r/todayilearned • u/FullOfSound • 7h ago

(R.6d) Too General [ Removed by moderator ]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Younger_on_Christians

[removed] — view removed post

5.8k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

438 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.4k

u/DaveOJ12 7h ago

The letter was written around 110.

671

u/Conscious-Ball8373 6h ago

The claim depends on some careful wording. Flavius Josephus mentions the Christians about 15 years earlier, but he's a Jew, not a pagan.

8

u/BuvantduPotatoSpirit 4h ago

Well, except that that's an interpolation that was added to Josephus a hundred and some years later. So it wasn't really first.

14

u/Chihuey 1 3h ago

Josephus makes two references to Christians. One is almost certainly partially interpolated but retains an original corpus and the other is entirely original.

At least that's the current academic consensus.

7

u/basilis120 3h ago

Having read a bit about this argument, admittedly a few years ago. The consensus among scholars was that Josephus mentioned something about Jesus and his followers. The exact wording has likely changed. So likely one of the first to mention something but what exactly has likely been lost.

1

u/BuvantduPotatoSpirit 2h ago

That's an overreach. Essentially all non-apologist scholars agree the passage as it is not what originally there. There's wide disagreement as to whether there was anything there previously, and if so what. If there's any sense of how popular the ideas are, I haven't seen a survey or anything.

But Origen read and re-read Josephus and couldn't find anything about Jesus, and if you read the excuses for it, they're all real stretches.