In the year 64 during the Principate of Nero, in the night between July 18 and 19, a fire broke out in Rome that within nine days destroyed or badly damaged a substantial part of the City, leaving many dead or homeless. Rumors circulated that the fire had been set by Nero, who, it was claimed, sought to divert blame from himself by holding responsible a new sect of aggressively proselytizing Jews, known as Christians. Most recent scholarship has rejected the popular view of Nero as an arsonist "who fiddled while Rome burned." 1 Largely ignored, however, has been the question of whether the Christians, generally regarded as innocent scapegoats of Nero, might in fact have played some role in the fire. This chapter considers the problematic nature of Christianity and Roman attitudes toward Christians in the first century CE and suggests based on this evidence that Christian involvement is not out of the question.
NERO AND THE FIREOf the few surviving ancient accounts of the Great Fire of 64, the most detailed is that of Tacitus (Ann. 15.38-44), who wrote in the early second century. Most sources contemporary with Nero say nothing * Too late to be incorporated and discussed in extenso in my essay is a new article by B.D. Shaw, "The Myth of the Neronian Persecution," JRS 105 (2015) 73-100. I do not agree with Shaw's major premise that it is most unlikely that Christians were specifically targeted as arsonists, but that they instead suffered punishmentor rather "persecution"for their faith. Tacitus notes that Christians were punished for arson, but carefully and skillfully leads us to deduce that the real culprit was indeed Nero. In my opinion, the reason that other elite post-Neronian authors omit reference to early "Christianized Jews" in connection with the conflagration is that they were intent upon laying the blame for it at the feet of the tyrannical Nero, rather than the new heretical Jewish sect.
