Bodhi

How does one exaggeration make the entire story a fiction? Yeah, there's obviously more than one... but still, it doesn't mean it's all fiction.

Well obviously the people who deified him believed he was a remarkable person.

RAFH

I believe if the study of Jesus was subject to 1/10 of the rigor of usual scientific and/or historical inquiry, xianity would be a very, very different religion. But that applies to the entire subject of religion.

Ben C Smith

Because nobody would need to know what the term means. They would only need to know that a certain cult founder bore that name.

Compare George Herman Ruth. How many people really know the origin of his much more famous nickname? Yet it would be easy to write about George Herman Ruth, also known as Babe Ruth. No one has to know the origin of the name to use the name.

I am not referring to the Chrestus reference in Suetonius, which I quite agree is problematic. I am referring to his use of the term Christian.

1. Christianity, as a cult or sect, reached Rome by the fifties at the latest; refer to the epistle to the Romans by Paul the apostle.
2. The name Christian was known in that area by the sixties or seventies; refer to Tacitus, Annals 15.44.
3. If the Tacitus reference is not good for you, then we have the name Christian scratched on a wall in Pompeii from the seventies at the latest, still more than a decade before Josephus penned the Antiquities.

Ben.

S.C.Carlson

Is this legit? BDAG states: "On the Pompeian ins CIL IV 679, the reading of which is quite uncertain, s. VSchultze, ZKG 5, 1881, 125ff."

I haven't looked up Schultze, but a Google search (mainly book) indicates the following:

* It had the letters ?RISTIANI, whose beginning is uncertain.
* It was in Latin
* It had no context to evaluate its meaning.
* It was a charcoal inscription
* It is now lost (!)

A reviewer for Paul Berry, the author of a recent book promoting this inscription calls its discoverer, "the great archaeologist Alfred Kiessling," but he gets the first name wrong (should be "Adolf") and the man seems better known as a Horace scholar.

I'd like more information about this inscription.

Stephen

Ben C Smith

Well, after reading your comments, I am not sure. Perhaps I was rash to pass on this information so quickly. I hereby withdraw it until I can verify it.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

In the link you provided, it is not necessarily Paul Berry who gets the name wrong. That mistake may rest with the reviewer, Robert J. Edgeworth.

Ben.

S.C.Carlson

Good point. Reviewers have been known to get details wrong.

Stephen

Ben C Smith

I have tried to recall or find whence I first read about this inscription, and thought it was in Orazio Marucchi, Christian Epigraphy, but I cannot locate it there.

Here are some Google book links of relevance.

Frederick Amadeus Malleson, The Acts and Epistles of Saint Paul, 1881, page 587:

In Pompeii, destroyed A.D. 79, was found, twenty years ago, an inscription in charcoal, "Igne gaude Christiane" ("Rejoice, Christian, in the fire").

The same information is to be found in George Stokes, Latin Christian Inscriptions, Contemporary Review, 1881, page 97, with the added note that this is indeed CIL IV 679.

Johannes Overbeck, Pompeji in seinen Gebäuden, Alterthümern und Kunstwerken Aufl, 1866, page 115:

...NI GAVDI ...HRISTIANI, igni gaude Christiane....

This diplomatic version is one letter better than the one you found. I wonder what led to the difference. Was the H unclear? I also wonder what led to the reconstruction of ...ni as igni. But if indeed the key word was ...hristiane, is there any other Latin word it could be?

Now, that is all to do with the inscription that I had in mind, but I also found another inscription which is quite new to me. I have no idea what to make of it. The discussion on that page almost looks like a practical joke.

Ben.

No Robots

I recently signed out the Berry book. He cites recent photographic analysis which confirms the initial "C" to make "Christiani".

Vorkosigan

Fascinating stuff, guys.

This makes the non-references to Christians in all three works of Josephus even harder to explain. I have to admit that the relationship between Josephus and early Christianity grows ever more fraught each time I learn something.

Michael