RADICE, Betty, The Letters of the Younger Pliny (New York: Penguin, 1963); DE STE.- CROIX, G.E.M., "Why were the Early Christians Persecuted?," Past and Present, 26 (Nov 1963), 6-38; WILKEN, Robert, "Pliny: A Roman Gentleman," in idem., The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 1-30; A. N. SHERWIN-WHITE, The Letters of Pliny: A Historical and Social Commentary (Oxford, 1966); IDEM, "The Early Persecutions and Roman Law," in Letters of Pliny, Appendix V (= JTS 2 [1952], 199ff.); FREUDENBERGER, Rudolf, Das Verhalten des römischen Behörden gegen die Christen im 2. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1967); KERESZTES, Paul, "The Imperial Roman Government and the Christian Church, I. From Nero to the Severi," ANRW II 23.1, 247-315: 273-287.

TRAJAN (98-117 CE)

According to Schaff (46), Trajan was the first emperor to pronounce Christianity a proscribed religion. "His decision regulated the governmental treatment of the Christians for more than a century." As a basis for these claims, Schaff refers to Trajan's correspondence with Pliny. Schaff also calls attention to the crucifixion of bishop Symeon of Jerusalem by fanatical Jews and the martyrdom of Ignatius. (47)

Keresztes calls attention to stories of martyrdoms during the reign of Trajan told by "late Christian writers" e.g., the martyr deaths of Nereus and Achilleus, Clement of Rome, and Ignatius of Antioch, the reliability of the Ignatius story supposedly being confirmed by Eusebius (273). Even though such stories are "quite late and legendary," Keresztes maintains that "there is not enough reason for rejecting their heroes' martyrdoms." (n 146). What would constitute "enough reason"?

In addition, Keresztes appeals to "sporadic persecutions of official and popular origin" reported by Eusebius (HE 3.32), and especially the martyrdom of Simeon, "the second bishop of Jerusalem," which account Eusebius claimed to have obtained from Hegissipus. (273) (Significantly, Eusebius can produce only this single example.) Keresztes observes (274) that what the martyrdom of Simeon and the persecution carried out by Pliny had in common was that "the death penalty was in both cases the result of confession of Christianity and final perseverance in it." (274) For Keresztes and most all scholars, however, the "outstanding witness" for persecutions of Christians during the reign of Trajan is Pliny's letter to the emperor and the emperor's Rescript.

According to Keresztes, "there is no doubt that even before the Rescript, i.e., at Pliny's own trial of the Christians, Christianity was a capital crime, and the faithful confessors died for being Christians." (278). Such a lack of doubt, however, does not derive from any historical evidence. Keresztes comes up with this explanation only because there is no other.

Keresztes explains that there are basically three different views on this matter. One view is that Christianity was prohibited by some kind of "general law" or "enactment," which is usually thought to have been set forth by Nero. The second view (the coercito theory) finds the legal basis in the Roman governors' "power of imperium" to enforce public order at their own personal discretion. The third is that Christians were simply prosecuted under existing crimnal laws governing specific offenses, such as illegal assembly, treason, etc. (279)

As for the coercito theory, with regard to the suggstions that Christians were persecuted because they refused to worship the Roman gods, Keresztes observes that "private individuals, Roman citizens or peregrini, had no positive and publicaly enforceable obligation to participate in and particular acts of worship." (283)

With regard to the view that Christians were prosecuted for holding illegal assemblies (collegium), Keresztes observes (284) that illegal assemblies "never seemed to be an issue at Christian trials. We do not have a single case showing that Christians, at this early date, were even tried for this so-called illegal assembly."

Keresztes also rejects the argument that Christians were being treated just like other "superstitions" (Bacchanals, Druids, etc.), prosecuted because of the flagitia they practiced.

Decisive for Keresztes is that Pliny's actions provide good evidence that "there is unquestionably only one charge, the capital crime of Christianity." Keresztes favors the first theory, namely, that presupposed by Pliny is an enactment that goes back to Nero (285f). According to Keresztes,

tradition firmly maintains that Nero persecuted the Christians and that Christianity was proscribed by him. The cumulative effect of this tradition is strongly in favour of a Neronian action that made it a capital crime to be a Christian. While not all the sources of this tradition are equally strong, some, especially the 'First Letter of St. Peter' and certain passages of Tertullian... suggest very clearly that some enactment of Nero indeed made Christianity a capital offense. (286) (Tertullian Apol. 2; 5; 21; etc. Ad. Nat. 1.7 etc. Scorp. 15; Adv Her 36; 1 Pet 4, esp. 12-17; also Tacitus Annals 15.44; Suetonius Nero, 16.2; Eusebius, HE 3.1.2., and others)

However, Keresztes places his finger on the real problem, namely, that the Pliny material presupposes that Christians were prosecuted not for crimnal actions (flagitia) but simply because they were Christian, that "Pliny's unhesitating decision to have the faithful confessors put to death" indicates the existence of a general practice, and that the legal basis for such a practice can only be some kind of imperial edict -- for which, however, we have no evidence whatsoever. Nor do we have any actual evidence that at this time Christians were already persecuted by Nero or anyone else simply because they were Christians. This is a conclusion apologists come up with because they can't find any real reason.

As to why Christians were persecuted, Robin Lane Fox explains:

Christians disturbed the peace of a province, and detracted from the gods' honours and most governors would agree that 'atheists' might provoke anger in heaven. If many governors in the second century had been asked to be more precise, one suspects they would simply have said that Christians were Christians; they had been persecuted elsewhere, and precedent required governors to take up accusations and persecute them again, without too much thought for the niceties." (428)

But Fox himself then observes that "these conclusions risk becoming circular, as if Christians were persecuted because they were Christians" (428)-which, of course, seems to be the precise reason why Christians were executed under Trajan, for whom we are told that the nature of their crime was "their 'name' as Christians..." (427)

PLINY'S LETTER TO TRAJAN

Pliny tells us that he was seventeen at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius, which would mean he was born in 62 CE. He began his career as a lawyer at the age of eighteen. After holding a series of minor administrative offices, he was appointed as a administrator (praetor) of military affairs by Emperor Domition in 93 CE. From 98-100 he served as administrator of the treasury, during which time he also continued to function as a civil prosecutor. Leaving the Treasury office, he continued to carry out various civic responsibilities, including a three-year stint in which he was responsible for maintaining the river banks to prevent Rome's sewers from flooding. In 111 CE he was appointed as the Emperor Trajan's official representative in Bithynia and Pontus, where he died in 113. (for all this, see Radice, 12-15; S-White, 72-82; Scholars differ as to precise dates). The letters of Pliny are collected in ten books. The first nine books contain 247 letters of personal correspondence, and book ten contains 121 more official letters to and from Trajan written during his ministry in Bithynia and Pontus.

Regarding the letter collections as a whole

With regard to the authenticity of the letters as letters, Sherwin-White observes, "Modern scholars have taken no very coherent line about this. Some regard the letters as entirely fictitious, written for the books in which they appear... Others speak of the letters being written up for publication from simpler originals..." (11) With regard to the letters concerning Christians (10.96-97), for S-White "it is hardly necessary to defend the genuine character of these two letters," since the letters were known to Tertullian (691) and "this type of theory, like the notion that Tacitus' account of the Neronian affair is a forgery, raise greater difficulties than it solves..." (692). These are obviously words of a Christian apologist

Keresztes observes that "the genuineness of the correspondence on the Christians, especially that of Pliny's letter, has been questioned, or even completely rejected by many scholars," but that "the complete authenticity of these letters has always had staunch and convincing defenders" (274f) - which seems to settle the matter for him.

S-White observes that the "more personal letters" form a special group.

They are highly polished specimens. Yet it is unlikely that their topics and occasions were entirely fictitious... Anything is possible, no doubt, in the field of imagination. But it would require an extraordinary ingenuity to invent so many convincing minor details for the setting of so miscellaneous a subject-matter as that of these letters. It must be reckoned at least [as] a probability that Pliny was in the habit of advising or consoling his friends on occasion with appropriate litterae curiosius scriptae, and that these formed one basis of the collection. (11f)

This is not a very strong argument for authenticity.

In a similar way, we are told that letters dealing with Pliny's business affairs and domestic arrangements "are full of precise and particular details that can hardly have been invented." And then it is strangely explained that "they read as literary revisions of practical letters which have been polished in language and style and simplified by omission of the most technical and transient details... These letters are close to the realities of correspondence." (12)

Is this the most that can be said even by a defender of the letters! - they are filled with "particular details" many of which were omitted (which also explains their lack of concrete details), so that they are "close to the realities of correspondence" (in the same way that good forgeries would be).

S-White assures us that Pliny's letters of recommendation for promotion written for his friends are also "close to the realities of correspondence"... and "have never been regarded as other than genuine letters." (12)

How close? Again, the same could be said for good forgeries.

With regard to the "letters of substance" offering "long descriptions of character, of political and social events, or natural phenomena, and the rest," S-White observes that "there is no reason why Pliny should not have written long descriptions of his famous trials, for example, to his educated friends..., who otherwise would depend for public news solely on what appeared in the acta diurna ("daily news")..."

But it is also not impossible that someone else fabricated such accounts.

And again we are told that the "numerous brief notes... seem to carry signs of authenticity... One would seldom sit down to invent this kind of thing..." (13)

Unless this kind of thing supported the authenticity of other letters.

The point here is not that Pliny's correspondence is probably spurious, but only that S-White's arguments in favor of their authenticity are not overwhelming.

A related question is whether the letters are literary imitations, either by Pliny himself or by someone else. S-White observes that "Pliny certainly writes under strong literary influences, both in the language and the content of the letters. Reminiscences of Vergil and of various subsequent writers of the imperial period are common enough." But to conclude from this that the whole thing should be taken as a fiction simply because Pliny writes in the language of his predecessors "seems a rather crude approach to the understanding of classical literature..." (16) But the matter is not quite that simple, since this would also be what one might expect from a forger.

Such a criticism has been made of Pliny's report to Trajan about the Christians, where echos of Livy are alleged (R. Grant, HTR [1948], 273ff.). S-White counters that "the echos turn out to be genuine but faint and dim, and in no way affect the historicity of the narrative... To a man immersed by long education and continued reading in his native literature, the appropriate language arose from memory's store at the prompting of the theme. It is doubtful whether this is a wholly conscious process." (17) S-White later suggests (p. 692) that the immediate influence "may not be Livy but an account, in any of the annalists of the Julio-Claudian period, of measures taken to repress Druids, Magisians, or Jews."

What S-White doesn't seem to perceive is that if the question has to do with the authenticity of what is reported here, it doesn't matter where the material was stolen from (and we don't have to assume it was Pliny who did it). S-White also fails to notice that such borrowing would be far more probable in a literary fiction.

Chronology -

Assuming the letters to be authentic, there is no agreement among scholars regarding when the various books of letters were compiled, or when they were published, or whether they were published separately, one by one, or in groups, or some separately and some in groups, or all at once. According to S-White, for example, "the evidence points to three or four separate publications: I-II together or separately, III-VI or VII together, VII or VIII-IX together." (52)

The only thing scholars must agree about is that the collection of letters from Pliny's time in Bithynia and Pontus could not have been compiled by Pliny himself (since he died there), although no one knows who collected and published them, or when (or why).

Radice observes (32) that for Book 10 "there is a very fragmentary MS. authority."

All this raises a number of difficult questions. How were such letters collected? How did Pliny retrieve his letters from the hundreds of different people he wrote to? And when he did, why would such letters be preserved and copied and recopied for a thousand years? On the other hand, however, why would anyone fabricate such letters?

The Letters concerning the Christians

"No mention is made of Christians in any of his other letters" (Wilken, 16)

According to S-White (80f.), Pliny arrived in Bithynia in September 109 and died sometime between January and September 111. Radice (15) places his mission in Bithynia-Pontus between 111 and 113 (also Wilken). It is generally thought that Pliny spent the first year in Bithynia, and traveled further east to Pontus only after September 110. Pliny's itinerary in Pontus is puzzling: he seems have gone first to Sinope, then east to Amisus, and back-- either by sea, or by passing through Sinope again-- to Amastris, before returning to Bithynia. His letter to Trajan concerning Christians must have been written sometime between September 110 and January 111 (when he ceased writing letters), and stands between a letter written from Amisus (on the eastern border of Pontus) and another written from Amastris, about 100 miles west of Amisus, on the way back to Bithynia. But we are not told where Pliny was when he wrote the letter.

We do not know, therefore, where the letter was written, nor do we know whether the problem Pliny encountered arose in Amisus, Amastris, or somewhere else. "The city where the trouble first arose cannot be determined" (S-White, 693; cf. Wilken, 15). Wilken tells us (15) that Pliny no doubt assumed "that Trajan would know where he was." But how would Trajan have known this? And even if he knew where the letter was written from, how would he have known in what city the problem arose? -- which is not unimportant, since Amisus was a self-governing city with significant freedom to determine its own way of life (Wilken, 14). In any case, it is strange that, particularly in a letter of such length and detail, dealing with such an important subject (as he emphasizes in his letter), Pliny makes no mention of where the trouble arose. Such vagueness raises suspicion regarding authenticity.

Nor does Pliny explain how the trouble arose. The nature of the actual charges brought against the Christians is obscure.

Wilken speculates (15) that the complaint may have been made by local butchers and others engaged in the slaughter and sale of sacrificial meat because people were not making sacrifices and business was poor -- which reminds one of Luke's story of Paul in Ephesus (Acts 19:23-27). But this does call attention to the last paragraph of Pliny's letter where reference is made to the "great number of persons of every age and class" being brought to trial, and the fact that, in spite of this, "not only the towns, but villages and rural districts too" are infected by this wretched cult (indeed, all of Pontus?). This sounds like Christian exaggeration.

In any case, Keresztes states the problem very clearly: "Our problem, however, is serious, and it is this: What was the juridicial basis for Pliny's unhesitating decision to have the faithful confessors put to death?" (278).

This is the crucial question. If the issue has to do with whether we are dealing here with Christian legend or with historical facts, the plausibility of all the persecution and martyrdom stories depends on whether any meaningful reason can be found for the persecution of Christians. And it is not surprising, therefore, that Christian historians have devoted so much energy to this task -- and that so many answers have been proposed. It has been proposed that they were executed because they engaged in indecent and immoral practices (flagitia), or because they refused to worship the Emperor, or make sacrifice to the gods of the State, or because they pursued an illegal "superstition" (de Ste. Croix) or because they constituted illegal colloqium or hetaeria (cf. Frend, 221), or simply because (as Pliny says) they were stubborn and obstinate. And for every one of these proposals it is easy to find several scholarly refutations.

Since few people find any of these answers really satisfactory, a very common proposal is that Christians were slaughtered simply because they were Christians. According to Keresztes, it is clear from Pliny that the Christians were "punished for the name alone" (284)... "The Christian name, without any connection with flagitia, alone remains a capital crime" (287). For Keresztes, this answers the question regarding the juridicial basis for Pliny's decision to execute Christians. But can one really refer to this as a "juridicial basis." Must it not still be determined why, from a legal perspective, simply being a Christian was regarded as a capital crime?

According to Keresztes, "Pliny's unhesitating decision to have the faithful confessors put to death" indicates the existence of a general practice, and the legal basis for such a practice can only be some kind of imperial edict previously issued by Nero. But we have no evidence whatsoever for the existence of such an edict under Nero. Nor does Keresztes indicate what might have been the grounds for executing specified in such an edict. Nor do we have any evidence that at this early time Christians were already persecuted by Nero or anyone else simply because they were Christians.

Reflections

Pliny's letter is problematic. We have already observed that the fact that we do not know where it was written or in what city the Christian problem surfaced is strange.

More problematic, however, is that, according to Pliny, there was a "great number" Christians, "of every age and class," not only "in the cities" [plural] "but in villages and rural districts as well" -- i.e., just about everywhere. This doesn't seem like a realistic scenario.

Another problem is that if Pliny has no direct knowledge of judicial proceedings against Christians, nor of the punishments usually meted out, why did he nevertheless proceed in the way he did -- executing those persons who confess to being Christian. In spite of what he says to begin with, Pliny seems to know very well how to deal with persons who confess to being Christians, and the only uncertainty he seems to have concerns the special cases in which people retract their beliefs and renounce Christianity. But why did Pliny decide that Christians should be put to death simply because they were Christian? To put this another way, in spite of his questions, Pliny already knows the answer to the most important question: punishment of Christians has nothing to do with any specific crimes they commit.

Trajan's reply is also problematic. To begin with, he doesn't answer all of Pliny's questions. He only assures Pliny that his course of action against Christians is correct, which includes at least implicit affirmation of Pliny's execution of Christians. He makes no reference to Pliny's question concerning distinctions on the basis of age. But he adds the very important specifications that Christians should not be hunted out, that charges made against them- presumably the charge of being Christians-must be proved (in a civil court before the governor), and that anonymous accusations should be rejected.

But the problem concerns the source and basis for Trajan's instructions. Did he make all this up on the spot, or did he have some basis or precedent for his reply? Is the implication that (even though Pliny is unaware of it and seems to know nothing about the Christian movement) persecution of Christians is already quite common, and Trajan is simply following established precedents? Does what Trajan says here apply only to the problems in Pontus, or is this some kind of general edict? Or is Keresztes right, and presupposed here is an edict previously propagated by Nero? At the very least, Keresztes recognizes that there is a problem here, even if an appeal to an edict by Nero doesn't really solve the problem - since it still remains unclear why Christians were condemned to death simply for being Christians.

Why would later Christians invent a dialogue like this between Pliny and Trajan. To begin with, it supports the Christian myth that from the very beginning Christians were persecuted for no reason at all except for the fact that they were Christians - that to be a Christian means to share the suffering and death of Christ. All attempts by Christian historians to determine the real reasons why Christians were persecuted fail to recognize the apologetic and mythical character of such claims, for which the most important point is that there "were" no reasons.

At the same time, however, Trajan's instructions would be very favorable to Christians when persecution did take place in the third and early fourth centuries: Christians should not be hunted down; charges against Christians must be proven in a court of law; anonymous accusations have no merit; and Christians who deny their faith should be pardoned - a stipulation many Christians later made use of.

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