The scare quotes around "evidence" suggests you don't believe that the Pliny passage is genuine. That's your opinion, and you are free to have one. But I am cautious about waving away evidence that is inconvenient.ficino wrote:... Pliny's "evidence" merely boils down, presumably, to what he learned from "Christians" at the time of Trajan, so it does not form a bridge to the man behind "Jesus Christ."
What that passage does tells us is that in Pliny's time, in Bithynia, a group that self identified as Christian was worshipping a christ figure "as if a god." "Quasi" means nothing more than that Pliny does not agree with their sentiment. Nothing about an origin in Judea or Galilee, or even a connection with Judaism, or about the atonement, etc.
What is described here is a meeting of a voluntary association that was not approved by the state. Hence the cessation of the meetings when Pliny had to make an order reminding the population that these were illegal.they [Christians] were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food--but ordinary and innocent food.
Even this, they affirmed, they had ceased to do after my edict by which, in accordance with your instructions, I had forbidden political associations.
Despite any suspicions Pliny may have had that this association had nefarious intent (i.e., was pushing a political agenda by promoting social disorder), at the end of his investigations ...
This is far from proof that "Christians" of NT caliber were active in Bithynia in the early first decade of the 2nd century. It does show that a voluntary association that could be described as a "Christian cult" existed. Perhaps we should not be capitalizing the "C" in Christian wrt this passage.I discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition.