“To put an end to these rumours,” says Tacitus, “he sought for guilty persons, and inflicted the most cruel tortures upon persons detested for their infamous practices, who were commonly called Christians. This name they took from Christ, who was condemned to death under Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate. This pernicious superstition, suppressed for the moment, had since overflowed, not only in Judea, where was the source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all crimes and shames meet together. Those were first seized who confessed, and afterwards, on their testimony, a great number of others, who were convicted, less of having set fire to Rome than of hating the human race. Mockery was added to torture; they were wrapped in the skins of beasts to be cast to dogs to devour; they were crucified; they were set alight like torches to give light by night. Nero had offered his gardens for this spectacle, and he mingled with the people in the garb of a charioteer or driving a chariot. Thus these wretches, though deserving of exemplary punishment, inspired pity, for they were not sacrificed to the interests of the public but to the cruelty of a single man.”
It seems as though the Christians must have been safe in their obscurity from the emperor’s notice if it had not been directed to them by some special influence. Gibbon appears to believe that the beautiful Poppæa, the mistress and wife of Nero, and a Jewish comedian who had won his master’s favour, prevented the persecution from spreading to all Jews at Rome by concentrating it on a dissenting sect, in very evil odour with genuine Israelites. Renan goes farther, and thinks that the persecution directed against the Christians may have been excited by the intrigues of the Jews. He bases his opinion upon an ingenious interpretation of a very obscure passage in Clemens Romanus. Against this conjecture we may set the silence of the Apocalypse, which contains no allusion to Poppæa nor to the Neronian persecution. Now, as Renan has demonstrated by a wealth of evidence, the Apocalypse was a direct outcome of this persecution.
Nero is Antichrist and the Beast, and the number 666, which is the number of the Beast, represents the letters of his name, Νέρων Καισαρ, transcribed in Hebrew and added up according to their numerical value. Like the Book of Daniel, written at the time of the great struggle of the Jews with the kings of Syria, the Book of the Revelation is a political and religious pamphlet. The author gives his estimate of the events of his time or expounds his hopes for the future under the figure of prophetic visions and of enigmas to which he sometimes supplies the key. The Jews were extremely fond of this form of literature. The Apocalypse, i.e., the Revelation, ascribed to John, the last survivor of the Apostolic band, was written during the period of anarchy which lay between the death of Nero and the accession of Vespasian. It was the eve of the last agony of Judea; the speedy dissolution of the Roman Empire was expected. A supreme conflict between heaven and earth was about to begin, and would end by the great judgment of God and the reign of his Christ. Nor did the prophet lie; for it was in truth the end of the old world and the birth of the new.[b]
Jewish Headdresses
CHAPTER XIII. THE REVOLT AGAINST ROME
[62-67 A.D.]
The Jewish heart had been kindled to a successful revolt under Judas Maccabæus. The memory of this triumph and of the cruelties that had forced it upon the unwarlike people, ripened the national heart for an effort against even the mighty empire of Rome. The struggle was one of the bravest and one of the most horrible in the world’s annals. It found a splendid chronicler in Josephus, who was one of the generals, and fought bravely, and yet, like his Grecian prototype, Thucydides, won his immortality by his pen instead of by his sword. Josephus’ account is, however, a voluminous work in itself, and we must be content with some of the most brilliant pages, turning to Ménard for a briefer sketch of the general story.[a]