Tacitus, Did He Use Archives or Was His Works Altered?

TACITUS AND NERO

Christians lie that Tacitus spoke of Jesus and so Jesus existed. That is just their scraping at the bottom of the barrel in a desperate question for corroboration that Jesus lived.

TACITUS
The Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus who died in 117 AD condemned Christianity. In 115 AD he wrote his Annals and declared that Christ – he doesn’t call him Jesus - had been executed under Pontius Pilate, lived in Judaea and created a new system of pernicious superstition. Christians say he plucked this from the Roman legal records and sceptics counter that he was only taking for granted what Christians were saying which would mean he could not be used as proof for the existence of Jesus. Some historians even today take Christian yarns for granted.

Tacitus said, according to some translations of his work, that Christ had the extreme penalty or was executed. There is no reason to believe though some do that extreme penalty means crucifixion. Tacitus did not say that Christ was crucified. He wrote scathingly about the Christians trying to turn his readers against them and if Jesus had been crucified he would have said so for crucifixion was a disgrace and marked the victim as a criminal. It would have repulsed those who had heard of Jesus. The Tacitus Christ is not Jesus Christ.

Tacitus said that the death of Christ was a temporary setback for the Christians for Christianity exploded in Judaea and in Rome as if the Christians existed when Christ died. Everybody had turned against Jesus and there is no evidence that any of the handful who stood by Jesus believed in him at that time. They probably did not and proved it when they did not attend the execution. So it was a case of destruction of Christianity rather than a setback. He said that the superstition was “checked for a moment” when Jesus perished and then exploded again – but killing the ringleader and not the supporters is a strange kind of checking and the gospels say the Romans and Jews never went after the apostles even though it was feared that the people might come out in support of Jesus perhaps as a result of the apostles raising the alarm. Tacitus has to be saying that the whole group that followed Jesus was eliminated as well which makes the apostles and the New Testament authors to be serious liars and impostors. 

Tacitus says the Christian faith was a shameful and evil and dangerous religion during the spread afterwards. If he read that in the records he allegedly had then one wonders how Christians can insist upon the importance and reliability of these records. Why is he is trusted with Jesus who lived decades before and not trusted with his negative history of the Christian Church as a sect full of poison and evil though this history is more recent and the sect was intermingled with his society? Prejudice and wishful thinking are the answers! 

When Tacitus believed the slander – if that is what it was! - about the Christians perhaps he was depending on hearsay for all the information he gave on Christ and Christianity (which Turton admits to believing in his The Truth of Christianity, page 379) or perhaps he never believed that a Jesus existed but just wanted to say he was executed for that was considered to be a one sentence refutation of Christianity in those days as even Paul’s First Corinthians attests. People couldn’t believe that an executed man could be the Son of God. 

Obviously, if Christianity was so bad its supporters would have been killed as soon as they opened their mouths which contradicts the book of Acts which has them preaching with impunity for long enough. Tacitus is hinting that it was a secretive religion for only one that keeps its head low could be slandered like that. This makes sense if the Jews and Romans went to such trouble to get rid of Jesus for they would not have let a new cult get off the ground. Nobody trusts secret cults and their stories that much. The secrecy would suggest that it was not the resurrection that was responsible for the conversion explosion – if there was an explosion at that time which nobody apart from cranks believes now. The secrecy was useful if the Church sought to fabricate evidence for a Jesus of history.

Tacitus says that the superstition rose in Judaea. It did not. Mark says that Jesus lived in Galilee and launched his cult there in a huge way and went to Judea to preach the good news apparently after John had been jailed. Most of Jesus’ activities took place in Galilee (Galilee, Biblical Dictionary and Concordance, New American Bible). Why would Tacitus try to be accurate in relation to Christianity for it was the dirt, imagined and real, his audience wanted not the facts?

Tacitius never mentions Jesus but just Christ. Tacitus refers to Jesus as Christ thinking that Christ was Jesus’ name but it was only his job description (page 51, Jesus the Evidence). Lots of people were called Christ and were executed under Pilate so could there have been a mistake? Tacitus is depending on hearsay and so he cannot be accepted as evidence for Jesus. When he thinks the Christians are depraved and evil it shows that his source for the religion and Christ was or was probably gossip. It was all he had to go by. It was all anybody could go by in those days in relation to Jesus and his sect. If Tacitus had known about Jesus he would have called him the so-called Christ instead of giving him a royal title that implied that Rome had no business running Jesus’ country when he was crucified.

The gospels say poor Pilate was blackmailed by the Jews to kill Jesus. And why did Tacitus not exonerate Pilate being the whitewasher he was for Rome if Pilate was really forced by the Jews? 

And Tacitus calls Christ the founder of the name Christian. Jesus was not. The name started off decades later as a nickname. You don’t say that Jesus was the founder of the name Mormon even though Mormonism is supposed to be true Christianity unless he was there in 1829 when the Mormon Church was established. 

Jesus could not have been the only Christ crucified or at least executed under the maniacal Pilate so Tacitus who is writing for those who don’t know anything about this Christ would have named him if he meant Jesus or if there had been any decent reason to believe in the existence of Jesus. It could well be that Tacitus thought that Christ was somebody other than Jesus and the evidence supports that notion. Somebody who perhaps used the Roman name Chrestus and not Jesus. Perhaps it was somebody who had no name but Christ. This would not be Jesus who took the title Christ late in his ministry according to the gospels.

If you read Tacitus one thing is very strange. He says Nero cruelly persecuted a class of men called Christians and that Christus the founder of their name underwent the extreme penalty under Pilate and the pernicious superstition was stopped but broke out again in Judea and in the capital probably meaning Jerusalem. He then says the Christians were loathed for their hatred of the human race. He never says it is a religious sect but a superstition started by Christ. 

The question is, what superstition does Tacitus have in mind? Some say he meant the resurrection of Jesus. But Tacitus being a pagan would have believed Jesus could have risen from the dead. He could have thought that Jesus was just a wayward god like many of the other wayward gods of Rome. When he says the death of Jesus stopped the superstition for a while only for it to break out again he means the whole corpus of Christian teaching. Tacitus was suggesting that the Christian teaching was religious and full of vice and hatred and in that sense it was superstitious nonsense. Since he condemns the Christians for vices and hatred that is probably the superstition. 

The gospels themselves show us that Christianity is vice and encourage the idea that the more you sin the more you will love God when he forgives you. The claim that true Christians hate the human race is accurate for the Bible sees nothing but sin in the world and you can’t hate the sin and love the sinner for if you hate the sin that is personal and involves the sinner being hated. 

Jesus came to pretend to hate sin but his real purpose was to reward it by paying the price for it in our place so that we could come to him with weak and nearly useless repentance and still get away with it. But the intensity and ferocity of his condemnation of Christian immorality suggests that he had a dangerous and violent sect in mind. This would suggest that the sect was not that of Jesus Christ which wasn’t that bad. It suggests that he had the wrong messianic sect in mind. In other words, maybe there was a sect of violent zealots following some Christ who died under Pilate and by mistake he thought they were the Christian sect.

Tacitus is no help at all in verifying the historical Jesus. All he does is prove that this man’s existence is doubtful.

TACITUS – DID HE USE ARCHIVES OR WAS HIS WORK ALTERED?

Christians say that since Tacitus was senator that he must have had access to the best records and been using them to back up what he said about Christ. They were not very good records when he did not use more of them and to get Christians despised by accusing Jesus of being a rascal. This suggests that the records were either lost or never existed. What would records about Jesus be doing in Rome? They were probably destroyed in Palestine if they existed at all. But we have reason to believe that Tacitus depended on gossip for his data on Christ. We have no reason at all to think he had records.

The Christian hope that the Roman historians like Tacitus had studied the records which the Romans scrupulously kept is a false one. There must have been no Jesus in the records when the Church kept none. And when Christ was the founder of a sect that the Romans hated they would have had records for he was important but only if he had existed.

Christians argue that Tacitus complained of conflicts in his sources for other things and that he condemned absurd statements in them and when he reported a rumour he just said things like, “It is said”. So they think then he would have written “it is said” if he had been recording a rumour about Christ’s death. But why would he? It is said can mean a rumour yes but it can also means something the historical sources say. With history it is just a matter of what is said in records and by people who remember. All history books have a pile of rumour in them too. That’s life. Tacitus could not possibly have said its is said before reporting everything he thought was just a story that could be false.

The Christian story was more than a rumour by that stage and one can understand a historian taking it for granted that a Christ was crucified by Pilate if some books say so no matter how silly the books are for he would take that as a kernel of truth even if he never saw the books but only got good testimony about them. 

It is a fact that Tacitus did make records of events that never happened. He only occasionally referred to something as hearsay when he knew for sure that it was. Like all historians Tacitus would have intended to update his work when new information came to light. If he erred on Jesus perhaps he never got the chance. Tacitus made up a story to smear Livia and Tiberius (Josh McDowell’s Evidence for Jesus: Is it reliable?). And if Tacitus had been wrong about Christ it did not matter for he was only writing about Nero’s treatment of the Christians and their origin in Christ. That was the main point and the others including the existence and crucifixion of Jesus were merely incidental. That was why he might never have checked them out. It was too hard in those days to check out everything so it is most probable that Tacitus was just reported what he heard or thought he heard about Jesus and was not consulting any records. He hated Christians and would have written a bit more had he been using records. 

The standards of the time made allowances for a certain amount of assumption being incorporated into historical discussions and records. They had to. Tacitus might tell us when he thought something was a rumour but that was only when he knew for sure and it was obviously a false report. He would have taken rumours as true when they were good ones. Since he did make up things to incriminate people he might have been willing to say that Jesus was crucified which was as good as incriminating Jesus because the Romans would have thought, “Gee the wretch must have done something awful to deserve that.” Why would Tacitus investigate the existence of Jesus when it was not an issue in his day? No historian investigates everything. Nobody cared but the Christians if Jesus lived.

Tacitus did not like Christians and would have had no interest in the details about their Jesus so he did not go to the records and why would he when he only wrote two or three things about Jesus? You don’t visit the library in the next town looking for the whole life story of John F Kennedy when you just want to write when he was shot and where. Tacitus wrote that Christians were dying for being Christians which Christians use as proof that there was a Jesus but there is no evidence at all that they freely died for Jesus (Josh McDowell’s Evidence for Jesus: Is it reliable?). Moreover, some say that Tacitus’ interest in a man who claimed to be the resurrected Emperor Nero and who had great success in Parthia would have led Tacitus to investigate Jesus (See A Reply to J.P. Holding’s “Shattering” of My Views on Jesus, GA Wells). But this is speculation. Christians are often interested in religion but not in anybody else’s religion so Tacitus being interested in the new Nero does not imply he would have investigated Jesus too. 

Christians are keen on what he wrote about Christ but not so eager to accept his account of a miracle worked by the divine Emperor Vespasian (His. Lib. IV. C.81, Opp. Ed. Paris, 1819, III, p.490).

Tacitus called Pilate the procurator and some believe that this title was too uncommon before the middle of the first century to have been used by a man depending on written records. Wells argued that it shows that Tacitus got his data about Christ from Christian hearsay. He Walked Among Us observed that he called another man procurator and that he even called the Emperor something that was not his proper title (page 51). It says he was only using the layman’s vocabulary for it was for a lay readership. If so then why did he write so little about Jesus? The public would have wanted to know what this Christianity was about and who started it. And to say that using the wrong title for Pilate would mean that it came from hearsay and to say that doing this two or three more times means he wasn’t is simply ludicrous. 

If Tacitus were using records he would have said Jesus instead of just Christ. Some say if he had said Jesus Christ then he would have had to explain how Jesus is related to Christ because the followers of Jesus were called Christians! This is a ridiculous argument.

If Tacitus had been using Christian testimony he would have been most likely to have called him Jesus or Jesus Christ. The records would have to be specific so they would have been more likely to call him not Jesus or Christ but Jesus called Christ. 

Some say that Tacitus would have been likely to use Christ alone for it was common knowledge that a Christ was expected among the Jews and this would incite dislike of Christians. Rubbish. He would have used Jesus Christ in case anybody didn’t know who Christ was if that was his motive. 

TACITUS NOT GOING TO THE RECORDS SHOW THERE WERE NO RECORDS EXTANT IN HIS DAY --- Wells stated that Tacitus just got his info from the Christians and was biased towards accepting it for it gave Christianity a recent origin and the Romans hated new religions. He Walked Among Us rejects this on the basis that he reported about Jesus as a historical fact and not as something he heard (page 50). But history is not just about studying written records but also about oral tradition.

The unprofessional historian depends too much on oral tradition but the professional does not turn his back on it. The professional will use it to fill gaps for a lot of history comes from the need to avoid saying nothing. To say that Tacitus would have said if it was hearsay is simply a lie. Then He Walked Among Us says that Justin and others told their readers to research official documents about Jesus. But what has that got to do with Tacitus for we don’t know if he was meant? Who would recommend him when he only wrote a line or two? And besides Justin recommended an Acts of Pilate that sounds like a forgery. Justin said that the timetable of the Quirinius census which is reported in Luke still existed in his day (Josh McDowell’s Evidence for Jesus: Is it reliable?). Justin even went as far as to tell his readers to consult it.

This calls his Acts of Pilate references into question. Justin was not adverse to inventing back-up when he was stuck. He must have lied too that some of his works were written for the Emperor. We know that Pilate’s Acts or records would not have been sent to Rome for Jesus lived in a land that was under Rome but was largely an independent jurisdiction (ibid). It may be that Justin just took it for granted that the Acts existed and put two and two together and came up with twenty. I find the title of the alleged document to be suspect. Why call it the Acts of Pilate? A legal document would be unlikely to get an appellation like that. Justin could not recommend the gospels instead of the Acts of Pilate because the gospels were still being censored by the Church or perhaps still even being edited at the time.

Some believe that Tacitus could not have used records about Jesus because when Rome turned against Pilate it wanted all trace of Pilate forgotten (Wells Without Water). The references to Pilate in Josephus were probably tolerated for Josephus was very unflattering to him and Josephus’ writing was commissioned by Rome and it would not have tolerated any other for Josephus would have been employed to do away with the need for any other memorial. That would have made Pilate the perfect person for the Jesus mongers to blame for the fictitious crucifixion.

Rome of course might not have destroyed all the records of Pilate in Jerusalem for it did not care what the Jews thought. But the likes of Tacitus and the people in Rome would not have been allowed to mention him and there would have been no records in Rome. This would mean both that there were no records and no Christian gospels were tolerated so any gospels would have been kept secret. And above all that somebody interfered with the text about Jesus in Tacitus because it speaks of Pilate. When they went to the bother of putting in an unnecessary reference to Pilate they probably invented the whole thing. A forger would only put in a reference to Christ and his death if there were a need to fabricate evidence that Jesus lived because he didn’t live at all.

The mention of Jesus is of no worth even if we cannot rule out it having come from records – which we can. It would have to come from the ancient records to be trusted. Historians have sometimes mistaken fictitious characters for real ones. Records were sometimes muddled up and altered in the copying and sometimes entries were made too late. Sometimes it was impossible to tell if a record had the right information in it.

Some believe the data Tacitus gives about Christ was an interpolation because it calls him Christ and seems to say he was executed which is religious dogma. In response to this it is said that stating Jesus’ title and that he existed and was put to death is not religious dogma. Christ was a religious title and to say he was executed when the evidence of Paul indicates that this was revealed through visions means it is a religious dogma. To say it is not is as silly as saying that the existence of Adam and Eve is not a religious dogma. The idea that the Christ material is a statement of dogma cannot be disproved. So its authenticity cannot be proved either. Those who say the Christ material is dogma not history will have to accept that if it is not an interpolation then Tacitus did not access any records for he did not know Christ was a religious title and that the death of Christ was a dogma.

The passage is nearly exactly the same as one in the work of a man called Sulpicius Severus who died in 403 AD. This man was known for his credulity and tall stories. He did not copy from Tacitus because nobody seemed to know of the Tacitus passage in those days. There is no evidence that they knew. It appears then that the copyists copied the passage from Severus’s book into Tacitus. There is no evidence for the authenticity of the Tacitus text on Jesus (The Jesus of History, A Reply to Josh McDowell, Gordon Stein). If it is forged then it is proof that the Christians were manufacturing fabricated evidence for the existence of Jesus. 

The argument that Tacitus used records from Jesus’ day is worthless speculation and not only that it makes no sense. We are not sure that Tacitus mentioned Christ at all. Tacitus is no help when you want secular references to the historical Jesus.

TACITUS AND NERO

It was because Tacitus was discussing how Nero hated Christians and used them as scapegoats, that he seemed to mention Christ and his death under Pilate. We will see that this calls the reliability of the passage and the legitimacy of saying he said Jesus existed into serious question.

Tacitus stated that the Emperor Nero persecuted Christians. There is not a scrap of evidence that Nero did and there should have been tons. Origen the great apologist for Christianity stated in his Contra Celsum (Book 3, Chapter 8) that it was not hard to number the Christian martyrs (The Martyrdoms of Peter and Paul; How Did the Apostles Die?). There is no evidence that Nero started the fire in Rome and blamed the Christians. There were plenty of more suitable sects to choose from as scapegoats (see The Jesus of History, A Reply to Josh McDowell, Gordon Stein). 

There is no evidence that Nero persecuted Christians and there were only a few Christians in Rome at that time – indicating that there was no point in a persecution. This makes the reliability of the passage doubtful. Perhaps it is an interpolation or a lie. I would be happy enough if the passage was unreliable or doubtful for then you can’t use it to prove Jesus. Whether unreliable or an interpolation it still destroys the evidence for the existence of Jesus. 

Skeptic Gordon Stein’s belief that since Christian was not a common term in the first century and that Nero did not care what religions came to Rome is unfairly dismissed as irrelevant by Christians just because it destroys their case. When Tacitus is okay everywhere else except here an interpolation is the most probable implication. It’s the simplest explanation. The pro-authenticity argument is that the record is anti-Christian but it did not do the Christians any harm for it only repeated the gossip that was rife about them anyway. And it would have been too obvious the passage was forged if it was more positive. The way the passage fits the story proves nothing for you can put a new sentence or two in any text so that no awkwardness or anything gives you away.

One thing is certainly true, if Nero did attack Christianity it was for political reasons and not religious ones. The later Christian boast that he hated the Christians he killed because he wanted to destroy their faith just on religious grounds makes no sense for the Empire knew it had to tolerate many widely differing and eccentric cults and there is no evidence that Nero was that bigoted. The early Church liked to turn murdered Christians into martyrs for propaganda purposes. But there is as much difference as day and night as being murdered for your religion and being a martyr.

Nothing like persecution happened to the Christians until the time of Diocletian (The Martyrdoms of Peter and Paul). And Rome tolerated tolerant religions so if Christianity was persecuted it was because it stressed that other religions were all of the Devil and so the martyrs deserve to be regarded as fruitcakes rather than as heroes of God.

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[Source: christisnotrisen.com]