Roger Pearse

7. Affirmabant autem hanc fuisse summam vel culpae suae vel erroris, quod essent soliti stato die ante lucem convenire, carmenque Christo quasi deo dicere secum invicem seque sacramento non in scelus aliquod obstringere, sed ne furta ne latrocinia ne adulteria committerent, ne fidem fallerent, ne depositum appellati abnegarent.

...they were accustomed (essent soliti) to come together (convenire) before dawn (ante lucem) on a fixed day (stato die) and (que) to speak (dicere) a poem (carmen) to Christ (Christo) as if (quasi) to a god (deo)...

All the best,

Roger Pearse

EarlDoherty

Quote:
I can see we're going to need a few extra pegs in lower positions on this board. It is absolutely amazing how so many anti-mythicists here come off so cocky and cocksure of themselves when they really know very little.

From my "Alleged Scholarly Refutations of the Jesus Myth" article:

(There was another scholar I saw recently who made the same remark about the Pliny translation, but I can't put my mental finger on him. If I can track it down, I'll let you know.)

And I'm rather disappointed that Roger seems to have supported S.M. in his narrow understanding, and did not point out that the "if" is not necessary in the Pliny passage.

Earl Doherty

Ben C Smith

What are (some of) the (other) references for the use of quasi in Pliny?

Thanks in advance.

Ben.

EarlDoherty

Quite frankly, I don't know, Ben. I have not surveyed the complete Latin text of Pliny's letters. I made that particular point based on the views of other scholars, those "authoritative" ones that everyone seems to appeal to. I assume that Sherwin-White had a look.

Earl

Toto

a bit of Sherwin-White online
More discussion of this particular issue in Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence (or via: amazon.co.uk) p. 28 viewable on Google books. Footnote 26 notes that PG Ware, Oxford Latin Dictionary, states that with the ellipsis of the verb quasi generally means "as if." Van Voorst does not place much reliance on this reference.

Ben C Smith

Thanks, Toto.

And I have also drummed up the Perseus list of the 144 instances in Pliny of the word quasi. Of course, that would be a lot of work to go through. I think I will take a glance at those references Sherwin-White gives before I do anything with that.

Ben.

EarlDoherty

And my thanks to both of you. It always helps when someone else does your work for you. Of course, that's what we're here for, (in Fathom's commendable words) "to learn"--from each other.

(As usual, Ben, Perseus is playing hard-to-get.)

Earl

jules?

Messiah= Latin Christos= English Anointed. Kingship or High priests were annointed [are you keeping up SM?] Jesus gets the special translation of Joshua but no else does and it seems he got to monopolise Christ. So when Tacitus mention Christians he is really saying followers of the Anointed who get there name from the Anointed who according to official records or a later christian scribe was executed by Pilate. But Herod was Anointed, [Herod christ!] and Simon claimed he was [no doubt by a higher authority] and so did all the other imposters as mentioned by Josephus.

Well there are some people I understand who believe fiction to be true. I suggest you look at the many threads that discuss the reliability of those sources. As Origen mentions Although not believing in Jesus as the Christ, Josephus when searching for the true cause of the fall of Jerusalem ought to have said that the persecution of Jesus was the cause of its ruin

you are quite correct that Josephus does not say vespasian is the christ
yet Tacitus fails to connect his knowledge of Judean prophesy with Christians sorry Anointedians but then Christians were a popular religion in his time so everybody must have known what they were about, surely and especially someone as worldly as Pliny the younger?

Solitary Man

The appeal to authority to Van Voorst does little to boost either Toto's or Earl Doherty's argument. Does anyone else find it ironic that both appealed to someone who has doctrinal commitments to Christianity, while ignoring other apologists when it doesn't suit their needs? And to dismiss the Oxford Latin Dictionary by the authority of Van Voorst borders on the absurd and shows to what lengths these people hold on to their pet theories, with or without evidence. But contra Toto, that's not actually what Van Voorst was saying. Van Voorst is saying that we cannot place too much weight on the passage given historical credence to Jesus as a man. But this idea is contrary to the Latin of Pliny.

And all this without going into what Sherwin-White meant and how it relates to the discourse.

To the topic. For one, the primary meaning of the word is "as if" or "as though". It also denotes similarity to, for example in our own texts, Christ is sung a hymn to quasi to a God, i.e. they both are sung hymns to.

Second, quasi always implies a difference in subjects. For example, even in legal texts (of which Pliny's letters are certainly not), some categories can serve in the capacity of another category via quasi, like the example given in OLD § 6: si...quasi intercessor servus intervenerit, non rem peculiarem agens "if...a slave has intervened as a surety" (Gaius, Institutiones 15.1.3.5). Servus as a whole isn't intercessor, but only in this particular instance, and only because the servus is acting in the capacity of the intercessor.

Pliny is no different here. It is not "to Christ their God" or "to their God Christ" (which would be expected), but to Christ quasi God. We can also thank Cicero, whom Pliny strove to be like, for giving us an example of what it would look like if Christ was God in "De Finibus 5.15.43, although it doesn't always mean that it is such formulated as such.

The vast majority of quasi in Pliny, though, is hypothetical, "as if, as though", and this is borne out just by a cursory glance at quasi. Take Book V, for instance:

V.1 - quasi praemium - (something) like a reward [not actually as the reward itself]
V.3 - quasi...statuit [William Melmouth takes the quasi here as "so to speak"; Pliny is referring to something like advice, from context, but it's not a clear example]
ibid. - quasi populum + ellipsis of verb - as if I had invited the public into the auditorium, not my closest friends into my bedroom
V.6 - quasi margine arbusta - by a quasi-border of shrubs [here used as an adverb]
ibid. - quasi novas alunt - clearly as if here, as the trifolium isn't new

None follow quasi in the Cicero example I gave above, and four out of the first five clearly are of the hypothetical nature. So let's look at what Sherwin-White actually gives:

VIII.8:

Inde non loci devexitate, sed ipsa sui copia et quasi pondere impellitur.

I doubt this qualifies since quasi here is used adverbially and not conjuctively like in the letter to Trajan.

IX.23

Exprimere non possum, quam sit iucundum mihi quod nomina nostra quasi litterarum propria, non hominum, litteris redduntur, quod uterque nostrum his etiam e studiis notus, quibus aliter ignotus est.

Unfortunately, this defeats Doherty severely. For you see, the names Tacitus and Pliny were belonged to men (homines, g.pl. hominum), but here they were being used as if there were literature itself!

Talk about pegs being taken down a notch, I think Doherty needs to go back and instead of arguing from authority, which may or may not be right, actually do his homework and evaluate the evidence himself.

Toto

I have not made an argument.

Nor have I dismissed the Oxford Latin Dictionary. I don't think that Van Voorst did either.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that I would disagree with that.

But I'm not convinced that even if Pliny meant that the Christians worshipped Christ "as if" he were a god, that this proves that their Christ was once a historical person - any more than worshipping Christ "as" a god would prove the opposite.