Reformed Baptist Josh Sommer has attempted to rebut my peer reviewed paper on the Testimonium Taciteum in Suetonius and Tacitus: Christians or Chrestians? The paper he is talking about is “The Prospect of a Christian Interpolation in Tacitus, Annals 15.44,” which I published in Vigiliae Christianae in 2014 as part of my funded post doc research on the historicity of Jesus, but it’s available, along with all my other peer reviewed papers in history, in my book Hitler Homer Bible Christ.

That paper’s conclusions are also summarized, added to, and contextualized in my peer reviewed book, the capstone of that grant-funded research project, On the Historicity of Jesus. Which also treats of the case of Suetonius, which Sommer also botches in this same article.

By the time I produced OHJ, I found that in the end it doesn’t matter whether the passage in Tacitus is authentic or not. It still adds no probability to the historicity of Jesus, as it evinces no awareness of any independent sources. In all probability, in fact, Tacitus would have only gotten his information (directly or indirectly) from Christians, who took it in turn from the Gospels. It therefore only evinces the Gospels were circulating in the early 2nd century, which we already knew. This does nothing to corroborate anything in those Gospels. It doesn’t even support the conclusion that Christians in the 60s A.D. were preaching that version of the creed; as Tacitus does not say he learned that fact from any source of that period, rather than from Christians of this own time. And unknowns, remain unknowns. To argue otherwise is ad ignorantiam.

Because one cannot argue to a probability, from a possibility. That’s a possibiliter fallacy. As here, though it is “possible” Tacitus had other sources or checked them somehow, we have no evidence he did. Nor, honestly, that he even would—the claim was embarrassing enough to someone as unimpressed by Jewish martyrdom theology; Tacitus, yet another notorious recorder of unverified gossip he liked (as even the great Michael Grant would document), hardly needed break a sweat confirming it. So we can’t argue that it’s “probable” he did. The mere possibility is therefore useless. And yet, this fallacy is what Sommer relies on quite a lot. That, and ignoring all other evidence and argument bearing on his conclusion. Like all Christian apologetics: their conclusion reverses, the moment you put back in, all the evidence they leave out.

A Possibiliter Fallacy

Sommer argues it’s “possible” Tacitus wrote “Chrestianos” because he read Christians written as Chrestians in some source, due of a common mistake in conflating the two letters in Greek (and we know many actual examples of that: a fact I already mentioned earlier in my own paper on this subject: n. 327 in Hitler; p. 377 in Vigiliae). But that that is possible, is not an argument that it is probable. To the contrary, as I point out, this requires assuming ad hoc that Tacitus also wrote Chrestus, and that this was corrected to Christus separately sometime before a later scribe corrected Chrestians to Christians in our present manuscript. Otherwise, Tacitus would not think “Christus” explained the name “Chrestianos.” Moreover, I list many other reasons to doubt this is what Tacitus meant—all of which Sommer ignores. Leaving out evidence. Christian apologetics 101.

A Circular Argument

Sommer says “We know of no other Jewish leader who may have been named Chrestus with followers called Chrestians.” This is a circular argument. Because it illogically assumes Suetonius did not mean what he plainly says in his passage where he mentions in fact a Jewish leader named Chrestus who instigated riots in Rome under Emperor Claudius, which is the 50s A.D., twenty years after the Gospels claim the Christian Jesus was killed—and in Judea, not Rome. You can’t just assume that, in order to argue that’s not what Suetonius meant.

Obviously, the conclusion that Tacitus might have meant followers of the Jewish rebel leader Chrestus follows from the fact that Suetonius records the existence of just such a person. And Latin entails the followers of such a person would be named Chrestiani, just as supporters of Brutus the assassin of Caesar were called Brutiani. Sommer wants to argue that Suetonius also meant Christ, so he can therefore erase mention of the Jewish leader, and the rioters following him, that Sommer wants you to think there wasn’t a record of. But that is not what the text plainly says; so Sommer has to labor up a convoluted argument to get Suetonius to have meant something other than what he plainly said. Whereas I’m building my hypothesis directly on the evidence as it is. No circular presumptions required.

Replacing Actual Facts with Implausible Scenarios

Sommer argues “In Suetonius we see the name ‘Chrestus’ being used in relation to Jews making disturbances” while “Tacitus says this disturbance was fabricated by Nero’s administration in order to find a scapegoat for the fires.” Suetonius, “then, makes perfect sense if we look at what else Tacitus says.” This is false. It makes zero sense. Quite the opposite of “perfect sense.”

• Suetonius mentions no connection between Nero, Christians, and the burning of Rome.
• Suetonius (at least in the text we now have) mentions that Nero persecuted Christians. He also discusses Nero’s connections to the burning of Rome. He never connects the two, nor discusses them anywhere near each other.
• Suetonius does not just use the name Chrestus “in relation to Jews making disturbances.” That’s a deceptive way to word the matter, which conceals all the evidence against Sommer’s theory.
• Suetonius says Chrestus was himself, the man, the instigator of disturbances.
• …and of riots, not arson.
• Suetonius makes no connection at all between this Chrestus and any fire, much less the burning of Rome, which Suetonius devotes a whole other section to elsewhere in the biography of Nero.
• Suetonius never mentions whom Nero accused or punished for the burning of Rome. He only mentions Chrestus as a rioter whose acts were punished by Claudius, and in his biography of Claudius, not Nero.
• Suetonius says this literally in the Latin: it says Chrestus is the man who instigates; not the idea that instigates or the object of instigation.
• Suetonius does not say this man lived in Judea in the 30s A.D. He says this man was alive in Rome in the 50s A.D. In no possible way can this be a description of the Christian Jesus.
• Suetonius describes Jews, not Christians, being punished for riots started by Chrestus. Suetonius, though knowing what Christians are (as he mentions Nero persecuting them), evinces no knowledge of any connection between this disturbance and Christianity.
• Suetonius does not mention Nero persecuting Chrestians. Only Christians. And not in connection with the burning of Rome. Whoever Suetonius had read Nero punished for that fire, Suetonius fails to tell us. So no assumptions can be made about who he thought it had been.

On top of all that (yet already Sommer’s absurdly presumptive apologetics is looking ridiculous), I adduce a great deal more evidence than this in my paper for Vigiliae. All of which Sommer ignores. Because in point of fact, all Christian sources, and there are many, on Nero’s persecution of Christians do not exhibit any knowledge of any connection between that and the burning of Rome. Some in fact explicitly exclude any such connection, all referring simply to the execution of Peter and Paul and some of their acquaintances. The Acts of Peter outright narrates this event without any mention of the fire or charges of arson at all.

Outside this passage in our manuscript of Tacitus, the first we hear of any connection between the burning of Rome and the Neronian persecution is a fourth century Christian forgery of a letter from Seneca to Paul, in which Christians are added to the Jews as the actual targets of that event. In other words, even the Latin forger of this letter had no knowledge of the Tacitean account, and instead seemed to know of some other account in which it was the Jews were were scapegoated and killed by Nero, and then simply added that the Christians were swept up along with them. No other source, not even any of the other Christian sources, nor even our version of Tacitus, makes such a claim. This includes another text that could not have failed to mention this if Tacitus had, because it actually uses this passage in Tacitus as a literary model! (Read my article: I adduce quite a list of examples.)

So when do we first hear of anyone having ever read Tacitus saying Christians were punished by Nero, finally eclipsing any mention of Jews? Near the end of that same fourth century. Do the math. No one had ever heard of Tacitus saying this, not even numerous Christian authors using Tacitus as a source or discussing, even narrating, the Neronian persecution, until centuries later, and a lifetime or more after Christians started circulating a forged letter from Seneca adding Christians to the Jews it was apparently instead believed Nero had scapegoated for the fire.

So how is it reasonable to read back into Suetonius, what not only Suetonius never says, but what no one ever said, not even all the many Christians who wrote about the Neronian persecution?

Put back in context, all of the actual evidence I adduced in my article Sommer claims to be rebutting, and does Sommer’s alternative reading of Suetonius make any sense? Not at all. Quite the opposite of making perfect sense, it’s just bonkers.

Worse than that…

Bearing False Witness

Violating his own cherished Ten Commandments, Sommer says in reference to the Neronian punishment of arsonists in 64 A.D., “This would be the same disturbance Suetonius was referring to.” Except…Suetonius never mentions any disturbance. None. So how can it be “the same” disturbance?

Sommer seems to have conflated Suetonius saying that Nero, at some point in his reign, punished Christians—but mentions no actual event or act they were being punished for (no “disturbance” at all, much less setting the imperial capital on fire, hardly a trivial fact to omit), but instead only their holding of superstitious beliefs—and Suetonius saying that Claudius, not Nero, a decade before, punished followers of Chrestus for a “disturbance” that was not a fire, but a riot, and for which the punishment was not execution, but mere expulsion from the city, and of Jews, not Christians; and again, this was not Nero who did this, nor in the same decade. So how can Suetonius have been referring to “the same disturbance” as Tacitus, in either passage? Crickets. Sommer just made this up. Fake evidence out of whole cloth. Christian apologetics 201.

So when Sommer argues the complete silence of all sources including numerous, even Christian sources, on this connection between Christians and the burning of Rome, “is only” persuasive “if one first assumes Tacitus and Suetonius aren’t referring to Christians,” he is relying on having tricked his readers into thinking Suetonius said something about Nero punishing some group for the burning of Rome. Suetonius never says any such thing. Not of Christians. Or of anyone. So even Suetonius is completely silent on the fact, which is extra weird. Not least as he is writing just a few years after Tacitus published the Annals. Suetonius was the imperial librarian, hardly someone who could have failed to read the Annals.

It’s similarly dishonest of Sommer to claim “there’s no positive reason to think Tacitus was talking about anything else,” as I adduce numerous positive reasons to think so. Even beyond what Sommer and I have mentioned here. Seriously. Read my paper on this.

Dorking Out

Sommer then complains that the passage in Tacitus does not make sense with the key line about Christ removed. But totally dorks out by failing to notice his own argument persuades against the line being there! “What superstition” is Tacitus talking about, Sommer asks. “Without the commentary about Christus who was executed by Pilate, there is no superstition.” But…um…there is no superstition with the commentary about Christus. Read the line. It just says a guy was executed in Judea. That is not a superstition. In fact, Tacitus never mentions what superstition this was, or what was superstitious about it. Even on Sommer’s reading of the text.

If it were persuasive that Tacitus must have described the superstition before he spoke of it, then this suggests the line about Christ may be a forgery. A forgery that replaced some other line, one that actually did describe the superstition Tacitus was talking about. So there are only two ways to go here: Sommer just gave us another reason the Christus line might be inauthentic, because something was deleted from the text in its place, or his argument isn’t valid; that in fact, Tacitus wouldn’t be any more likely to describe what the superstition was on either the authenticity or inauthenticity of the text as we have it. Which means, no matter what, Sommer’s argument is trashed.

Dork.

Of course, my argument in my paper was that Tacitus did describe this superstition: in his account of the Chrestus riots discussed by Suetonius under the reign of Claudius. That section of the Annals is lost. So when Tacitus says “the Chrestians” who “were hated for their crimes” were “a superstition” that was “put down for a time” (referring to the expulsion of Chrestians by Claudius) but “flared up again,” Tacitus assumes the reader has read his previous volume on Claudius and thus knows who these Chrestians are and what “abominations” they were known for, as Tacitus will have said so there. By contrast, “their leader was executed” does not explain any of this—how is that a “superstition”? What “crimes” (plural) were they hated for? How were they “put down up to now”? My theory explains all this. Sommer’s does not.

Clueless Remarks

Sommer similarly objects to the point that it is somewhat less likely that there would be, already so early, “an immense multitude” of Christians in Rome for Nero to execute for a whole day and night as Tacitus describes, by claiming “The Christian population didn’t even have to be significant for Nero to have addressed it.” Obviously missing the point that the Christian population did have to be significant for Tacitus to describe it as “an immense multitude” (my actual point) and for it to take a whole day and night to kill them all in a public theatrical involving numerous forms of execution. Whereas the number of Jews in the city, indeed with rebel aspirations, would certainly have been immense. This alone is not a conclusive argument. It just adds to the pile. Sommer doesn’t even get it.

Sommer then seems to think that when Pliny says he improvised punishments for Christians because he knew nothing of what crime they had committed, and says this even half a century after the time of Nero, that this is evidence that Christianity was specifically outlawed, indeed even in Nero’s day. That’s irrational. Pliny explicitly says he made up punishments, and his actions scholars agree entail he had decided to punish Christians for illegal assembly, concluding their unwillingness to engage an act of patriotism to the state and renounce their illegal association was grounds enough to convict. And he did this solely because they had some reputation Pliny wasn’t privy to, and that he says he only later found out seemed undeserved. The Emperor Trajan agreed, ordering persecution to stop.

The evidence is clear and universally agreed by all experts: Pliny attests Christianity as such was not outlawed, and Roman officials weren’t really that bothered by it. At most Christians could be tried for other crimes, like illegal assembly. But most Roman officials didn’t care that much about it to bother. We all know now, that Christian tales of state persecution were largely fictions. So what did the Christians do before 64 that led the whole people of Rome to openly loathe them as horrific villains? It begs credulity to imagine. Whereas it is immediately explained if Tacitus meant the followers of Chrestus, whom Suetonius records led such destructive riots in Rome just ten years before as to provoke Claudius to expel hordes of Jews from the city.

Sommer then makes a false statement about Latin grammar. He argues that when Tacitus uses the imperfect tense to say the people “called” the offenders Christians, he can mean present tense. That’s not true without clear contextual modifiers, which are not present in this passage. Sommer says:

It’s in the imperfect tense which is used to indicate a past action or state which has happened in the past, and continues to happen frequently. It’s normal, Tacitus says, for these people to be called Chrestians, both in the past and at present.

This is not correct. Here is a correct analysis of the Latin imperfect. Here is a more detailed analysis, showing that it only ever has present meanings in highly specific contexts not relevant to this passage in Tacitus. If you check a proper grammar, like Gildersleeves, you’ll find the imperfect only takes the meaning Sommer suggests when context makes clear that’s the case. For instance, in compound sentences, akin to the one we are talking about, “The imperfect is used to express an action continued into the time of the principal clause” (Gildersleeves § 562). What is the time expressed in the principal clause? The past (Nero’s decision). Not the present.

The grammar does not entail Tacitus thought the action (of naming) had ceased; but it also does not express that fact either. It rather, instead, says that the people “used to” call these people Chrestians, up to the moment Nero decided to hound them. Whether they continued to thereafter, Tacitus does not say. Which is peculiar, if in fact Tacitus knew Christians remained a going concern, or indeed only learned of their name from present lore and not his source on the fire. Which most likely would have been Pliny the Elder, whose history Tacitus employed (indeed for the very same volume, as he mentions Pliny as his source just a few sections later, in Annals 15.54), whom we know can’t have mentioned Christians in his eyewitness account of Nero’s actions after the fire, as then his son and nephew Pliny the Younger (as we just saw) would not have to write to Trajan asking what Christians believed, did, and were guilty of, since the younger Pliny obsessively read and admired his father’s works.

Finally, Sommer makes the absurd and completely baseless claim that Christians didn’t record and thus didn’t remember any events that happened to them in the first century, thus explaining why none ever heard of this fire or how Christians were killed by Nero for it, because “Scripture actually doesn’t allow the random adopting of ‘Christian tradition’.” He evidently forgot about the entire New Testament, up to and including the Book of Acts, which consists of nothing but “random adopting of Christian tradition” from the first century—unless he aims to suggest that was all fake. Early in the second century, Papias reveals Christians also loved gossiping about their past. So how would they not be gossiping about this?

Sommer also forgot 1 Clement, who relates the death of Peter in Rome, and so clearly did know what happened and assumed the Corinthians all did too, so much so that he assumed the tradition was widely known in the Christian community, so well he had no need to relate it, and knew they already knew it was true. Yet Clement indicates nothing of an arson charge nor any connection to the burning of Rome. Nor does anyone after Clement who would have inherited the same tradition he and the Corinthians well knew. Meanwhile everyone in the second century appears to know about Nero’s persecution, as numerous Christians mention it, and indeed as if it was well understood what happened, yet none of them know of any connection to arson or the burning of Rome, or even of “an immense multitude” being involved.

In fact, they appear all to be referring instead to an extensive Christian narrative of the Neronian persecution called the Acts of Peter, in which there is nothing to do with arson or the burning of Rome. Even as a complete fiction, how could Christians fictionalize the famous deaths of Peter and Paul and not include what the famous circumstances were known to be? Unless, in fact, that’s not what they were known to be. And how could that not be known? How could Clement not have known it? How could the Corinthians he wrote to not? And if they knew, how could any subsequent Christians not know? Including Christians who were readers of Tacitus, and even used his account of the burning of Rome as a literary model? The probability is simply extraordinarily low. It begs all credulity. But Christians like Sommer remain superbly credulous. Because one thing they never seem to understand well at all, is probability.

Conclusion

In trying to recover Tacitus and Suetonius as evidence for the historicity of Jesus, Josh Sommer relies on fallacies and dishonest misrepresentations and omissions of evidence to get a conclusion completely contrary to the obvious facts. That’s Christian apologetics for you. Try reading my actual article instead. Then compare that to his bogus argumentation, which omits nearly everything I argue, and nearly all the evidence I adduce, and indeed even corrects his gross errors of fact (be they accident or lies). And then decide what makes the most sense.