When Rome Told the Truth About Jesus

When Rome Told the Truth About Jesus

Around 111 AD, Pliny the Younger, the Roman governor of Bithynia-Pontus on the Black Sea (modern-day Turkey), wrote to Emperor Trajan seeking advice on how to prosecute Christians in his province. After having interrogated and tortured two women whom he describes as ministrae (often understood as deaconesses), he writes to Trajan and says of these Christians:

"They had been accustomed to meet on a fixed day before it was light, and to sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by a solemn oath— not to the commission of any wicked deed, but never to commit any fraud, theft, or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up.”

Historical notes: 1. We know this Bithynia. The NT book of 1 Peter 1:1 (written 62-64 AD) addresses them: “To those who reside as exiles... scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.” 2. These Christians were singing hymns to Christ as to a god in 110 AD. This is in Turkey, and it seems that this practice was common enough in Bithynia that it became part of a Roman governor's official investigation. 3. For anyone not aware of the early creeds, they are embedded texts in the NT that are widely agreed to predate the NT corpus. These are the earliest Christian confessions of belief that we possess. Many scholars (including most skeptical scholars) consider several NT creeds and hymns to predate the books in which they appear, with some dating to within only a few years of Jesus' death.

Consider this: In roughly 50 AD, Paul tried to reach the region of Bithynia but the Spirit prevented him from going there to establish a church. After going elsewhere in the region, he eventually crossed into Macedonia and arrived at Philippi (arriving ~50-52 AD). One of our earliest creedal hymns is contained in a letter he wrote to these Philippians a decade later. We cannot know which hymn Pliny heard, but Philippians 2 preserves a remarkably similar example of the kind of Christ-centered hymn the earliest Christians were already singing decades before.

One of the earliest Christian hymns still preserved reads:

Philippians 2:5–11 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

This governor in 110 AD left behind one of history's earliest non-Christian testimonies to what they believed and sang. This was before ecumenical councils, before formal creeds were formally written, and long before Christianity became legal.

They gathered before dawn.

They sang to Christ "as to a god."

And one of the NT earliest hymns preserved for us still declares why:

Therefore also God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Every knee shall bow.

Every tongue shall confess.

Jesus Christ is Lord.

Amen.