Posted: Aug 27, 2017 1:44 am
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
RealityRules wrote: Do you realise Shaw, in that paper, argues the opposite of what you say there?
MS2 wrote:..You appear therefore to be claiming that Shaw confirms that the conventional view of historians is that the Tacitus passage provides no reliable information as to the Neronian persecutions...
Huh?? Shaw confirms the Tacitus passage provides the only information as to the Neronian persecutions.
Shaw says despite that, the Neronian persecutions are unlikely to have happened. I quote what he opens with
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."
I point out pertinent aspects of his argument -
"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...
"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 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...
"..This inventive narrative then produced a new Christian image of some power and authority: Nero as the first persecutor of the Christians.
Being " redolent of later fourth- and fifth-century fabrications" is also what Drews says of Annals 15.44.
Shaw' conclusion is
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.