I have therefore postponed any further examination and hastened to consult you. The question seems to me to be worthy of your consideration, especially in view of the number of persons endangered; for a great many individuals of every age and class, both men and women, are being brought to trial, and this is likely to continue. It is not only the towns, but villages and rural districts too which are infected through contact with this wretched cult. I think though that it is still possible for it to be checked and directed to better ends, for there is no doubt that people have begun to throng the temples which had been entirely deserted for a long time; the sacred rites which had been allowed to lapse are being performed again, and flesh of the sacrificial victims is on sale everywhere, though up till recently scarcely anyone could be found to buy it. It is easy to infer from this that a great many people could be reformed if they were given an opportunity to repent. (Emphasis added.)
Emperor Trajan
What we appear to be witnessing in this correspondence between the emperor and his governor is the first formulation of a Roman response to New Testament Christians. Here is Emperor Trajan’s reply to Pliny the Younger:
You have followed the right course of procedure, my dear Pliny, in your examination of the cases of persons charged with being Christians, for it is impossible to lay down a general rule to a fixed formula. These people must not be hunted out; if they are brought before you and the charge against them is proved, they must be punished, but in the case of anyone who denies that he is a Christian, and makes it clear that he is not by offering prayers to our gods, he is to be pardoned as a result of his repentance however suspect his past conduct may be. But pamphlets circulated anonymously must play no part in any accusation. They create the worst sort of precedent and are quite out of keeping with the spirit of our age. (Emphasis added.) (27)
Pliny’s ignorance of an existing policy concerning Christians is clear, along with his personal hostility toward them. Interestingly, Pliny thinks the Christians’ meetings are properly forbidden under Trajan’s ban on political groups. But Pliny clearly does not know what the emperor will think about this new problem.
Any sacrifice or prayer in the presence of pagan images would have been a form of idol worship forbidden in the Hebrew scripture, including the Ten Commandments’ famous prohibition against “making” or “bowing down” to the graven images of polytheistic deities. In this way, Gentile Christians could be detected immediately, Pliny presumes. Jews had been exempted from the requirement to worship Roman state deities. However, as such worship was required of Roman citizens and officials, the failure to do so restricted their social mobility within the Roman world.
It’s unclear, however, whether these early New Testament Christians would have had the same problem since we now know they were already using both symbolic representations of the divine and pagan religious images themselves, even images related to pagan gods like Apollo, as the examples of St. Clement of Alexandria demonstrate.
Trajan’s reply reassures the governor that he acted wisely by consulting him about the treatment of Christians and that he has ruled appropriately. He directs Pliny that Christians need only offer prayer with incense and wine to Caesar in order to acquit themselves. Emperor Trajan does not require Christians to recognize Caesar’s divinity but merely to make an offering to the divine for Caesar’s wellbeing. And, while the offensive images of pagan gods would be present, their official offering would not require an animal sacrifice of any kind. Above all, Christians are not to be hunted down, but ignored as much as possible. The official imperial attitude toward Christians, even as this earliest record shows, is actually rather benign and consistent with the policy of religious tolerance usually favored by the Romans.
Pliny’s letter also tells us that the Christian movement was at least 20 years old in 111 or 112 CE. This is most interesting because it dates the existence of Christianity in Bithynia to the time of the Flavian Roman emperors who preceded Trajan.
What else does this oldest surviving discussion of Christianity by Roman officials reveal? Pliny states that Christianity’s popularity seems to have waned since the Flavian era. He also mentions that the Christians he is dealing with, even at this early stage of Christian history, appear to come from all classes of Roman society. All of these facts challenge the conventional view of Christian history.
Pliny also reveals that the traditional or established forms of Roman worship became “entirely deserted” at one time in the recent past but that they were now staging a comeback. Even if this report is exaggerated, a great many people, it seems, had gotten over a “Christian phase” that had peaked and started fading during the reign of the Flavian Emperor Domitian, who succeeded his father Vespasian and brother Titus.
The archeological evidence tells us that the coin issued by Titus that mirrors the first symbol of Christ was discontinued by his brother Domitian only a few months into his reign. Titus ruled for only 2 years, 2 months and 20 days, yet he had managed to issue millions of coins bearing that symbol during this brief reign. His younger brother Domitian ruled for 15 years and was known to have conducted a harsh purge of the upper class, even executing and banishing some of his own family members who, as we shall see, may have been Christians—including his nephew-in-law Titus Flavius Clemens and his niece, the afore-mentioned Domitilla. He even adopted their children as his own heirs.
What is most vivid in this early correspondence between the Emperor Trajan and Pliny the Younger is the contrast between imperial Rome’s careful policy toward the new Christian religion on the one hand and its violent suppression of militant messianic Judaism on the other.
Outside the New Testament itself (and, possibly, the writings ascribed to St. Clement of Rome, St. Ignatius of Antioch and Papias of Hierapolis), this correspondence is the earliest primary evidence of Christianity that exists anywhere in the historical record with one controversial exception that we will examine in detail in Part II.
Among the earliest surviving mentions of Christianity we have an official statement of how the Roman Empire will not persecute Christians—written by the Roman emperor himself. The evidence from almost the whole of the two centuries that follow conforms to Emperor Trajan’s quasi-toleration of Christians. His approach seems to have become the standard operating policy of the Roman government toward Christianity, despite later fictional depictions of Roman mistreatment of Christians.
So what is the basis for the assertion that Christians were being systematically hunted down and slaughtered by Romans as early as the 1st Century, as we have been led to believe by tradition, books, movies and popular culture? The answer turns out to be a key to understanding what has been puzzling Christian scholars for centuries.