Tacitus on historicity of Jesus - reliable source or not?

[Insula Dei]

yo, John Dibble, (to be a bit jmfcst-y)

I'm not an expert on Flavius Josephus by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't think he'd have to rely solely on archives to get information on the execution of Jesus Christ. Especially the name 'Chreistos' must have been quite common even at that point.

[Insula Dei]

Of course Tacitus didn't talk to any real christians. The main thing he does about them is mentioning them in passing to both illustrate Rome's moral decay (always a favourite topic), and Nero's cruelty. Tacitus is essentially worthless as a source on early christianity. (Doesn't he mention their cannibalistic rites elsewhere? Or was that someone else?)

[Insula Dei]

Is it even clear what the difference between a prefect and a procurator would be? Procurator essentially just means 'equivalent to a curator', no? (Quite similar to proconsul, etc.) And consistency of terminology is frustratingly rare with antique authors.

I'm actually not at all familiar with the way the cursus honorum looked beyond the early Imperial Age (Roman history just isn't the same after Actium ). Would a procurator have been a former curator? I suppose he would, again going from the proconsul analogy. Didn't Pilatus came from a family of Umbrian rural equites? Curator would have been the sort of rank that would be relatively achievable for someone with such a background. So that seems sort of plausible. A bit off-topic, I know, but to be fair this thread and its companion are all sorts of pointless and a real understanding of antiquity seems to be remarkably absent (not that I've really read any of the marathon posts beyond the first half of the first page), so I might as well ask an actually semi-interesting little question.