The narrative provides significant information. We obviously learn that Tacitus did not like Christians (he calls the religion a “disease”), and yet he helps us establish some useful facts. He uses the name Christus, the Latin word from which we get Christ. Tacitus regards Christus as the source of the name, and his followers were a group that others called Chrestiani, with the well-documented vulgar Latin substitution of e for i.6 We note that Tacitus says it was the crowd who named them Chrestians,