other · 49 · Rome
Suetonius, writing some seventy years later, says Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome because they were making constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus. Chrestus was a common slave name, so the sentence can be read as an ordinary riot led by an otherwise unknown man; but Chrestus and Christus were confused constantly in Latin, and the natural reading of a disturbance in the Jewish community of Rome about the year 49 is a quarrel over whether Jesus was the Messiah — in which case this is the earliest notice of Christianity in a pagan author, and it describes the church as a disturbance inside a synagogue. This dataset records the reading and its uncertainty rather than choosing. What is not uncertain is the consequence, and it is one of the neatest joins in the whole record: Acts says Paul at Corinth met a Jew named Aquila lately come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. An imperial expulsion order is why the two people who would teach Apollos, host a church in their house and be greeted first in Romans were in the right city to meet Paul at all.
Is there a pagan record of the church this early?
Possibly one sentence, and it turns on how you read a name.