contradicted the Tacitean scenario, we have both of these apocrypha supplying evidence that no such tradition was known in the Christian circles of the later 2nd century.)
Revelation and the Sibylline Oracles
There is a scene in Revelation which is often pointed to as containing a reference to the Christians martyred by Nero. Before examining that passage, one should note that this document, the apocalypse of apocalypses, employs a range of elements characteristic of the genre, often in obscure and chaotic fashion. Vivid hyperbole and overwrought sensationalism run riot. Identifying the meaning and symbolic nature of the various End-time figures and scenarios has challenged scholars for generations. Contradictions and conundrums abound, simply because the author was not concerned with bringing logic or consistency to his picture (and because scholars insist on introducing the Gospel Jesus into the mix: see page xxx).
For example, in chapter 14, the famous “144,000” are presented as those “who alone from the whole world had been ransomed.” (A certain Christian sect today still regards this figure as the total of those from all humanity who are destined to be saved.) In chapter 7, on the other hand, they are first introduced as those who receive the seal of God, as his servants; yet immediately following this another group is presented who are also saved ‘by the blood of the Lamb.’ It is this group we must examine (7:9-14):
“After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb….These are the ones who have come out of the great tribulation, and they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” To identify this group as representing the Christians martyred by Nero after the fire ignores the first verse quoted. The Roman Christian community was hardly made up of people from every nation, tribe and language. That very world-wide inclusiveness and vast numbers involved indicate that the writer is speaking not only of martyrs of the past but of the future. As David E. Aune (Harper’s Bible Commentary, p.1310) puts it: “(In 7:9-17) John receives a visionary preview of an innumerable host representing all of the people of God.” These are other Christians, over and above the 144,000, who “will perish in the ‘great tribulation’ (v.14)…”
Thus we need no past ‘great tribulation’ to have inspired the author. By the time he wrote, persecution was, if not constant and widespread, a fact of life for many believers in the Christ. Even a focus on “Babylon” throughout the document is not to be limited to an association merely with the city of Rome. As John Sweet (Revelation, p.26) says: “ ‘Babylon’ is far more than simply Rome.” The “great city” represented the earthly power with all its corruption and cruelty. Sweet regards the visions of the martyrs standing before the throne of the Lamb as all of God’s people who had suffered, “whether under Pharaoh, Jezebel or Antiochus, or in the guise of Sodom, Ninevah, Babylon, Jerusalem or finally Rome.” Such a concept fits the language and scope of chapter 7’s scene. And in 17:5-6, the vision of the woman riding the beast represents “Babylon the great” and “the great city,” and it is she, representing the powers of the world, who is “drunk with the blood of God’s people and with the blood of those who had borne their testimony to Jesus.” This goes far beyond any association with a Neronian pogrom.6
A particularly bloody image is created in 14:19-20, in which an angel is directed to gather in the earth’s grape harvest and throw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath. “The winepress was trodden outside the city, and for two hundred miles around blood flowed from the press to the height of the horses’ bridles.” John A. T. Robinson (Redating the New Testament, p.230f) interprets this as echoing Nero’s slaughter of Christians, suggesting that without an historical provocation like that, the “vindictive reaction” of John’s Apocalypse “is scarcely credible.” But Revelation is chockfull of other equally horrific scenes of blood and destruction to be wreaked upon the earth, and few if any of those suffer attempts to be identified with specific historical events. The apocalyptic fever of the times itself, especially in the decades following the Jewish War, would have been sufficient to provoke John’s “vindictive reaction.” To that we might also add John’s own personality, a mind bordering on the psychotic; there are many preachers today who consign non-believers to similar horrors without having experienced anything on the scale of the alleged Neronian persecution.
But if John did require some immediate inspiration for his vision of persecution, he could have found one in Domitian. Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. V, 30) placed Revelation “toward the end of Domitian’s reign” and most modern scholars have followed suit, opting for the year 95 or 96. While those scholars also tend to play down the extent of Domitian’s persecution of Christians, Pliny only a decade and a half later witnesses to its operation under Trajan’s rule, pointing to the possibility of earlier versions providing an impulse to John in the 90s.
An alternative dating has been suggested for the late 60s, following the death of Nero in 68. Two passages in Revelation, in chapters 13 and 17, suggest the so-called Nero redivivus legend, in which Nero—either returning from the dead or not having died in the first place—would return at the head of an army to reconquer his kingdom; in that role he was also associated with the Antichrist. But such a legend would hardly have developed within a year of Nero’s death, to immediately inspire a writer in Asia Minor; nor does the Christian Antichrist legend seem to have arisen that early. In fact, if Nero and a great slaughter of Christians had figured in John’s past and provided the inspiration that some would like to read into passages of Revelation, we might expect him to assume a greater role than he does. The two passages which offer a Nero redivivus do not assign to him a past atrocity, and in fact he is more or less subsumed into the Antichrist figure who shall arrive in the future. This is the “beast” of chapter 13, who will make war on the saints and be worshiped for a time by the world. These expectations are those of apocalyptic tradition and do not require that Nero himself, in being identified with the beast, was known for some great barbarity against a mass of Christians.
We can consequently dismiss Revelation as providing any sign of Christian knowledge about an episode of persecution on the scale of Annals 15:44.
While we are on the subject, the Nero redivivus legend figures prominently in some of the Jewish/Christian Sibylline Oracles, referred to above. Such oracles, in poetic form, were a feature of several societies in the Graeco-Roman world, including Egyptian Judaism, extending from Hellenistic times well into the Christian era. As in apocalyptic writing, they were represented as the product of a past prophetess who successfully ‘predicted’ the future, but they included much genuine prophecy as well. Christianity took over many of the Sibylline Oracles of the Jews and reworked them; the Oracles were known and used by many of the Church Fathers.
Several passages predicting the return of Nero can be found. And while it is difficult to say which might have come under special scrutiny by Christians, it is a fact that no opportunity was taken to amend any of the original Jewish passages on Nero to reflect a dramatic persecution by that emperor of an entire Christian community. One in particular, in Book 5, verses 140-146, stands out:
Him, they say, Zeus himself begot and lady Hera.
Playing at theatricals with honey-sweet songs rendered
With melodious voice, he will destroy many men, and his wretched mother.
He will flee from Babylon [Rome], a terrible and shameless prince
Whom all mortals and noble men despise.
For he destroyed many men and laid hands on the womb.
He sinned against spouses, and was sprung from abominable people…. The destruction of “many men,” especially mentioned in close association with his mother, would quite reasonably refer to the friends and family which Nero had murdered. Yet if passages like this fell under Christian eyes, and they were in the habit of interpolating references to reflect their own interests, it is significant that no doctoring was undertaken to add to Nero’s list of atrocities what should have been the greatest of them all, the slaughter of Rome’s Christians as arsonists of the great fire as described by Tacitus.
The Ascension of Isaiah
Finally, we can look at yet another transformation of Nero, this time in the Ascension of Isaiah. The passage from 3:13 to 4:22 has been identified as a Christian insertion into an earlier Jewish work (the first five chapters) now referred to as “the Martyrdom of Isaiah.” This section Michael Knibb (The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol.2, p.149), on the basis of its Nero redivivus feature, dates to the end of the 1st century CE since “presumably a little time would have been needed for this belief to develop.” In 4:2f, the descent into the world of the angel Beliar is prophesied, “the king of this world, which he has ruled ever since it existed.” It is clear that Beliar is not simply Nero returned; he is a demonic figure expected at the End time who has existed since creation. Rather, he has assumed the form of a “king of iniquity”—Nero, “a murderer of his mother.” The Nero redivivus legend has apparently become so strong by this time that it has imposed itself on the current more traditional apocalyptic thinking.
In describing this past king, he says:
“and (he) will persecute the plant which the twelve apostles of the Beloved will have planted; some of the twelve will be given into his hand.” [Knibb notes that the Greek manuscript “is apparently more precise, ‘[one] of the twelve’—an allusion to the martyrdom of Peter or Paul.” It would seem that at the end of the 1st century, the Christians possessed a tradition about the martyrdom in Rome of only one of those figures, possibly Paul.] In this reference to persecuting “the plant” we are brought back once again to yet another example of a very frustratingly vague reference to a Neronian persecution of Christianity in general—if we can securely take it in such a manner. The wording is too brief and ambiguous to be sure of anything, and the textual tradition of this document has been long and tortuous. But if we assume that the passage was originally meant to impute to Nero something beyond the murder of a single apostle, we can add it to our list of the several other early Christian writings we have looked at which have created the same impression—and like them, regrettably lacking in any specifics which might enable us to decide whether to identify it with a mass persecution such as that outlined in Tacitus. Those Christian writers of the first few centuries would seem to have had an itch they couldn’t help scratching, without being able to put their finger on what exactly had produced it.
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How to interpret that “itch”? After the above, much further discussion follows, but this later quote will give you an idea of the sort of conclusions I have reached.
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Thus we have been led to a feasible explanation for the later genesis of the passage in Tacitus and the idea of the persecution by Nero for causing the great fire: the phenomenon of ‘blaming the Christians.’ Like the Testimonium, its embodiment does not emerge in Christians’ own writings until the 4th century, in this case at its very end. As it stands, Annals 15:44 may be as much a Christian product as the extant Testimonium in Josephus is. But now we face a series of possibilities. As is claimed for the Testimonium, might this blame have built on something in Tacitus? Might Tacitus have referred to a situation on a mild level of ‘persecution’ or defamation which would fit with the impression conveyed by Melito of Sardis about Christian ill-treatment in the time of Nero: attacks on some Christian or Jewish community in Rome whose doctrines or apocalyptic expectations were held in contempt by the emperor and/or the people, remarks perhaps in close proximity to the account of the fire but not associated with it?
Whether that was the case or not, who might actually have tampered with the Tacitus passage? Might we theorize that the account of the fire was at some point first reworked by a pagan scribe to set it on the path of an association of Christians with it, given the pagan propensity just outlined to blame them for every misadventure that came along? Some time later, a Christian scribe might then have worked on it further. Or was the entire thing a Christian insertion into the Annals—ex nihilo as far as any literary precedent was concerned—giving expression to an ‘in the air’ pagan accusation that Christians had been responsible for the burning of the city at the time of Nero? Either one could have envisioned as part of the picture the Christians suffering some punishment for it. (The cryptic passage in Suetonius would have supported this.) A Christian redactor’s motive might have been a desire to create yet another powerful piece of inspiring martyrology, this time from the pen of a pagan historian no less, and also, perhaps, to introduce a reference to Christ, who had an annoying habit of being missing in so many of those historians.
Prior to this pagan/Christian collaboration to develop the dramatic legend of a Neronian persecution, Christian commentators would have had no concrete basis—or a very mild one—on which to envision Nero’s animosity, thus explaining why the references we have looked at which may possibly point in such a direction are so obscure, cursory and unspecific. Other influences on the Christian impulse to build up Nero as the great persecutor would have been Peter and Paul’s association with that emperor and the legends of their martyrdom at Rome during his time. As well, Nero was seen as the Antichrist, due to arrive at the apocalyptic End-time, the future enemy of the Messiah; thus, in a balance between future and past, it was natural for him to become the great enemy of Christianity at its beginning. Drews also suggests (op.cit., p.46) “the political interest of the Christians in representing themselves as Nero’s victims, in order to win the favor and protection of his successors on that account.”
Indeed, we could consider that, for those reasons just outlined, the gradual development of a Christian conception of Nero as the first great persecutor could have occurred without any particular event, minor or otherwise, being at the root of it, other than growing legends about the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul….
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It should be noted that I do not advocate for Tacitus one particular scenario which I consider ‘proven,’ with all elements nailed down. There are too many different options available for that, but all of them discredit the passage as providing reliable witness to the HJ. I’ll add one final quote, to give you my ‘bottom line.’
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Tacitus’ Bottom Line
We have thus arrived at the crux of the entire argument. If no evidence can be supplied that Christians until the time of Sulpicius Severus knew of a great persecution by Nero as arsonists of the Great Fire, and there are even telling pieces of evidence against it, what does this say for the scene in the Annals? The compelling conclusion is that, as it stands, it is historically erroneous, and very much so. Even if the evidence collected in Christian documents points to the possibility of some mild measure or antagonism on Nero’s part to the Christian community in the Rome of his day, then in such a case, if we are to rescue authorship of 15:44 by Tacitus, we would have to acknowledge that the historian got it quite wrong. He would have created out of a minor event a vast exaggeration in scope and intensity, perhaps confusing something that took place around the time of the fire as something that was intimately involved with it, the very cause of the conflagration itself, leading to a bloodbath unparalleled in any domestic event the Romans ever recorded—and no Christians did for three centuries.
But is this really feasible? The Annals were written only five decades after the fact. Tacitus may not have been a ‘careful historian’ to the extent that is often made of him, but he did have available to him good and multiple sources. Much of the rest of his text shows him to be one of the most reliable historians of his age, with two feet on the ground. How could he have gotten a relatively simple matter like this so wrong? If he could make such a mistake in regard to Nero and the Christians, we could expect his works to be riddled with other mistakes, and he would hardly have gained the reputation he has among both ancients and moderns. If no event took place under Nero, and Christians were simply imagining that Nero was the first persecutor—perhaps building on the legendary martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, or for reasons like those offered earlier, such as political interest or because Nero redivivus became associated with the Antichrist—then Tacitus has simply invented the whole thing, for reasons or through error which we can scarcely understand or identify. This seems even less feasible.
Either way, the reliability of 15:44 cannot be rescued. With the fundamental accuracy or authenticity of its central feature, the persecution of the Roman Christians for the fire, so undermined or discredited, there is no way to salvage its accompanying feature, the reference to “Christus” as executed by Pontius Pilate. And thus the secure lifeline which Tacitus is claimed to have thrown to those foundering in the sea of doubt and lack of evidence for the existence of an historical Jesus has been severed and washed away.
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Earl Doherty
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08-20-2008, 09:18 AM
