OK, playing catch up again.
Jayson
So what? "Chrestus" presumably reflects what Suetonius has from his sources, over whom he has no control. What he gives us is bounded above by what he has. If he had more elsewhere, then he could give more elsewhere.
False dichotomy, and nakedly so, easily recognized as such even before I presented a third serious possiblility just above.
I would agree to this possibility if there was a single entry in Suetonius' material that shows an entry of a name without context such that we are left to simply not know who Suetonius is talking about.
As it stands, this is the only entry (if rendered as a name) that would be such.
Also, Suetonius didn't just copy; he quite overtly added and removed as he wanted, and a bunch of his sources were people's words on matters and not always Senate records; due to being banned from the Senate late in his carrier.
So that does bring it to a binary set of possibilities as the option that Suetonius just copied something that he himself didn't understand the context of is not reflected in any of his work, nor is it in any of his work to give a name an entry without the name either being well known, or if not well known, referred to in relation to another well known name for context.
That does leave us with the choice of either this being the only entry where Suetonius breaks his authorship pattern completely, or we assume he meant the Christ when referring to an unrest in the Jewish community.
What we don't know is whether or not Jesus was or was not the actual instigation to the unrest. We can be pretty certain, given the above reasons, that Suetonius thought this, but that doesn't prove anything because Suetonius' entries are not foreign to being wrong.
The Letter
But there was, reputedly, and as you acknowledge, a "Wise King" of the entire Jewish homeland, whose name is synonymous with Jewish wisdom and yet liable to superstitious avoidance.
This king actually did make laws, if he lived at all. According to our sources, he apparently died of natural causes in the course of civil and religious conflict which cost his immediate successor the secession of ten of the twelve tribes, and in crisp order led to the utter dispersal of those ten tribes. If this king lived, then he lived several centuries before the letter was written, like the other two figures mentioned, Socrates and Pythagoras, and would be familiar to Gentiles, just as these other two figures are, since his name is literally a name to conjure with.
It is superfluous, I trust, to say the name. I might even be inhibited from doing so if I believed in the efficacy of the name to influence demons, jinn, or what have you. Meh, demons and jinn don't worry me much. Of course, I can't say what Mara's views about that may have been, since we know bupkis about him.
The king's name, obviously, was Solomon.
We have no figure who perfectly fits the text in hand. Then again, our one and only manuscript witness is what? Sixth Century, do you think? What is the Hamming Distance in Syriac between "murdered" and the closest synonym for "violently opposed"? What is the conceptual distance between murder and hounding an old man to his death? What is the rhetorical distance between the two?
And as you were kind enough to acknowledge, Jesus wasn't literally murdered either, was he?
So, if we go fairly by points of similarity, I will affirmatively guess that the intended reference is to Solomon; 65-35 against the field (Solomon against anybody at all besides Solomon, including Jesus). Perhaps you would take the bet; pity that there is no earthly way to resolve it.
My beliefs are not a reason for you to agree with my identification of the Wise Jewish King, but I hope this post explains my complete lack of interest in pursuing this letter as evidence bearing on a historical Jesus who counts.
I agree that Solomon should be considered, and I did consider it in the previous post where I addressed why Solomon does not fit the description:
Post #2868
The only other figure so named in the Jewish community was King Solomon, who was not murdered, nor looked down upon by the Jews (or really any Hebrew peoples in general), but instead was praised as the the wisest in their legends of their Kings; they record this alleged King of theirs as dying of natural causes far long before any loss of the Jewish lands.
Solomon neither is held in their legends as a King who introduced new laws, but instead unified the land with strong rule.
And if he had even introduced new laws, he was certainly not thought of as introducing laws that were contentious and required his death.
As the euphemism; this would not be the only instance of someone calling the death of Jesus a murder.
Solomon was not murdered, however; not even euphemistically.
To place Solomon as this Wise King would be to make an entry that indicates that the Jews did not like Solomon, as the entry of the Wise King holds slanderous tone toward the figure by the Jews in the letter's record.
Solomon was far from slandered, but exalted.
Jesus fits the description perfectly fine without difficulty.
He was sarcastically called the Wise King, he was viewed as murdered by Jews (by at least some demographics), he was a bringer of new laws that angered the Jews.
Solomon was not accounted for as angering anyone with new laws; his tradition is praised, even to this day, right along side of David.
Solomon is not a tragic figure that fits the tangent, or descriptions.
Jesus, on the other hand, is both a tragic legend and fits the description.
