Washington – In the year 112, the Roman governor Pliny the Younger dispatched a letter to the Emperor Trajan, asking how to handle the emergence of a “mad sect” in the Middle East.
The Roman temples in Pliny’s jurisdiction were deserted. Tithing was down; no one was sacrificing to the pagan gods.
“This superstition is spread like a contagion,” Pliny complained. “There are many of every age, of every rank, and of both sexes.”
The good news, Pliny told the emperor, was that these “Christians” didn’t appear to be a threat to Roman national security. His legionnaires had tortured and interrogated several members of the sect before putting them to death.
“They were wont, on a stated day, to meet together before it was light, and to sing a hymn to Christ, as to a god … and to oblige themselves by a sacrament not to do anything that was ill … that they would commit no theft, or pilfering, or adultery; that they would not break their promises, or deny what was deposited with them, when it was required back again,” said Pliny.
Afterwards, the Christians would gather, Pliny noted, at “a common but innocent meal.”
Today, at many a common and innocent meal, Christians around the globe celebrate the birth of a Jewish preacher in whose name great good, and much evil, has been done for 2,000 years.
You can read Pliny’s letter, and other documents about the early Christians, at the PBS website http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion, which includes the “Frontline” segment on “From Jesus to Christ.” But history, as a whole, offers few records about Jesus; little proof, even, of his existence.
The epistles of Paul of Tarsus, the great evangelist, date to the year 50 or so. They speak, like Pliny, of a new religion based on love and goodness, celebrated at meals, honoring a crucified Christ. But Paul paints no portrait of Jesus, the man from Nazareth.
The works of the Roman historian Josephus, raised as a Jew in Palestine, date from around the year 100 and offer valuable detail about John the Baptist, King Herod and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. Almost in passing, Josephus mentions a “wise man” named Jesus who was crucified by Pontius Pilate, but experts clash about the passage, and whether some or all of it was added in later years by the church.
A few years after Pliny’s letter to Trajan, the Roman historian Tacitus, noting how the emperor Nero blamed Christians for the infamous fire that destroyed much of Rome, wrote that “Christus, the founder … had been executed in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of … Pontius Pilate.” Tacitus, unfortunately, does not list his sources.
The gospels of the New Testament, of course, offer the most detailed version of the life, teachings and death of Jesus. They were written in the decades after his execution, scholars say, by evangelists who appear to have mixed oral and written, Jewish, Christian and pagan traditions, and perhaps eyewitness accounts.
The New Testament offers varying biographical details for Jesus. Consider the events of Christmas. The three wise men, and the flight to Egypt, only appear in Matthew. Luke alone has shepherds hearing angels on high. John and Mark forgo Christmas completely, and start with Jesus and John the Baptist.
As any reader of “The Da Vinci Code” can tell you, the young church staged a Council of Nicea in 325 to sift among many competing gospels and doctrines and impose a Christian orthodoxy. From that point on, any glimpses of Jesus were filtered by a self-protective church bureaucracy.
Yet if Jesus remained elusive, his message did not. In a time of vengeful and capricious gods, widespread poverty and imperial Roman brutality, the new faith offered a revolutionary idea – the power of love and sacrifice – as its guiding principle.
“I show you a still more excellent way,” wrote Paul, just a few years after Jesus was crucified. “Love is patient. Love is kind … love never fails.”
Pliny, of course, was wrong in gauging Christianity’s subversive potential. Just 300 years after the Romans crucified the rabblerouser from Nazareth, the empire fell to the “mad sect” that gathered for those common, innocent meals.
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday in Perspective. Comment at the Washington and the West blog () or contact him at jfarrell@denverpost.com.
