FatherMithras

Contemporary? Not quite.

ynquirer

Tacitus is said to be a contemporary of Jesus likewise Herodotus is said to be a contemporary of Cyrus II the Great, King of Persia, of whose life and and deeds Herodotus is the main source.

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about Herodotus and Cyrus: "Herodotus wrote a century after Cyrus, in Athens and in Sicily. We have no idea what his sources on Persia were."

Do you - or the professional historians - doubt that Cyrus existed and that he did such and such things? Why do you apply a different yardstick to Tacitus on Jesus?

David B

Indeed. I didn't mean to imply that the evidence in the NT is satisfactory.

Nonetheless, I still have a working hypothesis that Jesus was a historical person - but based on nothing more than seeing that many myths have some sort of basis in fact, and inductively including the NT among such myths.

David B

Alf

He just paraphrase what christians told him - that is, he say what they belived - he says absolutely NOTHING - zip - about the historical facts related to these beleiefs. He does not - and cannot even if he did - say anything about the historical facts because he was not there himself to eyewitness the events.

Also about the contemporary part. If tacitus is contemporary then I am a contemporary witness to WW2. Never mind that I never saw it happen myself and my father who told me a little about that war was just a teenager when it happened and wasn't a soldier or anything. Please look up what the word "contemporary" means. Someone living decades after may appear close to the events for us when we live milleniums after the events but it is still not contemporary.

Sigh - how many times do we have to repeat that until it sinks in?

Alf

Roller

I'm no expert but it seems to me that the only evidence we have of Jesus are Gospels themselves. It is certainly up for debate how good of a "witness" the Gospels are but, ultimately, that’s all we truthfully have. Once you strip away legends and embellishment in the Gospels, I think a pretty reasonable picture of a 1st century Jewish apocalyptic prophet emerges.

David B

Indeed! And since we have (don't we?) evidence that apocalyptic prophets around that time existed, it seems to me an ordinary claim that Jesus was one of them.

David B

jakejonesiv

0 + 0 + 0 = 0

1. The 11th-century manuscript which has a wonderfully strange provenance
   
2. The similar text found in Sulpicius Severus was not from Tacitus , but Paulus Orosius History Against the Pagans 7.9.4-6.
   See Severus Is Not Quoting Tacitus. ©2006 Richard Carrier and Internet Infidels, Inc.
   
3. A number of quotations and comments of the whole Annals from the 2nd to the 6th century. But not the passage in question. Also, please remember that Annals, 1-6 are contained in another (the first Medicean) manuscript.

And you mentioned "no contemporary reader of Tacitus did ever notice the forgery." And what contemporary reader would that be?The alleged older manuscript is not extant. There is no record of it and no record of alleged contemporary readers. A better question would be, "Where was the lost manuscript during the 1,000 years between the time of Tacitus and the sudden appearance of the copy allegedly in the 11th century? And what happened to the original from which it was supposed to be copied? Do we even have a scrap of it? There has been scholarly suggestions of this to be sure, but speculations none the less.

It has been shown that the chain of custody from the 11th century to the 15th century is full of gaps, with the manuscript passing in and out of the hands of an alleged "master forger." The mere suggestion should be cause to proceed with caution.

All we really know for a fact is that a solitary manuscript passed into the possession of the Medici family in 15th century, and every extant copy of Tacitus Annuals 15:44 comes from this solitary manuscript. And the alleged history of the text is so fantastic that that Dan Brown should write a novel about it. What a plot!

You are pinning your hopes for a HJ Jesus on a text discovered in the age of fantastic relics. What next, the Shroud of Turin?

Jake Jones IV

ynquirer

I'm glad that you acknowledge that Tacitud is considered one of the best Roman historians. This lends greater strength to Annals 15:44 as a source on the HJ.

Let's now address your first objection to the paragraph on Jesus. This is what Wikipedia has to say:

• "Though by definition the procurators were prefects, a procuratorship was a more formal way of denoting a prefect’s authority to govern."

All procurators were prefects, though not all prefects were procurators. Therefore, Tacitus, in saying that Pilate was a procurator does not say that he was not a prefect - since this is implied in the word "procurator." He is just giving us additional information. Yet you dismiss such information on the grounds that it was based on "hearsay, not record." Surely you have checked the records to make such a claim?

Let's see the reason why in all likelihood Tacitus knew better. We are still on Wikipedia:

• "Equestrian procurator
  The Emperor also had under his control a number of smaller, but potentially difficult provinces that did not need an entire legion. These provinces were put under the control of governors of equestrian status. New conquests generally fell into this equestrian category but most were later changed in status to reflect the changing conditions of Roman's growing empire. Thus, a province would become upon conquest a procuratorial province until it was decided that it should become either an imperial or senatorial province and thus governed by either a propraetor or proconsul. Like the other imperial provinces, the equestrian governors could serve any length of time up to 5 years, or even longer."

Pilate fits in all major traits of this depiction of a prefect invested of a procuratorship: we know he was a member of the equestrian order, his commission was to rule a small but potentially difficult province, his term was 10 year long.

After all, it seems that Tacitus wrote this based on record. Quite possibly, someone writes on hearsay, but it wasn't Tacitus. :devil3:

Roger Pearse

Which scholars make this mistake?

Is there any text on any subject transmitted from antiquity that could not be ignored by this argument? I think not. As such this argument is invalid, unless we propose to ignore the entire classical heritage.

Indeed. But that is how the world of manuscripts is. I am currently assembling all the information I can find on the rediscovery of the "Bazaar of Heracleides" by Nestorius, some time in the late 19th century. It's even worse, and the oldest manuscript now known to exist was written ca. 1900.

Note that the origin and date of the ms. are not derived from the testimony of the humanists, but from paleography.

Only to the layman. It's best to check these sorts of arguments against other texts. Most are preserved in single late medieval copies. You might look at Velleius Paterculus, for instance, and imagine that some passage in it is uncongenial to someone's political or religious views. Would we be impressed by an argument based on the fact that there is now no known ms, and was only ever 1, lost 5 centuries ago?

There is misreading here. The Bishop used the text in one of his extant works; unless you want to posit another copy in existence at that date, it follows that he had access to the Monte Cassino Ms. But I do not mention that as evidence of anything; it's merely a piece of data in the rediscovery of the text.

Don't rely on this idea when disputing a will in court, tho.

Just to sum up; all of these arguments rely on not knowing all that much about how the classical heritage comes to us. That is nothing to be ashamed of; most people know nothing. I wish people knew more! However the 19th century hyperscepticism, when any passage found inconvenient could be asserted to be interpolated to get rid of it led to rampant subjectivism (since the passages to be retained were so retained, despite the fact that identical arguments could be invented against them). These days scholars in general really fight shy of doing this, for obvious reasons.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

The provenance seems quite normal to me.

By chance I was reading an article by T.D.Barnes in JSTOR on the fragments of Tacitus, recoverable from Suplicius Severus. It would appear that professional scholars don't agree.

The same objection could be made against most of Annals.

These sorts of arguments, if valid, dispose of all the classical heritage.

Why?

Yes? So you think that Tacitus should no longer be treated as a source for antiquity?

All the best,

Roger Pearse