• Just because Nero is known for his temper doesn’t mean this story of persecution is compeltely beliavable.

Caution with Tacitus:

• Tacitus’s Annals dates to 120 CE, 50 years after the events he describes.
• His use of the term “Christian” is anachronistic, it’s hihgly unlikely that at the time the Great Fire occured, anyone recognized Jesus followers as a distinct group. Jesus followers did not use the name “Christian” until the end of the 1st century.
• It’s highly improbable that Christians were well known and disliked enough that Nero could single them out as scapegoats.
• Tacitus doesn’t provide any evidence for their persecution in the first, only the animosity towards them in the 2nd (century).
• For almost all of the first century, it’s unclear that Roman emperors even knew that Christians existed.

• Tertullian notes that governors were lenient with Christians and encouraging them to recant and dismiss the charges.
• A famous case in Asia Minor around 185 where Christians wanted to be executed by the governor, and the governor told them to jump off a cliff if they wanted to.
• This story might lead us to believe that martyrdom was widespread, but there’s no other records of other incidents like this.

No proof, there’s more probability of Peter dying in the mid-50s in Judea.

For Nero and the source:

1. (i) Paul’s execution had nothing to do with any anti-Christian moves by the emperor Nero. The emperor’s ofcials were simply hearing and deciding, on appeal, the original charge against Paul that had been sustained by the governors of Judaea in the mid- to late 50s. That initial charge manifestly had nothing to do with his being a Christian. It was based, rather, on accusations that Paul was provoking violent disturbances or was dangerously threatening the public order: in sum, that he was engaged in seditious behaviour of some sort. Decisions regarding such matters normally fell under the coercive powers of a governor. Paul’s arrest and subsequent execution had nothing to do with the Great Fire at Rome or with a persecution of Christians. Both had proceeded correctly according to proper legal form in a matter that was of concern to the Roman governors of Judaea at the time.
2. (ii) What happened to Peter is very uncertain indeed. It has been suggested that he might have died in the reign of Nero and perhaps at Rome. But everything about him in these contexts is radically uncertain and unclear. On the balance of the available evidence, it seems more probable that he never even made it to the imperial metropolis. It is almost certain that he was not crucied, upside down or otherwise. Nor did his death have anything to do with the charge of being a Christian. Such an identity would have had no meaning to secular Roman ofcials as early as the 60s. It is difcult to imagine the charge on which he might have been executed (if indeed he was) unless it was something akin to what happened to Paul. Perhaps some persons had successfully charged him with dangerously disturbing the public peace. But such hypotheticals only serve to add more pure speculation to an already obscure history. The data, such as they are, indicate that Peter died a natural death in Jerusalem at some point in the mid-50s.
3. (iii) There is no objective contemporary evidence that would denitely indicate an attack on Christians by Nero, either in connection with the Great Fire or otherwise. It seems probable that certain persons were denounced by the common people of Rome in the aftermath of the conagration as responsible for setting the re and for aiding and abetting its destructive spread. Nero seized on this development to exculpate himself from the blame that was being heaped upon him. Even if this was not true, he at least advanced to the punishment of persons who were popularly held to be responsible for the re in order to be seen as holding someone accountable for the terrible damage and destruction. As emperor, Nero had to show that he had discovered the culpable parties and that he had punished them.98 The explanation for the kinds of rened punishments that were vented on these persons is that they were a mimicry of deserved rewards. As a spectacle of punishment staged at dusk, some were tied to stakes and set on re as living torches, while others were exposed to wild beasts in a manner that was deemed appropriate to the nature of their crime. For the more specic mythic and cultic associations of the executions, see Champlin 2003: 122–3: note that there is no specic Christian aspect to them. The punishments are connected to quite traditional myths, themes, and cultic places; they would have worked perfectly well for non-Christians.
4. (iv) The specific connection of Christians with the re in Rome as the persons who were punished for the conagration somehow developed later. Most surviving sources point to the decades on either side of 100 C.E. as the time when this was happening. This conclusion suggests at least two developments that contributed to the linkage. One was the growing awareness of high-ranking Roman officials, especially those who were confronting Christians in the circumstances of judicial hearings, that there were people denounced to them as Christians — Chrestiani or Christiani — whose ideas and behaviours were perceived to be a subversive threat to local order, primarily because they so upset the sensibilities of provincial communities. They could now be identied as dangerous persons as such (i.e. under this name) and were therefore punished for the name. The second development was the growth of a powerful popular mythology that focused on the emperor Nero. This popular fascination began hailing Nero forth as a gure who was either especially benecial or who was especially malicious to different types of subject peoples in the Empire. The emergence of a series of ‘false Neros’ beginning in the late 60s and early 70s is but one sign of this powerful obsession with the deceased emperor as a living presence who was closely linked with strong popular desires (See Tuplin 1989: 364–404). The Jewish fascination with Nero as a gure was obviously connected with the fact that it was in the last years of his reign that the Roman war against the Jewish community in Judaea was launched. It is not surprising that there developed a literature in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple, perhaps beginning as early as the 70s and 80s, in which Nero became identied as a bestial and destructive gure. The oddly bifurcated attitude towards Nero, however, had its analogues even within Jewish lines of thinking. In some strands of thought and image, admittedly later in date and more remote in origin, Nero was to become a convert to Jewish beliefs and was actually to assist in keeping divine anger at bay.
5. (v) Splitting this into another point – Revelation and Nero. . In it Nero, the criminal matricide, is portrayed as a terrible avatar signalling the end of the world. He is explicitly identied with the gure of the Antichrist. The other inuential Christian shaping of the legendary Nero, and perhaps the one that is most directly relevant to the argument here, is found in the Book of the Revelation (Champlin 2003: 18–19), Here Nero is portrayed as a gure who has come to assume the rôle of the second Beast of the Apocalypse. ‘Let anyone with understanding’, says the prophet, ‘calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person; its number is 666’ (Rev. 13: 9–18, the quotation is specically 13: 18; see the detailed comments by Aune 1997–98, vol. 2: 730–71). But when was this happening? Almost all estimates (and they are that) about the date of composition of the Book of Revelation point to the mid- to late 90s or the early 100s. The date of Revelation or Apocalypse in the form that we have it has been the object of some intense debate, with some favouring a Neronian date and others a date late in the reign of Domitian (largely because ancient sources indicate these dates): see Aune, ‘Date’, Introduction § 2 in Aune 1997–98, vol. 1: lvi–lxx, for an introduction to the problem and the evidence. Aune himself prefers both dates according to various redactions. I cannot, however, accept the evidence for a Neronian date; in my view, this reposes on a view of Nero that developed only some time after the emperor’s death, something that Aune himself, 1997–98: lxix–lxx, explicitly recognizes. For a different view, see Barnes 2010: 39, who prefers a date in the late 60s (in the late autumn of 68 C.E.). The placing of the text in the reign of Domitian by Irenaeus is subject to the same basic objection that a persecution under Domitian is a later ction created by Christian writers calqued on the Roman secular categorization of Roman emperors as good or tyrannical (so, rightly, Barnes). Aune has sighted the interesting fact that the mention of ‘the twelves apostles’ as a named group does not occur before the writing of Matthew and so probably places the Apocalypse some time after it was written. I would agree, and think that a time soon after 100 C.E. is probable In these Christian accounts, Nero was not seen, as one popular strand of perception had it, as a benign gure who was the great benefactor of ordinary people, a millennarian avatar bearing their hopes and yearnings, but rather as a transcendentally evil and threatening gure, a bestial monster. Senatorial historiography and imperial biography, if nothing else, provided Christians with the appropriate imagery with which they could work. We know that these popular millennarian views of Nero, no doubt shared by both Jews and early Christians, were working their way into élite historiography. Tacitus himself is one of our main sources for the eastern phenomenon of the false Neros, writing one of the striking instances into his Histories.

1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2222582X.2023.2208316
2. This article contributes to the recent debate on the historicity of the Neronian persecution. Drawing on a recent publication by C. M. Hansen which argues that Tacitus’s account is largely invented by the ancient historian, this article contends against the pro-historicity defences offered by Jones, Cook, and Van der Lans and Bremmer and contends that evidence for the historicity of the Neronian persecution is lacking and cannot conclusively demonstrate that such an event occurred. In fact, the defences of the Neronian persecution offer a window into the lengths that one must go to assert its historicity, including hypothesising non-extant sources behind our Roman writers (Tacitus, Pliny, and Suetonius) in an attempt to reach behind them, among other logical problems. The article briefly contends that the Neronian persecution could easily have developed in Christian thought without any need of a systemic or focused attack upon Christianity. Instead, Christians were primed to consider themselves persecuted from the beginning because of the narratives surrounding Jesus’s death and the imprisonment narratives around Paul. It is not difficult to see how an expectation of persecution could be fulfilled in the generally hated and vilified Nero.
3. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2222582X.2023.2173628?src=recsys
4. This article contends with the multitude of suggestions that have been raised recently as to the origin of Tacitus’s information on Christians and Jesus, and concludes that, contrary to much popular opinion, the theory that Tacitus’s information is a reliable independent witness is likely faulty. It first discusses previous theories that have been proposed, including the hypothesis that Tacitus was reliant on Josephus, official Roman documents, etc., and finds all suppositions for Tacitus being independent of Christian tradition to be specious and reliant on faulty arguments and a lack of convincing evidence. The article presents an alternative solution which is that Tacitus was reliant on the work of his friend Pliny the Younger, both his Letter 10.96 sent to Trajan and likely also discourses he had with him, noting that Tacitus relied on Pliny’s works elsewhere and the close relationship the two had, even exchanging each other’s works for review and criticism. A number of verbal parallels between Tacitus’s work and Pliny’s letter also points in this direction. As a result, Tacitus’s information on Christians and Jesus likely stemmed from Pliny, who in turn gained it from interrogations of and hearsay from Christians. This has ramifications such as that Tacitus is then not a useful source for establishing the historicity of Jesus or the historicity of the Neronian persecution, as it looks as though he melded Christian tradition with the Great Fire of Rome, which Christians make no reference to for centuries.