Quote Originally Posted by lars573
In a Nat-Geo documentary about the fire they made a decent case for Nero being on the mark about blaming Christians. Now he blamed all Christians and fed them to the lions accordingly. I feel that it was just a small cabal of crazies with tourches.

1.Nero was at his country villaand raced back to Rome and sent the Praetorians to help fight the fire and directed the efforts.
-If he wanted Rome to burn he would have been "un-avoidably delayed" until the fire was over.
2.Tacitus is not a good soruce for anything about Nero's reign.
-Tacitus went out of his way to make Nero look bad. As he hated him. And we know more about how fire can behave than the Romans did.
3.Early Christian groups (I won't paint them as one group) though that the Roman empire was the 7 headed whore of Babylon spoken of in Revelations. And that distroying the city would destroy the empire and thus bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
Interesting theory. Get's me thinking...