Tacitus on Christ

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Book 15 of the Annals (written c. 116) by the Roman historian Tacitus mentions Christus as a person convicted by Pontius Pilate during Tiberius' reign:

auctor nominis eius Christus Tiberio imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio adfectus erat^[1]

The passage is part of an account of the Great Fire of Rome (64), which emperor Nero blamed on a religious group called Chrestians or Christians (see below), and offers an etymology for the group's name. This has become one of the best known and most discussed passages of Tacitus' works.^[2]

Annales 15.44, in the second Medicean manuscript

[edit] Context

Tacitus describes the support for the homeless provided by Nero and the rebuilding of the city, then refers to religious rituals carried out based on a consultation of the Sibylline Books.^[3] However, none of this did away with the suspicion that the fire had been started on Nero's orders:

Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians [or Chrestians; see below] by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.^[4]

Tacitus then returns to the topic of Nero's reputation and the effect on it of these events:

Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man's cruelty, that they were being destroyed.^[4]

[edit] Authenticity and reliability

The passage contains a very early non-Christian reference to the origin of Christianity, the Crucifixion described in the Bible's New Testament gospels, and the presence and persecution of Christians in first-century Rome. While a majority of scholars consider the passage authentic, some dispute it.^[5] Some supporting authenticity argue it is too critical of Christians to have been added by later Christian scribes.^{[citation needed]}

Some who argue against authenticity assert:^[6][7]

• No early Christian writers refer to Tacitus even when discussing the subject of Nero and Christian persecution. Tertullian, Lactantius, Sulpicius Severus, Eusebius and Augustine of Hippo make no reference to Tacitus when discussing Christian persecution by Nero, however the Tacitus text itself demonstrates that it may be a good resource for Christians to refer to since the text derides Christians and Christianity thus proving it to be free of later tampering by Christians.^{[8][citation needed]}

• Pontius Pilate's rank was prefect when he was in Judea.^[9] The Tacitus passage mistakenly calls Pilate a procurator, an error also made in translations of a passage by Josephus.^[10] (However, Josephus wrote in Greek and never used the Latin term.) It should be noted that after Herod Agrippa's death in AD 44, when Judea reverted to direct Roman rule, Claudius gave procurators control over Judea.^[11][12] This was made possible when he augmented the role of procurators so that they had magisterial power.^[13][14] Tacitus, who rose through the magisterial ranks^[15][16] to become consul and then proconsul had a precise knowledge of significance of the terms involved and knew when Judea began to be administered by procurators. It is therefore problematical that he would use "procurator" instead of "prefect" to describe the governor of Judea prior to the changes that he tells us Claudius brought in.
• The passage implies that the Christians may have been guilty of setting fire to Rome, another argument against veracity, for Tacitus was attempting to lay the blame of the fire on Nero by aspersion.^[17]
• Another ancient writer, Suetonius, mentions Christians being harmed during this period by Nero, but there is no connection made with the fire^[18].^[19]

[edit] Christians or Chrestians?

Detail of the Medicean manuscript showing the word 'Christianos'. The large gap between the 'i' and 's' has been highlighted; under ultraviolet light an 'e' is visible in the gap, replacing the 'i'

The surviving copies of Tacitus' works derive from two principle manuscripts, known as the Medicean manuscripts, which are held in the Laurentian Library, and written in Latin. It is the second Medicean manuscript which is the oldest surviving copy of the passage describing Christians. In this manuscript, the first 'i' of the Christianos is quite distinct in appearance from the second, looking somewhat smudged, and lacking the long tail of the second 'i'; additionally, there is a large gap between the first 'i' and the subsequent long s. Georg Andresen was one of the first to comment on the appearance of the first 'i' and subsequent gap, suggesting in 1902 that the text had been altered, and an 'e' had originally been in the text, rather than this 'i'^[20].

In 1950, at Harald Fuchs request, Dr. Teresa Lodi, the director of the Laurentian Library, examined the features of this item of the manuscript; she concluded that there are still signs of an 'e' being erased, by removal of the upper and lower horizontal portions, and distortion of the remainder into an 'i'.^[21] In 2008, Dr. Ida Giovanna Rao, the new head of the Laurentian Library's manuscript office, repeated Lodi's study, and concluded that it is likely that the 'i' is a correction of some earlier character (like an e), the change being made an extremely subtle one. Later the same year, it was discovered that under ultraviolet light, an 'e' is clearly visible in the space, meaning that the passage must originally have referred to chrestianos, a Latin word which could be interpreted as the good, after the Greek word χρηστός (chrestos), meaning 'good, useful'. "I believe that in our passage of Tacitus the original reading Chrestianos is the true one" says Professor Robert Renehan, stating that it was "natural for a Roman to interpret the words [Christus and Christianus] as the similarly-sounding χρηστός".^[22] The word Christian/s is in Codex Sinaiticus (in which Christ is abbreviated - see nomina sacra) spelled Chrestian/s in the three places the word is used. Also in Minuscule 81 this spelling is used in Acts of the Apostles 11:26.^[23]

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Syme, Ronald (1958). Tacitus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-814327-3. 

[edit] External links

• Early Christian Writings: Cornelius Tacitus

[edit] See also

• Historicity of Jesus
• Jesus and history pages