In the fifteenth book of the Annals, describing the fire that burned Rome in 64 and the rumour that the emperor had started it, Tacitus writes that Nero fastened the blame on a group the crowd called Christians, and that the originator of the name, Christus, had been executed under Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate. Then he describes what was done to them: convicted first for the arson and then, he says, for hatred of the human race, torn by dogs, crucified, burned as lamps in gardens, until pity turned toward them not because they were innocent but because they were being destroyed for one man cruelty.
That paragraph carries more scholarly traffic than almost any other sentence of ancient prose, because it is the earliest surviving notice by a Roman of standing that the founder of the movement was executed by a Roman official under a named emperor. It is examined accordingly. Pilate title is given as procurator, while the inscription found at Caesarea calls him prefect, which may be Tacitus using the term current in his own day. Whether he consulted official records or reported what was commonly said in Rome is argued. The oldest manuscript appears to have read Chrestianos before correction. None of the objections removes the datum, and the atlas cites the passage with the qualifications attached rather than as a plain confirmation.