1 Earliest Rome

Trajan to Pliny
11.11 Responses to the Christians
You have followed, my dear Secundus , the proper procedures in
investigating the cases of those denounced to you as Christians. For no general rule can
be laid down to a fixed formula. They are not to be sought out; if they are denounced and
found guilty, they are to be punished; but those who deny that they are Christians and
make that absolutely clear in practice, that is by making a sitpplicdtio to our gods, even if
they had incurred suspicion in the past, they should obtain an acquittal as a result of their
repentance. Anonymous pamphlets laid before you should have no role in any
accusation. They are an extremely bad precedent and out of keeping with our age.
1. For the regulation of social clubs see 11.9.
11.11 c Christian 'corruption of the vulnerable
Origen, Against Celsus 1.9, in.55
The first known treatise against Christianity (by Celsus), dating perhaps to c.
A.D. 180, was written in Greek, either in Rome or in Alexandria. It is preserved
only through an attempted refutation of it some seventy vears later by Origen,
a Christian theologian. Celsus criticized (among other points) the irrationality
of Christianity and the appeal of Christianity to the intellectually vulnerable
(the ill-educated lower class; women and children); he aiso shows how
Christian missionary activity in the second century A.D. could be seen by a
non-Christian.
See further: Vol. 1, 277, 296; Walzer (1949) 48-56 (on faith and reason);
Chadwick (1966) 22-30 (on Celsus), 66-94 (on Origen); Wilken (1984)
94-125*.
(l.9) He next exhorts one to accept doctrines only in the light of reason and
with a rational guide; error Is Inevitable if one adheres to certain doctrines without this
precaution. And he compares them to people who have irrational belief in mendicant
priests and diviners, in Mithras and Sabazios, and in whatever else one might meet,
apparitions of Hecate or of some other spirit or spirits. 1
Just as in these cults scoundrels
often play on the ignorance of gullible people and lead them where they like; so also the
same things, he says, happen with the Christians too. He adds that some of them do not
even wish to give or receive a reason for what they believe, employing the expressions
'Enquire not, but believe", and 'Your faith will save you'. He claims that they say. 'The
wisdom in the world is an evil, and foolishness a good thing' . . .
(Ul.55) . . . Even in private houses one can see woolworkers, leatherworkers,
laundryworkers, the most ill-educated and backward of men, who would not dare to
utter a word in the presence of their elders and betters - that is of their masters - but
who, when they can get some children or dim-witted women on one side, come up with
the most bizarre advice: they should pay no attention to their fathers or teachers, but only
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