Читать книгу The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus - Drews Arthur - Страница 11

There can, of course, be no question of any impossibility of interpolating the passage in the Annals on the ground of “the inimitable style of Tacitus,” as defenders of the genuineness repeat after Gibbon.^[7] There is no “inimitable” style for the clever forger, and the more unusual, distinctive, and peculiar a style is, like that of Tacitus, the easier it is to imitate it. It would be strange if a monastic copyist of Tacitus, occupied with his work for months, if not for years, could not so far catch his style as to be able to write these twenty or twenty-five lines in the manner of Tacitus. Teuffel, in his Geschichte der Röm. Literature (5th ed. 1890, ii, 1137), commends Sulpicius Severus for his “skill” in imitating Tacitus, among others, in his composition. Such an imitation is not, in his opinion, beyond the range of possibility. Moreover, as far as the historicity of Jesus is concerned, we are, perhaps, interested only in one single sentence of the passage, and that has nothing distinctively Tacitan about it.

Equally invalid is the claim that the way in which Tacitus speaks of the Christians excludes all idea of a Christian interpolation. Von Soden thinks that Christians “would certainly have put early Christianity in a more favourable light, as they always did when they falsified the story of the rise of Christianity in the historical works they read.” He overlooks the fact that the injurious epithets on the new religion and its adherents would probably, in the opinion of the forger, tend to strengthen its chances of passing as genuine. They are just what one might suppose to be in harmony with the disposition of Tacitus. The expressions, moreover, are at once enfeebled by the reference to the sympathy that the Romans are supposed to have felt for the victims of Nero's cruelty. It is a common occurrence in the accounts of the Christian martyrs for the pagan opponents of Christianity to find their hostility changed into sympathy, and recognise the innocence of the persecuted Christians. We need quote only the description of Pilate in Matthew and Luke—his “I find no blame in him” and “I am innocent of the blood of this just man”—and the supposed words of Agrippa when Paul is charged before him: “This man doeth nothing worthy of death or of bonds.”^[8] So Pliny the younger condemns the Christians in his letter to Trajan, although he acknowledges their innocence. This, it is true, is not the case with Tacitus; he seems rather to regard the Christians as guilty, whether or no they were the authors of the fire. But he allows the spectators to be touched with pity for the executed Christians, and thus awakens a sympathetic feeling for them in the readers of his narrative.

It is said, however, that Tacitus, “on account of the difficulty of his style and his whole attitude, was not generally read by Christians,” so that his text is, “in the general opinion of experts, the freest from corruption of all the ancient writings.” So at least von Soden assures us (p. 11). In this, however, he is merely repeating the opinion of Gibbon. As a matter of fact, none of the works of Tacitus have come down to us without interpolations. This supposed “purity of the text of Tacitus as shown by the oldest manuscripts” exists only in the imagination of Gibbon and those who follow him. It is, further, not true that the Christians did not read Tacitus. We have a number of instances in the first centuries of Christian writers who are acquainted with Tacitus, such as Tertullian, Jerome, Orosius, Sidonius Apollinaris, Sulpicius Severus, and Cassiodorus. It is only in the course of the Middle Ages that this acquaintance with the Roman historian is gradually lost; and this not on account of, but in spite of, the passage in Tacitus on the Christians. This testimony of the Roman historian to the supposed first persecution of the Christians would be very valuable to them for many reasons.

Are there, however, no witnesses to the genuineness of the passages of Tacitus in early Christian literature? There is the letter of Clement of Rome belonging to the end of the first century. According to Eusebius,^[9] it was sent by Clement, the secretary of the Apostle Peter, and the third or fourth bishop of Rome, to the community at Corinth, in the name of the Roman community; as is also stated by Hegesippus (c. 150) and Dionysius of Corinth.^[10] The point is so uncertain, nevertheless, that such distinguished authorities as Semler, Baur, Schwegler, Zeller, Volkmar,^[11] Hausrath,^[12] Loman,^[13] Van Manen, Van den Bergh van Eysinga,^[14] and Steck,^[15] have disputed the genuineness of the letter; and it was reserved for the modern believers in Jesus to discover grounds for regarding it as genuine. Volkmar puts the letter in the year 125; Loman, Van Manen, and Steck do not admit its composition earlier than the year 140. The letter cannot, therefore, be regarded as a reliable document on that account.

But what do we learn about the Neronian persecution from the letter of Clement? “Out of jealousy and envy,” he writes to the Corinthians, “the greatest and straightest pillars were persecuted and fought even to death”; as in the case of Peter, “who, through the envy of the wicked, incurred, not one or two, but many dangers, and so passed to his place in glory after rendering his testimony,” and Paul, “who showed the faithful the way to persevere to the end; seven times was he imprisoned, he was banished, stoned, he went as a herald to the east and the west, and he reaped great glory by his faith. The whole world has attained to a knowledge of justice; he went even to the farthest parts of the west, and gave his testimony before them that held power. Then was he taken out of the world and went to the holy place, the greatest model of patience.”^[16]

It is clear that we have here no reference to the persecution of the Christians under Nero. It is not even stated that the apostles named met with a violent death on account of their faith, as the word “martyresas” (“after rendering his testimony”) need not by any means be understood to mean a testimony of blood, because the word “martyr” originally means only a witness to the truth of the Christian faith in the general sense, and is equivalent to “confessor,” and was only later applied to those who sealed their faith by a violent death.^[17] If the expression in the above text is usually taken to refer to the execution of the apostles under Nero, it is not because Clemens says anything about this execution, but merely because, according to Christian tradition, Peter and Paul are supposed to have been put to death at the time of the Neronian persecution. This tradition, however, is not only relatively late, but extremely doubtful in itself. That Peter was never in Rome, and so did not meet his end there under Nero, must be regarded as certain after the research of Lipsius.^[18] As regards Paul, the tradition is, according to Frey,^[19] certainly not earlier than the end of the fifth century; before that time it was certainly said that he and Peter died under Nero, but not that Paul was a victim of the Neronian persecution.^[20] How, then, could the Roman Clemens about the end of the first century connect the death of the two apostles with the Neronian persecution? That he does so is supposed to be shown by the succeeding words, in which he says: “These men were accompanied on the heavenly pilgrimage by a great number of the elect, who have given us the noblest example of endurance in ill-treatment and torment, which they suffered from the envious. On account of envy women were persecuted, Danaids and Dirces, and had to endure frightful and shameful illtreatment; yet they maintained their faith firmly, and won a glorious reward, though they were feeble of body.” “These words,” says Arnold, in his work Die Neronische Christenverfolgung (1888), which supports the genuineness of Annals, xv, 44, “are seen at a glance to be a Christian complement of the description of Tacitus; he also speaks of ‘most exquisite tortures,’ of the shame and derision with which the victims were treated when they were put to death, and of the satisfaction it gave to the crowds' lust for spectacles.”^[21] But would Tacitus, with his well-known taste for spectacular stories of that kind, have refrained from giving us the ghastly picture of the Dirces torn on the horns of oxen? And what is the meaning of these Danaids, in whose form Christian women are said to have been shamed and put to death? Can anyone seriously believe that the patient water-drawing daughters of Danaos would provide a fitting spectacle for the satisfaction of the crowd's lust for display and blood? Or does the writer of the letter merely intend by the words “Danaids and Dirces,” which have no connection with what precedes and follows in the text, to set the Christian women-martyrs in contrast to the frivolous performers of the ancient myth? Further, what does he mean when he says that these numerous men and women were ill-treated “out of jealousy and envy,” and puts the lot of the Christians in this respect on the same footing as that of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Moses and the Egyptians, Aaron and Miriam, Dathan and Abiram, and David and Saul? Renan suggests the hatred of the Jews for the Christians; but Joel has successfully defended his coreligionists against such a charge, and Tacitus does not give it the least support. Arnold suggests “denunciations by Christians with party passions.”^[22] According to Lactantius, it was Nero's jealousy at the success of their propaganda that induced the emperor to persecute the Christians. But is it not possible that the writer of the letter had seen the Acts of Peter and other apocryphal writings, according to which Simon the magician, who had entered upon a struggle with Peter out of jealousy, may have been the cause of the persecution of the Christians? And may not the whole ambiguous passage, with its rhetorical generalities, not really refer to the Neronian persecution, but rather throw back upon the time of Nero the martyrdoms that Christian men and women had suffered in later persecutions? In any case, it does not follow from the letter of Clemens that the “number of the elect” who “had endured shame and torture on account of jealousy,” and been “added to the company” of the apostles Peter and Paul, died at the same time as they. This assumption arises simply from an association of ideas between the death of the apostles and the supposed Neronian persecution—an association that in all probability did not exist in the time of Clemens. How could the supposed Clemens, about the year 95, make Peter and Paul die under Nero, when the former had never been in Rome, and the latter did not die until after 64? And how can the very scholars who dispute the presence of Peter in Rome and do not admit the death of Paul in the Neronian persecution regard the letter of Clemens as genuine, and as establishing the Neronian persecution?

This, then, is the situation: either the letter of Clemens was really written about the year 95, and in that case the supposed reference to the Neronian persecution must, if it really is such, be regarded as a later interpolation; or this reference is an original part of the letter, and in that case the letter cannot have been written until the tradition as to the death of the apostles in the Neronian persecution had taken shape—that is to say, not before the middle of the second century. In either case, the so-called letter of Clemens is no evidence of the fact of a considerable persecution of the Christians under Nero.^[23]

The belief that the Neronian persecution of the Christians belongs to the realm of fable is further confirmed by the fact that the other witnesses that are quoted for it are just as vague and indecisive. What propagandist material would not the details of this first persecution of their faith have furnished to the early Christians! Yet what trace of it do we find in them? Let us take the evidence of Melito of Sardis. In his writing to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, in which he endeavours to explain to the Emperor how beneficial Christianity had been to Roman power, we read: “The only emperors who, seduced by evil-minded men, sought to bring our religion into evil repute, were Nero and Domitian, and from their time the mendacious calumny of the Christians has continued, according to the habit of people to believe imputations without proof.” In these words, which, moreover, are only known to us from Eusebius,^[24] there is no question of a general persecution of the Christians under Nero; it is merely stated that Nero tried to bring the Christians into bad repute. Dionysius of Corinth (about 170) also, and the presbyter Caius, who lived in the time of the Roman bishop Zephyrinus (about 200), affirm only, according to the same Eusebius,^[25] that Peter and Paul died the death of martyrs “about the same time” at Rome,^[26] which does not necessarily mean on the same day or the same occasion, or that the “trophies of their victory” are to be seen on the Vatican and the road to Ostia. Of the Neronian persecution they tell us nothing. In Tertullian's Apologeticum^[27] we read that Nero, cruel to all, was the first to draw the imperial sword against the Christian sect which then flourished at Rome. He thinks it an honour to himself and his co-religionists to have been condemned by such a prince, since everyone who knows him will see that nothing was condemned by Nero that was not especially good. But there is nothing in his words to show that he was thinking of anything besides the death of the apostles Peter and Paul. Indeed, he says expressly that the apostles, scattered over the world at the master's command, after many sufferings at length shed their blood at Rome through the cruelty of Nero, and he urges the pagans to read the proofs of this in their own “Commentaries”; which is much the same as when Tertullian refers to the Roman archives those who doubt the gospel narrative of the execution of Jesus.^[28] We read much the same in the same writer's Scorp., ch. xv: “Nero was the first to stain the early faith with blood. Then was Peter (according to the word of Christ) girded by another, as he was fixed to the cross. Then did Paul obtain the Roman right of citizenship in a higher sense, as he was born again there by his noble martyrdom.”^[29]

There remains only the witness of Eusebius and of Revelation. Eusebius, however, merely reproduces^[30] the statement of Tertullian that Nero was the first of the emperors to become an open enemy of the divine religion. He writes: “Thus Nero raged even against the apostles, and so declared himself the first of the arch-enemies of God. It is recorded that under him Paul was beheaded at Borne and Peter was crucified under him.” In proof of this he points to the fact that the names of Peter and Paul have remained until his time on an inscription in the burying-place at Rome. As to Revelation, the commonly assumed connection between it and the Neronian persecution is so little proved that Arnold speaks of it as “a most unhappy suggestion” to associate the “great crowd” of Christians executed under Nero, according to Tacitus, with the vision of John, in which the seer beholds a vast multitude, whom no man can count, of all nations, peoples, and tongues, bearing palms and clothed in white garments before the throne of the Most High.^[31] The Christian parts of the so-called Sybilline Oracles, which are supposed to have been written in part shortly after this event, have, as Arnold says, no relation to the Neronian persecution, even where there would be the greatest occasion. They speak often enough of the return of Nero and his cruelties, but he is never represented, as he is afterwards in Eusebius, as the enemy of God and Christ and the persecutor of the early community. It seems very doubtful if the poets knew anything whatever of such an occurrence.^[32] Hence the idea that Revelation is the Christian “counter-manifesto to the Neronian persecution” is of no value. Ecclesiastical tradition assigns Revelation to the year 96 A.D. When recent theological scholarship assigns it to the year 65, it is assuming that the work refers to the burning of Rome in 64. In that case it is clearly a vicious circle to infer the historicity of the Neronian persecution from the fact that Revelation was written shortly after 64. How little was definitely known of such a persecution in the first Christian centuries may be gathered from the fact that Eusebius puts it in the year 67. Justin, in spite of his praise of the courage and steadfastness of the Christians in their martyrdoms, does not say a word about it. Even the later Acts of Peter are silent about it, while other writings go so far as to make Nero a friend of the Christians, and say that he condemned Pontius Pilate to death for the execution of Christ. Origen (185-254) says in his work against Celsus^[33] that, instead of the “multitude ingens” of Tacitus, the number of those who suffered death for the faith was inconsiderable!

But does not Suetonius speak in his Life of Nero (ch. xvi) of a chastisement of the Christians by the emperor as a class of men full of a new and criminal superstition (genus hominum superstitionis novae ac maleficae)? It is to be noted that he in no way connects this event with the burning of Home, but with other misdeeds that were punished by Nero. Arnold has pointed out^[34] that this biographer does not follow a chronological order in his work or observe the internal connection of events, but classes the deeds of the emperor as good or bad, and so puts the burning among the latter and the punishment of the Christians among the former. However that may be, no reason is given why Nero should punish the Christians on account of their religion. It is expressly allowed by historians^[35] that the Roman emperors of that time were extremely tolerant of foreign religions. Suetonius himself says that Nero showed the utmost indifference, even contempt, in regard to religious sects.^[36] Even afterwards the Christians were not persecuted for their faith, but for political reasons, for their contempt of the Roman State and emperor, and as disturbers of the unity and peace of the empire.^[37] What reason, then, can Nero have had to proceed against the Christians, hardly distinguishable from the Jews, as a new and criminal sect?

Schiller also thinks that the Roman authorities can have had no reason to inflict special punishment on the new faith. “How could the non-initiated know what were the concerns of a comparatively small religious sect, which was connected with Judaism and must have seemed to the impartial observer wholly identical with it? Apart from Jerusalem, hardly any community at this time had so pronounced a Judaeo-Christian character as that of Rome.”^[38] If, moreover, it were supposed that by the “Christians” of Suetonius we must understand the Jews excited by messianic expectations—“Messianists” who, with their belief in the approaching end of the world and its destruction by fire, made light of the burning of Rome and so incurred the hatred of the people—the connection between them and the historical Jesus would be called into question, and the evidential value of the passage of Suetonius for the existence of Jesus would be destroyed. In fact, this supposition is negatived by the complete silence of Josephus as to any such misfortune of his co-religionists, though he does not otherwise spare the misdeeds of the emperor. Paulus Orosius also, the friend and admirer of Augustine, relies expressly on Suetonius for the expulsion of the Jews from Rome under Claudius, and even mentions the Neronian persecution, which, according to him, spread over every province of the empire,^[39] but for this does not quote the witness of either Tacitus or Suetonius. When we further reflect that neither Trajan nor Pliny mentions the Neronian persecution of the Christians in his correspondence, although there was every occasion to do so, since they were discussing the judgment and treatment of the Bithynian Christians, we can hardly do otherwise than regard the passage in Suetonius's Life of Nero as a later interpolation.