Note 6 — Chapter IV · THE EVOLUTION OF THE CULT

(11) That there was a general Jewish ferment of Messianism on foot in the first century is part of the case of the biographical school. That there actually arose in the first and second centuries various Jewish “Christs” is also a historical datum. But the biographical school are not wont in this connection to avow the inference that alone can properly be drawn from the phrase of Suetonius as to a movement of Jewish revolt at Rome occurring in the reign of Claudius impulsore Chresto, “(one) Chrestus instigating.”6 This is not an allusion to the Greek epithet Chrēstos before referred to: it is either a specification of an individual otherwise unknown or the reduction to vague historic status of the source of a general ferment of Jewish insurrection in Rome, founding on the expectation of the Christos, the Messiah. In the reign of Claudius, such a movement could not have been made by “Christians” on any view of the history. As the words were pronounced alike they were interchangeably written, Chrestos (preserved in the French chrétien) being used even among the Fathers. Giving to the phrase of Suetonius the only plausible import we can assign to it, we get the datum that among the Jews outside Palestine there was a generalized movement of quasi-revolutionary Christism which cannot well have been without its special literature.