According to the famous account of the 2nd Century historian Tacitus, Nero, the notorious 1st Century emperor, tried to pin the blame for the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE on “Christians.” In The Annals, Tacitus writes:
But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man's cruelty, that they were being destroyed. (Emphasis added.) (28)
Such a characterization of Christians—criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment—by a Roman senator and historian like Tacitus makes no sense if we understand the term “Christian” in the sense of Gospel-believing, tax-paying citizens who render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and turn the other cheek while walking the extra mile for Romans. Who, then, are these criminals Tacitus describes Nero as vilifying?
We must remember that by the year 64 CE, when the Great Fire decimated the city of Rome, the Gospels themselves had not yet been written. They would not be written until the Flavian era that followed Nero. The great majority of mainstream scholars, both Christian and non-Christian, agree on this dating.
There is simply no reason to think that many people in Rome had ever heard of this kind of Caesar-friendly Christianity only three decades or so after the Crucifixion. So few in number could such Christians have been, especially in the city of Rome, that it is exceedingly unlikely that these ostensibly peace-loving followers of New Testament ideals could have made a convincing or useful scapegoat for Nero. So who could Nero have been blaming—and who could Tacitus be describing?
The mystery is resolved if Tacitus is confusing one group of devotees of a Jewish messiah with another group who were, indeed, creating very serious trouble for the Roman government and were, in fact, quite active in Rome at that time.
Rebellion had been simmering among Jews since the days of the first Roman census early in the 1st Century and the new imperial tax that this census was designed to impose on them. These are events that the Gospel of Luke associates with the birth of Jesus, and they also signal the birth of the Jewish rebellion according to the ancient historian Flavius Josephus. According to all ancient sources, it was the galvanizing concept of the Messiah—a warrior who would lead the Jews to salvation—that most motivated the revolt against their Roman masters, however unlikely they were to succeed.
Violent disturbances among the Jewish population were an enormous concern to the Roman government. By the 1st Century CE, about 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire was Jewish, perhaps 7 million, of which only about 2.5 million lived in the region of modern-day Israel and Palestine. The rest, known as “Diaspora” Jews, were scattered within foreign countries following the Assyrian conquest of Israel in 8th Century BCE, the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem in 6th Century BCE, and the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th Century BCE. These Jews comprised a significant portion of the populations of Egypt, Africa, Greece, and Italy by the 1st Century, and they had also reached Gaul and Spain. There may have been another million Jews in the Parthian Empire in modern day Iran and Iraq. By comparison, the Jewish population of the United States in the early years of the 21st Century is between one and two percent—or about 5.4 million. (29)
In addition to their significant numbers, the proximity of the Hebrews’ traditional homeland to Egypt made any potential breakaway state in the area a direct threat to the bread basket of the Mediterranean world. As its chief producer of grain, Egypt was indispensable to the Empire. Rome’s leading competitor in the East, the Parthian Empire, was thus already too dangerously close for comfort to allow any instability.
Unlike any peace-loving Christians who may have existed at this time, the unrest among the Jewish population, particularly among messianic militants, was a clear and present danger to the Roman state. Nero would certainly have had a political motivation to blame them for any attack on Rome. It is far more likely that the “Christians” he blames for the Great Fire in Tacitus’s history were, in fact, this hardcore group of messianic rebels.
Is there any other evidence from all of the historical record that might be the basis for the idea that Romans persecuted Christians in the 1st Century? One piece of evidence often referred to as such an example is a passage written by the 2nd Century Roman historian Suetonius, who reports that Jews in the city of Rome were causing disturbances at the instigation of a person named “Chrestus” as early as the 40s CE, and that they had to be expelled from the city by the Emperor Claudius around the year 50 CE. (30) But again, this can hardly have been the “Christ” of the New Testament since Christ never visited Rome. And the idea of Christians (by our meaning of the term) being such a problem in distant Rome only a decade or two after the Crucifixion, and long before the evangelizing missions of St. Paul and St. Peter, is simply not plausible.
In any event, Jesus’s advocacy of peace with Rome in the Gospels rules him out as a possible instigator of any such disturbances in the first place. This very fact is demonstrated over and over again in the New Testament, as not just Romans but Roman governmental authorities uniformly find no problem with the Gospel of Christ. Nor is there any reason for them to. We are left to imagine Nero as a mad man unjustly accusing the kind and pacifistic Christians out of his own wanton cruelty.
Nero had good reason to fear the militant messianic Jews in Rome, however. Anticipating their Christ would arrive to deliver them, these fanatics were smoldering with resentment against the Empire. Only two years later it is they who would launch all-out war with the Romans. They make much more plausible suspects for the disturbances under Claudius and a much more likely political scapegoat for the arson under Nero that ravaged the city. These messianic Jewish rebels are in fact more believable candidates for setting the Great Fire than Nero himself, since that disaster caused calamitous financial and political challenges for the emperor. Burning for six days, the fire reduced over 70 percent of the capitol city to ruins.