100 Reasons to Believe New Testament History
63. Pliny the Younger (A.D. 112)
Pliny the Younger was the governor of Bythnia in Asia Minor in A.D. 112. Uncertain of how to deal with the growing number of Christians in his realm, Pliny wrote to the emperor Trajan for instructions. The result is a valuable written exchange between governor and emperor still extant today. These letters help give us a sense of what Christians believed in the early second century, and to what lengths they were willing to maintain these beliefs.
According to Pliny the Christians of his time,
“…affirmed, however, that the whole of their guilt, or their error, was, that they were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verse a hymn to Christ as to a god, and bound themselves to a solemn oath, not to do any wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft, adultery, never to falsify their word, not to deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up” Pliny the Younger, Epistles X, 96
This information, wrote Pliny, was confirmed when he captured and tortured two Christian women – presumably to death. The strong moral commitment to honesty by those who wrote and propagated the New Testament, even in the face of unspeakable tortures, can only serve to strengthen the case for the substantial reliability of the New Testament A.
63. Pliny the Younger (A.D. 112) - Notes and References
A. “It was therefore impossible that they could have persisted in affirming the truths they have narrated, had Jesus not actually risen from the dead, and had they not known this fact as certainly as they knew any other fact. If it were morally possible for them to have been deceived in this matter, every human motive operated to lead them to discover and avow their error. To have persisted in so gross a falsehood, after it was known to them, was not only to encounter, for life, all the evils which man could inflict, from without, but to endure the pangs of inward and conscious guilt; with no hope of future peace, no testimony of a good conscience, no expectation of honor or esteem among men, no hope of happiness in this life, or in the world to come…If then their testimony was not true, there was no possible motive for its fabrication.” Simon Greenleaf (1783-1853), Royal Professor of Law, Harvard University, “An Examination of the Four Evangelists by the Rules of Evidence Administered in the Courts of Justice”, pp. 28-30