Ken Olson wrote: ↑Thu Mar 17, 2022 3:05 am
neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Thu Mar 17, 2022 1:30 am
Ken Olson wrote: ↑Sat Mar 12, 2022 9:06 am
My question is: how much did Suetonius know about Jewish Messianism, Christ, or Christians? Is there any basis for thinking that he saw the expectation of a ruler coming from Judea, the Chrestus who stirred up the Jews, and the Christians who were given to a new and mischievous superstition were somehow related? It's not apparent to me he saw a connection among the three things.
Maybe it's just a passing moment of over-questioning, but I do wonder if we have any secure reason to think that Suetonius had even ever heard of Christians or Christ being associated "way back" in the days of Claudius and Nero and would be bemused to come back today to read what he has been said to have written.
Neil,
Interestingly enough, my question was indirectly inspired by James Valliant. I'm now cutting my way James Valliant and Warren Fahy, Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity (2018), which we discussed previously on this forum:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5054
I haven't quite finished it yet, but I'm not finding the major thesis of the book, as stated in the subtitle, at all credible. The authors' use of archaeological data and ancient symbols and imagery is methodologically ad hoc. In brief, they see a correlation between the dolphin and anchor symbol which the emperor Titus used on some of the coins he had minted during his reign, and the Christians use of the dolphin and anchor symbol pre-dating the cross, to be evidence supporting their thesis that the Flavian emperors created Christianity, or, rather, the kind of Gentile Christianity found in most of the New Testament.
To recap: they think the fact that Titus was the first emperor to use the dolphin and anchor symbol and that the Christians also used this symbol is a striking correlation. But (as you have pointed out) the evidence for Christian use of the dolphin and anchor symbol is from later than the reign of Titus. Also, Titus used several different symbols on his coinage. Do a google images search for Titus Coins and you find an elephant, a pegasus, a winged woman (Victory?) and many others. The Christians too used any different symbols, as V & F's quotation of Clement of Alexandria shows. And other people and groups used the dolphin and anchor symbol (Seleucus and the temple of Neptune). That Titus and Christians should both use a common symbol that others were also using, and alongside several other symbols they used, is not much evidence of anything.
But underlying their major thesis Valliant and Fahy have another which I think has a lot going for it. They think that the Gentile-friendly Christian writings of the New Testament, and particularly the Gospels and Acts, is a later development from outside Judea and that the Jerusalem church led by James should be understood as a (solely) Jewish messianic movement which might best be interpreted in terms of the sectarian scrolls at Qumran and Josephus' descriptions of Jewish rebels in the Jewish War. I think they probably overstate the connection between messianism and eschatology with violence. Sometimes eschatology brings about violent revolution as the believers try to help God's plan along, but sometimes it encourages them to accept the status quo as they wait for God to bring about change. But I think Valliant and Fahy have seen the disconnect between early Jewish messianism and the Gentile-friendly movement that came to be called Christianity more clearly than most.
To bring this back to Suetonius, they point out that there is no good reason to associate the Jewish agitators in Rome under Claudius and the Christians punished by Nero (both before 70) with the later gentle or Gentile-friendly Jesus who advised turning the other cheek. They may well have been Jewish messianists engaged in rebellion, or at least agitation, against Roman authority.
Best,
Ken
Thanks for the background to the question, Ken. Yes, as you point out, I also found V&F's use of the anchor-dolphin image problematic, being used by Christians "too late" for one thing.
I also find myself leaning in favour of that "school of thought" that sees no evidence for actual Jewish messianic movements until after 70 CE -- though I'm quite prepared to change my mind -- and would expect something slightly different in Suetonius if that was what the "Jewish/Christian problem" in Rome was.
But if Claudius and Nero were responding to messianic agitations in Rome then did they not do an adequate job of handling their respective problems? Surely a few expulsions and executions were enough to keep the problem under wraps without the convolutions and obvious risks of failure involved in concocting a new Roman-friendly Jewish type religion to fool the followers into submission. If Claudius and Nero failed to nip the problem in the bud then we would expect some evidence to that effect, would we not? (Should we thin of Christian scribes not interpolating but expunging passages from Suetonius and Tacitus that are evidence of messianic trouble-makers prior to 70 CE?)
As for one case study of the types of disturbances related to messianic hopes: Compare the followers of the messiah Sabbatai Sevi in the seventeenth century: they expected his imminent rise to power and made nuisances of themselves in ways that directly related to this messianic expectation:
1- they (many of them) abandoned economic trade thus disrupting businesses in some communities;
2 - some of them made nuisances of themselves by violently intimidating/attacking those who did not believe in their messiah and those who mocked them for their beliefs. They felt emboldened to act violently in towns where they were clearly in the majority.
There is evidence that the sectarians some of whose members engaged in these practices were fearful that the state authorities would punish them.
In other respects and with few isolated exceptions they appeared to be part of the Jewish "cult" (sabbath meetings and prayers).
Our information is very sparse of course, too sparse to enable any certain conclusions, but I do find myself wondering if what we read in Suetonius is what we would expect if his messianists were in large enough numbers in Rome at that time (which is another problem to work through) to be causing the sort of trouble that would arise from messianism per se.
Followers of Sabbatai may not be relevant, but if not, I still have a hard time getting my head around the sorts of problems caused by the Jews over messianic beliefs. Contrast the apparently messianic Jewish revolts in Cyrene. Now those appear to have had messianic associations and appear to have been provoked by Roman mistreatment. Even on a small scale does that appear to be the sort of thing facing the Julio-Claudians?