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The claim about "scholarly consensus" in paragraph 3 of the lead is supposedly backed by three citations. Of these, the first is by an "evangelical scholar and author", the second by authors belonging to the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion, and the third by the recently appointed Head of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. The miracle would be if these particular individuals didn't find evidence in Tacitus that Jesus existed! JezGrove ( talk) 23:21, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
Bart Ehrman (who is an agnostic atheist) says that extra-biblical evidence for Jesus is pretty lame, but that it is virtually certain that Jesus existed. So, no, usually speaking Tacitus does not provide conclusive evidence that Jesus existed. The existence of Jesus is asserted by WP:MAINSTREAM WP:SCHOLARSHIP on other grounds. Tgeorgescu ( talk) 10:55, 16 January 2020 (UTC)
"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", and it is clear to any good faith reader that under "passage" he means Tacitus text in Annals starting "Et haec quidem humanis con..." and ending with "curriculo insistens. Unde quamquam adversus sontes et novissima exempla meritos miseratio oriebatur, tamquam non utilitate publica sed in saevitiam unius absumerentu". That is the very same passage that mentions Christ (but not Jesus), and it is the only non-Christian source (except Josephus) that mentions Christ.
I still believe you are acting in a good faith, so I am explaining, hopefully, for the last time, my point. I expect your counter-arguments to contain references to concrete flaws in my arguments presented below. Your general statements (similar to the ones presented above) will be considered as an attempt to derail a discussion.
Et haec quidem...and ends with
saevitiam unius absumerentur.On the pages 81-82, Shaw continues: "
When was Tacitus composing these words? (...) And what sources might Tacitus have had?My conclusion, these two questions relate to the whole fragment, and Shaw assumes that Tacitus used the same sources for the whole passage, including the mention of execution of Christ.
In short, there is no known sign of any lost sources for histories that covered the reign of Nero to indicate where Tacitus would have found the facts about Christians that are retailed in our passage, or anything to controvert the observed fact that the first mentions of the Christians by this name in Latin sources are those made by the younger Pliny and Tacitus.Clearly, Shaw's words allow no double interpretation: he speaks not only about Neronian persecution, but about any mention of Christians in Latin sources. His conclusion is that Tacitus and younger Pliny are the two written Latin sources that mention Christians, and there is no indication that Tacitus could have gotten this information from any written source.
The historian could simply consult Acta senatus, as we know that he frequently did. And Tacitus had at his disposal, and used, oral sources, and in this case items of information being conveyed in conversation by his contemporaries might well have been the most significant.But that is just a possibility, which Shaw discusses in the "What actually happened" section.
emphasis on the Christians and the execution of their leader under Pontius Pilatus, so, again, he speaks about the whole passage) become available to Tacitus only after he finished his Historiae (
a different kind of information had come to the historian's attention in the years after he wrote The Histories.)
Ermenrich already told you that this talk page is wp:notaforum and asked you to make a suggestion for changing the article or drop the matter. Yet you continue to make the same repetitive and WP:TENDENTIOUS arguments here that have been fully answered. It is you who are being disruptive. Smeat75 ( talk) 19:35, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
In my opinion, the section is messy, and the content should be reorganized as follows.
The opinia on authenticity and historical value of the passage form a broad spectrum. One group pf authors (Bart Ehrman et al) conclude that the passage was written by Tacitus (presumably in 110s), and it reflects historical realities of late Neronian times (60s). The second group of authors (Shaw et al) agree that the passage is authentic, but they conclude that is was written based on the information that became available to Tacitus in 110s (probably some early Christian verbal testimony), and, therefore, it does not reflect historical realities of 60s, so its historical value is limited. The third group of authors (Carrier et al) conclude that that passage is a later interpolation.
In my opinion, this scheme looks logical, and it summarises all existing opinia. Any comments?-- Paul Siebert ( talk) 20:32, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
Sir Ronald Syme is widely considered the authority on Tacitus; he literally wrote the book on that historian -- Tacitus, 2 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957). When I read papers & monographs on the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, I find Sir Ronald's works are routinely cited for his erudition & insights. The bibliography of the article in the Oxford Classical Dictionary on Tacitus begins with this book. Turning to the book itself, one can clearly see that he has carefully studied the historian, his works, & the subject matter of his works. Tacitus ends with 95 appendices on numerous details of both Tacitus' works & their contents: 19 of these appendices are devoted to subjects such as "Words Tacitus Avoids", "Words only in Speeches", "The Vocabulary of the Annales", "Sallustian Language". So it would follow that Sir Ronald's opinion on this matter would carry weight.
It would be far too simple to find him declaring straightforwardly, "This passage is not a later interpolation. Tacitus wrote every word himself." In fact, Sir Ronald does not address the point directly. Instead, the matter arises obliquely after raising the issue of Christianity in Tacitus' contemporary 2nd century. At the time Tacitus was writing his Annales, we find our first independent mentions of Christianity: Pliny's famous letter to Trajan about what to do about them; Hadrian's rescript to the proconsul Minicius Fundanus a decade later about the Christian question; & between the two, Tactius was proconsul of Asia, a stronghold of Christianity. Thus on p. 469 he writes concerning Book 15, chapter 44: "The historian Tacitus, carefully noting an incident at Rome in the sequel of the great conflagration under Nero, registers the origin of 'Christiani' with documentary precision" -- & cites in the original Latin the passage about the death of Christ at the hands of Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius in a footnote. Sir Ronald Syme clearly has no doubts about the authenticity of the entire passage.
Sir Ronald adds a second footnote observing that the passage "is not on only relevant to Nero and the fire at Rome -- it has a place in the economy of the whole work as one of a series of spaced incidents, the culmination being the Jewish insurrection of 66." For the scholar of the Classics is constantly alert to show us how Tacitus structures his work to deliver his message. (A tactic Sir Ronald himself uses in this book.) "How was Cornelius Tacitus to evince his mastery, blending and transmuting?" Sir Ronald opens his chapter "The Technique of Tacitus". "His principal devices are structure, digression, comment, and speeches." (p. 304) In other words, every word in this passage can be shown to serve a purpose in conveying Tacitus' message; there is none of the clumsiness or falseness that betrays the hand of another writer.
Since Ronald Syme's opinions are as a rule embraced by other experts on the period, it would be accurate to say that his assumption the entire passage is free of interpolations is the consensus opinion. So Tacitus must have written the names Christus (or Chrestus), Tiberius, & Pontius Pilate in the same passage.
But Paul Siebert claims that were he "a person with no preliminary knowledge on this subject, and I wanted to familiarize myself with how Tacitus' fragment on Christ is seen in modern sources, I would go to jstor.org and typed [sic] 'tacitus christ'." He claims that the first article he encountered was the article by Carrier in Vigiliae Christianae; but when I repeated the exercise, the first article I encountered was one by A. Kampmeier, "Josephus and Tacitus on Christ", The Monist, vol. 21, No. 1 (JANUARY, 1911), pp. 109-119 -- which is what anyone who does not have a JSTOR account will encounter first. And Kampmeier in this article makes the opposite argument Carrier makes. So I'd venture that JSTOR is not a reliable guide to expert consensus.
But isn't what Tacitus actually wrote a matter for experts on editing ancient texts? I don't have that training, I doubt Carrier has that training (in his article he relies to the work of others to argue an interpolation exists). And scholarly editions of Tacitus' Annales have been published by Oxford, Cambridge, Teubner, & other presses of high repute. What do they report as the preferred text of this passage? And reviewers in the expert periodicals will note if their text varies too far from what is expected. This is where any discussion in good faith of what Tacitus wrote would begin.
But this is not what Paul Siebert has done. Instead, he has asserted his own grounds for argument. That anyone who believes Jesus Christ/Jesus/Joshua ben Joseph existed is not a reliable source. (Ignoring the fact that Richard Carrier is an advocate for the Christ Myth theory.) That Tacitus may be unreliable in this instance. (Ignoring that when his writing is compared to independent sources, such as the Lyon Tablet or the Senatus Consultum de Pisone, Tacitus is shown to be very reliable.) He appears to be repeating the tactics of I don't hear that that led to becoming a topic at WP:AN/I, & further led him to a topic ban. A disinterested reader would be baffled at reading his arguments above: first he argues that Annales 15.44 has an interpolation; when people respond to that point, he replies "Please, stay focused" & argues that Tacitus is an unreliable source; when people respond to that point, he claims he has been subjected to a personal attack, & now argues that there was never a Neronian persecution; when people try to keep up, he then announces "I expect to get concrete counterarguments, not just general references to some alleged 'consensus'." And when I'm alerted to this discussion, he claims to me that because he's winning this argument his opponents have resorted to using his "ridiculous topic ban" to frustrate his victory.
This has gone beyond I don't hear that. This is a very sophisticated version of Randy in Boise, arguing that since we can't prove this passage in Tacitus hasn't been altered, it must be. Then shifts the goal posts on everyone else to keep us debating on his terms, apparently hoping to tire us out & get his way with the article. This is not a good-faith debate. As a result, I'm banning Paul Siebert from editing or commenting on any article or talk page related in any way to this one, at risk of the usual sanctions. Including this page & talk page. If Paul Siebert does not like that ban, he can take it to WP:AN/I & complain. -- llywrch ( talk) 07:33, 18 January 2020 (UTC)
Is there anything reliable about why this is missing the critical vowel?-- 174.99.238.22 ( talk) 15:08, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
Are there no greek or other contemporary translations, surviving corpora, that can confirm or refute the passage? It (the tone of the passage) smells really fishy but I believe that it can probably be determined at least to what extent the whole text is transmitted as written originally by Tacitus, a first century elite Latin author. Text analysis even without a surviving contemporary corpus should be able to determine that the same as is done with for example old testament books, the Q source, etc. Lycurgus ( talk) 00:34, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
It seems this article has already attracted a lot of... emotions; this is why I am starting a new topic here. I hope discussions here will be more rational and to the point, instead of being about various personal beliefs and ideologies.
@ Ermenrich said above: "I don't think anyone will disagree that the section is poorly organized." Well, I don't disagree either. I have a proposal for reorganising it: A first section about the authenticity debate (or rather consensus, as far as I can tell), and a second one about historical value given authenticity. I think much of the "poor organization" is because these two topics are mixed up.
Is there any objection to this? Do you people think my proposal is reasonable?
More generally, do you think there are other things we could improve to this article? Corneille pensive ( talk) 15:58, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Tacitus on Jesus article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1, 2, 3Auto-archiving period: 21 days |
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The claim about "scholarly consensus" in paragraph 3 of the lead is supposedly backed by three citations. Of these, the first is by an "evangelical scholar and author", the second by authors belonging to the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion, and the third by the recently appointed Head of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. The miracle would be if these particular individuals didn't find evidence in Tacitus that Jesus existed! JezGrove ( talk) 23:21, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
Bart Ehrman (who is an agnostic atheist) says that extra-biblical evidence for Jesus is pretty lame, but that it is virtually certain that Jesus existed. So, no, usually speaking Tacitus does not provide conclusive evidence that Jesus existed. The existence of Jesus is asserted by WP:MAINSTREAM WP:SCHOLARSHIP on other grounds. Tgeorgescu ( talk) 10:55, 16 January 2020 (UTC)
"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", and it is clear to any good faith reader that under "passage" he means Tacitus text in Annals starting "Et haec quidem humanis con..." and ending with "curriculo insistens. Unde quamquam adversus sontes et novissima exempla meritos miseratio oriebatur, tamquam non utilitate publica sed in saevitiam unius absumerentu". That is the very same passage that mentions Christ (but not Jesus), and it is the only non-Christian source (except Josephus) that mentions Christ.
I still believe you are acting in a good faith, so I am explaining, hopefully, for the last time, my point. I expect your counter-arguments to contain references to concrete flaws in my arguments presented below. Your general statements (similar to the ones presented above) will be considered as an attempt to derail a discussion.
Et haec quidem...and ends with
saevitiam unius absumerentur.On the pages 81-82, Shaw continues: "
When was Tacitus composing these words? (...) And what sources might Tacitus have had?My conclusion, these two questions relate to the whole fragment, and Shaw assumes that Tacitus used the same sources for the whole passage, including the mention of execution of Christ.
In short, there is no known sign of any lost sources for histories that covered the reign of Nero to indicate where Tacitus would have found the facts about Christians that are retailed in our passage, or anything to controvert the observed fact that the first mentions of the Christians by this name in Latin sources are those made by the younger Pliny and Tacitus.Clearly, Shaw's words allow no double interpretation: he speaks not only about Neronian persecution, but about any mention of Christians in Latin sources. His conclusion is that Tacitus and younger Pliny are the two written Latin sources that mention Christians, and there is no indication that Tacitus could have gotten this information from any written source.
The historian could simply consult Acta senatus, as we know that he frequently did. And Tacitus had at his disposal, and used, oral sources, and in this case items of information being conveyed in conversation by his contemporaries might well have been the most significant.But that is just a possibility, which Shaw discusses in the "What actually happened" section.
emphasis on the Christians and the execution of their leader under Pontius Pilatus, so, again, he speaks about the whole passage) become available to Tacitus only after he finished his Historiae (
a different kind of information had come to the historian's attention in the years after he wrote The Histories.)
Ermenrich already told you that this talk page is wp:notaforum and asked you to make a suggestion for changing the article or drop the matter. Yet you continue to make the same repetitive and WP:TENDENTIOUS arguments here that have been fully answered. It is you who are being disruptive. Smeat75 ( talk) 19:35, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
In my opinion, the section is messy, and the content should be reorganized as follows.
The opinia on authenticity and historical value of the passage form a broad spectrum. One group pf authors (Bart Ehrman et al) conclude that the passage was written by Tacitus (presumably in 110s), and it reflects historical realities of late Neronian times (60s). The second group of authors (Shaw et al) agree that the passage is authentic, but they conclude that is was written based on the information that became available to Tacitus in 110s (probably some early Christian verbal testimony), and, therefore, it does not reflect historical realities of 60s, so its historical value is limited. The third group of authors (Carrier et al) conclude that that passage is a later interpolation.
In my opinion, this scheme looks logical, and it summarises all existing opinia. Any comments?-- Paul Siebert ( talk) 20:32, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
Sir Ronald Syme is widely considered the authority on Tacitus; he literally wrote the book on that historian -- Tacitus, 2 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957). When I read papers & monographs on the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, I find Sir Ronald's works are routinely cited for his erudition & insights. The bibliography of the article in the Oxford Classical Dictionary on Tacitus begins with this book. Turning to the book itself, one can clearly see that he has carefully studied the historian, his works, & the subject matter of his works. Tacitus ends with 95 appendices on numerous details of both Tacitus' works & their contents: 19 of these appendices are devoted to subjects such as "Words Tacitus Avoids", "Words only in Speeches", "The Vocabulary of the Annales", "Sallustian Language". So it would follow that Sir Ronald's opinion on this matter would carry weight.
It would be far too simple to find him declaring straightforwardly, "This passage is not a later interpolation. Tacitus wrote every word himself." In fact, Sir Ronald does not address the point directly. Instead, the matter arises obliquely after raising the issue of Christianity in Tacitus' contemporary 2nd century. At the time Tacitus was writing his Annales, we find our first independent mentions of Christianity: Pliny's famous letter to Trajan about what to do about them; Hadrian's rescript to the proconsul Minicius Fundanus a decade later about the Christian question; & between the two, Tactius was proconsul of Asia, a stronghold of Christianity. Thus on p. 469 he writes concerning Book 15, chapter 44: "The historian Tacitus, carefully noting an incident at Rome in the sequel of the great conflagration under Nero, registers the origin of 'Christiani' with documentary precision" -- & cites in the original Latin the passage about the death of Christ at the hands of Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius in a footnote. Sir Ronald Syme clearly has no doubts about the authenticity of the entire passage.
Sir Ronald adds a second footnote observing that the passage "is not on only relevant to Nero and the fire at Rome -- it has a place in the economy of the whole work as one of a series of spaced incidents, the culmination being the Jewish insurrection of 66." For the scholar of the Classics is constantly alert to show us how Tacitus structures his work to deliver his message. (A tactic Sir Ronald himself uses in this book.) "How was Cornelius Tacitus to evince his mastery, blending and transmuting?" Sir Ronald opens his chapter "The Technique of Tacitus". "His principal devices are structure, digression, comment, and speeches." (p. 304) In other words, every word in this passage can be shown to serve a purpose in conveying Tacitus' message; there is none of the clumsiness or falseness that betrays the hand of another writer.
Since Ronald Syme's opinions are as a rule embraced by other experts on the period, it would be accurate to say that his assumption the entire passage is free of interpolations is the consensus opinion. So Tacitus must have written the names Christus (or Chrestus), Tiberius, & Pontius Pilate in the same passage.
But Paul Siebert claims that were he "a person with no preliminary knowledge on this subject, and I wanted to familiarize myself with how Tacitus' fragment on Christ is seen in modern sources, I would go to jstor.org and typed [sic] 'tacitus christ'." He claims that the first article he encountered was the article by Carrier in Vigiliae Christianae; but when I repeated the exercise, the first article I encountered was one by A. Kampmeier, "Josephus and Tacitus on Christ", The Monist, vol. 21, No. 1 (JANUARY, 1911), pp. 109-119 -- which is what anyone who does not have a JSTOR account will encounter first. And Kampmeier in this article makes the opposite argument Carrier makes. So I'd venture that JSTOR is not a reliable guide to expert consensus.
But isn't what Tacitus actually wrote a matter for experts on editing ancient texts? I don't have that training, I doubt Carrier has that training (in his article he relies to the work of others to argue an interpolation exists). And scholarly editions of Tacitus' Annales have been published by Oxford, Cambridge, Teubner, & other presses of high repute. What do they report as the preferred text of this passage? And reviewers in the expert periodicals will note if their text varies too far from what is expected. This is where any discussion in good faith of what Tacitus wrote would begin.
But this is not what Paul Siebert has done. Instead, he has asserted his own grounds for argument. That anyone who believes Jesus Christ/Jesus/Joshua ben Joseph existed is not a reliable source. (Ignoring the fact that Richard Carrier is an advocate for the Christ Myth theory.) That Tacitus may be unreliable in this instance. (Ignoring that when his writing is compared to independent sources, such as the Lyon Tablet or the Senatus Consultum de Pisone, Tacitus is shown to be very reliable.) He appears to be repeating the tactics of I don't hear that that led to becoming a topic at WP:AN/I, & further led him to a topic ban. A disinterested reader would be baffled at reading his arguments above: first he argues that Annales 15.44 has an interpolation; when people respond to that point, he replies "Please, stay focused" & argues that Tacitus is an unreliable source; when people respond to that point, he claims he has been subjected to a personal attack, & now argues that there was never a Neronian persecution; when people try to keep up, he then announces "I expect to get concrete counterarguments, not just general references to some alleged 'consensus'." And when I'm alerted to this discussion, he claims to me that because he's winning this argument his opponents have resorted to using his "ridiculous topic ban" to frustrate his victory.
This has gone beyond I don't hear that. This is a very sophisticated version of Randy in Boise, arguing that since we can't prove this passage in Tacitus hasn't been altered, it must be. Then shifts the goal posts on everyone else to keep us debating on his terms, apparently hoping to tire us out & get his way with the article. This is not a good-faith debate. As a result, I'm banning Paul Siebert from editing or commenting on any article or talk page related in any way to this one, at risk of the usual sanctions. Including this page & talk page. If Paul Siebert does not like that ban, he can take it to WP:AN/I & complain. -- llywrch ( talk) 07:33, 18 January 2020 (UTC)
Is there anything reliable about why this is missing the critical vowel?-- 174.99.238.22 ( talk) 15:08, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
Are there no greek or other contemporary translations, surviving corpora, that can confirm or refute the passage? It (the tone of the passage) smells really fishy but I believe that it can probably be determined at least to what extent the whole text is transmitted as written originally by Tacitus, a first century elite Latin author. Text analysis even without a surviving contemporary corpus should be able to determine that the same as is done with for example old testament books, the Q source, etc. Lycurgus ( talk) 00:34, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
It seems this article has already attracted a lot of... emotions; this is why I am starting a new topic here. I hope discussions here will be more rational and to the point, instead of being about various personal beliefs and ideologies.
@ Ermenrich said above: "I don't think anyone will disagree that the section is poorly organized." Well, I don't disagree either. I have a proposal for reorganising it: A first section about the authenticity debate (or rather consensus, as far as I can tell), and a second one about historical value given authenticity. I think much of the "poor organization" is because these two topics are mixed up.
Is there any objection to this? Do you people think my proposal is reasonable?
More generally, do you think there are other things we could improve to this article? Corneille pensive ( talk) 15:58, 4 April 2023 (UTC)