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Tacitus suggested that Nero used the Christians as scapegoats. [17] As with almost all ancient Greek and Latin literature, [18] no original manuscripts of the Annals exist. The surviving copies of Tacitus' major works derive from two principal manuscripts, known as the Medicean manuscripts, which are held in the Laurentian Library in Florence ...
Non-Christian sources that are used to study and establish the historicity of Jesus include Jewish sources such as Josephus, and Roman sources such as Tacitus. These sources are compared to Christian sources such as the Pauline Epistles and the Synoptic Gospels. These sources are usually independent of each other (i.e., Jewish sources do not ...
Publius Cornelius Tacitus, [note 1] known simply as Tacitus (/ ˈ t æ s ɪ t ə s / TAS-it-əs, [2] [3] Latin: [ˈtakɪtʊs]; c. AD 56 – c. 120), was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians by modern scholars.
Largely made up of wooden tenements, fire was a frequent occurrence in the city. Rumor blamed the tragedy on the unpopular emperor Nero, who wanted to enlarge his palace. He accused the Christians. According to the historian Tacitus, many Christians were put to death "not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind." [3]
The surviving copies of Tacitus' major works derive from two principal manuscripts, known as the Medicean manuscripts, which are held in the Laurentian Library. The second of them (Plut. 68.2), as the only one containing books xi–xvi of the Annales, is the oldest witness to the passage describing Christians.
Tacitus's contemporaries were well-acquainted with his work; Pliny the Younger, one of his first admirers, congratulated him for his better-than-usual precision and predicted that his Histories would be immortal: only a third of his known work has survived and then through a very tenuous textual tradition; we depend on a single manuscript for books I–VI of the Annales and on another one for ...
Roman historian Tacitus referred to "Christus" and his execution by Pontius Pilate in his Annals (written c. AD 116), book 15, chapter 44. [189] [note 9] The very negative tone of Tacitus' comments on Christians makes most experts believe that the passage is extremely unlikely to have been forged by a Christian scribe.
According to Tacitus, Nero used Christians as human torches The Victory of Faith, by Saint George Hare, depicts two Christians in the eve of their damnatio ad bestias. According to Jacob Neusner, the only religion in antiquity that was persistently outlawed and subject of systematic persecution was not Judaism, but Christianity. [15]