Pliny writes Trajan, AD 112

**The most valuable single non-Christian document about early Christian practice**, and it survives because a governor was unsure of the law.

Pliny had executed people for being Christians and then began to doubt whether the name itself was the crime. His letter to Trajan asks for a ruling, and in setting out the problem he describes what he found — which is why the archive holds it.

## What he reports about the practice

He interrogated those who admitted it, and reports that they met **before dawn on a fixed day** and **“sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god”**, binding themselves by an oath not to commit theft, robbery or adultery, not to break their word, and not to refuse a deposit when called upon. Afterwards they separated and reassembled to take food, “ordinary and innocent”.

**Every element of that is evidence, and it is unimpeachable evidence** — written by a provincial governor to an emperor, in a document with no motive to flatter the sect. Within eighty years of the crucifixion, in a province far from Judaea, Christ was the object of weekly worship, and the ethical content of the oath is the content of the commandments.

**He also reports the scale.** The contagion had spread through **“not only the cities, but the villages and rural districts”**, to “persons of every rank and age and of both sexes”; the temples were almost deserted and the sacrificial victims had found no buyers.

## And Trajan’s reply is the policy

The rescript is short and it governed imperial practice for a century: **Christians are not to be sought out**; if accused and convicted they are to be punished; anyone who denies it and proves the denial by sacrifice is to be pardoned; **and anonymous accusations are not to be entertained**. The archive holds both letters, and the second is why the persecutions of the next hundred years were sporadic and local rather than systematic.

**One method noted without approval:** Pliny records torturing two slave women called deaconesses to obtain information. He states it as procedure.