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[quote=Anonymous]What did Tacitus really say about Christ and Christians?

Tacitus was a distinguished writer, born in the 50s of the first century AD, perhaps in northern Italy. Born about two decades after the crucifixion of Jesus, he is valuable to us not as an eyewitness of Jesus, but as a historian far closer to the time and place of Jesus than we are. And we are talking about him here because in one of the books of history he wrote, he mentions Christ. He is what historians call a 'secondary source' on the subject of Jesus, and a useful one.

Tacitus also provides our first explicit historical evidence of an event of which he was a contemporary - the persecutions of Christians under Emperor Nero in his own native country. This is  all in his Annals 15:44, written in Latin, published late in his life, around 116AD. I had to study this passage as part of my Latin degree (at a secular university, I would add), not much to my enjoyment as Tacitus is not an easy read in the original Latin. I will give him only in English translation here, a standard academic translation, you may be pleased to know. And what I'm setting out below is common ground to scholars in the field, nothing particularly new. 
Tacitus was well placed to get the information he gives in this passage for a few reasons. He had close ties to the Roman government: early in the second century, he was also an official of the Roman government in Asia; Tacitus had a special interest in the east of the Roman Empire too: he wrote a long history of the Roman war with the Jews in Israel. The breadth of his writing on the issue can only mean that Tacitus had spent time studying Roman records about what had happened in Palestine (as the Romans came to call the place) and talking to people who knew about it. He had access to official documents in Rome. He was a servant of the power of which the Christians were victims.
What was his attitude to Jews and Christians? Disdainful. In particular, we will see him calling the Jesus movement a nasty ‘superstitio’, with derogatory comments about Christians dripping from his pen.

http://gettingtothetruthofthings.blogspot.com/2017/02/what-did-tacitus-really-say-about.html?m=1[/quote]

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