PART II
I
THE FOUNDATION OF THE CHURCH IN ROME—“B”
The Roman Church in the year of grace 61 was evidently already a powerful and influential congregation: everything points to this conclusion: its traditions, we might even say its history, and, above all, the notices contained in S. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans written not later than A.D. 58.
Virtually alone among the Churches of the first thirty years of Christianity does S. Paul give to this congregation unstinting, unqualified praise—very different to his words addressed to the Church in Corinth in both of his Epistles to that notable Christian centre, or to the Galatian congregation in his letter to the Church of that province; or even to the Thessalonians, the Church which he loved well, where reproach and grave warnings are mingled with and colour his loving words.
But to the Church of Rome, in which in its many early years of struggle and combat he bore no part whatever, his praise is quite unmingled with rebuke or warning. As regards this congregation (Rom. i. 8), Paul thanks God for them all that their faith is spoken of throughout the whole world. In the concluding chapter of the Epistle, some twenty-five specially distinguished members of the Roman congregation are saluted by name, though it by no means follows that S. Paul was personally acquainted with all of those who were named by him.
About three years after writing his famous letter to the Romans,—just referred to,—Paul came as a prisoner to the capital city. But although a prisoner awaiting a public trial, the imperial government gave him free liberty to receive in his own hired house members of the Christian Church, and indeed any who chose to come and listen to his teaching; and this liberty of free access to him was continued all through the two years of his waiting for the public trial. The words of the “Acts of the Apostles,” a writing universally received as authentic, are singularly definite here: “And Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house (in Rome), and received all that came unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him” (Acts xxviii. 30–31).
It was during these two years of the imprisonment that the great teacher justified his subsequent title, accorded him by so many of the early Christian writers, of joint founder with S. Peter of the Roman Church. The foundations of the Church of the metropolis we believe certainly to have been laid by another leading member of the apostolic band, S. Peter.[8] But S. Paul’s share in strengthening and in building up this Church, the most important congregation in the first days of Christianity, was without doubt very great.
At a very early period, certainly after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, Rome became the acknowledged centre and the metropolis of Christendom. The great world-capital was the meeting-place of the followers of the Name from all lands. Thither, too, naturally flocked the teachers of the principal heresies in doctrinal truth which very soon sprang up among Christian converts. Under these conditions something more, in such a centre as Rome, was imperatively needed than the simple direct Gospel teaching, however fervid: something additional to the recital of the wondrous Gospel story as told by S. Peter and repeated possibly verbatim by his disciple S. Mark. A deeper and fuller instruction was surely required in such a centre as Rome quickly became. Men would ask, Who and what was the Divine Founder of the religion,—what was His relation to the Father, what to the angel-world? What was known of His preexistence? These and such-like questions would speedily press for a reply in such a cosmopolitan centre as imperial Rome. Inspired teaching bearing on such points as these required to be welded into the original foundation stories of the leading Church which Rome speedily became, and this was supplied by the great master S. Paul, to whom the Holy Ghost had vouchsafed what may be justly termed a double portion of the Spirit. The Christology of Paul, to use a later theological term, was, in view of all that was about to come to pass in the immediate future, a most necessary part of the equipment of the Church of God in Rome.
The keynote of the famous master’s teaching during those two years of his Roman imprisonment may be doubtless found in the letters written by him at that time. Three of these, the “Ephesian,” “Colossian,” and “Philippian” Epistles, were emphatically massive expositions of doctrine—especially that addressed to the Colossians. From these we can gather what was the principal subject-matter of the Pauline teaching at Rome. His thoughts were largely taken up with the great doctrinal questions bearing on the person of the Founder of Christianity.
We will quote one or two passages from the great doctrinal Epistle to the Colossians as examples of the Pauline teaching at this juncture of his life when he was engaged in building up the Roman Church, and furnishing it with an arsenal of weapons which would soon be needed in their life and death contest with the dangerous heresies[9] which so soon made their appearance in the city which was at once the metropolis of the Church and the Empire.
“The Father, ... who hath translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son, ... who is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature: for by Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by Him, and for Him: and He is before all things, and by Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the Church: who is the beginning, the first-born from the dead; that in all things he might have the pre-eminence. For it pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell; and, having made peace through the blood of His Cross, by Him to reconcile all things unto Himself; by Him (I say), whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven” (Col. i. 12–20).
And once more: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, ... and not after Christ. For in Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in Him, which is the head of all principality and power.”
Preaching on such texts, which contain those tremendous truths which just at this time he embodied in his Colossian letter, did S. Paul lay the foundation of the “Christology” of the Church of Rome. With justice, then, was he ranked by the early Christian writers as one of the founders of the Roman Church, for he was without doubt the principal teacher of the famous congregation in the all-important doctrinal truths bearing on the person and office of Jesus Christ.
S. Peter, whose yet earlier work at Rome, we believe, stretching over some eight or nine years, we have already dwelt on, was evidently absent from the capital when S. Paul in A.D. 58 wrote his famous Letter to the Romans; nor had he returned in A.D. 61, when Paul was brought to the metropolis as a prisoner; but that he returned to Rome somewhere about A.D. 63–4 is fairly certain.
II
THE FIRE OF ROME, AND ITS RESULTS AS REGARDS CHRISTIANS—A.D. 64. HENCEFORTH THEY WERE REGARDED AS ENEMIES OF THE STATE
For a little more than thirty years, dating back to the Resurrection morning, with the exception of the occasion of that temporary and partial banishment of the Jews and Christians from Rome in the days of the Emperor Claudius, had the Christian propaganda gone on apparently unnoticed, certainly unheeded by the imperial government.
The banishment decree of Claudius, the outcome of a local disturbance in the Jewish quarter of the capital, was after a brief interval apparently rescinded, or at least ignored by the ruling powers; but in the middle of the year 64, only a few months after S. Paul’s long-delayed trial and acquittal and subsequent departure from Rome, a startling event happened which brought the Christians into a sad notoriety, and put an end to the attitude of contemptuous indifference with which they had been generally regarded by the magistrates both in the provinces and in the capital.
A terrible and unlooked for calamity reduced Rome to a state of mourning and desolation. The 19th July, A.D. 64,—the date of the commencement of the desolating fire,—was long remembered. It broke out in the shops which clustered round the great Circus; a strong summer wind fanned the flames, which soon became uncontrollable. The narrow streets of the old quarter and the somewhat crumbling buildings fed the fire, which raged for some nine days, destroying many of the ancient historic buildings. Thousands of the poorer inhabitants were rendered homeless and penniless. At that period Rome was divided into fourteen regions or quarters; of these three were entirely consumed; seven more were rendered uninhabitable by the fierce fire; only four were left really unharmed by the desolating calamity.
The passions of the mob, ever quickly aroused, were directed in the first instance against the Emperor Nero, who was accused—probably quite wrongfully—of being the incendiary: there is indeed a long, a mournful chronicle of evil deeds registered against the memory of this evil Emperor; but that he was the guilty author of this special outrage is in the highest degree unlikely. His wild life, his cruelties, his ungovernable passions, his insanity,—for no reader of history can doubt that in his case the sickness which so often affects an uncontrolled despot had with Nero resulted in insanity,—indeed, all his works and days, gave colour to the monstrous and absurd charges which a fickle and angry mob brought against the once strangely popular tyrant.
All kinds of wild stories connected with the fire were circulated; he had no doubt many remorseless enemies. Men said, Nero sitting high on one of the towers of Rome, watched with fiendish joy and exultation the progress of the devouring flames, and as Rome burned before his eyes, played upon his lyre and sung a hymn of his own composition, for he imagined himself a poet, in which he compared the burning of his Rome with the ruin of Troy.
Another legend was current, averring that the slaves of the Emperor’s household had been seen fanning the flames in their desolating course; another rumour was spread abroad which whispered that the mad and wicked Emperor desired to see Old Rome, with its narrow and crowded streets, destroyed, that he might be able to rebuild it on a new and stately scale, and thus, regardless of the immemorial traditions of the ancient city, to render his name immortal through this notable and magnificent work.
At all events these improbable stories more or less gained credence in many quarters, and the Emperor found himself execrated by thousands of thoughtless men and women who had suffered the loss of their all in the fire, and who were glad to vent their fury on one whom they once admired and even loved, though their admiration and love had been often mingled with that fierce envy with which the people too frequently view the great and rich and powerful.
Prompted by his evil advisers, among whom the infamous Tigellinus was the most conspicuous, the Emperor in the first instance accused the Jews of being the incendiaries: curiously enough the quarter of the city where they mostly congregated had been spared in the late conflagration. It was no difficult task to persuade the fickle people that the strange race of foreigners, who hated Rome and Rome’s gods, had avenged themselves and the wrongs they had suffered at the hands of the Roman nation, by firing the capital city.
Up to this time—in the eyes of most of the Romans—the Jew and the Christian were one people; they considered that if any difference at all existed, it was simply that the Christian was a dissenting Jew. Now apparently, after the burning of Rome, for the first time was any distinction made. It happened on this wise: the Jews had powerful friends in the court of the despotic Emperor. Poppæa the Empress, if not a Jewess, was at least a devoted proselyte of the chosen race. There is no doubt but that her influence, backed up no doubt by others about her person at the court, diverted the suspicions which had been awakened, from the Jews to the Christians. These, it was pointed out, were no real Jews, but were their deadly enemies; they were a hateful and hated sect quite improperly confounded with the chosen people. The Christians were now formally accused of being the real authors of the late calamity, and the accusation seems to have been generally popular among the masses of the Roman population. Our authorities for this popular hatred—we may style them contemporary—are Tacitus and Suetonius and the Christian Clement of Rome. The testimony of Pliny the Younger, who governed Bithynia under the Emperor Trajan, will be discussed later.
Under the orders of Nero—who turned to his own purposes the popular dislike to the new sect of Jewish fanatics, as they generally were supposed to be—the Christians were sought for. It turned out that there was a vast multitude of them in the city, “ingens multitudo,” says Tacitus; and Clement of Rome, the Christian bishop and writer, circa A.D. 96, also speaks of their great numbers. Many of the accused were condemned on the false charge of incendiarism, to which was added an accusation far harder to disprove—general hostility to society, and hatred of the world (odio generis humani).
A crowd of Christians of both sexes was condemned to the wild beasts. It was arranged that they should provide a hideous amusement for the people who witnessed the games just then about to be celebrated in the imperial gardens on the Vatican Hill—on the very spot where the glorious basilica of S. Peter now stands.
Nero, anxious to restore his waning popularity with the crowd, and to divert the strange suspicion which had fixed upon him as the incendiary of the great fire, was determined that the games should surpass any former exhibition of the like kind in the number of victims provided, and in the refined cruelty of the awful punishment to which the sufferers were condemned. He had in good truth an array of victims for his ghastly exhibition such as had never been seen before. A like exhibition indeed was never repeated; the hideousness of it positively shocking the Roman populace, cruel though they were, and passionately devoted to scenic representations which included death and torture, crime and shame. Numbers of these first Christian martyrs were simply exposed to the beasts; others clothed in skins were hunted down by fierce wild dogs; others were forced to play a part in infamous dramas, which ever closed with the death of the victims in pain and agony.
But the closing scene was the most shocking. As the night fell on the great show, as a novel delight for the populace, the Roman people being especially charmed with brilliant and striking illuminations, the outer ring of the vast arena was encircled with crosses on which a certain number of Christians were bound, impaled, or nailed. The condemned were clothed in tunics steeped in pitch and in other inflammable matter, and then, horrible to relate, the crucified and impaled were set on fire, and in the lurid light of these ghastly living torches the famous chariot races, in which the wicked Emperor took a part, were run.
But this was never repeated; as we have just stated, the sight of the living flambeaux, the protracted agony of the victims, was too dreadful even for that debased and hardened Roman crowd of heedless cruel spectators; the illuminations of Nero’s show were never forgotten; they remained an awful memory, but only a memory, even in Rome!
There is good reason to suppose that one of the lookers on at the games of that long day and sombre evening in the gardens of the Vatican Hill was Seneca, the famous Stoic philosopher, once the tutor and afterwards for a time the minister of Nero. Seneca had retired from public life, and in two of his letters written during his retirement to his sick and suffering friend Lucilius, encouraging him to bear his distressing malady with brave patience, reminds him of the tortures which were now and again inflicted on the condemned; in vivid language picturing the fire, the chains, the worrying of wild beasts, the prison horrors, the cross, the tunic steeped in pitch, the rack, the red-hot irons placed on the quivering flesh. What, he asks his friend, are your sufferings compared with sufferings caused by these tortures? And yet, he adds, his eyes had seen these things endured; from the sufferer no groan was heard—no cry for mercy—nay, in the midst of all he had seen the bravely patient victims smile!
Surely here the great Stoic was referring to what he had witnessed in Nero’s dread games of the Vatican gardens; no other scene would furnish such a memory at once weird and pathetic. The strange ineffable smile of the Christian in pain and agony dying for his God, had gone home to the heart of the great scholar statesman. Like many another Roman citizen of his day and time, Seneca had often seen men die, but he had never before looked on any one dying after this fashion!
From the days of that ever memorable summer of the year 64 until Constantine and Licinius signed the edict which in the name of the Emperors gave peace and stillness to the harassed Church, A.D. 313, roughly speaking a long period of two centuries and a half, the sword of persecution was never sheathed. For practically from the year 64, the date of the famous games in the Vatican gardens, there was a continuous persecution of those that confessed the name of Christ. The ordinary number of the ten persecutions is after all an arbitrary computation. The whole principle and constitution of Christianity on examination were condemned by the Roman government as irreconcilably hostile to the established order; and mere membership of the sect, if persisted in, was regarded as treasonable, and the confessors of Christianity became liable to the punishment of death. And this remained the unvarying, the changeless policy of the Government of the State, though not always put in force, until the memorable edict of Constantine, A.D. 313.
After the terrible scenes in the games of the Vatican gardens, the persecution of the Christians still continued. The charges of incendiarism were dropped, no one believing that there was any truth in these allegations; but in Rome and in the provinces the Christian sect from this time forward was generally regarded as hostile to the Empire.
The accusation of being the authors of the great fire had revealed many things in connexion with the sect; the arrests, the judicial inquiries, had thrown a flood of new light upon the tenets of the new religion, had disclosed its large and evidently rapidly increasing numbers. Most probably for many years were they still confused with the Jews, but it was seen that the new sect was something more than a mere body of Jewish dissenters.
It was universally acknowledged that the Christians were innocent of any connexion with the great fire; but something else was discovered; they were a very numerous company (ingens multitudo) intensely in earnest, opposed to the State religion, preferring in numberless instances torture, confiscation, death, rather than submit to the State regulations in the matter of religion.
For some time before the fire they had been generally disliked, possibly hated by very many of the Roman citizens, by men of different ranks, for various reasons; by traders who lost much by their avoidance of all idolatrous feasts; by pagan families who resented the proselytism which was constantly taking place in their homes, thus causing a breach in the family circle; by priests and those specially connected with the network of rites and ceremonies, sacrifices and offerings belonging to the temples of the old gods. But, after all, this widespread popular dislike to the sect was not the chief cause of the steady persecution which set in after the wild and intemperate scenes which followed the great fire.
For the first time the imperial government saw with whom they had to do. It was the settled policy of Rome steadily to repress and to stamp out all organizations, all self-governing communities, or clubs, as highly dangerous to the spirit of imperial policy; and as the result of the trials and inquiries which followed the fire of Rome, it found in the Christian community a living embodiment of this tendency which hitherto Rome had succeeded in crushing—found that in their midst, in the capital and in the provinces, an extra-imperial unity was fast growing up—an Empire within the Empire.
In other words, the whole of the principles and the constitution of Christianity were considered as hostile to the established order, and if persisted in were to be deemed treasonable; thus after the discoveries made in the course of the judicial proceedings which were instituted after the great fire, the Christians, even after their innocence on the incendiary charge was generally acknowledged, were viewed by the imperial authorities as a politically dangerous society, being an organized and united body having its ramifications all over the Empire; but after the hideous and revolting cruelties to which so many of them had been subjected in the famous Vatican games, the original charge made against them came universally to be considered as an infamous device of the Emperor Nero to divert public attention from himself, to whom, although probably falsely, the guilt of causing the fire was popularly attributed.
Still there is no doubt that although the alleged connexion of the Christian sect with the crime of incendiarism seems to have been quickly forgotten, from the year 64 onward “the persecution was continued as a permanent police measure, under the form of a general prosecution of Christians as a sect dangerous to the public safety.”
This, after a lengthened discussion of the whole question, is Professor Ramsay’s conclusion,[10] who considers it doubtful if any “edict,” in the strict sense of the word, was promulgated by the Emperor Nero; and this he deduces from the famous correspondence which took place between Pliny, the governor of Bithynia, and the Emperor Trajan, some fifty years after the events just related in the days of Nero.
The words of Pliny when he asked for more definite directions from Trajan in the matter of Christian prosecutions, apparently indicate that he considered the Christian question not as one coming under some definite law, but as a matter of practical administration.
The more general opinion, however, held by modern Church historians is that an edict against the Christians was promulgated by Nero, and that Domitian specially acted upon the edict in the course of the severe measures taken against the sect in the later years of his reign; the words of Melito of Sardis (second century), of Tertullian (beginning of third century), of the Christian historians writing in the fourth century and early years of the fifth century Sulpitius Severus and Lactantius, being quoted in support of this view.
The expressions used by Sulpitius Severus here are certainly very definite in the matter of the imperial edict. This historian founds his account of the persecution under Nero on “Tacitus,” and then comments as follows: “This was the beginning of severe measures against the Christians. Afterwards the religion was forbidden by formal laws, and the profession of Christianity was made illegal by published edicts” (Chron. ii. 29).
It is not, however, of great importance if the profession of Christianity was formally interdicted, or if a persecution was a matter of practical administration, the profession of the faith being considered dangerous to law and order, and deserving of death—as Ramsay supposes. The other conclusion is of far greater moment. It is briefly this:
The first step taken by the imperial government in persecution dates certainly from the reign of Nero, immediately after the scenes in the Vatican games, when a Christian was condemned after evidence had been given that he or she had committed some act of hostility to society—no difficult task to prove. Subsequent to Nero’s reign, a further development in the persecutions had taken place (probably in the time of Vespasian), in which all Christians were assumed to have been guilty of such hostility to society, and might be condemned off-hand on confession of the Name. This was the state of things when Pliny wrote to Trajan for more detailed instructions. The great number of professing Christians alarming that upright and merciful official, he asked the Emperor was he to send them all to death?
The leading feature of the instruction of the Emperor Trajan in reply to Pliny’s question, as we shall presently see, was, although Christians were to be condemned if they confessed the Name, they were not to be sought out. This “instruction” held good until the closing years of the Empire, when a sterner policy was pursued; while it is indisputable that under Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, a yet more hostile practice was adopted towards the Christians.
One great point is clear—that from the days of Nero the Christians were never safe; they lived as their writings plainly show, even under the rule of those Emperors who were, comparatively speaking, well disposed to them, with the vision of martyrdom ever before their eyes; they lived, not a few of them, positively training themselves to endure the great trial as good soldiers of Jesus Christ. During the first and second centuries, comparatively speaking, only a few names of these martyrs and confessors have come down to us: we possess but a few really well-authenticated recitals (Acts and Passions), but these names and stories do not read like exceptional cases;[11] irresistibly the grave truth forces itself upon us, that there were many heroes and heroines whose names have not been preserved—whose stories have not been recorded.
The sword of persecution ever hung over the heads of the members of the Christian flocks—ready to fall at any moment. The stern instructions, modified though they were by the kindly policy of some of the rulers of the State, were never abrogated, never forgotten; they were susceptible, it is true, of a gentler interpretation than the harsh terms in which they were couched at first seemed to warrant, but these interpretations constantly varied according to the policy of the provincial magistrate and the tone for the moment of the reigning Emperor; but we must never think of the spirit of persecution really slumbering even for one short year.
III
SILENCE RESPECTING PERSECUTION
It has been asked, How comes it that for much of the first and second centuries there is a remarkable silence respecting these persecutions which we are persuaded harassed the Christian congregations in the provinces as in the great metropolis? The answer here is not difficult to find.
The pagan writers of these centuries held the Christian sect in deep contempt;[12] they would never think the punishments dealt out to a number of law-breakers and wild fanatics worthy of chronicling; the mere loss of life in that age, so accustomed to wholesale destruction of human beings, would not strike them as a notable incident in any year.
While as regards Christian records, the practice of celebrating the anniversary days of even famous martyrs and confessors only began in Rome far on in the third century.
But, as we shall see, although we possess no Christian records definitely telling us of any special persecution between the times of Nero and the later years of Domitian, the pages of the undoubtedly genuine Christian writings of very early date, from which we shall presently quote, were unmistakably all written under the shadow of a restless relentless hostility on the part of the Roman government towards the Christian sect. The followers of Jesus we see ever lived under the shadow of persecution.
Never safe for a single day was the life of one who believed in the Name; his life and the life of his dear ones were never for an instant secure: he and his family were at the mercy of every enemy, open and secret. Confiscation, degradation from rank and position, banishment, imprisonment, torture, death, were ever threatening him. A hard, stern combat, indeed, was the daily life of every Christian disciple. Many came out as victors from the terrible trial; this we learn from such writings as the Shepherd of Hermas, but some, alas! we learn from that same vivid and truthful picture of Hermas, flinched and played the traitor when the hour of decision between Christ and the pagan gods struck, as it often, very often, did in the so-called quiet days of the Flavian Emperors.
But it is only from the general character and spirit of the early Christian writers that we gather this; it is only from the allusions scattered up and down these striking and pathetic pages, which after all had other and nobler work before them than to record the many sufferings and martyrdoms of the brethren, that we learn what was the character of the hard life the followers of Jesus had to lead. So far from exaggerating, these writers give a very imperfect account of the sufferings of that period.
But in spite of this dark shadow of danger under which the Christian always lived, a cloud which for two hundred and fifty years never really lifted; in spite of popular dislike and of public condemnation,—the numbers of the persecuted sect multiplied with startling rapidity in all lands, among all the various peoples massed together under the rule of the Empire, and called by the name of Romans. Their great number attracted the attention of pagan writers such as Tacitus, writing of the martyrdoms of A.D. 64; of Pliny, speaking of what he witnessed in A.D. 112; of Christian writers like Tertullian, giving a picture of the sect at the end of the second century.
In the middle years of this second century, only a little more than a hundred years after the Resurrection morning, when the Antonines were reigning, we know that there were large congregations in Spain and Gaul, in Germany, in North Africa, in Egypt and in Syria, besides the great and powerful Church in Rome.
All that we learn of the busy, earnest, strenuous life of these early Christian communities, of their noble charities, of their active propaganda, of their grave and successful contentions with the heretical teachers who successively arose in their midst, makes it hard to believe that they were ever living, as it were, under the very shadow of persecution which might burst upon them at any moment; and yet well-nigh all the writings of these early days are coloured with these anticipations of torture, confiscation, imprisonment and death,—a death of pain and agony. The Apocalypse refers to these things again and again—Clement of Rome in his grave and measured Epistle—Hermas and Ignatius, Justin and Tertullian, and somewhat later Cyprian writing in the middle of the third century—allude to these things as part of the everyday Christian life. They give us, it is true, few details, little history of the events which were constantly happening; but as we read, we feel that the thought of martyrdom was constantly present with them.
Now what was the attraction to this Christianity, the profession of which was so fraught with danger—so surrounded with deadly peril?
“Le candidat au Christianisme, était, par le fait même, candidat au Martyre,” graphically writes the brilliant and careful French scholar Duchesne. The Christian verily exposed himself and his dear ones to measureless penalties. Now what had he to gain by such a dangerous adventure?
It is true that martyrdom itself possessed a special attraction for some. The famous chapters of Ignatius’ Letter to the Roman Church, written circa A.D. 109–10, very vividly picture this strange charm. The constancy of the confessor, the calm serenity with which he endured tortures, the smiling confidence with which he welcomed a death often of pain and suffering—his eyes fixed upon something invisible to mortal eyes which he saw immediately before him,—all this was new in the world of Rome; it was at once striking and admirable. Such a sight, and it was a frequent one, was indeed inspiring—“Why should not I,” thought many a believer in Jesus, “share in this glorious future? Why should not I form one of this noble band of elect and blessed souls?”
Then again another attraction to Christianity was ever present in the close union which existed among the members of the community.
In this great Brotherhood, without any attempt to level down the wealthier Christians, without any movement towards establishing a general community of goods, the warmest feelings of friendship and love were cultivated between all classes and degrees. The Christian teachers pointed out with great force that in the eyes of the divine Master no difference existed between the slave and the free-born, between the patrician and the little trader; with Him there was perfect equality. Sex and age, rank and fortune, poverty and riches, country and race, with Him were of no account. All men and women who struggled after the life He loved, were His dear servants. The result of all this was shown in the generous and self-denying love of the wealthier members of the flock towards their poor and needy brothers and sisters.
This is conspicuously shown in the wonderful story of the vast cemeteries of the suburbs of Rome, where at a very early date the rich afforded the hospitality of the tomb to their poor friends.
Most of the so-called “catacombs” began in the gardens of the rich and noble, where the little family God’s acre was speedily opened to the proletariat and the slave, who after death were tenderly and lovingly cared for, and laid to sleep with all reverence alongside the members of the patrician house to whom the cemetery belonged, and which in numberless instances was enlarged to receive these poor and humble guests.
But, after all, great and different though these various attractive influences were,—and which no doubt in countless cases brought unnumbered men and women of all ranks and orders into the ranks of Christianity,—there was something more which united all these various nationalities, these different grades, with an indissoluble bond of union; something more which enabled them to live on year after year in the shadow of persecution—in daily danger of losing all that men most prize and hold dear; something more which gave them that serene courage at the last, which inspired the great army of bravely patient martyrs to witness a good confession for the Name’s sake. It was that burning, that living faith in the great sacrifice of their loving Master—the faith which in the end vanquished even pagan Rome—the faith which comes from no books or arguments, no preaching and no persuasion—from no learning however profound and sacred—from no human arsenal, however furnished with truth and righteousness.
It was that strong and deathless faith which is the gift of God alone, and which in a double portion was the gift of the Holy Ghost to the sorely tried Church in the heroic age of Christianity.
After the death of Nero, during the very brief reigns of Galba Otho and Vitellius, probably the persecution of Christians, owing to the disturbed state of Rome and the Empire, languished. When, however, the Flavian House in the person of Vespasian was firmly placed in power, the policy of the government of Nero, which held that the Christians were a sect the tendency of whose beliefs and practice was hostile to the very foundations and established principles of the Roman government, was strictly adhered to, and possibly even developed.
The followers of the sect were deemed outlaws, and the name of a Christian was treated as a crime.
There is a famous passage in Sulpicius Severus (fourth century) which most modern scholars consider to have been an extract from a lost book of Tacitus. It is an account of a Council of War held after the storming of Jerusalem, A.D. 70. In this Council, Titus the son and heir of Vespasian—the hero of the great campaign which closed with the fall of Jerusalem—is reported to have expressed the opinion that the Temple ought to be destroyed in order that the religion of the Jews and of the Christians might be more completely rooted up; for these religions, though opposed to each other, had yet the same origin. The Christians had sprung from the Jews, and when the root was torn up the stem issuing from the root would easily be destroyed. There is no doubt but that this report of Titus’ speech at the Council of War is an historical document of the utmost importance. It tells us exactly what was the feeling of the imperial Flavian House towards the Christians—they represented an evil which it was well to extirpate.
It is possible that in a mutilated passage of Suetonius a reference occurs to Vespasian’s actions at this period (in the year following A.D. 70) in respect to the Christians. The passage runs as follows: “Never in the death of any one did Vespasian (take pleasure, and in the case of) merited punishments he even wept and groaned.” This is clearly a reference to some class of individuals whose punishment Vespasian felt bound to accept, while he regretted it. “It is inconceivable that Vespasian, a Roman soldier of long experience in the bloody wars of Britain and Judæa, wept and groaned at every merited execution.... We think of the punishments which by the principle of Nero attached to the Christians ... the principle in question continued permanently, and Suetonius alluded to it on account of the detail, interesting to a biographer, that Vespasian wept while he confirmed its operation.”[13]
But a yet more precise statement, that persecution was actively continued under Vespasian, is to be found in the Latin Father, Hilary of Poitiers, who ranks Vespasian between Nero and Decius as a persecutor of the Faith.[14] Some critics have supposed this notice an error. Lightfoot, however, thinks it more probable that it was based upon some facts of history known to Hilary, but since blotted out by time from the records of history.[15]
Towards the end of Domitian’s reign, circa A.D. 95, the persecution became more bitter. Indeed, so severely were the Christians hunted out and prosecuted that the period had become memorable in history. Domitian is constantly mentioned as the second great persecutor, Nero being the first. The reason doubtless for this general tradition is that in A.D. 95, persons of the highest rank, some even belonging to the imperial family, were among the condemned; notably Flavius Clemens the Consul, and the two princesses bearing the name of Domitilla—all these being very near relatives of the Emperor.
The violent outbreak of persecution, fierce and terrible as it seems to have been in the last year and a half of Domitian’s reign, does not appear to have been owing to any special movement among the Christian subjects of the Empire which aroused attention and suggested distrust, but was solely owing to the Emperor’s private policy and personal feelings. There is nothing to show that any edict against the sect was promulgated in this reign. Since the time of Nero the persecution of Christians was a standing matter, as was that of persons who were habitual law-breakers, robbers, and such-like. Probably under the princes of the Flavian dynasty, as we have said, this policy of the government was somewhat developed throughout the Empire, and now and again, owing to local circumstances and the disposition of the chief magistrate, was more or less severe. It is said that some governors boasted that they had brought back from their province their lictors’ axes unstained with blood; but others were actuated with very different feelings.
In the case of the so-called Domitian persecution, the ill-will of the autocratic Emperor naturally intensified it. Various motives seem to have influenced the sovereign Lord of the Empire here.
Domitian was a sombre and suspicious tyrant, and no doubt his cruel action in the case of his relatives, the consul Flavius and the princesses of his House, was prompted by jealousy of those who stood nearest his throne, and the fact that they were found to belong to the proscribed sect gave him a pretext of which he was glad to avail himself. But his bloody vengeance was by no means only wreaked upon his own relatives. We learn from the pagan writer Dion Cassius (in the epitome of his work by the monk Xiphilin) and also from Suetonius, that he put to death various persons of high position, notably Acilius Glabrio who had been consul in A.D. 91. This Acilius Glabrio was also a Christian. The researches and discoveries of De Rossi and Marruchi in the older portion of the vast Catacomb of S. Priscilla have conclusively proved this.
There was another reason, however, for Domitian’s special hatred of the Christian sect. The Emperor was a vigilant censor, and an austere guardian of the ancient Roman traditions. In this respect he has with some justice been cited as pursuing the same policy as did his great predecessor Augustus, and, like him, he looked on the imperial cultus[16] as part of the State religion. Domitian felt that these ancient traditions which formed a part of Roman life were compromised by the teaching and practices of the Christian sect. No doubt this was one of the principal reasons which influenced him in his active persecution of the followers of Jesus.
But although he struck at some of the noblest and most highly placed in the Empire, especially, as it seems, those suspected of being members of the hated sect, he appears to have vented his fury also upon many who belonged to the lower classes of the citizens. Juvenal in a striking passage evidently alludes to his pursuit of these comparatively unknown and obscure ones, and traces the unpopularity which eventually led to his assassination to this persecution of the poor nameless citizen.[17]
Domitian was assassinated A.D. 96, and was succeeded by the good and gentle Emperor Nerva. The active and bitter persecution which Domitian carried on in the latter years of his reign, as far as we know, ceased, and once more the Christian sect was left in comparative quiet, that is to say, they were still in the position of outlaws, the sword of persecution ever hanging over their heads. The law which forbade their very existence was there, if any one was disposed to call it into action. The passion of the populace, the bigotry of a magistrate, or the malice of some responsible personage, might at any moment awake the slumbering law into activity. These various malicious influences, ever ready, were constantly setting the law in motion. This we certainly gather from Pliny’s reference to the “Cognitiones” or inquiries into accusations set on foot against Christians in his famous letter to the Emperor Trajan.
PART III
CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN PLINY AND TRAJAN
PLINY’S LETTER TO TRAJAN AND THE EMPEROR’S “RESCRIPT”—GENUINENESS OF CORRESPONDENCE
Introductory
A flood of light is poured upon the early history of Christianity in the correspondence which passed between the Emperor Trajan and his friend and minister Pliny the Younger, who had been appointed to the governorship[18] of Bithynia and Pontus, the district lying in the north of Asia Minor.
The letter of Pliny, containing his report of the trial and inquiry into the matter of the accused Christians of his province, and asking for direction, was written to the Emperor Trajan in the autumn of A.D. 111; and the reply of Trajan, which contained the famous rescript concerning the Christian sect—an ordinance which regulated the action of the government of Rome towards the disciples of Jesus for many long years—was dispatched a few months later.
The correspondence was quoted and commented upon at some length by the Latin Father Tertullian before the close of the second century. Eusebius again refers to it, translating the quotations of Tertullian from a Greek version of the celebrated Christian Father.[19]
For various reasons, some critics have thrown doubt upon the genuineness of these two famous letters. The main cause of the hesitation in receiving them is the strong evidence contained in the correspondence bearing upon the existence and influence and great numbers of the Christian sect at the beginning of the second century. That a pagan author should supply us with the information—and especially a pagan author of the rank and position which the younger Pliny held—the adversaries of the Faith misliked.
These very doubts, however, as in other cases of doubt respecting the authenticity of some of our Christian and pagan writings bearing on the facts of very early Christianity, have established the genuineness of the pieces in question, the doubts requiring an answer, and the answer involving a careful and thoughtful investigation. It is singular, in their scarcely veiled hostility to the religion of Jesus, how some scholars attempt to discredit all the references to the Christians in early heathen writers.
In this case the investigation has completely proved the genuineness of the correspondence in question. Bishop Lightfoot, in the course of his thorough and scholarly examination, does not hesitate to write that the genuineness of the important Letters “can now only be questioned by a scepticism bordering on insanity.”
Amongst other critics who completely brush away all doubts here, he quotes Aldus Manutius, Mommsen, and the French writer (no friend to Christianity) Renan. The same view is also unhesitatingly taken by Allard and Boissier in France, and Ramsay in England. In any controversy which may arise here obviously the attestation of Tertullian in the last years of the century in which the Letters were written is of the highest value.[20]
I
THE CHARACTER OF TRAJAN
When Domitian was assassinated, and Nerva was proclaimed Emperor, a new spirit was introduced into the occupants of the imperial dignity. Nerva represented the old conservative and aristocratic spirit of the Roman Senate. He only reigned a short two years, but his great act was the association in the supreme power of one who in all respects would and could carry out the ancient traditions of Roman government, of which Nerva was a true representative.
Nerva died early in 98, and his associate Trajan at once became sole Emperor. In many respects this Trajan was the greatest of the despotic masters who in succession ruled the Roman world. At once a renowned soldier and a far-seeing statesman, his complex personality is admirably and tersely summed up by Allard (Histoire des Persécutions, i. 145), who writes of him: “On eût cru voir le sénat romain lui-même prenant une âme guerrière et montant sur le trône.”
As a rule, writers of sacred history treat the memory of Trajan with great gentleness. The Christian writers in the second half of the second century shrink from seeing in him a persecutor of the Church. They were, of course, biassed in their judgment, being loth to think of a great Emperor like Trajan as a persecutor of their religion. As we have already remarked, the written Acts of Martyrs were very few during the first and second centuries; and the name and memory of the earliest brave confessors of the Name, save in a few very notable instances, quietly and quickly faded away; so the recollections of the second-century Fathers in the matter of the State policy in the past, with regard to Christianity, were somewhat vague and uncertain. Later, in the early and middle years of the fourth century, Eusebius, though in his time the fact of continuous persecution in the past had become generally known, tries to exculpate the memory of Trajan as a persecutor, but with very doubtful success.
This favourable and somewhat generous view of Trajan held its own through the early Middle Ages. A striking and beautiful story illustrative of these estimates is told of Pope Gregory the Great (A.D. 590–604) by both his biographers, Paul the Deacon (close of eighth century) and John the Deacon (close of ninth century). The Bishop of Rome once, walking through the Forum of Trajan, was attracted by a sculptured bas-relief representing the great Emperor showing pity to a poor aged widow whose only son had perished through the violence of the Emperor’s soldiers.
Struck by this proof of the just and loving nature of Trajan, the Pope, kneeling at the tomb of S. Peter, prayed earnestly that mercy might be showed to the great pagan emperor. The prayer, so runs the story, was granted; and it was revealed to Gregory that the soul of Trajan was released from torment in answer to his intercession. The beauty and noble charity which colour the legend are, however, spoiled and marred by the words of the traditional revelation which follow. The generous Pope, while hearing that his prayers were granted, was warned never again to presume to pray for those who had died without holy baptism.
Not a few modern scholars, however, read the famous interposition of Trajan at the time of Pliny’s request for guidance as manifesting a hostile spirit towards Christianity; so, to quote a few of the better-known writers, interpret Gieseler, Overbach, Aubé, Friedlander, Uhlhorn, etc., while Renan (Les Évangiles) perhaps more accurately writes: “Trajan fut le premier persécuteur systématique de Christianisme”; and again, “à partir de Trajan le Christianisme est un crime.”
The truth, however, really lies between these two divergent opinions. The “rescript” of Trajan promulgated no new law on the subject of the treatment of the Christian believers. It evidently presupposed the existence of a law, and that a very stern and very harsh mode of procedure. From it Trajan neither subtracted anything nor added anything; still, as has been very justly said, the humane and upright character of the Emperor and his minister Pliny—Pliny, by his evident, though carefully veiled, advice and suggestions based upon his protracted inquiries into the tenets and customs of the sect; Trajan, by his formal imperial “rescript”—secured some considerable mitigation in its enforcement.
The story of the correspondence between Pliny the Younger and the Emperor Trajan, which was fraught with such momentous consequences to the Christians of Rome and the Empire generally, is as follows:
When Pliny, about the middle of the year 111, came to the scene of his government,—the provinces of Bithynia and Pontus,—apparently somewhat to his surprise he found a very considerable portion of the population members of the Christian community. The religion professed by these people, Pliny was well aware, was unlawful in the eyes of the State, and the sect generally was unpopular; and evil rumours were current respecting its traditional practices.
The new governor knew of the existence of the sect in Rome, but little more. He was clearly aware that these Christians had been the object of many State persecutions and judicial inquiries, “cognitiones” he terms them, and no doubt knew something, too, of the public severity with which these adherents of an unlawful religion had been treated by the State when convicted of the crime of Christianity.
The horrors of the amphitheatre in the case of these condemned ones could not have been unknown to one like Pliny. But the great world in which Pliny lived and moved and worked, cared little for human life or human suffering in the case of a despised and outlawed community.
The Roman teacher and patrician of the days of Trajan held human life very cheaply. The amphitheatre games, to take one phase only of Roman life in the days of the Empire, were an evil education for Rome. The execution, the sufferings of a few score Christian outlaws, however frequently repeated, would attract very little attention in Pliny’s world.
But now in his new government he was brought face to face with grave difficulties occasioned by the practices and teaching of this Christianity. And when he discovered in addition how numerous a body these followers of the forbidden religion were, Pliny set himself in good earnest to investigate the Christian question.
More than fifty years had passed since S. Peter first preached the gospel and laid the foundation stories of the Christian Church in these northern provinces of Asia Minor. The religion of Jesus had rapidly taken root in these districts. This we gather from the First Epistle of Peter, which he wrote to the followers of Jesus in the north of Asia Minor from Rome in the closing years of his ministry; and now Pliny found in his province no novel faith growing up, but a faith which had taken deep root in the hearts of the population, not only in the towns, but also in the more remote villages (neque enim civitates tantum sed vicos etiam atque agros superstitionis istius contagio pervagata est), with the result that the old pagan cult was being gradually abandoned. The temples were being fast deserted (prope jam desolata templa), the sacred rites were being given up, and what evidently excited bitter complaints on the part of the traders who suffered, there was no longer any market for the fodder of the beasts sacrificed (pastum ... victimarum quarum adhuc rarissimus emptor inveniebatur).
From the report of Pliny to the Emperor, it is evident that there had been several judicial inquiries (cognitiones), conducted by him as the responsible governor of Bithynia and Pontus, into the charges brought against the adherents of the unlawful faith.
In the first “cognitio” the more prominent Christians were brought before him. These all at once avowed their religion. Three times they were interrogated by Pliny. As they persisted in the avowal that they were Christians, the provincials were at once condemned to death. Those who claimed Roman citizenship were sent to Rome for their sentences to be confirmed.
The publicity of these first inquiries stimulated further accusations; various degrees of guilt were alleged, and subsequently an anonymous paper was put before the governor implicating a whole crowd of persons.
Of these, some denied that they were, or ever had been, Christians. These, on offering incense before the image of the Emperor and cursing Christ, were at once liberated.
Others confessed, but professed repentance. These he reserved for the decision of the Emperor. It is not explicitly said that of this second and larger group of “accused,” some persisted in their adherence to the “Name.” There is no doubt that such were treated as in the first group, some being put to death; others, as Roman citizens, reserved for the imperial decision.
It was then that Pliny, especially disturbed at the numbers of accused Christians, determined upon a more searching investigation into the manners and customs of these numerous adherents of the unlawful religion. He would learn for himself more of the “detestable” rites and other crimes with which these persons were charged.
Two Christian deaconesses are mentioned as being examined under torture; others were closely questioned, and the result of the inquiries to Pliny was startling.
He satisfied himself that the monstrous charges were absolutely unproven. All their rites were simple, perfectly harmless, and unostentatious. Pliny in the course of his inquiry found that they were in the habit of meeting together, on a day appointed, before sunrise; that they would then sing together a hymn to Christ as God; that they would bind themselves by a solemn vow—sacramentum (Pliny was evidently not aware that the sacramentum in question was the Holy Eucharist; indeed the whole narrative is evidently told by one who very imperfectly grasped the Christian idea, although it is strangely accurate in many of the details). The purport of the vow was that they would commit neither theft nor adultery; that they would never break their word; never betray a trust committed to them.
The just magistrate was evidently deeply impressed with the result of his careful and searching examinations. This strange sect, he was convinced, was absolutely innocent of all those dark offences with which they were commonly charged—like another and more sadly notorious Roman judge sitting in another and more awful judgment-scene, who after hearing the case, from that time sought to release the pale prisoner before him. So at once after hearing the Christian story, Pliny too, convinced of the perfect innocence of the accused, altered his opinion concerning Christians; but for State reasons would not release them, and while acquitting them of all wrong-doing, in the ordinary sense of the word, chose to see an evil and exaggerated superstition colouring all their works and days.[21] Innocent though they were of anything approaching crime in the ordinary sense of the term, the Roman magistrate deemed the inflexible obstinacy of the Christian deserved the severest punishment that could be inflicted, even death; for when the individual Christian in question was examined, he proved to be immovable on questions of vital importance. He refused to swear by the genius of the Emperor. He would not scatter the customary grains of incense on the altar of Rome and Augustus, or of any of the pagan gods. His religious offence was inextricably bound up with the political offence. He stood, as it had been well expressed, self-convicted of “impiety,” of “atheism,” of “high treason.”
Still, after all these points had been taken into consideration, there is no doubt that Pliny was deeply moved by what he learned from his close examination of the Christian cause; and this new, this gentle, this more favourable estimate of his concerning the “outlawed” sect of Christians, was scarcely veiled in his official report of the case when he asked for the Emperor Trajan’s advice and direction.
He was, we learn, especially induced to write to the Emperor when he became aware of the vast numbers of Christians who had been, or were about to be, brought before his tribunal. The numbers of the accused evidently appalled him. How would the Emperor wish him to deal with such a multitude?
Very brief but very clear was the answer of Trajan to his friend and confidant the governor of Bithynia and Pontus. This answer contained the famous imperial “rescript”—which in the matter of the Christians was “to run” not only in Rome itself, but in all the provinces of the wide Empire, and which, as is well known, guided the State persecution of Christians for many a long year.
The “rescript” bore unmistakably the impress of Pliny’s mind on the subject; and severe though it was, it inaugurated a gentler and more favourable interpretation of the stern law in the case of convicted Christians than had prevailed from the days of Nero onward.
The following are the principal points of the “rescript.” In the first place—and this point must be pressed—no fresh law authorizing any special persecution of the Christians was needed or even suggested by Pliny. They had evidently for a long period, apparently from the days of Nero, been classed as outlaws (hostes publici) and enemies to the fundamental principles of law and order, and the mere acknowledgment on the part of the accused of the name Christian was sufficient in itself to warrant an immediate condemnation to death.
Trajan’s reply, which constituted the famous rescript, was studiedly brief, eminently courteous, but imperious and decisive. The friendly bias of Pliny’s report and unmistakably favourable opinion of the Christian sect, lives along every line.
He begins with a few graceful words approving Pliny’s action in the matter. (“Actum quem debuisti mi Secunde ... secutus es.”)
Then follow the stern, unalterable words which attach the penalty of death to any person who persisted in claiming the name of Christian.
But extenuating circumstances, such as youth, may be taken into account, if the magistrate please to do so.
Any approach to repentance, accompanied with compliance with the law of the Empire, in the matter of offering incense on the pagan altars, is to be accepted, and the offender at once is to be pardoned.
The magistrate is by no means to search for Christians; but if a formal accusation be made by an open accuser, then inquiry must follow; and if the accused recognizes the justice of the charge, and declines to recant, then death must follow.
The accusation of an anonymous person, however, must never be received; the Emperor adding his strongest condemnation of all anonymous denunciations. “This kind of thing does not,” writes Trajan, “belong to our age and time.”
Tertullian (closing years of second century) quotes and sharply criticizes Trajan’s “rescript.” He writes somewhat as follows: “What a contradictory pronouncement it is. The Emperor forbids the Christians should be searched for—he therefore looks on them surely as innocent persons; and then he directs that if any are brought before the tribunal, they must be punished with death as though they were guilty ones! In the same breath he spares them and rages against them. He stultifies himself; for if Christians are to be condemned as Christians, why are they not to be searched for? If, on the other hand, they are to be considered as innocent persons and in consequence not to be searched for, why not acquit them at once when they appear before the tribunal?... You condemn an accused Christian, yet you forbid him to be inquired after. So punishment is inflicted, not because he is guilty, but because he has been discovered,—though anything which might bring him to light is forbidden.” (Apology 2.)
The brilliant and eloquent Latin Father, with the acuteness of a trained and skilful lawyer, lays bare the illogical character of the imperial rescript. The truth was that after carefully weighing the facts laid before him by Pliny, the Emperor clearly recognized that such an organization—so far-reaching, so numerous and powerful, was contrary to the established principles of Roman government. The Christian sect must be discouraged, and if possible suppressed; but Trajan saw at the same time that the spirit of the Christians, their teaching and practice, were absolutely innocent, even morally excellent; so he shrank from logically carrying out the severe measures devised by the Roman government in such cases. In other words, his really noble and generous nature prevented him sanctioning the wholesale destruction which a strictly logical interpretation of the Roman law would have brought upon a very numerous body of his subjects.
But in spite of the evident goodwill of the great Emperor and his eminent lieutenant, the sword of persecution was left hanging over the heads of the Christian sect suspended by a very slender cord. How often the slender cord snapped is told in the tragic story of the Christians in the pagan empire during the two hundred years which followed the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan.
The information supplied by these Letters respecting Christianity at the beginning of the second century, emanating as they do from so trusted a statesman, so distinguished a writer, as the younger Pliny, supplemented by a State communication containing an imperial rescript of far-reaching importance from the hands of one of the greatest of the Roman Emperors, is so weighty that it seems to call for a slightly more detailed notice than the particulars which appear in the foregoing pages of this work.
There is no doubt but that “Letters” such as those written by Pliny during the eventful period extending from the days of the Dictatorship of Julius Cæsar to the reign of Honorius—a period roughly of some four hundred and fifty years—occupied in the literature of Rome a singular and important position.
They were in many cases most carefully prepared and designed for a far larger “public” than is commonly supposed. Long after the death of the writer these Letters, gathered together and “published” as far as literary works could be published in those ages when no printing-press existed—were read and re-read, admired and criticized, by very many in the capital and in the provinces.
The first great Letter-writer undoubtedly was Cicero, who flourished as a statesman, an orator, and a most distinguished writer from the days of the first consulship of Pompey and Crassus, in 70 B.C., down to the December of 43 B.C., when he was murdered during the proscription of the Triumvirate.
Of the multifarious works of the great orator, possibly the most generally interesting is the collection of his Letters, a large portion of which have come down to us.
The art of “Letter-writing” suddenly arose in Cicero’s hands in Rome to its full perfection. It has been well and truly said that all the great letter-writers of subsequent ages have more or less consciously or unconsciously followed the model of Cicero.
But it was in the Roman Empire that the fashion was most generally adopted; of course, in common with so much of classical literature, the majority of this interesting and suggestive literature has perished, but some of it—perhaps the best portion of it—has survived. The great name of Seneca is specially connected with this form of literature. L. Annæus Seneca wrote the Epistolæ Morales, probably “publishing” the first three books himself circa A.D. 57. Among these precious reliquiæ the “Letters of Pliny,” including his famous Letter to Trajan and the response, are very highly prized by the historian and annalist.
The younger Pliny was the nephew and adopted son of the elder Pliny. He was a successful lawyer, and was highly trained in all branches of literature. During his brilliant career he filled most of the public offices of State in turn, and in the end became consul. Of the Emperor Trajan he was the trusted and intimate friend. Trajan appointed him, as we have seen, imperial legate of Bithynia and Pontus, and when holding this important post the famous correspondence between the Emperor and his friend took place. Pliny died some time before his imperial master, not many years after the famous letter respecting the Christians in his province was written.
His was a charming character,—kindly, beneficent, charitable,—deeply impressed with the grave responsibilities of his position and fortune. Carefully educated and trained under the auspices of the elder Pliny,—a profound scholar and one of the most weighty writers of the early Empire,—the younger Pliny, as he is generally called, won distinction at a comparatively early age as a forensic orator. He became Prætor at the age of thirty-one. During the reign of Domitian, however, he took no share in public life. Under Nerva he again was employed in the State service. Trajan loved and trusted him, and we read of Pliny being consul in A.D. 100. He subsequently obtained the government of the great provinces of Bithynia and Pontus, and during his tenure of office there must be dated the correspondence between Trajan and Pliny which has come down to us as the tenth Book of the “Letters of Pliny.”
This Pliny has been described as the kindliest of Roman gentlemen, but he was far more than that. He was a noble example of the trained and cultured patrician, an ardent and industrious worker, an honest and honourable statesman of no mean ability,—very learned, ambitious only of political distinction when he felt that high rank and authority gave him ampler scope to serve his country and his fellows. He was, we learn from his own writings, by no means a solitary specimen of the chivalrous and noble men who did so much to build up the great Empire, and to render possible that far-reaching “Pax Romana” which for so many years gave prosperity and a fair amount of happiness to the world known under the immemorial name of Rome.
What we know of Pliny and his friends goes far to modify the painful impressions of Roman society of the first two centuries which we gather from the pages of Juvenal and other writers, who have painted their pictures of Roman life in the first and second centuries of the Christian era in such lurid and gloomy colours.
It is in the “Letters of Pliny” that the real story of his life and work has come down to us. These letters are no ordinary or chance collection. They are a finished work of great deliberation and thought.
About a century and a half earlier, the large collection of Cicero’s correspondence was given to an admiring and regretful world. A renowned statesman, a matchless orator, and even greater, the creator of the Latin language, which became a universal language—the Letters of Cicero set, as it were, a new fashion in literature. They were really the first in this special form of writing which at once became popular.
The younger Pliny was a pupil of Quintilian, who was for a long period—certainly for twenty years—the most celebrated teacher in the capital. Quintilian is known as the earliest of the Ciceronians. The cult of Ciceronianism established by Quintilian, Pliny’s tutor, was the real origin of the wonderful Pliny Letters.
Pliny was one of the ablest scholars of his age. He, like many of his countrymen, was ambitious of posthumous fame—he would not be forgotten. He was proud of his position—of his forensic oratory—of his statesmanship—of his various literary efforts; but he was too far-seeing to dream of any of his efforts in forensic oratory, or in the service of the State, or even in his various literary adventures which amused his leisure hours, winning him that posthumous fame which in common with so many other earnest pagan Romans he longed for.[22]
Pliny was an ardent admirer of Cicero; but Cicero the statesman and the orator, he felt, moved on too high a plane for him to aim at emulating; but as a writer of Latin, as a chronicler of his own day and time, as a word-painter of the society in which he moved, he might possibly reach as high a pitch of excellence as Cicero had reached in his day.
To accomplish this end became the great object of Pliny’s life. To this we owe the inimitable series of Letters by which the friend and minister of Trajan has lived, and will live on.
In some respects the Letters of Pliny are even more valuable than the voluminous and many-coloured correspondence of Cicero. Cicero lived in a momentous age. He was one of the chief actors in a great revolution which materially altered the course of the world’s history. Pliny lived in a comparatively “still” period, when one of the greatest of the Roman sovereigns was at the helm of public affairs; so in his picture we find none of the stress and storm which live along the pages of Cicero’s correspondence.
It is an everyday life which Pliny depicts with such skill and vivid imagery, the life, after all, which “finds” the majority of men and women.
But it was the bright side of ancient society which Pliny loved to describe. Without his Letters we should have had no notion of the warm and tender friendships—of the simple pleasures—of the loving charities—of the lofty ideals of so many of the élite of Roman society in the second century.
It has been well said that Pliny felt that he lacked the power to write a great history, such as that which Tacitus, with whom he was closely associated, or even his younger friend Suetonius in an inferior degree, have given us. So he chose, fortunately for us, to strike out another line altogether, a perfectly new line, and in his ten Books[23] of Letters he gives us simply a domestic picture of everyday life in his time.
They were no ordinary Letters; we can without any great effort of imagination picture to ourselves the famous Letter-writer touching and retouching his correspondence. Some modern critics in judging his style do not hesitate to place his Latinity on a level with that of Cicero. Renan, no mean judge of style, in words we have already quoted, speaks of “la langue précieuse et raffinée de Pline.”
The subjects he loved to dwell on were sometimes literature, at others, the beauties of nature, the quiet charms of country life—“me nihil æque ac naturæ opera delectant,” he wrote once. He eloquently describes the Clitumnus fountain, and the villa overlooking the Tiber valley; very elaborate and graceful are his descriptions of scenery; yet more attractive to us are his pictures of the “busy idleness” of the rich and noble of his day.
Curious and interesting are the allusions to and descriptions of the reading of new works, poems, histories, correspondence, etc., before large gatherings of friends. Some of these “readings,” which evidently formed an important feature in the society of the Empire, must often have been sadly wearisome. Our writer, for instance, describes Sentius Augurinus reciting his own poems during three whole days. Pliny expresses his delight at this lengthy recitation, but he confesses that these constant and lengthy recitations were deemed by some tiresome. His own Letters were read aloud to an appreciative audience, who would suggest corrections and changes.
Pliny was quite conscious when he wrote these famous Letters, that he was writing for no mere friend or relative, but for a wide public. He evidently hoped that they would live long after he had passed away; it is doubtful, though, if he had ever dreamed that they would be read with interest and delight for uncounted centuries. For instance, he naively expresses his delight that his writings were sold and read in Lyons, on the banks of the distant Rhone.
He has been accused by some, not otherwise unkindly critics, of writing for effect—of putting upon paper finer feeling than was absolutely natural to him; some of his descriptions of nature, for instance, savoured of affectation. There may be some truth in this criticism. But it only proves, what we have taken some pains to assert, that this intensely interesting correspondence was most carefully prepared—revised and redacted possibly several times—that he wrote to impress the public. Indeed, throughout the whole collection there are numerous marks of the most careful arrangement.
At the same time there are many natural touches in which his very faults are curiously manifest; so in reading these letters, in spite of occasional bursts of a possible artificial enthusiasm, we are sensible that his inner life, his real self, live along his charming pages; for instance, his curious conceit in his own literary power comes out in such passages as that in which he compares himself not unfavourably with his dear friend, that greatest master of history, Tacitus. There were other writers of great power and of brilliant genius, but “You,” so he writes to Tacitus, “so strong was the affinity of our natures, seemed to me at once the easiest to imitate, and the most worthy of imitation. Now we are named together; both of us have, I may say, some name in literature; for as I include myself, I must be moderate in my praise of you.”
In the midst of these striking pictures of the day and of the society of the quiet and comparatively happy times of the Emperor Trajan—in the last and perhaps the least interesting Book of his correspondence—the one generally known as the tenth Book, which contains his semi-official Letters to the Emperor, and some of Trajan’s replies,—stands out the great Christian episode in his government of Bithynia and Pontus, by far the most valuable notice that we possess of the numbers and of the influence of the Christian sect in the first years of the second century, only a few years after the death of S. John.
The reference in Tacitus to the cruel persecution of Nero, and the yet briefer notices in Suetonius, are, of course, of the highest value; but the detailed story of Pliny, where he tells the Emperor actually what was taking place in the province of which he was governor, and gives us his own impressions of the works and days of the Christians, is and ever will be to the ecclesiastical historian the most precious testimony of a great pagan to the position which the Christians held in the Roman Empire some eighty years after the Resurrection morning.
We have already, it will be remembered, dwelt at some length on what was evidently in Pliny’s mind on the subject—on the impressions, after a careful and lengthy investigation, which this unpopular sect made upon him. He tells his imperial friend and master exactly what he thought; and it is clear that the great Emperor was strangely moved by Pliny’s words, and framed his famous rescript upon the report in question on the gentler lines we have dwelt upon above.
The value of such a picture of very early Christian life, painted by an eminent pagan statesman and scholar in the midst of such a work, so carefully arranged, so thought out, prepared, as we have seen, for posterity, as the Letters of Pliny were, can never be too highly valued.
II
VOGUE OF EPISTOLARY FORM OF LITERATURE
How Pliny was admired and copied in the Roman world of literature we learn from the subsequent story of Roman literature preserved to us.
With the exception of the writings of Suetonius, Pliny’s friend, for a lengthened period after the reign of Trajan, an age splendidly illustrated by the writings of Tacitus and Pliny, little literature has come down to us; very silent, indeed, after Trajan’s age seems to have been the highly cultured and literary society of Rome of which Pliny writes in such vivid and appreciative terms.
Thoughtful men seem to consider that in the Roman Empire, under Hadrian, under the noble Antonine princes and their successors, “the soil, the race, the language were alike exhausted.” Be that as it may, there is no doubt that from the time of Trajan until the latter days of the wondrous story of Rome, late in the fourth century, apart from a group of purely Christian writers, Latin literature was practically extinct; certainly it produced nothing worthy to be transmitted to later ages.
Perhaps a solitary but not a very notable exception might be made in the few fragments that have come down to us of Fronto, the tutor and dear friend of Marcus Aurelius. These fragments are chiefly pieces of his correspondence with his pupils Marcus and his shortlived colleague in the Empire, Lucius Verus. It is not, however, probable that these letters were ever intended for publication or for general reading. It has been said with some truth that the Emperor Marcus and his scholar friend and tutor wrote to each other with the effusiveness of two schoolgirls.[24] In one particular these correspondents evidently agreed—they both disliked, and tried to despise, the fast growing Christian community.
Towards the close of the fourth century, however, when the great Emperor Theodosius was fast fading away, worn out with cares and anxieties for the future of an empire which even his splendid abilities were powerless to preserve even for a little season, in a period which has been graphically compared to the “wan lingering light of a late autumnal sunset,” arose a few, a very few distinguished writers, whose works posterity has judged worthy of preservation.[25]
With two of the best known of these, the pagan poet Claudian, whose splendid claims for posthumous fame are undoubted, and somewhat later the half-pagan, half-Christian poet Ausonius, we are not concerned in this study; they were purely poets. Two other authors, however, in this late evening of Roman story especially interest us, as they carry on the tradition on which we have been dwelling,—the love for and interest in “letters,” in carefully studied “correspondence,” which the Letters of Cicero and Pliny made the fashion in the literary society of imperial Rome.
Symmachus, in the last years of the fourth century, and Sidonius Apollinaris, some half-century later in the fifth century, were close imitators of Pliny. Their Letters have come down to us; and the popularity which they enjoyed in their own time, a popularity which has endured more or less in all succeeding ages, tells us what a powerful and enduring influence the correspondence of Pliny must have exercised over the old world of Rome.
Both these writers belonged to the highest class in the society of the dying Empire. Q. Aurelius Symmachus had held some of the highest offices open to the patrician order, he had been governor of several important provinces, prefect of the city, and consul; in his later years he was regarded and generally treated as the chief of the Senate, for whose privileges he was intensely jealous at a time when the despotic rule of the Emperor had reduced the once proud assembly to a group of shadowy names whose principal title to honour and respect was the splendid tradition of a great past.
This Symmachus, statesman and ardent politician, was a writer of no mean power. Like Pliny, whom in common with all the literary society of Rome he admired and longed to imitate, he determined to go down to posterity as a writer of Letters.
These Letters of his were read and re-read in his day and time; his contemporaries classed him as on a level with Cicero, and loved to compare him with the younger Pliny, whom Symmachus adopted as his model. Many copies were made of his correspondence; his letters were treasured up in precious caskets, and after he had passed away, his son, Memmius Symmachus, collected them all together, dividing them, as Pliny’s had been divided, into ten Books. Nine of them, like the compositions of the great writer whom he strove to imitate, are mainly concerned with private and domestic matters; the tenth, as in the case of Pliny, being made up of official communications which had passed between his father and the reigning Emperor.
It is somewhat dull reading this “Symmachus” correspondence, but it gives us a picture of the nobler and purer portion of Roman society in the closing years of the fourth century. He was too good a scholar, too able a man, not to see his inferiority to Pliny; and evidently he had his doubts respecting the claim of his correspondence to immortality, and he apologizes for their barrenness of interesting incident; but his contemporaries and his devoted son thought otherwise, and to their loyal admiration we owe the preservation of his carefully prepared and corrected, though somewhat tedious, imitation of the charming Letters of Pliny.
Sidonius Apollinaris, who flourished a little more than half a century later, belonged also to the great Roman world; he was born at Lyons about A.D. 430, and partly owing to the elevation of his father-in-law Avitus to the imperial throne, was rapidly preferred to several of the great offices of the Empire—amongst these to the prefecture of Rome. His undoubted ability, his high character, and great position and fortune led to his election by popular voice to the bishopric of Clermont (though not in Holy orders), the episcopal city of his native Auvergne in Gaul. In his new and to him strange position there is no doubt that he fulfilled the expectation of the people who chose him as bishop; and when, some fifteen or twenty years after his election, in the great Auvergne diocese, he passed away, he was deeply, even passionately, mourned by his flock. He had been their devoted pastor, their helper and defender in the troublous and anxious period of the Visigothic occupation of Southern Gaul.
Sidonius Apollinaris was a poet of some power, and a graceful and fluent writer of panegyrics of great personages which in that age were much in vogue. He was also deeply read in the literature to which so many of the leaders of Roman society in the late evening of the Empire were ardently devoted.
But it is from his “Correspondence” that this eminent representative of the patrician order in the last days of the Empire will ever be remembered. We possess some hundred and forty-seven of his letters. They were collected and revised by him after he became Bishop of Clermont. Their publication is usually dated between the years 477 and 488. The letters were divided according to ancient models, Pliny being the principal model, into nine Books. (There was no tenth Book of official correspondence in his case.)
In their present form, revised and redacted by the writer himself, very many of the letters read as though intended for a public far wider than the individuals to whom the communications were originally addressed; and it is more than probable that from a comparatively early period, Sidonius intended to follow a well-known practice, and wrote many of his letters with a view to their being preserved as pieces of literature. He even tells us he proposed to be an imitator of Symmachus, his predecessor in this special form of writing by some fifty or sixty years; and Symmachus, we know, was an ardent admirer and imitator of Pliny.
The Letters, however, of Sidonius possess a far wider interest for us than the correspondence of Symmachus. Symmachus is dull and even prosy, partly from his exaggerated attention to Pliny’s rule which he suggested to one of his correspondents on the subject of letter-writing. The letter-writer, said Pliny, must aim at a style at once compressed and accurate in its form of expression (pressus sermo purusque ex Epistolis petitur). Sidonius, on the other hand, is diffuse and often picturesque, and his language is enriched or disfigured by an ample and often a barbarous vocabulary, drawn from the popular dialect into which the Latin of Cicero and Pliny was fast declining when the Bishop of Clermont wrote. His correspondents were many and various, including, it appears, some seventeen contemporary bishops.
On the whole, the Letters of Sidonius give a vivid and even a brilliant picture of the highly cultivated life of the noble and upper classes of the fast fading Empire of the fifth century.
Briefly to sum up what we have said in this second study of Pliny’s Letters. We have dwelt on the great importance of Pliny’s picture of Christianity in the first years of the second century; for it was
1st. A picture painted by a great Roman (pagan) statesman; and
2nd. Though it appears in a letter, the letter was one of a collection of Letters intended for future generations. Pliny here copied Cicero, who really may be said to have “invented” this novel and peculiar form of literature, i.e. letters written not merely for private friends and officials, but for the public, and intended to be handed down, if they were found worthy, to after ages.
The “silence” of all Latin literature after the age of Pliny for some two hundred and seventy years, of course prevents citing any examples of such letters, written for public use and for posterity, during this “silent” period.
But after this “silence,” a brief renaissance of Latin literature took place.
In this renaissance the works of only two prose writers of great reputation have been preserved for us. Both these were most distinguished men in the political world and in the world of literature.
And these two chose to copy Pliny’s plan of letter-writing, i.e., letters composed for public use and intended for posterity.
The two were Symmachus and Sidonius Apollinaris.
After this brief renaissance of Letters a veil of darkness fell over the Roman world.
III
VOGUE OF EPISTOLARY FORM IN LITERATURE—THE NEW TESTAMENT EPISTLES
When we consider how in the first century of the Christian era it was a frequent custom to clothe literature of all kinds in the letter form, and how popular amongst all classes and orders was this method—so to speak—of literary expression, when associated with it were, among a crowd of comparatively undistinguished authors, such personalities as Cicero, Seneca, and Pliny, whose letters as pieces of literature obtained at once an enormous popularity which has never really waned,[26] it becomes a grave and interesting question: Did this fashion, this method, this singularly popular form of writing, affect the great New Testament writers, and induce them to cast their sublime inspired thoughts in this special form, which certainly, when the apostles put out their writings, was a loved and admired literary method?
The fact of so large a portion of the New Testament writings being cast in “letter form” is striking; it is quite different from anything that we find in the Old Testament Scriptures, where, save in one solitary instance (Jer. xxix.), nothing in the letter form appears in that wonderful compilation which embraces so many subjects, and which in the composition spread over many centuries; but we are so accustomed to the New Testament writings, that the fact of a very large portion of the collection of its inspired writings being in “letter” form does not at first appear strange or unusual.
We may preface the few suggestions which follow with the remark, that whether or no the suggestion be entertained as a possible, even as a probable thought, the fact of “inspiration”—the fact of the New Testament writings referred to being “the word of God”—is not in the slightest degree affected. For it is the substance of the divine message, not the “colour” or “material” of the clothing of the message, which is of such paramount importance.
The question of the “colour” and “material” of the message’s clothing, the consideration in what it is clothed, is deeply interesting; but, after all, is nothing more.
The “message” which we believe to be from God remains the same—be it enclosed in a “pamphlet,” in a “treatise,” in a “study” (étude), or in a “letter” form.
Nothing like an analysis of the New Testament Epistles, some of which will be briefly referred to in the course of this study, will be attempted. Such an analysis would not, of course, enter into the scheme of the present work.
We would first indicate some at least of the New Testament Letters which certainly seem to be more than letters in the ordinary sense of the word—which, indeed, are “settings” to short theological treatises containing statements of the highest doctrinal import.
These “Letters” were evidently intended for a far more extended circle of readers than the congregations immediately addressed.
We have already in a previous section quoted the three Epistles of S. Paul written during his first imprisonment,[27] A.D. 61–3 (viz. the Epistles to the Colossians, Philippians, and Ephesians), as embodying some of the more weighty and important doctrinal teachings of the great apostle put out during the period in which S. Paul preached to the Christians of the capital, and thus and then earned his well-known and acknowledged claim to be one of the two “founders” of the Church of Rome—S. Peter being the other.
One of the reasons, no doubt, of the vast and long-enduring popularity of the “letter” form of literature was the introduction of quasi-confidential remarks, which gave a freshness, a breath of everyday life to the composition; or, to use another image, the “Letter” might even be termed a picturesque and attractive “setting” to the graver, the more serious thoughts contained in the writing.
This is well exemplified in the famous collection of the correspondence of Cicero, of whose Letters it has been happily written that the majority are “brief confidential outpourings of the moment.” The same purely human colouring is manifest in the Letters of Seneca, written from the year 57 and onwards; this is even more especially noticeable in the Letters of the younger Pliny.
There are, however, certain of the Pauline Epistles which partake more closely of the nature of private letters, and which scarcely seem intended for public circulation—notably the Second Epistle to the Corinthians and the little letter to Philemon.
Professor Deissmann, of Heidelberg, who has written at some length on the subject, differs somewhat from the general view taken here of S. Paul’s writings; but while expressing his doubts as to whether any of the Pauline Epistles were really written by the apostle with a view to publication, he unhesitatingly decides that amongst the New Testament writings the Epistle to the Hebrews, the First Epistle of John, the First Epistle of Peter, the Epistles of James and Jude, were most certainly written in “letter” form for general circulation.
As early certainly as the third century, the Christian Church placed the so-called Catholic Epistles as a group apart among the canonical writings and termed them “Catholic” or universal, as addressed to no one special congregation. This is absolutely true in the cases of the Epistles of 1 Peter, James, Jude, and 1 John, above referred to.
The First Epistle of Peter is addressed to a vast number of the “Dispersion,” who, the apostle says, were sojourning in the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, and Bithynia,—these provinces almost covering the region now popularly known as Asia Minor.
James wrote to the twelve tribes scattered abroad.
John in his First Epistle gives no address at all, leaving his Letter perfectly general—or universal.
Jude, too, names no particular congregation, but simply writes to those that are “sanctified by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ and called.”
In the Epistle “to the Hebrews” the writer is unnamed, and there is no mention of those to whom the anonymous “Letter” is addressed. It is, however, clear from the tenor of the “Letter” that it was addressed to Jewish Christians, and probably to Jewish Christians settled in Rome.
The “Pastoral” Epistles, so called (including 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus), were evidently intended for general circulation.
We may therefore conclude that the greater number of the New Testament Letters—certainly the four principal “Catholic” Epistles and the great Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Epistles of S. Paul with the exceptions above noted, influenced by the analogy of other collections of Letters made in the same age, were written in “letter” form, but were intended for a large group of readers. This particular “letter” form being adopted owing to the great popularity, throughout the Roman Empire, of this special description of literature.
Thus it is evident that the great Christian teachers to a certain extent adopted the most loved popular literary forms of the age in which they lived, especially choosing the letter form which such distinguished writers as Cicero, Seneca, and a little later the younger Pliny adopted.
While the “Acts of the Apostles” more or less followed the literary method of profane historical literature, with its picturesque insertion of “speeches,” “letters,” and “official papers”; while the “Revelation of S. John” more or less followed the method adopted in Jewish apocalyptic literature of the famous Alexandrian school: alone the Gospels are absolutely an original form—a literary form which originated within Christianity itself—a literary form which stands out alone. It imitated nothing, it followed no classical or Jewish examples—no models, however beautiful, attractive, or popular; nor has it ever been imitated in all the Christian ages, stretching over more than eighteen centuries, simply because it is inimitable.
The Apostolic Fathers
And when the Catholic Church judged, and as we see now wisely judged, that the Voice of Inspiration was hushed, we find that the literary remains of the primitive age of Christianity which have been preserved to us are cast in the same “letter” form, those few literary remains which have received the lofty title of “Apostolic.” The word comes to us from Ignatius, and seems to bear the meaning that the writers of these “remains” were historically connected with the apostles.
These writings properly so styled come from four persons—from (1) Clement (of Rome), of whom the tradition, constant and definite, tells us he was the disciple of Peter and also of Paul.
(2) From Ignatius, whose early date and connexion with Antioch, a chief centre of apostolic work, render, as Lightfoot well urges, his personal intercourse with apostles at least probable. The earliest tradition represents Ignatius as the second of the Antiochene bishops. His martyrdom must be dated circa A.D. 110. He was evidently then an old man. He was certainly a younger contemporary of some of the apostles.
(3) From Polycarp, whose close connexion in youth with S. John is indisputable, since his own disciple, the well-known Irenæus, tells us that Polycarp was a scholar of the beloved disciple; and that he (Irenæus) had heard from his master, Polycarp, many anecdotes of the apostles, which he had treasured up in his memory.
(4) From Barnabas, whose immediate connexion with the apostle is less certain; but the early date of his Epistle, written apparently during the days of the Flavian dynasty, would render the ancient traditions of this connexion at least highly probable.
These writings, few and humble, which have come down to us, are all we can with any certainty ascribe to “Apostolic” men; and they are all cast in “letter form,” viz., the one somewhat lengthy Epistle of Clement, the seven authentic Epistles of Ignatius, the one brief Epistle of Polycarp, the one (of considerable length) Epistle of Barnabas. These Epistles are genuine “Letters,” and “represent the natural outpouring of personal feeling arising out of personal relations”; but they contain doctrinal statements of the deepest importance, notably emphatic or positive statements bearing on the Godhead of Jesus Christ.[28]
These Epistles[29] were obviously meant by the writers for a far more extended circle of readers than the congregations of Corinth, Philippi, Rome, etc., to whom the Letters were formally addressed.