andrewcriddle wrote: ↑Tue Jul 25, 2017 10:45 am
The article accepts that the references to Christians in the time of Nero in Suetonius and Tacitus are both authentic (in the sense that Suetonius and Tacitus both wrote the passages). If so this prima-facie implies that there was a group named Christians (or Chrestians ) in Nero's Rome. It is unlikely that Suetonius and Tacitus are being independently anachronistic here.
Some have argued that the Christians (or Chrestians ) under Nero were different from what we mean by Christians but this does not seem to be what the article is proposing.
Andrew Criddle
I think there are several subsequent texts that suggest the development of narratives around Nero that were resulted in concrete narratives that were then framed as if they had happened in Nero's moral time on earth.
After Nero's death, he was, in certain groups and places (especially the eastern Provinces), expected to return; the Nero redivivus legend.
(Suetonius, LVII.1; Tacitus,
Histories II.8; Dio, LXVI.19.3).
Eastern sources, namely Philostratus II and Apollonius of Tyana, mention that Nero's death was mourned as he "restored the liberties of Hellas with a wisdom and moderation quite alien to his character"[162] and that he "held our liberties in his hand and respected them."
Modern scholarship generally holds that, while the Senate and more well-off individuals welcomed Nero's death, the general populace was "loyal to the end and beyond, for Otho and Vitellius both thought it worthwhile to appeal to their nostalgia."
Suetonius relates how court astrologers had predicted Nero's fall but that he would have power in the East (XL.2). And, indeed, at least three false claimants did present themselves as Nero redivivus (resurrected). The first, who sang and played the cithara or lyre and whose face was similar to that of the dead emperor, appeared the next year but, after persuading some to recognize him, was captured and executed (Tacitus, II.8). Sometime during the reign of Titus (AD 79-81) there was another impostor who appeared in Asia and also sang to the accompaniment of the lyre and looked like Nero but he, too, was exposed (Dio, LXVI.19.3). Twenty years after Nero's death, during the reign of Domitian, there was a third pretender. Supported by the Parthians, who hardly could be persuaded to give him up (Suetonius, LVII.2), the matter almost came to war (Tacitus, I.2). Such fidelity no doubt can be attributed to the magnificent reception (and restoration of Armenia) that Tiridates, the brother of the Parthian king, had received from Nero in AD 66 (Dio, LXII.1ff).
While the legend of Nero's return lasted for hundreds of years after Nero's death (Augustine of Hippo wrote of the legend as a popular belief in 422), he also became narrated as the antiChrist.
In the Christian version of the non-canonical
Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah (late first century AD), Nero is the anti-Christ ushering in the end of the world. In an interpolation, the so-called Testament of Hezekiah, Isaiah prophesies the end of the world, when Beliar (Belial) the Antichrist will manifest himself as the incarnation of the dead Nero.
Beliar will perform miracles and seduce the followers of Christ until, at the Second Coming,
- "the Lord will come with his angels and with the hosts of the saints from the seventh heaven, and will drag Beliar, and his hosts also, into Gehenna [the figurative equivalent of hell]."
Nero also possesses the attributes of the Antichrist in the Sibylline Oracles, a collection of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic verses attributed to the prophecies of the ancient Sibyl, who identifies herself as a native of Babylon (III.786; also Lactantius,
Divine Institutes, I.6) and a daughter (or daughter-in-law) of Noah (III.808ff). In Oracle V, which dates to the late first or early second century AD, Nero has become a resurrected and demonic power symbolic of Rome, itself.
- "One who has fifty as an initial [the Hebrew letter "N"] will be commander, a terrible snake [the serpent or dragon], breathing out grievous war....But even when he disappears he will be destructive. Then he will return declaring himself equal to God" (V.28ff).
Here, Nero is manifested as the Antichrist, "that man of sin [lawlessness]...who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God...shewing himself that he is God" (II Thessalonians II.3-4).
The Sibyl presents Nero both as king of Rome (Oracle V, 138ff) and the means of God's retribution in destroying it (365). A matricide and megalomaniac, who presumed to cut through the isthmus of Corinth and was perceived as responsible for the destruction of the Jewish Temple in AD 70, Nero "will come from the ends of the earth" (363) as a champion of the East and an instrument of God's punishment. He will overthrow tyrants and "raise up those who were crouched in fear" (370) before falling in a final battle against the West. Then there will be peace and "no longer will anyone fight with swords or iron or with weapons at all" (382ff). In this expectation, as in Oracle IV (119ff, 1137ff) and Oracle VIII (70ff, 153ff), one perceives the hope raised by the False Neros among the oppressed provinces of the East.
In canonical Revelation, of course, Nero appears as the beast whose number is 666. In the apocalyptic Revelation of John, Nero is the second beast who, through miracles and the threat of death, compels the worship of the first beast. Moreover, the second beast marks everyone with its own mark, without which "no man might buy or sell" (Rev 13:17). "Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six" (Rev 13:18). The riddle seems to have been forgotten almost as soon as it was written and not solved until 1835 ... see
http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... 908#p71908
Tacitus narrated a false Nero in
Histories 2.
Nero’s reputation as the first persecutor of Christians emerged in this atmosphere.
The Histories were written a few years before the Annals, by about 110, and Tacitus had there discussed Judea without mentioning Christianity. Pliny sponsored Suetonius, who likely was on his staff in Bithynia. Pliny and Tacitus were friends. Tacitus’s term as proconsul of Roman eastern Asia Minor 112-3 could have overlapped with Pliny’s term in Bithynia.
The notion of the Neronian persecution has also provided a location in time for the deaths of Sts. Peter and Paul in Rome, about which Acts of the Apostles and Scripture generally are entirely silent. But if there wasn’t one, then they died under other circumstances?
We need to recognize that ancient Christians were as prone as their pagan peers, and even as their modern successors, to devise fiction to fill in gaps of what we know about the past. A sharp distinction between fiction and documentary history is itself a modern construction.
Authors have variably argued that "We read the lives of the Cæsars: at Rome Nero was the first who stained with blood the rising faith" in Scorpiace 15 is referring to the passage in Nero 16, the Annals 15.44 passage, or to both passages.
See
http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... f=3&t=3265
tbc