Pliny the Younger, Letter 10.96

Sources

• Pliny the Younger, “Letters,” book 10, letter 96 (to Trajan), c. AD 112. Text (opens in a new tab)

  Pliny the Younger, “Letters,” book 10, letter 96 (to Trajan), c. AD 112. Text:

Objections & responses

Pliny says they sang to Christ “as to a god.” Romans sang hymns to emperors and heroes too. Isn’t this just honoring a founder?

The Latin (quasi deo) is genuinely open, and it should not be overstated. The context helps. Pliny was investigating whether Christians were guilty of a crime, and the test he applied was whether they would curse Christ and offer worship to the emperor’s image. Real Christians refused, which shows that Christ held the place in their devotion that the gods held for everyone else. Whatever the exact force of the phrase, Pliny understood Christian devotion to Christ as religious worship of the kind Romans gave to deities, not admiration of a teacher.

Pliny wrote in AD 112, two generations after Jesus, about one province. Doesn’t that show the worship existed early, not that it goes back to the apostles?

Correct, and Pliny should be read as a late data point rather than an early one. His job in this argument is to be an outside witness that worship of Christ was established and normal by the early second century, which already puts it two hundred years before the Council of Nicaea. The earlier evidence is internal: Paul’s letters from the 50s, the hymn he quotes in Philippians 2, and the Aramaic prayer Maranatha, all of which predate Pliny by half a century or more.

Appears under 1 claim in this case

• The divinity of Jesus was not invented at the Council of Nicaea; Christians worshiped Jesus as divine long before any council met.