spamandham

Ok, I can accept that. Now, based on what Suetonius wrote, how many groups of 'Christians' was he aware of?

aa5874

Suetonius was writing or is believed to have written at around 115 CE about events that occurred before he was born.

I cannot tell you with any reasonable certainty how many groups of Christians Suentonius was aware of during the time of Nero, before Suetonius was born.

Again, perhaps Suetonius merely copied the information about the Christians from some source.

spamandham

It seems to me, that if you posit that what he is purported to have written, was actualy written by him, the answer to this question is trivial, regardless of what he may have used as a source.

ynquirer

Focus is different on both, and so is, per force, the emphasis laid down by each one. Tacitus seems mainly concerned with the human side of the persecution, and that is why he highlights the sufferings inflicted on the victims. Suetonius, instead, gives relevance to the legal side: an abuse was being perpetrated and Nero suppressed it. Period.

Note that persecution of the Christians is listed by Suetonius among the positive accomplishments of Nero, while his cruelties are depicted much later in the text. It would have been an inconsistency to mix accomplishments with cruelty in dealing with this particular item, and that is probably the reason why Suetonius does not mention the fire and the Christians’ alleged participation in it.

It is up to the reader to understand that Suetonius condones the means used by Nero to achieve the desired outcome, which Tacitus obviously does not. This explains away differences in emphasis.

In point of fact, Suetonius fully corroborates that there was a persecution, of which he chooses not to give any detail.

EarlDoherty

“Opined it”??? Is it mere opinion when you point to a text and demonstrate what it actually says? That’s argument, Ben, not opinion. And when what is demonstrated conforms to the claim I am making, and to the opposite of your claim, that’s evidence in my favor. Whereas all you are doing is speculating on some other knowledge that could lie in the writer’s background, with no evidence in the text in favor of it. Surely you can see that this is fallacy, no better than on the level of all those claims that there could be some lost letter of Paul that said clearly that his Jesus was a recent man. The text of the Acts of Paul doesn’t allow for your claim, doesn’t even suggest the possibility, and you expect me to argue against that?

Precisely. Severus has indeed “just described the persecution of not a few Christians.” In other words, he has given us what all other commentators before him lack: an account of a separate persecution, clearly and in detail, distinguishable from that of Peter and Paul and those in their company. Are you going to claim that his use of tum can reach back across the centuries and impose the same meaning on Tertullian and Eusebius that even you admit is ambiguous? I don’t think so.

I don’t see that at all. You are being circular. What the apostolic martyrdoms belong to is the unspecific statement about Nero being an enemy to the Christian religion. “At the time of him being such an enemy”—in other words, what constituted it (at least its dramatic element), is his execution of Peter and Paul and perhaps a few others linked to them. Perhaps if there is anything else lurking there as well, it was some kind of proscription. Anything else is your “expectation”, unsupported by evidence in the texts.

As far as your specific quote (with Greek bolding), this is more of the same. You are forcing a meaning into a couple of simple words which it does not necessarily have, and only by means of very strained reasoning. Note, first of all, that these are Eusebius’ words, even though he has said that Tertullian “writes as follows.” I pointed out that Eusebius’ “quote” does not conform in important details to the extant Tertullian passage.

Now, first of all we lack here any clear reference to a slaughter of Christians or details about it. Moreover, this is Eusebius quoting Tertullian, and as well him, or someone before him, putting words into his mouth. (“after subduing all the east, he exercised his cruelty against all at Rome” does not appear in Tertullian.) Therefore, Eusebius is understanding Tertullian in a certain way, which Tertullian himself does not convey. That misquoted remark may (the line could have other interpretations less specific than a persecution of Christians) imply for Eusebius a general persecution of Christians, but the point is, he has no other source of knowledge for that implication than this misquoted Tertullian. He does not offer us any example of such a thing on his own and confines his own examples of a Neronian persecution to Peter and Paul. So there is no independent evidence in Eusebius of a knowledge of your ‘separate’ persecution. It is not “explicit in Eusebius.” As a consequence of all this, your pointing to “Thus [tautē]” and the verb being in the aorist cannot bear the weight of the meaning you are trying to draw from them. Your “grammar” has not proven anything.

And you know that this is not what I’m trying to imply. I’m talking about the death of other Christians which are described in the texts themselves, such as those in the Acts of Paul: the other Christians which Nero has rounded up solely on the basis of Paul’s words to him, as part of the legend attached to Paul’s martyrdom. In fact, if the author of that document speaks only about other Christians being persecuted in that particular connection, that in itself speaks to a lack of knowledge on his part of any Christians persecuted by Nero which lay outside the circumstances which he portrays.

Earl Doherty

EarlDoherty

I’ve seen this before, and it’s a good example of the over-subtle and dubious sophisticated reasoning indulged in by too many modern scholars to try to explain why a text doesn’t seem to say the things we would normally expect it to say. Is such a rigid categorization of details supposedly relating to “positive” accomplishments of Nero and of details supposedly relating to his cruelty, and the “inconsistency” of mixing the two, supposed to have trumped for Suetonius the much more blatant inconsistency of not mentioning the persecution of Christians as arsonists in the great fire at the same time as he mentions the great fire? As I’ve said before, give me a break. These sorts of ‘explanations’ do not stand up to scrutiny, especially scrutiny that allows common sense to be introduced.

Earl Doherty

andrewcriddle

I don't know exactly when the "Twelve Caesars" was written.

However there is some limited support fo the idea that Suetonius was in the middle of writing it when he got sacked. A number of scholars hold that Suetonius seems to have been able to make use of confidential official documents in the very early lives in a way that is not true of the later ones.

His access to such sources may have ceased when he lost his position in the Imperial household.

Andrew Criddle

Ben C Smith

Okay, where did you argue against B above? What did you say that cut that option off?

No, I am claiming that this is how tum (or tunc) is used. I gave you a clear case (Severus) to illuminate the less clear (Tertullian).

The thing is, I argued that either of the two main uses of tunc supports the executions of Peter and Paul belonging to a persecution; you did not read my argument closely enough to even realize that this is what I was doing; instead, you said that I had already acknowledged that tunc can go either way!

Think of Tertullian now. If you cannot read my contemporary English prose closely enough to realize what I am saying, how can you be expected to read his ancient Latin prose closely enough to realize what he is saying?

Here is the text (again):

Thus [ταυτη] having been announced [ανακηρυχθεις] as the first among the principal enemies of God, he was led on [επηρθη] to the slaughter of the apostles.

Now, it sounds like you are saying that Nero was announced as an enemy of God by his killing of the apostles, and then, after being so announced, he was led on to kill the apostles.

What I am saying is that these are two separate things; they have to be. The announcement as the enemy of God precedes the killing of the apostles; thus it cannot be the killing of the apostles.

Some kind of proscription... against Christians?

I am reading an aorist participle as time prior and an adverb of manner as, well, as manner. What exactly is your complaint about this?

For 3 points, can you tell me why (in the judgment of scholars) the quotation does not conform very well?

Of course Eusebius is dependent upon Tertullian. That was never at issue. You are confusing (A) knowledge of a separate persecution with (B) knowledge of a separate persecution independent of Tertullian. I never even tried to argue the latter. I think Tertullian is his main (trusted) source for the event, and he clearly reads Tertullian as saying that there was a persecution that included the apostolic executions. He clearly does not read Tertullian as saying that the whole affair consisted only (your word, remember) of the apostolic executions.

(Eusebius probably also knew the martyrdom scene from the Acts of Paul, but would not be inclined to quote that text authoritatively.)

No, it proved that you were mistaken when you wrote:

To the contrary, Eusebius reads Tertullian (his main or perhaps only source) as saying that there was a general persecution (having thus been announced as one of the principal enemies of God) of which the executions of Peter and Paul were a part. That is what all of this has been about. In the process of defending this indefensible sentence, you have miscontrued my intentions, shown surprise at views of mine that I have held for years, erected strawmen in my honor, and burnt them in effigy.

Heavens, no, I do not know that. All I have in my possession as an insight into your intended meaning is your dense, rhetorical, almost impenetrable prose.

You are slipping that last bit in as if you have argued for it, but in fact you have not. Again, how do you know that the author of the Acts of Paul did not know of the general persecution and of the martyrdom of Paul, and simply connected them artificially? How do you know that he invented those other martyrs or persecuted Christians on his own accord, rather than finding them in texts or traditions and interpreting them as the result of a run-in with Paul? His making them subject to an encounter between Nero and Paul no more makes them his own invention than Tacitus possibly artificially connecting the fire with the persecution makes either of those events questionable. People make connections that were not there originally; they simply do. Heck, you do it all the time.

And what about the Ascension of Isaiah and Revelation? No comments on those?

Ben.

EarlDoherty

OK, let’s try this one more time. (And I'm doing this as much to ensure that I get everything straight in my own mind as much as possible, and find the best way to lay it out.)

First look at Tertullian, Apology 5:

There is nothing in the above passage of Tertullian that even hints at your ‘two-stage solution’. Nothing that specifies something which first took place, and then that something else took place.

What, then, is the “Nero was the first who assailed with the imperial sword the Christian sect”? That, as I explained, is revealed by two other passages in Tertullian.

“Tunc” (as you yourself pointed out) can mean “at that time”. At what time? At the time that Nero stained with blood the rising faith. While it can also mean ‘next’ or ‘and then’, if he had meant the latter, he could have used “postea”. Since he gives not the slightest other detail of the “staining with blood,” Peter and Paul as constituting the staining with blood is the more natural alternative, especially when he then goes on to speak of those he has learned from about martyrdom, and once again all he speaks of is Peter and Paul.

I pointed out the passage in De Praescriptione 36, where Tertullian mentions only the martyrdom of apostles. You had a technicality to get around that (unlike with either of the above), yet it is still a silence on any martyrdom other than apostles. So, the point here is that this passage gives your claim no support either, not even a “hint” of one.

So far we have nothing to indicate that Tertullian possessed any concept of a wider persecution of Christians outside of apostles. Can I get you to agree on that at least? If not, on what basis in Tertullian do you disagree?

Now you seem to be trying to put all your chips on Eusebius. I’ll use your earlier posting of H.E. 2.25:

I made the point that the line in Eusebius quoting Tertullian, “Study your records: there you will find that Nero was the first to persecute this teaching when, after subjugating the entire East, in Rome especially he treated everyone with savagery,” is hardly to be equated with what Tertullian actually said. I suggested that the passage had been corrupted, perhaps interpolated, perhaps misconstrued in some way by the time it reached Eusebius. On further research on this matter, I can accept that the variance between the two texts was almost certainly the result of an incompetent translator from Tertullian’s Latin into Greek, the Greek which Eusebius is quoting. This does not change the fact that Eusebius’ understanding of the matter was based on that incompetent Greek translation. But what was that understanding?

First of all, understanding a separate persecution by Nero from that of the apostles is not possible from the Latin original of Tertullian. That I believe I established above. From the garbled Greek translation, could Eusebius have interpreted it otherwise, that there was some kind of separate persecution of others besides the apostles? (Let me point out that if he did, that cannot be used to imply that Tertullian also did. I trust you can see the logic in that.)

Let's consider the suggestion that Eusebius drew from that translation the understanding that Tertullian was referring to a separate persecution of Christians other than Peter and Paul. If so, we can conclude that he knew nothing about it on his own, by some other established tradition, because he does not give us any information about it. He launches into the record of Peter and Paul’s death at Nero’s hands, and the witnesses to those deaths in the form of certain cemeteries and monuments, as well as a letter of Bishop Dionysius of Corinth which itself makes no mention of any other martyrdoms besides Peter and Paul. Now, why could we not expect some kind of parallel record, with supportive evidence, of this separate/other persecution of Christians in general, if he had such a thing in mind?

Furthermore, let’s look at the sequence of ideas in this whole passage (ch.25), before and after the ‘quote’ from Tertullian. He first speaks of Nero’s power-mad depravity: “he gave himself up to unholy practices and took up arms against the God of the universe.” He speaks of “his perverse and extraordinary madness, which led him to the senseless destruction of innumerable lives, and drove him in the end to such a lust for blood that he did not spare even his nearest and dearest,” and he goes on to speak of the various murdered members of Nero’s family. So far, no inclusion of Christians. Then: “All this left one crime still to be added to his account – he was the first of the emperors to be the declared enemy of the worship of Almighty God.” This together with the earlier “took up arms against the God of the universe,” is all pretty woolly. If he meant a bloody slaughter of Christians in general, why not say so more directly? If he can regard such a general slaughter as a “crime”, why would he ignore it completely but for these woolly phrases and focus solely on the execution of Peter and Paul?

I suggest that the reason is that he had no such view of things, no such traditions to draw on in order to provide specifics. The reason that he is woolly is because he is simply relying on this garbled translation of Tertullian and may not be quite sure just what it is supposed to refer to. In fact, he tells us that this is exactly what he is doing. After the remark about Nero being the first declared enemy of Almighty God, he says: “To this the Roman Tertullian refers in the following terms,” implying that his “crime” assertion is dependent on Tertullian. We can reasonably wonder, too, since he focuses solely on Peter and Paul, whether he more or less regards the “crime” of being the enemy of Almighty God as encompassed simply by those two martyrdoms—the "tautē" notwithstanding. If he can be woolly about what he has in mind for that crime, he can also be woolly about whether his apparent grammatical sequence between an A and a B is borne out in actuality. What he actually tells us provides no clear picture of that alleged sequence.

Thus, you are trying to draw too much, some 'technically necessary' meaning, from the line “Thus [ταυτη] having been announced [ανακηρυχθεις] as the first among the principal enemies of God, he was led on [επηρθη] to the slaughter of the apostles.” Eusebius gives us no indication that the first clause refers to some general persecution of Christians that he knows of. The translation of the verb epairō seems to be intended to make it sound as though there is a sequence involved, but the verb simply means to “raise/rise up,” here in the sense of being impelled to do something, namely to murder the apostles. There is no necessary, even normal, sense of going on to murder someone else after having murdered a bunch of other people previously.

What is the bottom line? That Eusebius gives us no identifiable indication that he envisions a separate, preceding persecution of Christians to that of Peter and Paul. Whatever he may have taken to be the implication of Tertullian’s words—or rather of the faulty Greek translation of those words—he is unable to demonstrate (and unwilling to openly commit himself, apparently) that they refer to a general persecution of Christians involving death. If he can’t demonstrate it, or even indicate to us that he in fact takes that meaning from Tertullian—we are on risky ground if we try to claim that we can do so. At the very best, his ‘grammar’ suggests that he may envision something that Nero was guilty of in regard to the Christians, but the other evidence I have provided (as in Melito, for example) points at most to some mild action against Christians. It is certainly curious that Eusebius cannot even bring himself to say that this is “death” but only something marking Nero as the “enemy of the worship of God,” let alone actually bring himself to provide the slightest detail about any slaughter.

Keep in mind that my bottom line in all this is to discredit the Tacitus account of the slaughter of Christians after the great fire, by showing that we get no clear evidence from any Christian commentator before Sulpicius Severus that any of it was known in Christian tradition. Neither Tertullian, nor Eusebius, nor a smattering of others who might seem to ‘hint’ at something having happened under Nero, possibly distinct from the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, supports Tacitus.

And that includes the Acts of Paul, which you refuse to acknowledge. In fact, you have recourse to something amazingly fallacious on that topic.

This is no better than saying, How do we know that Paul didn’t have an historical Jesus in mind even if he doesn’t mention one? or, How do we know that there aren’t any pink elephants living on the far side of the moon? We decide what we do or don’t know by the evidence in front of us. And while it is always conceivable (if we are determined enough) that some species of pink elephants that don’t need air to breathe could have evolved and were brought by aliens in spaceships to the far side of the moon and still live there, the evidence we have in front of us would argue against it. Similarly, the text of the Acts of Paul gives us no reason to believe that its author did what you are trying to suggest he might have done.

Earl Doherty

Ben C Smith

What is my two-stage solution? Are you referring to the next definition of tunc?

Correct.

Sure, he could have. So what? Few words are free of synonyms that could have been used.

Tertullian does not give details because he tells the reader where to find the details. Consult your records. When I consult the records that a Latin reader in century II might have had access to, I find Suetonius; I find Tacitus. There may have been others.

Consult your records is practically a footnote, even if we are no longer sure exactly which records Tertullian had in mind. My point is, that is where the details would be. This is common practice both for ancient and for modern authors.

It leads to a tautology, and makes no sense; his words...:

Nero was the first to wield the sword against Christians. At that time he killed Peter and Paul.

...become nonsense:

Nero was the first to kill Peter and Paul. At that time, he killed Peter and Paul.

Tunc (at that time) is just not the right word for this usage.

Sorry, no. The wielding of the sword is, in Tertullian, a category to which the executions of Peter and Paul belong.

The syntax.

No, Tertullian is just not quite as clear as Eusebius. You actually have to consult the Latin, for example, to be sure. With Eusebius, it is easier to see.

You suggested that Eusebius was paraphrasing.

This is what distresses me about these IIDB exchanges with you. I already told you that this is what scholars thought was going on: Eusebius was relying on a Greek translation of Tertullian. Roger Pearse, whose opinion you specifically asked for on this thread, even weighed in to discuss an entire book (by Harnack) devoted to the question of this Greek translation of Tertullian. Yet you only now, through further research, come to this conclusion. I do not think you are reading my posts very carefully; I do not think you are giving them their fair due. I honestly think it would help a lot if you would do as others on this board do and quote your opponent, so as to answer what he or she actually wrote, and the better not to miss something important.

Of course.

I basically agree.

Agreed.

Because he is relying on Tertullian, who was similarly vague.

Because he has lots more information about Peter and Paul.

I agree that Eusebius is dependent upon Tertullian. I never said otherwise.

The tautē is his own word here; it sinks your case with respect to Eusebius.

What Eusebius indicates is that Nero had already established himself as an enemy of God (one of the worst!) by the time he took out Peter and Paul. And, even in the botched Greek translation, two ideas come out clearly:

1. Nero persecuted this doctrine.
2. Nero exercised his cruelty against all at Rome.

Since Eusebius is keen to connect what Tertullian said to Nero being enemy number 1, he virtually has to have Christians in mind when he reads about Nero being cruel against all at Rome.

What do you think Eusebius had in mind when he wrote that Nero was already enemy number 1 by the time he got to Paul and Peter? Your mild action does not seem to cut it. How does one become one of the principal enemies of God through mild action?

The first analogy is unfit, since it is an issue at point between us. The second is incompetent. We know that there are other Christians persecuted in the Acts of Paul; that is not in dispute. What is at issue is how the author knew about them. This is like actually finding pink elephants on the moon; now the question is: How did they get there? Make it less dramatic. This is like finding a seashell on a mountain trail; how did it get there? It is possible that somebody was eating oysters at a campout. It is also possible the ocean once covered that mountain. Either way, you have to mount an argument.

That said, I can really tell you took more trouble with this post than with others I have recently criticized. You even looked up Latin synonyms for tunc.

Ben.