Jesus looms so large in world history that it may come as a shock to realize his unimportance during his lifetime. The little surviving first-century literature was mostly written by members of the small, literate Roman elite. To them, Jesus (if they heard of him at all) was merely a troublesome rabble-rouser, perhaps a magician, in a very small, backward part of the world. Jesus' trial was not news in Rome. If there ever were archives there, they have not survived. If records were kept in Jerusalem, they were lost in the wars of 66-70 AD when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman army.
Suetonius, a second-century historian writing about the reign of the emperor Claudius (41-54 AD), tells us someone named "Chrestus" had been causing tumult among the Jews in Rome. Chrestus is presumably a misspelling of Christos, the Greek translation of the Hebrew word for Messiah.
Tacitus, writing around the year 100 AD, reports that during the reign of Nero (54-68 AD) Christians in Rome were viewed as dangerous enough to be persecuted. Romans knew about the strange "superstitions" of Christians and of their devotion to a man who had "suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus" (Annals, 15:44). (We'll mention this again later.) But knowledge of Jesus was limited to knowledge of Christianity. Tacitus and other non-Christian writers offer no evidence about Jesus, his life, or his death--only about the religion of his followers.