According to the Romans, Jesus was a nobody. The Romans had a very contentious relationship with the Jews of the period, but generally respected the Jewish faith as an ancient and decorous religion. As such, when Jewish communities by-and-large condemned new Christian cults as a bunch of troublemakers spreading nonsense, Roman authorities were generally content to take the established Jewish communities at their word - when they bothered differentiating between Jews and Christians at all.

Later Roman and Graeco-Roman writers, as Christianity became more known and defined, would criticize Christianity both for its subversive nature (refusing to participate in common religious rituals of the Roman state and local communities) and its blatant disavowal of (what the Romans and Greeks saw as) an ancient and respectable religion (Judaism). Jesus himself would be condemned either as an unexceptional miracleworker of the type that occasionally gained fame in the near-east, as a charlatan or sectarian troublemaker, or as a Jewish religious teacher whose teachings were corrupted by later followers.