I’m currently taking a course on worship practices in the early church, and just read this (in?)famous letter from Pliny the Younger to the emperor Trajan regarding the Roman punishment of Christians around the year 112 CE.
Pliny’s letter is striking and, at times, humorous. He suggests that the primary reason he has Christians executed (after giving multiple chances for rescission) is not that they are Christians, per se, but rather because he “had no doubt that, whatever the nature of their creed, stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy surely deserve to be punished.” Apparently Pliny believed that the earliest Christians deserved to be executed simply because they were unwilling to be persuaded, not because there was anything inherently insidious about the belief system.
He mentions that some defendants, when questioned, maintained that they had been Christians at one point, but “ceased to be, some three years before, others many years, some as much as twenty-five years.” I found this odd—many of us today don’t typically consider the notion that early Christians sometimes left the Church. This leads to questions about how the earliest Christians functioned as a religious society: what were some of the reasons (aside from imminent torture or execution) that might cause an ancient Christian to leave the religion? If one decided to leave and come back, how were they welcomed back into the association?
Pliny’s bewilderment at the Christians’ consumption of “ordinary and innocent food” is also curious—it appears that he can’t understand why the “potluck fellowship” is so important to the early Christians, in contrast to the sacred food consumed at pagan festivals.
The closing of Pliny’s letter is also hilariously ironic: “It is easy to imagine what a multitude of people can be reformed if an opportunity for repentance is afforded.” Is this not exactly what the earliest Christians believed God to be doing through Christ?
Additionally, his recounting of “torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses” is shocking for at least two reasons: 1) It communicates once again to the modern church that women held positions of authority within the early church, and 2) these women deaconesses were slaves, which indicates a lack of regard for social status among ancient Christians. I’m curious about what other sources might have addressed this particular passage in the past.
the archives near Emmaus 
Eusebius HE 3.33 mentions the correspondence between Pliny & Trajan.
Interesting to see Trajan’s “high ground” approach: c’mon Pliny, we’re too sophisticated to persecute people on the bases on anonymous charges! All of your insights might make for fun research projects, especially the woman deaconesses as slaves. I have heard that some think that one of the early Bishops named Onesimus may be that of the Epistle to Philemon fame. Too common a slave name to prove that, but interesting on conjunction with your observations here.
Your last two points are incredibly interesting! Will have to do some research into the matter myself.
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Thanks, Peterson! Let me know what you find out.
Brian: I thought Trajan’s response was pretty funny, as well. But it also reveals a kind of modern approach to jurisprudence—Trajan himself apparently considered Rome a thoroughly “modern” civilization (punishment following anonymous testimony is “out of keeping with the spirit of our age”). In a way, it is directly opposed to the kind of legal proceedings that ultimately got Jesus crucified.
I’m curious about just how much has already been written regarding the female slave deaconesses. To me, that set off one great big alarm while reading. I assume that it is the same for others.
I did a post on Onesimus several days ago and there were a lot of comments. Several articles were recommended and John Byron commented. Byron did his dissertation work on slavery in the ancient world under J.D.G. Dunn, so he may be worth contacting to discuss that subject.
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What I found most useful out of the letter to Trajan was it allowed me to diffuse the argument that the early Christians did not believe Jesus to be God. I had a Muslim professor in my undergraduate studies insist the New Testament was not in its original form and was corrupted (because the Qu’ran praised the “Injil” so much but yet contradicted nearly all of it). He made the same arguments Dan Brown used.
“They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so.”
So, as early as A.D. 111 Christians were singing hymns to and worshipping Jesus as God. Polycarp, John’s disciple, and others who interacted with the eyewitnesses were still alive and there was no concerted effort to stop this “heresy” of believing Jesus to be a god. So, of course there was approval of the worship of Jesus as God.
The New Testament is the most reliable document in all of antiquity. The New Testament we have today is the same New Testament penned by the eyewitnesses. In the New Testament, Jesus is proclaimed to be God. So from the earliest Christians on down to us, those who truly believed in Jesus confessed he is God. Those who posit that the early Christians did not believe Jesus to be God need to provide more evidence than the speculations of Dan Brown.
(On an unrelated note, I am always disappointed to see Christians use the “Common Era” and “Before the Common Era” instead of the traditional AD and BC. Every little capitulation to the removal of God from our collective consciousness is a defeat for the His Kingdom. I know it makes us look scholarly, but while it raises our reputations it diminishing God’s.)
Thanks for your comment, DogTags.
I agree that people should be more widely read when it comes to the documents of the early Christian movement. I’ve recently been making my way through Van Voorst’s Jesus Outside the New Testament (Eerdmans, 2000), and it has offered a decent portrait of how Christianity perceived itself and was perceived by others in the first few centuries of its existence. What many people who rely upon Dan-Brown-type sensationalistic claims of cover-ups and conspiracies do not realize is that in the first and second centuries, Christianity was little more than a minor Jewish cult that did not have the political or monetary clout needed to accomplish a wide-spread conspiracy. Conspiracy theorists read too much of the modern church (which through Christendom has become a hulking political behemoth) into their interpretation of its beginnings.
And while I agree that the first Christians did indeed worship Jesus as God (see Larry Hurtado’s work on the subject), I would push back against your claims that “the New Testament is the most reliable document in all of antiquity” and that “the New Testament we have today is the same New Testament penned by the eyewitnesses”. The first claim seems to be making too broad of a statement to be tested—after all, is it more reliable than Pliny’s letter mentioned above? Is it more reliable than, say, the Mesha Stele or the Code of Hammurabi? The second claim is patently false. Textual criticism has revealed that the text of the New Testament has been anything but static over the last two thousand years. It has been tweaked and corrected here and there, and frequently contradicts itself chronologically and theologically. That doesn’t mean it can’t be trusted. I’m just recognizing that it was written and edited by human beings.
Finally, I disagree with your argument regarding the use of BCE/CE. God’s reputation can’t be diminished or controlled by the comings and goings of academic vogue, and God’s Kingdom is not something that can be “defeated.” The parables of Jesus teach us nothing if not the inevitability of the breaking-in of the Kingdom. Using BCE/CE rather than BC/AD isn’t going to change that. However, something that has always puzzled me about the terminology is that chronologically speaking it uses the exact same dates—BCE/CE is still centered around the life and death of Christ every bit as much as BC/AD are. Additionally, no early Christians used the BC/AD terminology, as it wasn’t widely promoted until work of Bede the Venerable in the 7th-8th centuries. In choosing BCE/CE over BC/AD, we are only avoiding making the same historical and theological presumptions of an early medieval historian monk.
I understand your point about BCE/CE, but I can’t help but believe that the use of those terms was some academic attempt to obscure the reason for the dating method in the first place. I think that going along with the change of terminology, now that we have acknowledged our dating years to Christ’s birth, is complicity in that obfuscation. I don’t believe it to be sin, for sure, but I do think it unfortunate.
Certainly making a blanket statement about the quality of the sources is a bit broad, but compared to any other document in history, the NT boasts far more manuscript evidence (by the thousands) than any other document. The oldest manuscripts we have of the NT are closer to the autographs than most of the other ancient documents, certainly than the NT’s contemporary documents . If you could quantify “reliability” I would argue the NT has more of it than any other ancient document.
Can you give an example of the NT contradicting itself theologically? I did not intend to mean that the NT we have is word-for-word what was written in the autographs. There are certainly some portions of Mark, possibly John 21 and other scriptures that are not in the most ancient manuscripts (Irenaeus in the 2nd century used those portions in Mark). With all the manuscript evidence and the early Christian leaders correspondence, we can have full confidence that what was handed down by the eyewitnesses is largely what we have today. By “same” I mean the stories, principles, concepts originally drafted are found in our NT.
I would argue that Mark’s christology is in direct opposition to John’s (or perhaps the other way around). Whereas Mark makes use of adoptionism to describe Jesus’ relationship to the Father, John argues the preexistence of the cosmic Christ. Those two hardly go hand-in-hand. And that’s just a small example. The crucifixion/resurrection narratives of the Gospels, Acts, and 1 Corinthians 15 are all at odds with each other. It is literally impossible to create a coherent synthesis of the events leading up to and following Jesus’ death that isn’t riddled with errors (trust me, I’ve tried—if you’d like a copy of my narrative attempt to reconcile the stories, let me know and I’ll email you one). Each of the Gospel writers and Paul have their own theological agendas for telling their stories the way they tell them. Just about the only commonality among them all is the empty tomb.
But these theological and factual differences are important—they contribute to the Bible’s literary and spiritual beauty. They are the fourfold witness to the One True Gospel. Wouldn’t it be a little more suspicious if all of the stories lined up perfectly?
I understand that the “Gospels” and Paul have different emphases, but to say they have contradictory theology I don’t agree with you. At least not yet. Mark emphasized Jesus in his service. John highlighted the deity of Jesus. At times Paul wrote to address the Gnostics. They differ in some respects, but they do not simply agree on the empty tomb. They all agree on the bodily resurrection of Jesus, too.
On the last 2 points; This is before Catholicism took over as the dominant sect. Phoebe in the NT was likely a deaconess. Not a surprise since the OT mentions a female judge Deborah.