Alf

Wow, ok, I stand corrected.

Ok, so there are true christians (TM) who are not bigots then.

Ok, I will take back what I said about all christians. It is still true that many of them are bigots though but as you have proven - not all of them.

Alf

Afghan

I'm not aware of any other case in his letters which he resolves in this way. But his letters were widely published before the church became powerful. If the letter about the Bithynian Christians was a forgery you would expect that we would have heard about it by now.

And his letters do demonstrate a general pragmatism which this one is in keeping with. And I don't think it's fair to Pliny to label this one "punishing honesty". He is punishing criminals who are openly stating that they will continue to offend. Even if Pliny himself felt that what they were doing didn't constitute a crime, he is hardly likely to criticise an imperial edict in a letter to the emperor.

post tenebras lux

So you agree that the passage could be out of character for Pliny, even if you won't gto so far as to say that it feels to you to be our of character?

Are you sure that people haven't tried to question it's authenticity? It would be interesting to discover the oldest record/reference to this letter, as I understand that it was by Tertullian, which would place a large enough gap (which included a period of rampant forgeries).

Does anyone have a record of this imperial edict? Wouldn't the emperor have been Trajan?

Were there any anti-freedom of religion laws prior to Constantine? (I note that Gibbon says: "The religious tenets of the Galileans, or Christians, were never made a subject of punishment, or even of inquiry" (Rome, Vol. II, p. 215). Was Gibbon wrong?)

Is Trajan considered an intollerant emperor? Would he really be so clueless as to christians that Pliny would have to explain in detail what they got up to?

Afghan

Well yes of course it could have been out of character. It could even be a forgery or a false attribution. But there doesn't seem to be any evidence that it is.

At the time yes. But there is no reason to suppose that (assuming there was such an edict) he issued it. It seems more likely that it was one of his predecessors - such as Nero.

post tenebras lux

Actually, I think that I have started presenting you with evidence, but you snipped it, so I'm not sure if I'll bother adding any more, but here's another quote from 'that letter': "I therefore deemed it more necessary to inquire of two servant maids, who were said to be attendants, what was the real truth, and to apply the torture."
Are you saying that Pliny was the sort of guy who would torture female servants to get them to blab on their masters? Is there any other recorded instance of him doing that? Was it the general rule in pre-christian Rome?

And a question: would you trust anything that had been 'found' by Tertullian?
So, you're claiming that Gibbon was wrong? Where is your evidence that such an edict ever existed?
That strikes me as total baloney, do you have any evidence to back it up?

Afghan

They were slaves and moreover slaves involved in an illegal cult. Pliny was suitably horrified when Macedo was murdered by his mistreated slaves and fully condoned their execution.

Not having the book in front of me I don't have the context but it doesn't seem to me that Gibbon is saying that Christian's weren't persecuted but that the pretext wasn't their religious tenets.

No. But we do know from Tacitus that Nero used the Christians in Rome as a convenient scapegoat. Which, by the way, is another source for Christian persecution.

The general tenor of the evidence is that Christians were persecuted at least as early as the reign of Nero. Of course, it could all be fabricated but that doesn't strike me as the simplest explanation. And you're not exactly presenting an alternative hypothesis. You're just asking "Do you really know Pliny wrote that letter?" Well not with a document nearly 2,000 years old? But if wasn't Pliny, who did?

There don't, for instance, seem to be any accounts of Christians in the first and early second centuries doing anything other than being persecuted.

post tenebras lux

Those were guilty slaves, these were innocent female SERVANTS (there is a difference). To me, it is not credible, but as neither of us are experts on the cusoms and mores of pre-christian Rome, I can leave it there for now.

This had better not degenerate into 'yeah, but if even one of the people executed just so fucking happened to be a christian (or was claimed to be a christian by later christians, more likely) then that means THE CHRISTIANS WERE PERSECUTED', OK?

OK, I'll stop there Afghan. You give credibility to that alleged Tacitus bit. Right. Shame that nothing backs it up (not even archeological digs in Rome to find said fire) and that the first mention of it comes in the 15th century (IIRC), that said first reference claims it got it from a copy of Tacitus from the 8th century (since vanished I understand), which is only a few hundred years later than a certain christian called Sulpicius Severus wrote an almost identical story.

Why would no christian quote Tacitus until the 15th century?

If you want to claim that Tacitus and the Pliny letter are credible to you, then all I can suggest is that you ask around in the BC&H forum. But to me, there is no credible evidence that the early christians ever were persecuted (except as I mentioned above, i.e. their religion was incidental to the crime they were being punished for).

JGL53

As has been debated on another recent thread it is an impossible task to identify the "true" christians. Anyone can call himself a christian, even a Hitler. E.g, was that horrible old bag M. Theresa a "true" christian? How about Jimmy "10 Dollar Whore" Swaggart?

The problem, Alf, is using the world "all" in describing the traits of a large group of people. Hardly all of any large group is any one thing.

In my 56 years I have encountered a number of very nice people who would readily identify themselves as "christian". During the same time, I have encountered a VERY large number of self-labeled christians who were jerks, assholes, or worse. Ditto both scenarios regarding the actions of "christians" I've seen reported in the media.

AS a general rule I just take a very cautious approach to anyone who wears his "christianity" on his sleeve. It seems to me these are the ones with the most "problems", if you know what I mean.

Afghan

Ancillae were slaves. And they were only innocent if you assume that Christianity wasn't a crime. And that is rather begging the question. That they were treated as guilty is hardly a reason to question the authenticity of the letter.

By the same token, that the persecution of Christians was not universal and constant up to the reign Constantine does not invalidate the hypothesis that persecution of Christians occurred. It may not have been as savage, as vigorous, as institutional as was claimed. I have no doubt that Christians exaggerated and mythologised the accounts and even provoked the acts, particularly as the cult of martyrdom developed. Indeed Rome would be rather unique even by today's standards if every religious minority was tolerated all of the time. And I find it quite hard to understand the development of second century Christian theology if no persecution occurred at all. It strikes me as rather difficult to develop a cult of martyrdom if you don't have any martyrs.

No. I don't think Tacitus is as credible as Pliny. But I don't think there is a scholarly consensus that the passage in the Annals is a later interpolation either. But if you want to argue that all of these documents are forgeries and the claims of Christian writers are false then you should be able to provide just one source that casts doubt on their persecution. Otherwise, it seems to me that the best explanation for the claims of persecution was that some persecution actually took place.

post tenebras lux

I don't know which other fora you frequent here, but I frequently see threads commenting upon how modern day christians in christian-majority North America claim that they are being persecuted and discriminated against. To the best of my knowledge, there is little or no reliable evidence towards the persecution of christians pre-Constantine, whereas there is ample evidence of christian presecution against others post-Constantine.

On a personal aside: I'm only here at IIDB because of a christian who felt that her religion gave her the right to humiliate and abuse my SO. From feedback through others, I know that she felt persecuted just by me defending my SO's right to say "no".
On a less personal aside: I know of many, many, people with persecution and/or martyr complexes, don't you?

Christ suffered for our sins: Christ was MARTYRED for our sins: and then along comes old "Odd 'three pennies short of a shilling' Bob", recently released from a mental asylum claiming that people are harrassing him and trying to kill him ...
I already did provide 'just one source': it was Gibbon.