[10] In his treatise Dieu et les Hommes Voltaire, after a very incomplete survey of history, puts the number of victims of religious wars and quarrels at 9,468,800.—J. M.
[11] To marry within certain degrees of kindred, etc.—J. M.
[12] An exaggerated account of the Ulster rebellion.—J. M.
[13] This position could be held in a modified form in regard to ancient Greece. See E. S. P. Haynes’s work, Religious Persecution.—J. M.
[14] The Jews had no right to inflict death after Judæa had become a Roman province, but the authorities at times overlooked these punishments of blasphemy.
[15] Ch. 25. Voltaire has in this followed ecclesiastical custom. The word in Suetonius is not “Christo,” but “Chresto,” and therefore the passage reads, in English: “Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome for their constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus.” As Chrestus was not an uncommon name at Rome, there is no need to apply the passage to Christ in any way.—J. M.
[16] The passage of Tacitus (Annals, xv., 44) is very generally rejected as an interpolation.—J. M.
[17] I omit many of the lengthy notes, in which Voltaire, with veiled irony and a bland pretence of orthodoxy—for the reason of which see the Introduction,—throws doubt on the persecutions. The freer scholarship of the nineteenth century has so far justified his scepticism that few are now interested in the fairy tales of the early “persecutions.” There was only one general repression of the Christians, under Diocletian. See the latest editions of Gibbon, and Robertson’s Short History of Christianity (pp. 130-140).—J. M.
[18] Voltaire’s irony and pretence of orthodoxy must again, as in so many places, be taken into account. You do not, as a French commentator says, incur death in French law for throwing a piece of wood into the Rhone.—J. M.
[19] A beautiful youth loved by the Emperor Hadrian.—J. M.