The highlighted is referenced from the New World Encyclopedia’s, Historicity of Jesus page: Thallus, of whom very little is known, wrote a history from the Trojan War to, according to Eusebius, 109 B.C. No work of Thallus survives. There is one reference to Thallus having written about events beyond 109 B.C. by Julius Africanus , writing in c. 221, while writing about the crucifixion of Jesus. Julius Africanus mentioned that Thallus wrote:
On the whole world there pressed a most fearful darkness; and the rocks were rent by an earthquake, and many places in Judea and other districts were thrown down. This darkness Thallus, in his third book of History, calls (as appears to me without reason) an eclipse of the sun.
We have the historian Julius Africanus, quoting another historian, Thallus. Julius Africanus’s quote is one of the earliest known references of Jesus and the Crucifixion. Thallus wrote a three volume history known as the history of the Mediterranean world before the Trojan war and up to the 167th Olmpiad,112-109 B.C. Sextus Julius Africanus had recopied and used much of Thallus’s work in is his historical writings. Sextus Julius African copied this work of Thallus
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Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against