Italy’s birth rate, already one of the lowest in the world, has been falling steadily for about 15 years and reached a record low last year.
Pope Francis is stepping up his campaign to urge Italians to have children, calling for long-term policies to help families and warning that the country’s demographic crisis was threatening the future.
“The number of births is the first indicator of the hope of a people,” Francis told an annual gathering of pro-family groups on Friday.
“Without children and young people, a country loses its desire for the future.”
Jesus almost certainly existed, Tacitus refers to his cult and execution and he was not a fan of the weirdo Jewish cannibal cult or their growing popularity in Rome.
Everything else is a bit more in question.
Tacitus refers to Christians, which doesn’t necessarily mean that Jesus existed if he was an amalgamation of various apocalyptic prophets; there were many mystery cults at the time who had a legendary founder.
I think the chances are pretty good that he did exist, but it’s not a foregone conclusion.
Tacitus explicitly refers to a “Christus” crucified by Pilate and the cult followers he gave his name to, “Chrestianos,” distinct but related to Judaism. If there is a problem with citing him as proof of Jesus’s historical reality it’s that he doesn’t tell us where he heard about “Christus,” and might just be reporting the claims of the cult without having bothered to see if Prefect Pilate actually executed a random Hebrew cult leader for treason.
Of course, by the time Tacitus wrote he might just not have bothered, rebelling against Rome and getting executed for it is just kind of what Hebrews did at the time.
I thought that Tacitus was debunked, no?