Roman · Latin · c. 116 CE
The Annals
Tacitus; tr. A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb
A senator's history of Rome from Tiberius to Nero, and the earliest surviving non-Christian notice of the movement's founder. Explaining whom Nero blamed for the fire of 64, Tacitus identifies the Christians by their originator — Christus, executed under Tiberius by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate — and calls the resulting belief a destructive superstition. He is a hostile witness reporting background, which is exactly what makes the notice worth having.
Read The Annals in full at the linked edition →What this text attests · 1
| Name here | Rank given | # | Powers described |
|---|---|---|---|
Christus = Jesus of Nazareth | Originator of the name | — | Executed under Tiberius by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate — given in passing, while explaining whom Nero blamed for the fire of 64, by a senator who calls the movement a destructive superstition. Note what the corpus can and cannot take from it: the figure is named by title rather than name, and Tacitus is reporting what was known in Rome eighty years later rather than consulting an archive. What it does establish is that by 116 an unsympathetic Roman historian took the execution under Pilate as ordinary background. |