In the Annals, by pagan Roman historian Tacitus, it is mentioned that the Christians were blamed for causing the Great Fire (64CE) by the Emperor Nero; however, there is some evidence to suggest that he actually retrojecting beliefs held about Christians at the time of writing (115 ~ 120CE) rather than what actually happened.>no other contemporary accounts of the The Great Fire mention Nero singling out a specific group responsible for it>Christians in 64AD were not calling themselves that, much less Romans would be able to distinguish them from Jews>Pliny the Younger asks Emperor Trajan about Christians in ~110CE, yet neither of them seem aware of the story>even early Christian accounts like the Letters of Clement and Revelations (~95CE) don't mention the Nero storyChristians probably were persecuted in Rome under Nero (as mentioned in Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars) for matters unrelated to the fire, but probably just as another group of Jews.
>>18118955Christians do (indirectly) mention Nero in the book of Revelation. The number 666, the mark of the beast, is gematria for Nero’s name and title transliterated from Greek (ΝΕΡΟΝ ΚΑΙΣΑΡ) into Hebrew (נרון קסר). We know this because there’s a major textual variant of the number as 616, which occurs when doing the same process with the direct Latin transliteration of his title (NERO CÆSAR) into Hebrew (נרו קסר).>picrel>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_the_beast#Nero>https://digitalcommons.luthersem.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=faculty_articles
>>18119057The question isn’t whether Nero persecuted Christians (he probably did), it’s whether he persecuted them for the Great Fire in particular.
