Rome’s historian
Tacitus, the greatest Roman historian, disliked the Christians. Writing around AD 116 about the fire of Rome, he explains that their name came from “Christus,” who was executed under Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate. A hostile witness confirms the central fact of the Gospels: the crucifixion under Pilate.
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.