What if Pliny compared Jesus cult to mystery of Dionysos?

[Giuseppe]

That would be the position assumed by dr. Bilby (Christian and historicist).

I should quote the precise words, but I can say from now that, if true, then Pliny would be de facto euhemerizing Jesus by merely comparing him to Dionysos.

Dyonisos would be conceived by Pliny as walking on the earth in a distant past.
So Pliny would have placed Jesus on the earth in a distant past.

The first gospel would have merely mentioned Pilate to make Jesus a new Joshua.

[Giuseppe]

Pliny's description of Christians was shaped by Livy's account of Bacchanalia.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvbcd1w ... b_contents

[Leucius Charinus]

An application of a profile-based method for authorship verification: Investigating the authenticity of Pliny the Younger's letter to Trajan concerning the Christians.
https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article-ab ... 35/2669642

Abstract

Pliny the Younger's letter to Trajan regarding the Christians is a crucial subject for the studies on early Christianity. A serious quarrel among scholars concerning its genuineness arose between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th; per contra, Plinian authorship has not been seriously questioned in the last few decades. After analysing various kinds of internal and external evidence in favour of and against the authenticity of the letter, a modern stylometric method is applied in order to examine whether internal linguistic evidence allows one to definitely settle the debate.The findings of this analysis tend to contradict received opinion among modern scholars, affirming the authenticity of Pliny’s letter, and suggest instead the presence of large amounts of interpolation inside the text of the letter, since its stylistic behaviour appears highly different from that of the rest of Book X.

[schillingklaus]

It is a late forgery by post-medieval scribe Giocondo of Verona, as already figured by Herman Detering.