RealityRules wrote:Shaw says "the [
Annals 15.44] passage is probably genuine Tacitus". Yet it may not be. Arthur Drews thought it likely to have been interpolated in conjunction with the chronicle of Sulpicius Severus (4th C), and Jay Raskins has suggested that Tiberius is simply an interpolated substitution for an original reference to Nero (who is mentioned before and after that passage, as that book, Book 15, is about the time of Nero), and Pontius Pilate is simply an interpolated substitution for an original reference to Porcius Festus, as supported by Jospehus's
Antiquities 20.8.10.
https://jayraskin.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/294/
MS2 wrote:And those arguments have been rejected by most historians
MS2 wrote:Oh good grief! Shaw himself confirms that the conventional view of historians is that the Tacitus passage provides reliable information as to the Neronian persecution
When you said "..those arguments have been rejected by most historians" the implication was you were referring to the propositions of
Arthur Drews and Jay Raskins. It would be useful if you could say if you know of any refutation of them.
nb: Raskins' proposition puts the whole passage in the time of Nero:
more so___________________________________
MS2 wrote:Oh good grief! Shaw himself confirms that the conventional view of historians is that the Tacitus passage provides reliable information as to the Neronian persecution
Do you realise Shaw, in that paper, argues the opposite of what you say there?
Shaw B (2015)
The Myth of the Neronian Persecution The Journal of Roman Studies Vol 105, pp. 73-100.
I have Shaw's paper. He says in it, italics and underlining mine -
... I am 'mostly convinced' that all of the passage on the fire is genuine Tacitus, and that no easy answer to the problem is available by way of that route. Even if only to provide the strongest possible case for a Neronian persecution of the Christians in the 60s, however, and as a tactic of criticism I shall provisionally accept that the words are indeed those of the historian. In this light, it is important to understand that Tacitus is the only source for the involvement of Christians with the fire and their persecution in its aftermath.
Shaw says in the introduction -
"The simple argument of this essay, deliberately framed as a provocative hypothesis, is that this event never happened and that there are compelling reasons to doubt that it should have any place either in the history of Christian martyrdom or in the history of the early Church."
He then says
"Before turning to the Neronian persecution of the summer of 64 C.E. as a critical episode in the history of early Christianity, let us begin by dismissing any connections of the executions of the apostles Peter and Paul with the supposed executions of other Christians in the aftermath of the great conflagration that levelled many districts of the city of Rome in July of 64. A specific link between the demise of Peter and specific anti-Christian acts ordered by Nero is perhaps the easiest to dismiss."
Soon after -
" They wanted Peter, like Paul, to be a victim of a Neronian persecution and they wanted his death, also like that of Paul, to be connected with the Great Fire. They wished the two deaths be seen as typological replays of the executions of John the Baptist (by beheading) and of Jesus of Nazareth (by crucifixion). The assertion that Peter was crucified is found as early as the African exegete Tertullian who was writing around 200 C.E., but he says nothing about when the execution took place or in what fashion. Much later, Eusebius is the first to state that Peter, at the end of his apostolic travels, came to Rome where he was ‘crucified head downwards as he himself had requested to suffer’. Oddly enough, Eusebius does not say when this happened. In this same passage, however, he mentions the martyrdom of Paul under Nero, claiming Origen’s (lost) commentary on Genesis as his source. But even he does not connect Peter with the fire.
The story that Peter died by being crucified head downwards at his own request is also found in the apocryphal Martyrdom of Peter that is part of the larger Acts of Peter. It is rather difficult to date this late antique confection. The collection of which it is a part is like a novelette featuring Peter’s various stand-offs with Simon the Magician. The driving themes of the virginity of women, the refusal of wives to have sexual relations with their husbands, and the raft of invented and fictitious characters and exaggerated scenes of confrontation are redolent of later fourth- and fifth-century fabrications like the
Acts of Paul and Thekla... The later dramatic accounts of Peter’s death were manifestly shaped so that his execution would be an
ex post facto fulfilment of the prophecy. There are truly remote possibilities that Peter could have died in the 60s and perhaps even at Rome, but there is no sound evidence to sustain the claim that he was crucified or crucified upside down. Nothing about Peter’s death in these later fictions has any connection with a general attack on Christians in the 60s much less with the great fire of 64, for which claims there are no supporting data at all...
"The case of Paul is equally irrelevant...
THE GREAT CONFLAGRATION
What the later Pauline narratives show is that at some point in time there had emerged a triangulation between the apostles Peter and Paul, the emperor Nero, and the construal of the individual events in which they were involved as part of a general persecution of Christians (under this name). This inventive narrative then produced a new Christian image of some power and authority: Nero as the first persecutor of the Christians. As we shall see, all these points were then connected with the catastrophe that struck the city of Rome in midsummer of 64 C.E. when a great fire raged for nine days between 19 and 27 July, devastating large parts of the imperial metropolis...
There is every good reason for historians to have grave doubts about the story of an attack on Christians by Nero that emerged decades after the fire itself. They should be sceptical to the point of dismissing the commonly accepted idea of Nero as a persecutor, indeed the first great persecutor of Christians, specifically in connection with the conflagration that raged through Rome in July of 64... Arguments have been ventilated, from time to time, that the passage [
Annals 15.44] , in whole or in part, was a later interpolation into the text of the
Annales. The possibility has been frequently suspected and continues to hail forth a fair number of detailed studies...
But Shaw does not discuss them all & hardly discusses any.
And then adds the qualification underlined in the next quoted passage -
... I am 'mostly convinced' that all of the passage on the fire is genuine Tacitus, and that no easy answer to the problem is available by way of that route. Even if only to provide the strongest possible case for a Neronian persecution of the Christians in the 60s, however, and as a tactic of criticism I shall provisionally accept that the words are indeed those of the historian. In this light, it is important to understand that Tacitus is the only source for the involvement of Christians with the fire and their persecution in its aftermath.
Shaw also noted -
Chrestianos is the correct reading of M2 reported by the Teubner text rather than the frequently ‘corrected’ reading of Christianos as found, e.g., in the Oxford Classical Text. 8. I believe that the Christus of M2 has similarly been corrected (as one hand had already tried to correct the Chrestiani to Christiani) from Chrestus. Such alterations were rife, as when, from Orosius in the fifth century to William of Malmesbury in the twelfth, the reading of Chrestus in Suet., Claud. 25.4 was ‘corrected’ to Christus. And it makes the most logical sense for Tacitus to say that Chrestianus would come from Chrestus. Nevertheless, I have maintained the reading of Christus found in M2.
and
The elder Pliny’s only explicit statement regarding the fire of 64 holds Nero to blame for it and, in consequence, for the destruction of an important rare species of tree.43 But nowhere in the more than 20,000 facts collected from 2,000 books and 100 different authors in his Natural History does Pliny so much as refer to any people called Christians or Chrestiani, much less does he make any connection of them with the fire that destroyed large parts of the imperial metropolis.44 In short, there is no known sign in any of the lost sources for histories that covered the reign of Nero to indicate where Tacitus would have found the facts about Christians that are retailed in our passage, or anything to controvert the observed fact that the first mentions of the Christians by this name in Latin sources are those made by the younger Pliny and Tacitus.
Shaw does refer to Sulpicius Severus, but does not seem to be aware of
Arthur Drews' views on the relationship of these two passages -
Later sources are useless for deciding the matter. They might seem compelling but, like Sulpicius Severus, they are wholly dependent on Tacitus.
48… quin et novae mortes excogitatae, ut ferarum tergis contecti, laniatu canum interirent, multi crucibus adfixi aut flammas usti, plerique in id reservati, ut, cum defecisset dies, in usum nocturni luminis urerentur.
The precise diction, if nothing else, shows that Sulpicius was ultimately borrowing from, indeed almost copying Tacitus.
A discussion about Suetonius ensues.
Then
when Tacitus says that there arose a distaste towards Nero for his executions because they were perceived to be a concession to the emperor’s bestiality and not a contribution to the utilitas publica of the state, he is surely echoing a dominant ideology not of the 60s but of his own age.
Shaw concludes
PATTERNS OF PERSECUTION
The conclusions are simple. There are no sound probative reasons to accept the mirage, however appealing it might be, that Christians were attacked by the Roman state as a special group and were martyred under Nero, and no good evidence, contemporary or even later, that links them with the Great Fire in 64 C.E. There is even less good evidence to sustain the Christian fiction of Nero as ‘the first persecutor’. There is no evidence — I mean none at all — to indicate that the emperor would have been capable of forming such a conception or that he would ever have executed such an imperial policy. It is completely anachronistic. The whole incident and its surrounding ‘historical’ addenda should be excised from histories of the early Church, and the sooner the better. The consequences are significant, not the least for the long-term history of Christianity and Christian martyrdom. There was no ‘first’ in 64 C.E. There never was any Institutum Neronianum or any general covering law or senatus consultum or any such official anti-Christian measure concocted in connection with (or in the aftermath of) the Great Fire. But such an idea, as we know, had become entrenched, at least among Christians in the West, as early as Tertullian who, in the late 190s, specified this ‘established practice’ of Nero’s as the only one that survived the general condemnation of all of his other acts.
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