Ancient literary text
Tacitus, Histories 5.13
Cornelius Tacitus
The chapter concerns the war of AD 70. Tacitus wrote in the early second century.
- Citation
- Tacitus, The Histories 5:13, as cited by Ralph Ellis.
- Locator
- Histories 5.13
What the source says
In the public translation on Perseus, the chapter begins with prodigies at Jerusalem. Later it reports a prediction, found in the priests’ records, that the East would grow powerful and rulers from Judea would gain empire. Tacitus says the prediction referred to a Roman emperor, while the Jews applied it to themselves and rebelled.
Why it is here
Ellis quotes this chapter, together with Suetonius, in Jesus, King of Edessa. The English paragraph in his file is his conflation of the two reports.
Ralph’s interpretation
He sets the oracle inside his account of an eastern star and a king from the east. The further identification of that king with Jesus of Edessa is his, and it is not in Tacitus.
Alternative readings
Tacitus’s own sentence applies the prediction to the Roman emperor, as the events turned out. That is the historian’s reading, not Ellis’.