Van Der Lans & Bremmer on first uses of the name Christians

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MrMacSon
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Van Der Lans & Bremmer on first uses of the name Christians

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Selected passages from Van Der Lans' & Bremmer's 2017 paper 'Tacitus and the Persecution of the Christians: An Invention of Tradition?' -

How significant is it that Pliny, Suetonius and Cassius Dio do not refer to Christians when they describe the Fire or mention the event in passing? ...
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Does Tacitus’ anachronistic use of the term Chrestiani for a group that was supposedly not sufficiently distinctive yet to be blamed for the Fire make the persecution historically implausible?13 ... Tacitus’ description of the Chrestiani as a baleful superstitio draws on early second-century perceptions of the new movement ...

https://www.academia.edu/35878331/Tacit ... 17_303-333

13 Shaw (89): “Christians, who were probably not called or even known by this name at the time, were hardly a sufficiently distinctive group within the Jewish communities at Rome in the 60s to be noted for their own peculiar identity, much less a well-known group under this name and recognized as such by the ordinary inhabitants of the city.” Tacitus’ account is often taken as an indication that by 64 Christians had moved away from Jewish circles: L 1993; L 2003, 16; S 2004; T 2012, 276–280.

... the name Christians is especially frequent in works directed to outsiders, rhetorical or not, be they pagans (Aristides, Diognetus and Athenagoras) or Jews (Justin Martyr). Before that time the Christians used other terms to denote themselves, such as “the Way”,101 “the believers”, “the saints” or “God’s people”.102



APPENDIX

the term [Christian] first appears in papyri in the earlier third century, becomes more popular only after AD 250 and is still rare as a self-identification in the fourth century.91 In inscriptions the term first turns up in Phrygia in the first half of the third century,92 even if in varying spellings, such as Chreistianos, Chrestianos, and Christianos93 ...


Although the term Christian appears in the last decades of the second century in the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Peter,95 the term does not appear in the writings of Paul, 1 Clement, the Apocalypse of Peter and Tatian, and is still fairly rare in Irenaeus and Hippolytus.96 The name Christian is more popular in the Apology of Aristides (2,2; 15–17: time of Hadrian), and in Ignatius,97 but both writers make explicit that Jesus’ followers are called Christians, rather than using the name in a self-evident manner.98 Justin Martyr needs the term in his dialogue with Tryphon to distinguish the Christians from the Jews, but he also lets the latter speak of “the so-called Christians” (λεγομένων Χριστιανῶν; 35,1; see also 80,3) as does Athenagoras (ἡμεῖς δὲ οἱ λεγόμενοι Χριστιανοί: 1,3). In the Letter of Diognetus, which probably dates from the earlier second half of the second century,99 the term occurs often, but given the apologetic genre of the Letter this might not come as a surprise.


...[the name Christian] is especially frequent in works directed to outsiders, rhetorical or not, be they pagans (Aristides, Diognetus and Athenagoras) or Jews (Justin Martyr). Before that time the Christians used other terms to denote themselves, such as “the Way”,101 “the believers”, “the saints” or “God’s people”.102
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Now the impression of the term Christiani being an outsider designation in the beginning is strengthened by our last two examples, the famous notices about the term Christian in the Acts of the Apostles ... the first example conforms to what we have already often seen, namely, that the use of the term Χριστιανός is attributed to an outsider, in this case King Agrippa (Acts 26,8), the second example is more informative but also much debated. Here the author tells us: “and it was in Antioch that the disciples were called Christians for the first time” (χρηματίσαι τε πρώτως ἐν Ἀντιοχείᾳ τοὺς μαθητὰς Χριστιανούς: 11,26).106 The notice raises two important problems. First, what is the exact meaning of χρηματίσαι and, second, what is the exact meaning of Χριστιανούς?
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... it [is] hard to understand why it would have taken so long for the name Christian to become the accepted self-designation of the early followers of Christ, if the followers themselves had coined the term at such an early stage in the movement.
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DCHindley
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Re: Van Der Lans & Bremmer on first uses of the name Christians

Post by DCHindley »

Birgit van der Lans is so much more than "another pretty face" (I refer to her academia.edu icon).

Her scholarship is very impressive.

Look at her other articles posted at academia.edu, and be prepared to download several of them.

DCH
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MrMacSon
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Re: Van Der Lans & Bremmer on first uses of the name Christians

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The authors note [p. 3022] -
Brent Shaw recently denied the persecution altogether. He argues that “an attack on Christians by Nero, either in connection with the Great Fire or otherwise” (91) rests on data that is poor in quantity and quality (74).5 Instead, he proposes that the notion of a Neronian persecution of Christians is based on “written or oral sources” in which “the figure of Nero had somehow (our italics) come to be connected with Christians and then, in turn, Christians were linked to the guilty persons who had had severe punishments inflicted upon them in the aftermath of the Great Fire” (93).

... After assessing the importance of some of the objections advanced by Shaw and others (§ 1), we pay closer attention to the question as to how the different reports function in their literary and historical contexts in Tacitus (§ 2) and the earliest Christian sources (§ 3), and we conclude with a new analysis of the name “Christian” (Appendix*).

https://www.academia.edu/35878331/Tacit ... 17_303-333
  • see the Opening Post.
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