Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Sinouhe wrote: ↑Fri Jun 10, 2022 12:14 pm

Ken Olson wrote: ↑Fri Jun 10, 2022 10:53 am If the text is a forgery, the author is better at counterfeiting the attitudes of Christianity's opponents than other counterfeiters of which I'm aware (see the two examples at the end). If it's a forgery, the author is expecting the reader to do a lot more work to get to the desired conclusion than in those examples.

If the letter is a forgery, then it follows point by point what Tertullian says in his book. The same Tertullian who told us all sorts of lies about Pilate, Tiberius and the Roman Senate concerning the death and resurrection of Jesus (Tertullian : Apologies Livre V - Eusebius: Histoire ecclésiastique livre II)

And if it is a forgery, it is certainly a renaissance forgery, more sophisticated than what one could read in antiquity or in the Middle Ages. It is still a bad forgery in my opinion, for the reasons that Polydor Hochart explains in his book.

There is no explicit statement of Roman wickedness,

This is not what Tertullian tells us in his text. He himself condemns Pliny and Trajan:

O miserable deliverance — under the necessities of the case, a self-contradiction! It forbids them to be sought after as innocent, and it commands them to be punished as guilty. It is at once merciful and cruel; it passes by, and it punishes. Why do you play a game of evasion upon yourself, O Judgment? If you condemn, why do you not also inquire. If you do not inquire, why do you not also absolve?

Anyway, how could a letter forged in the name of Pliny or Pliny himself can say openly that the Romans are cruel ? I don't understand your logic. On the other hand, what I read (and what Tertullien read or invent) is that Christians are harmless and virtuous but that they are condemned to death if they do not renounce their faith in Christ. And that is cruel.

That Christianity spreads rapidly is common to all our sources, though I suppose it is possible to think all of our sources that say this (including Tacitus Annals 15.44) are the work of Christians.

I really don't think that Bythinia had become predominantly Christian by 112 and that the temples were empty because of Jesus. I really don't.
And yes, Tacitus' testimony on christians is also doubtful.

Two further points:

1) There very likely were people in Bithynia that could and did advise Pliny on how Christians had been handled previously. But he's writing to the emperor for *approval*, and only the emperor can give that.

This is not what I read in this letter :

I have never participated in trials of Christians. I therefore do not know what offenses it is the practice to punish or investigate, and to what extent. And I have been not a little hesitant as to whether there should be any distinction on account of age or no difference between the very young and the more mature; whether pardon is to be granted for repentance, or, if a man has once been a Christian, it does him no good to have ceased to be one; whether the name itself, even without offenses, or only the offenses associated with the name are to be punished.

They are the words of a lost guy who does not know what to do, who does not know how to punish them, nor to distinguish them, they are the words of someone who is alone and whom nobody can advise. This is ridiculous coming from someone like Pliny who is a magistrate and a lawyer, one of the most famous Romans in the city, an adviser to Trajan who asks his opinion in legal matters, etc. etc.
It is also ridiculous because it implies that no one had ever had to deal with these matters in Bythinia when it is said that Christianity is the most important religion in the region and that it has even supplanted paganism. And I repeat myself but Pliny was friends with Maximus, an ancient a former quaestor of Bythinia (VIII:24).

2) Pliny has an interest in exaggerating both the extent of the problem he dealt with and the effectiveness of the measures he took in dealing with it. However, I think there is probably an underlying truth to what he says about the sacrifices, even if it's exaggerated. The people most likely to denounce Christians to the government are those who had had their livelihoods impacted by them, such as those who sold animals for sacrifice in the temples. Even if only a few of the householder class who paid for most of the sacrifices in the temples converted to Christianity that may have caused a serious reduction in income for the vendors.

What is the need to exaggerate the problem?
A new religion is spreading, it is known to Trajan (unless you consider that Trajan doesn't really know what Christians are and what they represent either). I don't see why Pliny should exaggerate the situation unless you consider him a dedicated enemy of the Christians. On the other hand, I understand very easily why a forger who knows Tertullian's text would exaggerate the dynamism of Christianity in Bythynia.
Besides, the fact that he describes the Christians to Trajan, their beliefs, the way they grouped themselves, etc., seems illogical if one assumes that the emperor knew the Christians and are a well known sect in the Empire. But again, if this is a forgery, then i understand why the author would presents the Christians in a beautiful light.

One of the reasons for this is that it's unlikely a forger would simply have placed letters 96 and 97 in Book X of Pliny and just waited for someone to stumble across them.

I rather think that the book X was entirely forged to be resold at a high price as it was very common at that time to create fake books of the antiquity. This would explain all the mysteries surrounding the discovery of the manuscript, its disappearance, the doubts surrounding this discovery, and the style of book X itself. Besides, no one had ever heard of a Book X before its discovery, Pliny's letters having always been considered as part of 9 books. The correspondence of the Christians would then be only an anecdotal element that would have been inspired by Tertullian. But not the primary purpose of the forgery.
Perhaps it was Tertullian's text that inspired the creation of a book of unpublished letters by Pliny. A whole book would have far more financial value and be far more believable than two lost letters concerning Christians in Bythinia.

That said, I don't see a smoking gun here. At least in my opinion, there isn't anything Pliny couldn't quite plausibly have said.

I think the opposite. Coming from a high magistrate of Rome, member of the senate, lawyer, adviser of the emperor in judicial affairs, this letter is really incoherent. But I guess we won't agree on that

Acts 5.33

If I imagine that it is a renaissance forgery, it is not very relevant to compare it with the Acts or Eusebius. Especially since the creativity of the forger is strongly limited by the text of Tertullian. And Tertullian is very clear: he makes Pliny a cruel being who condemns without reason the nice and innocent Christians. And I hope you will agree with me, in view of how he manipulates history with Pilate, Tiberius and the senate, it would not be surprising if Tertullian invented a story of a letter from Pliny to Trajan to present Christians under a good day and the Roman Emperor with Pliny as the villains.

perseusomega9 wrote: ↑Sat Jun 11, 2022 4:24 am I find it interesting that letter 96 has no specific time and place to it and just happens to fall between two other letters that are at opposite ends of Pliny territory.

perseusomega9 wrote: ↑Sat Jun 11, 2022 4:24 am I find it interesting that letter 96 has no specific time and place to it and just happens to fall between two other letters that are at opposite ends of Pliny territory.

DCHindley wrote: ↑Sat Jun 11, 2022 6:37 am I think that both D Trobisch (First Edition of the NT) and H Gamble (Books and Readers in the Early Church) discuss how the elite classes edited their books for "publication" (that is, release into the public domain). At least one Roman writer explained how they edited their own letters, explaining they removed any material that was not to point ("Oh, yeah, I finally had My slave Erastus - yes it's made up - paint the southern wall") or "correct" their grammar and/or improve the style.

[Snipped]

Anyhow, the order of letters can be done several ways: Length, Chronological sequence as perceived by the editor, Subject, its Status within the editor/publisher's circle of readers, order encountered by the editor who published, etc.). Perhaps Pliny X.96-97 were just not in chronological order. The letters of Plato and certain Dialogues are were published in a couple different orders.

That 99% of all 1st-2nd century manuscripts are forever lost, the few that by pure chance remain may not be recognized as valuable by copyists, and was probably copied as practice for monks and professional scribes. The realization that a particular manuscript was significant, seems to have occurred in the late medieval period.

Chris Hansen wrote: ↑Sat Jun 11, 2022 6:47 am They did commit a crime... they didn't worship at temple. Hence why they are being punished. It was a crime not to worship the Roman gods at the Temple. Pliny never once declares Christians innocent. He reports that the Christians proclaimed themselves innocent, but he declares them guilty of violating Roman law and therefore deserving of punishment, which Trajan agrees with.

Rebillard, 2013: 64 and 105.
The case of Christian non-participation in public sacrifices and festivals thus offers an interesting case in which the confrontation with political power is largely, if not imagined, at least staged by a religious group in order to impose on converts a behavior that would distinguish them from the rest of the population, in a context where otherwise their identification and distinction by their religious affiliation does not seem to be problematic

• Pliny, Seneca, Persia, Juvenal, never saw in the Jews of Rome anything but merchants of orvietan.

• Flavius Josephus, circa 90, cites decrees by Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Augustus and Claudius, granting the Jewish communities a number of rights (AJ XIV 185-267; 301-323; XVI 160-178; XIX 278-311). They are even exempted from military service and from supplying troops to the Roman armies (AJ XIV 228).

• According to Juvenal, the Jewish colony in Rome was made up of miserable people, a kind of bohemian who rented from the State the right to live in the wood dedicated to the nymph Egeria, near the Capene gate (Satires, III, 13-16)
  Brought up in contempt of the Roman laws, they followed only the mysterious precepts of the book of Moses; they were circumcised, abstained from pork, but they ate, it was said, human flesh; faithful observers of the Sabbath, they suspended on that day all the ordinary work of life; none of them deigned to indicate a street, a fountain to the passer-by who addressed him, if the latter was not initiated into their cult [Satires, XIV, 96-104).

• Perseus and Seneca show us them freely lighting lanterns in their windows, without being disturbed, to celebrate their religious festivals.

• On the other hand, Jewish writers never complained about the situation of the jews in Rome : they had for proselytes great ladies such as Poppea, people of the court; moreover, the destiny of the Roman world would have been in the hands of Israelite prophetism; it is Agrippa who would have predicted to Caligula his elevation to the empire; it is he who would have decided Claudius to accept power, it is Josephus who would have given confidence to Vespasian by revealing to him the future and his brilliant fortune.

So, he gained information from torturing and interrogating Christians. Hence, he can talk of Christ and all of this, and would use "Christ" as a name, as Christians had been doing for ages.

No he doesn't. That is you exaggerating the temple and festival line, which never declares the whole region predominantly Christian but only that temple and festival practices had fallen into disuse, and assuming that Pliny is incapable of exaggeration himself... even though he regularly overinflates his import and events in his letters.

He didn't invent those. Those were in circulation before Tertullian was writing. Again, I pointed out that Justin Martyr said the same things. You seem to really want to impart dishonesty to Christian authors for no apparent reason. Tertullian is just repeating something in common circulation. He isn't lying or inventing anything. And therefore, this does not impugn his reference to Pliny.

Sinouhe wrote: ↑Sat Jun 11, 2022 12:35 am Even Ken is forced to recognize here that Pliny is exaggerating and lying to the emperor. A strange logic which shows the weakness of the argumentation : why would Pliny go so far as to lie to the emperor in order to get rid of the innocent Christians who gather to sing their hymn and who do not commit any crime ?

Ken Olson wrote: ↑Sat Jun 11, 2022 4:49 pm

Sinouhe wrote: ↑Sat Jun 11, 2022 12:35 am Even Ken is forced to recognize here that Pliny is exaggerating and lying to the emperor. A strange logic which shows the weakness of the argumentation : why would Pliny go so far as to lie to the emperor in order to get rid of the innocent Christians who gather to sing their hymn and who do not commit any crime ?

I'm fairly sure I did not use the language of 'lying to the emperor".

Could you quote what I wrote that you think would constitute lying to the emperor and why?

Also, I take Pliny's aim in writing to the emperor to be the opposite of what you say it is in your (rhetorical) question. At least, if by 'get rid of' you mean kill.

Best,

Ken

Sinouhe wrote: ↑Sat Jun 11, 2022 11:47 am I would like to point out to you that this letter of Pilate to Tiberius mentioned by Tertullian is first mentioned by Tertullian, and it was forged later during the Renaissance. (Elliott, James Keith (1993). The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford University Press. p. 205–227)

Does it remind you of anything? Tertullian mentions a fanciful letter between Pilate and Tiberius. And Miraculously it was found (forged) during the renaissance.

Does it remind you of the letter of Pliny to Trajan which is mentioned first by Tertullian and which is found miraculously (forged ?) during the renaissance ?

Sinouhe wrote: ↑Fri Jun 10, 2022 12:14 pm

Ken Olson wrote: ↑Fri Jun 10, 2022 10:53 am If the text is a forgery, the author is better at counterfeiting the attitudes of Christianity's opponents than other counterfeiters of which I'm aware (see the two examples at the end). If it's a forgery, the author is expecting the reader to do a lot more work to get to the desired conclusion than in those examples.

If the letter is a forgery, then it follows point by point what Tertullian says in his book. The same Tertullian who told us all sorts of lies about Pilate, Tiberius and the Roman Senate concerning the death and resurrection of Jesus (Tertullian : Apologies Livre V - Eusebius: Histoire ecclésiastique livre II)

And if it is a forgery, it is certainly a renaissance forgery, more sophisticated than what one could read in antiquity or in the Middle Ages. It is still a bad forgery in my opinion, for the reasons that Polydor Hochart explains in his book.

Ken Olson wrote: ↑Sat Jun 11, 2022 5:32 pm
Here is the letter of Pilate to Tiberius from Elliott, the Apocrypha New Testament (1993):


Pilate to Tiberius 1.png


Pilate to Tiberius 2.png

I take it you see the similarity between them is that they both have their first outside attestation in Tertullian, and if the letter of Pilate to Tiberius is a Renaissance forgery, why not the letter of Pliny to Trajan.

But I think this does not help your case a great deal (to put it mildly).

Tertullian - Apology XXI
All these things Pilate did to Christ; and now in fact a Christian in his own convictions, he sent word of Him to the reigning Cæsar, who was at the time Tiberius.

The letters are vastly different and the letter of Pilate to Tiberius is far more obviously a Christian work (I'd rank it as more obviously a Christian work that the Testimonium Flavianum). It's hard to imagine that there's a strong connection between the Pilate's letter and Pliny's. The two must have very different genealogies.

Do you have an example of a forged work from the Renaissance that purports to be a pagan Roman writing about Christians that actually exhibits the level of sophistication (i.e., better than one could find in antiquity or the Middle Ages) you hypothesize the forger of the Plin-Trajan correspondence had?