1st & 2nd C writers who missed Christianity

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MrMacSon
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1st & 2nd C writers who missed Christianity

Post by MrMacSon »

.
There were plenty of 1st and 2nd century historians or authors who might have mentioned early Christianity or Jesus of Nazareth, but didn't

The emperor Claudius (10bc - 54ad) was noted for writing a lot, such as a treatise on Augustus' religious reforms, and felt himself in a good position to institute some of his own. He had strong opinions about the proper form for state religion.
  • Claudius's major works included Tyrrhenica, a twenty book Etruscan history, and Carchedonica, an eight volume history of Carthage, as well as an Etruscan dictionary ... he penned a defense of Cicero against the charges of Asinius Gallus. Modern historians have used this to determine the nature of his politics and of the aborted chapters of his civil war history.
  • Seneca the Elder (d. ~39ad), a historian who noted various aspects of Claudius's attitudes to, & activities for & against, various religions
  • Suetonius quotes Claudius' autobiography once and must have used it as a source numerous times.
  • Tacitus uses Claudius' arguments for the orthographical innovations [the old custom of putting dots between successive words (Classical Latin was written with no spacing)] and may have used him for some of the more antiquarian passages in his Annals.
  • Pliny-the-Elder used Claudius as the source for numerous passages in Natural History.


Philo (d ~50ad) mentions mentions Pontius Pilate in the Embassy to Caligula/Gaius 299-305 in relation to Caligula's plan to erect a statue of himself in the temple of Jerusalem when describing the sufferings of the Alexandrian Jews, and Jews more widely, and asking the emperor to secure their rights
  • Somewhat separately, some scholars hold that his concept of the Logos as God's creative principle influenced early Christology.
Cluvius Rufus (fl. 60s ad) Annales (at least to 67 AD)

Quintus Asconius Pedianus (c. 9 BC – c. AD 76)

Pliny the Elder (d. 79 AD.), On the German Wars, Annales



Pamphile or Pamphila of Epidaurus, Sth Greece (Greek: Παμφίλη η Επιδαύρια, Pamfíli i Epidávria; Latin: Pamphila; fl. ad 1st century), was a historian who lived in the reign of Nero. Her principle work was the Historical Commentaries, a history of Greece comprising thirty-three books. Photius considers the work as one of great use, and supplying important information on many points in history and literature. The estimation in which it was held in antiquity is shown not only by the judgement of Photius, but also by the references to it in the works of Aulus Gellius and Diogenes Laërtius, who appear to have availed themselves of it to a considerable extent.



Mucianus served as governor of Syria in 69AD and was the author of a memoir, chiefly dealing with the natural history and geography of the East, a text often quoted by Pliny the Elder as the source of 'miraculous occurrences'.



Josephus 37 ad - ~100 ad born in Jerusalem, then part of Roman Judea, son of Matthias, an ethnic Jewish Priest and a mother who claimed royal Hasmonean ancestry. Josephus's paternal grandparents were supposedly direct descendants of Simon Psellus, and he supposedlu descended through his father from the priestly order of the Jehoiarib, which was the first of the 24 orders of priests in the Temple in Jerusalem.

At the outbreak of the First Jewish-Roman War, Josephus was appointed the military Jewish governor of Galilee.

One would think Josephus would have known about early Christianity and to have written about it if it had been a rising religion.



Plutarch (c. AD 46 – AD 120; later named, upon becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, Λούκιος Μέστριος Πλούταρχος) was a Greek biographer and essayist, known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia. He is classified as a Middle Platonist. Plutarch's surviving works were written in Greek.



Tacitus c. 56 AD – c. 120 AD Histories, Annals
  • Of course, Annals 15.44 is well-known, but not without doubt. It's a pity parts of Book 5 are missing.

Suetonius (c. 69 - after 122 AD) Lives of the Caesars

Claudius 25 refers to the expulsion of Jews by Claudius. The Ihm's Latin version:
  • Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis Roma expulit
(in Edwards' translation):
  • "Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome."
Nero 16 states:
  • "During his reign many abuses were severely punished and put down, and no fewer new laws were made: a limit was set to expenditures; the public banquets were confined to a distribution of food; the sale of any kind of cooked viands in the taverns was forbidden, with the exception of pulse and vegetables, whereas before every sort of dainty was exposed for sale. Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition. He put an end to the diversions of the chariot drivers, who from immunity of long standing claimed the right of ranging at large and amusing themselves by cheating and robbing the people. The pantomimic actors and their partisans were banished from the city."

Florus (c. 70 - c. 140 ad?) 'Military history of Rome to Augustus' in 2 books



Granius Licinianus (fl. 120 ad?) History of Rome

Appian of Alexandria (c. 95 - c.165ad)
  • Roman History in 24 books
  • 'Roman wars from the beginnings to Trajan'
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Re: 1st & 2nd C writers who missed Christianity

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Thallus, via wikipedia (Greek: Θαλλός) was [supposedly] an early historian who wrote in Koine Greek. He [supposedly] wrote a three-volume history of the Mediterranean world from before the Trojan War to the 167th Olympiad, c. 112-109 BC. Most of his work, like the vast majority of ancient literature, has been lost, although some of his writings were [supposedly] quoted by Sextus Julius Africanus (d. 240ad) in his Chronographiai: a history of the world in five volumes that covers the period from Creation to the year AD 221. Chronographiai, in turn, is no longer extant.
  • ..copious extracts from Chronographiai are [supposedly] found in the Chronicon of Eusebius, who [allegedly] used it extensively in compiling the early episcopal lists. There are [said to be] fragments in George Syncellus, Cedrenus and the Chronicon Paschale. Eusebius gives some extracts from his letter to one Aristides [in] reconciling the apparent discrepancy between Matthew and Luke in the genealogy of Christ by a reference to the Jewish law of Levirate marriage, which compelled a man to marry the widow of his deceased brother, if the latter died without issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextus_Ju ... s#Writings
Thallus' works are considered important by some Christians because they believe them to confirm the historicity of Jesus and provide non-Christian validation of Gospel accounts. A reference to an eclipse, attributed to Thallus, has been taken as a mention of the worldwide darkness described in the Synoptic gospels account of the death of Jesus, although an eclipse could not have taken place during Passover .. (a common view in modern scholarship is that the crucifixion darkness is a literary creation rather than a historical event).
  • The 9th-century Christian chronologer George Syncellus cited Sextus Julius Africanus as writing in reference to the darkness mentioned in the synoptic gospels as occurring at the death of Jesus:
    • "On the whole world there pressed a most fearful darkness; and the rocks were rent by an earthquake, and many places in Judea and other districts were thrown down. This darkness Thallus, in the third book of his 'History', calls, as appears to me without reason, an eclipse of the sun."
    Africanus [allegedly] pointed out that an eclipse cannot occur at Passover when the moon is full & therefore diametrically opposite the Sun.



and See https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Thallus
  • All of the works of Africanus are lost, so there is no way to confirm the reference or to examine its context. We have no idea who Thallus was, or when he wrote.

    Based on the Armenian translation of Eusebius (which preserves references not in the Greek version) one of his sources was ‘three volumes of Thallus, in which he made a summary in abbreviated fashion from the sack of Troy (1184 BCE) to the 167th Olympiad (which ended in July, 109 BCE)’. But to get this to fit the Jesus story one has to conclude the numerals in the Armenian translation are corrupt with many scholars claiming that the 167th Olympiad should really be either the 207th Olympiad (ending in July, 52 CE) or the 217th Olympiad (which ended in July, 92 CE),[3]

    [There are] four options:
    • (i) Africanus meant Phlegon, not Thallus; or

      [ii] Eusebius quoted Thallus verbatim, revealing that Thallus did not mention Jesus; or

      [iii] Thallus mentioned Jesus, but wrote in the 2nd century, when we know the gospels were already in circulation; or

      [iv] Thallus mentioned Jesus and wrote in the 1st century, and is the earliest witness to the gospel tradition.
    Although all of these are possible, it is clear that any of the first three are more likely than the last one, since there are several facts which support each of them, but none which support the last one --in other words, it is a "mere" possibility, whereas the others actually have some arguments in their favor."[5]


    In a journal article Richard Carrier noted
    • "All we are told is that ‘Thallus calls this darkness an eclipse of the sun in the third book of his Histories’... That inference may derive from Julius Africanus."
    and
    • ".. we can conclude that to a very high probability the passage in the third book of the Histories of Thallus that Julius Africanus was referring to said only this: ‘The sun was eclipsed; Bithynia was struck by an earthquake; and in the city of Nicaea many buildings fell’...

      "This would also argue for the conclusion that Thallus wrote after Phlegon (whose work is usually dated between 120 and 140 ce), as the line being quoted from Thallus appears to be an abbreviation of Phlegon, repeating the exact same sequence of eclipse of the sun, earthquake in Bithynia, and collapsed buildings in Nicaea, just with the details stripped away."
    and concluded "The curtness and brevity of this line is also what would be expected from a treatise that covered the history of the entire world over the enormous course of twelve centuries in only three scrolls. Whereas, by contrast, refutation of claims made in the literature of obscure cults is what would not be expected from such a treatise, there being neither room nor purpose for such a thing. Therefore the Histories of Thallus probably contained no such thing. And from the evidence of Eusebius, we can be virtually certain that it did not. Therefore Thallus should be removed from lists of writers attesting to Jesus, and Thallus’s most probable floruit should be revised to the middle to late second century."

    Carrier, Richard (2011–12) "Thallus and the Darkness at Christ's Death" Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 8; 185-91



and http://www.doxa.ws/Jesus_pages/HistJesus5.html
  • "Thallus ([allegedly] a Samaritan-born historian who lived and worked in Rome about A.D. 52) wrote [about a] supernatural element [said to have] accompanied the crucifixion. Though the writings of Thallus are lost to us, Julius Africanus, a Christian chronographer of the late second century, [is said to have been] familiar with them and [to have] quoted from them. In a comment on the darkness that fell upon the land during the crucifixion (Mark 15:33), Africanus says that "Thallus, in the third book of his histories, explains away this darkness as an eclipse of the sun" [F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents, Eerdmens, p. 113.]. Africanus stated his objection to the report arguing that an eclipse of the sun cannot occur during the full moon, as was the case when Jesus died at Passover time. The force of the reference to Thallus is that the circumstances of Jesus' death were known and discussed in the Imperial City as early as the middle of the first century.

    Will Durant observed that Thallus' "argument took the existence of Christ for granted." [Will Durant, Caesar and Christ, Simon and Schuster, p. 555.] ... Durant summed up the matter of Christ's historical existence for himself by saying that it never occurred to the early opponents of Christianity to deny the existence of Jesus. [Ibid].

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Re: 1st & 2nd C writers who missed Christianity

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My mother died without knowing who The Weeknd is ... and my mother's house is less than 15 minutes from his. Explain that. I went to Steven Page's Bar Mitzvah and went to school with him and Ed Robertson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woburn_ ... _Institute but she never had a clue who the Barenaked Ladies were.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
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Re: 1st & 2nd C writers who missed Christianity

Post by neilgodfrey »

Secret Alias wrote: Sun Sep 17, 2017 9:26 pm My mother died without knowing who The Weeknd is ... and my mother's house is less than 15 minutes from his. Explain that. I went to Steven Page's Bar Mitzvah and went to school with him and Ed Robertson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woburn_ ... _Institute but she never had a clue who the Barenaked Ladies were.
There's a fallacy in this comparison that should be fairly obvious with a moment's reflection. If your mother was one of a number of writers of some note who demonstrated in their works a knowledge of a world that would entitle readers to expect her to know of certain musicians....
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Re: 1st & 2nd C writers who missed Christianity

Post by Paul the Uncertain »

Not necessarily just to Neil, but here I am quoting him
There's a fallacy in this comparison that should be fairly obvious with a moment's reflection. If your mother was one of a number of writers of some note who demonstrated in their works a knowledge of a world that would entitle readers to expect her to know of certain musicians....
There's a curious irony in Jesus Talk. We can't apply the criterion of embarrassment because we don't know what would embarrass the writers. We can apply the "these people wrote about other things" heuristic because ... what? We can know what would most interest those writers?

We are not discussing idle curiosity or cranking out a twice weekly column. Bandwidth was a scarce resource at the time of interest. We are discussing not investigating and then writing about something else, because just hearing those stories about Jesus and how he will, future tense, be really-really important, must have been so fascinating to anybody who wrote about things that had already shaped the fates of nations and the lives of their living audience.

Whatever is balonious about the embarrassment heuristic is balonious about this heuristic, too.
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Re: 1st & 2nd C writers who missed Christianity

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MrMacSon wrote: Sun Sep 17, 2017 3:04 pmThere were plenty of 1st and 2nd century historians or authors who might have mentioned early Christianity or Jesus of Nazareth, but didn't

The emperor Claudius (10bc - 54ad) was noted for writing a lot, such as a treatise on Augustus' religious reforms, and felt himself in a good position to institute some of his own. He had strong opinions about the proper form for state religion.
  • Claudius's major works included Tyrrhenica, a twenty book Etruscan history, and Carchedonica, an eight volume history of Carthage, as well as an Etruscan dictionary ... he penned a defense of Cicero against the charges of Asinius Gallus. Modern historians have used this to determine the nature of his politics and of the aborted chapters of his civil war history.
  • Seneca the Elder (d. ~39ad), a historian who noted various aspects of Claudius's attitudes to, & activities for & against, various religions
  • Suetonius quotes Claudius' autobiography once and must have used it as a source numerous times.
  • Tacitus uses Claudius' arguments for the orthographical innovations [the old custom of putting dots between successive words (Classical Latin was written with no spacing)] and may have used him for some of the more antiquarian passages in his Annals.
  • Pliny-the-Elder used Claudius as the source for numerous passages in Natural History.
Out of curiosity, how does one know that Claudius did not mention Christianity, when not one of his compositions survives? The quotations of his work mentioned above must comprise a scant fraction of a fraction of his overall output.
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Re: 1st & 2nd C writers who missed Christianity

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How much did some writers know and write about?
Sepphoris in Galilee is mentioned often in (surviving) rabbinic literature, but there is no mention of the huge amphitheater there, now excavated.
Some rabbis probably knew about Essenes, but would not call them by that (positive, self-designation) name, and apparently made only disapproving allusions.
The death date of Philo of Alexandria is not known; guesses vary widely. It is likely that the word "Christianity" did not exist in his lifetime. His knowledge of Hebrew was vanishingly small. In Philo's large surviving output he mentions a trip to the Jerusalem temple only once (On Providence 2.64).
Famously, Philo (like Pliny the Elder) mentioned Essenes but did not name Sadducees or Pharisees, who surely existed in his lifetime. I think Philo and Pliny had sources on Essenes ("Posidonius, Strabo, and Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa as Sources on Essenes," J. of Jewish Studies 45,2 (1994) 295-298.
While Philo did not name Sadducees and Pharisees, he may have alluded to them. Philo in Every Good Man is Free sections 88-91 describes two types of disapproved rulers in Palestine Syria. Though he doesn't name them, one type sounds, from the pro-Essene perspective, like the cruel rulers of Palestine Syria, Sadducee-influenced ones, like Jannaeus the "lion of wrath" (Alexander was also specifically disapproved of by Strabo), and the other, like lying flatterers, Pharisee-influenced ones (like "seekers of smooth things").
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Re: 1st & 2nd C writers who missed Christianity

Post by arnoldo »

MrMacSon wrote: Sun Sep 17, 2017 3:04 pm
Philo (d ~50ad) mentions mentions Pontius Pilate in the Embassy to Caligula/Gaius 299-305 in relation to Caligula's plan to erect a statue of himself in the temple of Jerusalem when describing the sufferings of the Alexandrian Jews, and Jews more widely, and asking the emperor to secure their rights
FWIW, this author states that the Pauline writer(s) was addressing teachings based on Philo of Alexandria in certain writings.

https://books.google.com/books?id=aDbaq ... lo&f=false
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Re: 1st & 2nd C writers who missed Christianity

Post by MrMacSon »

Ben C. Smith wrote: Mon Sep 18, 2017 5:00 am
Out of curiosity, how does one know that Claudius did not mention Christianity, when not one of his compositions survives? The quotations of his work mentioned above must comprise a scant fraction of a fraction of his overall output.
Yes, good point. But, in the context of the narrative that Christianity grew fairly quickly through the 1st century and into the early 2nd century, one would think if someone like Claudius had documented it someone would have reproduced, preserved, or referred to that.
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Re: 1st & 2nd C writers who missed Christianity

Post by MrMacSon »

StephenGoranson wrote: Mon Sep 18, 2017 5:50 am
How much did some writers know and write about?

Sepphoris in Galilee is mentioned often in (surviving) rabbinic literature, but there is no mention of the huge amphitheater there, now excavated.

Some rabbis probably knew about Essenes, but would not call them by that (positive, self-designation) name, and apparently made only disapproving allusions.
One thing I omitted to mention in the OP is references to Jesus in rabbinic or other Jewish literature -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_the_Talmud
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