Johann_Kaspar

About Pliny I remember a thread questioning very much the authenticity of those "letters". Xian "persecutions" are mostly faked. Felcity and her 7 sons... :rolling: :rolling: :rolling: :rolling: :rolling: ...just a "corrected" copy of an older text.
Justin "martyr"...
Mostly xian propaganda.

rlogan

Say, Ben - and whomever.

I had cited this material below in an earlier thread on Tacitus here at IIDB:

http://courses.drew.edu/FA2001/bibst...1/tacitus.html

Wherein we find a very reasonable proposed original Tacitus passage:


I think given all of the most recent discussions I am coming to view this as the strongest explanation. Professor Doughty merely lifts the proposed interpolation out as a single block.

Ecrasez L'infame

Well, I haven't read the rest of Pliny, so feel free to pull rank on me - but I can't see this. By my understanding, neither Pliny's letter nor Trajan's reply are concerned with accusations as such, whether for profit or otherwise - only with anonymous accusations (which can't be, by definition, for profit). No, to me, Pliny and Trajan are still dancing the commissar's waltz - very nicely too, says I (who himself has some experience in it).

Moreover, they know they're good, as evinced by their cordial greetings.

Regards

Robert Loughrey

Ben C Smith

There are millions of passages that I could lift out of a text as a single block; the question is whether I should lift all such passages out.

Ben.

Roger Pearse

Or any.

My own view is that no text should be considered as interpolated without *objective* evidence. Otherwise we stop doing history and start playing games in which we start with a theory and manipulate the texts with cries of 'interpolation' to make them say what we want. This has been done, as I'm sure you know.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

andrewcriddle

One problem with this proposed reading is its banal nature.
What it says in effect: is that to distract attention from the causes of the Great Fire, Nero caused people who would (given general Roman practice) have suffered messy public deaths, to suffer very very messy public deaths.

Andrew Criddle

rlogan

?

This is actually one of the reasons why the proposed original is such a strong candidate. I fits very well with the degeneration of nero into the cartoonish chariot-riding, sadistic carnivalist.


Now, now Ben. Why play such a ridiculous straw man card? millions?!

Here we have a very problemmatic passage, as you have said yourself. Moreover, the Christians have doctored documents, destroyed others, and literally executed people that challenged their propaganda line.


This is pretty laughable from an objective standpoint. The Bible, from Genesis through Revelation, is repleat with made-up "history". Without question, Christians have also perpetrated not just little frauds with documents, but astonishing ones as stupendous as the Donation of Constantine.

For you to pretend that this area is one in which we need to trust all documents that have been in the hands of the Christians - specifically the ones that they use as "evidence" to back the state-sanctioned propaganda regarding their early history -

is ridiculous.


Kind regards nevertheless.

countjulian

Before some one asks the mandatory who/what/where questions, the the Paul-Seneca letters were Christian forgeries, Against the Christians by Porphyry was destroyed, Hypathia was carved up for being a pagan too close to political power, and Anatolius met a rather gruesome fate for even practicing paganism secretly.

Ben C Smith

Yes, millions. I know that term is used as an exaggeration, but not in this case. Take all the ancient documents available to us up to, say, the fall of Rome, go through them line by line and paragraph by paragraph to find any block of any size that one could cleanly lift from the text so that a reader would not notice the loss, and yes, I am certain the number of such passages would easily tilt into the millions.

Terms like ridiculous and straw man, by the way, threaten to spoil the peaceful coexistence you and I have enjoyed so far.

Ben.

rlogan

Well, Ben - and again in kindness: the problem is that you are applying it to an argument that I have made, and by implication have pretended to render the small number of actual cases offered as if they were tanatamount to a random plucking of the millions of permutations possible.

You have been here through more than one thread of discussions where this topic is under discussion. So I think it unproductive to pretend that there have been no reasons why this passage is a candidate for interpolation. Therein lies the straw man. The man who had no legitimate reasons for considering interpolation.

You have problems with the passage yourself. It requires explanation. You have offered none. Please do, and why it is superior to interpolation as an explanation.



well, I certainly do not wish to spoil it Ben, as it has indeed been enjoyable and I think profitable.

So I'll throw out riduculous. But I'm leaving in straw man.

Cheers...