For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Confused Ape]

As Eusebius clearly states in Book 8, 2 of Ecclesiastical History: (he is talking about martyrs)

This is a man with an agenda. Pretty much like Goebbels.

Which is why he'd quote Tertullian supposedly saying there were records of Nero persecuting Christians.

I'm now going to reply to the discussion points out of order because I've discovered something which Kenneth Humphries left out of his quote from Severus's Chronicle. Here's the full version with the really important bit bolded.

In the meantime, the number of the Christians being now very large, it happened that Rome was destroyed by fire while Nero was stationed at Antium. But the opinion of all cast the odium of causing the fire upon the emperor, and the emperor was believed in this way to have sought for the glory of building a new city. And in fact, Nero could not by any means that he tried escape from the charge that the fire had been caused by his orders. He therefore turned the accusation against the Christians, and the most cruel tortures were accordingly inflicted upon the innocent. Nay, even new kinds of death were invented, so that, being covered in the skins of wild beasts, they perished by being devoured by dogs, while many were crucified or slain by fire, and not a few were set apart for this purpose, that, when the day came to a close, they should be consumed to serve for light during the night.It was in this way that cruelty first began to be manifested against the Christians. Afterward, too, their religion was prohibited by laws which were given, and by edicts openly set forth it was proclaimed unlawful to be a Christian. At that time Paul and Peter were condemned to capital punishment, of whom the one was beheaded with a sword, while Peter suffered crucifixion.

Gee....why would xtians repeat the same shit over and over? Oh, its in their creeds that they make everyone recite like little friggin' sheep. The fact remains that Severus did not quote what is now purported to be Tacitus' words...nor, does he cite Tacitus as his source.

The Tacitus reference to Christians is -

Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. 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, and a most mischievous superstition,thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.

Severus could have added - "Christians were named after Christus who was executed during the reign of Tiberius by Pontius Pilate" to his chronicle account but he didn't. Maybe he thought everyone knew that because the Acts of Pilate have been dated to the middle of the 4th century and he was writing in the 5th century. What he does say, though, was that Paul was beheaded and Peter suffered crucifixion during Nero's reign.

I've been looking around the internet for reasons why Severus is supposed to be a forger but no luck so far. I did, however, find this which just adds another question.

Christians Parroting The Party Line

Another problem is the actual authenticity of the passage as it is almost word for word written in the Chronicle of Sulpicius Severus (who died in 403 A.D.), where it is mixed in with obviously false stories. It is highly unlikely that Sulpicius had copied this passage from Tacitus, as none of his contemporaries even mention the passage. This means that it was probably not in the Tacitus manuscripts at that date. It is much more likely, then, that copyists working in the Dark Ages from the only existing manuscript of the Chronicle, simply copied the passage from Sulpicius into the manuscript of Tacitus which they were reproducing.

The above suggests that only the description of Nero's spectacle was copied in so where did the Tacitus explanation of Christians and his rant about them come from? If the entire passage was forged to mimic Tacitus's style, complete with rant, why didn't anyone take the opportunity to hint that Peter had been crucified in Nero's spectacle? What if the entire passage really was forged but at a much earlier date when the legend about Peter's crucifixion hadn't been invented? Severus could have quoted from what he thought was authentic Tacetus even though he didn't bother saying what his source was.

Who said they were gnostics?

Kenneth Humphries is arguing that the Tacitus passage could have referred to gnostics originally. You gave me the link to his page so I could read Erik Zara's report of the word chrestianos being changed to christianos. KH's own speculation about the change is -

The photograph reveals that the word purportedly used by Tacitus in Annals 15.44, chrestianos ("the good"), has been overwritten as christianos ("the Christians") by a later hand, a deceit which explains the excessive space between the letters and the exaggerated "dot" (dash) above the new "i". The entire "torched Christians" passage of Tacitus is not only fake, it has been repeatedly "worked over" by fraudsters to improve its value as evidence for the Jesus myth.

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. .

This is why I think he shot himself in the foot where his arguments about Sulspicious Severus forging the Tacitus passage are concerned. Seutonius is a bit confusing with his references.

In The Life of Claudius 25.4, we find the statement, "As the Jews were making constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome."

Suetonius also makes mention of Nero's persecution in 16.2: "Punishment by Nero was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition."

This is plausibly a reference to the expulsion of Jewish Christians from Rome.

However, it is also possible that the Jews were expelled from Rome for a different cause. Chrestus is a suitable Greek name, so there may have been an agitator by the name of Chrestus in Rome. Or there may have been a different messianic pretender in Rome. It is difficult to say.

Maybe Christian beliefs had expanded since Claudius's time or maybe he was talking about something else entirely.

Anyway, back to KH making a big deal out of Pliny's letter to Trajan.

Curious, is it not, that such a well-placed, well-educated Roman grandee, directly and intimately involved in the Roman judicial system at the highest levels, and a friend of historians Tacitus and Suetonius, should – in the second decade of the 2nd century – remain so ignorant of Christians and the persecution of them – unless, that is, they were nothing other than an obscure, and insignificant bunch of fanatics and the "persecution" is a fable?

"Having never been present at any trials concerning those persons who are Christians, I am unacquainted not only with the nature of their crimes, or the measure of their punishment, but how far it is proper to enter into an examination concerning them."

Pliny hadn't been involved with prosecuting Christians before so he was checking what the official policy was in Trajan's day. What were the real crimes they should be punished for? I'm using a different translation now because of something else KH said but I think this is an interesting little comment

after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble, to eat in common a harmless meal.

Why would he point out that the meal was harmless? Christians Accused Of Cannabilism

Christians also aroused suspicion among the pagan population. Accustomed to public displays of religion, pagans found the private practices of Christians highly suspect; it was often believed that they committed flagitia, sclera, and maleficia[25]—outrageous crimes, wickedness, and evil deeds. Specifically, Christians were most frequently accused of cannibalism and incest -

Maybe Pliny was telling Trajan he'd checked this rumour out and discovered it was just a rumour. KH continues with suspicion about the letters.

It's worth noting that unlike the 247 letters Pliny himself prepared for publication (so-called books 1-9), book 10, which contains the celebrated letters "96" and "97", was published posthumously and anonymously. "It is surprising," says Betty Radice (translator of the Penguin edition), "that no more letters were to be found in the imperial files or among Pliny's personal papers to add to this record of the relations between one of the best of Rome's Emperors and his devoted servant."

The link I gave shows that there were a lot of letters in book 10 but only two were about Christians. Any forger was obviously very subtle because it comes across as them having no need to discuss the matter further after Trajan had given Pliny instructions about prosecuting them. The other thing is if a Christian forger was trying to make out that Christians were always horribly persecuted, why did he have Trajan come across as being fairly lenient towards them?

KH also said the following -

Pliny was a lawyer in Rome before going to the east. He was only a child when the "persecution of Christians by Nero" supposedly took place but his guardian Verginius Rufus was a high-placed commander at the time, loyal to Nero. Following Nero's suicide, Rufus actually declined an offer from the army of the Rhine to become emperor himself. Any "lurid massacre" of Christians, if it had taken place, could have been told to Pliny as a child – but in later life he recalls no such thing.

Pliny might have heard about Nero's spectacle but why would he want to discuss it with Trajan? Going by the letters it's obvious that Trajan wasn't doing the same things to Christians so stories about Nero's day were irrelevant here. Pliny was also a pagan Roman so why would he have been interested in writing a history of Christian persecution? Only Christians wanted to do that.

I'm happy to read arguments about why some documents are fake but I would like the arguments to make sense. Here's another little gem from KH which is included in his section about Tacitus.

His dastardly story of Nero was embellished during the Renaissance into a fantastic fable with Nero 'fiddling while Rome burned'.

The story about Nero fiddling wasn't embellished from anything that Tacitus wrote because it was Suetonius who said that Nero was singing -

Viewing the conflagration from the tower of Maecenas121 and exulting, as he said, in "the beauty of the flames," he sang the whole of the "Sack of Ilium,"122 in his regular stage costume. 3

Was that bit added to Suetonius's account later? If so, it must have been earlier than the Renaissance otherwise Nero would have been fiddling.

Nero took advantage of the destruction to build his 'Golden House' though no serious scholar believes anymore that he started the fire (we now know Nero was in his hometown of Antium – Anzio – when the blaze started.)

We know that Nero was at Antium because Tacitus said it's where he was - Suetonius only reported that Nero did his singing from a tower in Rome. Tacitus gave Nero the benefit of the doubt where starting the fire is concerned but Nero not being in Rome at the time is no proof that he wasn't responsible. Nobody said that Nero ran through the city setting fire to the houses himself. He's supposed to have given orders for the fire to be started so he didn't have to be there at the time.

Had they made a marker for Moses, it would probably have included a "space mountain" styled rides, with Disney having bid on the animatronics.

Well, on the Jewish side, weird things about Peter (he gave up that Jesus nonsense and wrote a prayer about repentance that some Jews attribute to Peter) and Paul (Gamliel sent him to turn Christianity into something so weird that only non-Jews would follow it, since there was a war coming) that it's probably fair! And while I cannot find a source via Google, I can attest that this kind of stuff does get passed around in the Yeshiva world!

There are some people who insist that Paul never existed. What they fail to do afterwards is explain how and why something which started in Judea was taken to non-Jews outside Judea. The above does offer an explanation.