Christ's birthday

[Violet]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacitus plenty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacitus_on_Christ

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Authenticity and reliability

The passage contains an early non-Christian reference to the origin of Christianity, the execution of Christ described in the Bible's New Testament gospels, and the presence and persecution of Christians in first-century Rome. While a majority of scholars consider the passage authentic, some dispute it.[5] Some supporting authenticity argue it is too critical of Christians to have been added by later Christian scribes.[citation needed]
Some who argue against authenticity assert:[6][7]
No early Christian writers refer to Tacitus even when discussing the subject of Nero and Christian persecution. Tertullian, Lactantius, Sulpicius Severus, Eusebius and Augustine of Hippo make no reference to Tacitus when discussing Christian persecution by Nero, however the Tacitus text itself demonstrates that it may be a good resource for Christians to refer to since the text derides Christians and Christianity thus proving it to be free of later tampering by Christians.[8][citation needed][9]
Pontius Pilate's rank was prefect when he was in Judea.[10] The Tacitus passage mistakenly calls Pilate a procurator, an error also made in translations of a passage by Josephus.[11] (However, Josephus wrote in Greek and never used the Latin term.) It should be noted that after Herod Agrippa's death in AD 44, when Judea reverted to direct Roman rule, Claudius gave procurators control over Judea.[12][13] This was made possible when he augmented the role of procurators so that they had magisterial power.[14][15] Tacitus, who rose through the magisterial ranks[16][17] to become consul and then proconsul had a precise knowledge of significance of the terms involved and knew when Judea began to be administered by procurators. It is therefore problematical that he would use "procurator" instead of "prefect" to describe the governor of Judea prior to the changes that he tells us Claudius brought in.
The passage implies that the Christians may have been guilty of setting fire to Rome, another argument against veracity, for Tacitus was attempting to lay the blame of the fire on Nero by aspersion.[18]
Another ancient writer, Suetonius, mentions Christians being harmed during this period by Nero, but there is no connection made with the fire[19].[20]

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Some of which I hold as probable.
Also:

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Christians or Chrestians?


Detail of the Medicean manuscript showing the word 'Christianos'. The large gap between the 'i' and 's' has been highlighted; under ultraviolet light an 'e' is visible in the gap, replacing the 'i'
The surviving copies of Tacitus' works derive from two principal manuscripts, known as the Medicean manuscripts, which are held in the Laurentian Library, and written in Latin. It is the second Medicean manuscript which is the oldest surviving copy of the passage describing Christians. In this manuscript, the first 'i' of the Christianos is quite distinct in appearance from the second, looking somewhat smudged, and lacking the long tail of the second 'i'; additionally, there is a large gap between the first 'i' and the subsequent long s. Georg Andresen was one of the first to comment on the appearance of the first 'i' and subsequent gap, suggesting in 1902 that the text had been altered, and an 'e' had originally been in the text, rather than this 'i'[21].
In 1950, at Harald Fuchs request, Dr. Teresa Lodi, the director of the Laurentian Library, examined the features of this item of the manuscript; she concluded that there are still signs of an 'e' being erased, by removal of the upper and lower horizontal portions, and distortion of the remainder into an 'i'.[22] In 2008, Dr. Ida Giovanna Rao, the new head of the Laurentian Library's manuscript office, repeated Lodi's study, and concluded that it is likely that the 'i' is a correction of some earlier character (like an e), the change being made an extremely subtle one. Later the same year, it was discovered that under ultraviolet light, an 'e' is clearly visible in the space, meaning that the passage must originally have referred to chrestianos, a Latin word which could be interpreted as the good, after the Greek word χρηστός (chrestos), meaning 'good, useful'. "I believe that in our passage of Tacitus the original reading Chrestianos is the true one" says Professor Robert Renehan, stating that it was "natural for a Roman to interpret the words [Christus and Christianus] as the similarly-sounding χρηστός".[23] The word Christian/s is in Codex Sinaiticus (in which Christ is abbreviated - see nomina sacra) spelled Chrestian/s in the three places the word is used. Also in Minuscule 81 this spelling is used in Acts of the Apostles 11:26.[24]

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I myself am convinced Tacitus was reffering to 'innocent people', because he was trying to pin the blame of the fire on Nero (who was insane, and noted by several authors for atrocities committed to the innocents.).

You may be interested in the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annals_(Tacitus)

I think that it is possible that just about anything can be forged... while I have no evidence beyond one letter and intended context in this instance... I do not put any text past the possibility of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_forgery

How would the quote from Tacitus help Christians at all politically such that one would forge it?

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_forgery Which is what I believe happened in this instance. Why wouldn't you do this if you had a new religion that not everyone liked?