Only Tacitus and Pliny and Clement and Origen and Eusebius and...
It would help you to answer these things yourself if you read the thread.
Bart Ehrman on the Historical Jesus
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Only Tacitus and Pliny and Clement and Origen and Eusebius and...
It would help you to answer these things yourself if you read the thread.
There is legitimate room for doubt, and personally I am doubtful. Not all these sources are independent, and I agree with those commentators who say that Tacitus obtained his information from Christians of his own day, and not from contemporary official records of Nero's reign. (Of course this doesn't necessarily mean that all his information is false!) We know for example that Pliny, friend and colleague of Tacitus (http://www.smatch-international.org/PlinyLetters.html) knew nothing of Christians until he investigated those living in Bythinia. Nor does Trajan seem to have been much better informed.
Eusebius must be treated with the greatest caution as a historian of the earliest days of the Church.
I happen to think that Tacitus as a Roman Chronicler who lived in the city all his life, would be familiar with lots of sources about the Great Fire and its aftermath.
Just as anyone who lived in Chicago in the early 20th Century would be familiar with what happened there in the 19th century.
Oral tradition was how anyone knew anything (mostly) in Ancient Rome.
Your Questing has now made you desperate.
You forget the Robert Van Voorst is a theologian and was a practising minister for the Reformed Church of America.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Van_Voorst
This is the Belief of the Reformed Church of America.
https://www.rca.org/beliefs
Robert Van Voorst believes in the Jesus of Faith--NOT your standard HJ.
Robert Van Voorst believes in a Myth--a Son of a God who is alive even today.
Robert Van Voorst worships Jesus as an eternal being.
Robert Van Vorst worship Myth Jesus--Not your assumed standard obscure criminal.
HJ the obscure criminal is tantamount to a Hoax---No such Jesus has ever been found in or out the Bible.
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And in modern Chicago?
pakeha
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Did Tacitus live in Rome all his life?
I couldn't find evidence to support that idea.
"Little is known for certain about the origins of Tacitus, although he is believed to have been born, around A.D. 56, into a provincial aristocratic family in Gaul (modern France) or nearby, in the Roman province of Transalpine Gaul. We don't even know if his name was "Publius" or "Gaius Cornelius" Tacitus. "
http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/historianstacitus/a/Tacitus.htm
Wiki tells us he served " in the provinces from ca. 89 to ca. 93 either in command of a legion or in a civilian post.[22]", that "[a] lengthy absence from politics and law followed while he wrote the Histories and the Annals. In 112 or 113 he held the highest civilian governorship, that of the Roman province of Asia in Western Anatolia, recorded in the inscription found at Mylasa mentioned above"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacitus
I was surprised at how sketchy our knowledge is of Tacitus.
Conversely we can't take for granted that Chrestus is definitely another form of Christus. It is like calling Sitting Bull a great chef for over a century and then realizing you have been calling him a great baker all that time.
Remember that by the time we get our first complete NT manuscripts Christianity has borrowed ideas from the pagans in order to compete...like the December 25 birth date. So why not the term Chrestian?
From what we know there seem to be many sects by 180 CE and as with today they seemed to be calling themselves something other then Christian (Marcionism for example). It is well within possibility that one sect latched on to the term Chrestian; 'we're not like those other sects that follow Jesus, we're the good ones' (ie Chrestians)
As I have mentioned before Pliny the Elder doesn't mention Christians at all even though he does mention the Great Fire. Pliny the younger doesn't mention Nero.
Perhaps following your own advice is in order.
Not my point at all, as you must be aware. I am saying that the word "Chrestian" in the earliest complete manuscript of the NT can only refer to the Jesus group. It can't possibly refer to worshippers of Osiris or any other pagan group. Now, if it means the Jesus group here, then it must mean the same thing in Tacitus who explicitly refers to the founder of the "Chrestian" movement as having been executed by Pilate.
So what? Tacitus was referring to people who followed a person executed by Pilate. And the term he uses is also the one in the Codex Sinaiaticus. So your possibility doesn't arise here, even though for all I know the word Chrestian may refer to worshippers of Osiris or Serapis in some other context. But these gods weren't executed by Pilate, and their followers are not the people of the NT account.It is well within possibility that one sect latched on to the term Chrestian; 'we're not like those other sects that follow Jesus, we're the good ones' (ie Chrestians)
David Mo
Philosopher
I would be a little more drastic than these historicists mentioned by Wikipedia . I think I should explain why.
Let us take into account the baptism of Jesus. It is one of the broadest consensuses among historians and specialists because it includes believers and nonbelievers. For the latter the story of Jesus' baptism should have some historic cause because it represents a difficulty for the evangelists. Indeed, it is assumed that John the Baptist baptized to wash away the sins, but the evangelists believed in Jesus as a semi-divine being who had not any imperfection and, of course, he was much higher than Baptist. Someone who would believe in these characteristics of Jesus had not invented such a scene that required him to add contradictory paragraphs. The first, the Baptist recognize himself as precursor and inferior to Jesus and then he sends some disciples to ask if he is the Messiah. This contradiction led to believe that the evangelists are trying to hide a historical fact: Jesus was once a disciple of John and then they separated and the mutual suspicions came. The baptism would be real, not all the paraphernalia that accompanies it.
But this argument ignores other possibilities that go against it. Perhaps there wasn't an initial relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist, but a rivalry between both eschatological preachers and the evangelists are trying to mask it. Another possibility is that neither was there any contact nor rivalry, but the evangelists invented the story to put Jesus above John, without knowing the theological implications that surrounded the Johannine baptism. Another possibility is the story was invented by Christians who did not believe in the divinity of Jesus and so the invention of baptism posed no difficulty to them. The statements of John, the heavenly voices and the pigeons coming up and down would be added later and were used for purposes to place Jesus above John. These assumptions, and some more that could be done, dissolve the strength of the argument of difficulty, but they assume the existence of the character named John. In fact we have no more accounts of him than the Gospels and a brief mention in Josephus so reverent that someone can doubt its authenticity. If John is an invention, all would be an invention.
Therefore I would say that the evidence of the baptism of Jesus seems very fragile. If I had to pronounce I would say that I do not known if baptism happened or not. So I would only assert that at that time there was a preacher who was crucified by the Romans. Full stop.
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eight bits
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David
I don't have any problem with your defining "what counts as a historical Jesus?" for you without a baptism (especially since it isn't in all the Gospels and is at best suggested in Paul). I do dispute your interpretation of why historians, especially non-believers, might think there was something to the story. Only Christian apologists could assume that John dunked for the same reasons as they do, contrary to the only extra-canonical mention of John in his own century.
The real "embarrasment" for New Testament scholarship is how much of it is Christian apology. Best, then, not to draw attention unnecessarily to how easily that perspective can distort the interpretation of evidence.
Because it is a good guess. Paul says he practiced baptism, without apparent enthusiasm. That Paul believed there was some sort of Jesus-Dunker link is easily suspected. The precise quality of the believed link is debatable, as you say, but the net upshot was that Jesus' survivors and successors dunked. Somebody thought John was on to something.
Really? The only evangelist who pimps Jesus as unambiguously divine, the Fourth, omits the incident. If it bothered the others, then they could have dumped it, too. In fact, the other three follow Mark's lead. Jesus scores an endorsement from a big-name Jewish holy man, his only one before he died, talk about embarrassment for a Jewish Messiah, and a theophany - one-on-one with God Almighty. Not bad for a swim. I'd leave it in if I was Jesus' press agent.
Really? That isn't what Josephus says. Metanoia covered the sins as needed. The ritual washing was to cleanse the body afterwards so that it matched the purity of the now-refreshed spirit. Assuming that the point of Jesus' ministry was to "redeem flesh," one would be hard pressed to find a more approporiate expression of the idea within the range of Jewish ritual.
I don't have any problem with your defining "what counts as a historical Jesus?" for you without a baptism (especially since it isn't in all the Gospels and is at best suggested in Paul). I do dispute your interpretation of why historians, especially non-believers, might think there was something to the story. Only Christian apologists could assume that John dunked for the same reasons as they do, contrary to the only extra-canonical mention of John in his own century.
The real "embarrasment" for New Testament scholarship is how much of it is Christian apology. Best, then, not to draw attention unnecessarily to how easily that perspective can distort the interpretation of evidence.
All this ignores the point I raised regarding Chrestos and the related Chrestian:
As noted in Mitchell, James Barr (1880) Chrestos: a religious epithet; its import and influence and Pleket, H.W.; Stroud, R.S.. "Egypt. Funerary epithets in Egypt.(26-1702)." Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. Current editors: A. T. R.S. R.A. Chaniotis Corsten Stroud Tybout. Brill Online, 2013. "Chrestus" was also used as a title and some of these inscriptions predate the supposed time of Jesus.
According to one source the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum CIL VI:24944 which is dated to 1st century BCE has the inscription Iucundus Chrestianus. If the dating is correct then Chrestianus cannot be a misspelling for Christianus...unless you accept the Jesus 100 BCE theory.
Finally there is a funeral stone with the inscription "Chrestians for Christians" (Van Voorst, Robert E (2000). Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence Eerdmans Publishing ISBN 0-8028-4368-9 pages 33-35; Gibson, Elsa (1978) The Christians for Christians Inscriptions of Phrygia) which if they were the one and the same group would be totally nonsensical.
The evidence suggests there was a Chrestian group around that possibly predated the Jesus followers by a century.
You also have to remember that the Jews took meticulous care in translating their holy book from Hebrew into Greek and would know the difference between the Greek word for annotated (ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ) and the one for good or useful (ΧΡΗΣΤΟΣ). So if Jesus was the annotated one why did his followers not get it right until the mid point of the 5th century (c450 CE) and keep calling him the Good or Useful?
Furthermore if until 450 CE the Christian themselves were calling themselves Chrestian what does that mean regarding all the references to Christian that are supposedly before that date, hmm?
The point I was making is that the evidence is that the term Chrestian appears to predate Jesus and one sect of what would eventually become called Christianity co-oped the term. In fact in the light of Marcion of Sinope's Bible a Jesus Chrestos (Jesus the Good) makes far more sense when you are claim that god of the Jews and the God Jesus was from are two different beings. That is hard to even consider if you are using the Greek version of a Jewish title.
Tacitus seems to be repeating an urban myth as Pliny the Elder and Josephus who were in Rome in 64 CE don't mention a Christian or Chestian movement at all. If the TF was genuine in any way wouldn't Josephus have mentioned the further misfortune of Jesus followers under Nero since he was right there in the freaking city when it was supposedly going on?
Belz...
Fiend God
Is that the word of the week for you ?
pakeha
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Tacitus seems to be repeating an urban myth as Pliny the Elder and Josephus who were in Rome in 64 CE don't mention a Christian or Chestian movement at all. If the TF was genuine in any way wouldn't Josephus have mentioned the further misfortune of Jesus followers under Nero since he was right there in the freaking city when it was supposedly going on?
A good point about Josephus.
We actually know he was in Rome during the Great Fire
"When Gessius Florus sent some priests that Josephus knew in chains to Rome (64 CE), he followed to petition the emperor [Nero] to release them. The emperor's consort, Poppea, introduced the 26 year old Jewish aristocrat to the imperial court & supported his cause. This successful mission left Josephus favorably impressed by the grandeur & power of Rome & with a first-hand familiarity with imperial circles that few of his contemporary Jews could match.
By the time he returned to Jerusalem, however, the Jewish revolt had already begun (66 CE)."
http://virtualreligion.net/iho/josephus.html
Given that Josephus was in Rome at the time of the Great Fire to support some Jewish priests and even petition Nero to release them, it beggars belief he wouldn't have mentioned/exulted over the downfall and deaths of those heretics.
Your assertion about the crucifixion is really worthless because nowhere in Tacitus Annals it is asserted that the WELL KNOWN Christus was crucified.
HJ is a recent Hoax--No HJ has ever been found in the history of the Quest for HJ.
pakeha
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Hmm.
The Great Fire didn't seem to have affected Pliny the Elder as much as it did Tacitus.
"...In his N.H. XVII, 1. 5. Pliny mentions, in passing, that in his youth he had seen some remarkable trees on a Roman estate which were famous for their longevity, they lasted “down to the Emperor Nero’s conflagration.” That is the sole mention of the ‘great fire’ by one who lived through the period. Pliny was to die, in 79 CE, at the eruption of Vesuvius. This was a year before the serious fire in the reign of Titus which burned a much more important area of the city; in which many of the temples and other public buildings were destroyed. The Christians were not blamed for that fire in 78."
http://carrington-arts.com/cliff/Nero.htm
Imagine surviving Nero, retire to a quiet life in a lovely city, only to die in a volcanic explosion.
ETA
Wrong, and not for the first time.
Pliny the Elder " died on August 25, AD 79, while attempting the rescue by ship of a friend and his family from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that had just destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The prevailing wind would not allow his ship to leave the shore. His companions attributed his collapse and death to toxic fumes, but they were unaffected by the fumes, so he probably died of natural causes rather than volcanic action.[2]"
The man died a hero.
The Great Fire didn't seem to have affected Pliny the Elder as much as it did Tacitus.
"...In his N.H. XVII, 1. 5. Pliny mentions, in passing, that in his youth he had seen some remarkable trees on a Roman estate which were famous for their longevity, they lasted “down to the Emperor Nero’s conflagration.” That is the sole mention of the ‘great fire’ by one who lived through the period. Pliny was to die, in 79 CE, at the eruption of Vesuvius. This was a year before the serious fire in the reign of Titus which burned a much more important area of the city; in which many of the temples and other public buildings were destroyed. The Christians were not blamed for that fire in 78."
http://carrington-arts.com/cliff/Nero.htm
Imagine surviving Nero, retire to a quiet life in a lovely city, only to die in a volcanic explosion.
ETA
Wrong, and not for the first time.
Pliny the Elder " died on August 25, AD 79, while attempting the rescue by ship of a friend and his family from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that had just destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The prevailing wind would not allow his ship to leave the shore. His companions attributed his collapse and death to toxic fumes, but they were unaffected by the fumes, so he probably died of natural causes rather than volcanic action.[2]"
The man died a hero.
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eight bits
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pakeha
Not making any particular point, just appreciating a life well lived.
(If I was to make a point, then it might be that scholarly consensus once held that his nephew, Pliny the Younger, exaggerated the dramatic quality of the eruption, which he witnessed from his uncle's estate. Making Uncle more of a hero, don't you know. However, in modern times, dramatic eruptions featuring high-flung ash columns and pyroclastic flow were observed first hand by the living. Such events are now called Plinian eruptions, in honor of the nephew, who gave the first scientific field report of them, to record the circumstances in which his uncle died, truthfully.)
As a hero, leading a combined relief and research mission to the stricken area.
Not making any particular point, just appreciating a life well lived.
(If I was to make a point, then it might be that scholarly consensus once held that his nephew, Pliny the Younger, exaggerated the dramatic quality of the eruption, which he witnessed from his uncle's estate. Making Uncle more of a hero, don't you know. However, in modern times, dramatic eruptions featuring high-flung ash columns and pyroclastic flow were observed first hand by the living. Such events are now called Plinian eruptions, in honor of the nephew, who gave the first scientific field report of them, to record the circumstances in which his uncle died, truthfully.)
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Belz...
Fiend God
Recent, eh ? So now, what, you think the bibble is a 14th century forgery ?
pakeha
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Quite right, eight bits.
I rectified my post without having seen your correction.
As a hero did the man die, indeed.
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