If the proofs of Jesus Christ’s existence in the first #5 through #10 didn’t make a huge impression on you, then buckle up because the next four proofs in our series take our quest for the historical evidence of Jesus to the next level.

First, in case you were wondering, yes, there was a Pliny the Elder, and both he and his son hobnobbed with Roman emperors. Pliny the Younger, the focus of this post, served under Emperor Trajan and corresponded with him regularly. Eleven of his letters to the emperor have survived, and here’s an excerpt from one of them that describes the early practice of Christians as well as the tension between Christianity and emperor worship that resulted in the persecution of so many Christians during the first and second centuries. The letter is dated to 112 A.D.

“Others, whose names were given me by an informer, first said that they were Christians and afterwards denied it, declaring that they had been, but were so no longer, some of them having recanted many years before, and more than one so long as twenty years back. They all worshiped your image and the statues of the deities and cursed the name of Christ. But they declared that the sum of their guilt or their error only amounted to this, that on a stated day they had been accustomed to meet before daybreak and to recite a hymn among themselves to Christ as though he were a god and that so far from binding themselves by oath to commit any crime, their oath was to abstain from theft, robbery, adultery, and from breach of faith, and not to deny trust money placed in their keeping when called upon to deliver it.”

Trajan’s extant reply to Pliny explained that Christians were “not to be hunted out,” but even so those who refused to deny their faith in Jesus should be punished. On the flip side, however, any who recanted of their faith in Jesus and who were willing to participate in emperor worship should be readily pardoned. From Pliny’s letter, quoted above, it’s quite clear that many did recant in order to receive a pardon.

What would have been your response to Trajan and Pliny’s goons if they asked you whether you’d be willing to curse the name of Jesus in exchange for your life? Think that couldn’t happen to you? Where once our founders humbly sought God’s blessing and guidance, today our leaders seem bent on the marginalization of Christians. Tomorrow they may even criminalize the public display of Christian symbols and speech in their efforts to combat what they’ve assessed to be a threat to democracy. Or are we already there?

Daniel McCabe