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>A second explanation for why there are two different spellings is that both "Christians" and "Chrestians" were terms being thrown around at the time and Tacitus was attempting to explain how one became the other. The 19th-century German Lutheran theologian Adolf van Harnack suggested that Tacitus was trying to show his superior knowledge by providing the true etymology of the name the Chrestians mistakenly called themselves. Yet Tacitus himself gives no such indication that that is what he was doing. Where would Tacitus have gotten his information? Although Tacitus did commend himself for relying solely on written evidence and not accepting hearsay, it is nevertheless hard to imagine that he would bother spending time checking Roman archives for such a short, unimportant tangent. Even if we assume Tacitus had attempted to retrieve archives to confirm that Christ lived in the first century BCE, the records from Jesus' time period would probably have been destroyed in the two library fires that had occurred in Rome since then. So if Tacitus did write the sentence about Christ living during the time of the Roman Emperor Tiberius, he probably would have gotten it from Chrestians or the gospels themselves. The only canonical gospel from the Bible that mentions Tiberius is the Gospel of Luke in the fourth chapter, and as it so happens, a very popular heretical group known as the Marcionites used a version of the Gospel of Luke that instead began with the line about Jesus living during the time of Tiberius, and that they also called Jesus "Chrestos" instead of "Christos" since they did not believe that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. There is also an Egyptian text from Oxyrhynchus, dated to around the fifth century CE, of a man named Horus who identifies himself as a Chrestian
