No less weight (indeed, far more) attaches to the testimonies of Suetonius and Tacitus, which can hardly be dismissed as interpolated falsifications, as the critics would suggest. The passage in Suetonius displays an ignorance of the circumstances which would be impossible where Christians were concerned, and that in Tacitus manifests decided enmity and scorn towards them. The Christians at that time were not in the habit of falsifying things so subtly; their falsifications were crude affairs and always included fulsome praise of their own cause, just as, on the other hand, they simply burned all books hostile to Christianity (Cod. Theodos. I tit. I, 1,3), thus eliminating, no doubt, much that would have been significant and illuminating. Moreover, Christians then would not have been greatly interested in merely providing evidence that Christ really existed; they did not have to prove his existence to the critics—for such sophisticated critics did not exist at the time. These accounts do not have the 'feel' of forgeries, neither of Christian nor of Jewish provenance, for, just as Christians would have falsified things in their own way, so would the Jews have done in theirs. But we do not find so much as a mention of the terms in which Jews always spoke of Christ; it all sounds exactly as the Romans, with their particular interest in the matter, would have discussed it, and no doubt did discuss it. What Jew, what Christian would have been able to speak in such an unmistakably Tacitean style as we find in this passage from the Annals! According to Suetonius, in his life of Claudius (c.25), the latter "banished from Rome"—in the year 51—"the Jews who were constantly making disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus." (The author of this statement seems to think that Christ lived in Rome in the reign of Claudius; the form "Chrestus" for Christus occurs frequently, as does "Chrestiani" for Christiani.) In Annals XV,44 Tacitus writes, in connection with the great fire caused by Nero in the year 64: "Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate, and a deadly superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but also in the City, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world meet and become popular."--Brunner, Our Christ