RE: For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus
February 18, 2013 at 6:25 pm
(This post was last modified: February 18, 2013 at 6:38 pm by Confused Ape.)
(February 18, 2013 at 5:23 pm)ThomM Wrote: However - if the early mentions of the christ were to be significant - why do they not mention his miraculous rising from the dead ? Maybe that was NOT made up to be part of the MYTH yet?
Pagan Roman historians weren't interested in writing books about Christian beliefs because they regarded Christianity as superstitious nonsense. Why would they think that details of such nonsense would be regarded as significant in the future? See the start of Post #140 for a scholar's theory about why Tacitus mentioned their Christ being executed by a procurator. Tacitus saw an opportunity to make a catty comment about Christians and men of Pilate's rank (equestrian) being given so much power and he took the opportunity.
Pliny's Letter To Trajan is him asking for guidance about how to go about prosecuting Christians. He gives Trajan a brief account of what the Christians told him concerning their meetings and said that he tortured two slaves who were called deaconesses for further information. He ends the report with "But I discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition." We'll never know what this depraved, excessive superstition was in Pliny's and Tacitus's day.
My PS to Minimalist was me wondering why he didn't believe what Tacitus said about Christ being executed by Pilate and it turned out that he doesn't think the passage about Christians being persecuted is authentic. We then went on to discuss this and our discussion had nothing to do with whether Christians had invented Christ rising from the dead by AD 64 or whether Tacitus's catty comment is supposed to be proof that Jesus existed.
Do you think that Nero put Christians to death in horrible ways after the fire of Rome?
Where are the snake and mushroom smilies?
