More thoughts on Tacitus, the Great Fire of Rome and modern historians

I remain convinced that Christians did not start the Great Fire of Rome, and had that stance well before reading Candida Moss.

More importantly, I remain convinced that Nero did not scapegoat Christians as arsonists, mainly because there weren't enough Christians in Rome to be on his radar screen circa 64 CE to be fingered. Rather, while agreeing with Nero revisionist historian John Drinkwater that the fire was an accident, as I excoriated him in an extended review of his book, I reject that there was any scapegoating followed by persecutory death.

Rather, this appears to have been Tacitus trying to bank-shot two smears for the price of one. Taking what he claimed to know about Christians 50 years later, which of course was itself scurrilous, he retrojected that 50 years. Since, in reality, Christians not only weren't scurrilous, but as I also say at that link, were too small a percentage of Rome's population, at probably no more than 1/10th of 1 percent, and ALSO, circa 64 CE, were not self-identified separately from Jews, they simply would not have been on Nero's radar screen to persecute. Tacitus, rather, is grasping a chance to show his Roman readership that Nero was so odious to the odious Christians for them to evince sympathy from Romans. Why Drinkwater can't see this bank shot as it is, or seems to be to me, I don't know. In any case, he's flat wrong on the number, and group identity, of Christians in Nero's Rome.

He's not alone. Tom Holland, in his book "Dynasty," with even less analysis, repeats the way-too-precise claim by Jerome that exactly 979 Christians were killed by Nero.

That said, there remains the issue of Tacitus' story perhaps being an interpolation. Drinkwater rejects that; Holland doesn't discuss it, if he's even aware of it. Per that link, Christians appear not to have discussed the Great Fire and alleged Christian martyrdom before circa 400 CE, that is, before Jerome and his suspiciously precise claim.

Furthering my idea that this was, if anything, a general messianic Jewish disturbance either mislabled by Suetonius and/or Tacitus, or Tacitus doing a bank shot? (Suetonius, in the expulsion at the time of Claudius, is almost certainly a mislabeling, not a bank shot. BUT? Drinkwater seems to believe there were Christians even back then.) Holland notes that, according to Valerius Maximus, the first Roman expulsion of Jews happened way back in 139 BCE.