Quote:I mean, Nero's reign was longer than 12 years, and it's hard to see why he was so hated by the Christians if he didn't actually persecute them.
Study this:
http://www.oocities.org/athens/atrium/3678/Nero.htm
Quote:According to Tacitus, alone, Nero blamed the Christians for the fire in Rome. Annals, XV. This passage is not referred to in any other pagan, nor Christian writings until 400 CE. The Fantastic details of the sufferings of the Christians - dressed in animal hides and torn apart by dogs, crucified, and used as human torches - fits the pornographic masochistic obsession of the early Church. The sordid details of flesh torn and blood copiously shed is repulsive to the modern mind. For some reason the early Church wallowed in graphic descriptions of virgins violated and gored to death by bulls, old men crucified suffering horrific tortures and not to mention the over-fed lions of the Colosseum. By the way, the Romans did not feed their lions exclusively on Christians, any old mal-content would do; and more often did.
Eusebius, when the Church was triumphant in the 4th century, after the ‘persecutions’ could only find 146 martyrs in the history. As we shall see, in Lactantius, between Domitian in the nineties and Decius in the late 3rd century there was a long peace where the Church was not persecuted. There was then a brief period of political persecution, especially under Diocletian, before his successor formed an alliance with them in the beginning of the 4th century. Constantine defeated his political opponents with the assistance of the Christians and recognized the fact when he held power. This period, of the Ante & Post-Nicene Fathers, knows nothing of Nero’s fire and its Christian victims.
In On The Historicity of Jesus Richard Carrier shows how simple it would be to forge a single sentence into the Annales of Tacitus and thereby change it from blaming Chrestus - and the Chrestianos which word shows up in ultra violet examination in the sole remaining manuscript of Annales as having been altered in the 9th century by a scribe. The fact that not a single writer, xtian or pagan, knows jack shit about Nero blaming the xtians for the fire is damning.
