Talk:Pliny the Younger on Christians

Questioned authenticity of book 10

In this edit, User:Smeat75 mangled my contribution to this article. If he had read my reference to Detering, he would have known that that is the source for "some scholars". Also, the argumentum ex silentio is strong evidence for this book having been unknown in the Middle Ages: a volume of letters by Emperor Trajan would have been very interesting to medieval legal scholars. But I won't start an edit war with the believers... /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 22:59, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

"But I won't start an edit war with the believers"

I feel your pain. The whole page need to be re-written in the light of recent research that pretty well shows the letter to be yet another Christian forgery. Everything should now be "attempts to show" or "portrays Pliny as..." instead of "Pliny wrote..." or "it is clear that Pliny executed Christians..." etc. 82.21.35.81 (talk) 10:36, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Title?

Isn't this article really about Pliny X.96, and not about the rather nebulous and non-specific topic "Pliny the Younger on Christians"? If we have a title like that, we might as well have "Thucydides on Syracusans" or "Caesar on Republicans" - neither of which would have much value. The value of this article, though, is considerable, in that it gives good information about a particular source, namely Pliny X.96. We have an article Epistulae (Pliny) - so wouldn't it make sense to move this to Epistulae X.96 (Pliny)? If no objections I may do so. Dionysodorus (talk) 00:59, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

I would oppose such a move, the title "Letter X.96" tells the reader nothing about the content (and for it to be in Latin seems unnecessarily academic and off-putting to general readers, plus "Epistulae" is plural, so it would be incorrect). The title may not be perfect, but at least it carries some indication of what it is about. It is the most important document we have about the attitudes of Roman officials to early Christians and constantly referred to in studies of the early church.Smeat75 (talk) 01:43, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

I don't think the plural would be incorrect or even contentious, since it's notionally part of a whole source, but that's a side matter. It's all very well it being referred to in studies of the early church, but when it is so referred, it is surely cited as Epistula(e)/Letter(s) X.96, and not as "Pliny the Younger on Christians". As for not carrying indications of what things are about, isn't that what the article's for? If all titles of sources were descriptions of the subject matter of their subjects, we would have some very odd titles. Also, I reckon that, if someone wants to know about Christians in the Roman Empire, they will surely go to whatever the main article is on that, and then link here if there is a link - or look up Pliny the Younger and link here - whereas if one is actually looking up this particular source, which is in fact the subject of the article and given its importance is not unlikely, general readers especially may be thrown by the apparent generality of the title not matching the article's specificness. At any rate, I shall make some redirects for Epistula(e)/Letter(s) X.96 to here. Dionysodorus (talk) 15:21, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

I am in favour of renaming this article to "Correspondence between Pliny and Trajan on Christians". Because Pliny does not mention Christians anywhere else, and because Trajan, the emperor himself, responded to him with his own instructions on how to deal with Christians, I think we should regard this article as as the exchange of two letters between Pliny and Trajan, not just Pliny's opinion on Christians. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 01:11, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

PS: See for example this English translation, which calls it "Pliny and Trajan on the Christians".

Or: "The letter of Pliny to Trajan concerning the Christians and the rescript of Trajan together constitute one of the most important documents in the whole history of early Christianity". [1]

Or:"the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan on the problems arising from the judicial investigation of the Christians" [2]

Or:"the aforementioned correspondence between Pliny and Trajan provides an early Roman record of [persecution of Christians]." [3]. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 01:24, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

As an example, I've already renamed the Dutch article to nl:Briefwisseling tussen Plinius en Trajanus over christenen, that is, "Correspondence between Pliny and Trajan on Christians". The original title was "Punishment of Christians around 112 AD", but that doesn't quite cover it. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 00:18, 3 November 2018 (UTC)

Authenticity

The introduction, as it stands now, contains the following paragraph:

More recently, the authenticity of this letter has been seriously questioned, on the basis of stylometric analysis which seems to indicate that a different person wrote the letter than wrote the others contained in the tenth "book" of Pliny's collected epistles, although a majority of historians view the letter as authentic.

I must admit I do not know the topic too well, but I see two problems:

• There is no corresponding section in the main body of the article.
• I have not been able to access most of the sources, but some seem rather dubious. The first one smells of the author having an axe to grind, not to say pushing a conspiracy theory (because of the expression "Church Industry" in the title). The second one is off-topic, it is about Pliny as a source for the Vesuvius eruption (unless the main body also mentions the Christianity correspondence?). The third one seems serious and I have been able to access it, but it only implicitly assumes that the Christianity correspondence is authentic, without explicitly saying so. I don't know about the fourth one.

Any suggestions? Corneille pensive (talk) 09:17, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

I have now tried to improve these problems:

• I moved the paragraph to a section of its own.
• I mentioned the scholarly consensus at the beginning and the end of the section, to put things into their place.
• I suppressed the first two sources: I have now accessed the first one and it is obviously not anything Wikipedia policy would call a reliable source. The second one, as already mentioned, is off-topic.
• After reading the abstract to Tuccinardi's article (fourth source), I have been able to explain his actual statements better. They were not as strong as our text previously suggested. Moreover, he also explicitly says that (before his article) authenticity was the consensus, so I could use him as a source for that.
• I suppressed the nonsensical phrase "and speaks to its belief system" in another section. It was added by the same anonymous editor who wanted us to believe the correspondence is a recognised forgery.

At least two problems remain:

• I don't really know how to source that the scholarly consensus hasn't changed since 2017. It obviously hasn't: More recent articles about the text clearly assume authenticity without even considering other possibilities. (See the link to my search - but this isn't a source in the sense of Wikipedia.) For want of a better option, I have kept the third reference of the previous version (World History Encyclopedia).
• It would be nice to also have the arguments in favour of authenticity, instead of just stating that basically everybody agrees about it. I think Tuccinardi reviews these arguments, so we could use him as a source; but unfortunately I don't have access to the full text.

I would greatly appreciate any collaboration! --Corneille pensive (talk) 15:10, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

References