The Triumph of Christianity

by Bart D. Ehrman

The first detailed account of a Roman judicial proceeding against Christians foreshadows what was occasionally to happen in subsequent years. It comes to us in the early-second-century letters of Pliny the Younger, Roman governor of the province of Bithynia-Pontus in northwest Asia Minor.

  This Pliny is called the Younger because he was adopted by an uncle, Pliny the Elder, an equally famous Roman official and author best known for his scientific writings on natural history and for dying during the most catastrophic natural disaster of his time. Following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, Pliny the Elder attempted a sea rescue of some who were trapped and he died in the cataclysm. His nephew recorded his own observation of the volcano from afar, along with numerous other incidents in his life, in a large collection of his letters in ten books. They are among the most extensive, informative, and intriguing sets of correspondence to come down to us from the ancient world.

  Book ten contains sixty-one letters Pliny exchanged with the emperor Trajan from 110 to 113 CE. Particularly important for our purposes are letters ninety-six and ninety-seven, the first containing Pliny’s only references to Christians and his judicial proceeding against them, the second setting forth the emperor’s very brief response.

  Pliny wrote letter ninety-six because Christians had been brought to his attention, and he was not certain that his treatment of them followed acceptable protocols. There obviously was not a “law” against Christians or any official procedure for dealing with them, or Pliny would not have needed to inquire. He knew that something was to be done, but he was not sure what. As he says at the outset of the letter: “It is my regular custom, my lord, to refer to you all questions which cause me doubt, for who can better guide my hesitant steps or instruct my ignorance? I have never attended hearings concerning Christians, so I am unaware what is usually punished or investigated, and to what extent” (Pliny the Younger, Letters, 10.96).

  Clearly there had been official proceedings against Christians before, but they must have been relatively few and far between. Pliny, a highly placed Roman official, had never attended one and did not know what they entailed. He asks the emperor whether the age of a Christian should be a matter of consideration, whether a Christian who has recanted the faith should still be held liable, and whether it is simply the name “Christian” that is actionable or if, instead, actual crimes attendant to the name are to be punished.

  He goes on, then, to explain how, in the absence of any law or known precedent, he has proceeded. When a person was accused of being a Christian, Pliny would simply ask if the charge was true. If the person confessed, he then gave the person two chances to recant, under threat of execution. If the person persisted in remaining a Christian, Pliny ordered execution on the ground of obduracy in the face of imperial power, for refusing to obey the orders of a Roman official. Christians who could show they were Roman citizens, however, were sent to Rome for trial, one of the privileges of citizenship.

  What the term “Christian” actually meant, and why it was a capital offense, becomes clear in Pliny’s fuller explanation of his procedure. If a person claimed not to be a Christian, Pliny made them prove it. He brought cult statues of the gods and of the emperor into the courtroom and ordered the person to do obeisance, to offer up a sacrifice of wine and incense, and to curse the name of Christ. Anyone who refused was obviously a Christian and was taken off for execution. Those who complied were acquitted of all charges.

  This was a clever test, and it showed why the term “Christian” itself was punishable. Those who genuinely claimed that name would refuse to worship the gods and the emperor himself. They did not follow cultic practices acceptable to Rome. That was both dangerous and actionable. Pliny therefore knew a simple way to see whether someone really was a Christian or not. Non-Christians would have no qualms about participating in a traditional cult; Christians who persisted in their views would rather die first.

  Then there arose the question about what to do with Christians who chose not to persist in their views. What should happen to someone who admitted to being a Christian previously but who recanted? Pliny decided that such a person was not guilty of an offense and should be released unharmed. This is extraordinary. It means that Christianity was not a crime like any other crime. Anyone who commits murder cannot escape a judicial penalty by claiming that even though he had committed murder in the past, he was not murdering anyone in the present, and so he should not be punished. Murder, like all other crimes, is punishable for having been committed. Romans did not treat Christians that way. Having been a Christian was not a crime. Being a Christian was. Anyone who recanted and returned to traditional ways was acquitted.

  Pliny’s logic was followed by later Roman officials as well. It was the logic of religious observance. Refusing to worship the traditional gods was not simply a matter of personal preference. It was a social and political issue as well, in part because, when not revered, the gods could bring communal disaster. Obdurate members of nontraditional cults who refused to participate in the religious life of the community therefore constituted a threat. Those who recognized the error of their ways, however, no longer posed a threat, and so did not need to be coerced into obedience. The gods were happy, the officials were happy, and the community was happy. There was, then, no need for punishment.

  In his letter Pliny goes on to indicate that his interrogations of Christians revealed important information about their cultic practices. His comments show not only what Christians were doing in their communal services but also, by inference, what they were wrongly suspected of doing. Pliny indicates that the Christians came together to worship at dawn and in their gatherings they sang antiphonal hymns to Christ as God. They also bound themselves by oaths to engage in highly ethical activities: they agreed to commit no crime, no theft, no adultery; they agreed never to break their word or to withhold money from someone who had deposited it with them. The Christians would then disband and gather again later to share a meal together, of food that Pliny indicates was “common and harmless.”

  These comments about Christian activities may seem rather straightforward and banal, yet they are anything but that. An understanding of Christian writings of the second century makes it quite easy to read between the lines to see what Pliny is actually saying. He is, in effect, indicating that the common rumors in circulation about Christian worship practices were unfounded. As we will see later in this chapter, Christians were accused of engaging in wild nocturnal rituals that involved profligate immorality, infanticide, and cannibalism. Pliny found nothing of the sort. The Christians were committed on oath to being unusually ethical and they ate regular food—not human babies—in their periodic celebrations.

  Pliny appears not to have believed his own findings at first. He identified two slaves who served as “deaconesses” or “ministers” in the community and had them tortured to find the truth. In Roman antiquity it was believed—quite contrary to our own way of thinking—that only under extreme torture would a person necessarily speak truthfully. In judicial proceedings involving slaves, it was actually required that they be tortured. Pliny wanted the truth. But when tortured the slaves revealed nothing scandalous “other than a debased and boundless superstition.”

  Nonetheless, Pliny indicates the problems caused by this superstition were indeed significant. It had affected “many of all ages, every rank and both sexes” and was widespread: “The infection of the superstition has extended not merely through the cities, but also through the villages and country areas” (Pliny the Younger, Letters, 10.96). In fact, the local pagan temples had been virtually deserted and there was almost no demand for sacrificial meat. That had all been rectified, however, by his intervention. Now that he had acted, the temples were once more crowded and the meat markets were beginning to thrive.

  Pliny clearly wanted the emperor’s approbation for his way of proceeding, and he received it in a terse reply. Trajan does not invoke any imperial law that was to govern the case—the clearest indication of
all that no such law existed, since, if it had, the emperor, of all people, would surely know. On the contrary, Trajan indicates that in dealing with Christians: “No general rule can be laid down which would establish a definite routine.” Pliny’s procedures were fine. In particular, anyone who denied being a Christian and proved it “by worshipping our gods,” even if previously suspected of adhering to the aberrant faith, was to be acquitted.

  Trajan does stress two provisos. Christians were not to be sought out. There was to be no witch hunt, no tracking down of criminals. Second, Trajan emphasizes, accusations could not be made anonymously. If someone had a charge to bring, they needed to bring it in person and stand by their claim: “Documents published anonymously must play no role in any accusation, for they give the worst example, and are foreign to our age.” With that, Trajan’s reply ends.

  It should be clear that there were simply no established procedures for dealing with Christians in the early second century. Pliny’s approach was clever and effective, but it was also ad hoc. He was not following precedent, because he did not know any precedents. Some scholars have argued, however, that his procedure itself became a kind of precedent. Later officials acted in similar ways. Christians were to be forced to recant their faith and worship the traditional gods. Anyone who refused was guilty of a crime—ironically, to our modern thinking, a crime without a law—and was to be punished accordingly, sometimes with torture and death. This did not happen frequently. But it did happen on occasion. It happened because people knew what being a Christian involved and, possibly even more, because they suspected what it involved.

  That Pliny was not alone in his understanding of what being a Christian entailed is shown in writings of second- and third-century Christian intellectuals, who occasionally discussed their treatment at the hands of Roman officials. Among other things, these discussions show that Christians were known to be atheists engaged in regular acts of grotesque immorality.

  THE CHRISTIAN ATHEISTS

  It may come as a shock to learn that Christians on trial in the Roman world were maligned and punished for being atheists. Christians? Atheists? Aren’t Christians precisely the opposite of atheists?

  They may be in modern times, when Christians believe in God and atheists believe there is no God. But the situation in antiquity was different. Virtually no one would ask a friend, “Do you believe in God?” In its barest form, the question presupposes a theology that almost no one held: namely, that there is, or may be, one divine being in the universe and that it is possible to accept his existence or not. In the ancient world, any such view would have been considered bizarre at best.

  Nonetheless, the term “atheist” was used. Only rarely did it refer to someone who denied the existence of any divine being at all. Rather, it was used either to refer to those who thought the gods were radically disinterested and uninvolved with human affairs—that was the view of the Epicurean philosophers—or to those who did not ascribe any true divinity to the traditional gods. No one who participated in the regular religious life of the empire fit that category. The Jews were a partial exception, but even most Jews were completely open to gentiles worshiping their pagan gods in any way they chose. The charge of atheism principally came to be applied, after the Epicureans, to Christians. They insisted not only that theirs was the only god but also that a person needed to worship this god alone. None of the other gods was really a god. Worse still, Christians did not engage in widely recognized and accepted cultic acts, especially sacrifice. Because of their idiosyncratic views and practices, Christians were considered to be without the gods. They were the atheists.

  That this was not just a slur but an actual judicial charge becomes clear from the writings of the “apologists,” the intellectual defenders of the faith, including the witty but relatively obscure Athenagoras of Athens, who lists “atheism” as the first accusation typically leveled against the Christians (Plea Concerning the Christians 3). So too the second-century Justin—who was himself eventually to be martyred for his faith—clearly states: “This is the sole charge you lodge against us, that we do not worship the same gods as you do” (1 Apology 24). We have seen the reasons this would be a charge warranting punishment, not simply a religious concern. Religion was not stored in a separate compartment, apart from social and political life in antiquity. Not revering the city or state gods meant not being faithful to the city or state. On one level it was the ancient equivalent of refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance. But it was far more dangerous. The gods could harm the communities that refused to give them their due. Recall the chilling words of Tertullian on why pagans feared and despised the Christians:

  They think the Christians the cause of every public disaster, of every affliction with which the people are visited. If the Tiber rises as high as the city walls, if the Nile does not send its waters up over the fields, if the heavens give no rain, if there is an earthquake, if there is a famine or pestilence, straightway the cry is “Away with the Christians to the lion!” (Apology 40)

  Writing some five decades later, in the middle of the third century, Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, indicates that Christians are widely blamed for wars, plagues, famines, and droughts: “You have said that all these things are caused by us, and that to us ought to be attributed the misfortunes wherewith the world is now shaken and distressed, because your gods are not worshiped by us” (Letter to Demetrius 3).2

  Cyprian too was eventually martyred for his faith. Remarkably, in his case, we have a transcript of his trial, which appears to be reasonably unadorned and accurate. From it we can see more fully the judicial charges brought against Christians.

  Cyprian had been a wealthy and highly educated aristocrat who made his living as a rhetorician. He converted to Christianity as an adult, around 245 CE; within two years he was consecrated bishop of the largest church of North Africa. As a high-profile figure he was under the eye of the local Roman authorities in the persecutions of the 250s (which we will examine later in this chapter). Finally he was arrested on September 1, 258, and put on trial two days later. The magistrate’s summary of Cyprian’s capital offense is worth citing in full:

  You have long persisted in your sacrilegious views, and you have joined to yourself many other vicious men in a conspiracy. You have set yourself up as an enemy of the gods of Rome and of our religious practices; and the pious and venerable emperors Valerian and Gallienus Augusti and Valerian the most noble of Caesars have not been able to bring you back to the observance of their sacred rites. Thus, since you have been caught as the instigator and leader of a most atrocious crime, you will be an example for all those whom in your wickedness you have gathered to yourself. Discipline shall have its sanction in your blood . . . . Thascius Cyprian is sentenced to die by the sword.3

  The sentence was carried out immediately. Cyprian was beheaded. His crime: refusing to worship the gods of Rome.

  CHRISTIAN FLAGRANT IMMORALITY

  We have seen that Pliny suspected the Christians of unethical and even criminal activities in their weekly meetings. Secret societies were always suspect, and the rumors about the Bacchanalia in an earlier age no doubt occasionally affected how people thought about Christians. Recall how Livy had reported that in those Bacchic feasts “all sorts of corruption began to be practiced, since each person had ready to hand the chance of gratifying the particular desire to which he was naturally inclined.” These nocturnal festivities involved not only licentious sexual activities but also the ritual murder of innocent and helpless victims: “No cries for help could be heard against the shriekings, the banging of drums, and the clashing of cymbals in the scene of debauchery and bloodshed” (Livy, History of Rome 39.10).

  We find Christians accused of similar outrageous behavior. Both Justin around 150 CE and Tertullian some fifty years later refer to the charges. In rather graphic terms, Tertullian indicates the allegations had even been ratcheted up a notch for the Christians to include not just murder but cannibalism: “Monsters of
wickedness, we are accused of observing a holy rite in which we kill a little child and then eat it; in which, after the feast, we practice incest, the dogs—our pimps, forsooth, overturning the lights and getting us the shamelessness of darkness for our impious lusts . . . . This is what is constantly laid to our charge” (Apology 7).

  An even more detailed and shocking exposition of the charges is set forth in the defense of the faith written by Tertullian’s younger contemporary Minucius Felix, who, according to tradition, had earlier been a lawyer in Rome. His only surviving work is called Octavius, named after its main character, who engages in a conversation with a pagan named Caecilian over the merits of the Christian faith, with Minucius Felix himself serving as the mediator between the two. The account is allegedly autobiographical, but if not made up wholesale, the back and forth has been heavily edited in Octavius’s favor. His speech promoting Christianity takes up twice the space as Caecilian’s attack on it, and at the end of the speech the pagan is utterly convinced. Without further ado, he converts on the spot.4

  Despite its fictitious features, there can be no doubt that the dialogue contains historically valid information, including the charges that Caecilian levels against the Christians. These reflect both the suspicions of Pliny from a century earlier and the statements of other writers, such as Tertullian later, even if they are unmatched in their gruesome vividness. Minucius Felix intimates that the charges derive from the writings of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the famous rhetorician and onetime tutor of the great emperor Marcus Aurelius.

  Caecilian’s emphatic castigation of the Christian religion comes in his description of their salacious nocturnal rituals:

  They recognize each other by secret marks and signs; hardly have they met when they love each other, throughout the world uniting in the practice of a veritable religion of lusts. Indiscriminately they call each other brother and sister, thus turning even ordinary fornication into incest. (Octavius 9)