My first article this month established with extensive evidence that Gnostic Informant (Neal Sendlak) is completely unreliable and cannot be trusted to tell you the truth or get key facts right or even understand how arguments and logic work. Among the copious evidence I presented backing that conclusion, I also cited several examples that aren’t just unreliably argued, but literally crank. One of those is Neal’s completely bonkers use of a passage in Pliny the Elder to argue that he attested to the existence of the Galilean town of Nazareth. Which if true would be an attestation by a major Roman historian, entailing the town was famous enough to even be mentioned by an eminent author in a brief survey of Syria in the 70s A.D. I’d love that to be true. But alas, it’s false. And it’s so obviously false only a crank would maintain otherwise. 

Alas, Neal has chosen to be a crank. His response to being shown this was not to admit he made a huge and careless mistake, and rested his case on an entirely irresponsible crank claim. Nope. His response in various messaging and comment venues was to double down on the crank claim itself, even lying to people, telling them I am incompetent and haven’t read Pliny; even though unlike Neal I can actually read Latin and extensively read and employed Pliny in my peer-reviewed Columbia University doctoral dissertation (which you can observe in the corresponding published work, The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, which Neal has praised as excellent scholarship). So I most definitely consulted Pliny’s text and essential scholarship in this case too. I am literally an expert in this matter. Neal isn’t. And amateurs denouncing the experts who correct their lazy and irresponsible assertions is very much the behavior of a crank.

But never mind that. I despise Arguments from Authority. That Cult of Personality and Camp of Childish Insults is Neal’s hideout. Not mine. You shouldn’t have to just take an expert’s word at things. The only reason being an expert has any value is that it qualifies you to explain correctly why your conclusions are as they are. So we should always be able to show you the evidence backing our opinion, including a competent and truthful assurance that no evidence is being left out of that account; and our opinion should logically follow from that accurate survey. Even a layperson should be able to evaluate the claim at that point, once we have used our professional skill to lay it out clearly. Because logic is a universal skill—particularly among the discerning, who take the trouble to master its basics (because even just being a reliable human being in every facet of life requires no less). Then, as long as we’ve been honest, you then have all the factual premises to apply logic to so as to verify our conclusion. (On the principles here described see Galatians 1:19, Ancient Grammar, and How to Evaluate Expert Testimony and On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus.)

What Pliny the Elder Actually Said

So let’s do that. In the process I will use this as a teaching example to illustrate the difference between how to think and argue like a real historian, vs. how to think and argue like a crank. Plus we’ll get to learn some cool history stuff. And you’ll get a peek into how we historians do our job. In the end, if you are a sane and rational human being, you’ll come to the same conclusion I did: when Pliny mentions “the Nazerini” he is talking about a tribe, a people and their kingdom, not a town or city, and he very clearly locates that people in the center-north of Roman Syria, nowhere near Galilee or any part of Palestine.

So for anyone to continue maintaining that “the Nazerini” means “Nazareth” is simply crank. And anyone who continues arguing such nonsense even after being shown all this has no kind of judgment you can ever trust. On this basis alone you should assume nothing Neal ever says about anything can be believed; you now need to fact-check him before relying on him about anything. Of course, I think you should save yourself the time and labor. Just stop listening to anything he says. Unsub his channel and roll your eyes at anyone who brings him up ever again. He’s burned his rep. Treat him like every other crank on the internet: they deserve no one’s attention. They are to be mocked or ignored; never trusted. Unless he does a proper, honest mea culpa here and rebuilds his reputation as reliable again. But you can verify all that for yourself first.

Back to Pliny. The translation everyone is using in this “debate” is The Natural History by Pliny the Elder as translated by John Bostock and H.T. Riley, published by Taylor and Francis in 1855. I’ll give that here first, because everyone online can verify it on their own, as it’s used by the scholarly website Perseus operated at Tufts University. Ideally we’d want to use or at least check the latest translation (when there is any; see above right for the most recent Loeb Classics translation, for example); but I can vouch for this one. It’s reasonably accurate, and insofar as it might at all mislead people today who can’t read the underlying Latin, I’ll help you out when I parse the Latin of this text, so you can compare what experts see there, with the choices of Bostock-Riley (and you’ll find confirmation of my points in the Loeb translation, above right).

So I will quote Bostock-Riley, and put in bold every actual place Pliny mentions, either by tribe, governmental administrative unit, or actual city or town. Because you’ll soon see…that kind of matters to the question (the footnotes indicated in brackers are in Bostock-Riley; I’ll discuss some of them shortly).

We must now speak of the interior of Syria. Cœle Syria has the town of Apamea [1], divided by the river Marsyas from the Tetrarchy of the Nazerini [2]; Bambyx, the other name of which is Hierapolis [3], but by the Syrians called Mabog [4], (here the monster Atargatis [5], called Derceto by the Greeks, is worshipped); and the place called Chalcis [6] on the Belus [7], from which the region of Chalcidene, the most fertile part of Syria, takes its name. We here find also Cyrrhestice, with Cyrrhum [8], the Gazatæ, the Gindareni, the Gabeni, the two Tetrarchies called Granucomatæ [9], the Emeseni [10], the Hylatæ [11], the nation of the Ituræi, and a branch of them, the people called the Bætarreni; the Mariamitani [12], the Tetrarchy known as Marnmisea, Paradisus [13], Pagræ [14], the Pinaritæ [15], two cities called Seleucia, besides the one already mentioned, the one Seleucia on the Euphrates [16], and the other Seleucia [17] on the Belus, and the Cardytenses. 

Immediately after this Pliny says he will then discuss “the remaining part of Syria (except those parts which will be spoken of in conjunction with the Euphrates),” and he had just discussed the most important locations in Syria already before this, and then after this lists cities and regions closer to the coastline of Syria, and then to its Eastern border as marked by the Euphrates river. Put these together, given that they are “not” what Pliny means by “Coele” Syria (roughly pronounced KOI-lay-Syria), and then mark out all the places he declares to be in Coele Syria and it becomes undeniable that he means by “Coele Syria” simply the core of Syria, from its northernmost to southernmost borders (see marked-up map to the right; my own additions are marked to within a hundred miles); not what Neal’s proffered “Wikipedia” map says. Take note of this. Because it matters to evaluating Neal’s crankery.

Pliny’s Latin

The Latin of Pliny (extracted from Perseus) reads as follows:

Nunc interiora dicantur. coele habet apameam, marsya amne divisam a nazerinorum tetrarchia, bambycen, quae alio nomine hierapolis vocatur, syris vero mabog—ibi prodigiosa atargatis, graecis autem derceto dicta, colitur—chalcidem cognominatam ad belum, unde regio chalcidena fertilissima syriae, et inde cyrresticae cyrrum, gazetas, gindarenos, gabenos, tetrarchias duas quae granucomatitae vocantur, hemesenos, hylatas, ituraeorum gentem et qui ex iis baethaemi vocantur, mariamnitanos, tetrarchiam quae mammisea appellatur, paradisum, pagras, penelenitas, seleucias praeter iam dictam duas, quae ad euphraten et quae ad belum vocantur, tardytenses. Reliqua autem syria habet, exceptis quae cum euphrate dicentur…

This was digitally transcribed from Naturalis Historia by Karl Friedrich Theodor Mayhoff and published by Teubner in 1906. Note that in the Perseus version, every Latin word here is hyperlinked to a dictionary entry (when one exists), complete with grammatical analysis of the word-form; and they use one of the two top lexicons, digitized, that all scholars of ancient Latin now use (here A Latin Dictionary by Lewis & Short). Experts in ancient history will also recognize that the Teubner editions are the most common go-to for critical editions of ancient Latin and Greek works. Perseus is thus giving us good source material, if outdated.

Nevertheless, ideally, we’d want to actually look at the Teubner for Pliny; likewise the most recent edition, if one has been published since 1906. Translations and critical editions, belonging to the more specific subfield of philology, are among the few exceptions to my “never trust history before 1950” rule. But the benefit of consulting the actual printed work anyway would be to avoid succumbing to any possible transcription errors in producing the digital version, and to see if there are any manuscript variants for this paragraph (which will appear, if any were known, at the foot of the page, an area of critical editions called “the apparatus”). I will skip that step only because I am certain it won’t matter to anything we here discuss. But definitely if you want to “vet” what I argue here, going to the original Teubner to make sure there isn’t anything pertinent there that I’ve overlooked should be part of your procedure. 

Note as a general rule: advanced books like this might be too rare or expensive to purchase or get online access to, but at least in the United States, you can get any such works (in fact, almost any book that exists that hasn’t literally been declared an antique) through your local public library. Odds are that obscure stuff like this won’t already be there, obviously. But the U.S. library system operates a program called Interlibrary Loan. Anything you can find in WorldCat, they can order for you, from anywhere in the world shown there as participating. It may take a few weeks to come in. And you can only borrow it a week or so, or consult it on site. But the program is either free or a nominal charge. And this gives you affordable access to nearly all the scholarship on Earth. This holds true for every printed academic work, journal article or book, that I shall ever mention, here or anywhere.

Back to Pliny’s Latin. If you know the language, you will already notice some license has been taken in Bostock-Riley, more than would be allowed in Bible translations, for example. That’s actually typical in Classics (you can see some examples of this becoming a problem in the early chapters of my book Hitler Homer Bible Christ). But this won’t prove too important for our present question. For example, where Bostock-Riley have “We must now speak of the interior of Syria,” the Latin actually says, “Now the interior may be described,” omitting the word “Syria” and using the passive and third person plural (“the interior [parts] may be described”), and the subjunctive of “describe” rather than the indicative (“may” being one sense thereof), which doesn’t really have a literal translation in English here, but more or less vaguely conveys the sense Bostock and Riley intend with the word “must” (and the Loeb translators with “let us”). And while Pliny uses the third person passive, Bostock-Riley’s (and even the Loeb’s) transferring of that to the authorial “we” is a trivial distortion, carrying Pliny’s idiom into one more familiar to modern readers. There is little actual difference in meaning. From context we know Pliny means Syria even though he doesn’t say Syria; and the particulars of which idiom to use here won’t affect anything we are concerned with. 

The same goes for when Pliny also says “coele” without Syria, as you’ll notice in the Latin. Bostock-Riley have supplied the word “Syria” here too, because we know that’s what Pliny means. Although in this case the distortion they create could mislead, particularly in the present debate. Pliny is not using an official provincial or administrative phrase like “Coele-Syria” (no such thing existed yet) but is simply using the Greek loan-word koilê by itself as a generic geographical indicator. That word meant “hollow” and was used commonly to refer to the “core” or “valley” of a region, and hence is best translated as “center” or simply “the valley.” Notice the Loeb translators actually render it as “Hollow Syria.” This is similar to uses of the modern word, e.g. Sleepy Hollow, but broader in application.

You might notice that Wikipedia claims instead a connection between “Coele” and the Aramaic for “all, entirety,” but it’s self-evident that Pliny is not using any such sense here; and he is far more likely to be using Greek than Aramaic in his choices of vocabulary anyway. And contrary to the text of Wikipedia, as that lexicon will tell you, the Greek word koilê dates back to Homer, then in reference to the interiors of ships, so it most definitely is not an Aramaic loan-word. Likewise, from what Pliny describes, which is a region between Syria’s two major mountain ranges (or highlands) from north to south, we can be certain he is employing the sense of a topographical hollow, not an administrative area, much less “the whole of Syria” or any Aramaic regional designation.

Pliny thus isn’t talking about any specific place called Coele Syria. He is simply talking about the general category of Syria’s interior, the “belly of its ship” as it were, as he had just announced he would. One might think a more accurate translation then might rather be, “the center has…” or “the valley has…” rather than “Coele Syria has,” although that would hide the presence of the word Coele, which might be a point of dispute regarding just what Pliny means. Likewise, the word “town” that Bostock and Riley add does not exist in the Latin; so you can’t make any argument from the valence of that word (like, say, arguing “town” means a place smaller than a city). It’s a translator’s conceit. Pliny makes no such distinction. It is clear that he is only listing the largest and most important urban centers in the hollow of Syria. So we know he means city.

There is no resolution of these questions or nuances in translation. This is a matter that simply requires you to know how to read Latin. But for the present debate, we needn’t hang any argument on these translation disputes, because it won’t matter which translation you use (as you’ll soon see). So I’ll stick with Bostock-Riley. Because notice: even Wikipedia admits “Coele-Syria” had no fixed meaning at the time. Wikipedia isn’t entirely accurate at any point in this entry; but that much is clear if you read it all through. So you wouldn’t have made Neal’s mistake if you had read the Wikipedia entry’s entire text rather than, like Neal did, just ignorantly grab the map someone plopped into the Wikipedia page, which does not describe anything Pliny is talking about. Just see my mark-up of that map above, where I indicate every city (that we know the general location of) that Pliny says is in “Coele” Syria. No overlap. Neal’s map simply isn’t showing what Pliny is talking about. Yet he would have caught this if he had bothered to check; for example, simply marking out the cities Pliny lists. That’s a lesson here. Cranks don’t check. Scholars do. So, check. (On the role of competently trying to disprove a claim like this before asserting it, fundamental to critical thinking, see Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning.)

This is why you can’t simply “trust” Wikipedia. Wikipedia is useful, but you need to verify any details you get there first. So if you are going to use it, always read the text before carelessly grabbing graphics to make an argument with; and always check your facts from other more reliable sources to make sure they are correct and pertinent before resting any case on them. Conversely, don’t assume someone who cites Wikipedia is thereby endorsing every claim it makes, e.g. I think it’s entry on Coele-Syria would, if actually read, have prevented Neal’s mistake, but I do not thereby think it’s void of error; there are quite a few things wrong with it, even beyond those I shall mention. This is actually true of all reference works, as even undergraduates are taught; it’s not just a problem with Wikipedia. So failing to perform any of these tasks typifies cranks. Hence Neal acted like a crank, ignoring the text of both Wikipedia and Pliny, as well as all more substantial scholarship than either, and thoughtlessly grabbed a map online without checking that it even pertained to Pliny. It doesn’t.

Don’t replicate Neal’s methodology. It’s careless and irresponsible. It’s all the worse that even when Neal’s mistake was pointed out, he refused to admit it, and invented new and even more ridiculous arguments to try and defend what he said was true. Which is also the behavior of a crank. Real scholars check their facts when anyone claims they’ve made an error, and correct any mistakes they made. Cranks just make more stupid shit up to try and save face.

Correcting the Facts

Getting into Pliny’s description of the “coele” of Syria, his very first sentence is crucial: translated literally, “The Hollow (coele) has Apamea, divided by the river Marsyas from the tetrarchy of the Nazerini.” If you go check you’ll realize this can’t refer to the more famous River Marsyas in Phrygia (now northern Turkey). Bostock and Riley append a note here that this means a small tributary of the Orontes, because the Apamea Pliny is referring to is already well known as Apamea on the Orontes (as even the Loeb translators agree). There is no other Apamea in Syria. And being one of its greatest cities, Pliny won’t have omitted mention of it in preference for some unknown obscure village by the same name—so that this is the only Apamea he mentions in Syria confirms which Apamea it is.

Of course you can’t simply trust 19th century scholarship. The translators are assuming “the Marsyas” is the name of a tributary to the Orontes near Apamea; but that assumption is valid and modern experts have agreed with it. Whereas their belief that Pliny is referring to the modern “Nosairis” (an Islamic sect), for example, is not likely if you look into it, because that derives from the corresponding Alawite sect’s founder’s name, the 9th century Ibn Nusayr, who wouldn’t even be born yet for centuries (nor would his sect be associated with this region for many more centuries after that). Maybe he is mythical, and maybe his name comes from some forgotten name of the place where his sect settled in mountain strongholds near modern Beirut centuries later. But that would be an implausible conjecture. Such a link is rejected by modern specialists on the Alawite sect anyway: Stephan Prochazka and Gisela Procházka-Eisl, The Plain of Saints and Prophets: The Nusayri-Alawi Community of Cilicia (Southern Turkey) and its Sacred Places (Harrassowitz Verlag 2010), p. 20.

Fact is, we do not know what group Pliny is referring to because almost all our sources (including his own) are lost, and this tribe is not mentioned anywhere else. But we can be certain it is a tribe—Pliny’s Latin makes this clear (masculine plurals typically designate peoples, not places; there are exceptions, but even those often in some way follow the rule, e.g. Pompeii). Indeed, it was no mere tribe, but a tribe awarded its own tetrarchy, a subordinate administrative kingship, in the Roman province of Syria (and a tetrarchy is typically a region, not a town; e.g. you can have a tetrarchy of Galilee, but not usually a Tetrarchy of Nazareth). Whether that was actually still the case in Pliny’s day is less certain, as most scholars believe he is relying here on data a century old by then (e.g. his own bibliography mentions reliance on the more-or-less official Roman geography of Agrippa). This tetrarchy might not have existed anymore when he wrote. But that doesn’t matter for our purposes: either way, Pliny (and thus his source) does not imagine this was a town, but a whole ethnic region, an actual people; nor does he locate it anywhere near Palestine, but hundreds of miles north of it.

After naming Apamea and its neighbors the Nazerini, Pliny continues by describing a number of cities, regional ethnic groups, and administrative units. In all, under the category of “Coele” Syria he lists the following cities (in order of mention, and here giving my literal translation when applicable, and links to relevant geographical sourcing you can now locate them on a map by):

• Apamea, the one “divided by the river Marsyas from the tetrarchy of the Nazerini.”
• Bambycen, “which is also called by the other name Hierapolis, indeed ‘Mabog’ by the Syrians, where the strange Atargatis, called by the Greeks Derceto, is worshipped.”
• Chalcis, “the one identified as ‘on the Belus’, from which derives the Chalcidene region, the most fertile in Syria.”
• Cyrrhestice
• Cyrrhus
• Paradise
• Pagra
• Penelenite (misspelled in Bostock-Riley)
• Seleucia “on the Euphrates”
• Seleucia “on the Belus”

Besides those cities, Pliny intersperses mention as well of various tribes of peoples, which he is thus indicating were associated with particular regions of Syria, likely because these parts of Syria were highly nomadic and devoid of major urban centers and thus administratively referenced by the ethnic group inhabiting them. Most of these peoples whom Pliny mentions we know little about, even so as to locate them; the notes in Bostock-Riley represent attempts at doing that, sometimes sound and sometimes questionable; you can find more reliable, albeit not necessarily definite, attempts in more recent scholarship). These include:

• The Gazetae (or possibly a city named Gazeta)
• The Gindareni
• The Gabeni
• The Hemesenes
• The Hylatae
• The Baethaemi (a tribe “from among the Ituraeans”)
• The Mariamnitani
• The Tardytenses (misspelled in Bostock-Riley)

Finally, Pliny mentions several “tetrarchies” and one “nation” (gens). A “tetrarchy” is a loan-word from Greek meaning an ethnic governmental administrative unit, typically split into “four,” each run by the equivalent of a client or subordinate “king” in modern parlance. It’s perhaps most usefully translated into English as simply “kingdom,” as we have no word carrying its specific distinctions in the Greek language or the Roman political order. But a Biblical example is Herod Antipas, “Tetrarch of Galilee and Perea.” Pliny identifies all these “kingdoms” by their ethnic tribal groups as well:

• “The tetrarchy of the Nazerini”
• “Two tetrarchies that are called the Granucomatites”
• “The nation of the Ituraeans”
• “The tetrarchy that is called Mammisea”

Of these only two are definitely locatable: from many other sources we know Iturea bordered Galilee and occupied the southernmost “bottom” of the Roman province of Syria (in Pliny’s description, which matches what Agrippa would have reported; after that the status of Syria’s southern border was often in flux); and from Pliny’s description we know “the kingdom” of the Nazerini was near to Apamea (in fact with only one tributary of the Orontes separating them), which was far north of there. There is no possible way to think Pliny is talking about the Galilean village of Nazareth. Given that Pliny has thus placed the Nazerini in a vast, dense, and practically impenetrable mountain range (see map below), an area that could well have been quite underdeveloped and resource-poor, it is reasonable to infer they were allowed their own tetrarchy because that was easier and cheaper than attempting to pacify that region militarily. The Nazerine Tetrarch would have paid Rome a tribute annually as agreed by treaty; while Romans themselves probably rarely even ventured in there.

Such theories aside, the facts of the case can be confirmed in reliable peer-reviewed scholarship today. For example, Cambridge University’s Guide to the Geography of Pliny the Elder, in § 5.81-82, confirms the general fact of Pliny’s actual map of “Coele” Syria extending across all of Syria, north to south; and it identifies some of the tribal locations, finding them all near the Orontes river (befitting a description of a river valley). See also The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces by A.H.M. Jones (Oxford University 1971), pp. 62-63. Jones says that among other “small principalities” Pliny lists here the “tetrarchy of the Nazerini” which “is stated by Pliny to have adjoined the territory of Apamea” and so, Jones infers, “the Nazerini must therefore be the ancestors of the modern Nusairi who inhabit the mountains behind Laodicea,” which as I noted is not as solid an inference as Jones lets on, but at least he has the location right: in the mountains between Apamea and Laodicea.

Finally, Princeton University’s Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, which is the most definitive geographical source on the era today, provides even clearer guidance: you’ll find “Nazerini?” in the index, indicating its location in grid B3 of Map 68, the same general area as Apamea, as you can see, above right (the index likewise indicates no other Apameas exist in Syria for Pliny to refer to). This is so far away from Galilee you have to flip several more maps away even to find Nazareth. (Note that question marks on this map indicate the “best guess” given all expert knowledge). All as I know, because I own this volume. It was in part gifted to me by my Columbia University advisor, William V. Harris, who contributed to it (he composed one of the maps for Italy). The image above was taken by my phone from the atlas laid out on my desk.

Hosing the Facts

Those are the facts.

Now to Neal’s hosing of the facts.

Neal started this ridiculous argument in his original video (around minute 17), in an attempt to rebut “tons of mythicists” (really, only a fringe minority of them) who claim Nazareth didn’t exist in the first century, inexplicably while showing a screenshot of my saying I do not doubt the existence of Nazareth (cf. OHJ, p. 258 n. 8 and p. 400 n. 30). In a video supposedly responding to my arguments (just look at its title), why Neal even bothers with this argument, thereby implying I share rather than reject this position, or why he does not mention that I have rebutted this very argument, nor uses any of my well-researched rebuttals, is beyond me. It’s just more of the unhinged pattern of unintelligible ranting that his video consisted of. But though this digression makes no sense and serves no intelligible purpose in his video, digress on it he did. So we have to evaluate what he did. And this is what we get: instead of constructing any competent rebuttal to these “other” unnamed mythicists (such as discussing real evidence he could have cited for Nazareth’s existence), instead of doing scholarship, he chose to appeal to this bizarre crank fabrication about Pliny the Elder. Which is so wildly loony it was just one more item of evidence to me that Neal had completely lost it.

Indeed, even more weirdly, Neal didn’t even get the crank argument right—which is not that Pliny is referring to Nazareth (that’s crank even for cranks) but that he is referring to “Nazorians” (despite the disagreement in spelling) as a tribe located at “Pella” (which Apamea was originally named hundreds of years earlier) and “therefore” this means Christians because, supposedly, the Christians “fled to Pella” in Pliny’s day. Which argument, unlike Neal’s, at least gets its major premise right (Pliny is talking about a tribe near Apamea), a fact Neal somehow (!) missed; but it still falters at its minor premise: they have the wrong Pella (the Christians were rumored to have fled to the region of Jordan, the actual city then named Pella, not Apamea).

Indeed, the tale that some Jerusalemite Christians fled to Jordanian Pella “presciently” before the Jewish War (or one might conjecture, “during” the war, only later claiming it was “presciently before”) is not credible anyway (it is an implausible and apocryphal rumor attested by no reliable source and backed by no evidence and only first mentioned by a documented liar), nor could a few dozen or even hundred people be mistaken for an entire regional tribe that would be at all visible on a Roman map—especially since most scholars agree Pliny is using an old gazette for Syria, perhaps composed by Agrippa under Augustus, predating Christianity; but even if he had a more recent one (like, say, from the 60s or 70s A.D.), in no way could a region on it already be marked up as belonging to “the Christians.” So even the original crank theory is bogus, as is quite strongly stated by Ray Pritz in Nazarene Jewish Christianity: From the End of the New Testament Period Until Its Disappearance in the Fourth Century (Brill 1988), pp. 17-18 (cf. p. 46 where the more plausible possibility that it refers to a pre-Christian Jewish sect located in the mountains of Syria is also raised and dismissed). But Neal did it one worse. He telephone-gamed this into an even more crank notion: that Pliny meant “a town.” Even though “Nazerini” is not even a valid Latinate form of the word “Nazareth,” and Pliny says “tetrarchy of,” not “village of” or “town of” or any such indicator. No sane and rational person could have missed this. So I simply cannot explain Neal’s error—or why he is still sticking to it.

Because after Neal was caught and called out on this outrageous error, he didn’t admit it, but doubled down, defending his crankery with the argument that “Pliny’s map” (while pointing to that Wikipedia map that in no away agrees with Pliny) shows “Coele-Syria” being “adjacent” to Galilee and therefore Pliny “is” describing the “town” of “Nazareth.” This is all deranged. That Syria abuts Galilee (which is true) doesn’t even get you to a location in Galilee. But that’s not even what’s so bonkers about this. Pliny doesn’t say “the Nazerini” exist just “somewhere” in Coele-Syria. He very specifically says they reside across a river from Apamea on the Orontes (of which the Loeb translators give the modern name)—way north, hell-and-gone from Galilee or any border in Palestine. Just as I pointed out to Neal in the first place. Pliny also very unmistakably says “tetrarchy of the Nazerini,” in other words, a whole minor kingdom, not a town. Which I likewise pointed out. So Neal has delusionally “deleted” both facts from his memory as he continues standing by this nonsense.

Honestly, I think Neal can only be insane or a stone-cold liar at this point. But that you’ll have to judge for yourself. Either way, you can never trust his judgment. By making this inexplicable mistake in the first place (which betrays a catastrophically unreliable methodology), and even worse, failing to admit he fucked this up once caught on it, and then correcting himself, and explaining why he was so carelessly foolish in this matter, he has in both respects established he is in no way trustworthy in either his reliability, honesty, or judgment (or possibly all three). So much for him. As for the claim itself: No. Pliny the Elder never mentions Christians or the Galilean town of Nazareth. And that’s not an opinion. It’s a concrete fact.