Early Christians Persecuted for “Harmless Food”: Pliny’s Testimony. By Dr Chapman Chen
- Chapman Chen
- 17 minutes ago
- 3 min read
The clearest contemporary evidence for the earliest persecution of Christians comes from the Roman governor Pliny the Younger, who wrote to Emperor Trajan around AD 112 (Letters of Younger Pliny, Book X, 96–97 https://ia802807.us.archive.org/34/items/lettersofyounger00plinuoft/lettersofyounger00plinuoft.pdf). His report describes a systematic procedure: suspected Christians were interrogated, ordered to worship the Roman gods, offer incense and wine before the emperor’s image, and curse Christ. Those who complied were released; those who refused were executed for obstinate disobedience.
What makes this document especially significant is that Pliny could find no criminal behaviour behind the movement. He reports that Christians met before dawn, sang hymns to Christ, pledged moral conduct, and later assembled again to share food — explicitly described as “of an ordinary and innocent kind.”
This phrase contrasts sharply with the animal sacrifices central to Roman public religion, in which slaughtered animals were offered to the gods and then consumed in communal ritual meals.
Pliny further notes the social consequences of Christian refusal to participate in these rites. Temples in his province had become nearly deserted, traditional sacrifices had been neglected, and the market for animals intended for sacrifice had almost collapsed; only after coercive measures against Christians did participation and, to borrow co-director of Christspiarcy Kameron Waters’ (2026 https://www.instagram.com/reels/audio/34980041544928032/) words, “flesh sales” revive.
This observation shows that the Christian movement posed not merely a theological challenge but an economic and civic one, undermining practices that symbolised loyalty to the Roman state (cf. Waters 2026). As pointed out by Waters (2026),
Rome didn’t care who you worship. They allowed many gods and religions as long as you participated in the animal-sacrifice blood cult, a major driver of the Roman economy. Every other cult killed animals for sacrifice and consumption, but the Christians refused. They chose harmless food.
Trajan responds plainly. He says, “Christians could only be spared if they prove their loyalty by supplicating to the Roman gods.” That wasn’t a private prayer or confession. That meant performing an animal sacrificial ritual in public and eating their flesh. In other words, sacrifice animals or die.
This pattern did not end with the Roman persecutions. The Council of Nicaea in the 4th Century in 325 purged and/or burnt most vegan versions of the Scriptures. It is said that Constantine used to pour molten lead down their throats if they were captured (Rosen 1987, p. 19). Saint Jerome durst not include in the Vulgate the vegan Gospel According to Matthew, which he had privately translated into Latin (Jerome, On Famous Men 2, de Santos 17). Earlier still, faithful Jews were tortured and killed under the Greek King Antiochus IV Epiphanes for refusing pork. In the Middle Ages, dissenting Christian movements — some of which practised strict asceticism and abstinence from meat — were violently suppressed during campaigns such as the Albigensian Crusade. Across centuries, refusal to participate in sanctioned forms of violence against animals could become a matter of life and death.
Read in this light, the letters preserve a rare snapshot of a community defined by moral discipline, simple “innocent” food, and refusal to participate in animal sacrifice — a stance that brought them into direct conflict with the religious and political order of the Roman Empire. The Gospel account of Jesus’ disruption of the Temple’s sacrificial commerce (Mark 11:15–18) is precisely an example for this broader rejection of animal flesh and ritual slaughter. Pliny’s correspondence therefore remains the most reliable early evidence that Christians were persecuted for principled non-participation in sacrificial practices, choosing conscience over conformity at the cost of their lives.
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