Bede

Jay,

With respect this is getting just a little bit silly.

You base your theory on silence and when you find your sources are not so silent after all, you decree yet another interpolation so the sources work again. This is so ad hoc and such poor methodology that I am in awe that I am the only one here really calling you on it. In fact, your method is to declare any passage that you don't like an interpolation and then declare the remaining passages are silent. And you still haven't dealt with my other points in earlier posts.

There is nothing left of your theory. It's gone, burnt, buried, destroyed and pulverised. An honest man would admit he was on a hiding to nothing and think again.

Yours

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

PhilosopherJay

Hi Bede,

I apologize that I only have time to respond to what I consider valid objections to particular hypotheses. I simply do not have time to respond to trivial objections which do not affect these hypotheses. I assume interested readers will have the ability to separate the serious from the inconsequential objections.



Warmly,

Jay

Bede

Ok, I'll bow out as I'm wasting my time with this.

Vivisector

Apologies, but you're moving a little fast for me on some of these issues.

How does your conclusion on the fifth quote follow from the four previous and four following quotes? Or is this your "bottom line up-front?"

Okay ...

Yes, it wouldn't require much effort to change "old" to "new," but it seems that the key question is, how would Romans have characterized nascent Christianity if not as a "new superstition?"

Again, I'm not seeing how it follows from anything above that Suetonius borrowed from Tacitus.

I'm with you so far ...

I'm undoubtedly experiencing a fit of unually intense density, but I'm not seeing how you conclude that, in this case, this occurred. What is the motivation? Did ancient Christians tamper with the texts in anticipation of contemporary debates about, for example, when their religion arrived on the scene? What was to be gained by saying, in essence, "No, it wasn't the Jews that Nero abused so badly - it was US?" When you consider how incredibly early Christians depicted Pilate, ostensibly to demonstrate a low degree of Roman culpability in Jesus's death, I find it difficult to understand how Christians would benefit from inserting themselves into history in this manner.

Cheers,

V.

Amaleq13

How early was it considered as a separate faith from Judaism? Wouldn't they initially have been considered as Jews?

PhilosopherJay

Hi Vivisector,

Sorry, I cannot devote as much time to these things as I should like.

Well, we'll looking for patterns to determine the likelihood of the Suetonius phrase referring to Christians or Jews. If we had four references to Jews and four to Christians, we would say that there is no reason to suspect this single sentence of being an interpolation based on subject matter. If we had eight references to Jews and then a single reference to Christians, we could suggest that Suetonius just switched his interests. However, because the quote comes in the middle of a series of references which shows interest in Jews, we have to say that Suetonius was interested in Jews, suddenly switched to Christians for one sentence for no apparent reason and then switched back to being interested in Jews. (Also we should also note that Suetonius says nothing about Jesus when reporting on Tiberius) On the whole, it is much more likely that he refered to Jews straight through based on this particular pattern of interests.



He could start by explaining where and when the movement came from and what precisely it was, something his audience was bound not to know.


Well simply that he is summorizing the passage in Tacitus about the torture of Jews/Christians which is the only other place we find it.



More likely, Eusebius had argued in his History along with Tertullian [ad nationes] that evil Nero punished Christians, which proved that they were good people. Using the same argument, the torture of Jews by evil Nero would mean that the Jews were good people too. How embarassing. A little cut and paste and that problem goes away.

Warmly,

Jay

Vorkosigan

LOL. That's one of the major reasons I don't think this event occurred. How could anyone tell the difference as early as Nero?

Wow! A dismissive personal comment followed by a collective insult! It must be Bede....

Why yes, Bede, it is ad hoc. It's a collection of assertions and insights, like NT historical Jesus methodology or NT text critical methodology or Crossan's Sayings Complexes. Does it make sense? That's what we are currently exploring. Amazingly, we are doing it without being dismissive or either Jay or anyone else.

Also, Bede, all of the posters so far have asked questions and raised objections. If you had a metholodological objection, why didn't you just ask Jay:

"What methodological stance.....?"

You know, politely-like. It's not difficult. If you basically have nothing but disrespect for Jay and everyone else here, why don't you just go?

Vorkosigan

rlogan

Well, yes - and in particular since the early versions of "Christ" in the epistles are in the "spiritual" realm, the distinction between the two is blurred.

The later Gospel Man-God who defies the Law in his worldly exploits would have been so objectionable to the orthodoxy that Christianity would have been treated as a dangerous cult at the outset. I would think that this should have been of note by Josephus in his exposition of the various strands of Judasim, had it been a real distinction circa 90 CE.

Vivisector

Trust me, I understand the time thing. I think I'll always have more interests than time to pursue them.

A couple of observations/questions:

1. You indicate that the sequence JJJJCJJJJ suggests that the C (Christian reference) is an interpolation. Would you suggest an interpolation if the sequence were JJJCJJJJJ or JJJJJCJJJ? In other words, how important is the order of references to your hypothesis of an interpolation?
2. To what degree is the current sequence (JJJJCJJJJ) chronologically anomalous in the context of Suetonius's style of reporting events?
2. If, in the course of a week, a news anchor reports five stories involving Iraq and one involving North Korea, then I don't think I'm entitled to infer that the anchor has a high degree of interest in Iraq relative to North Korea. I think I would be entitled to infer that the anchor (or producers) considered more events in Iraq to be newsworthy than in North Korea. In other words, even if the author's interest were strong evidence in the context of detecting interpolations, I don't think a particular interest in Jews relative to Christians has been established.
3. The strength of the omission of Christian reference during his discussion of Tiberius would seem to depend on the writing style of the author and the author's personal knowledge of those characteristics of Christianity that would link their origin to Tiberius's era. But more on what Suetonius knew or could have been expected to know later.

Has it been demonstrated that it was Suetonius's practice to provide a relatively detailed description of the origin, practices and beliefs of fledgling cults on first mention? And even if he had wanted to report this information, how much of it would it have been reasonable to demand that Suetonius know? Is it unreasonable to suppose that Suetonius was relatively ignorant of the specifics, considering them no more than a new cult and unworthy of serious consideration?

Why is Suetonius's passage not considered independent attestation rather than borrowing? Absent clear textual indications of a relationship between the two passages, it seems this (independent attestation) would be the normal position to take.

A variation on the "Enemy of my enemy" theme? If this is the case, then why don't we see the principle applied in the opposite direction? In other words, why don't we see instances in which Christians have inserted the Jews as the victims of persecutions during the tenures of the more favorably (or neutrally) regarded emperors?

Regards,

V.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Vivisector,



1. In regards to the order, I think it is significant that the order is not JJJJJJJJC. In such a case, we may propose that Suetonius had switched his attention from Jews to Christians possibly because the Christian population had grown. It is also significant that the pattern is not JJJJCJJJCJ. He does not return to the subject of Christianity as we might expect him to. Suetonius apparently did not find anything else interesting about Christians than this one incident with Nero. Tacitus too shows the same pattern of repeated interest in Jews, a sudden mention of Christians in regards to the same singular incident with Nero and then back to Jews. In the case of Tacitus, certain annals are missing and it has been proposed that the missing Annals contain references to Christians. In Suetonius we have no such missing Annals to worry about. It appears that we have two writers interested in Jews for over a century who are only interested in Christians for the fact that Nero tortured some of them. As mentioned previously, it is Eusebius who devotes several paragraphs to this incident. It is reasonable to see why he should be interested in it. It is difficult to see why Tacitus and Suetonius are interested in it.
In any case, the order isn't really decisive, but it is a enough to make one pause and go, "Hmmm, that's interesting. either he was far more interested in Jews than Christians both before and after writing about Nero, or the passage was changed."

2. Let us say that you watch the news Monday through Thursday and the lead story was on Iraq. You skip the news on Friday. The next week you again watch the news and again Monday through Thursday the lead story was Iraq. Now, you are put on a quiz show and the question you are asked for $1,000,000 is, "Was the lead story on the news last Friday on Iraq or North Korea? Unless you had some special knowledge about events of that day, I think the more logical answer would be Iraq. This certainly does not rule out North Korea being the correct answer. It simply points to the fact that we expect continuity in our reporting. Going back to Suetonius, if we had two copies of the text one saying "Nero tortured Jews" and one with "Nero tortured Christians". We would certainly find it noteworthy and significant evidence that Suetonius mentioned Jews before and after the disputed text and did not mention Christians.

3. Yes, everything does depend on Suetonius's specific knowledge of Christianity. However, since he is not here to answer our questions, we have to see what was most probably his knowledge based on the text he was kind enough to leave us. It would be nice if I could come up with a signed note by
Suetonius saying, "Hey someone put something about Christians into my book and I don't know who the *?&! the Christians are." In lieu of that we have to use other means to determine the most probably course of the text.

Well, Suetonius assumes that his audience knows about Christians so he does not bother to explain anything about them. Imagine if he had said "Nero tortured Chejewonians a new and mischevious superstition." Obviously, Suetonius would need to explain just who or what "Chejewonians" were to his audience in order to be coherent. So. assuming the passage is by Suetonius, we have to suppose that both he and his audience knew what a Christian was and Suetonius is just putting them down by calling them "a new and mischevious superstition."

I think it is the fact that Tacitus reports only the torture of Christians by Nero and Suetonius reports nothing other than what is reported in Tacitus. IWe would suspect that if he had other sources reporting on incidents with Christians, he would have reported other things from these sources. Because he does not report anything beyond what Tacitus apparently has reported before, we must conclude that Tacitus is his source. There is always the chance that they are both coincidentally using an earlier unknown third source, but since there is no need for such a source, we really can't introduce one just to make Suetonius independent of Tacitus.


AEusebeus does rant a bit about the Jews persecution and punishment by Vespasian and Hadrian, the agents of God apparently revenging the Christ crucifixion incident. For the most part, Eusebius trys to get sympathy exclusively for the Christians. Reading his History we get virtually nothing about the persections of other peoples during the first three centuries C.E.



Warmly,

Jay