For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Confused Ape]

BUT -as I note - you still post NO PROOF - and that it remains that the christ is a MYTH - just as the other supernatural gods claimed are.

This current discussion isn't about whether Jesus actually existed - it's about whether Tacitus's account is authentic or a forgery.

The topic has the title "For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus" because I was asking people to come up with suggestions for how Christianity got started when Jesus is pure myth. I had a go at this myself and came up with an idea. Why don't you have a go as well instead of repeating that Tacitus and Pliny don't prove that Jesus really existed?

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/josephus-etal.html

Ultraviolet photo of a critical word from the earliest known extant manuscript of Tacitus (second Medicean, Laurentian library, Italy).

You might also want to click on the link of Zara's discussion.

Yes, I know about it because I already replied to this point in another post somewhere. I also clicked on the link to Zara's discussion and read it.

The problem I have with this is only the word Chrestianos was changed, not the word Christus as well. (Zara points this out himself.) Zara also says the following which indicates that everything is a bit inconclusive -

For which intent and by whom the letter “e” was altered, we will probably never know for certain. We only know that the scribe originally wrote about Chrestianos, “Chrestians”, which could have been just a spelling error, but, as Fuchs says 14 : «even if this change was made already by the copyist, the original 'e' does not lose its meaning. In that case the copyist, which Andresen has explained, could very well have found the form "chrestianos" in his original, and by himself changed the strange "e" into the familiar "i".» (my translation)

Anyway, I went to the Seutonius section on Jesus Never Existed com

It should also be noted that Suetonius does not associate punishment of the Christians with the fire that swept Rome, a crucial part of the later myth.

Quite simply, the reference is a Christian forgery, added to Suetonius to backup the work of the 5th century forger Sulpicius Severus, who heavily doctored the work of another Roman historian – Tacitus – with a lurid tale of brutal persecution ('torched Christian martyrs') which immortalized Nero as the first Antichrist in the eyes of the Christian church

The website owner gives links about Tertullian (quoted by Eusebius) who said that Christians were persecuted under Nero. It's possible that Sulpicious Severus forged the entire Tacitus passage but somebody adding a line to Suetonius which doesn't mention the fire didn't make much of a backup.

I'm now quoting Tacitus again - some translations just use the word executed.

Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus

If Severus forged this, why didn't he say crucified because Lucian of Samosata c 160 used this word? (I haven't double checked that he's the first one because I'm really tired - I'll look into it tomorrow.) Celsus, writing c 180 (which I haven't double checked either) used the name Jesus which Severus would have known about as well seeing as he lived in the 5th century. Why didn't he add that detail? After all, if he was capable of forging the description of what Nero supposedly did to the Christians, surely he was capable of getting the name Jesus into it unless he thought that would be overkill.

The truth may be that there was an original gnostic cult following a personified virtue, "Jesus Chrestos" (Jesus the Good). Consequently, they were called Chrestians, an appellation which seems to have attached itself at an early date to the sectarians of the "heretic" Marcion.

I think we can be fairly certain about one thing, though. If Severus forged the passage in the 5th century to make people believe that Christians were being persecuted in Nero's reign, it's unlikely that he'd have used the word chrestianos instead of christianos. Why would he want to say that Nero had persecuted the sectarians of a gnostic cult when gnosticism had been declared a heresy?

The website owner also says -

Even St Paul himself makes not a single reference to 'Christians' in any of his writings.

So little were Christ-worshippers known in the Roman world that as late as the 90s Dio Cassio refers to 'atheists' and 'those adopting Jewish manners'. Christians as a distinct group from the Jews appear only late in the 1st century, not long before the Jewish curse on heretics at the council of Jamnia (around 85 AD). The label 'Christian' itself only appears with the 2nd century Acts – with the story that the term 'began in Antioch' (11.26).

I looked up when Judaism and Christianity started splitting although I only got as far as wikipedia. Split Of Early Christianity and Judaism

The split between Pharisaic/Rabbinic Judaism and Early/Proto-orthodox Christianity was a slowly growing chasm between Christians and Jews in the first centuries of the Christian Era. It is commonly attributed to a number of events said to be pivotal: the antithesis of the law and rejection of Jesus c. 30, the Council of Jerusalem c. 50, the destruction of the Second Temple and institution of the Jewish tax in 70, the postulated Council of Jamnia c. 90, or the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135. On the one hand, while it is commonly thought that Paul established a Gentile church within his lifetime, it took centuries for a complete break to manifest, and the relationship of Paul of Tarsus and Judaism is still disputed

So maybe nobody called them Christians in 64 AD or maybe some people did because it was after the Council of Jerusalem. Or maybe Tacitus called them Christians because he got the word from his friend, Pliny.

I then went to the article's section on Pliny.

Around 112 AD, in correspondence between Emperor Trajan and the provincial governor of Pontus/Bithynia, Pliny the Younger, reference is made to Christians for the first time. Pliny famously reports to his emperor:

This is well before the Bar Korba revolt of 132-135 AD so I think we can leave that out of it.

At the end of all this you choose to believe the scholars who say the passage in Tacitus is forged. I continue to think that it might be authentic while most modern scholars regard the passage as being authentic. One thing is certain, though - if the Tacitus passage is authentic it's no threat to atheism because it doesn't prove that a divine being who rose from the dead actually existed.