Читать книгу The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus - Drews Arthur - Страница 10

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The passage in Suetonius leaves it uncertain who Chrestus is, and cannot, therefore, be advanced as a proof of the historicity of Jesus. It is very different with the evidence of Tacitus. In the Annals (xv, 44) Christ is expressly mentioned as an historical personage. The historian has related what measures were taken by Nero to lessen the suffering brought about by the great fire at Rome in the year 64, and to remove the traces of it. He then continues: “But neither the aid of man, nor the liberality of the prince, nor the propitiations of the gods, succeeded in destroying the belief that the fire had been purposely lit. In order to put an end to this rumour, therefore, Nero laid the blame on and visited with severe punishment those men, hateful for their crimes, whom the people called Christians [Ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos et quaesitissimis poenis affecit quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Christianos appellabat]. He from whom the name was derived, Christus, was put to death by the procurator Pontius Pilatus in the reign of Tiberius [autor nominis ejus Christus, Tiberio imperitante, per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio affectus erat]. But the pernicious superstition, checked for a moment, broke out again, not only in Judaea, the native land of the monstrosity, but also in Rome, to which all conceivable horrors and abominations flow from every side, and find supporters. First, therefore, those were arrested who openly confessed; then, on their information, a great number, who were not so much convicted of the fire as of hatred of the human race. Ridicule was poured on them as they died; so that, clothed in the skins of beasts, they were torn to pieces by dogs, or crucified, or committed to the flames, and when the sun had gone down they were burned to light up the night [Igitur primum correpti, qui fatebantur, deinde indicio eorum multitudo ingens, haud proinde in crimine incendii quam odio humani generis convicti sunt. Et pereuntibus addita ludibria, ut ferarum tergis contecti laniatu canum interirent, aut crucibus affixi, aut flammandi, atque ubi defecisset dies, in usum nocturni luminis urerentur]. Nero had lent his garden for this spectacle, and gave games in the Circus, mixing with the people in the dress of a charioteer or standing in the chariot. Hence there was a strong sympathy for them, though they might have been guilty enough to deserve the severest punishment, on the ground that they were sacrificed, not to the general good, but to the cruelty of one man.”

(a) Evidential Value of the Passage.—When Tacitus is assumed to have written, about the year 117, that the founder of the sect, Christus, was put to death by the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius, Christianity was already an organised religion with a settled tradition. Even the gospels, or at least three of them, are supposed to have then been in existence. Hence Tacitus might have derived his information about Jesus, if not directly from the gospels, at all events indirectly from them by means of oral tradition. That was the view of Dupuis, who writes: “Tacitus says what the legend said. Had he been speaking of the Brahmans, he would have said, in the same way, that they derived their name from a certain Brahma, who had lived in India, as there was a legend about him; yet Brahma would not on that account have lived as a man, as Brahma is merely the name of one of the three manifestations of the personified god-head. When Tacitus spoke thus in his account of Nero and the sect of the Christians, he merely gave the supposed etymology of the name, without caring in the least whether Christ had really existed or it was merely the name of the hero of some sacred legend. Such an inquiry was quite foreign to his work.”^[1] Even J. Weiss observes: “Assuredly there were the general lines of even a purely fictitious Christian tradition already laid down about the year 100; Tacitus may therefore draw upon this tradition” (p. 88). It has been said, on the authority of Mommsen, that Tacitus may have derived his information from the Acts of the Senate and the archives of the State, and it has been suggested that his authority was Cluvius Rufus, who was consul under Caligula. Weiss says, however: “That he or any other had seen a report from Pontius Pilate in the records of the Senate is a hypothesis I should not care to adopt, as it would be complicating a simple matter with an improbability.” “Archival studies,” we read in the Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, “are not very familiar to ancient historiography; and Tacitus has paid very little attention to the acta diurna and the records of the Senate.”^[2] In fact, Hermann Schiller says, in his Geschichte des Römischen Kaiserreichs unter der Regierung des Nero (1872): “We are accustomed to hearing Tacitus praised as a model historian, and in many respects it may be true; but it does not apply to his criticism of his authorities and his own research, for these were astonishingly poor in Tacitus. He never studied the archives. ”^[3] It is, moreover, extremely improbable that a special report would be sent to Borne, and incorporated in the records of the Senate, in regard to the death of a Jewish provincial, Jesus. “The execution of a Nazareth carpenter was one of the most insignificant events conceivable among the movements of Roman history in those decades; it completely disappeared beneath the innumerable executions inflicted by the Roman provincial authorities. It would be one of the most remarkable instances of chance in the world if it were mentioned in any official report.”^[4] It is the sort of thing we may expect from a Tertullian, who, in his Apology for Christianity (c. 21), tells one who doubts the truth of the gospel story that he will find a special report of Pilate to Tiberius in the Roman archives. In the mouth of a modern historian such a statement is frankly ridiculous.

There is nothing, then, in the records of the Senate, and of Cluvius Rufus we know next to nothing. As Bruno Bauer ironically observes: “That the founder of Christianity was put to death under Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate must have been discovered by the historian—who was not otherwise a very assiduous searcher of the archives—in the same archive which, according to Tertullian, also gave the fact that the sun was darkened at midday when Jesus died.”^[5] In any case the reference in Tacitus is no proof of the historicity of Jesus, because it is far too late; it is almost certain that the Roman historian simply derived it from the Christian legend. Tacitus could in 117 know of Christ only what reached him from Christian or intermediate circles. In such matters he merely reproduced rumours in whatever light his subject seemed to him to demand.^[6]

Here we might close our investigation into the profane witnesses. We have reached the same result as J. Weiss: “There is no really cogent witness in profane literature” (p. 92). Weinel comes to the same conclusion when he says that not much importance can be attached by either side to non-Christian witnesses: “As there can be no doubt that at the time when the Annals of Tacitus, the letters of Pliny, and even the historical works of Josephus, appeared, Christianity was widely spread in the Roman Empire and traced its origin to Jesus, the man of Nazareth, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate” (p. 104). Jülicher also, in the above-mentioned essay in Kultur der Gegenwart, denies altogether the evidential value of the Roman profane witnesses.

(b) The Question of the Genuineness of “Annals,” xv, 44.—It is, however, not superfluous, perhaps, to consider more closely what is regarded as the most important profane witness for the historicity of Jesus—that of Tacitus. Such witnesses still seem to make a great impression on the general public. Even theologians who are themselves convinced of the worthlessness of such witnesses as regards the problem we are considering do not fail, as a rule, to repeat them to “the people” as if they gave some confirmation of their belief in an historical Jesus. That would be prevented once for all if it could be proved that the whole passage is not from the pen of Tacitus at all. However, this statement, which I advanced in the Christ Myth in accordance with the view of the French writer Hochart, has been so vehemently attacked, even by those who, like Weiss and Weinel, admit the worthlessness of the passage as far as the historicity of Jesus is concerned, that it seems necessary to inquire somewhat closely into the genuineness of Annals, xv, 44.