Frank

What I posted was a "rebuttal" to Stein's work (did you follow the link)?


Right, the author of this article (who disagrees with Stein's conclusions, as apparently you do, and I do) makes all the same points you're making here (either explicitly or implicitly). I think Stein's conclusions were largely speculative.

Roger Pearse

No, I understood that. I was agreeing with you. (Sorry if I sounded otherwise -- the perils of posting when on the run!)

If I were to go interpolation hunting, I'd start by drawing up some kind of rules, and ways to test them, and especially to check for false positives. The 19th century editors were very prone to denounce inconvenient material as interpolated, in all sorts of texts. But their methods were arbitrary, and their editions have consequently not stood the test of time. It is simply too easy to slip into "this is inconvenient therefore this is interpolated", without even doing so in bad faith. In reality it is the bits of the historical records that do not quite fit our mental picture where we have the chance to learn; for the awkwardness indicates something in the past that has not reached us about the situation.

Cheers,

Roger Pearse

spin

What utter rubbish. You've said absolutely nothing about the five substantive issues I raised in the blog. Labeling something as speculative is a matter of nomenclature and does in no way deal with content.

That's really useful, isn't it?

When you feel like dealing with what I've already put before this forum let me know.

There is no way supplied to know which passage came first, that found in A.15.44 or that written by Sulpicius Severus. To help you understand how I see the progress look at this post.

The christianizing passage in A.15.44 is not interested in its context as can be seen with its damaging the discourse by deflecting onto christians. That can only serve christians.

By the early Renaissance sufficient Latin skills existed to produce such a passage working from indications in Severus. Lorenzo Valla exposed several forgeries that were retained for centuries to be veracious. He reflected a new level of Latin scholarship that had the capacity to spot forgeries and therefore to be able to produce good ones.

Beside rehearsing christian apologetics, you need to deal with substance.

Frank

You haven't presented anything beyond speculation. What are your credentials? Do you have a PhD in this area? Are you qualified to examine ancient documents? Are you fluent in ancient Latin?

I'm none of these things (although I have a law degree, which helps me weigh the evidence, of which you've presented none). Why do most historians seem to disagree with your assessment? I'm assuming they do have the proper credentials to properly examine this material (and have considered all the factors you've raised), and therefore they have more credibility than you do.

I don't need to address your objections point by point, because in the first place I'm not qualified to do so (nor have you provided any indication that you're qualified to make these assertions). So I have no reason to dispute what historians and "qualified" textual critics have to say about this subject. Moreover, even if by chance they're all wrong, and you're right, it still wouldn't mean my analytical approach was flawed. In my business expert testimony is valued over non-expert testimony (when it concerns matters where expertise is required). In fact non-experts aren't even allowed to testify in an "expert" capacity. As a matter of sheer probability, an expert will be right (concerning things within the scope of his expertise) far more often than a non-expert. So unless you're a qualified expert in this field, I will continue to value expert opinions above yours.

spin

OK, so you are going to repeat this speculation nonsense ad nauseum.

Whatever I answer to these, will it change the arguments and the evidence used? No.

By your own admission you have excluded yourself from being able to comment. Yet you continue to drone on about speculation. If you have a law degree you should know the difference between speculation and evidence. But you don't.

You've shown no analytical approach. All you've done, in your self-confessed inability to deal with the evidence, is rehash someone else's view of another person's arguments. Stop joking.

In your field evidence is valued over testimony. You are supposed to interact with the evidence. You've proven impotent in your efforts.

All you've done is argue from authority. Religion is not your field, so why don't you trust the experts in the field and accept that Jesus has saved you and believe in him?

Toto

I'm tired of bringing this up, but has anyone actually found a source to confirm that mainstream authorities actually have considered the possibility that this passage is an interpolation and rejected it?

I know that spin prefers to work directly from the texts, but most people would like to use expert opinion - if we can actually read it.

So far we have Van Voorst, not a Tacitus expert, who quotes Norma Miller without any context to the effect that the passage must be valid, but then relegates about 6 scholars who think it was interpolated to footnotes (as cited by Roger Pearse in post #22.)

Wikipedia cites Meier's Marginal Jew (or via: amazon.co.uk) where, at p. 90-91. Meier argues that the interpolation is too anti-Christian in tone, which I take as an argument from personal incredulity that a Christian would be smart enough to insert a reference that appeared so anti-Christian. Meiers claims It's so obvious, Meier does not feel the need for a footnote.

I am not persuaded about the state of scholarly opinion.

GakuseiDon

According to Richard Carrier:

It seems evident from all the source material available that the post was always a prefecture, and also a procuratorship. Pilate was almost certainly holding both posts simultaneously, a practice that was likely established from the start when Judaea was annexed in 6 A.D.

Spin quotes the following sentence as "full gory details of torture and mayhem against the christians":

"Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired."

Spin seems to be reading what he wants to read into this, and not dealing with the evidence. If Tacitus had been using his "normal style", what would he have written there? What would have been the difference?

The text has nothing to do with martyrdom. No mention of Christians bravely dying for their faith; just them being rounded up and killed. The text has "Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion..."

The compassion isn't for how they died. Why would the interpolator miss the opportunity to actually make this into an actual martyrdom scene? E.g. "... there arose a sense of wonder at how they faced death, unconcerned with their fate". THAT would be a martyrdom scene.

I don't see the problem there (space for spin to insert insult). Nero kills the Christians in front of those suffering from the fire. And the text doesn't say he opened the gardens twice.

Same comment as (4). (space for spin to insert insult)

It seems that the interpolator is a curious mix of genius and incompetent. Or maybe there was no interpolator. I don't know nothing from nothing (space for spin to insert insult) but I don't see that spin's points are very strong (space for spin to insert insult).

Frank

Because I don't consider biblical historians to be "experts" (they're more like opposition counsel, do you believe an accused criminal is innocent just because his lawyer claims he is)? That's what biblical historians are, they're representatives for their chosen faith (they're not unbiased scholars, they operate from a presuppositionalist stance). So I can very easily make this distinction. Nevertheless, I do think it's clear that an "e" was replaced by an "i" (here's the best I could find supporting this idea, but it's pretty convincing):

The surviving copies of Tacitus' works derive from two principal manuscripts, known as the Medicean manuscripts, which are held in the Laurentian Library, and written in Latin. It is the second Medicean manuscript which is the oldest surviving copy of the passage allegedly describing Christians. In this manuscript, the first 'i' of the Christianos is quite distinct in appearance from the second, looking somewhat smudged, and lacking the long tail of the second 'i'; additionally, there is a large gap between the first 'i' and the subsequent 'long s'. Latin scholar Georg Andresen was one of the first to comment on the appearance of the first 'i' and subsequent gap, suggesting in 1902 that the text had been altered, and an 'e' had originally been in the text, rather than this 'i'.

In 1950, at historian Harald Fuchs' request, Dr. Teresa Lodi, the director of the Laurentian Library, examined the features of this item of the manuscript; she concluded that there are still signs of an 'e' being erased, by removal of the upper and lower horizontal portions, and distortion of the remainder into an 'i'. In 2008, Dr. Ida Giovanna Rao, the new head of the Laurentian Library's manuscript office, repeated Lodi's study, and concluded that it is likely that the 'i' is a correction of some earlier character (like an e), the change being made an extremely subtle one. Later the same year, it was discovered that under ultraviolet light, an 'e' is clearly visible in the space, meaning that the passage must originally have referred to chrestianos, a Latinized Greek word which could be interpreted as the good, after the Greek word χρηστός (chrestos), meaning 'good, useful', rather than strictly a follower of 'Christ'.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evidenc...Christ#Tacitus

The most recent study on this was conducted in 2008 (using modern methods e.g. ultraviolet light). However, this is the only alteration averred (and the fact that we can see an alteration is good evidence that the manuscript was not interpolated beyond this single alteration). Why would an interpolator first mistakenly spell Christos as Chrestos, and then alter his own alteration (that seems more bizarre that accepting as is, and simply replacing the altered "i" with an "e"). So I guess in a sense the alteration itself helps us prove the authenticity of the document. The best you can say with any convinction is that Tacitus was not referring to Christians (but that seems like a tenuous argument, because we know he was referring to some sort of religious group or cult just by the way he describes them, and there is independent verification for the idea that Christians were persecuted during this period, albeit minus the association with the fire of Rome, but I think it's easy to see why a Christian writer would omit this information, even if he was aware of it).

mountainman

The Tacitus Reference is a later forgery

The "Testomium Flavianum" is a late pious forgery. The "Testimonium Tacitum" another even later pious forgery. When we will get to the "TMA", the pious interpolation into Marcus Aurelius? the many "TG" interpolations into Galen and the magnificent TS - the Testimoniums of Seneca? When did the modus operandi of forged interpolations and massive fabrications actually historically commence? Who commissioned the "Historia Augusta"?


When did the "age of Christian forgery start precisely?

All roads didn't lead to Rome in the Roman Empire, they lead to the expertise in the Pontifex Maximus, in shall we say, exercising the power of decisions. The Pontifex Maximi, usually in collaboration with his collegiate "Sacred College of the Pontifices" (ie: the PanHellenic priesthoods), consulted the Sibyls, and eventually heard about Jesus. It was a kind of ancient pagan "bush telegraph" that bypassed having to read the new testament. See Diocletian's experience for example.

spin

And what is the evidence that Carrier bases that opinion on?

What is clear from Tacitus is that he knew when procurators were given power in provinces and that he says was during the reign of Claudius. Carrier needs evidence to counter what Tacitus has said.

If you checked out Martin you'd know that Tacitus preferred not to go into the gruesome details.

No, nothing to do with martyrdom according to Gak. It just so happens that these first to die for Jesus in the persecution died on the site of the Vatican!

But Gak just chooses to believe that a report of a martyrdom has to follow some set literary criteria.

For some reason this sort of approach is constantly put forward: a christian interpolator has to be incompetent to write an interpolation into a hostile text.

The writer makes clear that the christians were consumed/destroyed not for the public good, but for base motives. It is their suffering which is always important in a martyrdom story and that is certainly present, as indicated by the passers by who felt that the christians had done nothing to merit such treatment.

Let's not be over-literal. He gives his gardens over twice so that the first time isn't considered by the second.

Beside the fact that Nero doesn't do any bad act in front of the populace (unaccountably except here)--he is the golden boy of the plebs--, he has already committed his gardens to the homeless and improvised structures are put up as shelter (15.39.2). As though that had never happened, he offers his gardens for the spectacle so that the public of Rome can circulate and he can burn christians as torches, notwithstanding the temporary structures installed and people living there. And amongst all this he's dressed up in public as a charioteer and riding around on a chariot.

You haven't registered the discourse issue that I've outlined. Let me outline it again:

1. Tacitus includes various acts of long duration prior to his conclusion of the the discourse. In A.15.42 Tacitus then describes the new palace of Nero built after the fire as well as further wasteful measures he enacted, but which got nowhere. A.15.43 talks about Nero's city reconstruction measures. These carried on past the moment in his narrative when he ended the fire discourse. But they were placed before, so as to allow a conclusion to be given.
   
2. Then comes a conclusion which ends:
   
   [T2]"But neither human help, nor imperial munificence, nor all the modes of placating Heaven, could stifle scandal or dispel the belief that the fire had taken place by order."[/T2]
   Everything he tried failed to dispel the belief.
   
3. Yet, despite having done everything and to no avail, suddenly he hadn't done everything at all. The conclusion, ie that nothing could stifle the belief that the fire had taken place by order is in fact stifled by the addendum about the christians.

I'll leave that for the moment to the uncommitted reader.