rationalskepticism.org

RealityRules wrote:

Svartalf wrote:Isn't Tacitus close enough to count? He was not a novelist, but a real historian.

Stein wrote:... or someone like Tacitus, who only uses direct witnesses.

Except for Annals XV.44 he doesn't ... And he's not as pristine a historian as people make out.

There are a number of possibilities. The best hope for the authenticity of Annals XV is it's based on hearsay. But there's poor provenance for it for centuries.

Arthur Drews noted Annals VX.44 is similar to a passage in the Chronicle of Sulpicius Severus written ~401 a.d. in his 1912 Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus, and proposed that, rather than the Chronicle of Sulpicius Severus being based on Annals XV.44, the Annals passage is based on Sulpicius' [or they could have been penned or inserted/interpolated at the same time].

Besides the argument of Richard Carrier, 2014, that there was a sentence inserted in Annals 15.44 - viz, "The author of this name, Christ, was executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius” ('auctor nominis eius Christus Tiberio imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio adfectus erat') - there is the simpler proposition of Jay Raskins (author of The Evolution of Christs and Christianities, 2006) that, where the current, extant version of Annals XV.44 has Tiberius and Pontius Pliate, it originally had Nero and Porcius Festus, respectively, and Chrestus for Christus, so would have originally read

Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite punishments on a class hated for their disgraceful acts, called Chrestians by the populace. The author of this name, Chrestus, was executed by the procurator Porcius Festus in the reign of Nero, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular.
[via https://jayraskin.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/294/]

Nero is referred to before that passage and after, and his mention there would better fit.

Note also that Raskins uses what's in Antiquities 20:8.10 support his argument.