neilgodfrey

It is certainly representing popular opinion as objecting to the sadism of Nero, but does not the next clause, "rather than to the national interest", imply that it was acknowledged that they were not being punished as culpable threats to Rome -- that is, that it is publicly acknowledged that the Christians were not guilty of what Nero himself was suspected, responsibility for the burning of Rome?

In other words, the author of the passage is concurring with the existence of slanders against Christians, while simultaneously presenting the Neronian persecution as occasioned not by these slanders, but by imperial injustice?

Neil

andrewcriddle

I would prefer to say that on the one hand the author presents the Christians as bad people deserving severe punishment, but on the other hand suggests that what actually happened to the Christians was more a result of Nero's sadism than a legal punishment for their crimes.

(I think you may be minimizing the problems involved in going behind the rhetoric of this passage to the explicit historical claims being made. The passage represents the persecution as a story of wicked things being done to wicked people by a wicked person. Retelling the story in less rhetorical language, and working out the exact culpability and responsibility being attributed to the different actors, has been made difficult by the way the story is told, maybe intentionally so.)

Andrew Criddle

Ben C Smith

Are you kidding me? 50 years is still living memory. Are you saying that Suetonius does not corroborate Tacitus?

Ben.

Ben C Smith

This is partially correct. I did not (even try to) demonstrate the scale of the persecutions, beyond noting that they included more than two apostles.

It is also partially incorrect. I did demonstrate the separateness of the persecution from the deaths of the apostles. You simply ignored the sections of my post(s) where I did so.

More of your expectations. You once expected Tertullian to have referred to Galatians 4.4 against Marcion had he known of the made of a woman phrase therein, and concluded that he did not even know it based on his silence; yet it was shown to you that Tertullian did refer to Galatians 4.4 in another work. Your expectations misled you.

I am going to say this again, but only once; nobody is bound by your expectations. Your expectations are not an argument.

Earl, you berate others for not reading what you write and for returning to discarded points again and again. I suggest you take a dose of your own medicine here.

Should have been? More of your expectations. Nothing requiring a rebuttal here.

Could be? Sure, could be. Except that Tertullian is backed up by, for example, Suetonius!

The point is that you said these Christian authors had only Peter and Paul in mind; and you used that word only. That has been shown to be incorrect. Yet for some reason you are still kicking it around.

I already argued, using tunc, that these specific executions (of Peter and Paul) are parts of a whole! Are you not reading my posts?

The whole point of the context here is that the churches in various locales have the authority to convey the apostolic tradition. The deaths of the apostles in these cities are relevant to this context. How is the death of Joe or Jane Christian relevant to this context?

Okay, now I know you are not reading my posts. Can you recall for me the most likely reason why this quotation shows these notable difference? Paraphrase is not the answer. If you are reading my posts, you ought to be able to tell me what the standard scholarly reason for the differences is.

No, it cannot be; the grammar is clear. And had you read my post you would know why. Or you would at least have enough information to ask for clarification.

Not grammatically possible. Refer to my post again.

At this stage of the game you seem merely to be saying that the persecution under Nero was perhaps not as severe as has been imagined. Whatever. That does not interest me, especially since we are given no hard numbers to work with. What was of interest to me was (A) the reason why Eusebius did not refer to Tacitus and (B) the fact that most of these authors envision a persecution not limited to the apostles.

Ben.

ETA: I cut this part out by mistake.

Let me rephrase then: The author of the Acts of Paul wrote that Nero, because of a run-in with Paul, persecuted Christians, and then also killed Paul.

spamandham

Yes, that's what I'm saying. 50 years is 10 lifetimes of urban legends.

ynquirer

Both works, The Annals and The Twelve Caesars, were written in a four-year span. That renders them contemporary to each other, even according to spanmandham’s narrow criterion of contemporariness – 50 divided into 10 equals 5 years, doesn’t it?

Now, there are two different questions. The answers are: yes, Suetonius corroborates Tacitus in the persecution of Christians by Nero, but they disagree in the question about the origin of the word ‘Christians’. Tacitus follows Josephus, while Suetonius deems the Jew to be an unreliable source and supports the theory – ‘urban legend’? – of a Greek rather than Jewish origin of the Christian faith.

spamandham

I certainly never said anything like that. The discussion was Neronian persecution of Christians as a result of the fire of Rome. The point being, that if Tacitus was wrong about the reason for Christian persecution, then it calls into question his claim of the fact of such persecution.

I do not consider people writing later than Tacitus to count as corroboration of what he said. I doubt Tacitus was just making things up, so the fact he wrote about it means he had heard the story somewhere, and implies that others would also have heard it. Suetonius attributes the persecution to a different cause. Are we to conclude therefor that Christians were persecuted under Nero, and yet no-one knew why, or is it simpler to propose that story evolved by the time Suetonius wrote?

If the first records of some significant event from the US Civil war first surfaced in 1925 by someone who was a toddler at the time of the said event, and his story was internally inconsistent, how seriously would we take it? If another 50 years later, someone else wrote about that same event, but now the facts were different, what would be the most reasonable assumption?

- hence the comment about urban legends.

ynquirer

Corroboration of Tacitus by Suetonius – a later writer – is not factual evidence that Tacitus got it right: both might be wrong, of course. Furthermore, Suetonius could possibly have been induced to mistake by Tacitus himself. Is that what you mean? I’m afraid it is pointless to the issue of whether or not Annals 15:44 is authentic.

Tacitus on the persecution of Christians by Nero allegedly is an interpolation on the grounds that there is no factual evidence that the persecution ever was. As such a suspect invention it qualifies as the insertion of an unscrupulous Christian writer rather than a serious historian like Tacitus.

The point is that Suetonius corroborates the persecution – whether actual or an urban legend – to be not a later invention, and that there was reason for the narrative to be there, exactly where it is.

mountainman

Persecution was commonplace in the empire at that time. Good people were being persecuted. THE CHRESTIAN meaning literally "The Good" were being persecuted. As Arthur Drew's pointed out almost a century ago, this is no witness to the historicity of Jesus.

What needs to be restated today is that none of this provides any evidence for the historicity of THE CHRISTIAN in this epoch of antiquity, other than what dear Eusebius informs and misinforms us of, a few centuries later. There is the boundary event (or at least the transition, was it gradual) between the use of the scroll (in the time of Tacitus and Suetonius) and the use of the codex (in the time of the boss).

Best wishes,


Pete

ynquirer

Suetonius, who mentions 'the Chrestians', does not provide us with evidence of the existence of Jesus, certainly. Yet he corroborates Tacitus, who furnishes the evidence.