nPeace
Veteran Member
Ha Ha Ha. Holding my belly and laughing out loud.
Now the OP has an makeover... legitimate. Never a dull moment on RF.
You can talk from now till next year B.Tacitus alone has so many problems that no reputable historian outside the Christian camp takes the Tacitus passage seriously. Among the problems (listen carefully, you're going to learn something now):
1. the Tacitus passage, outside of suspicions it is an interpolation, is pure hearsay gotten about 40th-hand from rumors Tacitus heard about Christians likely from other Romans talking about the Christians.
Richard Carrier, PhD in Biblical history says this about this Tacitus passage:
"Some scholars have argued that Tacitus’ reference to Christ in connection with the burning of Rome under Nero is a 4th century (or later) interpolation. It is here argued that their arguments can be met with no strong rebuttal, and therefore the key sentence in Tacitus referring to Christ should be considered suspect."
2 Tacitus does not give any references to how he came about the information therefore the passage has no foundation for veracity. It's worthless, only good as a historical curiosity.
3. Tacitus does NOT mention the name, Jesus. All he says is "....called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin...." Israel was lousy with "Christs" in Jesus' time. Tacitus didn't know who was referring to or he would have named the Christ by his proper name, Jesus.
4. Tacitus is writing a full century after the alleged events of Jesus. How much reliable info do you think he's going to get with that large a gap in time and ALL witnesses dead having left no writings. Note: the gospels are NOT eyewitness accounts according to nearly all historians.
5. How do we know Tacitus isn't referring to Dositheos the Samaritan
6. There is no reliable text of the Annals directly from Roman records. The first copy doesn't appear until roughly 800 years after it was allegedly written.
- Dositheos the Samaritan (mid 1st century), Origen wrote that Dositheos wished to persuade the Samaritans that he was the Jewish Messiah who was prophesied by Moses, and classes him with John the Baptist, Theodas, and Judas of Galilee as people whom the Jews mistakenly held to be the Christ (Hom. xxv in Lucam; Contra Celsum, I, lvii).[16][17]
"There is some evidence that it was copied only once in about ten centuries, and that this copy was made from an original in rustic capitals of the 5th century or earlier, but other scholars believe that it was copied via at least one intermediate copy written in a minuscule hand."
The Text of Tacitus' Annals and Histories Survived in Only Two Manuscripts : History of Information
The Text of Tacitus' Annals and Histories Survived in Only Two Manuscriptswww.historyofinformation.com
I know none of this is going to matter to you because you simply don't care about integrity of sources as long as it supports your position that Jesus was real. But there is a reason why secular scholars admit that there is little to no evidence for Jesus' existence. It's because anything that is extant is of the poor to worthless quality of the Tacitus, Josephus, Pliny and Suetonius passages for reliable evidence. None of them mention the name, "Jesus" and scholars outside Christianity all agree the phrase "who was called Christ" in the Josephus passage is an interpolation
"Analysis of the evidence from the works of Origen, Eusebius, and Hegesippus concludes that the reference to “Christ” in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.200 is probably an accidental interpolation or scribal emendation and that the passage was never originally about Christ or Christians. It referred NOT to James the brother of Jesus Christ, but probably to James the brother of the Jewish high priest Jesus ben Damneus."
Jesus in Josephus • Richard Carrier Blogs
Now that the world has ended, my peer reviewed article on Josephus just came out: “Origen, Eusebius, and the Accidental Interpolation in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.200” in the Journal of Early Christian Studies (vol. 20, no. 4, Winter 2012), pp. 489-514. The official description is...www.richardcarrier.info
Christians sadly scrape the bottom of the barrel to try to find ANYTHING they can lay their hands on if it just sniffs of something they can try to claim proves the divine Jesus was real. Pathetic, nPeace.
The thing is, life does not revolve around what you will or will not accept.
Evidence is not valid or invalid based on the breath from your mouth.
Tacitus on Jesus
Authenticity
Most scholars hold the passage to be authentic, i.e., they hold that Tacitus really wrote it; however, this has also sometimes been questioned.Suggestions that they may have been a complete forgery have been generally rejected by scholars...
Given that Tacitus is really the author of the Annals, the next question is whether this particular passage is part of the original work, or whether it was inserted later in the process of copying the text. Here too, most scholars hold the passage to be authentic.
Scholars such as Bruce Chilton, Craig Evans, Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd agree with John Meier's statement that "Despite some feeble attempts to show that this text is a Christian interpolation in Tacitus, the passage is obviously genuine"
Sorry.
Now you are back to where I began.
I'm not doing that circle though, so... peace.
I will say this though. Continue to pick which you like, but then, asking questions about it, or asking people to provide what's there, when you know you will reject it, and pick whatever goes against it, isn't very useful... now is it.
Then behind that, claiming that you genuinely want to see something that Christians can provide in support of their beliefs, isn't consistent with your position, is it.
