Pliny Asks Trajan How to Treat Christians

Pliny the Younger governed Bithynia and Pontus, on the south coast of the Black Sea, as the representative of the emperor Trajan (Pliny, Letters 10.17a–18). In his second year there he wrote to ask the emperor how to deal with people denounced to him as Christians. He had never been present at a trial of Christians, he says, and did not know what was usually punished or how far to inquire: whether age made a difference, whether those who gave up the faith should be pardoned, and whether “the name itself” was punishable or only crimes that went with it (Pliny, Letters 10.96).

He then describes what he had done. He asked the accused three times whether they were Christians, warning them of the penalty, and ordered those who persisted to be led away. The Latin says only that he ordered them to be led off (duci iussi); the words “to prison” in the translation linked here are not in it (Pliny, Letters 10.96 (Latin)). Tertullian, citing the letter about 197, took Pliny to have condemned Christians to death (Tertullian, Apology 2). Roman citizens he set aside to be sent to Rome (Pliny, Letters 10.96). When an unsigned list of names reached him, he released those who denied the charge once they had called on the gods, offered incense and wine before the emperor’s image and cursed Christ (Pliny, Letters 10.96).

Some said they had left the Christians years before, and from them Pliny learned what the group did. They met on a fixed day before dawn and sang a hymn “to Christ, as though he were a god”. They bound themselves by oath to commit no theft, robbery or adultery and to break no trust. Later they met again for an ordinary, harmless meal, which they had given up after his edict against associations (Pliny, Letters 10.96). He had two slave women who were called ministrae (“deaconesses” in the translation) questioned under torture, and found only “a debased superstition” (Pliny, Letters 10.96 (Latin)) (Pliny, Letters 10.96). The movement, he adds, had spread through towns, villages and countryside, and the temples had been almost deserted (Pliny, Letters 10.96).

Trajan approved. No fixed rule could be laid down. Christians were not to be hunted out. Those accused and convicted were to be punished, but anyone who denied being a Christian and proved it by praying to the gods was to be pardoned, whatever his past. Unsigned accusations were to be ignored (Pliny, Letters 10.97).

The two letters are official documents written by the governor and the emperor themselves, and Pliny’s is a description of Christian worship by an outsider who had questioned former members. They show that the name alone was treated as punishable while no search was ordered. Tertullian called the ruling a self-contradiction: it forbade a search as though Christians were innocent and ordered their punishment as though they were guilty (Tertullian, Apology 2). Eusebius, in the fourth century, says that he took his account of the exchange from Tertullian (Eusebius, Church History 3.33).