Roger Pearse

The use of the word 'fact' in either case for what is speculation has, in my experience, tended to confuse others.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Diogenes the Cynic

It is a factual claim that Christian sources cannot be ruled out for the Tacitus passage. There is nothing speculative in stating that.

hallq

Tacitus obviously wasn't blindly accepting whatever the Christians said. He may have just listened to what they said and rejected what he found incredible, but that he states the execution as fact lends some credence to the HJ.

Celine

The connotations of "sophist" have come down to us largely negative. But I would suspect that some, or most, of the ancient sophists would be very kindly received, if more of their ideas had survived. One in particular would be the Socratic (Plato?)adversary, Protagoras. "Man is the measure of all things..", an adage that religionists especially despise.
Sorry to but in.

jgibson000

And an adage that is genrerally misunderstood and misapplied by both religionists and non religionists. By it (and the "it" actually reads "Of all things the measure is man, of the things that are, that [or "how"] they are, and of things that are not, that [or "how"] they are not) Protagoras was NOT making, as it is often assumed he was,, an ontological claim (i.e., that human beings are the pinacle of creation).

Rather he was asserting an epistemological claim that truth is relative to the knower and that the measure of what is true is a given person's perception of what is the case.

See, e.g. http://www.iep.utm.edu/p/protagor.htm

Jeffrey

Celine

Just so. I yield to your deeper explanation.

An interesting character, ol' Protag.

copernicus

Roger, my original point was that this was information that 'could have' been gotten from Christians. There is no reason to speculate that it wasn't just taken for granted by Tacitus from contemporary sources. Since we know nothing about his sources, all is speculation. Those historicists who take Tacitus as evidence of Jesus' real existence are engaging in speculation just as much as anyone else.

Regarding the business of Nero, if we take Tacitus' reference to 'Christiani' at face value, we can only say that Nero persecuted people that Tacitus thought were actual Christians. However, there is some controversy over the name 'Christiani', which may have been used in a broader sense in Nero's time--i.e. for Jewish zealots, not actual followers of Jesus. Hence, the idea that Nero persecuted real Christians isn't even certain.

jgibson000

How then do you explain the fact that Tacitus explicitly identifies Jesus as the ultimate source of the name of those whom Nero scapegoated?

Jeffrey

Julian

But he doesn't refer to Jesus. He refers to Christ.

Julian

Diogenes the Cynic

This is a non-trivial point, I think. It shows a knowledge of a tradition (and a traditional origin of a name) rather than a use of some other journalistic source.

And what kind of non-Christian source would have been available to Tacitus anyway? Is there any reason to believe he should have had access to the names of every insurgent and peasant ever executed by Pilate? How, hypthetically, could a knowledge of Jesus' crucifixion reached Tacitus through non-Christian channels (and why would those channels use the name "Christus" rather than Jesus)?