to events in the aftermath of the great fire that had destroyed much
of Rome in 64. Tacitus also noted that the Christians were
followers of a certain ‘Christus’, who had been executed by
Pontius Pilate, and that the movement originated in Judaea.
Beyond that, he said nothing, which suggests that this was
the limit of his knowledge. Such apparent ignorance was not
unique: even his contemporary Pliny the Younger, who person-
ally presided over trials of Christians in Asia Minor, came to know
very little about the new religion (see chapter 6’s case study).
Meagre knowledge might also have given rise to confusion.
Suetonius noted how the emperor Claudius (41–54) once expelled
from Rome ‘the Jews who were constantly causing disturbances
at the instigation of Chrestus’ (Life of the Deified Claudius25.4).
Scholars have suggested that the name ‘Chrestus’ was a collo-
quial (or garbled) reference to Jesus and have linked Suetonius’
remark to the account in the Acts of the Apostles of Paul’s
encounter at Corinth with ‘a Jew named Aquila, a native of
Pontus, lately come from Italy with this wife Prisca, because
Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome’ (Acts18.2;
cf. Witherington 1998: 539–44). If this identification is correct,
it suggests some element of confusion between Judaism and emer-
gent Christianity, either by Suetonius himself or in his sources.
It was only as Christians became a more sizeable proportion
of the Roman empire’s population after the mid-second century
that pagan authors took more notice of them and began to write
about them at length (Wilken 2003). Christianity (like so much
else) attracted the barbed tongue of Lucian of Samosata (c.AD
125–90) in his satirical works on the pagan prophet Alexander of
Abonuteichos and the Cynic philosopher Peregrinus Proteus.
Other authors took the Christians more seriously, however, and
produced a series of well-informed attacks on Christianity.
Among them were the philosophers Celsus, who wrote a work
entitledTrue Doctrinesome time around AD170, and Porphyry,
who penned a critique probably called simply Against the
Christiansat the end of the third century. Impressive though these
pagan assaults on Christianity seem to have been, knowledge of
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