For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Minimalist]

Dio Cassius mightn't have thought that Christians from the lower classes were worth mentioning.

But can the same be said of xtian writers who fail to mention it, too?

Why didn't Seutonius mention Nero's spectacular execution of Christians?

My guess is that he didn't mention it because it didn't happen. Occam's razor, you know.


Seneca was not a fan of the "games." He regarded them as common butchery fit for the masses but his upper class tastes required a bit more.

Tacitus's approach to history was more like writing a novel.

Also true of Livy and Josephus. In fact, ancient "historians" were basically storytellers since they had no way to verify what they were writing. I recall in Livy's Early History of Rome that he was equating what must have been rock and stick throwing riots between mud hut villages to the "wars" of his day. Then again, Reagan did that in Grenada and Bush I did that in Panama. So perhaps things never really change?

I'm not doing your job again. You're the one insisting that Tacitus's bit of gossip is a fake so you can look for your own evidence from now on. Big Grin

It's good practice for you. Still it is necessary to address Carrington's point that neither xtian nor pagan writers seem to know anything about Nero slaughtering xtians because of the fire. Now that is odd.

There's a very long argument about how Tacitus was just repeating gossip and his couple of lines doesn't prove that Jesus really existed.

Again, it is useful to note that Suetonius and Pliny do not mention any "jesus." Neither does Tacitus regardless of whether or not the passage in question is authentic. The next Greco-Roman writer to mention xtians is Lucian of Samosata c 160 and HE does not mention "jesus" although he does refer to a crucified man in Palestine which indicates that the story was beginning to be fleshed out around then. It is not until Celsus, writing c 180 that we hear of "Jesus."

[Confused Ape]

But can the same be said of xtian writers who fail to mention it, too?

This is why I've been looking for articles about why the passage could be a fake. I managed to find that one by Cliff Carrington whose writings are on a website owned by his wife, an Australian artist. The only information she supplies about him is that he died in 1996. I managed to track down another article of his on the Jewish-Christian relations website and found this at the bottom - Gophna To Galilee

Cliff Carrington is an autodidact and owner/librarian of Carrington’s Classical & Christian Library.

Autodidact means a self taught person.

My guess is that he didn't mention it because it didn't happen. Occam's razor, you know.

That's your opinion as a self taught person and my own personal speculations are those of a self taught person too. Can you please find something by a qualified scholar to back your opinions up because I just keep running into people who think the passage is authentic.

Seneca was not a fan of the "games." He regarded them as common butchery fit for the masses but his upper class tastes required a bit more.

I know he wasn't a fan of the games. The quote relates to something that Cliff Carrington said in his article, though.

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.

Seneca supplied gruesome details of what went on in the games but he wasn't a Christian who shared the pornographic masochistic obsession of the early Church. This suggests that Tacitus's gruesome description mightn't have been added by a Christian later on.

Also true of Livy and Josephus. In fact, ancient "historians" were basically storytellers since they had no way to verify what they were writing.

Some of them would have had access to official documents. Sadly, none of those documents appear to have survived so there's no way of knowing what's true. That's why I've been looking for articles by qualified scholars about why Tacitus's description of executed Christians is a fake.

It's good practice for you. Still it is necessary to address Carrington's point that neither xtian nor pagan writers seem to know anything about Nero slaughtering xtians because of the fire. Now that is odd.

I've had enough practise looking for information relating your side of the argument. Did you base your opinions about all this on reliable sources? If so, please tell me what these sources are because some qualified scholar must have written a detailed analysis of why other writers didn't mention Nero slaughtering Christians.

I'm currently looking up what's been said about Seutonius's report and found something on the California State University College Of Humanities website. It's part of a history series written by a Professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures -Christian Beginnings

After quoting Tacitus he goes on to what Seutonius said.

SUETONIUS, Life of the Emperor Claudius, chapter 25:
"Since the Jews were constantly causing disturbances at the instigation of CHRESTUS, he expelled them from the city..."

SUETONIUS, Life of the Emperor Nero, chapter 16:
"[After the Great Fire]...punishments were also inflicted on the CHRISTIANS, a sect professing a new and mischievous religious belief ...."

According to that, Nero punished Christians after the fire even though Claudius just threw them out of Rome. I'm leaving it up to you to find arguments about why Seutonius's reference to Chrestus in the first quote proves that he wasn't talking about Christians.

Again, it is useful to note that Suetonius and Pliny do not mention any "jesus." Neither does Tacitus regardless of whether or not the passage in question is authentic.

I know they don't mention the name Jesus because I've quoted them umpteen times in this discussion. I've even said that the most sensible approach is to regard the passages as telling us something about Christian beliefs.

The next Greco-Roman writer to mention xtians is Lucian of Samosata c 160 and HE does not mention "jesus" although he does refer to a crucified man in Palestine which indicates that the story was beginning to be fleshed out around then.

I found something very interesting in a blog article written by Richard Carrier, an advocate of atheism and metaphysical naturalism who has a PhD in ancient history from Columbia University in 2008.

Herod And Pontius Pilate

Tacitus almost certainly got this information from his good friend Pliny the Younger, who would have gotten it from his strong-arm interrogation of a Christian deaconess in 110 A.D. (when Tacitus and Pliny were governing adjacent provinces in what is now Turkey, and carrying on a regular correspondence in which Tacitus evinces asking Pliny for information to include in the history books he was then writing). And she would certainly have gotten the information from the Gospels, many of which were being read in the churches of the time. So yes, Tacitus is in fact giving us useless evidence, since it is not independent of the Gospels (that’s why his account contains nothing not in them, yet that would have been in an official government record, like Jesus’ full name and crime)

I could only find two of Pliny's letters to Tacitus on the internet and they're about the Eruption Of Vesuvius but it indicates that it's not impossible that Tacitus could have got his information about Christians from Pliny. The only problem is that the accepted date for the Annals is 109 AD and Pliny's letters to Trajan are dated to 111 AD. I've been trying to find out why all the books in the Annals series are supposed to have been written in 109 AD but, so far, have only come across a reference to some controversy over dating the Annals.

Anyway, on to the question of why Tacitus called Pilate a procurator instead of a prefect.

In actual fact, Pilate was both a prefect and a procurator. An imperial procurator, to be precise. In fact this was true of all the prefects of Judea, and many other regional prefects,

Which gets us back to that passage in the Annals where Tacitus says Christ was executed by Pontius Pilate “the procurator.” Tacitus was a consular senator who had held many imperial provincial governorships and nearly every other office in the land. He knew full well that Pilate was a prefect. He would not have had to check any records to know that. He also knew full well that Pilate, like all district prefects, was the private business manager of the emperor, a lowly money collector and landlord, a filthy procurator. He clearly chose to call Pilate a procurator and not a prefect in this passage as a double insult: on the one hand, his aim was to paint the Christians as pathetically as possible, and having their leader executed by a petty business manager was about as low as you could get (and Tacitus would never turn down a good juicy snipe like that);

It is not until Celsus, writing c 180 that we hear of "Jesus."

Which explains why Tacitus didn't mention the name Jesus. As he was writing early in the 2nd century he could only report what Christians believed early in the 2nd century.

PS - for Minimalist. Why are you so against the idea that Tacitus was reporting what Christians believed early in the 2nd century? You're happy to refer to Lucian not mentioning Jesus in 160 AD and Celsus being the first writer to mention the name in 180 AD. Tacitus doesn't mention Jesus any more than Pliny and Lucian did and he doesn't mention crucifixion either - he just says executed. The only thing about Tacitus's report is that it mightn't have been what Christians believed in 64 AD because he wrote the Annals 45 years later.

[ThomM]

There you go again about proof.
[/quote]


If you had any proof - it would have been long ago stuffed down the throat of every other religous person in the world and there would be only ONE realigion

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.

THERE is not even ONE version of xtianity - there are over 40,000 different ones.

IF xtians cannot agree on a story COMPLETELY - why should I believe you.

IF I want to know which Xtian version is true - ALL I need do is ask Xtians
THEY will give me LOGICAL and REASONABLE reasons why EVERY xtian religion is wrong

THERE are none left standing to believe.

[Minimalist]

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).

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. Support for this possibility comes from the earliest known "Christian" inscription, found in the 19th century on a Marcionite church at Deir Ali, three miles south of Damascus. Dated to circa 318, the inscription reads "The meeting-house of the Marcionists, in the village of Lebaba, of the Lord and Saviour Jesus the Good", using the word Chrestos, not Christos.

As a flesh-and-blood, "historical" Jesus gradually eclipsed the allegorical Jesus so, too, did "goodness" get eclipsed by "Messiahship". Justin, in his First Apology (4), about thirty years after the death of Tacitus, plays on the similarity in sound of the two words Χριστὸς (Christ) and χρηστὸς (good, excellent) to argue for the wholesome, commendable character of Jesus followers.

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

[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.

[Brakeman]

If the saga of jesus christ existed in fact, then there would have been contemporary art found that corroborated it.

Writings were few but descriptive art was plentiful. Where is the ~30AD art depicting the Zombies walking in the streets and the empty tombs with an angel? Where is the art that depicted jesus doing magical fish and bread multiplying? Where is a picture of jesus as anything but a European?

Taking the word of people whose jobs and respect depend on a fable to determine the veracity of the historical story is silly. They couldn't be unbiased if they tried.

[ThomM]

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



Question - are Ian Fleming's accounts of James Bond - real or not?
Did he save us from Dr. No?

Should I bow down an pray to Harry Potter because he saved us from Voldemort?


WE already know that Tacitus did not live during the supposed life of the mythical christ - so it really does not matter whether it is real or a forgery - it is not first hand knowledge - regardless. WE have NO knowledge who might have supplied the information and whether they could also have had first hand knowledge of the christ as well. So - we cannot even make a decision as to whether the source of the information is worthwhile. So - whether the passage was added in or was written by Tacitus makes NO difference

As has oft been noted - Tacitus also mentions Hercules in his writings - not as a first hand account. This is also not proof of the existence of THAT god as well.

For the record -

[Confused Ape]

If the saga of jesus christ existed in fact, then there would have been contemporary art found that corroborated it.

Minimalist and I are discussing whether Tacitus's report about Nero's persecution of Christians is authentic. It's got nothing to do with whether Jesus really existed.

WE already know that Tacitus did not live during the supposed life of the mythical christ - so it really does not matter whether it is real or a forgery

The question of whether it's a forgery is important because it's about Christian persecution under Nero. Did Nero really put on a spectacle where Christians were executed in horrible ways or did Christians add that later?

Do you think that Nero put on an execution show for Roman citizens after the great fire of Rome? It's taught as real history but some people think it never happened.

The reference to someone being executed by Pontius Pilate doesn't prove that Jesus existed. If it's authentic it just tells us what Christians believed at the time.

[Question Mark]

Minimalist and I are discussing whether Tacitus's report about Nero's persecution of Christians is authentic. It's got nothing to do with whether Jesus really existed.

It's difficult to say. It's understood by historians that historical sources like Tacitus had no set of standards put down like we do in modern times, since professional historians didn't appear until von Ranke.
One of the advantages of this however is the generally obvious agendas and biases of the source in question when compared to other sources. Tacitus is known to be scornful of the aristocracy at the time of Nero, of which he himself was a member, and Nero was usually at odds with the Senate during the later parts of his reign. The difficulty here comes from his opinion of Nero himself.

Nero is clearly a tyrant according to Tacitus, possibly insane. Writing of christian persecution might well have strengthened this notion if Tacitus were in favour of, or even indifferent to christianity, but so far as I'm aware he had no particular opinion towards christianity.
The general bias towards Nero in regards to what he did to christians is therefore a little difficult to make out, but I can only see an omission of atrocities if Tacitus were either in favour of Nero, or actively against christianity.

[Confused Ape]

Tacitus is known to be scornful of the aristocracy at the time of Nero, of which he himself was a member, and Nero was usually at odds with the Senate during the later parts of his reign.

According to Richard Carrier, Tacitus explained who Christians were because it gave him an opportunity to be spiteful about them and Pontius Pilate in one go. Pilate's Rank

One of the persistent drums Tacitus beats throughout his entire Annals is that it was shocking (why, just shocking!) that lowly equestrians were being given the official powers of senators. As business managers, procurators were only ever equestrians, or often even commoners or slaves; no senator would disgrace himself by taking such a servile job (again, imagine the President of the United States taking a job as a “common” real estate agent). But Tacitus was annoyed even by the idea of prefects running things. Procurators were just an even bigger insult. Since an imperial procurator was the legal agent of the emperor, he literally had power of attorney to represent the emperor in court and contracts. Which meant that in practice, lowly procurators could tell mighty consular senators what for. It’s not like a senatorial governor is going to cross the emperor. Thus procurators often wielded in effect imperial scale power. And that pissed off consular senators like Tacitus. His Annals is full of morality tales illustrating how so really disastrous and awful this was.

Tacitus deplored depravity and corruption but he loved writing about it.

He clearly chose to call Pilate a procurator and not a prefect in this passage as a double insult: on the one hand, his aim was to paint the Christians as pathetically as possible, and having their leader executed by a petty business manager was about as low as you could get (and Tacitus would never turn down a good juicy snipe like that);and on the other hand, he was always keen to remind the reader of his persistent protest against granting equestrians real powers, and thus calling Pilate here a procurator does that,

People in Tacitus's time would have got the reference but it's lost on us today unless we're aware of what are now obscure details concerning the running of the Roman Empire.

Nero is clearly a tyrant according to Tacitus, possibly insane.

Dio Cassius and Suetonius had the same opinion of him.

Writing of christian persecution might well have strengthened this notion if Tacitus were in favour of, or even indifferent to christianity, but so far as I'm aware he had no particular opinion towards christianity.

After his catty comment about Pilate he went on to say -

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.

Rome was the cesspit of the known world. He loved saying that as well. I found a ridiculous rambling passage of his about a theatrical entertainment. which relates to his opinions of degeneracy and the awful aristocracy. (I've hidden it because it's quite long.)

---

In Nero's fourth consulship with Cornelius Cossus for his colleague, a theatrical entertainment to be repeated every five years was established at Rome in imitation of the Greek festival. Like all novelties, it was variously canvassed. There were some who declared that even Cnius Pompeius was censured by the older men of the day for having set up a fixed and permanent theatre. "Formerly," they said, "the games were usually exhibited with hastily erected tiers of benches and a temporary stage, and the people stood to witness them, that they might not, by having the chance of sitting down, spend a succession of entire days in idleness. Let the ancient character of these shows be retained, whenever the praetors exhibited them, and let no citizen be under the necessity of competing. As it was, the morality of their fathers, which had by degrees been forgotten, was utterly subverted by the introduction of a lax tone, so that all which could suffer or produce corruption was to be seen at Rome, and a degeneracy bred by foreign tastes was infecting the youth who devoted themselves to athletic sports, to idle loungings and low intrigues, with the encouragement of the emperor and Senate, who not only granted licence to vice, but even applied a compulsion to drive Roman nobles into disgracing themselves on the stage, under the pretence of being orators and poets. What remained for them but to strip themselves naked, put on the boxing-glove, and practise such battles instead of the arms of legitimate warfare? Would justice be promoted, or would they serve on the knights' commissions for the honourable office of a judge, because they had listened with critical sagacity to effeminate strains of music and sweet voices? Night too was given up to infamy, so that virtue had not a moment left to her, but all the vilest of that promiscuous throng dared to do in the darkness anything they had lusted for in the day."

Oh, the horrors of vice which this theatrical entertainment might lead to and how degenerate the youth of his day had become. He'd have hated rock 'n' roll.

Many people liked this very licence, but they screened it under respectable names. "Our ancestors," they said, "were not averse to the attractions of shows on a scale suited to the wealth of their day, and so they introduced actors from the Etruscans and horse-races from Thurii. When we had possessed ourselves of Achaia and Asia, games were exhibited with greater elaboration, and yet no one at Rome of good family had stooped to the theatrical profession during the 200 years following the triumph of Lucius Mummius, who first displayed this kind of show in the capital. Besides, even economy had been consulted, when a permanent edifice was erected for a theatre, in preference to a structure raised and fitted up yearly at vast expense. Nor would the magistrates, as hitherto, exhaust their substance, or would the populace have the same motive for demanding of them the Greek contests, when once the State undertakes the expenditure. The victories won by orators and poets would furnish a stimulus to genius, and it could not be a burden for any judge to bestow his attention on graceful pursuits or on legitimate recreations. It was to mirth rather than to profligacy that a few nights every five years were devoted, and in these amid such a blaze of illumination no lawless conduct could be concealed."

Tacitus wasn't fooled by all the arguments in favour of the event. He just knew that everyone was hoping the nobility would take their clothes off and hold boxing matches.

This entertainment, it is true, passed off without any notorious scandal. The enthusiasm too of the populace was not even slightly kindled, for the pantomimic actors, though permitted to return to the stage, were excluded from the sacred contests. No one gained the first prize for eloquence, but it was publicly announced that the emperor was victorious. Greek dresses, in which most people showed themselves during this festival, had then gone out of fashion.

He must have been very disappointed that there wasn't any notorious scandal. I love the idea of the populace being underwhelmed by it all because the pantomimic actors weren't allowed to compete.

---

Anyway, I've been doing a bit more research. (The site I used for Suetonius references is down at the moment so I've had to find other translations) It appears that the Christian writer,Tertullian (c. 160 – c. 225 AD), believed that Nero had persecuted Christians.  Unfortunately, it's from his lost works so there's only some quotes from Eusebius (AD 263 – 339).

Tertullian - Lost Works

The Roman Tertullian is likewise a witness of this. He writes as follows: "Examine your records. There you will find that Nero was the first that persecuted this doctrine, particularly then when after subduing all the east, he exercised his cruelty against all at Rome308. We glory in having such a man the leader in our punishment. For whoever knows him can understand that nothing was condemned by Nero unless it was something of great excellence." (NPNF; =Apol. ch. 5. NPNF note 308 indicates that the Greek translator did not understand the Latin here)

HE III, 20, 9:

9 Tertullian also has mentioned Domitian in the following words: "Domitian also, who possessed a share of Nero's cruelty, attempted once to do the same thing that the latter did. But because he had, I suppose, some intelligence, he very soon ceased, and even recalled those whom he had banished." (NPNF; =Apol. ch. 5)

Suetonius's account of Domitian's reign presents him as being as awful as Nero. Maybe Domitian wasn't that bad in Tertullians eyes, though, because he convicted people for all kinds of trivial reasons and, according to Dio Cassius, only Flavius Clemens and his wife, Flavia Domitilla, were charged with atheism because they'd drifted into Jewish ways.

It's possible, of course that Severus forged the Tacitus passage in the 5th century to back Tertullian/Eusebius up and somebody else added the line to Suetonius to back Severus up.

There's still the question of why most scholars regard Tacitus's account as authentic so I've tried imagining being a pagan Roman at the beginning of the second century. This is a time when atrocities were committed in the arena for public entertainment so Nero's spectacle wouldn't have been anything special. Suetonius doesn't spend much time on Christians.

Many abuses were punished severely, or repressed during his reign, under a spate of new laws: limits were set to private expenditure; public banquets were replaced by a simple distribution of food; and the sale of cooked food in wine-shops was limited to vegetables and beans, instead of the wide range of delicacies available previously.
Punishment was meted out to the Christians (from AD64), a group of individuals given over to a new and harmful set of superstitions.
Nero ended the licence which the charioteers had enjoyed, ranging the streets and amusing themselves by robbing and swindling the populace, while claiming a long-standing right to immunity. He also expelled the pantomime actors and their like from the City.

Was anyone newsworthy executed at the spectacle? No. It was just a few nameless Christians who were rounded up and it's likely that other undesirables got rounded up as well to make a bit of a show. Suetonius seems to have regarded it as having as much importance as limiting the sale of food in taverns and banishing pantomime actors from Rome.

Tacitus, on the other hand, specialised in making drama out of trivia, especially if it gave him an opportunity to be spiteful, and he was writing a gothic novel type of buildup to the plot to assassinate Nero. He didn't say that attending the spectacle was compulsory so only people who enjoyed that kind of thing would have turned up. Is it likely that the spectators would have felt pity for the victims? The way I see it, they were more likely to have thought that human torches were a fun idea. Tacitutus, however, put some pathos into it to make it appear that even hardened blood sport fans were shocked by Nero's cruelty.

Tacitus then went on to say that the empire was going downhill and there were rumours that Nero had tried to poison Seneca. Some gladiators attempted to escape and this supposedly led to everyone talking about Spartacus's rebellion. The fleet was wrecked and then there's portents of doom - Suetonius reports the comet but doesn't mention all the urban legends.

At the close of the year people talked much about prodigies, presaging impending evils. Never were lightning flashes more frequent, and a comet too appeared, for which Nero always made propitiation with noble blood. Human and other births with two heads were exposed to public view, or were discovered in those sacrifices in which it is usual to immolate victims in a pregnant condition. And in the district of Placentia, close to the road, a calf was born with its head attached to its leg. Then followed an explanation of the diviners, that another head was preparing for the world, which however would be neither mighty nor hidden, as its growth had been checked in the womb, and it had been born by the wayside.

Anyway, I'm off to see what else Tacitus wrote - I've become a fan because he's such fun to read.