Christians, Stop Saying This About Jesus
The Counsel of Trent | 21 Jan. 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMHZgtahZuE
1:41 Prove Anaphora Pilati is a forgery?
- BrentenApologetics
- @BrentenApologetics
- If you’re looking for evidence that the Anaphora Pilati is a forgery, the scholarship is actually unanimous on this. There are zero early manuscripts of it, the earliest Greek copies show up over a thousand years after Pilate, and no Roman administrative record ever mentions such a report even though we have thousands of surviving Roman documents. The style and vocabulary are clearly Christian and post‑Nicene, not Roman bureaucratic, and the text uses theological language that didn’t even exist in the first century. Early Christian writers like Justin Martyr and Tertullian only reference the idea of Pilate reporting to Tiberius as an apologetic trope, not as an actual document, and none of them ever quote a text. On top of that, the content contradicts known Roman procedure, because a governor would never send a theological reflection to the emperor praising a man he just executed. Modern scholars classify it as an apocryphal pseudepigraphon, with works like Baudoin’s “Truth in the Details: The Report of Pilate to Tiberius as an Authentic Forgery” explicitly identifying it as a later Christian composition falsely attributed to Pilate.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @hglundahl
- @BrentenApologetics "There are zero early manuscripts of it,"
Did you just attack Caesar's writings?
"the earliest Greek copies show up over a thousand years after Pilate,"
Them being Greek might be a problem, if one could show Zeno and others were too interested in religious forgeries. Can one do so, or does that depend on viewing other things as forgeries which have also been accepted as genuine, just because they theoretically could be and it sounds "over the top"?
A thousand years after Pilate? So, one century worse than Caesar, but some centuries better than the epistles of Cicero.
"and no Roman administrative record ever mentions such a report even though we have thousands of surviving Roman documents."
I don't know what you mean by us having thousands of surviving Roman "documents" ... if you mean administrative reports, sorry, we don't.
We have thousands of literary works that are based on administrative reports, and we may have thousands of fragments of administration, like wage rolls for militaries or inscriptions saying "such and such an administrator did this building, while so and so were consuls" ... neither of these would be likely to mention Pilate, unless you mean Roman historians of Nero's time, like Labienus, none of whom have survived in full if they dealt with contemporary issues.
[Pilate is mentioned inscriptionwise as builder in Caesarea Maritima, I think, though]
"The style and vocabulary are clearly Christian and post‑Nicene, not Roman bureaucratic, and the text uses theological language that didn’t even exist in the first century."
You are presuming very much on 1) Pilate never having Christian convictions and 2) 1st C. Christians never using language close to Nicene theology. If Nicene theology is correct, at least the ideas should have been there.
"Early Christian writers like Justin Martyr and Tertullian only reference the idea of Pilate reporting to Tiberius as an apologetic trope, not as an actual document, and none of them ever quote a text."
Oh, they did reference that idea. How if it happened, but they couldn't access the document, but had a reliable rumour about it?
"a governor would never send a theological reflection to the emperor praising a man he just executed"
As in changes of heart and stepping out of the routine never happens?
You might be overdoing the routine aspect of Tiberius' administration after analogy with later administrators, like Pliny the Younger.
"[Anne-Catherine] Baudoin"
She's in these institutions and conferences:
1 AOROC - Archéologies d'Orient et d'Occident et Sciences des textes
2 ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris
3 LEM - Laboratoire d'Etudes sur les Monothéismes
4 Cultures de l’écrit
In, very Secularist academic culture, France. I think there is a bias.
3:15 How much evidence do you have for the Rubicon?
"Bellum Civile" is his own words, earliest manuscript 10th C AD.
Livy, Velleius, Tacitus and Suetonius, but by the latter two, it's like comparing to Early CCFF for Jesus.
3:18 Cicero wasn't precisely a historian, he was a historic source, and we have his letters from one manuscript discovered by Petrarca.
3:25 Between Cicero and Bellum Civile, you insert a letter from Pompey.
Is it in Cicero's correspondence, or where else?
- Anthony Zav
- @anthonyzav3769
- Only in Cicero’s letters back and forth to each other. The Poet Lucan has Pompey as a charter - he prob used sources we lost.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @anthonyzav3769 Ah, thank you!
It's a while since I read Cicero, does Pompey mention the Rubicon?
Lucan using lost sources is obviously a parallel to Justin Martyr mentioning a real report by Pilate if the Anaphora is after all even a forgery.
3:34 Coinage commemorates Pallas Athena.
Is she a real goddess, or is the coin just showing her statue?
4:52 We have enough manuscripts for Bellum Civile, but enough isn't as many as for Jesus, or especially, as early as for Jesus.
Assume someone had wanted to forge history about Caesar, the production of manuscripts of fake documentation would have had more time.
7:38 I begin to think, both you and the Orthodox priest have read my work on the issue, and he's repeating me badly, you are partially correcting and partially repeating me, badly, both without mentioning my name.
The blogs in question, mainly "somewhere else" (than in the comments section of Tim O'Neill, hence the name of my blog) have made these points:
- on manuscript evidence, Moses is comparable and Gospels better than Corpus Caesareum
- on other authors confirming Caesar, they also have late manuscript evidence
- on George Washington, he is, per definition, the origin story or "aetiological myth" about the US, doesn't prove he isn't historical, and neither should the origin stories of Israel or of the Church be assumed to be such
- on comparable documentation, in the sense of contemporary surviving to us, Alexander the Great has lots less than the Crucifixion, Caesar conquering Gaul less (not as good as the crossing of the Rubicon), Tiberius has less, if only because Velleius says nearly nothing except "Tiberius is perfect, let this be perfectly clear" and after Velleius no contemporary historian speaks up before Tacitus' Agricola, but obviously, Joseph Smith and George Washington have more, because he lived in a much more written age, with newspapers, and a closer and therefore better preserved age.
8:25 I did go on and on about historians who wouldn't have mentioned Jesus and why.
Like if Varro died in 4 AD ...
11:30 I would, for reasons mentioned, not call it an overstatement.
I respect your mention of the Testimonium Flavianum, to which I have done parallel work.
Returning to the Rubicon, we don't have much sources for it:
Cicero, contemporary of Caesar, does not mention Rubicon or the cast of the die in his letters.
Neither does the historian Livy in his Ab Urbe Condita, written only 17 years or so after the event. (Tucker, p. 246) The relevant volume (liber 109), however, containing these events is missing. What we have left is the Periochae, i.e. summaries of the book itself. The summary does not mention the Rubicon or Iacta alea est, the book might have.
Another Roman historian, Marcus Velleius Paterculus (c. 19 B.C.- c. 31 A.D.), mentions Rubicon, but not the expression:
“…ratus bellandum Caesar cum exercitu Rubiconem transiit.”
— Velleius, 2.49
i.e. ”Caesar concluded that war was inevitable and crossed the Rubicon with his army.” (transl. Shipley, 1924)
Iacta Alea Est: Crossing the Rubicon
By Amelie Rosengren
https://latinitium.com/iacta-alea-est-crossing-the-rubicon/
Both Velleius and Lucan were born after Caesar had been killed.
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