ICANT writes:
When would Christians have had access to these Annals?
EVIDENCE that such happened please.
The earliest copies of the Annals that are available to us were all created by Christian scribes, see
here for more detailed information. There is really no reason to doubt this at all.
ICANT writes:
Being a Historian and a government official why would he need hearsay information when he would have had total access to the official government documents?
Any information on Christianity Tacitus obtained from government documents would have been the words of Christians written down by government officials. In other words, it would be based on a third party's account of what the Christians said, or to use the more succinct term for presenting a third party's words: it would be hearsay.
Incidentally, it
was recently suggested that Tacitus' source was Pliny himself.
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