The 79 ce eruption of Mt. Vesuvius

[credoconsolans]

How many people at that time wrote about the eruption?

It was a big deal, destroyed a lot fertile property, impacted Rome, killed lots of people.

But don't we only have one record of one person who wrote about it?

Without scientific investigation we would have never otherwise known the mountain erupted in 79 ce?

I'm thinking about it because a lot of atheistic arguments against the existence of the godman Jesus and his miracles is that we have no contemporary writings about him or them. The argument is that Jesus' acts were so astounding people should have been writing about them and so we should have written records - at least one or more surviving.

But can't we use the same argument about the 79 eruption if we'd never found the ruins of Pompeii and if we didn't have Pliny the Younger's account?

Or are there other records or accounts of the eruption?

 

[Bronzeage]

How many people at that time wrote about the eruption?

It was a big deal, destroyed a lot fertile property, impacted Rome, killed lots of people.

But don't we only have one record of one person who wrote about it?

Without scientific investigation we would have never otherwise known the mountain erupted in 79 ce?

I'm thinking about it because a lot of atheistic arguments against the existence of the godman Jesus and his miracles is that we have no contemporary writings about him or them. The argument is that Jesus' acts were so astounding people should have been writing about them and so we should have written records - at least one or more surviving.

But can't we use the same argument about the 79 eruption if we'd never found the ruins of Pompeii and if we didn't have Pliny the Younger's account?

Or are there other records or accounts of the eruption?

For all we know, there may have been a lot of writing about Vesuvius and Jesus. There is no good reason for any of it to have survived.

Suppose you lived near Vesuvius during the eruption. You write your cousin in Palestine to tell her you are okay and the family is safe. She writes back to say she is glad and mentions a new group of friends. They follow the teachings of a Jewish Rabbi. She goes on to say they claim he was executed by the Romans, but came back to life a few days later.

The Roman postal system was quite efficient, so the exchange would only take a couple weeks, maybe less.

What would become of these letters, or any of the other thousands of letters sent out to tell friends and family the current status of those near the volcano?

 

[credoconsolans]

How many people at that time wrote about the eruption?

It was a big deal, destroyed a lot fertile property, impacted Rome, killed lots of people.

But don't we only have one record of one person who wrote about it?

Without scientific investigation we would have never otherwise known the mountain erupted in 79 ce?

I'm thinking about it because a lot of atheistic arguments against the existence of the godman Jesus and his miracles is that we have no contemporary writings about him or them. The argument is that Jesus' acts were so astounding people should have been writing about them and so we should have written records - at least one or more surviving.

But can't we use the same argument about the 79 eruption if we'd never found the ruins of Pompeii and if we didn't have Pliny the Younger's account?

Or are there other records or accounts of the eruption?

For all we know, there may have been a lot of writing about Vesuvius and Jesus. There is no good reason for any of it to have survived.

Suppose you lived near Vesuvius during the eruption. You write your cousin in Palestine to tell her you are okay and the family is safe. She writes back to say she is glad and mentions a new group of friends. They follow the teachings of a Jewish Rabbi. She goes on to say they claim he was executed by the Romans, but came back to life a few days later.

The Roman postal system was quite efficient, so the exchange would only take a couple weeks, maybe less.

What would become of these letters, or any of the other thousands of letters sent out to tell friends and family the current status of those near the volcano?

Except we do have writings from more than one person of the period in Palestine, but they don't mention Jesus.

How much writing do we have surviving from the end of the 1st century that mention Vesuvius?

 

[dystopian]

It's a misconception that we only have one historical mention of Vesuvius erupting in 79.

We only have one written *eyewitness* account in the form of Pliny the Younger. We have however quite a few references to the eruption that are completely independent from Pliny. For instance, we would know about it even independently from the eyewitness account of Pliny because Emperor Titus is known to have visited Pompei in order to oversee the displaced population (this is also how we can arrive at the date of 79, since the life of Titus is well chronicled). There's also contemporary poetry by Valerius Flaccus and Marcus Valerius Martialis that reference the eruption. Josephus also makes mention of the eruption. All of these references occur within 15 years of the event. If we allow for a bit more time to pass we also find Suetonius make mention of it. Tacitus also makes mention of the destruction of cities in Campania by means of being 'swallowed up and overwhelmed', which is most certainly a reference to the eruption.

Beyond that, we also of course have extensive archeological and geological evidence.

 

[Bronzeage]

For all we know, there may have been a lot of writing about Vesuvius and Jesus. There is no good reason for any of it to have survived.

Suppose you lived near Vesuvius during the eruption. You write your cousin in Palestine to tell her you are okay and the family is safe. She writes back to say she is glad and mentions a new group of friends. They follow the teachings of a Jewish Rabbi. She goes on to say they claim he was executed by the Romans, but came back to life a few days later.

The Roman postal system was quite efficient, so the exchange would only take a couple weeks, maybe less.

What would become of these letters, or any of the other thousands of letters sent out to tell friends and family the current status of those near the volcano?

Except we do have writings from more than one person of the period in Palestine, but they don't mention Jesus.

How much writing do we have surviving from the end of the 1st century that mention Vesuvius?

I live in a city with a lot of churches, and I write a lot. There is a church across the street from me that just moved to this location. I don't know if they moved from someplace else, or this is their first place. Imagine some day in the future, the followers of this church claim miraculous things happened during the services. A scholar could scour my writings for some hint of this small group's genesis. After all, it can be established, we were separated by only 100 yards.

That is the nature of contemporary writing. It tends to be focused on matters at hand and often, what's happening across the street is not important. It would be nice if someone had written a "Comprehensive Study of Rebellions in Palestine in the 1st Century." It would be telling evidence if Jesus and the Christians were not mentioned.

 

[Barbarian]

The argument is that Jesus' acts were so astounding people should have been writing about them and so we should have written records - at least one or more surviving.

But can't we use the same argument about the 79 eruption if we'd never found the ruins of Pompeii and if we didn't have Pliny the Younger's account?

No, we can't use the same argument, and you yourself said why. Jesus' claimed acts were miraculous, while a volcanic eruption is anything but. The miracles of Jesus would require millions of times the amount of independent documentation required for a mere volcanic eruption or the existence of an overly ambitious ruler like Iulius Caesar. Christians don't feel this simply because their minds have been twisted into seeing jesusite miracles as trivially possible.

 

[credoconsolans]

It's a misconception that we only have one historical mention of Vesuvius erupting in 79.

We only have one written *eyewitness* account in the form of Pliny the Younger. We have however quite a few references to the eruption that are completely independent from Pliny. For instance, we would know about it even independently from the eyewitness account of Pliny because Emperor Titus is known to have visited Pompei in order to oversee the displaced population (this is also how we can arrive at the date of 79, since the life of Titus is well chronicled).

So someone during Titus' reign wrote about Titus and thus Vesuvius within the same time period?

There's also contemporary poetry by Valerius Flaccus and Marcus Valerius Martialis that reference the eruption. Josephus also makes mention of the eruption. All of these references occur within 15 years of the event. If we allow for a bit more time to pass we also find Suetonius make mention of it. Tacitus also makes mention of the destruction of cities in Campania by means of being 'swallowed up and overwhelmed', which is most certainly a reference to the eruption.

Beyond that, we also of course have extensive archeological and geological evidence.

OK, good. I wasn't aware of anyone else writing about it in the same time period.

- - - Updated - - -

Except we do have writings from more than one person of the period in Palestine, but they don't mention Jesus.

How much writing do we have surviving from the end of the 1st century that mention Vesuvius?

I live in a city with a lot of churches, and I write a lot. There is a church across the street from me that just moved to this location. I don't know if they moved from someplace else, or this is their first place. Imagine some day in the future, the followers of this church claim miraculous things happened during the services. A scholar could scour my writings for some hint of this small group's genesis. After all, it can be established, we were separated by only 100 yards.

That is the nature of contemporary writing. It tends to be focused on matters at hand and often, what's happening across the street is not important. It would be nice if someone had written a "Comprehensive Study of Rebellions in Palestine in the 1st Century." It would be telling evidence if Jesus and the Christians were not mentioned.

So you are proof that the miraculous things didn't happen because otherwise you would have written about them, right?

 

[dystopian]

So someone during Titus' reign wrote about Titus and thus Vesuvius within the same time period?

If there's no direct reference to the eruption but there's an account of the emperor going to Pompeii to take charge of the operation to deal with the people displaced by some disaster, and another independent source that claims that Pompeii was destroyed by an eruption; then the two accounts corroborate each other. Suetonius (in The Twelve Caesars, 121 CE), and Cassius Dio (A Roman History, 229 CE) both wrote quite extensively about the emperor's life. Suetonius was only around 10 years old when the eruption happened, but such an event would certainly be widely known about by the time he'd take to writing. Cassius Dio was not contemporary to the event, but would have had access to sources now lost and did a great deal of research for his work (22 years worth)

Christian apologists, when faced with arguments that there are no independent contemporary sources for Jesus, like to point to the vesuvius eruption as an analogy. As we've seen, they're wrong to claim there are no contemporary mentions apart from Pliny. The two situations are also not really similar to begin with. For one, the accounts of the eruption are supported by archeological/geological evidence, the existence of Jesus as written in the bible is not.

But more importantly, the lack of contemporary sources mentioning Jesus is much more of a problem than it'd be for the eruption. Consider that there was no real organized group that would've been dedicated to preserving documents mentioning the eruption. Such a task fell to individual historians, librarians, and scriveners; who had to copy such documents by hand and who didn't always have the meticulous attention to comprehensive detail that modern historians would like them to have had. Someone who'se copying documents of historic worth in say 200 CE might not think to preserve everything. He might decide that the most comprehensive account of an event such as the eruption of vesuvius is the only one that really needs to be preserved. Far better, he might say, to preserve the account of an eyewitness (Pliny), than the vague mentioning of the event in some random letter or census or what not. And that's assuming he even considers preserving the account of a historical disaster important enough to begin with; there's a lot of other things to preserve as well, after all, and he might need to prioritize. Vesuvius erupting is just one more in a long list of disasters and events.

For Jesus on the other hand, we DO have an organized group that has a vested ideological interest in gathering and preserving writings about him. The historian's life does not revolve around the eruption of vesuvius; but the christian's life does revolve around Jesus. It is only natural to assume that literate christians would, in the early centuries, try to gather as much material about him as they could. Then, in later centuries, after the fall of Rome, we have large numbers of monks dedicated to the task of preserving and copying books and literary works. Surely they would pay extra special attention to the preservation of works that talk about and support christianity; assigning such works far more importance than random roman accounts of Vesuvius erupting.

 

[credoconsolans]

Thanks. Makes sense.

 

[SLD]

Except we do have writings from more than one person of the period in Palestine, but they don't mention Jesus.

I thought Philo was the only Jesus contemporary close enough, but was actually in Alexandria (although he visited Jerusalem on occasion). Do we know whether Philo was in Palestine during Jesus's supposed time? Also I thought his writings were mostly philosophical commentary and not much on historical goings on. Did he write about events in Palestine during the same time Jesus would have been alive? I just wasn't aware of it.

SLD

 

[credoconsolans]

Except we do have writings from more than one person of the period in Palestine, but they don't mention Jesus.

I thought Philo was the only Jesus contemporary close enough, but was actually in Alexandria (although he visited Jerusalem on occasion). Do we know whether Philo was in Palestine during Jesus's supposed time? Also I thought his writings were mostly philosophical commentary and not much on historical goings on. Did he write about events in Palestine during the same time Jesus would have been alive? I just wasn't aware of it.

SLD

I found this on the net, I don't know how accurate it is:

Why Are The Ancient Historians Silent About Jesus?
________________________________________
By Richard Smith
Consider the following list. These are the historians and writers who DID live within Christ's alleged lifetime or within a hundred years of it, after the time:
Apollonius
Persius
Appian
Petronius
Arrian
Phaedrus
Aulus Gellius
Philo-Judaeus
Columella
Phlegon
Damis
Pliny the Elder
Dio Chrysostom
Pliny the Younger
Dion Pruseus
Plutarch
Epictetus
Pompon Mela
Favorinus
Ptolemy
Florus Lucius
Quintilian
Hermogones
Quintius Curtius
Josephus
Seneca
Justus of Tiberius
Silius Italicus
Juvenal
Statius
Lucanus
Suetonius
Lucian
Tacitus
Lysias
Theon of Smyran
Martial
Valerius Flaccus
Paterculus
Valerius Maximus
Pausanias

 

[Bronzeage]

So someone during Titus' reign wrote about Titus and thus Vesuvius within the same time period?

There's also contemporary poetry by Valerius Flaccus and Marcus Valerius Martialis that reference the eruption. Josephus also makes mention of the eruption. All of these references occur within 15 years of the event. If we allow for a bit more time to pass we also find Suetonius make mention of it. Tacitus also makes mention of the destruction of cities in Campania by means of being 'swallowed up and overwhelmed', which is most certainly a reference to the eruption.

Beyond that, we also of course have extensive archeological and geological evidence.

OK, good. I wasn't aware of anyone else writing about it in the same time period.

- - - Updated - - -

Except we do have writings from more than one person of the period in Palestine, but they don't mention Jesus.

How much writing do we have surviving from the end of the 1st century that mention Vesuvius?

I live in a city with a lot of churches, and I write a lot. There is a church across the street from me that just moved to this location. I don't know if they moved from someplace else, or this is their first place. Imagine some day in the future, the followers of this church claim miraculous things happened during the services. A scholar could scour my writings for some hint of this small group's genesis. After all, it can be established, we were separated by only 100 yards.

That is the nature of contemporary writing. It tends to be focused on matters at hand and often, what's happening across the street is not important. It would be nice if someone had written a "Comprehensive Study of Rebellions in Palestine in the 1st Century." It would be telling evidence if Jesus and the Christians were not mentioned.

So you are proof that the miraculous things didn't happen because otherwise you would have written about them, right?

I need to be more judicious in my use of irony. Let me try again. If in the future, it were found I had written an essay titled, "Miracles which occurred in Baton Rouge in the 21st Century," it would be reasonable to expect the miraculous church across the street from me to be included. After all, it is plain I have an interest in the subject and have gathered a good bit of information. If I write nothing about this church, it's not evidence of no miracles, but it might mean the date or the location of these miracles is incorrect.

As it is, non of my writing is concerned with local religious groups, so it's unlikely to find mention of them in my surviving writings. For all anyone in the future knows, I could have been lame and made whole by a laying on of hands. My testimony, or lack of it, is not evidence of anything, one way or the other.

 

[credoconsolans]

I need to be more judicious in my use of irony. Let me try again. If in the future, it were found I had written an essay titled, "Miracles which occurred in Baton Rouge in the 21st Century," it would be reasonable to expect the miraculous church across the street from me to be included. After all, it is plain I have an interest in the subject and have gathered a good bit of information. If I write nothing about this church, it's not evidence of no miracles, but it might mean the date or the location of these miracles is incorrect.

As it is, non of my writing is concerned with local religious groups, so it's unlikely to find mention of them in my surviving writings. For all anyone in the future knows, I could have been lame and made whole by a laying on of hands. My testimony, or lack of it, is not evidence of anything, one way or the other.

Yeah, but you're not from 2000 years ago. Life was a lot slower and duller and people were extremely superstitious.

Nowadays there is plenty of other things to occupy your attention. Back then, daily life ground to a halt with the sun going down each day and unless you had money to burn, literally, you could sit in the dark and do nothing, or just go to sleep when it got dark, no matter what time it was.

I imagine back in the day, miracles happening would have been of GREAT interest to anyone in these small towns.

 

[lpetrich]

About the members of credoconsolans's list, I'd like to see:

• Where they lived
• When they lived
• What they wrote about

in comparison to ca. 30-CE Palestine. I recall some others doing that and paring down this list by some large fraction. The only author in the right place and at the right time was Philo Judaeus (~25 BCE - ~50 CE). He mainly lived in Alexandria, Egypt, but he visited the Jerusalem Temple at least once. While he discussed Pontius Pilate, he made zero mention of Jesus Christ.

The next closest was Titus Flavius Josephus (37 CE - ~100 CE). He was not quite a contemporary, but he had lived in Jerusalem for much of his life. The "Testimonium Flavianum" is a much-discussed bit of his writings that is purportedly a description of Jesus Christ and his followers. However, it is often considered a forgery or an accidental inclusion of a scribe's note.

Any references after about 100 CE are almost certainly secondhand, likely using what the early Xians stated about JC. Like Pliny the Younger talking about some people whom he encountered who worshipped "Christ as if (a) god". Lucian of Samosata once referred to a "crucified sophist". Etc.

So if there was a historical Jesus Christ, then he wasn't nearly as famous as the canonical Gospels imply that he had been.

 

[Bronzeage]

I need to be more judicious in my use of irony. Let me try again. If in the future, it were found I had written an essay titled, "Miracles which occurred in Baton Rouge in the 21st Century," it would be reasonable to expect the miraculous church across the street from me to be included. After all, it is plain I have an interest in the subject and have gathered a good bit of information. If I write nothing about this church, it's not evidence of no miracles, but it might mean the date or the location of these miracles is incorrect.

As it is, non of my writing is concerned with local religious groups, so it's unlikely to find mention of them in my surviving writings. For all anyone in the future knows, I could have been lame and made whole by a laying on of hands. My testimony, or lack of it, is not evidence of anything, one way or the other.

Yeah, but you're not from 2000 years ago. Life was a lot slower and duller and people were extremely superstitious.

Nowadays there is plenty of other things to occupy your attention. Back then, daily life ground to a halt with the sun going down each day and unless you had money to burn, literally, you could sit in the dark and do nothing, or just go to sleep when it got dark, no matter what time it was.

I imagine back in the day, miracles happening would have been of GREAT interest to anyone in these small towns.

True. but 2000 years from now, I will from 2000 years ago, when life was simple and we were not distracted by teleceberal transportation.

 

[credoconsolans]

Yeah, but you're not from 2000 years ago. Life was a lot slower and duller and people were extremely superstitious.

Nowadays there is plenty of other things to occupy your attention. Back then, daily life ground to a halt with the sun going down each day and unless you had money to burn, literally, you could sit in the dark and do nothing, or just go to sleep when it got dark, no matter what time it was.

I imagine back in the day, miracles happening would have been of GREAT interest to anyone in these small towns.

True. but 2000 years from now, I will from 2000 years ago, when life was simple and we were not distracted by teleceberal transportation.

But you still had lights at night and entertainment at night from a myriad of sources and you are not superstitious like the folks with telecerebral transportation. Not the same thing.

 

[Bronzeage]

True. but 2000 years from now, I will from 2000 years ago, when life was simple and we were not distracted by teleceberal transportation.

But you still had lights at night and entertainment at night from a myriad of sources and you are not superstitious like the folks with telecerebral transportation. Not the same thing.

On the contrary, I believe in the force of gravity, something which 2000 years in the future has been long dismissed as an empirical observation and the creation of science to explain why things appear the way they are. People of our age will be laughed at the way we laugh at those who thought the Earth was flat because it looked flat. Our future descendants will wonder why it took us so long to develop teleceberal transportation, because once reverse rotational plasma cells were discovered, the idea seemed obvious. In the year 4015, we will seem like an island of cargo cult worshipers.

 

[dystopian]

In the year 4015, we will seem like an island of cargo cult worshipers.

But what else can we do but worship the teleporting brain entities in the hopes that they will grace us with the ability to have teleporting brains too?

 

[credoconsolans]

But you still had lights at night and entertainment at night from a myriad of sources and you are not superstitious like the folks with telecerebral transportation. Not the same thing.

On the contrary, I believe in the force of gravity, something which 2000 years in the future has been long dismissed as an empirical observation and the creation of science to explain why things appear the way they are. People of our age will be laughed at the way we laugh at those who thought the Earth was flat because it looked flat. Our future descendants will wonder why it took us so long to develop teleceberal transportation, because once reverse rotational plasma cells were discovered, the idea seemed obvious. In the year 4015, we will seem like an island of cargo cult worshipers.

Nonsense. You know very well the theory of gravity will be dispelled in 2000 years and Einstein relegated to the 'weren't they cute' heap with Newton and Kepler.