ynquirer

No ancient historian gave us notice of his sources.

Would the Romans let them use either Hebrew or Aramaic instead?

You here put the cart before the horse.

Public records of the Jewish local administration before 70 CE? Please mention one.

Nope. Romans were good at administration. From local records in Greek language, intermediate civil servants wrote summaries in Latin, which they sent to Rome. These Tacitus checked.

What about intellectual honesty?

Which one? Ockham's razors cuts this off.

You call silly what I call honest.

Does this really mean anything to you? Frankly speaking, it means nothing to me.

Checking archives is normal procedure by professional historians.

Evidence is against your theory. Suetonius, writing about the same time as Tacitus, believed that Jesus Christ - whom he called "Chrestus" - was still alive and an active leader of the Jews at the time of Claudius (49 CE).

Iasion

Greetings,

Later Christians had all the details, they mention the details every chance they can. Yet they had no NEED to.

But the earliest Christians who had the most need to mention the details of this new religion to gather new recruits, say nothing.

Early Christians show no knowledge of any details.
There is no evidence ANYWHERE in the early Christian record of these details.

Your argument depends on evidence we don't have at all - evidence you CLAIM existed.

No.
Only if you ASSUME he is referring to a historical Jesus.

"Christ crucified" is a spiritual concept - it perhaps means the Christ (the soul) is crucified on the cross of the body by being incarnated in flesh.

Paul talks of Christ in spiritual terms - no mention of a historical Jesus. But later Christians now read their beliefs back into Paul.


Iasion

Iasion

Suetonius refers to a Chrestus (a not uncommon name meaning "good" or "useful") who was causing disturbances in Rome in the 40s.

Do you really believe this refers to Jesus?
If so, why?


Iasion

ynquirer

Chrêstos certainly means "good" and synonyms in Greek language. Some Latin dictionaries also yield "slave" for chrestus, though. Suetonius, who as every educated Roman citizen of his time spoke both languages, probably meant the Greek and the Latin words together. Greek Christos means "the anointed one." This notion was alien to Romans, who as a pragmatic people always thought that power was the booty of the best fitted rather than inheritage of the more legitimate claimant.

Apart from linguistic reasons, Suetonius quite clearly says that the Jews caused disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus. Such a notion of the Christians - almost all of them Jews at those ealiest times - causing disturbances, which Tacitus calls "enormities," is recurrent in Roman history until Diocletian.

Might Suetonius' Chrestus have been another leader, either a good man or a slave or both, who inured such strong influence on the Jews of Rome as to justify their expulsion from the City, of which influence history gives no further notice? It is possible, yes.

Yet it is much more parsimonious an explanation the Christians' being given a first warning by way of expulsion in 49 CE. And as they later returned unrepentant to Rome to provoke the same disturbances, they were persecuted to the death fifteen years afterward (64 CE).

Malachi151

ynquirer, you're just making up nonsense, you're not even making sense.

So, now you say that these records were copied all over the place in Greek and Latin. Well then, why would the destruction of Jerusalem even matter, and where are the other references to the records?

If these records were copied off througout the Empire in Greek and Latin, how come no one else mentions them, not even Tacitus!

Again, Tacitus would have no reason to go an archive to write this statement. What would he learn their?

As I said, he may have gone to an archive or some other source material that gave a summary of the events in 64, when the persecutions took place, that certianly may have happened, but there would have been no need to check any archive of executions, which would have been the only thing of importance to this issue.

Essentially, Tacitus would have had some source of information telling him what he recorded in the passage in question. The only reason for him to have gone to archive at that point would have been to double check this info, and there is way to make that accessment from this quote.

Alf

I can agree to that. The reason why I am still MJer and not HJer is that such a jewish apocalyptic prophet was nothing like the Jesus the christians believes in. In their mind Jesus was a hero, a superman, a god, sitting in heaven and smiling at them at this very moment. When they hear a historian say "there was most likely a historical person behind the gospels" they hear confirmation of their beliefs and they hear that this superman really was alive and blessed us puny humans with walking around with his feet on earth.

That this super human deity was just a fairly ignorant and superstitious person who thought he had some authority on ethical and religious matters and preached his word of end of the world would come soon to other similarly ignorant and superstitious persons and as such was more similar to David Koresh and other such fringe cults than any christian want to admit is something the christians don't like to hear about.

Alf

Roger Pearse

Tertullian tells us in the Apologeticum that the pagans jeered "Non licet esse vos!" (You are not allowed to exist) and the work points out that condemning people merely for a name - "Christian" is irrational and unjust.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

Well, I don't think we set the bar to exclude Secret Mark! It isn't absolutely clear that it is bogus.

But it's a bad example because a fake always smells of the era when it was composed, and since we live in that era, the smell is not perceptible to us. A change of era is needed to see really good fakes. The Letter of Clement to Theodore is also suspicious in one sense, tho, because there is no manuscript accessible to scholars. This is a key element in modern pseudo-gospels, which always claim to be translations of manuscripts found in Tibet (etc) and then somehow, invariably, lost and so unavailable for checking by scientific methods. So in genre it may belong to what E.J.Goodspeed classified as modern apocrypha. A better example would be something like the Donation of Constantine?

There is no textual difference between Annals 15:44 and the rest of Annals, so we really *are* talking about the whole work. An interpolation is always very difficult to detect, unless there is a clear anachronism. (An example would be the presence of the word theotokos in a text supposedly from the second century -- the word was a badge in the controversies of the 5th century).

Look at Lorenzo Valla's work on the Donation of Constantine. It has many merits, and is interesting for its own sake.

Perhaps. Human beings tend to amend texts to suit themselves, whoever they are; but people also want accurate texts. Somewhere in the middle is what happens. But it isn't a good enough reason to allege interpolation, because it is just too easy to propose interpolation. And we are often on dodgy ground supposing that we certainly known what 'must' be in the mind of an ancient writer. They lived in another culture, and their interests were not ours. Quite what Annals 15:44 would show that would be of advantage at any date before 1700 I am unsure. Indeed that so great a writer as Tacitus calls them scum is rather a problem for many of these scribes, surely?

I am toorushed to answer this properly -- sorrty.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

FatherMithras

Not entirely true, but commonly this is correct. Regardless, assuming their sources isn't evidence based.

It had nothing to do with this. You are correct the Jews were using primarily Greek at this point, but not for the reasons mentioned above. It was simply a culture invasion of hellenized Jews. The misuse of imporperly translated Greek versions of the OT by Christians early on is actually one of the things that lead to Jews reverting to the Hebrew.

You just made this up. No, really, you did and I don't understand how on earth you justify saying this. It's true he was a professional historian. It's true he probably had some source of information to clarify what he was writing about. However, you're assuming standards that very obviously were not the norm in Rome. There's a large problem in Roman histories of incredibly selective, biased, and wildly conflicting information being present in texts, which wouldn't have arose if authors always checked their sources so thoroughly. though Tacitus is generally thought of as a scrupulous historian who checked his sources well, his bias against the "corrupt" in order to create drama is well known. Assuming that Tacitus specifically went to a very specific source that you claim exists that we have no evidence for is incredibly weak. You make a claim of fact to an action that has zero verification. It's possible he did what you say, but assuming it and calling it the most likely explanation is intellectually dishonest.

Intellectual honesty would be saying Tacitus went to a source from which he heard of the Christians and wrote what they said occured. There was no reason to question the motives, so he wouldn't likely have felt it necessary to call up specific records to absolutely verify the claims of an incredibly unimportant, minor detail on a tiny fringe cult. Were the cult of any kind of importance, I could agree with you that he MAY have verified his sources with more specific documentation. Since they weren't, I don't suppose he would.

1. Tacitus went to a document we have no evidence existed, about a character no one alive at the time wrote about, who supposedly did a slew of miracles and caused an enormous social upheaval, in order to make absolutely certain to get the details about a tiny, unimportant fringe cult that not many cared about.
2. There was some documentation about said minor cult that e read and including.

I think it's fairly safe to assume whic one is more parsimonious.

Once again, it's an issue of importance. Tacitus, like any historian is known to have gotten some details wrong in his works, due to not checking up specifically on certain claims about minor, relatively unimportant issues. Though in all honesty, some ascribe his unfinished works innacurasies of being a result of his death leading him to be unable to go back and fix it. Regardless, you assume that a professional historian living in Rome, speaking about an issue virtually as important as Avril Levigne's wedding. Seventy years from now I don't think anyone will remember the details or care enough to check the archives for it.

Correct, but generally only when they're writing about something IMPORTANT. There's no need to verify with specific data minor claims of little importance. Less stringent documentation will do.

This isn't evidence against anything. In The decades leading up to the Jewish-Roman war, there was someone in the area causing trouble with a name that has a similarity to another figure? Almost 20 years after the fact? And you're claiming that fact checking was vital and always done? Apparently, not well enough.

jakejonesiv

Like the manuscript from which the Second Medicean manuscript was presumably copied at Monte Cassino

That famous forgery shows that the Catholic Church would not hesitate to forge documents. Paulinus Venetus, Bishop of Pozzuoli, this guy is interesting in his own right; inquisitor, papal ambassodor and apparently a favorite of Pope John XXII. What did he actually plagiarize that came from the Tacitus document? You can google all day that he "plagiarized passages from the Annals in his mappa mundi" (This is attributed to Clarence W. Mendell. Tacitus: The Man and His Work. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957) ISBN 0-208-00818-7 pp. 236–237). I have to run this down but I am looking for the source text also.

Not necessarily. It would have been extremely difficult for a hypothetical forger to create the text contained in the Second Medicean manuscript entire.

A clever plagiarizer could have reworded Sulpicius Serverus to fit Tacitus style. That would only have required the insertion of a small amount of text instead of mass creation.

That is true. But see Persecution and Martyrdom in Early Christianity by Prof. Darrell J. Doughty.

The confusing reference, however, to people being arrested because they "confessed" has the appearance of a Christian motif, as well as the idea that "based on their information," an immense multitude was convicted, both of which resemble what we read in Pliny and later Christian Martyr Acts. So the Christian elaboration may include at least the identification of the despised people as "Christians" (christianos appellabat), the reference to Christ as the founder of the movement, his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate, and the revival of the movement in Judea and even in Rome, as well as the references to people confessing to be Christians and then ratting on their Christian brothers, and their being put to death because of their "hatred for the human race.".

It is difficult to determine what else might be Christian elaboration. The description of the tortures suffered by the crimnals resembles what we find in Christian martyr legends. And the reference to "mockery" of those condemned to death and execution by crucifixion could be Christian motifs alluding to the crucifixion of Jesus. But the portrayal of Nero in the gardens driving his chariot may be original. And the conclusion could also be original: "Hence, even for crimnals who deserved extreme and examplary punishment there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but glut one man's cruelty, that they were being punished.The original version in Tacitus, therefore, may have been something like the following:

"Therefore, to put an end to the rumor Nero created a diversion and subjected to the most extra-ordinary tortures those hated for their abominations by the common people. Nero had thrown open the gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or drove about in a chariot. Hence, even for crimnals who deserved extreme and examplary punishment there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but glut one man's cruelty, that they were being punished."

I will put it on my list, thanks.

A wise observation.

Christians always love martyr stories and Annals 15:44 starts with "'To dispel the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and treated with the most extreme punishments, some people, popularly known as Chreistians..."


No, they would just have spun it as fulfilment of prophecies of persecution.

Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake. Matthew 24:9.

Roger, you are quite right. The issues involved are much too complicated to address in a single post. In fact, it could be a fascinating subject for a book. Just consider all the colorful characters that are involved! If I had Stephen Carlson's (hint hint) considerable skills (which I do not), I might undertake the effort myself. It could even be an educational tool for the methodologies of ancient manuscripts.

I thank you very much for your information and explanations.

Jake Jones IV