Tacitus basically accuses the Christians of the equivalent of 9/11, burning down Rome mass murder all of this stuff, but no one's heard of it for untill the end of the fourth century.
And so how does that happen? We can't just gloss over this. I'm just going to go through the list of all the places where this doesn't show up.
Pliny the Younger has never heard of it. So this is a huge public event that would be in public memory for generations, right? Like there's no way you just forget about this, right?
And we know from him through the way that he talks about Christians that his unclePliny the Elder who wrote this eyewitness history of this event where never mentions it has no knowledge of it.
Suetonius never mentions this. He only mentions one persecution under Nero and he lists the Christians that were persecuted. He lists it a list of public morals legislation. So he has no knowledge of them being accused of being mass murderers and he mentions the fire, but he doesn't connect them to the fire. He has no knowledge of Christians being connected to the fire. He has no knowledge of Nero persecuting Christians for the fire. It's not in there. And when he does mention Christians being persecuted, he seems to think that it was just for some sort of public morals thing and not for, you know, mass murder destroying Rome.
Then all the Christian writings. The acts of Peter and the acts of Pilate. You know, these are forgeries, they're fictions written in the second century, but they relate basically how Peter and Paul got killed by Nero. So the persecution of Christians to Christians all throughout the second century. We see Tertullian confirms this as well only knows about this that Peter and Paul were killed by Nero for some more sort of weird petty political reasons. No knowledge of the fire, no knowledge of connection to the fire.
The Acts of Peter and the Acts of Paul. There's kind of like sort of political intrigue yada yada. Point being is they're not killed for anything to do with the fire, right? They're not killed for arson. There's no fire. Like it never happened.
There are no masses of Christians. There's just Peter and Paul and maybe a few of their colleagues are killed. So it's the only persecution by Nero that even Tertullian has heard of. And Tertullian read Tacitus. So we know he's a reader of Tacitus. So he'd never heard of this burning of Rome connection either. So how could Tertullian have never heard of it, right?
So when Tacitus talks about the Christians being persecuted by Nero, he's talking about these acts of Peter and the acts of Paul, those legends. And we know that because he explicitly says, "Oh, it's because of the killing of Peter and Paul." He has no knowledge of the fire or anything that uh and the Christians themselves when they're telling narratives, whole narratives about the persecution under Nero.
And then Lucius has never heard of it. And Lactantius has never heard of it. And Lactantius was a renowned Latinist. So he would definitely have known Tacitus.
So you have even like Tacitus is not aware of this. He wrote a whole history of the church that goes through persecutions. He doesn't mention this important event.
Christian apologists will say, "Well, maybe this just happened but it just wasn't popular or whatever." Like they can make up an excuse, but when you have to make up excuses for all these sources I listed, your argument is improbable, right? Like how probable is it that all these sources had never heard of it, right?
Book of Revelation also doesn't know about this. So, so Revelation's narrative, of course, is coded, so you have to like interpret it, but of course, it never says Nero, but you can work it out that he's talking about Nero. And its narrative is that Nero persecuted Christians and then the fire of Rome was God's punishment for persecuting Christians. So even the author of Revelation had no knowledge that Christians were persecuted for the fire. He's thinking of some other persecution which is probably a reference to the legend that we see in the acts of Paul and Peter.
https://youtu.be/jF3EUqLoH6U?si=C-UYT6RUL8ugG7Nw
