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

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

Post by Giuseppe »

andrewcriddle wrote: Fri Jan 14, 2022 11:10 am
Giuseppe wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 10:34 am
Chris Hansen wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 10:12 am Not really that surprising. Christ and Jesus became interchangeable as both proper names
The following quote from Anthony Barrett, Rome is Burning, has persuaded me that at least the reference to Pilate in the Testimonium Taciteum is probably an interpolation:


The way that the now famous Pontius Pilate is introduced raises suspicions; he is mentioned simply as “procurator” without any indication of the “province” for which he was responsible (Judea was strictly The Christians and the Great Fire speaking not a true provincia but administratively subordinate to the provincia of Syria). Pilate is, of course, a very familiar figure in the later Christian tradition as the governor of Judea at the time when the crucifixion occurred. But to a Roman readership in Tacitus’s day, he was not nearly well enough known to be mentioned without some prefatory information. One might explain that away by assuming that an earlier reference to his generally incompetent term of office was made in one of the lost books of the Annals that covered the latter years of Tiberius’s reign, when Pilate served (chapter 1). But a major role for Pilate in one of those now lost books seems very unlikely, given Tacitus’s almost flippant statement in his Histories about Judea at the time: “under Tiberius all was quiet” (sub Tiberio quies). Even the mere fact that Pilate’s term of office is mentioned as the context for the death of Christ comes as something of a surprise; it is a detail about Christ that would be of very little interest to a Roman but would have had considerable significance for a Christian reader.

More strikingly, Pilate is said to have held the rank of “procurator.” This is simply inaccurate. The term “procurator” for someone in an administrative position has a long history (it is attested well before the imperial period), but it was not used for the equestrian governors of quasi-provinces like Judea at the time of Christ’s crucifixion, that is, late in Tiberius’s reign (he died in AD 37).64 In fact, the designation of such governors as procurators was introduced by Claudius, thus after AD 41. The change apparently did not occur everywhere at the same time and seems to have prevailed only gradually.65 Before Claudius, equestrian governors like Pilate held the title of “prefect” (praefectus). We have explicit primary evidence that Pilate was no exception: on a building inscription found in the city of Caesarea in Judea he is unequivocally called a praefectus. 66 Thus, the allusion to Pilate’s office, an item already likely to be far more interesting to a Christian than to a pagan in the Rome of Tacitus’s day, adds to the mystery by committing a serious, and quite elementary, anachronism on a technical point. Tacitus is elsewhere quite punctilious in his use of such terminology and makes a careful distinction between procurators and prefects. He reports, for instance, that during the preparations for a major offensive against the Parthians in AD 63, letters were sent out to “tetrarchs, kings, prefects, procurators and praetors in charge of neighbouring provinces [sc. to Syria]” where a distinction is drawn between the procurators, that is, the governors of small “provinces,” and the prefect who commanded cohorts of troops established within some provinces.67 While it may be true that at times the phraseology and the concepts applied by Tacitus to an earlier era are more properly those of his own day (this certainly might be reasonably claimed about the language that he uses to describe the Christians),68 the error over Pontius Pilate’s office is of a different order, it is a basic historical blunder and, as such, very surprising indeed if made by Tacitus. If this passage is not by Tacitus but is rather a later interpolation, there may be a clue to how the error arose.
[...]
All of this adds weight to arguments that at least the specific reference to the “procurator Pontius Pilatus” could actually be an interpolation by someone very familiar with Christian writings.

(p. 158-161, my bold)
Tacitus says
But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called "Chrestians" 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 Pilate, 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 center and become popular.
I think we are meant to infer from the origin of the Chrestians/Christians in Judea and from Pilates measures while procurator against them, that Pilate was procurator in Judea.

Andrew Criddle
correct, thank you.
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