Nero and The Christians

[sandwiches]

Interesting piece on Larry Hurtado's blog concerning an article casting doubt on the supposed persecution of Christians by Nero. This article seems to suggest Tacitus just made an error rather than that the whole thing was a Christian interpolation (as Carrier suggested last year).

larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/nero-and-the-christians/

A recent article mounts a “full-on” challenge to the widely-accepted report of a Neronian pogrom against Christians in Rome in 64 AD, after the fire that destroyed a goodly part of Rome: Brent D. Shaw, “The Myth of the Neronian Persecution,” Journal of Roman Studies 105 (2015): 73-100.

[himself]

Why assume that Tacitus was wrong? Is there some other document to the contrary?

[sandwiches]

Dec 20, 2015 2:33:42 GMT himself said:

Why assume that Tacitus was wrong? Is there some other document to the contrary?

This is the abstract of the article:

journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9995690&fileId=S0075435815000982

A conventional certainty is that the first state-driven persecution of Christians happened in the reign of Nero and that it involved the deaths of Peter and Paul, and the mass execution of Christians in the aftermath of the great fire of July 64 c.e. The argument here contests all of these facts, especially the general execution personally ordered by Nero. The only source for this event is a brief passage in the historian Tacitus. Although the passage is probably genuine Tacitus, it reflects ideas and connections prevalent at the time the historian was writing and not the realities of the 60s.

i.e. the writer of the article, Brent D Shaw, seems to be saying that Tacitus projects back fears and bigotry against Christians from the early second century Rome to the Rome of the A.D.60s,. He is saying we are too uncritical of the sole source (Tacitus) connecting Nero with blaming Christians for the fire that destroyed so much of Rome. His motive in doing so may be simply an academic wish to question conventional academic wisdom. But he also examines other supposed references to Christians from the first couple of centuries A.D. in order to back up his contention that Tacitus has simply got it wrong.

I have not had the opportunity yet to read Shaw's article but hope to do so soon. Shaw seems to be a respected historian though I am not sure what his specialisation is. See e.g.:

www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/12/17/rome-inside-emperors-clothes/

Our view of Neronian Rome and early Christianity would be dramatically altered if the crucified and flaming Christians in 64 turned out to be mythical, as the Princeton historian Brent Shaw now claims they are. His recent and carefully reasoned article in support of this view rests essentially upon a conviction that it would be anachronistic to refer to Christians in 64, since he questions whether they were then identified as such. Therefore he believes that Tacitus’s version of the fire derives from a fiction, Christian or otherwise, that was devised and disseminated at some point between 64 and the time when he was writing, more than five decades later.


The article is likely to be picked up on by those with less impressive academic credentials but a certain animus and cyclopean view of Christianity. See e.g. this which contains a useful flavour of Shaw's arguments:

vridar.org/2015/12/17/the-myth-of-neros-persecution-of-christians/

Generally though it is always interesting to see such an article dissected for its errors by someone like Hurtado. The apparent error by Shaw about the reference to Christians in Antioch in Acts is a maybe a good example of how even respected academics can trip up in this area?

[ignorantianescia]

Dec 20, 2015 12:32:52 GMT sandwiches said:

I have not had the opportunity yet to read Shaw's article but hope to do so soon. Shaw seems to be a respected historian though I am not sure what his specialisation is.

From what I have seen his specialisation appears to be late Antiquity, focusing on Christian violence against pagans in that era, but he has also published outside that area.

[himself]

IOW, he has no new empirical facts. He's just arguing that the current facts are wrong because, well, they just can't be right.

[sandwiches]

I did read Shaw's original article casting doubt on Nero's persecution of Christians as referred to by Tacitus but Larry Hurtado seemed to have summarised it well.

There is now a response referred to again by Hurtado:

larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2016/12/20/nero-the-christians-jones-contra-shaw/

Christopher Jones has a new article just out refuting Brent Shaw on Nero’s pogrom against Christians in Rome in AD 64: “The Historicity of the Neronian Persecution: A Response to Brent Shaw,” New Testament Studies 63 (2017): 146-52.

Not had chance to read the full article in response but seems from Hurtado's post that it makes good points in response.

[ydoethur]

Shaw is a Professor of Classics at Princeton:

www.princeton.edu/classics/people/display_person.xml?netid=bshaw&display=All

So he's definitely a significant and well-qualified figure in the relevant field. However, he also seems to have a definite anti-Christian bent.

I haven't read his article so I can't comment on it directly, but i imagine this would be a very difficult negative to prove. The only thing that might make it plausible is that it isn't mentioned in the Epitome of Cassius Dio - but since he only mentions the fire quite briefly and many details seem to be wrong anyway (Nero fiddling) that's hardly conclusive.

Meanwhile, this is presumably the Christopher Jones who wrote the reply:

scholar.harvard.edu/cjones

who seems if anything rather better qualified but has a definite pro-Christian bent to judge by his extraordinarily long bibliography.

[sandwiches]

I suspect no writer is wholly 'objective' in that I assume every writer has been subjected to various influences which have shaped his or her basic outlook. Nevertheless, it is the quality of argument and evidence which ultimately matters. Still, certainly a writer needs a certain bedrock of relevant qualifications and knowledge before they can taken seriously. For example, I did raise the efforts of Richard Carrier on the topic with Dr Hurtado who did not denigrate Richard Carrier in his response, but did point out some rather massive holes in his attempts at academic argument on the topic:

larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/nero-and-the-christians/#comment-12898

[ydoethur]

Dec 23, 2016 16:47:26 GMT sandwiches said:

I suspect no writer is wholly 'objective' in that I assume every writer has been subjected to various influences which have shaped his or her basic outlook. Nevertheless, it is the quality of argument and evidence which ultimately matters. Still, certainly a writer needs a certain bedrock of relevant qualifications and knowledge before they can taken seriously. For example, I did raise the efforts of Richard Carrier on the topic with Dr Hurtado who did not denigrate Richard Carrier in his response, but did point out some rather massive holes in his attempts at academic argument on the topic:

larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/nero-and-the-christians/#comment-12898

It is intriguing to note that in my work on Carrier I will - to be polite - express reservations about his command of French and German, two of the four languages he claims to have translation competency in. Here is Hurtado making similar comments about his command of Greek. That just leaves Latin - and I think I am right in saying he has never yet actually published anything that depended on a command of Latin (although now his thesis is finally coming out, notwithstanding its net availability, that will change). So I am starting to wonder exactly what languages he is actually competent in.

With regard to history, no historian is objective, but ultimately historians base their conclusions on evidence. If they do not, they are writing propaganda not history. The further back you go, the less complete the evidence is, so the more room you have for speculation and interpretation. But that doesn't mean that even where there is ample evidence, interpreting it can lead to furious rows. For example, it's less than 20 years ago that there was a legitimate debate about whether the Holocaust was planned (the structuralist/intentionalist debate) and there continues of course to be endless discussion around Richard III's character. This is where the whole science of historiography comes into play. For example, Geoffrey Elton's work on Tudor government was very much informed by his belief in the importance of great men - in this case, Wolsey and Cromwell, whose impact on the government he described in minute detail.But that meant, as later research pointed out, that he missed huge areas where the Tudor mechanism was derived from earlier work, or was implemented at a local level. Or we could mention E. H. Carr's famous History of the Soviet Union, which denied that Stalin had absolute power or responsibility for the purges, instead blaming much of it on the KGB, including Yezhovschina and Beria. That's actually tenable on the documentation he had. But he didn't actually ask too much further because as an admirer of Stalin he was relieved to find that he hadn't done so badly as was thought and didn't bother to enquire further.

The reason I am somewhat puzzled by this particular debate is that on my admittedly limited knowledge of it so far it seems to be based on an effort to prove a negative - which is very hard to do because by definition it suffers from a lack of evidence. This is particularly strange with a source like Tacitus. Generally speaking, given our knowledge of Tacitus and his methods and how widely his word was accepted at the time, we would accept his account unless there is a very good reason not to do so - in this case, that would have to be some hard evidence such as archaeology or an account by a reliable eyewitness. With Goebbels, of course, it would be different and you assume his public pronouncements are lies unless you have hard and irrefutable evidence to support them (if he had claimed rain was wet in a release for the Deutsches Nachrichten-Buro, I would want a 50 page submission signed by 300 FRS proving that empirically, liquid precipitation is indeed moist before accepting it).

That was why I thought, and still think, that it is very relevant that Professor Shaw appears to have almost a pro-pagan and certainly an anti-Christian outlook in his previous work. I'll close this comment with the words of the finest lecturer I ever had, Peter Lambert, a dogmatic Marxist atheist; 'We all have biases. In your work, you should tell people what they are right at the start so they can allow for them as they read.'

If you are interested in a much more erudite and thorough discussion of the issues than I can mange, may I recommend Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, as an excellent starting point and very easy to read?