Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman (read book .TXT) 📕

He says nothing more about the man. But a large number of scholars over the years have thought that the situation in Rome is relevant for understanding early Christian history. In this theory, it was Roman Jews who believed that Jesus was the messiah, or Christ (Chrestus), who had stirred up the passions of Jews who did not believe. This led to violent reactions that got out of hand: the riots mentioned by Suetonius. And so Claudius expelled the whole lot of them.

The reading of the situation may receive some support from the New Testament book of Acts, which also refers to the incident (18:2). One problem with this reconstruction of events is that if Suetonius did have some such situation in mind, he misspelled Jesus’s epithet, since Christ in Latin would be Christus, not Chrestus (although this kind of spelling mistake was common). Moreover, since Chrestus itself could be a name, it may well be that there simply was a Jew named Chrestus who caused a disturbance that led to riots in the Jewish community.

In any event, even if Suetonius is referring to Jesus by a misspelled epithet, he does not help us much in our quest for non-Christian references to Jesus. Jesus himself would have been dead for some twenty years when these riots in Rome took place, so at best Suetonius would be providing evidence, if he can count for evidence, that there were Christians in Rome during the reign of Claudius. But this could have been the case whether Jesus lived or not, since mythicists would argue that the “myth” of Christ had already been invented by then, as had the supposed life of the made-up figure of Jesus.

Whereas these first two sparse references are of limited use, a third by the Roman historian Tacitus seems more promising.

Tacitus

Tacitus wrote his famous Annals of Imperial Rome in 115 CE as a history of the empire from 14 to 68 CE. Probably the best-known single passage of this sixteen-volume work is the one in which he discusses the fire that consumed a good portion of Rome during the reign of the emperor Nero, in 64 CE. According to Tacitus, it was the emperor himself who had arranged for arsonists to set fire to the city because he wanted to implement his own architectural plans and could not very well do so while the older parts of the city were still standing. But the plan backfired, as many citizens—including those, no doubt, who had been burned out of house and home—suspected that the emperor himself was responsible. Nero needed to shift the blame onto someone else, and so, according to Tacitus, he claimed that the Christians had done it. The populace at large was willing to believe the charge, Tacitus tells us, because the Christians were widely maligned for their “hatred of the human race.”

And so Nero had the Christians rounded up and executed in very public, painful, and humiliating ways. Some of them, Tacitus indicates, were rolled in pitch and set aflame while still alive to light Nero’s gardens; others were wrapped in fresh animal skins and had wild dogs set on them, tearing them to shreds. It was not a pretty sight.

In the context of this gory account, Tacitus explains that “Nero falsely accused those whom…the populace called Christians. The author of this name, Christ, was put to death by the procurator, Pontius Pilate, while Tiberius was emperor; but the dangerous superstition, though suppressed for the moment, broke out again not only in Judea, the origin of this evil, but even in the city [of Rome].”

Once again, Jesus is not actually named here, but it is obvious in this instance that he is the one being referred to and that Tacitus knows some very basic information about him. He was called Christ, he was executed at the order of Pontius Pilate, and this was during the reign of Tiberius. Moreover, this happened in Judea, presumably, since that was where Pilate was the governor and since that was where Jesus’s followers originated. All of this confirms information otherwise available from Christian sources, as we will see.

Some mythicists argue that this reference in Tacitus was not actually written by him—they claim the same thing for Pliny and Suetonius, where the references are less important—but were inserted into his writings (interpolated) by Christians who copied them, producing the manuscripts of Tacitus we have today. (We have no originals, only later copies.)12 I don’t know of any trained classicists or scholars of ancient Rome who think this, and it seems highly unlikely. The mythicists certainly have a reason for arguing this: they do not want to think there are any references to Jesus in our early sources outside the New Testament, and so when they find any such reference, they claim the reference was not original but was inserted by Christians. But surely the best way to deal with evidence is not simply to dismiss it when it happens to be inconvenient. Tacitus evidently did know some things about Jesus.

At the same time, the information is not particularly helpful in establishing that there really lived a man named Jesus. How would Tacitus know what he knew? It is pretty obvious that he had heard of Jesus, but he was writing some eighty-five years after Jesus would have died, and by that time Christians were certainly telling stories of Jesus (the Gospels had been written already, for example), whether the mythicists are wrong or right. It should be clear in any event that Tacitus is basing his comment about Jesus on hearsay rather than, say, detailed historical research. Had he done serious research, one might have expected him to say more, if even just a bit. But even more to the point, brief though his comment is, Tacitus is precisely wrong in one thing he says. He calls Pilate the “procurator” of Judea. We now know from the inscription discovered in