AndyB said
In terms of the OP, it documents that a group held this belief about Christus.  Jesus would not have referred to himself that way.  As for Pontius Pilate reference, etc. all that could be repeated stories from the group.  One would think these would be based on actual history but how much embellished and changed we don’t know.

IIRC Pliny the younger has a similar passage.

In terms of history, it is interesting to note the extent to which the Christ story was already developed at the time.

    

No, Jesus would not have referred to himself as Christus, or Christ, or God Jr.  And he’s long dead by the time Tacitus is writing.  Tacitus can’t very well look him up on Wikipedia.  Before Wikipedia (long before Tacitus) there used to be this series of reference books you could find in the library that listed people who were distinguished or influential in some way, but not necessarily famous.  I remember looking through it in high school.  I can’t remember what it was called.  I tried looking it up, and Google couldn’t find it.  It’ll come to me in the middle of the night, probably.  You see the problem.  (Does anybody remember what it was called?)

Tacitus’ problem is that he doesn’t know Christus’ real name, and doesn’t care.  He doesn’t have a copy of any gospel, or Paul’s epistles.  He can’t send a servant down to the local bookstore to find them.  And you know, they crucified so many people, it’s such a bore really……

Christus is a TITLE.  It refers to who they believe Jesus was.  It’s a bit like some WASPy aristocrat who doesn’t follow baseball saying “I hear the people worship some god named Bambino, whom they have proclaimed Sultan of Swat, whatever that means.”

Tacitus can’t be expected to know all this. The interesting question is how he even learned this much.  And the fact that he’s relating it to someone means that it’s still not widely known in his society.  That he actually has to explain this little bit of information he has to someone who doesn’t know about these Christians and their strange attachment to a crucified criminal.  

Point is, what kind of religion MAKES UP a god who got killed in such a degrading way–not in some distant nether-realm, but in the relatively recent past, by non-fictional civil servants?  That’s a hell of a work-around.  You don’t do that unless you have no other choice.  Because Jesus really did exist, and he really was crucified, and people really did believe he’d appeared to them after death (which we don’t have to believe happened to believe other people could believe it happened, and basically everyone had some belief in the supernatural then).  

People twist themselves into knots trying to find some influence in Mithras or Horus, and what they prove in the process is that they don’t know anything about Mithras or Horus.  They don’t read serious scholarly literature about mystery cults (which are called that for a reason), or Egyptian mythology.  They read books that mangle what knowledge we have about those reilgions to prove Jesus is just a rip-off.  Or that ‘dying and rising gods’ were a thing back then, which they were not.  

It’s amazing how little direct documentation we have of people who were hugely famous in their own lifetimes–Leonidas, Alexander, Cleopatra.  

Socrates left us no writings, and basically all we know about him we know from two of his pupils (who clearly put words in his mouth) and Aristophanes making fun of him in the Ancient Greek equivalent of an SNL skit.  He’s had a huge influence on the modern world, and not always a good one (since he reportedly loathed Democracy).  

We can and should question most of what we’re told about Jesus–but not that there was a Jesus.  It’s a waste of time, and an attack on serious historical scholarship.  

The fact is, the Gospel of Judas is an interesting look into what some gnostics were doing, and doesn’t tell us anything about Jesus, because it was written much later than the synoptics, and of course far later than Paul.

The myth of the Christ story can’t end as long as people obsess over it.  The myth of Jesus of Nazareth can’t end because he really existed, and his memory was the basis for the most influential social movement in all history.  

And man, you are selective about your sources.  It’s a fact that that is terrible scholarship.  

A contemporary of Jesus, who knew him, witnessed much of his ministry, and was literate (in Greek!) was moved to write a book debunking Jesus’ purported miracles (after Jesus was seemingly a dead issue).  This book survived as an intact manuscript, being copied many times over the course of ten or eleven centuries, and yet nobody in antiquity, Christian Jew or Pagan, ever mentions it.  And its author’s pseudonym is an anagram of a famous New Testament scholar’s name.  (Pseudo-Ehrmanic?)

Kind of debunks itself, wouldn’t you say? 

But you know, in a world where The Secret sells thirty million copies, not to mention the oeuvre of Dan Brown………this will still flop. 

😉

Because he’s not a good enough writer to stand on his own merits? 

Seriously, if he was, I might read it. 

The popularity of the gospels is not evidence of anything, no.  But the fact that their popularity, and the backlash against it in the modern era, has led to massive scholarly investigation, which has shown that there is ample reason to doubt much of what the gospels say, but no reason at all to doubt that they are based on the deeds and words of a man who actually lived–that’s about as solid as it gets in ancient history.  All the original records of that era are suspect.  Historians still debate the factual nature of secular accounts from that era. So the double standard is fully in effect, and the New Testament alone is subjected to standards of proof no other area of historical study ever has to face. 

So it all comes down to many millions wanting to believe all of it and an infinitesimal number of people wanting to believe none of it.  And all one can draw from this is that there’s no real difference between these two groups except in their relative numbers.  Both are extreme and irrational and contemptuous of serious scholarship–both champion junk scholarship and ignore the real thing.  

And both, I might mention, are dominated by white males.