What the text says. In the fifteenth book of his Annals, after describing the fire that destroyed much of Rome in July AD 64 and Nero's rebuilding, Tacitus turns to the rumour that the emperor had ordered the fire himself. To kill the rumour, he writes, "Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome" (Annals 15.44, Church and Brodribb translation). He then describes the executions, Christians torn by dogs, "nailed to crosses", or burnt "to serve as a nightly illumination" in Nero's gardens, and records that the cruelty produced a public feeling of compassion for people he himself calls criminals.
What it shows, plainly. Five facts stand in Tacitus's own words, from a writer with every reason to be careless of Christian claims and none to invent them: a man called "Christus" existed; he was executed ("the extreme penalty"); this happened in the reign of Tiberius (AD 14-37) under Pontius Pilate; the movement began in Judaea; and by AD 64 it had reached Rome in numbers large enough to supply "an immense multitude" of victims. The Gospels date the crucifixion to exactly that governor and that reign, "Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Cæsar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judæa" (Luke 3:1, ASV), and "Jesus he scourged and delivered to be crucified" (Matthew 27:26, ASV). Tacitus knows nothing of the resurrection and reports nothing of Jesus' teaching; what he attests is the execution and the movement.
The contested points, each side stated. (1) Authenticity. The passage is accepted as genuinely Tacitus's by the overwhelming majority of classical scholars, the Latin is his, the contempt is his, and no Christian forger would have written "hatred against mankind", but a small minority has argued that some or all of the sentence about Christus is a later interpolation (the case has been made most fully by Richard Carrier); that view has not been widely adopted, and this file records it rather than endorses it. (2) "Procurator". Tacitus gives Pilate the title procurator, but the inscription found at Caesarea in 1961 (the Pilate stone, which has its own entry among the archaeology finds) calls him praefectus, which was the office's title in his day. Most scholars take Tacitus to be using the title current in his own time; a few have read the slip as a sign that he wrote from general knowledge rather than from an official record. Either way the point concerns Tacitus's precision, not the fact of the execution. (3) Independence. Whether Tacitus drew on Roman archives, on his own inquiries as a senator and governor, or simply on what Christians in Rome were known to say about themselves by AD 116, is genuinely undetermined; scholars argue each. If the last, the passage still shows what was believed about Christus' death within living memory of it, but would not be a Roman record independent of the Christians. (4) The spelling. The one surviving manuscript of this part of the Annals writes the people's name as Chrestianos, corrected by a later hand to Christianos, while "Christus" is spelled with an i, a detail that matters for the Suetonius entry below, because it shows Romans of the period confusing the unfamiliar title with the common name Chrestus.
Sources: Tacitus, Annals 15.44; Luke 3:1; Matthew 27:26; the Pilate inscription (Caesarea Maritima, 1961).
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