Servile Functionaries or Priestly Leaders?

Abstract

Attention to literary artifice marks an important advance in research on Pliny's famous letter on the Christians (Ep. 10,96). Literary features in the letter shape the depiction of events to serve the larger patterns of Pliny's particular story. According to Angelika Reichert, for example, Pliny wants Trajan to put the whole account together in a way that exonerates the Christians whom the governor has already freed. Approaching Pliny for his literary style and purpose rather than for neutral reporting of objective “facts” about Christians in Bithynia-Pontus confirms what Robert M. Grant suggested over a half century ago. Grant argued that Pliny patterned his passage on the Christian sacramentum (10,96,7) after the literary model and legal precedent of Livy's reference to sacramentum in the Bacchanalian conspiracy. The intertextual echoes of Livy in Pliny's letter make untenable the simple reading of the passage as social description of a fixed baptismal creed in second-century Christian liturgy. The present essay confirms the value of this literary approach by applying these findings to Pliny's passage on the tortured Christian slave women (ancillae) called ministrae (Ep. 10,96,8).