Tacitus, Annals, Book XV

Tacitus's Annals, Book XV, chapter 44, written around 116 CE, records that Christus was executed under the procurator Pontius Pilatus during the reign of Tiberius, generally regarded as the earliest surviving non-Christian mention of the crucifixion. Its strength is that Tacitus was a Roman senator writing from within Roman administrative record keeping, independent of Christian sources. Its limit is that he wrote roughly eighty years after the event he reports, evidently repeating what Roman officials of his own day understood rather than offering eyewitness testimony; no publisher, year or url is given here because the work survives through ancient manuscript transmission rather than as a single dated edition.