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Tacitus 115 CE

Tetrarchy of Church Forgeries
Pliny | Trajan | Tacitus | Suetonius | Persecutions?

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How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

~ Sherlock Holmes

111 CE Pliny "Letter"

111 CE Trajan "Letter"

115 CE Tacitus "Annals"

122 CE Suetonius "Lives"

Tetrarchy of Church Forgeries

The term "tetrarchy" (from the Greek τετραρχία "leadership of four [people]") describes any form of government where power is divided among four individuals. The earliest and most prestigious references to the persecution of "Early Christians" by Roman Emperors are divided among the manuscripts attributed to these four individual authors. This tetrarchy of authors binds together strongly, supporting each other in their testimony of Christian persecution in the rule of the Roman Emperor Nero. Collectively this "leadership of four" sources represents a tetrarchy of government directly related to authenticity of historical events in Rome in the later 1st century of the common era. One of the core principles for determining reliability using the historical method is that "If a number of independent sources contain the same message, the credibility of the message is strongly increased". As a result the references to the Christians in this tetrarchy of Roman writers are generally accepted as authentic. With only a few exceptions, the consensus of opinion among modern historians is that the persecution of Christians under Nero is an actual historical event. This may be stated in another form: the hypothesis that Nero persecuted the Christians is generally accepted as being true.

However in this article, the exceptions to this consensus are gathered, and the counter-arguments to authenticity are outlined in their basic form. Another of the core principles for determining reliability using the historical method is that "Any given source may be forged or corrupted. Strong indications of the originality of the source increase its reliability." Many of the academics who have argued against the authenticity of some or all of these references have done so on the basis that they suspect them of being forged, or corrupted in some manner. Many of the manuscripts containing these references were "suddenly and unexpectedly discovered" in the manuscript archives of the church, which will here not be treated as a "Divine Institute" but rather as a "Church Organisation" or "Church [Belief] Industry", and associated with political, financial and business agendas. The manuscripts of four individual Roman authors - Pliny, Trajan, Tacitus and Suetonius - have certainly not been "miraculously and immaculately transmitted from antiquity. It needs to be stated quite clearly that history has demonstrated that the church organisation slash industries (and their CEO's) have perpetuated themselves (business as usual) from antiquity by means of .... atrocities, exiles, tortures, executions, inquisitions, book burning and prohibition of books, censorship, and (one of the most vital instruments of deceit) literary forgery. Accordingly it needs to be stressed that the organisation that was responsible for the "miraculous and immaculate transmission of these manuscripts from antiquity was itself utterly corrupt, at least from the 4th century when it became a political instrument of the Roman Emperor Constantine. It will be argued that this literary evidence currently attributed to this tetrarchy of Roman authors was probably forged by the church organisation during the Middle Ages, and that, as a result, the hypothesis that Nero persecuted the Christians is probably false.



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