Tacitus may have gotten his theology wrong, but his historical sense is sound. For in saying that the Christian movement (the “deadly superstition”) had “broken out afresh” after a “temporary setback,” he recognized that those who carried on Jesus’s mission in spite of his death were the same men and women who had followed Jesus during his lifetime. This is a point of capital importance for understanding the origins of Christianity and the Church’s nascent self-understanding.
