Years ago as part of my postdoc research for On the Historicity of Jesus I published a peer reviewed article in Vigiliae Christianae presenting the case (advanced under peer review by a few other scholars before me) that the single line about “Christ” in the Annals of Tacitus was never originally there, and only came to be added by a copyist sometime in the fourth century A.D. I there argued the whole persecution passage was originally about an unrelated group of messianic Jews associated with a Jewish Roman agitator named Chrestus. That article is reproduced, complete with added mathematical appendix, in my anthology Hitler Homer Bible Christ.

Recently a response piece was published, also in VC, by Willem J. C. Blom, titled “Why the Testimonium Taciteum Is Authentic: A Response to Carrier” 17.5 (2019). Here is my evaluation of it.

First, Suetonius

It’s important to the awkwardly elaborate alternative thesis Blom wants to sell that he rehabilitate Suetonius’s passage about Chrestus as somehow about Jesus (“Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome, since they were always making disturbances because of the instigator Chrestus,” Life of Claudius 25.4). So he first spends half the paper on that. He correctly outlines my case there as follows:

According to Carrier, it is improbable that this passage is about Jesus Christ. His first argument is that Acts does not relate the expulsion of the Jews by Claudius to Christianity and depicts Jews at Rome knowing little about Christianity (Acts 28:17-28). His second argument is that Suetonius writes that the riots were instigated by Chrestus himself, although Jesus cannot have been in Rome in 49 AD.

… His [additional] arguments are: 1) No other source—even Acts—mentions that the expulsion has to do with Christians. 2) Suetonius knew who Christians are and would not have referred to them as Jews and would not have written “because of the instigator Chrestus” but “because of the Christians”. 3) The text says “Chrestus”, not “Christ”; Chrestus was a common name. 4) Claudius would have expelled the Christians, not the Jews, because the Jews had a protected legal status. 5) The word “instigator” refers to the person who performs the act (i.e., making disturbances) and not to someone who is dead.

Of course, he thinks all of these arguments are “unconvincing.” But when we get to hear why he doesn’t find them convincing, what we get is not sound historical argumentation, but what looks a lot like Christian apologetics—elaborate rationalizations in a desperate attempt to “explain away” all the evidence, a technique that logically actually reduces the probability of your conclusion, not increases it (see my demonstration of this in respect to God apologetics here). If the field of history had any idea why any of its own arguments are logically valid at all (and as David Hackett Fischer points out, it doesn’t), apologetic tactics like that would not pass peer review. Alas. But we have to work with what we have. So here goes.

• “It is logical that the book of Acts does not indicate that Claudius expelled the Jews because of the Christians, because that would have shown Christianity in a bad light.”

This is 100% false. Quite to the contrary, this incident exactly fits the entire apologetic framework of Acts: those mean Jews making trouble for Christians, and the Romans punishing the Jews for it. This would have been gold for the author of Acts. It is well nigh impossible he wouldn’t use this most juicy proof of his entire theme that the Romans always side with the Christians and punish the Jews in such incidents.

Of course, even were that not the case, the more obvious thing the author of Acts would do if Blom’s hypothesis were true is not mention the expulsion at all. Thus Blom has not explained why Acts actually bothers even to mention it. But it’s all the worse that Blom has also not explained why Acts, whose entire narrative theme is to portray Romans always punishing the Jews for their meddling with Christians, does not capitalize on a historical event that (on Blom’s own theory) literally shows Romans punishing the Jews for their meddling with Christians.

What should have nixed this in peer review is the fact that I already made this point in the VC article Blom is responding to. That Blom ignores and does not respond to and in fact even makes a statement entirely discredited by the actual article he is supposed to be answering should definitely call upon any peer reviewer to insist he address the actual argument contradicting him before accepting his paper for publication. I can only suppose his peer reviewers did not read, or re-read, my paper to evaluate the merits of Blom’s argumentation before giving it a pass.

Lest you be unsure about this, here is what I wrote that Blom is supposed to be responding to:

In fact not even Acts (cf. 18:2) shows any awareness of this expulsion being connected to Christians, yet the author of Acts would certainly have made use of the fact that the Jews were making trouble for Christians in Rome and were duly punished for it by the emperor, so we can be fairly certain no such thing occurred (and thus no such rhetorical coup was available to the author of Acts).

You can compare this with what Blom attempts in reply. He belabors a whole paragraph in the original article on his apologetic, but at no point does he even attempt any answer to my actual argument. And yet my argument is entirely correct: it is a demonstrable fact that Acts repeatedly exploits exactly that theme, and that on Blom’s theory (that Jews were rioting over Christianity) this incident exactly matches that design and thus could not possibly not have been exploited to the very same end. The only explanation with any probability is that the author of Acts didn’t know Christians were in any way involved in the incident. Which evinces the fact that they weren’t (as Suetonius could hardly be better informed about that than a Christian story-collector).

An even weaker point Blom makes at this point is that, “In contrast to what Carrier writes, Orosius does relate the event to Christians, although he is an untrustworthy source,” which answers itself: he is not a trustworthy source. He is also a near-medieval source, writing in the fifth century, so not even a relevant ancient source. So why bring it up? In fact, Orosius incorrectly says the event is also recorded in Josephus; and in his text the word in Suetonius is altered from Chrestus to Christus, at which Orosius says he is mystified why Christ would even be in that passage, as “no one can say whether the emperor ordered the Jews to be restrained and repressed because they were creating disturbances against Christ or whether he wished the Christians to be expelled at the same time on the ground that they were members of an allied religion” (Histories against the Pagans 7.6.15-16). In other words, Orosius was simply misled by a corrupted text he can’t explain the sense of, and had no other information to go on.

Blom also incorrectly states that this mention existing in Orosius is something I omitted (“In contrast to what Carrier writes”). In fact I actually mentioned and discussed the Orosius passage, multiple times in my article. Such directly false claims about the article he is responding to definitely should never have passed peer review. Blom does not mention any of the arguments I made about Orosius, nor respond to them. I don’t know what Blom’s religious affiliation is, but this kind of dishonest misrepresentation and “omission” and avoidance of arguments (which Blom has already done now twice) typifies Christian apologetics.

For Blom’s next argument I will have to numerate his points myself in brackets, so we can more easily refer back to them:

• “Suetonius was familiar with Christians. This statement is quite likely, although [1] it does not mean that Suetonius could not have regarded Christians as Jews. However, when writing about an expulsion of the Jews, [2] Suetonius refers to what Claudius did, not to his own view on the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Furthermore, the information in this brief line on the expulsion of the Jews [3] may rather reflect the way in which Suetonius’ source viewed the affairs, without much revision by Suetonius.”

Argument [1] is a non sequitur. Since Suetonius knows Christians are either distinct from Jews or a distinctive subset of Jews (as Blom himself admits), he would not have said “Chrestus” but “Christians” if what he meant was Christians. Because nowhere has Suetonius explained any link between a Chrestus (or even Christus) and Christians. Blom’s theory is thus contrary to all known ancient historiographic practice, including the established tendencies of Suetonius. Thus Blom’s theory renders the evidence as we have it quite unusual and unexpected, and thus rather improbable. Which is precisely what I point out in my article. So once again Blom isn’t even responding to my arguments. (It is possible Suetonius never mentioned Christians at all, per OHJ, pp. 348-49, but for obvious reasons Blom does not attempt that argument here.)

Argument [2] is another non sequitur. Suetonius was a historian. Historians explain things. The issue is not that Suetonius would opinionize about the event. The issue is that he would correctly and intelligibly describe the event—much more probably than not. Even briefly. On Blom’s theory, Suetonius is not doing that. The evidence we have is therefore improbable on Blom’s theory. Whereas it is 100% exactly what we expect on mine. Once again Blom never responds to this, my actual argument.

Argument [3] is yet another non sequitur. If Suetonius didn’t know what his source was saying about Chrestus, he would not have included mention of him. He’d just have listed an expulsion of the Jews for rioting. Whereas if Suetonius did understand what this business about Chrestus meant in terms of explaining the event, Suetonius would have related it—if it was anything more that what he is plainly saying, that a guy named Chrestus instigated this stuff. In other words, just as Suetonius knew to say Nero punished “Christians,” not “some Jews,” he would know to say Claudius expelled some Jews over “Christians,” not “because of the instigator Chrestus,” unless even Suetonius’s source did not mention any connection to Christians either, which is precisely my point, not Blom’s. Blom is thus expecting Suetonius to act as ancient historians, Suetonius included, did not typically act. He is thus making the evidence less likely, not more so. This is very typical of Christian apologetics, which often resorts to ill-thought-out ad hoc excuses for things, that grate against all known evidence of usual practice.

Next Blom says:

• “Chrestus was a common Greek name. However, among Jews, this name is never attested. On the other hand, the relation between Christ/Christians and Chrestus/Chrestians is well-established.”

This is a misleading statement, suggestive of a logical error. Over a hundred men are attested as named Chrestus—whose status as being or not being a Jew is not known. It was a particularly common name for slaves and freedmen (it means “Handy”), and a great many slaves in Rome were Jews. It was also a common name for Easterners; where Jews predominately came from. We cannot expect their status as Jews would always accompany any mention of them. This was not Nazi Germany where they all wore armbands identifying themselves and no one would dare omit their ignominious religious interests upon even a casual mention of them. So it is not logically valid to say “we have no confirmation of a Jew named Chrestus, therefore it’s unlikely any Jew would ever be named Chrestus.”

Indeed, that’s a circular argument: it presumes that no Jews were ever named anything unless we have an attestation confirming a Jew had that name; but if we had such an attestation they would no longer be in the category of named Jews who weren’t also specified as Jews. This circular reasoning would thus prevent you recognizing any Jew of any name, lest they conveniently, by chance, come with an additional mention that they were Jewish. If you think this through, you’ll realize how illogical this reasoning is. There is no causal correlation between “what name a Jew has” and “his being identified as a Jew.” So no such inference can proceed.

As I put it once before:

This is a common apologetic line, but it’s baseless. We do not know the ethnicity, much less the religion, of every person bearing the name Chrestus on any extant artifact (of which, including literature and papyri, there are more than a hundred surviving examples…), much less every person so named (it’s a non sequitur to think every name any Jew ever went by is represented in extant materials, or that no Jews, particularly leaders of resistance movements, took unique names—indeed, we have dozens of examples of uniquely named Jews), so this “not one” claim is hogwash. And honest experts wouldn’t be chucking hogwash like this.

And as I further add, “In actual fact countless Jews adopted Greek names throughout the ancient period, particularly slaves who had such names forced on them.” So Blom’s inference is wholly illogical.

It is true though that the confusion of spelling Blom mentions existed, but that’s why it matters that Suetonius doesn’t specify Christians. He would have to even if he meant Christ here, because he nowhere else explains any connection between those two things, so he would have to do so now, if that’s what he—or indeed, especially, his source—had said. Thus, we have no basis for assuming this isn’t just what Suetonius says: an instigator named Chrestus who goaded the Jews to riot. Ockham’s Razor. Any attempt to advance an elaborate conjecture that he meant something else than he plainly says only reduces, not increases the probability of your conclusion.

Blom is attempting to make a similar argument to prior probability, that we must presume a low prior for any Jew having that name, whereas mispellings are common. But the first half of this argument is a non sequitur. There is no evidence no Jew was so-named, or even that it’s likely no Jew was so-named, because we have only a tiny fragment of named Jews (of all Jews combined), and a great many of them have otherwise unique names—so a singly-attested name for a Jew is common, not improbable. Blom is thus failing at the logic of probability. Having a rare name is common enough for Jews that the rarity of any Jew having that name is not the prior probability that there could be a Jew so named.

The second half of Blom’s argument, meanwhile, mistakes Vulgar for Elite Latin. Yes, such misspellings were common among less educated or less professional speakers and scribes, but they are not at all common among the literary elite. Suetonius was a famed grammarian and librarian of the highest sophistication and education attainable; he would not likely make a mistake like this, nor likely be trusting a source that would. So Blom is the one who is starting with the less probable assumption. I’m working from a highly probable one: that many a Jew had a uniquely attested name; and this name in particular is widely attested, particularly among slaves and freedmen as many Jews were, and many of which mentions may well have been Jews.

It’s also not even true that the name is unattested for a Jew. A wealthy Jewish woman, member of a synagogue community, erected an inscription in 81 A.D. boasting of the manumission of her slave. She herself holds the name Chresta, the feminine version of Chrestus (Philip A. Harland, Greco-Roman Associations: Texts, Translations, and Commentary 2.25). There is no reason to believe that if Jewish women could be named Handy, that Jewish men could not, particularly as we know it was a common name for men generally. And yet the only difference between the –a and –us ending (as it would be rendered in Latin) is simply whether a woman or a man has the name.

• “According to Carrier, the Jews in Rome had a protected legal status, whereas the Christians had not. Therefore, Claudius would have expelled only the Christians if they were making trouble. This argument goes well beyond the evidence we have.”

Here Blom seems to have mistaken what my argument was. He goes on to demonstrate religious bias could lead to similar Roman actions against the Jews, which obviously no one doubts. But that isn’t what I was talking about. When I said the Jews had a protected status, I was referring to the fact that they had a license from the state to openly practice their religion. In other words, it was not illegal to be a practicing Jew. Whereas it was illegal to be a practicing Christian: they were actually continually in violation of the law against unauthorized assembly. As, for example, Pliny the Younger reports. Granted, that’s sixty years later, but it is not probable that Christians had a license from the state to assemble, but then that license was revoked somehow before the time of Pliny, and neither Pliny nor any Christian source had ever heard of this astonishing sequence of events. So if anything happened that drew imperial attention to Christians causing trouble, they would more likely target the Christians.

Note the key point here: I am saying such speculated possibilities are not probable. Thus, to presume they indeed happened is introducing an improbability into your argument. Thus it is to no avail to complain that it is “possible” something like this happened. Logically, its being merely possible cannot confer probability on any theory that requires presuming it actually happened. This is the entire problem of “making up reasons” to get the results you want: whatever probability those made-up reasons have must commute to your conclusion. In other words, if your premise is improbable, so is your conclusion. Blom is not heeding this basic principle of logic.

Finally, Blom moves on to my fifth argument (my numeration again):

• “[Carrier points out that] Suetonius could not have referred to Jesus as an “instigator” of disturbances in 49 CE. This is [his] strongest argument … However, it is possible that Suetonius did not mean that Chrestus was present in Rome in 49 CE when writing “impulsore Chresto”. [1] For Orosius, who cites this passage and relates it to Christ, the word choice of Suetonius was apparently not a problem. Furthermore, [2] it is very well possible that the source of Suetonius was mistaken. Christians in Rome proclaimed that Christ was alive and worshipped him. This could have caused confusion among the Roman citizens, for whom the doctrine of the resurrection was unfamiliar. [3] The source of Suetonius could have thought that the Christians proclaimed that Christ was still alive and wrote that Christ was the ‘instigator’ of the disturbances.”

Here again Blom starts stacking up several assumptions for which there is no evidence, in order to get the evidence to “fit” his theory—evidence that otherwise does not fit it (thus necessitating all these contortions to wiggle out of that fact). Each here is a possibiliter fallacy, magically converting a statement that something is “possible” into its being “probable,” when you actually need evidence that a possibility is probable (Proving History, pp. 26-29). Worse, Blom often attempts this even against the evidence, not just in the absence of it. This is exactly the opposite of how historical reasoning should proceed; but is typical of Christian apologetics.

With Orosius, Blom fallaciously uses a Christian author’s assumption that Christ is alive (which is entirely to be expected) as evidence a pagan author, especially one as early as Suetonius, would agree Christ was alive and thus say Christ himself caused the riots. This assumption is not only lacking any evidence, it’s contrary to the evidence. Suetonius obviously did not think Jesus Christ could be described as a living agent interfering at Rome—he was a rationalist historian who never credits events to divine acts, and also not a Christian believer, and thus obviously did not think Christ was a real god who could cause riots.

The probability of Blom’s premises (and hence conclusion) only declines from there. As with his argument 2, “it is very well possible…” Stop right there. Possible does not get you to probable. Thus, Blom is importing an unevidenced assumption to get the conclusion he wants. That can only reduce, not increase, the probability of his conclusion. By contrast, I need no such unevidenced assumption about a possible mistake. I can argue from the text as written; and since sources Suetonius used are usually not mistaken like this, Blom is requiring an unusual thing to be true—whereas I am not.

Blom then makes things worse by making the factually false statement that a pagan author would write “the Christians proclaiming that Christ was still alive caused the riots” as “Christ caused the riots.” There is literally no possible way that’s how any author in Latin would say that; least of all a renowned grammarian and imperial librarian with a body of literature firmly establishing his excellence in Latin. So again Blom is just “making up” something as having happened for which there is no evidence, and which all evidence is against being even remotely likely.

That’s Christian apologetics, not competent historical argument.

So much for Blom’s desperate attempt to escape my arguments. He now attempts some arguments of his own, starting with, “If the Chrestians” in Tacitus “have the origin of their name in the instigator Chrestus, then should Chrestus have lived in Judea” because Tacitus says the movement originated “in Judea.” Face, meet palm. By Blom’s reasoning, Peter and Paul (and Philo and countless other Jews we can name who personally expanded their missions into Rome from abroad) can never have ever gone to Rome, because originally they were working somewhere else. Um. No. That’s not how reality works. When Tacitus says the Chrestus movement started in Judea but then moved to Rome, he would of course be referring to the incident under Suetonius (which, as I point out, we know Tacitus would have covered in a section of the Annals that does not survive).

After that face-palm moment, Blom moves on to claiming “the hypothesis that the Chrestus of Suetonius is the same as Jesus of Nazareth is much more parsimonious,” which I’ve just demonstrated is exactly the opposite of the truth. How does Blom then try to argue it is, nevertheless, somehow more parsimonius, after having just rested on a huge stack of improbable, often even contrafactual propositions? With one of the most bizarre sequences of non sequiturs I have ever seen.

Only one point Blom here makes even has logical relevance: “Christ was known by the pagans as ‘Chrestus’.” But as I just explained, that doesn’t have empirical relevance: Suetonius is not a speaker or writer of the vulgar Latin in which this vocal mistake occurred, nor would likely have used sources who were—and to instead just “presume” he was or did is un-parsimonious.

Other than that, Blom only offers that “it is very plausible that there were Christians in Rome” and “we know that the proclamation of the Christian Gospel caused repulsion among the Jews.” How do either of those things make it “likely” that Suetonius would violate his own standards of history, logic, and grammar in order mean something his words on any straightforward reading don’t say? How does it make it “likely” that the author of Acts would miss out on a golden example fitting his entire rhetorical project? They don’t. In fact these premises have no relevance to the strength of either of our theories, as I do not have to abandon any one of them for my theory to hold. I don’t think Blom understands what parsimony means in the context of theory construction.

Even when Blom tries to add that Suetonius “seems to assume that his readers understand to whom he refers,” he is mistaking this as evidence of relative parsimony. But it’s not. Because it is true of both our theories: on my theory, Suetonius assumes people know about the Chrestus riots (for which, as my entire argument then goes on to show, Tacitus himself would be evidence); whereas on his theory, Suetonius assumes people know that Chrestus means in vulgar Latin Christus and that Christus is the god worshiped by the Christians. Even at best, on this point our theories are equal in number of presumptions, and therefore they would be equally parsimonius—if it weren’t for everything else that I just explained renders his theory so much less so, given all the assumptions he must lean on for which there is no evidence, all the “maybes” he needs to handwave you into confusedly thinking he has proved are “probablys.”

And I’m being overly generous. Pliny the Younger, who would have been even better informed on such things than his contemporary Suetonius, did not know Christians worshiped a Christ—until he interrogated some under torture to find out, and he was surprised by the fact; and Pliny shows no sign of knowing Christ was also vulgarly known as Chrest, either. Likewise, on Blom’s own theory, another contemporary of Suetonius—Tacitus—felt he had to explain to his readers that Christianity comes from a guy named Christ (having, I must add, most likely learned it from Pliny on that account: OHJ, Ch. 8.10). So Blom is actually adopting a less parsimonious theory than mine: abundant evidence even he insists upon contradicts his claim that “everyone knew” that “Chrest” could refer to “Christianity” somehow. And that’s even before we get to the fact that Suetonius would have used a completely different construction in Latin had he meant Christian claims about this “Chrest” caused the riots, rather than “Chrest” himself doing so, which we can clearly see would have been completely mysterious to his even-better-informed colleague Pliny!

Then at this point Blom mistakes, again, a Jew having a rare name as evidence he wasn’t a Jew (conflating “an unlikely name for a Jew” with “it is unlikely any Jew would have that name”), getting quite wrong how base rates for a theory are calculated. Ulysses S. Grant is not less likely to have been a United States President because Ulysses was a rare name for anyone to have (and never has any other President had it!). With arguments like this Blom is simply confusing how probability works, illustrating how a failure to study probability greatly hinders the quality of peer review in the field of history.

Now for Tacitus

So Blom really can’t recover his Christian interpretation of Suetonius by any logically sound argument. It remains the simplest explanation, requiring the fewest additional assumptions, that when Suetonius says a man named Chrestus started Jewish riots in Rome, he means a man named Chrestus started Jewish riots in Rome. And it remains an unassailable fact of the Latin language that anyone who continued agitating in his name thereafter would be known as Chrestians. And it remains a material fact that the only manuscript we have of Tacitus describing the Neronian persecution originally referred to Nero’s scapegoats as Jewish agitators called Chrestians (sic). The rest of my argument follows on several other factually well-established premises (at least four, which I evaluate the effect of probabilistically in Hitler Homer, pp. 392-94; see also A Bayesian Brief on Comments at TAM). How does Blom attempt to escape those facts?

Blom first mistakes how the probabilities stack in my argument. He says that I argue the Neronian persecution can’t have happened, and then says that that wouldn’t show that Tacitus’s manuscript was interpolated, it would only show that Tacitus made a mistake. This is not even a correct description of my argument (as you’ll see). But it’s also a non sequitur. It does not follow that one theory (Tacitus made a mistake) of the same claim (Nero didn’t really persecute the Christians this way) is “more likely,” or even as likely, as another theory (Tacitus did not write the one single sentence about Christ now extant in his text). Such a “mistake” requires exceptional assumptions about Tacitus and his use of sources, which are improbable, relative to interpolation, which we know to be more common, particularly at the hands of Christians. That is not the argument I make. But it is a defect of what Blom is attempting to argue instead. “Tacitus completely screwed this up” is not the default; to argue that it is more likely requires evidence specifically of it being the case, instead of interpolation. I present extensive evidence for interpolation. What evidence does Blom have for “an egregious mistake”? None. And that’s the difference between a historian and an apologist.

At this point Blom digresses to rebut a paper by B.D. Shaw arguing the Neronian persecution didn’t happen. I don’t concur with Shaw’s reasoning and nowhere employ it or reference him in my article that Blom is responding to. But in the course of Blom’s critique of Shaw he makes a false claim that should never have passed peer review: “we have an independent account” of Nero’s persecution of Christians “that is either written by an eyewitness or a contemporary of eyewitnesses of the persecution by Nero.” What text does he mean? 1 Clement. I agree on an early date for 1 Clement. But 1 Clement never mentions Nero, and does not mention any persecution specifically in Rome. More importantly, it does not give “an account” in any sense. There is no “account” of a persecution in 1 Clement. There is merely the bare reference to there being difficulties and persecutions, sans details. And Clement never says any of them occurred at Rome. Or involved Nero. Or the fire. Or any other detail in Tacitus.

As I point out in On the Historicity of Jesus (pp. 309-10), 1 Clement “mentions Peter having been martyred” but “not where or when.” Likewise some other vague references to martyrdoms. Whereas of Paul, Clement says, he “was recently killed (in ‘their’ generation: 5.2, 7) at the hands of state officials (‘by those in charge’, epi tōn hēgoumenōn) at the ‘end of the western world’ (epi to terma tēs duseōs), which means Spain,” because “Rome was not the ‘terminus’ of where the ‘sun sets’; that was universally recognized as the Spanish coast.” The implications are obvious:

The fact that this contradicts all later legend (which has Paul executed by Nero in Rome) suggests, first, that that was indeed only a later legend and, second, that Paul did in fact die in Spain—as otherwise there would be no reason for Clement to make this up, unless Clement invented that fate by merely conjecturing that that is where Paul is last heard to have been. According to Paul himself, he was to venture on to Spain after he stopped at Rome (Rom. 15.24-28; notably, Paul clearly was not going to Rome in chains when he wrote that—contrary to the narrative in Acts—but was simply planning to go there on his own and only stop by ‘briefly’ on his way to Spain). But if Clement is doing that, then no knowledge existed as to Paul’s actual fate—not even the bishop of Rome himself knew. Either way, Paul’s martyrdom at Rome is proved to be a myth (that tale either not existing yet, or it being known at Clement’s time that in fact Paul was martyred in Spain).

OHJ, pp. 309-10

Note also, far from saying “Nero” killed Paul, or Peter or anyone, Clement says “leaders” (plural) killed Paul. So we have the wrong agent, wrong location. 1 Clement is actually giving us evidence against Nero having persecuted Christians in Rome; and at best, contains no evidence for it. It’s true that Clement opens his letter by mentioning vague “sudden and repeated misfortunes and experiences befalling us” (meaning, one can guess, in Rome), but he does not say these were persecutions or involved Nero or even had anything to do with what he much later says about Peter and Paul. So Clement simply isn’t saying what Blom claims. I do not know how a peer reviewer could let Blom’s factually false statement to pass. I can only conjecture that his peer reviewers had never actually read 1 Clement, or fell asleep at the wheel when reading this sentence.

Blom goes on to cite those later myths and legends placing Peter and Paul’s martyrdom in Rome under Nero, but I already cite those myself—because they prove no one had ever heard of any connection between any persecution by Nero and the fire of Rome. And if Christians had never heard of hundreds of Christians slain at Rome by the universally loathed emperor Nero, and for such an egregious false accusation, despite that being the most calamitous thing that could abide in Christian memory and be of repeated use in defending Christians as falsely accused and unreasonably abused, it is well nigh impossible Tacitus had.

Blom then makes the weirdest argument ever: he tries to deny that instigating riots in Rome, riots so severe that Claudius expelled many Jews from Rome for it, constitutes being “hated for their previous urban violence.” And after accusing that of being a baseless assumption, he delivers a bunch of completely unevidenced assumptions of his own to replace it with (like “the people that caused the disturbances under Claudius were probably Christians,” circularly the very thing he has been struggling to argue quite illogically so far). Unlike that assumption, which is unfounded on any evidence, a riot is by definition urban violence; and being expelled for it is by definition being hated for it.

So Suetonius directly attests that the people Chrestus motivated, hence “Chrestians,” were likely hated for this previous urban violence. That’s a fact, not an assumption. It’s right there, plain and clear in the text of Suetonius—in precisely the way “Suetonius meant Christians caused those riots” is not. Blom’s method is exactly upside down. By contrast, there is no extant evidence of Christians ever committing any crimes so severe as to warrant the murderous “hatred of mankind” (illegal assembly didn’t cut it; even Pliny thought that was weak tea, and Trajan advised just leaving them alone). It is thus plain that it makes more sense of Tacitus to have said this of the Chrestians than the Christians. This is a statement of relative probability. And it is correct.

Ironically Blom even admits this (“we cannot decide why the people of Rome hated” the Christians). So, we know why the people would hate the Chrestians (past urban violence attested by Suetonius); but don’t know why they would hate the Christians. Thank you for making my point for me.

Next.

More Heaping Stacks of Unevidenced Assumptions

I make four main arguments for my conclusion: (A) no Christian accounts of the Neronian persecution mention “a large multitude” being killed, or any proximity to the fire of Rome, or being blamed for it, yet Christians should know their own history better than Tacitus would (in other words, it’s not in any of the Neronian martyrdom texts we have); (B) there is in fact a complete absence of any martyrdom tradition resulting from that event for almost three hundred years, when it appears obliquely in the fourth century in the forged correspondence between Seneca and Paul, which actually says Jews and Christians were persecuted for the fire (evincing knowledge of Tacitus mentioning Jews, and then forging a new addition of Christians being swept up with them); (C) before that forgery, even Christian authors who read and used Tacitus (from Tertullian to Lactantius) had never heard of anything Tacitus relates in this passage, and never mention it, in fact so far as we can tell no Christian or non-Christian author had ever heard of it until that forged fourth century correspondence invented it; and, finally, (D) Tacitus’s account makes more sense as a persecution of Chrestians than of Christians (which I already touched on above).

Three of these are arguments from silence: Christian accounts we have don’t mention it; we have no Christian accounts that mention it until the forgery of a “Jews and Christians” story in the fourth century; and even Christian apologists who had read and employed Tacitus and wrote about the Neronian persecution don’t mention it (likewise any other author, Christian or otherwise). Together that’s a pretty devastating argument against any mention of Christians, rather than simply Jews (the Chrestian agitators), having been in Tacitus, until that starts to appear in the late fourth century, after the notion was invented in a Christian-forged letter from Seneca that appears to have been inspired by the original account in Tacitus that blamed Jews.

Blom’s reply?

Nothing really. He just repeats the same erroneous arguments I just surveyed and exposed as illogical. Blom expects an argument from silence to show that a source we still have today would know the fact in question (Christian apologists, of all people, certainly should have known of such a devastating, remarkable, and rhetorically exploitable event had it occurred, and would be far more likely to than the pagan Tacitus; and several I name, we even know, knew and read Tacitus), and they would have mentioned it (Christians repeatedly mentioned, even relished in, their martyrdom stories, and regularly used them to rhetorical effect as proof of the injustice of it, as well as the perseverance of Christianity in the face of it). So I met all the conditions Blom set.

Blom instead struggles to insist Tacitus made up the story through some manner of error that he never clearly explains (a highly improbable conjecture for which there is no evidence) and then no one ever noticed it—no Christian scholar, ever, in three hundred years, not even Latinists familiar with the works of Tacitus (another highly improbable conjecture), nor anyone else. That simply doesn’t work well as a thesis. It explains too little, and requires too many improbabilities.

Blom’s theory does at least let him off the hook in one respect, as it would explain why Suetonius doesn’t mention it (Suetonius mentions both the fire and the Neronian persecution, but gives no hint of them being in any way connected), and likewise Pliny the Younger, Revelation, the Acts of Paul, the Acts of Peter, Eusebius. Etc. But to “buy” that escape, he has to “sell” two improbable things he’s just “making up” (they are not things he has any evidence for): that Tacitus made an enormous mistake; and that no Christians ever encountered the resulting passage in Tacitus, or anyone ever mentioning or citing it, for three hundred years. And on top of that, his conjecture still doesn’t explain things like why the forged letter of Seneca says Jews and Christians were persecuted for the fire; or why only after that people start “finding” this passage in Tacitus that somehow no one had run across for three hundred years, not even well-educated Christian Latinists.

Blom loses track of his own narrative at this point to try and defend the Neronian persecution of Christians for the fire as an actual event (and thus forgets he’s supposed to be arguing Tacitus erroneously invented it), but again he deploys only suppositional apologetics (a stack of undemonstrated “maybes” that he then uses as “surelys” as if we aren’t going to notice), or even gets the facts wrong.

For instance, Pliny the Younger reported that he did not know what crimes Christians were guilty of or why they should even be investigated. Yet he was an avid fan of his father’s writings: Pliny the Elder, his uncle and adoptive father from a very young age. Yet we know Pliny the Elder wrote an extensive history of the early Empire, including a whole volume on the reign of Nero—which could not possibly have failed to mention Christians being persecuted en masse for the fire. So how could Pliny the Younger not know what crimes Christians have been accused of or why he should investigate them? This is well nigh proof his father, an eyewitness to the events in question, never connected the fire to any Christian persecution. The only response Blom really can have here is to agree, and retreat to the fabricated excuse that Tacitus therefore must have made it up. But in a manner suspiciously like a Christian apologist, Blom can’t follow that road with any discipline, and instead just has to argue that Pliny the Elder did mention it, but that “maybe” his son never read all his revered father’s books (!). Seriously. “There is no reason to think that Pliny the Younger read” his father’s most famous history of the Roman Empire. That’s the hill he is choosing to die on. Wow.

As another example, I point out it’s clear the Christian Latinist Lactantius used Tacitus’s account of Nero’s persecutions after the fire as a literary model for his account of Galerius’s persecution of Christians for a different fire—so Lactantius definitely knew the passage well. Yet had no knowledge Christians were ever involved in it. Lactantius never once draws the obvious, powerful parallel that Galerius was doing exactly the same thing Nero did; and when Lactantius relates the persecutions of Nero, he never mentions a single detail of this there either. Blom’s reply? Maybe Lactantius just didn’t bother mentioning this in either place. Really?

Blom similarly goes on to fabricate more improbable excuses for the silences in Revelation and the martyrdom accounts of Paul and so on. This is a standard Christian apologetic tactic. But it has no merit as a historical method. As I’ve said, every unevidenced excuse you make up to “explain away” inconvenient evidence reduces the probability of your conclusion—by exactly as much as your unevidenced excuses are improbable. And when you have to resort to dozens of such excuses—as Blom does, as he has to race around a whole field of examples and invent a new array of excuses for each and every one—they multiply. The probability of your conclusion plummets precipitously in result.

Truly. Even if each excuse had as much as a 50% chance of being true (and that’s being generous—for example, it’s not even 10% likely that Pliny wouldn’t read his own beloved father’s greatest work of history, a history of the very empire Pliny helped rule), with twelve such excuses (and that’s a low count; Blom’s article is littered with them), the probability your conclusion is true would be reduced over four thousand times. The exact math is 0.50^12 = 1/4096. So whatever probability your hypothesis started with, now you must divide it by 4096. So even if you started at 100% likely, the highest probability possible, you would end up with a theory that is only 0.02% likely. Not even one tenth of one percent. This is Blom. That low a probability could be overcome with good enough evidence; but Blom doesn’t have any.

Any remaining arguments Blom deploys (such as regarding textual reasons to suspect an interpolation) are already refuted in my original article, or are too obviously fallacious to require belaboring the point.

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Side Note: In contrast to all the above, Jobjorn Boman wrote “Comments on Carrier: Is Thallus Actually Quoted by Eusebius?” in Liber Annuus 62 (2012), in response to another peer reviewed article of mine, this time on Thallus, that I published in the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism, also reproduced in Hitler Homer Bible Christ, and I don’t really have much to contend with in it. He adds a lot of useful information and argues for an alternative thesis to mine, that Thallus never wrote anything about Jesus because his chronology ended a century earlier, and that what I take as a quotation of Thallus in Eusebius is just a “brief” of Phlegon. I am not convinced by Boman’s argument, but I think it’s entirely plausible; we both rely on equally sized stacks of background assumptions, so our priors are about the same, the likelihoods are close, and only the “Thallus mentioned Jesus” hypothesis suffers on both counts for all the same reasons Boman and I outline. You can read a summary of all this from Roger Viklund.

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