In Genesis 2, no man existed to cultivate the land, amusingly echoing the Babylonian myth in which the purpose of men was to cultivate the land and thereby serve the gods.

Manipulating the Good News 2

Acta Pilati
Suetonius
Thallus and Pliny
The Talmud and Lucian
Tacitus

Abstract

If Nero persecuted Christians, it was the only example of Roman intolerance up to the Jewish War. Origen, the early Christian apologist, declared that the number of martyrs was inconsiderable. The Christian fathers, Acts, Justin and Origen all say little or nothing about the Christian persecutions of Nero, because the victims were predominantly Jews. Acts concludes by saying that Paul was not forbidden to teach in Rome, he did it with all boldness—and the year was around 64 AD. How Christians have manipulated their good news to create myths—aka lies—still told.

The passage on Jesus in Maimonides' Hilkhoth Melakhim repeatedly censored

Acta Pilati

Provincial governors had to dispatch, to the Emperor, “acta”, official reports of all that occurred under their jurisdiction. Important trials such as those requiring the death penalty had to be filed, particularly if the trial concerned an attempt at insurrection against Imperial rule. On the evidence of the gospels Pilate must have filed an account of the trial of Jesus, and one must have existed in the Roman archives.

We know that Tiberius had an almost obsessive reverence for the legal and civic reforms introduced by his predecessor, Augustus, and paid meticulous attention to the governance of the provinces. Officials had to take care not to step outside of their powers and particularly not to oppress their inferiors. Taxation was light and the policy in frontier regions was to avoid conflict. It is inconceivable that Tiberius should not have been informed of the trial of a man charged with riotous assembly and treason.

Josephus had access to the Acts of the Governors and he would have needed it to get an accurate view of events between 6 AD when his earlier source, the books of Nicholas of Damascus, court historian to Herod the Great, ended and about 55 AD when his direct experience as a scribe to the Sanhedrin would have become relevant. So for the period of about 50 years, which covered the ministries of John the Baptist and Jesus, Josephus’s main source would have been Roman and Herodian archives.

Justin Martyr was certain that Pilate would have sent a report of the crucifixion to Tiberius at Rome. He knew what the duty of a Roman governor was, and it involved being a dutiful bureaucrat. He had to despatch his reports, but Justin cannot have had access to the records and could not have verified there definitely was such a report. Christians take refuge behind this uncertainty, but Justin himself has no doubt and writes (1 Apol 48,53) “And that He did those things, you can learn from the Acts of Pontius Pilate, ” and “And that these things did happen, you can ascertain from the Acts of Pontius Pilate.”

Justin was also confident that the Roman records of the census of Cyrenius would reveal the birth details of Jesus and his family.

Now there is a village in the land of the Jews, thirty-five stadia from Jerusalem, in which Jesus Christ was born, as you can ascertain also from the registers of the taxing made under Cyrenius, your first procurator in Judaea. (Justin Martyr, 1 Apol 34)

The point about these assertions is that no such evidence has ever been adduced by Christians, whether the Acts of Pontius Pilate or the census of Cyrenius. When the Christians took control, they obviously had access to these records, but they have never produced them and they are not part of the New Testament as they ought to be. It shows that they did not support the Christian case.

If Jesus did live, it seems incredible that there was no reports like these, because Romans were usually meticulous officials. Of course, the Acta might have said nothing more than what the gospels accept—that Jesus was crucified as a rebel against Roman authority, a man claiming to be the king of the Jews, at a time when the proper king of the Jews was the Roman Emperor. Such a report would prove Jesus was a criminal in Roman law, not that he was a god. Christians might have wanted to preserve such a report nevertheless, but did not. It must therefore have given detail of the acts that led to Jesus being crucified—that he led a rebellion and captured Jerusalem. Christians would not have wanted to keep such incriminating evidence and there is little doubt that they therefore destroyed it and presented forgeries to the world when they took power under Constantine.

In the fifth century, someone forged a report that Christian theologians know is a forgery but nevertheless quote as if it were genuine.

In his History of the Church in 325 AD, Eusebius informs us that the Acta Pilati, were published in 311 AD by the Emperor Maximinus Daia precisely to prove that the claims of the Christians were false and the verdict of Pilate was correct. Oddly these documents date Jesus’s trial and crucifixion to 21 AD, apparently at odds with Josephus who says Pilate did not take up office until 26 AD. Eusebius concludes the Acta Pilati were forgeries. But it is stretching credulity to suggest that the Roman administration were so incompetent as to unnecessarily change the date when they were altering the record to discredit the Christians.

What reason could they possibly have to want to alter the date especially with Josephus so well known? It is more likely that the triumphant Christians only a few years later decided to alter Josephus to put Pilate’s rule outside of the period when the Acta were dated. The Christians had control of the copying of books after the time of Constantine but their opponents could have hidden copies of the Roman records. By altering Josephus, any copy of the true record that emerged could be shown by reference to Josephus to have been a forgery. And altering the dates in Josephus needed only two simple numeric changes—to the Greek number for the length of Pilate’s Prefecture (from 18 to 10 years) and the Greek number for the length of the Prefecture of Gratus, his predecessor (3 to 11 years).

Gratus had appointed four High Priests according to Josephus. Now John’s gospel (11:49) describes Caiaphas as “High priest that year”, implying that it was usual for High Priests to be changed each year. That is just what Gratus had been doing, confirming that three years was his term of office. Gratus had appointed a new High Priest for each year he was governor and had appointed the fourth one, Joseph Caiaphas, for the next year, but Gratus was then recalled.

Pilate arrived, found Caiaphas High Priest and kept him in place for his full term of office. When Pilate was recalled, Vitellius, Legate of Syria, Pilate’s boss, sacked Caiaphas also. So there is good reason to believe that Pilate and Caiaphas ruled Judaea in tandem for eighteen years from 18 to 36 AD. The policy of Tiberius was not to change governors believing that, like blowflies, they left the body alone when they were sated. Pilate’s long period of office is testimony to the policy if not the theory.

To return to the Acts of Pilate: we are faced with the following chain of logic.

Either the Acta Pilati existed or they did not.
If they did not exist Pilate must have neglected his duty in not submitting them but Pilate was a conscientious bureaucrat and would not neglect such matters. It is difficult to believe that none were written or submitted.
If they existed either they were favourable to the Christian story and so would be part of the Christian canon or they were unfavourable to the Christian story and so would have been destroyed or altered. They are not part of the canon and so they were unfavourable to the Christian cause. They were either destroyed or altered.
If they once existed but had been destroyed someone must have known and therefore claims that they once existed would have been made. Claims that the Acta once existed have been made.
If they once existed but had been altered someone must have known and therefore claims that they had been forged would have been made. Claims that the Acta have been forged have been made.

It looks very much as though the Acta Pilati once existed as would have been expected but have been destroyed by the Christians. The only reason they would have destroyed them is that they did not match the story the Church wanted to be believed.

There is a Slavonic text of Josephus’s Jewish War which seems to be an early version. it is not free of Christian alterations but tells a different story from the usual. Jesus is not named as such but is called the “Wonder Worker” and led a band of 150 disciples into Jerusalem in a pathetic attempt at revolution. He was crucified around 21 AD. Christians tell us this is a mediaeval forgery!

Suetonius

The apparent allusions to Christians in The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius (120 AD), one in the section on Claudius and one in the section on Nero, are ambiguous. The short mention of “Chrestus” in Suetonius shows that the Roman author was not sure of his subject by spelling Christ’s name wrongly, if that is who he meant. Suetonius wrote of a Jewish revolt at Rome in the reign of the Emperor Claudius apparently instigated by “Chrestus”:

As the Jews were making constant disturbances at the instigation of one Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome.
Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars (Claudius 25:4)

The passage implies that there was an actual person named “Chrestus” in Rome at the time instigating trouble. Jesus was not in Rome instigating the Jews in 45 AD, so Suetonius must have meant another person. By 41 to 54 AD when Claudius was Emperor scholars doubt that Jesus’s supporters could have spread to Rome in sufficient strength to cause a revolt.

“Chrestus” is not another spelling of “Christus”, as some Christians pretend. Chrestus is the Latin form of a Greek name Chrestos. It means “Excellent One” in Greek. Christus means Messiah, so “Chrestus” would have to be a mispelling of “Christus”, meaning Christ to imply a Christian presence in Rome at the time.

Chrestus as a proper name is so common that it occurs over 80 times on Roman inscriptions. Chrestus was a common name in Rome because it was given to hard working slaves, many of whom earned their freedom over the years. Suetonius might have been simply giving the name of a Roman rabble-rouser. He possibly read “Christus ”and, assuming the common name was intended, corrected it to “Chrestus”. So he perhaps should have written “Christus”, meaning a messiah, but not specifically Jesus. The disturbance would have been caused by messianic Jews possibly responding to the messianic claims of a contemporary. If Chrestus indeed meant Jesus, the riots were by orthodox Jews incensed by early Christian missionaries on Stephen’s wing.

So, in summary, plausible explanations of this passage in Suetonius are:

Chrestus was a freed Jewish slave fomenting zealous Jews into believing the messiah was soon to come.
Chrestus is an error by Suetonius who took his source to mean that, Chrestus being the name with which Suetonius was familiar, but the riots were by messianic Jews rioting with each other about whether the messiah had come or not, possibly in reference to the claims of Jesus’s followers.

The linking of a word so close to Christus and “Jews” in the same context, favours the second explanation, so Suetonius can be taken as a rather weak witness to the fact that Jews even in Rome were in a turmoil over messianism at the time, possibly as a result of Christian claims. At a stretch, it shows that some people—presumed to be Christians—might have been claiming that the messiah had come.

Even if Suetonius is referring to Christians in Rome, this only confirms the existence of Christians, not the earlier existence of Jesus. There were Christians in Rome during the first century AD but this does not imply that Jesus was himself historic.

Thallus and Pliny

The testimony of the Pagan historian, Thallus, is also worthless but is often quoted by the liars of Christendom. Eusebius says Thallus wrote, in Greek, in three volumes the history of the world from the fall of Troy down to the 167th Olympiad in 52 AD. None of Thallus’s work exists any more except a reference to the crucifixion in the remaining writings of a third century Christian, Julius Africanus. Africanus’s own work survives only in fragments, but refers to the lost history of Thallus as describing Jesus’s death being accompanied by an earthquake and darkness. Africanus says Thallus in the period before 221 AD, wrote in the third book of his history, that the darkness which supposedly covered the earth at the time of the crucifixion was an eclipse:

Thallus calls this darkness an eclipse of the sun—wrongly in my opinion.

Plainly this has little value since the passage could easily have been inserted into Julius Africanus and we have no way of checking whatever Thallus said. The earthquake and darkness are confirmed nowhere. They are peculiar to the New Testament. Yet, from this, Christian apologists have argued that a non-Christian contemporary of Jesus testified to the midday darkness. Thallus might be saying what the Christians believed, but the explanation is impossible because Jesus was crucified at the new moon. Solar eclipses cannot occur at Passover when the moon is full. The moon, in its monthly track round the earth, is in the diametrically wrong place. Even Africanus realized this.

The fragment is damaged. It speaks of “…allus”. Is this Thallus? Thallus was a popular name common on Roman inscriptions. Josephus (Antiquities 18:6:4) refers to a Thallus:

Now there was one Thallus, a freed-man of Caesar’s, of whom he borrowed a million of dracmae, and thence repaid Antonia the debt he owed her.

Thallus was born about 50 AD, so must have been writing about 80 AD or later, after the first gospel written, Mark’s. If he had used Mark’s gospel as a source, the observation is not independent, and Thallus would have probably have been a Christian himself, to have been reading it at such an early date after it was written.

The Talmud and Lucian

The Talmud contains virtually no mention of Jesus. There was much persecution of the Jews by Christians during the Middle Ages, and many Jews were afraid that the presence of unfavorable references to Jesus in the Talmud of the time would bring down greater revenge by the Christians. References were eliminated by Jewish copyists so that Christians would have no excuse for burning their books and synagogues, as they were wont to do. Scholars have collected the references from ancient copies of the Talmud and published them, but they remain disputed.

Jesus in the Talmud was a bastard and a magician who learned magic spells in Egypt or else stole the secret name of God from the temple and used it to work magic or miracles. The father of Jesus was a soldier named Pantera. Talmudic stories were set down in the period from 200 to 500 AD, and, even if reflecting the earlier situation, were coloured by Jewish attempts to deal with Christianity. The Talmud therefore is not historically accurate and is only marginal use in assessing Jesus as an historical person.

Another fragment, quoting the letter of Mara Bar Serapion, also has not been accurately dated. It says that the Jews killed their “wise King”. Christians will say this is Jesus, but this fragment is, again, worthless for this purpose.

Lucian’s sarcastic comment, written in the second century, is evidence that the Christians of the time thought that a man had been crucified in Palestine as the basis of their sect. It also shows that they were a brotherhood, confirming that the use of brother in the bible acknowledges membership of the common order not blood relationship, and the gullibility of the gentile Christians is also lampooned.

It was then that he [Perigrinus] learned the wondrous lore of the Christians, by associating with their priests and scribes in Palestine. And—how else could it be? He made them all look like children; for he was prophet, cult-leader, head of the synagogue, and everything, all by himself. He interpreted and explained some of their books and even composed many, and they revered him as a god, made use of him as a lawgiver, and set him down as a protector, next after that other, to be sure, whom they still worship, the man who was crucified in Palestine because he introduced this new cult into the world…

The poor wretches have convinced themselves first and foremost, that they are going to be immortal and live for all time, in consequence of which they despise death and even willingly give themselves into custody, most of them. Furthermore, their first lawgiver persuaded them that they are all brothers of one another, after they have transgressed once for all by denying the Greek gods, and by worshipping that crucified sophist him-self and living under his laws. Therefore they despise all things indiscriminately and consider them common property—receiving such doctrines traditionally without any definite evidence. So if any charlatan or tricksters able to profit from them, comes along and gets among them he quickly acquires sudden wealth by imposing upon simple folk. Lucian, Perigrinus

The “evidence” quoted from Pliny Secundus, Pliny the Younger, is also of dubious value. He had to punish the Christians in Asia Minor as a subversive group. In a letter to the Emperor Trajan of about 112 AD, some eighty years after the presumed date of the crucifixion, Pliny wrote that he had found Christians to be harmless people who sang hymns at daybreak (just like the Essenes) to their Christ as to a god, and asked the Emperor whether therefore he had to take action against them. This correspondence proves that there were Christians living in Asia Minor in 112 AD, which is hardly surprising as it was one of the first places proselytised by Paul. But the fact that Roman officials found Christians practising their “superstition”, as Romans called, it tells us nothing about Christianity’s origins. Singing hymns to a god called Christ says nothing about the historical Jesus. Christians could have invented their myth of Jesus Christ to explain why they were worshipping a god called Christ.

Tacitus

Another major ancient historian who supposedly mentions Jesus is Tacitus. Cornelius Tacitus (55-120 AD) wrote his Annals at least 70 years after Jesus’s crucifixion. Jesus is not mentioned by name anywhere in the extant works of Tacitus. In his Annals, Tacitus says that the Christians were accused by Nero of setting fire to Rome in 64 AD. He accuses the Christians of hating the human race.

He says that members of this mischievous sect were horribly tortured and their confessions led to many others being convicted, and, in Book 15:44, he mentions Christus:

Nero looked around for a scapegoat, and inflicted the most fiendish tortures on a group of persons already hated by the people for their crimes. This was the sect known as Christians. Their founder, one Christus, had been put to death by the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius. This checked the abominable superstition for a while, but it broke out again and spread, not merely through Judaea, where it originated, but even to Rome itself, the great reservoir and collecting ground for every kind of depravity and filth. Those who confessed to being Christians were at once arrested, but on their testimony a great crowd of people were convicted, not so much on the charge of arson, but of hatred of the entire human race.
Tacitus, Annals, (D R Dudley’s translation)

Even if this is genuine, what does this tell us about Jesus? From the way in which this is written, Tacitus did not claim firsthand knowledge of the origins of Christianity. By 120 AD the Christian tradition that Christ had died under Pilate had been established. Tacitus was not recording a historical event but the Christians’ own explanation of their origins. And Tacitus would have thought an action like this typical of Pilate. He is repeating a story which was then commonly believed, namely that the founder of Christianity, one Christus, had been put to death under Tiberius.

In any case, scholars maintain there could not have been many Christians in Rome even by 64 AD and that Tacitus, writing 60 years later, is confusing the Christians of his day with those instigated by Chrestos in Suetonius, messianic Jews. This would better explain the accusation of “hating the human race”, in conventional terms a curious accusation to make of Christians but one which could apply to Jews, especially orthodox Essenes, who considered themselves as God’s Elect, thought gentiles were inferior and hated the Romans.

If Tacitus had been using the Roman imperial records, to which he had access, the report would grow in importance. Had he? Note that he calls Pilate the “Procurator”. This shows he was not using official records because Pilate was the “Prefect” of Judaea. The lesser title of Procurator only came into use later. He also calls Jesus by the religious title “Christos”. Roman records would not have referred to Jesus by a Christian title, but by his given name. Tacitus is telling us nothing historical but only contemprary knowledge.

Gibbon points out that, if Nero persecuted Christians, it was the only example of Roman intolerance up to the Jewish War. Even Origen, the early Christian apologist could declare that “the number of martyrs was very inconsiderable”. The Christian fathers, Acts, Justin and Origen all say little or nothing about the Christian persecutions of Nero, because the victims were predominantly Jews. The only other reason for the silence would be if the passage in Tacitus was interpolated. Notice that Acts concludes by saying that Paul was not forbidden to teach in Rome, he did it with all boldness—and the year was around 64 AD.

In truth, these are serious difficulties that prevent this passage from being taken as genuine, and suggest it is a Christian interpolation (Comment). In summary:

No other report that Nero persecuted the Christians has ever emerged.
Multitudes of Christians cannot have been in Rome in 60 AD, unless Christian is being used more widely than it is today—to mean messianic Jews rather than believers that the messiah had come in Jesus.
The term Christian was not in common use in the first century.
Nero was indifferent to the religions in his city, and did not need any group to be his scapegoat because the rumour that he started the fire was an early slander of an unpopular man.

Damning to the authenticity of this passage is that it is cited, among obvious fairy tales, almost word-for-word in the Chronicle of Sulpicius Severus (d 403 AD). Again, no one before had mentioned this part of Tacitus, and nor do contemporaries. It was probably not in the manuscripts of Tacitus at that time, but copyists in the Dark Ages might well have copied the passage from the Chronicle into the manuscript of Tacitus they were reproducing.

Page Tags: Bible Fraud, Manipulating the Good News, Censorship, Messianic Judaism, Messianic Jews, Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Jewish, Jews, Roman, Fraud, Rome, Missing Records

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.