3. It Never Happened!
Although the Bible is a source rather than the nebulous concept of a ‘history book’, it does contain, or purports to contain, actual history. Some people accept that it contains events that actually happened but say that the narrative that surrounds those events is what should be questioned. And that seems perfectly reasonable. Others say that none of it is real and the whole thing is simply an invention from cover to cover. Which doesn’t seem reasonable.
We’re not going to go into the theology of the Biblical narrative, so questions regarding whether Jesus was divine, or the Son of God are of no interest to us. It’s also fine to think that the whole Jesus narrative is invented and simply inserted into a series of otherwise known and verifiable world events. But often you’ll see people making claims that some historical event portrayed in the Bible never happened.
Again, these seem to be attempts to find a magic bullet that will simply kill the whole narrative dead instantly. The more you can prove the Bible wrong, the more chance you can fatally wound the whole Christian ideology. And vice versa.
But I’m not trying to trip anyone up here, nor ‘win’ an argument one way or another. All I’m trying to do is look at what the history or the archaeology says, and address arguments people use in respect of them. It’s less about checking the validity of someone’s argument, more about checking the veracity of them.
There are all sorts of things one can point at in the Bible and say, ‘That never happened!’ Most of the time with some validity. It’s impossible to use archaeology or history to demonstrate one way or another if the Resurrection actually happened, for example. Arguments about whether it could have happened are arguments for other disciplines than history, like medicine. I often get asked if I think the Resurrection happened and to be honest, I can’t help you there. I can talk about the historical narrative surrounding it, but that’s all.
But there are other events in the Bible that are sometimes roundly dismissed as never happening and these arguments sometimes seem to have no realistic basis in fact. Quite where these arguments originate from isn’t clear, but they’re repeated passionately and by people who genuinely seem to think they have a killer point.
Let’s deal with a few.
Has the tomb of Jesus been found - No. Lots of claims have been put around saying that this or that is the tomb of Jesus, but people have been discovering genuine pieces of the real cross for thousands of years, too. It must have been huge. There is no archaeological evidence for the existence of Jesus anywhere in the world. Period. Don’t believe YouTube videos that say otherwise. Don’t believe anyone who claims otherwise. And before you think that I’m part of some Illuminati Shadow Cartel, hiding the truth for science or whatever, I would love for there to be some evidence. Archaeologists spend their whole careers working in this field and to find some archaeological evidence for the existence of Jesus wouldn’t be a disaster, it would be a crowning moment in the long and illustrious discipline of archaeology. Nobody could be more excited for it to be real. But it isn’t, sadly.
Did the trial of Jesus happen - This is perfectly feasible, but with a couple of caveats. The trial of Jesus, as depicted in the Bible, is relatively swift. Jesus is bought before Pilate, who asks him a couple of questions. Pilate’s wife intervenes and the governor decides that Jesus has done nothing wrong. Ultimately, he is handed over to the crowd in order to keep the peace, rather than because he has been found guilty of a crime.
This has some precedent in extra-Biblical history. When the crowd at Smyrna call for the execution of the bishop Polycarp in 155 or 156AD, the governor first tries to calm them, informing them that the man has done nothing wrong, other than admitting being a Christian, which is not necessarily something for which he should be punished. The crowd demand that Polycarp be thrown to a lion and when the governor informs them that this isn’t possible and the rules don’t allow it, they demand he be burned at the stake instead. The crowd rush around gathering firewood and kindling and because he otherwise has a riot on his hands, the governor concedes, and the crowd take Polycarp and burn him alive.
It’s possible that Pilate would be involved. As a prefect and governor, he would have been a busy man, but it’s not unknown for governors to become personally involved in trials of individuals, as we can see in the example of Polycarp. That said, he is a busy man and Jesus is a relatively minor figure who, rather than breaking Roman law, has simply annoyed the Jews who are unable to deal with him under Temple Law because Roman Law has precedent. So, it’s possible to argue that he wouldn’t have bothered with such affairs.
The history suggests either scenario is possible. When the Apostle Paul is bought before the proconsul of Achaia, Gallio, by the Jews at Corinth (Acts 18.12-17), the governor dismisses them, saying:
” If it some bickering about words and names and your Jewish law, you may see to it yourselves; I have no mind to be a judge in such matters”
And when the writer Pliny, as governor of Bithynia, writes to the Emperor Trajan, professing that he has never stood over a trial of Christians before, and he doesn’t really know what to charge them with or how to punish them, Trajan writes back with advice saying that they shouldn’t be sought out, but if they are found guilty and repent, then they should be pardoned.
So, we can see how Roman governors could either have an entirely stand-offish approach to such matters or become actively involved.
It’s likely that the narrative surrounding the trial of Jesus is a construct, particularly that of the intervention of Pilate’s wife, who pleads that her husband does not interfere after seeing Jesus in a dream. This portent laden narrative seems a likely construct.
Jesus is not a Roman citizen and as such it’s feasible he weas dealt with summarily by the Romans. I suspect, but cannot be certain, that any ‘trial’ was perfunctory at best, and Jesus was dealt with briefly by the Romans who simply handed him back to the Jews and let them get on with it. The habit of inventing narratives and putting them into the mouths of others when writing histories during the Roman period is well documented. When you read the words of Pilate in the Bible, you’re not reading his actual words, which aren’t recorded. Instead, you’re reading the words of whoever wrote that passage.
When you read the words of Boudica’s speech before the final battle against the Romans, you’re not reading her words at all. She didn’t even speak Latin, probably and her speech to her own troops, even if she made one, wouldn’t have been in the language of the conquerors. What you are reading is one of Tacitus’ polemics about the moral decline of the Roman state.
The Census Never Happened - This is a very common one. People often claim that the census that occurred has no basis in historical fact and that the Bible’s description of it, as Augustus ordering that ‘the whole world’ be accounted for is wrong. The argument sometimes even goes to great lengths to explain how a Roman census was taken and that families would not have been ordered back to their homes just for a census.
To begin with, the narrative surrounding the birth of Jesus in the Bible is confusing and confused. There are two versions of events, one in Matthew 2 and the other in Luke 2 and they differ in some key events.
Matthew 2 puts the events in the time of King Herod (the Great):
”Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,”
(Matthew 2.1)
And Luke puts events in the time when ‘Quirinius’ (in the Bible as ‘Cyrenius’) was governor in Syria:
”And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.”
(Luke 2.1-5)
It is genuinely accepted that King Herod the Great dies in 4BC and it is also known that Quirinius becomes governor of Syria in 6AD, meaning that each account is ten years apart. One of these accounts is wrong, or they both are. They can’t both be right. Both accounts also differ in certain details. One has the ‘Three Wise Men’, the other has shepherds watching their flocks. Put together, they form the Christmas Nativity we all know, but there are fundamental problems with the historical record at this point.
However, the reasons for these differences are a discussion for another time. If I went into that argument here, we’d be way off subject, and I’ll happily address those points in another post.
Here, we need only to focus on whether the census from Luke 2 actually happened or not.
At the time of the census, Judea is not a Roman province. It has been under Roman influence for some time, with King Herod and then his son Archelaus both serving as ‘client kings’ to the Roman state. In 6AD, however, Archelaus has become so unpopular, particularly among the Jewish population for his violations of Mosaic Law, that unrest has spread through his lands and the Romans step in to remove him from power. He is banished to Gaul and the governor of the neighboring province of Syria, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, is ordered to take control of Judea with a view to making it a full Roman province.
As part of the assessment of his new charges, he orders a census to be taken. This is the census mentioned in the Bible. Also, to quell the unrest in the new province, he orders everyone to disperse and return to their homes. This serves not only the purpose of gathering people for the census, but of breaking up the rebellious factions across the land. Judea is effectively put under martial law.
The use of the term ‘the whole world’ can be easily explained by pointing out that to many of the inhabitants of the province, Judea was their whole world. ‘The whole world’ can just easily mean ‘everyone in the places we know’ as ‘everyone around the entire planet’.
Furthermore, and critically for the argument that the census never happened, we can find dateable, contextual evidence for it in the archaeological record. Unequivocally, the census happened, and it happened in 6AD.
A 1st Century AD tombstone of a soldier known as Quintus Aemilius Secundus, records how:
”At the command of Quirinius, I carried out a census of the district of Apamea involving 117,000 citizens.”
Apamea was a city in what is now modern Syria but was then in Roman Judea.
The stele of Quintus Aemilius Secundus. The inscription was originally found complete although the top section has since been lost
We can date Quirinius in Syria via the numismatic record. Coins issued by him on becoming governor of Syria, date the beginning of his rule in that province to the ‘36th year of Caesar [Augustus]’, which if dated from the Battle of Actium, where Augustus became the sole ruler by defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra, relate to 5/6AD.
The archaeology absolutely confirms that the census at the time of Jesus took place and the brief description of it in Luke 2 makes perfect sense.
This particular argument has no legs.
4. There Are No Contemporary Accounts That Mention Jesus
Here we’re on much more solid ground. It’s absolutely true that no contemporary accounts from the life of Jesus exist. None of the gospels are contemporary to Jesus and none of them actively claim to be either. The authors of those works are now no longer assumed to be the ‘Matthew’, ‘Mark’ and so on that they were once commonly assumed to be, not even by theologians, and all of them appear to be the work of multiple authors. We can deduce several things about the identity of those authors via clues such as the language they wrote in, that they were obviously literate, and they were educated on the ways of the temple, but we cannot put a name to any of them. I suspect several of them were from Syria, if that helps.
The Apostle Paul never claims to have met Jesus in person, not in corporeal form anyway, although their timelines arguably crossed. Paul’s travels take him to and fro across the empire in the period between 40-60AD and he finally ends up in Rome where he is executed, most probably in the anti-Christian retributions that occurred after the Great Fire of 64AD, which were brutal but relatively brief, and certainly before the fall of Nero in 68. Here again, it is likely that some of his works are not written by ‘Paul’ but described as ‘Pauline’ suggesting a school of followers either finishing his work or writing after his style.
Truth is, if we were to explore the avenue of authorship further, this article would have to be in 24 parts and would be published as a book. When I’ve finished it, you’ll be the first people to get a copy.
It’s also not a particularly helpful avenue to explore in this context because we could be accused of the old problem of using the Bible to prove that the Bible is true, which presents all sorts of philosophical and theological hoops through which we don’t want to jump.
Instead, we’ll concentrate on aspects of this argument that need clarifying. Whilst it’s true that no contemporary secular sources exist for Jesus, some sources that are pretty close to him, do exist.
Quite often in this argument, people will make claims that need to be corrected. I have seen people claim that nobody wrote about Jesus until 100 years after his supposed death, to 200 years and, only the other day, 500 years and these wild claims need fact checking.
Quite a few writers emerge in the late 2nd and early 3rd Century, but these people are writing so distantly from events that they are straying into the realms of myth building and storytelling, which are legitimate historical narratives, but outside of our scope for this article.
The two main extra-Biblical sources for Jesus in the 1st Century come from our old friend Tacitus and the former Jewish rebel turned enthusiastic Roman, Josephus.
The passage in Tacitus is quite informative:
”To suppress this rumour, Nero fabricated scapegoats - and punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were popularly called). Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius’ reign by the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate.”
(Tacitus, Annals, XV.44)
There are a couple of things to talk about here. Firstly, Tacitus isn’t talking directly about the history of Jesus but mentioning Christians, in Rome, in the period following the Great Fire, whom Nero is blaming for starting it, to deflect blame away from himself, even though he wasn’t even in Rome when the fire started.
But Tacitus is clearly referring to ‘Christ’ as a historical figure, even if it is only by saying that there are people who believed he was a historical figure. This was some 30 years after the death of Jesus and these people are within living memory of that event, even if we have no idea who they were or if they knew for sure that Jesus was real.
He gives further corroboration. The execution was under the governorship of Pontius Pilate, which is attested by the archaeology, and in the reign of Tiberius (14-37AD), both of which fit the narrative from the Bible. Furthermore, Tacitus continues:
”But in spite of this temporary setback, the deadly superstition had broken out afresh, not only in Judea (where the mischief had started) but even in Rome”
Which is a third piece of corroborating evidence, namely that the sect began in Judea.
”Christ’ is therefore fixed in a historical setting by who, where, what and why, which is pretty compelling and is the same level of evidence, more even, than we accept for other historical figures Tacitus talks about and for whom there is no other direct evidence, such as Boudica.
If he’s right about Boudica, and nobody ever doubts he is, then he is right about ‘Christ’, too.
There’s a further argument that says Tacitus is not talking about Christians at all, rather another sect entirely called the ‘Chrestians’. In order to address this, we need to understand a little about the physical evidence for Tacitus’ works.
I mentioned earlier that no extant original copies of Tacitus exist. All the copies of Books XI-XVI of Annals appear to come from a manuscript held in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence known as the Second Medicean, or simply M.II. This manuscript itself is a copy of an 11th Century monastic work, probably produced in Italy and that copy is a copy of another manuscript which probably dates to the 4th or 5th Century. They are copies of copies of copies and all those copyists were, of course, monks.
What leads some to make the claim about ‘Chrestians’ is that the passage in question in the copy of M.II, where the word ‘christianos’ is used, appears to have been originally written as ‘chrEstianos’ with the E later scraped off and rewritten with an I.
Quite when this correction was made is uncertain but that monks corrected their work is well known. A single monk, sitting by candlelight, creating a manuscript is bound, at some point, to make a mistake. Medieval literature is full of them, as are Roman era inscriptions. There is no mechanic in place by which the correction can be made without it being evident, apart from simply restarting the whole work. It might have been corrected within minutes or it might have been decades.
The argument is that because the original scribe wrote ‘chrEstianos’, then that is what Tacitus wrote, a claim that is palpably silly. It’s already gone through the hands of several copyists and if it is a direct translation of what the M.II scribe saw, then it might have been a mistake made by any of them, no necessarily Tacitus.
An added problem is that Suetonius’ biography of Claudius, he writes:
”[s]ince the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, [Claudius] expelled them from Rome.”
(Claudius, XXV)
And the argument goes that it’s Tacitus who is making the mistake and instead what he is talking about are followers of the person Suetonius calls ‘Chrestus’.
This, however, would require some evidence of a sect that followed ‘Chrestus’ and there just isn’t any. Nowhere else in the archaeology or history of Rome is a sect called the ‘Chrestians’ ever mentioned. In addition, the name ‘Chrestus’ is a relatively common Greek name of that time and is distinctly different than ‘Christus/Χριστός/Messiah which is an honorific rather than a proper name. The grammatical structure doesn’t work for ‘Chrestus’ to be used in the same way from the Suetonius passage.
To assume that this Chrestus is instead a reference to the later Christus then requires two different mistakes to have occurred perfectly, at the same time, and to have been copied, unchanged, down the centuries and through version after version after version, only to then be changed at some point in, say, the 14th Century in order to cover up a lie about Jesus.
There is also the problem of Tacitus describing Christus as having been executed during the reign of Tiberius, who dies 4 years before Claudius becomes emperor, so they clearly cannot be the same person
Like all Dan Brown level conspiracy gibberish, it stretches credibility to the limit.
Occam’s Razor proposes that when presented with competing hypotheses, one should always choose the one with fewest assumptions and the argument about ‘Chrestos’ requires assumption after assumption. The only assumption the competing hypothesis requires is that a monk made a mistake.
As to whether Tacitus is simply repeating what he is told, that is possibly true, but elsewhere in his works, he goes to some lengths to let us know that he is reporting what he has been told, or simply passing on a rumor. He uses terms like ‘it has been said’ or ‘it was reported’ and in this passage, he doesn’t infer that the Christians reported that Christ was their leader, but that he was. Of course this might not matter very much, but it does at least suggest that this isn’t something the Christians have told him and so is not a rumor that they themselves spread.
Tacitus is quite careful at times to make it clear that some of the things he includes are because they are taken from records, or that they are things that he has heard, or that they are rumors and hence are, or aren’t, things that he himself is willing to accept as fact. In effect, he imbues his reports with motive where he sees it necessary. So ‘they said X because of Y’ is something he makes very clear. What this then suggests is that he spends a lot of time personally considering whether the events he relates are the ‘truth’ in his eyes.
There are plenty of examples where Tacitus is careful to distance himself from what he sees as rumor, make it clear that he is uncertain about the claims or indicate that he has substantiated the claims as fact.
Whilst we must be careful with his work and try to independently validate the veracity of the facts, we must also remember that Tacitus himself has done the same thing. We check his work, but he checked it himself, too.
Tacitus tells us where he gets his sources from and while ancient historians didn’t go to all the pain of footnoting their sources and I’m supposed to (and don’t always, just because this isn’t an academic tome), he does tell us that he uses eyewitness accounts, reports from earlier historians and the imperial gazette, the official history of the Empire. He is not presenting this passage as hearsay.
Tacitus would have known people who were Christians. He served as a senator under the reign of Domitian, who dies in 96AD and Domitian’s own niece, and hence Titus’ niece and Vespasian’s granddaughter, Flavia Domitilla, was a Christian who was later beatified as the Orthodox Saint Flavia Domitilla. Her husband, Titus Flavius Clemens, was Consul in 95 and was executed by Domitian for the charge of ‘atheism’, which roughly meant ‘not believing in the usual gods’ and for ‘going over to Jewish customs’, which strongly suggests that he, too, converted to Christianity. Flavia Domitilla was exiled for the same crime, only to become part of the plot that saw her uncle murdered.
Although there is no direct evidence that Tacitus knew them, the noble elite at that level isn’t huge and he surely knew them and knew they were Christians. it wasn’t a big secret. Here, the, he has access to people who would have been able to tell him that, in their eyes at least, Christ was a real person.
The exact date of Annals isn’t known, but it was certainly begun after the death of Domitian, simply because nobody would have had the balls to write an, at times, highly critical account of the moral degradation of Rome had Domitian still been alive to get mad about it. The whole of the work can be seen as a reaction to the reign of Domitian. He’s probably finished writing it by at the very latest 115 and more likely around 110.
It’s written some 80 years after the death of Jesus, about events that happened 50 years previously, but there are direct historical links between the accounts of the mid 60s and the last possible writing date.
The attempts to dismiss this reference don’t seem to ever take the bigger picture into consideration. It’s not possible to be entirely certain where Tacitus got his information about Christ from. The counter argument to that is that we should therefore dismiss it entirely, but this is fraught with all sorts of problems.
If we were to reject everything that any ancient writer says simply because we cannot exhaustively demonstrate exactly where they got their information from, we’d have to throw out pretty much the entirety of everything ever written. We’d be left with almost nothing.
In trying to hammer a hole in this particular piece of work from Tacitus, internet debaters never seem equally as willing to apply the same criteria universally. They’re only ever concerned with making this one piece of information unusable and don’t stop to think for one second what it then means for the rest of any historical narrative, including any that they then rely on later to support their arguments.
This problem never seems to bother the people who use this argument, because they have only ever heard it repeated somewhere else and have never had to stop and think about the wider picture of what they are saying. And that’s something that someone attempting a rational approach to the evidence should never do.
You can’t, for example, dismiss Tacitus because nobody knows where he got the information from, but then use Suetonius as an argument to support the Chrestus theory because, guess what? You don’t know where Suetonius got his information from, either.
The last attempt at fatally wounding Tacitus is by claiming that Annals XV.44 is a later Christian interpolation. After all, this practice is not without precedent. The gospels appear to have been constantly edited and revised for centuries and one can argue that with the publication of new versions of the New Testament from King James on, they still are. As we will see later, the works of Josephus have been very clearly edited to include later passages, but these stand out like blind cobbler’s thumbs.
There are a surprisingly few advocates of this theory, chief among them being Dr Richard Carrier, a strong voice in the ‘mythicist’ and atheist movement. Dr Carrier is a fine academic and his works are very well argued and that then leads people to automatically assume that what he argues carries enormous academic weight and thus legitimizes the narrative of his arguments.
It’s great to use in online debates because this one is succinct, fatally flaws the whole of Tacitus, and has the weight of a bloke with a PhD in Ancient History behind it.
We discussed the problem of trying to use one tactic to shoot down a whole narrative just a few paragraphs ago and the same problem arises here. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander and the same critical rubber stamping should be applied universally, not just to the passages you find it more convenient for one’s narrative to apply them to.
Plus, there’s one other problem in that whilst Dr Carrier is a fine academic with reasonable arguments, simply picking up on one of them and using that one alone as what you might think is the knockout punch is not only insufficient as evidence, but it is not even particularly kind to Dr Carrier’s overall narrative. Dr Carrier doesn’t rely on one thing and one thing alone to build his mythicist narrative, but other people cherry-pick them in that fashion, nonetheless.
And whilst Dr Carrier is a good academic with the right qualifications, his views in relation to the interpolation of XX.44 are very much fringe views. Outside of a few papers from many decades ago, almost nobody else in this area of academic study agrees with him. That doesn’t make him wrong and everyone else right, but it has to be pointed out that Dr Carrier’s views sit very much in the extreme margins of the debate.
That’s not to say that Dr Carrier is like a climate change denier or some other extremist. He’s not part of a lunatic fringe in academic history, it’s just that nobody else has reached the same conclusion as he has, given the exact same set of data to work from. It’s not as if he has discovered something amazing and previously unknown, rather that he has reached a conclusion that almost nobody else shares.
There doesn’t appear to be any reason to claim that XV.44 is an interpolation other than it would be really cool if it was. Claims that the text scans perfectly without it can be explained by the brevity of the passage itself and any minor textual issues can be explained, again, by everything we know about Annals having to go through M.II.
And not only has the majority of academia agreed that this passage is fine, but the question of whether it is or isn’t has never really been raised in the several hundred years of study of it.
It’s not as if there was a debate and now the debate has been settled. There never has been any doubt, or even any question about its authenticity. It has always been accepted as genuine.
The argument simply seems to exist purely in order to have another stick to drum the mythicist message home with.
It’s fine to argue that there are many examples of later Christian interpolation in the New Testament, but then there would be. The sample size is much, much higher. It’s wrong then to say that because there are so many in the New Testament that there must be some in Tacitus because ‘statistics or something’. If 10% (I made this figure up for illustrative purposes) of the New Testament is later interpolation, then it doesn’t then scan that 10% of Tacitus is interpolation. Or because Josephus has some, so must Tacitus.
Another claim is that the text must be fake because Christianity was an obscure and tiny sect and it’s unreasonable that Tacitus, all the way up the pointy end of the Roman social scale, would have known anything about what was, in effect, a Jewish peasant’s private sect. Dr Carrier points out that Pliny, as we saw earlier, had to write to Trajan to ask him for advice on Christians and, as Tacitus and Pliny were good buddies, this means that neither of them knew anything about Christians.
However, Pliny doesn’t say he knows nothing about Christians, he says he doesn’t know what to charge them with, or how to punish them. That’s not the same thing as saying he has never heard of them before. His letter to Trajan is more about legal advice than ‘what the hell are these guys!”
Plus, as we discussed earlier, Tacitus did know about Christians before he started writing Annals. He began his career under Vespasian and entered public life, at the age of 25, in either 81 or 82 under his son, Titus and there were Christians among the Flavian dynasty at that time. He served in the provinces in some capacity until around 93 and then returned to the Senate when Clemens, later executed as Christian, served as Consul. Tacitus himself became a suffect Consul in 97. Christians were not strangers to him and the Christians he knew were certainly not obscure peasants.
A lot of the rest of this argument rests on the correct observation that nowhere else in any of the great works do the Christians appear. Again, this doesn’t then mean that the mentions in Tacitus must be false. That’s a false equivalence. It also assumes that other writers, such as Pliny’s adoptive father, Pliny the Elder, felt the need to write about Christians or that Christians were desperate to pop up in everyone’s works.
Christianity wasn’t that much of a big deal that someone like Pliny the Elder felt the need to include them in his accounts of the Great Fire, but the counter to that isn’t then that they were so obscure that Tacitus wouldn’t have heard of them. It’s not that black and white. Christians existed in one of the myriad shades of grey in between. At the end of the day, Pliny can’t put everyone in his works. We might find this subject, and the subject of Christianity in general to be, if I can steal a phrase, The Greatest Story Ever Told, but not to the Romans it wasn’t.
Just because we think it ought to be there, doesn’t mean the Romans thought it ought to be there.
It’s hard to draw any other conclusion than this particular argument started with a desire to prove that Tacitus is an interpolation and then built a narrative to fit. To almost everyone else in academic history, it’s a total non-issue.
And so, to the end of part two of this one part article. Or that’s how it was meant to be, anyway. Again, I have grossly underestimated my own ability to keep rambling and I’m grateful you made it this far with me.
In part three we’ll look at Josephus, some of which is entirely made up and then at the broader issue of theist v atheist internet shitslinging, which should be…err…fun?
This article would normally appear under the paid section of the subscription, but I know a lot of people want to read it and I want them to be able to use these clarifying points in arguments they then encounter. Please feel free to share it wherever and whenever you like, but please leave a link back to my Substack if you do.
If you’d like to help me keep writing, a paid subscription for $5 a month will get you access to everything I have done before and everything coming up in the future, including exclusive material only available to paid subscribers and, hopefully in the near future, the ability to decide what subjects you would like covered.
If you’d like to just buy me a cup of calming tea, you can do so via
https://ko-fi.com/jamescoverley
I’ll keep this paywall free for a short while so everyone can read it
Stay tuned for part three (and hopefully not part four!) coming soon!