Volume 59, Issue 1, June 2019
Pierluigi Leone Gatti
Pages 201-215
Much Ado about Nothing
An Answer to B. D. Shaw’s The Myth of the Neronian Persecution
In recent years, the veracity of the tradition of the martyrdom of the apostles Peter and Paul has been disputed; recently, Brent Donald Shaw denied the historicity of the persecution of Christians. In this article, the author analyzes the texts of Tacitus and Suetonius as well as other texts omitted by Shaw and demonstrates the inconsistency of the hypotheses put forward by negationist scholars (Zwierlein; Shaw) from a theoretical and historical point of view.