Trajan (27 gen 98 anni – 8 agos 117 anni)

Descrizione:

IN A letter to the Roman Emperor Trajan, Pliny the Younger, the governor of Bithynia, stated: “This is the course I have taken with those who were accused before me as Christians. I asked them whether they were Christians, and if they confessed, I asked them a second and third time with threats of punishment. If they kept to it, I ordered them for execution.” As for those who denied Christianity by cursing Christ and worshipping a statue of the emperor and the images of the gods that Pliny had brought into court, he wrote: “I thought it right to let them go.”

Trajan praised Pliny’s handling of the cases brought before him and directed that Christians who refused to worship Roman gods be executed. “However,” wrote Trajan, “where the party denies he is a Christian, and shall make it evident that he is not, by invoking our gods, let him (notwithstanding any former suspicion) be pardoned upon his repentance.”

Roman thinking could not conceive of a religion that demanded exclusive devotion from its adherents. Roman gods did not require it, so why should the God of the Christians? It was felt that worship of State deities simply indicated recognition of the political system. Therefore, refusal to worship them was considered treason. As Pliny found out, there was no way to force most Christians into compliance. For them, such an act would signify unfaithfulness to Jehovah, and numerous early Christians preferred to die rather than perform idolatrous emperor worship.

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