The Historical Jesus - Pagan Sources
The non-Christian sources for the historical truth of the Gospels are few and polluted by hatred and prejudice. A number of reasons have been advanced for this condition of the pagan sources: The field of the Gospel history was remote Galilee; the Jews were noted as a superstitious race, if Horace may be believed (Credat Judieus Apella, I, Sat., v, 100); the God of the Jews was unknown and unintelligible to most pagans of that period. The Jews in whose midst Christianity had taken its origin were dispersed among, and hated by, all the pagan nations; the Christian religion itself was often confounded with one of the many sects that had sprung up in Judaism, and which could not excite the interest of the pagan spectator.
It is at least certain that neither Jews nor Gentiles suspected in the least the paramount importance of the religion the rise of which they witnessed among them. These considerations will account for the rarity and the asperity with which Christian events are mentioned by pagan authors. But though Gentile writers do not give any information about Christ and the early stages of Christianity not found in the Gospels, and though their statements are made with unconcealed hatred and contempt, still they unwittingly prove the historical value of the facts related by the Evangelists.
Tacitus (a. D. 54-119) reports that the Founder of the Christian religion, a deadly superstition in the eyes of the Roman, had been put to death by the procurator Pontius Pilate under the reign of Tiberius; that His religion, though suppressed for a time, broke forth again not only throughout Judea where it had originated, but even in Rome, the conflux of all the streams of wickedness and shamelcssnoss; furthermore, that Nero had diverted from himself the suspicion of the burning of Rome by charging the Christians with the crime; that these latter were not guilty of incendiarism, though they deserved their fate on account of their universal misanthropy. Tacitus, moreover, describes some of the horrible torments to which Nero subjected the Christians (Ann., XV, xliv). The Roman writer confounds the Christians with the Jews, considering them as an especially abject Jewish sect; how little he investigated the historical truth of even the Jewish records may be inferred from the credulity with which he accepted the absurd legends and calumnies about the origin of the Hebrew people (Hist., V, iii, iv).
Another Roman writer who shows his acquaintance with Christ and the Christians is Suetonius (AD 75-160), who considered Christ (Chrestus) as a Roman insurgent who stirred up seditions under the reign of Claudius (a. D. 41-54): "Judaeos, impulsore Chresto, assidue tumultuantes [Claudius] Roma expulit" (Claud., xxv). In his life of Nero he appears to regard that emperor as a public benefactor on account of his severe treatment of the Christians.
Of greater importance is the letter of Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan (about A. D. 61-115), in which the Governor of Bithynia consults his imperial majesty as to how to deal with the Christians living within his jurisdiction. On the one hand, their lives were confessedly innocent; no crime could be proved against them excepting their Christian belief, which appeared to the Roman as an extravagant and perverse superstition. On the other hand, the Christians could not be shaken in their allegiance to Christ, Whom they celebrated as their God in their early morning meetings (Ep., X, 97, 98). Christianity here appears no longer as a religion of criminals, as it does in the texts of Tacitus and Suetonius; Pliny acknowledges the high moral principles of the Christians.
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