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Persecutors seldom get good press. Whether the reporting is done by the journalist or the historian, it is always easier to side with the victims. The courage and fortitude of martyrs holds greater appeal than the haughty rationalizations of their judges and executors. Thus, the persecutors are seen as cruel and capricious tyrants, sybarites, inattentive to the needs of their subjects and indifferent to the ways of God.

In the writing of Christian history, the emperors most closely identified with the persecution of Christians—Domitian, Decius, and Diocletian—have long been the object of obloquy and abuse. One early Christian writer, Lactantius, even wrote a book entitled On the Death of the Persecutors. Its purpose was to describe in lurid detail the torturous end of the “enemies of God.”

Yet the writing of history is more than the celebration of the deeds of noble and virtuous men and women; it is also the challenge to understand what offends and disturbs our moral sensibilities.

The earliest document on Christianity written by a Roman official bears no marks of cruel indifference; its author, Pliny (governor of the province of Bithynia in Asia Minor), is humane, cautious, prudent, fair, and pious.

Pliny had been sent (c. 111) by the emperor Trajan to tour the cities of Bithynia and to oversee the social and economic affairs of the region. At one of these cities, located on the southern shore of the Black Sea, the local citizens lodged a complaint against Christians living in the region. What prompted the petition is not known, but it may have had to do with the refusal of Christians to participate in the public cult.

When Pliny looked into the matter, he discovered that the “sum total of their guilt or error amounted to no more than this: [the Christians] had met regularly before dawn on a fixed day to chant verses alternately among themselves in honor of Christ as if to a god, and also to bind themselves by oath.… After this ceremony it had been their custom to disperse and reassemble later to take food of an ordinary, harmless kind.”

In his investigation, Pliny is not being cruel; he is simply conscientiously fulfilling his duty to maintain public order.

To what, then, does Pliny object?

In his letter Pliny calls Christianity a “degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths.” The term he uses for a degenerate cult is superstitio. (This same word is used by two contemporaries, the historians Tacitus and Suetonius, to designate Christianity. Tacitus terms Christianity a “deadly superstition,” and Suetonius calls Christians a “class of persons given to a new and mischievous superstition.”)

The Latin word superstitio has somewhat different overtones than our English superstition; in its most common sense it designates practices and beliefs associated with foreign peoples—for example, the Germanic tribes in northern Europe or the Egyptians. Jews, too, were thought to be tainted with superstition: they worshiped a single supreme deity, refrained from work on the Sabbath, refused to eat pork (a meat Romans loved), and circumcised their male children.

To say that a group was “superstitious” meant that its rites and customs set the people apart from the rest of society. The superstitious did not conform their lives to the traditions of most citizens. They were “other,” just as the saffron-robed Hare Krishna monks are to most Americans. Their otherness was, however, not simply social; it was also religious. What set them apart were not only national customs and familial traditions but also religious rituals and beliefs. In saying that Christians were “superstitious,” the Romans were making a religious judgment about their way of life.

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