Roman writers on Christ and the Christians

Three Roman authors of the early second century mention Christ or his followers. None was sympathetic, which makes their testimony valuable: they show that the movement, and its founder’s execution under Pilate, were known to educated outsiders. Each was writing about something else, an emperor or a provincial problem, and mentions the Christians only in passing.

Tacitus gives the most specific information about Jesus himself. Suetonius’ reference to “Chrestus” is disputed: it may be a garbled reference to Christ, reflecting conflict in Rome’s synagogues, or to some other agitator. Pliny, governor of Bithynia around AD 112, describes Christian worship as he learned it from interrogations.

Tacitus dates Christ’s execution to the reign of Tiberius under the procurator Pontius Pilate, agreeing with the Gospels (Pilate’s actual title was prefect).
Suetonius’ “Chrestus”, whom many historians take to be Christ, is still debated; the expulsion of the Jews from Rome under Claudius is often linked with Acts 18:2.
Pliny’s Christians meet before dawn and sing a hymn to Christ “as though he were a god”, an outsider’s glimpse of early worship.

Hover a word to find it in every account

TacitusAnnals 15.44.2–5In context →

Therefore, to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue.

First, then, the confessed members of the sect were arrested; next, on their disclosures, vast numbers were convicted, not so much on the count of arson as for hatred of the human race. And derision accompanied their end: they were covered with wild beasts’ skins and torn to death by dogs; or they were fastened on crosses, and, when daylight failed were burned to serve as lamps by night. Nero had offered his Gardens for the spectacle, and gave an exhibition in his Circus, mixing with the crowd in the habit of a charioteer, or mounted on his car. Hence, in spite of a guilt which had earned the most exemplary punishment, there arose a sentiment of pity, due to the impression that they were being sacrificed not for the welfare of the state but to the ferocity of a single man.

SuetoniusClaudius 25.4In context →

25.4 Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome.

PlinyLetters 10.96.6–8In context →

Others, whose names were given me by an informer, first said that they were Christians and afterwards denied it, declaring that they had been but were so no longer, some of them having recanted many years before, and more than one so long as twenty years back. They all worshipped your image and the statues of the deities, and cursed the name of Christ. But they declared that the sum of their guilt or their error only amounted to this, that on a stated day they had been accustomed to meet before daybreak and to recite a hymn among themselves to Christ, as though he were a god, and that so far from binding themselves by oath to commit any crime, their oath was to abstain from theft, robbery, adultery, and from breach of faith, and not to deny trust money placed in their keeping when called upon to deliver it. When this ceremony was concluded, it had been their custom to depart and meet again to take food, but it was of no special character and quite harmless, and they had ceased this practice after the edict in which, in accordance with your orders, I had forbidden all secret societies. I thought it the more necessary, therefore, to find out what truth there was in these statements by submitting two women, who were called deaconesses, to the torture, but I found nothing but a debased superstition carried to great lengths. So I postponed my examination, and immediately consulted you.