Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

This is pure speculation on my part. I'm curious if anyone has ever attempted any serious scholarly work on determining whether Tacitus used Josephus' writings as a source, and if so, whether Tacitus' description of Jesus (as the instigator of a superstition who was crucified under Pilate) may have been sourced from a pre-tampered with Testimonium Flavianum?

If you mean the original Tacitus used a tampered-with copy of Josephus, the timeline doesn't work. It was probably Pamphilus (as Carrier believes) or Eusebius who created the TF.

^I'm talking about the possibility of Tacitus getting his info on Jesus from a pre-tampered-with Josephus reference to Jesus, and whether anyone's ever explored that idea to any scholarly length.

Its unlikely a "pre-tampered-with" TF would have reference to Jesus the Christ, Christ per se, or to Christians.

toejam wrote:This is pure speculation on my part. I'm curious if anyone has ever attempted any serious scholarly work on determining whether Tacitus used Josephus' writings as a source, and if so, whether Tacitus' description of Jesus (as the instigator of a superstition who was crucified under Pilate) may have been sourced from a pre-tampered with Testimonium Flavianum?

S. C. Carlson makes such a case on two old weblog entries: http://hypotyposeis.org/weblog/2004/08/ ... ebius.html and http://hypotyposeis.org/weblog/2004/08/ ... onium.html. He has follow-up posts that he collects here: http://hypotyposeis.org/weblog/2006/07/ ... eries.html. (At that time I was fairly enthusiastic about the case; I am not as sure now; Ken Olson makes some good points.)

Ben.

^Yeah, I'm not enthusiastic about it either... just seeing if anyone's explored the possibility before...

Tacitus, Pliny-the-Younger, Seutonius and Hadrian were all contemporaries of each other

Pliny-the-Younger was friends with both Tacitus and Seutonius, and Suetonius became employed by Hadrian.

They collectively referred to Christ, Christians, Chrestus, and Chrestiani; but not Jesus.

^I've engaged with you on this point before, and I found it an unfruitful conversation. If you don't think the reference found in Tacitus' Annals 15:44, which describes a Judean cult leader who was executed under Pilate as the instigator of a sizable superstition, is a reference to Jesus because it doesn't say "Jesus", then I think you're fooling yourself. That would be like saying the phrase "in the 1950s, there was a tall pasty red-head who started $cientology" isn't a reference to L. Ron Hubbard. If you can't see this and would like to engage on this point, start a new thread. In this thread, we're working on the assumptions that Tacitus' passage is authentic, and that Josephus wrote *something* about Jesus in a pre-tampered with TF, and whether or not anyone has ever explored in any detail the thought that this may have been Tacitus' source for his passage.

Well perhaps we can bring it back into context.

In the Josephus passage, so-called, then there is -no- statement about Jesus being Christ... unless one thinks that the passage was unedited. The distinction is made that Jesus is "called the Christ" (20.200 and 18.63 both allegedly have such wording). But the person is introduced as "Jesus."

On the other hand, the Latin-writing Tacitus seems to share the perspective of Pliny and Suetonius, by referring to this person as "Christ."

If Tacitus read Josephus, he was none the wiser for doing so, in that he does not call Jesus by his actual name.