Roger Pearse

Tertullian refers to book 5 of the Histories in his Apologeticum, but there is no reference to Annals anywhere in his works. However Robin Birley has proposed in a paper that the Apologeticum may have been composed with that passage in Annals 15:44 in mind, considering that in this work Tertullian inter alia rebuts the slanders in it.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

Sherwin-White also states that a general change and increase in the use of the term procurator took place in the reign of Claudius. This is no doubt the source of Wells' statement.

judge

So if it was changed then who changed it? I don't think it suffices to say "bloody christians" :devil1:.
For some one to attempt something like this I imagine they would have to be confident that no other copies of Tacitus's Annals existed.
What would be the point of changing one copy if ten other copies (for example) remained out there unaltered?
If we are going to play detective then the next obvious step it to provide some evidence that someone was (a) in a position to do so and (b) confident they would not be found out via other existing copies. , or others who may have frowned on such dishonesty.
Anyone prepared to have go?

Malachi151

I think the reason for this is that what Tacitus wrote was not a real historical account, what he wrote was a set of recent claims. This is close to the time of Pliny's letter about persecuting Christians. I think that if you went back to 64 CE you wouldn't have heard anything about what Tacitus was claiming. No one would have associated Christians with the fire, and no one would have known anything about someone called Christus killed by Pilate.

Tacitus was projecting back popular claims of his own time onto the past.

spin

At some point there was only one copy of John that had a stone casting scene.


spin

2-J

Isn't the idea rather that, if the fire of Rome story (about Christians being blamed) is true, we might expect to find it more heavily referenced in christian literature earlier than it was.

I naively imagine that it might have been a rather big deal, rather infamous, and news that would have travelled (relatively, this being the ancient world) fast and been comment-worthy.

Solitary Man

If there weren't that many Christians in Rome, what makes you think that it would have been that news worthy?

Roger Pearse

Possibly, but, of course, we can't tell.

What we do know is that, however notorious it was, we wouldn't know it unless someone said so, and unless that saying so was preserved. 99% of all ancient literature is lost. So such arguments are always precarious. In fact we have the testimony of Tacitus, and the argument of Tertullian, so we're ahead, rather, on that one.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

Your claim is rejected, unless you can produce some ancient evidence in favour of it.

Come, Malachi, we all heard the Von Danikenists do this sort of argument nearly half a century ago.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

spin

While Tacitus was working so hard to insinuate that Nero started the fire despite knowing that there was no real evidence for the position, doesn't anyone think it's strange that Tacitus changes the subject off his presentation of Nero not being able to stop people from thinking he did start the fire and onto crispy-crackly christians lighting up the night? This sort of tripe is eminently more Suetonius's cup of tea.

(Besides, anyone who knows a bit about Nero would know he was slow to act when it meant killing someone.)


spin