Hot off the presses! Here is a MAJOR piece of the Christ-myth puzzle. I have taken a lengthy article and broken it down into different essays, with numerous links both to these other articles and to references, citations and annotated footnotes. You will see the other new articles in this “Chrestos” series in the “Related articles” and “Further Reading” sections.
This “Chrestos” research ties together many loose ends in study of Christian origins. I think I have sufficiently demonstrated that Suetonius cannot be used as “proof” of a “historical” Jesus of Nazareth.
Is Suetonius’s Chrest a Reference to Jesus?
Does the Roman historian refer to the historical Jesus of Nazareth, or is the famous Suetonian passage concerning “Chresto” about another individual altogether?
One of the few citations from antiquity proffered by Christian apologists and others to prove the purported historicity of the figure “Jesus Christ” is a sentence from the ancient Roman historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars (book 5, Life of Claudius 25.4). Published around 120 AD/CE, this passage is one of two in Suetonius’s works held up as “evidence” of Jesus of Nazareth’s existence as a “historical” personage, the second a sentence in that writer’s Life of Nero 16.2 which supposedly discusses “Christians.” Here I will examine the Claudius passage in terms of its value in this quest for the “historical Christ.”…
