If even Tacitus didn't mention Pilate in connection with Jesus...

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Peter Kirby
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Re: If even Tacitus didn't mention Pilate in connection with Jesus...

Post by Peter Kirby »

Peter Kirby wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 2:07 pm Is it possible that the missing sections of the Annals contained some discussion of Pilate?
perseusomega9 wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 2:17 pm Intentionally or not?
I'm not thinking of anything crazy. Maybe just a story about Pilate's removal from office.
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Re: If even Tacitus didn't mention Pilate in connection with Jesus...

Post by perseusomega9 »

So intentionally, yet not crazy.
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Re: If even Tacitus didn't mention Pilate in connection with Jesus...

Post by MrMacSon »

Peter Kirby wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 2:07 pm Is it possible that the missing sections of the Annals contained some discussion of Pilate?
Apparently the missing sections do include most if not all of the time of Tiberius
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Re: If even Tacitus didn't mention Pilate in connection with Jesus...

Post by Irish1975 »

From an older thread:
Irish1975 wrote: Wed Aug 05, 2020 6:02 pm There is a good discussion of the Testimonium Taciteum in a recent publication by 3 classical scholars:

The Emperor Nero: A Guide to the Ancient Sources (Princeton UP, 2016), by Anthony Barrett, Elaine Fantham, & John Yardley (pp. 161-170).

About Tacitus’ incorrect identification of Pilate as Procurator, rather than Prefect, they find an interesting connection in the Vetus Latina text of the NT:

In these pre-Jerome Latin versions of the NT, at Luke 3:1, where in the Greek text Pontius Pilate’s office is described by the neutral Greek word hegemon, the Vetus Latina translates the term with the phrase procurante Pontio Pilato (“when Pontius Pilate was acting as procurator”). Thus, the notion that he held the office of procurator was part of the Latin Christian tradition.

Ben C. Smith confirmed this connection in Codex Bezae.

For me the strongest point against authenticity is the silence in Christian sources about any such persecution in Rome:

Perhaps even more astonishing is the silence of Christian writers...Tertullian, Lactantius, Jerome, and Eusebius all refer to Nero generally as a persecutor. The supposed fates of Peter and Paul made this inevitable...But not a single Christian writer makes any mention of what they would surely have viewed as the first large-scale martyrdom. The case of Eusebius is striking since his Ecclesisastical History is in effect an exhaustive history of martyrdoms in every corner of the empire...

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Re: If even Tacitus didn't mention Pilate in connection with Jesus...

Post by Peter Kirby »

perseusomega9 wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 2:17 pm Intentionally or not?
perseusomega9 wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 3:09 pm So intentionally
What is the question here? Kindly add a few more words.
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Re: If even Tacitus didn't mention Pilate in connection with Jesus...

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It is thought to be highly improbable that a 4th century Christian could have emulated the great historian so convincingly. The style is perfectly “Tacitean.”

But most of the story could have been from Tacitus, with only the names switched out—

Sed non ope humana, non largitionibus principis aut deum placamentis decedebat infamia, quin iussum incendium crederetur. ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos et quaesitissimis poenis adfecit, quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Chrestianos appellabat. auctor nominis eius Christus Tibero imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio adfectus erat; repressaque in praesens exitiablilis superstitio rursum erumpebat, non modo per Iudaeam, originem eius mali, sed per urbem etiam, quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt celebranturque. igitur primum correpti qui fatebantur, deinde indicio eorum multitudo ingens haud proinde in crimine incendii quam odio humani generis convicti sunt. et pereuntibus addita ludibria, ut ferarum tergis contecti laniatu canum interirent aut crucibus adfixi [aut flammandi atque], ubi defecisset dies, in usu[m] nocturni luminis urerentur. hortos suos ei spectaculo Nero obtulerat, et circense ludicrum edebat, habitu aurigae permixtus plebi vel curriculo insistens. unde quamquam adversus sontes et novissima exempla meritos miseratio oriebatur, tamquam non utilitate publica, sed in saevitiam unius absumerentur.

A different group, a different founder, a different province. Not that complicated.

I think we sometimes forget how easily a text can be altered so as to yield an entirely different picture. Not to mention that some of the great fakers and forgers must have been clever. They weren’t all dolts.
Last edited by Irish1975 on Tue Jan 11, 2022 6:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: If even Tacitus didn't mention Pilate in connection with Jesus...

Post by DCHindley »

So, to put it like codex "E",

Latin of Tacitus
English gloss (Google Translate)
ergo therefore
abolendo to get rid of
rumori the report
Nero Nero
subdidit subdued
r eos r some (persons)
et and
quaesitissimis most elaborate
poenis penalties
adfecit, inflicted
quos which
per by (their)
flagitia atrocities
invisos disliked
vulgus common people
[Chrestiano] ["chrestians"]
appellabat. they were called
auctor author
nominis name
eius his
[Christus [Christus
Tibero Tiberius
imperitante during his reign
per by
procuratorem his procurator
Pontium Pontius
Pilatum] Pilate]
supplicio punishment
adfectus severe
erat; was;
repressaque checked for
in in
praesens present
exitiablilis fatal
superstitio superstition
rursum again
erumpebat, it broke
non non
modo only
per by
[Iudaeam], [Judea]
originem origin
eius his
mali, bad
sed but
per by
urbem city
etiam, also
quo where
cuncta everything
undique everywhere
atrocia atrocious
aut or
pudenda shameful
confluunt flock to
celebranturque. become popular.

To me your struck-out words (I have them in brackets above) do not really improve my understanding of the existing text. Unfortunately, my Latin is practically non-existent (Oh ... I have dictionaries and a grammar and some lexicons, pretty basic).

That's not to deny that the original strikes me as chaotic and disjointed, which suggests to my shriveled old brain that a muddled revision history lay behind it.

My own opinion is that Nero singled out a generic group he called "christians" (or "those of the anointed one"), perhaps calling them that in jest of the unfortunate fact that they had been selected pretty much at random to be subjected to punishments as examples. But punished for what? Are they just scapegoats? Or did the concept of "belonging to an anointed one" signify an anti-establishment messianic movement? We know from the Sibylline Oracles that such anti-Roman propaganda predicting a new world order was known (well, at least in 3rd century CE form).

It was later "Christian" copyists who interpreted this reference to refer to them in their new and improved state, as a mystery, not to messianic agitators. They long ago had stopped thinking of themselves as members of a messianic cult. The upside was that by claiming even this statement they can add it to the ever increasing list of things that they imagined revolved around the myth of Jesus' atoning sacrifice as the Christ.
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Re: If even Tacitus didn't mention Pilate in connection with Jesus...

Post by Giuseppe »

Irish1975 wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 3:53 pm For me the strongest point against authenticity is the silence in Christian sources about any such persecution in Rome:
this point is confuted very well by Anthony Barrett. I invite you to read about it.
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Re: If even Tacitus didn't mention Pilate in connection with Jesus...

Post by Sinouhe »

Giuseppe wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 10:14 pm
Irish1975 wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 3:53 pm For me the strongest point against authenticity is the silence in Christian sources about any such persecution in Rome:
this point is confuted very well by Anthony Barrett. I invite you to read about it.
Not really,

Anthony Barrett :
Not only is Eusebius silent about any persecution following the fire, but an internal analysis of his writings seems to offer positive evidence that he was unaware of it. The Chronica of Eusebius, as preserved in Jerome’s translation, reports under the year 64 that, in order to watch a replica of burning Troy, Nero burned down the major part of Rome.94 But then under the year 68, again in Jerome’s translation, Nero is re- corded as the first to launch a persecution of the Christians, in which Peter and Paul died in Rome.95 Eusebius thus clearly determined from the material he had available to him that the fire of Rome and the first Christian persecution were distinct events, separated by four years.96

Finally, as a footnote to the silence of the Christian sources, we must add the silence of their opponents. If Christians had been convicted of setting fire to Rome, we would surely expect the fact to be highlighted by anti-Christian writers. For instance, in the second century AD, Cel- sus, a Greek philosopher and opponent of Christianity, wrote an anti- Christian diatribe, Alethes Logos (“True Word”), known through co- pious quotations by the Christian scholar Origen (supplemented by Origen’s refutations), but he seems to have skipped the potentially use- ful ammunition provided by the Annals.100

(...)

Clearly, something is seriously wrong. One solution is to impute negligence to Tacitus, as Shaw has recently done, suggesting that Taci- tus based his account on some dubious later source.101 A limited ver- sion of Tacitean error was first proposed in the nineteenth century, when Pierre Batiffol suggested that Tacitus combined two separate events to create one incident, and that the fire and the punishment of the Christians were historically unconnected.102 The confusion could have arisen because actions taken by Nero against the Christians, as described by Suetonius, may have included a claim of arson, but a minor claim quite unrelated to the fire of AD 64, and probably one of a whole complex of charges.

The notion of a Tacitean error has the merit of recognizing that, as it stands, this part of the Annals presents almost insuperable difficul- ties. But we still face the problem of the silence of Christian writers.

This loud silence of every source before the fifth century AD, other than the Annals, seems to bring seriously into question whether any authority earlier than Sulpicius had read Tacitus’s account of the pun- ishment of the Christians in the wake of the fire, and it matters not whether that section of the Annals is historically valid or seriously flawed.

There is a second, more radical, but in some ways much simpler, solution to the problem, proposed in its first manifestation by Polydore Hochart at the end of the nineteenth century and touched upon earlier in this chapter.


Whichever option might seem the more attractive, it would still mean that the most dramatic and lasting consequence of the fire of AD 64 is based on a false premise, and that “Nero made an indelible stain on the memory of the early Church,”122 not necessarily because of what happened, but because of what people have believed happened.
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Re: If even Tacitus didn't mention Pilate in connection with Jesus...

Post by Giuseppe »

In p. 169, Barrett writes:

But it seems that he made relatively little impact on his immediate posterity. By the third century, the emperor Tacitus (reigned AD 275–276), who believed himself to be a descendant, reputedly ordered that his namesake’s works should be copied to rescue him from the neglect (incuria) of readers. The information comes from the curious and notoriously unreliable collection of imperial biographies written perhaps in the later fourth or early f ifth century, the Historia Augusta, and it is not a secure guide to the activities of the emperor Tacitus, but the anecdote would have had little point had the historian Tacitus’s works been widely read.107 Even in the sixth century the writer Cassiodorus can refer to “a certain Cornelius” when referring to Tacitus (citing his Germania about the collection of amber), implying that the historian had by then sunk into considerable obscurity.108

(my bold)

Sic stantibus rebus, I think that the silence about Tacitus's Annals 15:44 is not so anomalous (=unexpected), pace Carrier.

Differently from the silence about the Testimonia Flaviana.
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