Vorkosigan

Now that's an interesting observation....

Toto

Why would a Christian say that Christianity had started in Bethlehem or Nazareth? Especially if the birth stories were added later. I could see a Christian saying that Christianity started in Jerusalem, perhaps.

Vorkosigan

That was my first reaction too -- since Judea was in all probability where it started. But if this interpolation is a later job -- and I can't see it as dating from the time when Christians still recalled that the origin was Jerusalem -- that had vanished by the end of the second century -- then Jay's point holds.

Vorkosigan

Lucretius

This is only partly true,while recognized as a religion with certain rights , Tiberius had expelled Jews from Rome in 19 A.D ,(after the death of Sejanus this was reversed as reported by Philo,who states that the persecution was in fact Sejanus idea ).
(Josephus (Ant., XVIII, iii, 5), Tacitus (Ann. ii.85) .)

Claudius similarly expelled Jews from Rome in 49 A.D. and Tacitus even says from all of Italy
At about the same time Claudius also restricted the Jews in Alexandria to living in one specified area rather that the two of the five districts they had previously occupied,an early example of creating a Jewish Ghetto.
So there are intermittent spells of persecution of the Jews within the Empire ,in spite of the legal rights granted by Julius Caesar to them.

PhilosopherJay

I really derived it from several lines of investigation that came together. First Lucretius's point that the Christian reference lines sounded like "schoolboy Latin" started me thinking about Eusebius as the interpolator, as his lack of knowledge of Latin is often referred to as the reason for his not including Tacitus among his sources.

Also importantly, Darrell Doughty's reconstruction got me thinking that only a minimal amount of material in the passage was really interpolated.

Now Eusebius does not include Tacitus among his sources that Nero was the first to persecute the Christians. Is it really conceivable that two hundred years after Tacitus wrote his annals, well-educated Christian Bishops, even ones living in Caesarea, Syria could be ignorant of this? I mean it was not like there were so many history books written about the first century and so many references to Jesus that it would have escaped the notice of Church officials in Rome. Were they hiding the information from their brethen in the East? Once we see the absurdity of the argument that Eusebius did not quote Tacitus because he did not know Latin, we really have to conclude that the passage was not in Tacitus before the time of Eusebius.

Now, Eusebius does quote the Latin Apologeticum of Tertullian for support on the idea that Nero was the first to persecute the Christians. So much for the idea of an impassable language barrier stopping Eusebius from knowing important Latin Christian passages. There is again a problem with discrepancies in translation between this quote and the original that lead me to suppect that Chapter 5 of Apologeticum may also be a Eusebean interpolation, but we may put that aside for the moment.

The real breakthrough came from reading Tertullian's "Ad Nationes."
There, Tertullian accuses Nero of being the first to spread rumors against the Christians that Christians engaged in barbaric rituals. Quite clearly, if he had known that Nero physically persecuted the Christians or if he had read the Christian passage in Tacitus he would have also accused Nero of getting rough with the Christians and not just lying about their practices. Now whereas one might use the Latin barrier excuse with Eusebius to explain his lack of knowledge of the Tacitus Christian passage, no such excuse is possible with the Latin writer Tertullian. In fact, Tertullian does quote Tacitus in this very work, thus showing that he is familiar with Tacitus.

Now the quote by Tertullian of Tacitus has Tacitus referring not to the Christians but to the Jews. Tertullian attacks Tacitus not for any attack against Christians, but for his attack against Jews. (Tertullian criticizes Tacitus for suggesting that Jews worship asses). Now, we know that Tacitus attacked the Jews in his writings. Why does the Christian Tertullian condemns Tacitus for his attacks on Jews, but says nothing about his attacks on Christians. This is more evidence that the Christian passage did not exist in Tacitus.

This dovetails with another question I had considered:who were the people hated for their abominations if they were not Christians? Having just seen the movie Alexander and thinking about what a bad press this quite wonderful movie got because it dared to portray Alexander as gay, I first thought that Tacitus was talking about homosexuals. Of course there is no evidence of such homophobia at that point in history.

The consideration that Tacitus had mentioned the Jews in a rather unflattering light in his Histories, led me to the consideration that he was talking about the Jews in the Nero passage.

I then considered that Tacitus was writing Annals, descriptions of events year by year in Roman history. Why would he not mention Pontius Pilate and the execution of Jesus when writing about the time of Tiberius. Why wait until the time of Nero to mention it. If he did mention a procurator, it would be one that existed in the time of Nero. One can quickly look up Josephus to see that Poncius Festus was the procurator sent by Nero and he was quite brutal. The reference to "extreme penalty" in the passage fits perfectly.

Here, one may reasonably suggest that a Christian would not have chosen the phrase "extreme penalty" if it had not been in the original, probably a Christian would have said simply that Christ was "executed" or "crucified." This led me to think that the phrase "extreme penalty" was part of the original and not part of the Christian interpolation. The same thinking applies to the phrase "Judea, first source of the evil." If he was making up the sentence entirely, a Roman Catholic Christian from the time of Eusebius (fourth century) or later would have given the source of Christianity as Bethlehem or Nazareth or Galilee. It seemed to me more likely that the much more general statement "Judea" was in the original and the interplator let it go.

One also may feel it strange that Tacitus would mention Christianity briefly once and never again and he would not give any more information about it. In fact, if the reference was to Jews, then Tacitus does follow up with more information on the subject.


So, to sum up, this reconstruction resolves a number of problems with the passage as currently found in Tacitus -- lack of reference by other writers, especially Tertullian and Eusebius, styllistic differences within the passage, chronological narrative discrepancy in Tacitus, unusual styllistic references for Christian information within the passage, and a lack of continuity in Tacitus.

As for Toto's point in post #2107505 about Judaism having the status of a religion. This is true. But the term "superstitious" referred to people who were excessively in fear of the Gods. Under this definition Judaism, besides being a religion, would be seen widely as a superstition.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

Vorkosigan

:notworthy :notworthy

Chris Weimer

No, Vorkosigan, you have it wrong. It's :notworthy :notworthy :notworthy

Lucretius

This is the ONLY thing I can comment on in what was otherwise a well thought out post Jay
Sadly the some parts that are missing from the Annals are precisley those which cover the relevant period of Tiberus' reign, the years 29 A.D. to 32 A.D. are missing ,so it is possible (or not! ) that Pilate was mentioned earlier.
As far as the rest of your argument goes while it "extracts" a little bit more of a possible interpolation than I had ,I have no problem with it at all .

I was in fact coming up with a tentative idea for the possible interpolator myself but yours makes much more sense.

Bede

Tacitus is in Latin and not a Christian writer. No surprise Eusebius doesn't use him. I mean the Elder Pliny doesn't list Strabo in his sources! Go figure that out. The fact that Tacitus is so negative about Christianity explains why the passage was not used for apologetics.

Totally subjective. Given they have not been picked up on by Tacitean scholars without an anti-Christian agenda, they probably don't exist either.

Luc dealt with this. BTW, have you read anything of Tacitus? He always throws in asides as background.

These don't exist when we realise there is no interpolation.

Which also does not exist. Tacitus as it stands has perfect continuity, link words and all.

So in summary, we have no reason to believe there is an interpolation and thus any speculation as to who did it is redundant.

Yours

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

andrewcriddle

It seems unlikely that Eusebius himself could have interpolated the manuscript tradition of Tacitus here.

In the case of Josephus and the TF, although I think entire creation by Eusebius most unlikely, it is prima facie plausible that the version of the TF quoted by Eusebius in his various works could have influenced the manuscript tradition of the Antiquities.

However we are agreed that Eusebius never mentions this passage from Tacitus.

Hence, unless we are arguing that the archetype for our manuscripts of the Annals goes back to the (hypothetical) copy used by Eusebius, then whatever interpolations he made in his own (hypothetical) copy of the Annals are irrelevant for the textual problem.

It is possible though IMO unlikely that the passage did not specifically refer to Christians until after the time of Eusebius, (although I see no reason to believe that Eusebius knew Tacitus at all) but that is different from claiming Eusebius himself was responsible for modifying the passage.

Andrew Criddle