Tacitus

Newsflash Tacticus and Pilate are dead. Jesus Lives!

Yep- pretty cool when you read the bible, that overall it is real history backed up by real historical evidence- real people and places that tells us the story of God and his choosen people. Very early writings of the NT- roughly 20 years after death of Jesus, from multiple sources. Provides huge quality stamp.

Note: bible is library of books, authors use different styles, not all books are historical.

See Catholic Answers article- provides the quotes from Pliny the Younger, Tacitus and Josephus. All these quotes from 1st century- they back up what is written in NT.

Catholic Answers- Looking for Historical Jesus

Yup - So much for the atheist claim that Jesus is a "mythological figure." Tacitus was no friend of the Christians, and his writings verify historically that Jesus did in fact exist...

The good news about atheist comments is they make us learn our faith. If we all agreed we would not study and research our faith. So the unintended consequences of atheist is they strenghten us.

The more we study the more we find the solid ground in which Jesus established his church. Like it was built on rock!

I'm personally not a mythicist, but I do think Christians are a little overconfident about the Tacitus reference. Even assuming it was legitimately written by Tacitus, and there is reason to have doubts, its pretty clear that Tacitus is just repeating what he had heard the Christians themselves believed. For example, he doesn't even get Jesus' name right, instead calling him "Chrestus".

so he wasn't killed by the jews?

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its pretty clear that Tacitus is just repeating what he had heard the Christians themselves believed. For example, he doesn't even get Jesus' name right, instead calling him "Chrestus".

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I think it's a stretch to say "it's pretty clear...". It would make sense that he'd refer to Jesus as "Christus" since His followers were called "Christians". The assumption being what we are called is derived from His name. I would have also assumed that if his comments were based on what he'd heard that Christians believed, then there would also be mention of our belief in His resurrection and miracles that He performed.

To me, it reads like he's recounting something that he believed occurred to a real person. But, this is probably general enough that how you read Tacitus' comments will depend on what you think of Christ as the Messiah.

I'm not sure he would have cared about the Christian's claims of Jesus's miracles, to be honest. If you look at the historical context there were at that time quite a few of cults and cult leaders around claiming to be able to perform miracles and do other unbelievable things. So what, from Tacitus's point of view, would set them apart?

And I don't think that he would have reason to doubt reports of a cult leader being crucified. It's a perfectly believable story.

Jesus' name is not "Christ". Christ is a title, it is the Greek translation of messiah - anointed one - from the Greek verb chrio, to anoint with oil. It is spelled in Greek with a X, Chi, and we would spell out the Greek today Christos. Christos was used for Messiah in the Septuagint routinely.

Further, both Chrestian and Christian were used for Christians in antiquity. We have many inscriptions of both, sometimes inscriptions with both on one. This may be a bit of a play on words, or an appropriation by native Greek speakers of an existing word - Chrestos was a title meaning "good, useful, excellent, kind" and apparently was a common name for slaves.

Compare Proverbs 2:21, which says the upright will inherit the land - "Chrestoi" in the Septuagint. People calling themselves "Chrestians" would be "the righteous ones". But the -ian is Latin. So this whole thing is a complete muddled etymology mess from the get-go.

Tacitus is writing in Latin, and is transliterating this Greek word into Latin. A person who doesn't know or care about who the leader of the Chrestians is (and who may have not known Greek - I don't know if Tacitus did or didn't) could naturally assume their leader was Chrestus vs Christus. Or heard people saying Christian vs Chrestian and not known (or cared) about the distinction.

Apparently in some manuscripts he writes Chrestians as the followers of Christus. So this letter in and of itself is not meaningful.

My point, which you alluded to, was that this passage does nothing to prove Tacitus had researched Christianity or Jesus in any extent. So yes it is extra-biblical evidence that Christians believed Jesus was crucified under Pilate by the time of Tacitus but it doesn't tell us much more than that.

And I'd have to do some more research on this but I believe the first manuscripts that show this passage are from the 1100's and it isn't mentioned by early Christian authors who do reference Tacitus such as Origen.

No one said Tacitus researched Jesus or Christianity.

You know Tacitus lived in the first century, right? His Annals were written in 116 AD. The events in question happened in AD 60.

What this is evidence of is that in 116 AD the preeminent Roman historian noted that in 60 AD there were Christians in Rome of a decent numbers who believed that Pilate had crucified Jesus in 33 AD. Tacitus would have been 4 years old in AD 60.

This would be like us making up a person who had been executed under a governor in 1991. This is the year Nevermind came out. It's about as close as a primary source as you can get in antiquity.

I'm not sure what you think my argument is. I'm not a mythicist, which is something I said in my very first post in this thread. I have some doubts the section is authentic, but it may very well be. Even if it is real though it doesn't actually confirm much of anything. Just about everyone agrees that at least the synoptic gospels were written before the Annals and that Christians of that time period believed what Tacitus reported. Where did Tacitus get his information? I suspect he got it from Christians. Now that's not a problem, but it also isn't independent verification if someone is just repeating what the Christians believed.

I have no idea what your point is at all. You seem to be just informing everyone of the tautology "a historical reference is a historical reference" with the addition "Tacitus misspelled Jesus name".

Thanks for that, I suppose?

"Doesn't confirm much of anything"? It confirms a lot of things.

- That there was a sizeable Christian population in Rome in AD 60.
- That by AD 60 the Roman Christian community was different the Jews -- so much so that Pagans were aware of the difference
- That Christ's crucifixion by Pontius Pilate (part of the symbol of faith) was widely held, indicating it is part of the early Apostolic message
- That more than likely Christ was, in fact, crucified by Pontius Pilate.

You think Tacitus interviewed Christians for his records here? Maybe he strolled down to the catacombs to find them meeting in secret to ask.

My post was in response to the thread title: "Roman historian Tacitus confirms Christ was killed by Pilate". My point of view is that conclusion is incorrect as Tacitus can not be considered an independent source for verification if his information was drawn from Christians. What I mean by that is consider if I was a witness to a crime. If I later told someone else about what I had seen you don't suddenly have two witnesses whose stories can be used to validate the other. If you were to argue that Tacitus had done his own research and confirmed the story, which you haven't but I have previously seen argued, you would need to explain why he called the founder of Christianity "Chrestus" instead of his actual name.

Now yes, there is definitely other information that can be gleaned from the passage. But that is separate from the point of the OP.

This is a dumb argument. For starters, he calls the Christians "Chrestians" after their leader, "Christus".

For second, you have no idea what his source for his information was. He was also one the Quindecimviri sacris faciundis who were responsible for overseeing foreign religions in Rome, so this may well be primary material of his own. We don't know.

For third, you're holding this to a modern standard of historicity. The ancients did not have this practice of sourcing.

And finally, Tacitus does not say they say. He reports it as fact. If you call this fact into question, anything Tacitus writes in any of his histories that he either does not source or was not an eye witness to becomes "hearsay." This is a ridiculous anachronistic standard.

It is a dumb argument.

I didn't claim to know what his source was, my point was it can't be considered independent confirmation like the OP alleged unless his source wasn't Christian beliefs. Yes, that probably wouldn't have mattered to people at that time. But yes, that is still relevant to us. I'm not calling Tacitus a bad historian for not using modern standards, if that's what you think I am doing. Tacitus was pretty good historian for his time, but there are still things in his writings that historians are fairly confident are wrong as well.

No historical narrative should be taken at face value and I doubt you'll find any credible historian who says they should be. The authors all have their own biases and were limited by what information was available to them. That doesn't mean there is nothing we can learn from them.