The Great Fire and Nero’s persecution, AD 64

**The first imperial persecution, and the event that gives the archive its single most cited non-Christian source.**

The fire burned for days and destroyed much of the city. Nero needed a culprit, and **Tacitus** — a senator and consular historian writing about AD 116, with access to official records and no sympathy whatever for the sect — records who he chose and what was done. The passage is quoted in full on the archive’s record for Jesus because of its opening clause; here it matters for what follows it.

**Tacitus’s account is doubly valuable because he is hostile.** He calls the Christians “a class hated for their abominations” and their religion “a most mischievous superstition”. He nevertheless reports that they were convicted “not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind”, and describes the punishments precisely: **covered with the skins of beasts and torn by dogs, crucified, or made into torches to light the night.** And then, remarkably, he records that the cruelty produced **sympathy** — even in a populace that loathed them.

## Peter and Paul

**No first-century source names Nero as their executioner**, and the archive does not supply one. What it has is **1 Clement**, written from Rome to Corinth about AD 96, within living memory, which speaks of **Peter and Paul** as “the greatest and most righteous pillars” who “were persecuted, and contended even unto death”, and of “a vast multitude of the elect” who suffered with them.

**Clement does not name Nero, does not name the fire, and does not describe the manner of either death.** He is writing to Corinthians who knew, and he assumes rather than argues. The association of the two deaths with Nero’s persecution is an inference of the ancient church, made early and held universally — and it is recorded here **as an inference**, from a letter that supplies the deaths and a Roman historian who supplies the persecution.