Читать книгу The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus - Drews Arthur - Страница 12

(a) General Observations.—As regards the passage in Tacitus, the simple credulity with which it had hitherto been accepted led to a sceptical attitude, not only abroad, where the Frenchman Hochart,^[40] the Dutchman Pierson,^[41] the English author of Antiqua Mater, Edwin Johnson, the American William Benjamin Smith in Ecce Deus (1911), and others assailed its genuineness, but also in German science. Besides Bruno Bauer,^[42] H. Schiller has drawn attention to certain difficulties in the Tacitean tradition that had been overlooked; and even Arnold acknowledges, though he endeavours to show the unsoundness of the critical view of the passage, that “this reference, which had hitherto been regarded as quite simple and easy to understand, has been very little understood.”^[43] According to Hochart the passage contains as many insoluble difficulties as it does words.^[44] This is especially true of the sentence: “Igitur primum correpti, qui fatebantur, deinde indicio eorum multitudo ingens, haud proinde in crimine incendii quam odio humani generis convicti sunt.” Schiller calls this sentence “one of the most difficult in this sententious writer,” and adds: “One could almost believe that he deliberately left a riddle to posterity which he had failed to solve himself.”^[45]

We have first the “multitudo ingens” of the Christians. Even Arnold sees a “rhetorical exaggeration” in these words; it is opposed to all that we know of the spread of the new faith in Koine at the time.^[46] The question is, who exaggerated—Tacitus, who would scarcely take any interest in the number of the Christians, or a later Christian interpolator, who would naturally have such an interest, in order to demonstrate the rapid spread and marvellous attractiveness of the religion of Jesus?

Then there is the word “fatebantur.” Theological writers like Renan, Weizsäcker, etc., refer the expression to the belief of those who were captured, and so make them out to have been persecuted on account of their Christianity. Von Soden also translates it: “All who openly confessed Christianity were at once arrested,” etc. (p. 11). Schiller, however, rightly holds that it is not probable, in view of the close life of the Christians at the time, that some of them, apart from all the others, “had openly professed a doctrine that was not yet a peculiar creed, and would be intelligible to nobody.”^[47] Others, therefore, such as Arnold, think that the word “fatebantur” refers rather to the crime of setting fire to Rome. In that case, there would, as many historians, such as Neumann, admit, be no question of a persecution of Christians as such, but merely of a police procedure.^[48]

In the next place, however, the Christians are not so much “convicted” of the fire as of “hatred of the human race.” Holtzmann (in Sybel's Historischer Zeitschrift) has translated this phrase as “completely devoid of any humane and political culture,” “so that they might be relieved of considerations of humanity in dealing with them.” Schiller sees in it a reference to the custom of the Christians to withdraw from all intercourse with the world, celebrate forbidden festivals in secret meetings, and never sacrifice to the genius of the emperor.^[49] Arnold conceives the expression as “an opposition on principle to the omnipotence of the Roman State.”^[50] But, as Hochart rightly asks, could Tacitus, who never took seriously the faith of the Jews, and presented the Jewish and, according to Tertullian, even the Christian God to his readers as a deity with an ass's head, regard the existence of a Jewish sect, which differed in no respect from the Jews in the eyes of the Romans, as so menacing to the welfare of the empire that he must call down on it the full anger of the gods of Olympus? “It is inconceivable that the followers of Jesus formed a community in the city at that time of sufficient importance to attract public attention and the ill-feeling of the people. It is more probable that the Christians were extremely discreet in their behaviour, as the circumstances, especially of early propaganda, required. Clearly we have here a state of things that belongs to a later date than that of Tacitus, when the increase and propagandist zeal of the Christians irritated the other religions against them, and their resistance to the laws of the State caused the authorities to proceed against them.”^[51] The interpolator, Hochart thinks, transferred to the days of Nero that general hatred of the Christians of which Tertullian speaks. Indeed, the French scholar thinks it not impossible that the phrase “odium humani generis” was simply taken from Tertullian and put in the mouth of Tacitus. Tertullian tells us that in his time the Christians were accused of being “enemies of the human race” (paene omnes cives Christianos habendo sed hostes maluistis vocare generis humani potius quam erroris humani).^[52] And even the “Thyestean meals” and “Oedipodic minglings,” of which Arnold is reminded by the circumstance that Tacitus ascribes those horrors and scandals to the Christians, hardly suit the age of Nero, and have all the appearance of a projection of later charges against the Christians into the sixties of the first century—supposing, that is to say, that the writer was thinking of them at all in the expression quoted. It cannot be repeated too often that charges of this kind, if, as is usually gathered from similar expressions of Justin and Tertullian, they were really put forward by the Jews,^[53] have no ground or reason whatever in the historical relations between the two during the first century, especially before the destruction of Jerusalem. The schism between Jews and Christians had not yet taken place, and the hatred of the two for each other was as yet by no means such as to justify such appalling accusations.^[54] If, on the other hand, they are supposed to be brought by the pagans against the Christians, there is a complete absence of motive.^[55]

(b) The Criticisms of Hochart.^[56]—No one has more decisively attacked the belief in the persecution of the Christians than Hochart, and it is therefore advisable to give a summary here of the critic's arguments.

In the first place, he regards it as wholly improbable that the charge against Nero, of setting fire to the city himself, was made at all. The whole conduct of the emperor during and after the fire, as it is described by Tacitus, could not possibly have led to such a feeling among the people. Even Suetonius, who is so bent on throwing the blame of the fire on Nero, knows nothing of such a rumour, and, according to the account of Tacitus, the emperor suffered no loss of popularity with the people. Then the aristocrats, who were in conspiracy against him, did not venture to take any step against him, and the people were very far from disposed to take the part of the conspirators when they were tried. Hence the persecution of the Christians has no adequate motive, and cannot in any case have been due to the cause alleged in Tacitus. In this Schiller agrees with Hochart. In agreement also with Adolph Stahr, he regards the rumour that Nero was the author of the fire as utterly incredible. If any rumour of the kind arose, it would, he believes, have been confined to the members of the aristocratic party, with whom Tacitus was in sympathy, and would not be found among the people, who considered him innocent.^[57] There was, therefore, according to Schiller, with whom even Arnold agrees on this point,^[58] no reason why Nero should accuse the Christians of causing the fire.^[59] In any case there can be no question of a Neronian “persecution of the Christians,” even if Tacitus has discovered a statement handed down that, on the occasion of the fire, a number of Jewish sectaries, possibly including some Christians, were put to death on the charge of causing it.^[60]

The expression “Christians,” which Tacitus applies to the followers of Jesus, was by no means common in the time of Nero. Not a single Greek or Roman writer of the first century mentions the name: neither Juvenal nor Persius, Lucian or Martial, the older Pliny or Seneca. Even Dio Cassius never uses it, and his abbreviator, the monk Xiphilinus, sees no reason to break his silence, but speaks of the Christians who were persecuted under Domitian as followers of the Jewish religion.^[61] The Christians, who called themselves Jessaeans, or Nazoraeans, the Elect, the Saints, the Faithful, etc., were universally regarded as Jews. They observed the Mosaic law, and the people could not distinguish them from the other Jews. That Tacitus applied the name, common in his time, to the Jewish sectaries under Nero, as Voltaire and Gibbon believe, is very improbable. The Greek word Christus (“the anointed”) for Messiah, and the derivative word Christian, first came into use under Trajan, in the time of Tacitus. Even then, however, the word Christus could not mean Jesus of Nazareth. All the Jews without exception looked forward to a Christus or Messiah, and believed that his coming was near at hand. It is, therefore, not clear how the fact of being a “Christian” could, in the time of Nero or of Tacitus, distinguish the followers of Jesus from other believers in a Christus or Messiah.^[62] This could only be at a time when the memory was lost of the many other persons who had claimed the dignity of Messiah, and the belief in the Messiah had become a belief in Jesus, not as one, but the Messiah, and Christ and Jesus had become equivalent terms.^[63] Not one of the evangelists applies the name Christians to the followers of Jesus. It is never used in the New Testament as a description of themselves by the believers in Jesus, and the relevant passage in Acts (xi, 26), according to which the name was first used at Antioch, has the appearance of a later interpolation, belonging to a time when the term had become a name of honour in the eyes of some and a name of reproach in the eyes of others.^[64] With this is also connected the peculiar way in which Tacitus speaks of the execution of Christ under the procurator Pontius Pilate. He does not know the name Jesus—which, we may note incidentally, would be impossible if he had had before his eyes the acta of the trial or the protocols of the Senate—takes Christ to be a personal name, and speaks of Pilate as a person known to the reader, not as an historian would who seeks to inform his readers, but as a Christian to Christians, to whom the circumstances of the death of Christ were familiar.

The Jews at Rome had gone there voluntarily in order to make their fortune in the metropolis of the empire, and on the whole they prospered. They may have been held of little account, or even despised, but no more so than the other oriental foreigners who endeavoured to make money at Rome by fortune-telling, domestic service, or trade. In any case there is so little question of a general “hatred” of the people for them that the Jewish historians, especially Josephus, do not make much complaint of the treatment accorded to their countrymen at Rome.^[65] It is incredible that the Jessaeans or Nazoraeans amongst them, who must in any case have been few in number at the time of the fire, were the object of an especial hatred, and so would be likely to bear the blame of the fire in the eyes of the people.

Death by fire was not a form of punishment inflicted at Rome in the time of Nero. It is opposed to the moderate principles on which the accused were then dealt with by the State. The use of the Christians as “living torches,” as Tacitus describes, and all the other atrocities that were committed against them, have little title to credence, and suggest an imagination exalted by reading stories of the later Christian martyrs. The often quoted statements of Juvenal and Seneca have no bearing on this; they are not connected with the Christians, and need not in the least be regarded as references to the members of the new sect sacrificed by Nero.

The victims cannot possibly have been given to the flames in the gardens of Nero, as Tacitus says. According to his own account, these gardens were the refuge of those whose homes had been burned, and were full of tents and wooden sheds. It is hardly probable that Nero would incur the risk of a second fire by his “living torches,” and still less probable that he mingled with the crowd and feasted his eyes on the ghastly spectacle. Tacitus tells us in his life of Agricola that Nero had crimes committed, but kept his own eyes off them. The gardens of Nero (on the present Vatican) seem to have been chosen as the theatre of the deed merely to strengthen the legend that the holy of holies of Christianity, the Church of St. Peter, was built on the spot on which the first Christian martyrs had shed their blood.^[66]

Finally, there is the complete silence of profane writers and the vagueness of the Christian writers on the matter; the latter only gradually come to make a definite statement of a general persecution of the Christians under Nero, whereas at first they make Nero put to death only Peter and Paul. The first unequivocal mention of the Neronian persecution in connection with the burning of Rome is found in the forged correspondence of Seneca and the apostle Paul, which belongs to the fourth century. A fuller account is then given in the Chronicle of Sulpicius Severus (died 403 A.D.), but it is mixed with the most transparent Christian legends, such as the story of the death of Simon Magus, the bishopric and sojourn of Peter at Rome, etc. The expressions of Sulpicius agree, in part, almost word for word with those of Tacitus. It is, however, very doubtful, in view of the silence of the other Christian authors who used Tacitus, if the manuscript of Tacitus which Sulpicius used contained the passage in question. We are therefore strongly disposed to suspect that the passage (Annals, xv, 44) was transferred from Sulpicius to the text of Tacitus by the hand of a monastic copyist or forger, for the greater glory of God and in order to strengthen the truth of the Christian tradition by a pagan witness.^[67]

But how could the legend arise that Nero was the first to persecute the Christians? It arose, says Hochart, under a threefold influence. The first is the apocalyptic idea, which saw in Nero the Antichrist, the embodiment of all evil, the terrible adversary of the Messiah and his followers. As such he was bound, by a kind of natural enmity, to have been the first to persecute the Christians; as Sulpicius puts it, “because vice is always the enemy of the good.”^[68] The second is the political interest of the Christians in representing themselves as Nero's victims, in order to win the favour and protection of his successors on that account. The third is the special interest of the Roman Church in the death of the two chief apostles, Peter and Paul, at Rome. Then the author of the letters of Seneca to Paul enlarged the legend in its primitive form, brought it into agreement with the ideas of this time, and gave it a political turn. The vague charges of incendiarism assumed a more definite form, and were associated with the character of Antichrist, which the Church was accustomed to ascribe to Nero on account of his supposed diabolical cruelty. He was accused of inflicting horrible martyrdoms on the Christians, and thus the legend in its latest form reached the Chronicle of Sulpicius. Finally a clever forger (Poggio?) smuggled the dramatic account of this persecution into the Annals of Tacitus, and thus secured the acceptance as historical fact of a purely imaginary story.

We need not recognise all Hochart's arguments as equally sound, yet we must admit that in their entirety and agreement they are worthy of consideration, and are well calculated to disturb the ingenuous belief in the authenticity of the passage of Tacitus. It seems as if official “science” is here again, as in so many other cases, under the dominion of a long-continued suggestion, in taking the narrative of Tacitus to be genuine without further examination. We must not forget what a close connection there is between this narrative and the whole of Christian history, and what interest religious education and the Church have in preventing any doubt from being cast on it. Otherwise how can we explain that no one took any notice during the whole of the Middle Ages of a passage of such great importance for the history and prestige of the Church? No one, in fact, seems to have had the least suspicion of its existence until it was found in the sole copy at that time of Tacitus, the Codex Mediceus II, printed by Johann and his brother Wendelin von Speyer about 1470 at Venice, of which all the other manuscripts are copies.^[69] Our historians as a rule are content to reproduce the narrative of Tacitus in somewhat modified terms, without making any close scrutiny of Annals, xv, 44; thus does Domaszewski, for instance, in his History of the Roman Empire (1909), to say nothing of the numerous popular manuals of history. But our whole science of history is still, as regards the origin of Christianity, under the mischievous influence of theology, and is content to reproduce its statements without inquiry. In regard to the question of the origin of the Christian religion and the historicity of Jesus it has almost entirely abdicated its function, and is actually pleased that it need not deal with this delicate theme, as Seeck candidly admits when he says in his Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt (iii, 1900): “We have no intention of depicting the human personality of Jesus and telling the story of his life, since these problems are, in the present state of tradition, perhaps insoluble, but at all events not yet solved. Every question relating to the origin of Christianity is so difficult that we are glad to avoid it altogether.”^[70] It is true that Seeck regards the hesitation in regard to the genuineness of the writings admitted in theology as “in most cases without foundation.” He accepts tradition in regard to the Tacitus narrative, and believes in the Neronian persecution of the Christians. What is the use of this, however, when he has made no close inquiry into these things,, and therefore gives his verdict solely in accordance with a general belief which is possibly a mere prejudice? Assuredly we do not envy the “historical sense” and the good taste of men who would persuade themselves and others that it would be just as easy to deny the historicity of Socrates, Alexander, Luther, Goethe, Bismarck, etc., as that of Jesus, although this is shown in a very different way than the historical existence of the “god-man” of the gospels.^[71]

(c) The Possibility of Various Interpretations of “Annals” xv, 44.—So much as to the possible spuriousness of Annals, xv, 44. We have now to examine the evidential value of the passage, supposing it to be genuine, and apart from all that we have said of its historical value.

In opposition to Hermann Schiller, Neumann, and other historians, Harnack regards it as “certain” that the persecution mentioned by Tacitus was really a persecution of the Christians. He believes, nevertheless, that the passage is “not altogether intelligible” in the sense that it first ascribes the invention of the name “Christiani” to the “people,” and then goes on to say that “the author of the name” was Christ. “If that is so, the people acted quite reasonably in giving the name of Christians to the followers of Christ. Why, then, does Tacitus call the title ‘Christians’ a ‘name imposed by the people’?” The circumstance is really very curious. “In order to put an end to the trouble, Nero laid the blame on those whom, hateful for their crimes, the people called Christians.” However, Andresen has made a fresh study of the Tacitus manuscript, and shown that the word was at first “Chrestianos,” and was later altered to “Christianos”; whereas it is written “Christus,” not “Chrestus.” “Now it is quite clear,” says Harnack, “Tacitus says that the people call the sect Chrestiani; he, however—relying on more accurate knowledge, as Plinius has already written ‘Christiani’—quietly corrects the name, and rightly speaks of the author of the name as Christ.”^[72]

The expression “Chrestiani” is usually regarded as a popular version of “Christiani” (compare Vergil and Virgil), just as, on this account, Suetonius is supposed to have written Chrestus instead of Christus. But, as we observed before, Chrestus was not only a familiar personal name; it was also a name of the Egyptian Serapis or Osiris, which had a large following at Borne, especially among the common people. Hence “Chrestiani” may be either the followers of a man named Chrestus, or of Serapis. The word “Chrestus” means “the good.” Thus the Chrestiani were likely to attract the name of “the good,” and it is presumed that the people gave this name to those whom they detested on account of their evil deeds. Possibly this name was given to them precisely because they were hated for their crimes. The Latin sentence, “quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Christianos appellabat,” admits this interpretation, and it is often found. How came the people to give the name of “the good” to men who were in their eyes notoriously bad? Clearly, the expression must, when we examine their way of thinking, be regarded as ironical; the Roman people called the followers of Serapis-Chrestus “good” because they were precisely the contrary. We might therefore regard the name “Chrestiani” as equivalent to “the clean brethren,” just as it is customary to call the scum of Paris the “Apaches.”^[73]

We know from history what an evil repute the Egyptian people, which consisted mainly of Alexandrian elements, had at Rome. While other foreign cults that had been introduced into Rome enjoyed the utmost toleration, the cult of Serapis and Isis was exposed repeatedly to persecution. This was due, as we learn from Cumont, not merely to political considerations, the hostility of Rome to Alexandria, but also to moral and police reasons. The lax morality associated with the worship of the Egyptian gods and the fanaticism of their worshippers repelled the Romans, and excited the suspicion that their cultus might be directed against the State. “Their secret associations, which were chiefly recruited from the poorer people, might easily, under the cover of religion, become clubs of agitators and the resort of spies. These grounds for suspicion and hatred [!] contributed more, no doubt, to the rise of the persecution than purely theological considerations. We see how it subsides and flames out again according to the changes in the condition of general politics.”^[74]

In the year 48 B.C. the chapels devoted to Isis were destroyed by order of the Senate, and their images of the gods broken. In 28 A.D. the Alexandrian divinities were excluded from the limits of the Pomoerium—a proscription which Agrippa extended seven years afterwards to a sphere a thousand paces from the city. In fact, in the year 49 the feeling against the Egyptians ran so high, on account of a scandal in which Egyptian priests were involved, that the most drastic proceedings were taken against the followers of Serapis. On this occasion the maltreatment fell upon the Jews also, because some of their compatriots had behaved in a similar manner; this was not due to any general hatred of the Jews, but to the fact that the Roman Jews, who mostly came from Egypt and Alexandria, were confused with the Alexandrians, and even with that Alexandrian rabble the “Chrestiani.” We read in Tacitus^[75] that at that time the proscription of the Egyptian and Jewish religious practices was discussed, and the Senate decided to send four thousand men infected with their superstitions, of the class of freedmen, to the island of Sardinia, to fight the bandits, in the hope that the unhealthy climate of the island would make an end of them. Josephus also says this in his Antiquities.^[76] A few years later, under Claudius, “the Senate decreed the expulsion of the mathematicians from Italy, though the decree was not put in force.”^[77] The mathematicians—that is to say, astrologists—are the Egyptians and Egyptian Jews, the followers of Chrestus, as we read in Fl. Vopiscus in the letter of the Emperor Hadrian to his brother-inlaw Servius: “Those who worship Serapis are the Chrestians, and those who call themselves priests of Chrestus are devoted to Serapis. There is not a high-priest of the Jews, a Samaritan, or a priest of Chrestus who is not a mathematician, soothsayer, or quack. Even the patriarch, when he goes to Egypt, is compelled by some to worship Serapis, by others to worship Chrestus. They are a turbulent, inflated, lawless body of men. They have only one God, who is worshipped by the Chrestians, the Jews, and all the peoples of Egypt.”

It is true that this letter is often regarded as spurious, a fourth-century forgery, on account of its absurd and confused expressions on Christianity and the Christians. In any case, it shows the close connection between the Alexandrian Jews and the Egyptians, since both are described as mathematicians and Chrestians. And is it not possible that the reference to Chrestus and the Chrestians has been too hastily applied to Christus and the Christians? And may not the absurdity be due simply to the fact that the writer of the letter could see no clear distinction between the two religions and their deities? The passage in Tacitus may, in that case, be due to a similar misunderstanding. The “Chrestiani,” who were detested by the people for their crimes, and to whom the historian ascribes all the abominations that have invaded the metropolis, are not Christians at all, but followers of Chrestus, the scum of Egypt, the “apaches” of Rome, a “multitude ingens,” a real “object of hatred to the human race,” people on whom Nero could very easily cast the suspicion of having set fire to Rome, and whose admission that they had done so is not in the least unintelligible. Hence the “people” rightly called them “Chrestians,” which was, as we saw, an ambiguous name, and a not uncommon epithet in Rome at the time. Tacitus, about the year 117, confuses them with the Christians of his time, just as the Emperor Hadrian does in his letter to Servius fourteen years afterwards. Having done so, he felt compelled to add the explanatory words, “autor nominis ejus Christus,” etc., and describe them as coming from Judaea, confusing the Alexandrian Jews, who were identified with them, with the Jews of Palestine. In this way the expression “appellabat” (instead of “appellat”), which seems to Harnack “remarkable,” becomes intelligible. Possibly there is question of some popular phrase used in Nero's time which Tacitus himself did not understand; possibly, however, the sentence in which Christus is said to have been the author of the name of Christians and the whole reference to Judaea do not come from the pen of Tacitus at all, but are due to a later Christian, who identified the Chrestians of Tacitus with the Christians; and thus the whole Neronian persecution and the supposed confirmation of the historicity of Christ by the Roman historian are based upon a monstrous misunderstanding. If that is so, a new light is thrown also on the “Chresto impulsore” of Sulpicius. Chrestus was not only the name of the god, but, as frequently happened in ancient religions, also of his chief priest. May it not be that the tumults of the “Jews” under Claudius really refer to rebellious and criminal elements of the Egyptian rabble in the metropolis, under the influence of their chief priest, ending in the expulsion of the Jews from Rome? This, of course, is not the only plausible explanation of the passage. We need only say that it is a possible interpretation of what happened. In that case, the passage of Tacitus might remain substantially unquestioned, without proving what it is generally supposed to prove—namely, the fact of a Neronian persecution and the existence of an historical Jesus. In this way, at all events, we find the simplest solution of all the difficulties connected with the passage in Tacitus.

Those who do not find this interpretation of Annals, xv, 44, plausible have still to solve the problem whether the Chrestians or Christians of the Roman historian were really Christians in our meaning of the word or were distinct from them. Edwin Johnson regards the Chrestians as followers of the “good god” (Chrestus), as the Gnostics called their god in opposition to Jahveh, whom they looked upon as the perversely conceived creator of the Jews. He thus traces the name to a sect, the founder of which he considers to have been Simon the Magician, flourishing in Rome in the time of Claudius, whose members, as representatives of a spiritualised Judaism, were very obnoxious to the traditional Jew.^[78] He supposes that Tacitus transferred to the time of Nero the hatred of the Christians which animated the Jews of his own time, and thus the Chrestians (Gnostics) were confused with the real Christians. Possibly, however, the name is only another expression for Messianists, and the Chrestians of Tacitus are Jews exalted by eschatological ideas, living in expectation of a speedy end of the world by fire, and so contracting the suspicion of having set fire to the city. They may have formed a “multitude ingens” and incurred “the hatred of the human race” by being led in their fanaticism to express their satisfaction at the burning of the metropolis; possibly they even took part in it. However that may be, there is not the least proof in any case of a Neronian persecution of the Christians. Even in this case, Tacitus' s reference to Christ as the founder of the sect rests on a misunderstanding—namely, a confusion of the most confident of the Jewish Messianists with the followers of the Christus who, as Tacitus had heard, had been crucified under Pontius Pilatus.^[79]

In regard to the significance of Pilate in Tacitus, a remarkable hypothesis has recently been put forward by Andrzej Niemojewski in his work, Gott Jesus im Lichte fremder und eigener Forschungen samt Darstellung der evangelischen Astralstoffe, Astralszenen, und Astralsysteme (1910). According to this, the Pilate of the Christian legend was not originally an historical person; the whole story of Christ is to be taken in an astral sense, and Pilate represents the constellation of Orion, the javelin-man (pilatus, in Latin), with the arrow or lance-constellation (Sagitta), which is supposed to be very long in the Greek myth, and appears in the Christian legend under the name of Longinus, and is in the Gospel of John the soldier who pierces the side of Jesus with a spear (longche, in Greek). In the astral myth, the Christ hanging on the cross, or world-tree (i.e., the Milky Way), is killed by the lance of “Pilatus.” Hence, according to Niemojewski, the Christian populace told the legend of a javelin-man, a certain Pilatus, who was supposed to have been responsible for the death of the Saviour. This wholly sufficed for Tacitus to recognise in him the procurator in the reign of Tiberius, who must have been known to the Roman historian from the books of Josephus “On the Jewish War,” which were destined for the imperial house.^[80] In point of fact, the procurator Pontius Pilate plays a part in the gospels so singularly opposed to the account of the historical Pilate, as Josephus describes him, that we can very well suspect a later introduction of an historical personage into the quasi-historical narrative.

When we take account of these many possible interpretations of Annals, xv, 44, all of which are as probable as, if not more probable than, the customary Christian explanation, the narrative of Tacitus cannot be quoted as a witness to the historicity of Jesus. We may say, indeed, that history has hitherto treated the passage, in view of its importance, with an absolutely irresponsible superficialness and levity. “The non-Christian witnesses,” says von Soden, “can only be quoted in favour of, not against, the historicity of Jesus” (p. 14). The truth is that they prove nothing either for or against; they prove nothing at all.^[81] J. Weiss is perfectly correct when he says, as we saw previously: “There is no such thing as a really convincing witness in profane literature.” It is true that he is able to console himself for this. “What,” he asks, “could Josephus or Tacitus do for us? They could at the most merely show that at the end of the first century not only the Christians, but their tradition and Christ-mythos, were known at Rome. When it originated, however, and how far it was based on truth, could not be discovered from Tacitus or Josephus” (p. 91). The orthodox pastor Kurt Delbrück adds: “What does it matter whether or no Tacitus wrote it? He could only have received the information, a hundred years after the time, from people who had told it to others. It matters nothing to us, therefore, whether the passage is genuine or not. The historical personality of Jesus Christ is proved only by the fact [?] that the earliest Christian community recognised its Saviour in him whom it had once seen alive. We have no further historical documents.”