Why Nero couldn’t have been persecuting Christians for the fire of Rome

Even assuming that Rome had a number of Christians besides those mentioned in Paul’s letter to the group there, by AD 64, the entire city is unlikely to have had more than 200. (The whole world likely had no more than 1,500 or so; the Book of Acts and Paul’s letters paint a success story that just ain’t so.)

On a fairly conservative, but not extremely conservative estimate, Rome had a population of 500,000. Two hundred people, given the lack of electronic communications, newspapers, etc. would stand out even less in a city of 500,000 than they do today.

Now, the Roman historian Tacitus does mention a disturbance about a certain Χρήστος, but several observations need to be made. First, this is NOT the same as the Greek Χριςτός. The first Greek word means “excellent” or similar. It is nowhere used in the Greek New Testament, nor the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Instead, it was an epithet used about Greek Olympian divinities in general and Apollo in general. (Sidebar: nearly 200 years, Constantine would have a sun-struck vision that, had he not had a Christian mother, he probably instead would have interpreted as a vision of Apollo[or perhaps Mithras] instead; his first post-conversion coinage shows a beardless, Apollonian Jesus.)

Let’s say that Tacitus was unfamiliar enough with Judaism and with this nuance of Greek vocabulary that he used the wrong word. That, then, would mean he wasn’t familiar with Judaism in general, nor disputes among Jewish “sects.” He may have known enough to be familiar with the basic concept of the Messiah, the Christ, and that was, and thought Χρήστος was the right word.

In other words, he could be talking about a general dispute between Jews about the Messiah, and not about Yeshua bar-Yusuf at all. Second, he places this disturbance in the imperium of Claudius, not Nero. So, it could in no way be connected to any disturbance that caught Nero’s eye.

Between the likely generic Jewish dispute of Tacitus’ account and the small number of Christians at the time of Nero, and assuming Christians took to heart Paul’s “submit to the governing authorities” command of Romans 13, there seems to be no reason Christians were blamed for the fires.

Ergo, perhaps they weren’t blamed. Detailed accounts of this alleged persecution are found only in Christian writings, and not in any early ones. Clement of Rome nowhere mentions them in his epistle to Christians in Corinth, though it would have been an excellent example of steadfastness to pass on.

Update, May 26, 2024: A person at r/AcademicBiblical, in chat with me about a main comment of hers there, where she claims that 1 Clement, stripped of legendary accretions, is about Peter and Paul being killed by fellow Christians, nonetheless, in response to me, claims that the Tacitus is not an interpolation. 

I offered as a sidebar the Option B, that, if genuine by Tacitus, it's still a double-bankshot smear, projecting back from his own interactions with Christians, of what was a non-event, so that he could smear Nero even more than Christians.

As for said person's claims rejecting the interpolation idea? They note that the Correspondence of Paul and Seneca mentions the Great Fire earlier. Two counterpoints: First, on a late dating, only about 20 years earlier. So, it's in the same milieu, even if earlier. Second, the 11th letter of said correspondence is generally believed to be by a second forger than most other letters. Severus himself?

Said person does reject an actual persecution, so they're solid there.

So, perhaps there was no Neronian persecution of Christians, even one just limited to Rome.

New Skeptics’ Circle is up

It’s at Aardvarkology. For more on Skeptics’ Circle, a biweekly blog carnival about all things skeptical, go to It’s this Blogger site.

World-renowned scientist wants new 9/11 investigation, but unfortunately appears to be adding to conspiracy thinking

Now, Lynn Margulis is a biologist, not a structural engineer. But, she’s also a world-class scientist whom I think would not be given to non-scientific thinking, including conspiracy theories. So, should her call for a new 9/11 investigation should be taken at least somewhat seriously?

“I suggest that those of us aware and concerned demand that the glaringly erroneous official account of 9/11 be dismissed as a fraud and a new, thorough, and impartial investigation be undertaken.”

But, no, her call shouldn’t be taken too seriously. She immediately shoots herself in the foot:

(Margulis) compared 9/11 to several self-inflicted attacks that had been used in the past to arouse people's fear and hatred and justify war, including the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, the Reichstag Fire, and Operation Himmler, which Germany used to justify the invasion of Poland, the trigger for World War II.

First, the verdict of history on the Maine is pretty damn clear: accidental explosion. The verdict on the Reichstag fire is almost as clear: the Communists started it, although the Nazis apparently hindered firemen from immediately dousing it.

She then goes on to further plunge headlong into, you guessed it — conspiracy theories.

The fact that she’s also influenced by David Ray Griffin’s book “The New Pearl Harbor” (which I assume starts from the idea that FDR knew in advance of the original Pearl Harbor), a book endorsed a by a certain post-9/11 conspiracy-minded slice of liberalism, is more disquieting. Griffin, who is a professor of philosophy, relies heavily on the thoroughly debunked “The Big Lie” of French writer Thierry Meyssan. (A full 80 percent of non-five star reviews at Amazon one-star Griffin’s book for its conspiracy thought.)

Far more sober was the call for further study by British war correspondent/investigative journalist Robert Fisk, who specifically separated himself from conspiratorial thinkers a few days ago. (Fisk’s questions of disbelief about how the jet fuel could have burned hot enough have already been refuted multiple times; at the easily accessible popular level, the magazine Popular Mechanics had an excellent conspiracy debunking about two years ago.)

Beyond that, the best counterthought for this being a government conspiracy?

It’s the same one mentioned by Fisk. The government of George W. Bush has shown itself to be too inept to pull off such a thing.

On the bonus side, fellow skeptics, I haven’t seen such a clear illustration of the fallacy of appeal to authority (should anybody cite Margulis as a reason to open a new, “we did it” 9/11 investigation) in a long time.

Update: A blogger acquaintance informs me that Margulis has also jumped on the bandwagon of deniers that HIV causes AIDS, with the certain amount of conspiracy thinking that goes with that, as well.

Religious liberalism hits a mix of social conservativism and need

At least one of the United Methodist churches in rural portions of Grimes County, Texas, has a woman minister. I’m not going to nose around for opinions in my last 2.5 weeks here, but I do wonder how members there, in this conservative, Deep South part of Texas, feel about that.

Question yourself

To “know yourself” (Socrates), in order to “be true to yourself” (Polonius in “Hamlet”) you must first question yourself.

Question authority? Above all, question the authority of your own conscious ego and its attendants.

Question above all the tyranny of social authority and expectation, especially as you have internalized it, then the authority of internalized family messages, and then the tyranny of unquestioned self-expectation.

Question not, though, in the style of a harsh interrogator, but that of a young child discovering the world anew. I hope to throw questions at my own self and life like that every day.

A very “unlucky” non-Friday the 13th looming?

I wouldn’t want to be in the West Bank or Gaza Sept. 13. Why?

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, starts the evening of Sept. 12, according to the modern Western/Christian Gregorian calendar, and runs through the daytime hours of Sept. 13.

Ramadan, the Muslim month of daytime fasting, starts Sept. 13.

Can you say “potential for explosiveness”?

“Out of body” experience induced — no soul or God needed

Scientists have found a way to induce “out of body” experience in a purely naturalistic manner, simply by using virtual reality goggles.

In the studies published in Thursday’s Science journal, two teams of researchers managed to induce the effect in healthy people by scrambling their senses of vision and touch with the aid of the goggles.

“We ... describe an illusion during which healthy participants experienced a virtual body as if it were their own, and localized their ‘selves’ outside their body borders at a different position in space,” wrote Olaf Blanke, a researcher at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

One team, led by Henrik Ehrsson at University College London, had volunteers sit in a chair in the middle of a room wearing virtual-reality goggles showing the view from a video camera placed behind them.

A researcher moved a rod up to the camera at the same time as the person's chest was touched, and then the rod disappeared from view.

This created the illusion that the person was sitting a few steps back, where the camera stood.

In Blanke's experiment, subjects wearing virtual-reality goggles watched an image of a mannequin representing their own body placed directly in front of them while a researcher scratched their back.

Afterwards, the volunteers were blindfolded and guided backwards. When they were asked to return to their original positions, they went toward the place where they had seen their virtual body — the mannequin.

The researchers said mixing up the senses of sight and touch was key to the experiments.

As the story notes, the studies could shed more light on the sense of one’s self, from the basic proprioception, or knowing where one’s body is in relation to exterior space, to the grounding of a psychological self that has given rise to ideas of a “soul.”