The Roman Empire and Irenaeus of Lyons — Michael Haykin

Lectures in the history and thought and experience of the early church, and the sheets that you've been given out basically contain my notes, as it were, of what I want to think about with you tonight.

In the first lecture, looking at something of the way in which the early church sought to bear witness to its faith in a pluralistic... He didn't know the way I was going to bring out the first lecture tonight, but what we're thinking about is what it was like for early Christians, early believers, to find themselves in the midst of a pluralistic culture bearing witness to their faith in that context, but also a culture that was somewhat hostile to that faith.

And so we want to think about something of the early Christian witness, its shape, the response of the culture to that witness, and then the counter-response of the church to the way that their society treated them, at least for the first 300 years.

In the second lecture, we want to think about something internal to the church, and the way in which the church had to struggle, if you want to use that phrase, on a different front. We can think in the first lecture of external pressure, external attack, if you want to use that phrase, on the church.

In the second lecture, we think of the struggles within the church, as the church has to grapple with the nature of what is Christian truth, and at what point do certain thoughts and patterns of thinking go beyond the bounds of Christian truth?

Are there areas of thought in which you move beyond the pale of what we call Christian thinking, Christian orthodoxy, and so on? And the struggle is known as the Gnostic struggle, in which the early church had to face an area of very, very important truth.

But the first lecture, and then I have a series of texts after that, actually one text, the Letter to Diognetus, which we're going to use a little in the first lecture. This is the sort of format that we'll do week by week, lecture notes that basically give you an outline of what I want to do and where I'm going, and then a text or more in which we actually look at primary sources from the period.

The Epistle to Diognetus's date, as we will see, is around 177 to 200. Now, when our Lord was born, and when the early church came into existence, the context, the larger political and social context, is what we know as the Roman Empire.

And a few remarks are probably needed to kind of put the larger context in some sort of framework. The Roman Empire occupied at the time, or dominated at the time, probably a fifth of the world's population.

Somewhere around 70, maybe as many as 18 million, found themselves ruled by those whom we know as the Roman Emperors. The first Roman Emperor was Augustus Caesar. He came to power in 27 BC, would reign to 14 AD.

He came to power after a century of civil war had split apart what historians know as the Roman Republic. During the 200 years prior to the birth of Christ, Rome had expanded at a tremendous rate to gobble up most of the countries bordering the Mediterranean.

So that by the time of our Lord's birth, they could call the Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum, our sea. But that incredible imperial expansion had brought massive internal problems to the Roman Republic. And in the century prior to the birth of Christ, the old way of governing the Republic by an aristocratic elite based on the Roman Senate, and was no longer able to govern as a number of very powerful army generals, probably the most famous being Julius Caesar, began to think and use their legions to basically say that we know a much better way to govern the Empire, basically by military rule.

That long century of civil war comes to an end of Augustus Caesar, who introduces really what the Romans would later describe as Pax Romana, a period of unprecedented peace to the Mediterranean region, where for at least 200 years down to the late 100s, there was substantial peace for those peoples dominated by Rome, bordering the Mediterranean countries.

And there are today testimonies in mostly stone of the extent of the Roman Empire. In the north, you would have Hadrian's Wall, that wall that was strung across one of the narrowest parts of Great Britain, built to keep the ferocious Picts out of Northern England.

In the south, one can go all the way down to the Sahara, or over into Mesopotamia. And throughout this entire region, Mesopotamia being what is now modern Iraq, and a portion of Iran. And throughout this entire region, Romans left mute testimonies, as it were, to their presence.

Roman roads. About a month and a half ago, I was in England, and driving over what was, at least its basis, was a Roman road. It's the A1, which a portion of it is actually now the M1, but the A1 was originally a Roman road.

Very straight, the Romans built very straight roads. Or again in England, a place that I've been to, not recently, but about 10 years or so ago, Bath, where you have the complex of Roman baths, built over hot springs, an incredible complex that still is, people don't use it for bathing today, obviously, but it's still functional.

Or one could go to Lyon, southern France, where there are still remains of the aqueducts, four aqueducts that were built by Roman engineering to bring fresh water into that city to supply the various suburban villas that were built around the outskirts of that city.

Many of them have been unearthed today, containing incredible mosaics. All of these are testimonies to Roman might and Roman engineering. Now, socially, politically I should add that Rome was a dictatorship.

Any sort of semblance of republican government, any sort of democracy, and there had been some semblance of that, at least in the aristocracy during the Republic, came to an end when Augustus the Caesar established himself as first citizen.

There was a pretense made that things hadn't really changed, but it was very obvious to those who knew that Rome had made the transition to a military dictatorship. And so politically, Rome is a military dictatorship, all through the history of the early church.

Socially, Rome was dominated by, or the empire was dominated by a small 2 who were wealthy, who we would describe as the upper class. Stupendously wealthy. Augustus Caesar, for instance, had as his own personal farm the entirety of Egypt.

He had taken it from Mark Antony in Cleopatra at the end of that long period of civil war, took a fancy to it. Also, it was a very wealthy producing area in terms of, it became the breadbasket of the empire.

And he decided to keep it under his personal control, operating at his own personal farm. But up and down through central Italy, there were farms of stupendous magnitude. One thinks of, for instance, a farm in southern Italy, which ran a sheep operation of 250 ,000 sheep.

That's an enormous amount of sheep for one farming operation. And so there was a small percentage of the Roman Empire who were enormously wealthy, about 2%. About 8%, historians estimate, what we would describe today as the middle class.

The rest lived either as slaves, 50 of the empire as slaves, or they lived on what we would describe as subsistence level. They were in poverty. And so there is an incredible amount of social inequity in the empire.

And the church, as it begins to proclaim the coming of the kingdom of God and the person of Christ, would find it drawing its main number of its adherents, not surprisingly, from the lower class, from those who had nothing in this world and probably would never have anything, although there was a remarkable amount of social mobility in the empire.

You could start your life off as a slave and end up among the aristocracy. And that did happen. It didn't mean that you were able to get rid of the kind of social stigma that attached to you, but you could end up playing host at dinner parties to some of the wealthiest families, and you had started your life as a slave.

That happened. There was an incredible social mobility, at least compared to other ancient civilizations. The Greeks, for instance. If you started life as a slave, you ended life as a slave. And there was no way of ever getting out of that context and moving up the social ladder.

But it's not surprising, as the church begins to proclaim the gospel, that those who are first attracted to it are slaves in the lower class, those who have nothing in this world and for whom the gospel opened up a rich kingdom to come.

We should also mention, and I don't want to go into this in any great detail, that it was a patriarchal culture. It was a man's world in many respects. Now one needs to be very careful about evaluating the evidence of the ancient world, and not seeing it as kind of a flat society.

Greek women had a much rougher time than Roman women. Greek women basically lived lives much as you would find today in a very fundamentalist Islamic society. A respectable Greek woman would never go out without a veil.

She would never eat her meals with anybody but the immediate family, her own immediate family. Her own personal quarters were almost like a secluded area of the house, which members of the immediate family, male members of the immediate family alone, were allowed access to.

Roman women were very different. They could eat their meals and did eat their meals with men who were not of their immediate family. They did go out without veils. They did exercise a fair amount of power in their own way, but nonetheless it's still a very patriarchal culture.

Roman males had the power of life over their slaves, which was on occasion exercised, power of life and death. They had the power of life and death over their children. At birth, the child would be brought to the head of the Roman house, the man, and he would pronounce whether or not he would live or not.

And Romans, and the Greeks as well, were much into what we've described today as child exposure. Abortion existed in the ancient world, but it was very crude, often produced the death of the mother. And so one would the ways in which the Romans sought to deal, for a variety of reasons, with unwanted children was the exposure of children, where they would be taken out, laid in the streets, or as more frequently, put on rubbish heaps at the edges of the large urban centers.

And Roman males had the power of life and death over their wives, although we do not know, at least I'm not aware of an instance where this was actually exercised. But technically, legally, a Roman male could kill his wife and not be taken to court for it.

And so it's very much a patriarchal world. And so it's a world of social inequities, a very small percentage, enormously wealthy. It's a world in which it is a military dictatorship. There is a fairly extensive secret service that the emperor maintains.

It's a patriarchal world. It's a multicultural world. The Roman Empire embraced a huge number of peoples, not only Romans and Greeks, but Carthaginians and Spaniards and Arabs and Thracians and Celts, and all of these were brought together under Roman rule.

Welding them together was not only the Roman political structure, but also the languages. Latin was used extensively throughout the Western Europe and the Western Mediterranean. Most people would have been bilingual in that area, being able to speak Latin in their mother tongue.

In the Eastern Mediterranean, it was Greek. It's interesting to reflect that you could go from Northern England, up near Hadrian's Wall, and travel all the way over to the Persian Gulf, at least for the period of time when the Romans occupied over there, and all you needed to know were two languages, Latin or Greek, and you could probably make your way.

You look at a map of that period, of that area today, maybe English could function that way, but I'm also sure it could, and you think of the number of countries you'd have to cross going by land, we're not talking about going by sea, we're talking about going by land, and the number of languages you'd have to be familiar with to be able to make your way comfortably.

So the Romans were able to weld together this area by the use of two languages, Latin and Greek. They were also very astute in Romanising the people they conquered. When they conquered an area, they introduced their gods, and they took the gods and goddesses of the peoples they conquered.

And they started doing this back around 200 BC, whether or not it was originally a thought-out policy, or whether it had more to do, and I suspect this is more true, whether it had more to do with the Roman feel that, just in case these people are onto a god or goddess that we haven't heard about, and that being exists, and they may help us along, well, we'll take their gods and goddesses.

And so you find that the Romans embraced a huge number of gods and goddesses, but there was a subtle policy of Romanisation. When they conquered an area, for instance, when they conquered Gaul, the Celts, who lived in Gaul, and Celts, they're not French yet, the Franks come in with the Germanic invasions in the 400s.

The Celts had a variety of gods and goddesses the Romans didn't have, and what the Romans did was they took those gods and goddesses as their own. But in doing so, they also gave their gods and goddesses to the Celts, and through religion, and religion is often, their religion became a vehicle of extending Roman culture.

And so we need to have that background, a military dictatorship, a massive social inequity, a strongly patriarchal culture, one that is multicultural and pluralistic. And some similarities, then, to today.

Now Christ, the risen Christ, in Acts chapter 1, verse 8, gives explicit instructions to his disciples about their mission, as it were. And he tells them that they are to be his witnesses in Jerusalem, and then in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

And one can, I think, rightly argue that the book of Acts is the following out, or the laying out, of how that mission began to be accomplished, because the first seven or so chapters of the book of Acts are focused on Jerusalem.

And you see the disciples and the early church in Jerusalem. Everything's Jewish. The heroes, if I can use that phrase, are Jewish, and the bad guys are Jewish. Those who are protagonists and seeking to extend the witness of the church are Jewish, and the antagonists, the persecutors of the church, are all Jewish.

And then there is the death of Stephen, and persecution arises, and the church is pushed out of Jerusalem into Judea and Samaria, and is forced to bear witness now outside of Jerusalem. And that witness eventually issues in not only Jews being, the good news being shared with Jews, but also with Gentiles.

And Acts chapter 10 is that marvelous chapter in which there is this leap over of the racial barrier which was so deeply ingrained in the Jewish mind, of Jew and Gentile, but also in the Gentile mind.

The Jews, by nature, didn't like the Gentiles, but it also worked the other way. In Acts 10, you see the racial barrier being broken down, a very important event, very important. That statement by the Apostle Paul in Galatians 3 .28, where he says that in Christ Jesus, there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, is a statement that has social implications.

And dealing with the Jew and Gentile question here, it forced the church to grapple with the universality of her message. That the gospel was not simply just for Jews, but was for Gentiles as well. And you see the book of Acts is pushing that out and out, and further and further, and the Apostle Paul is probably the key figure whom, at least in the book of Acts, who we see as part of that story of the gospel being taken from Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, and beginning to go to the ends of the earth.

It's interesting that Luke spends, in the book of Acts, ten chapters looking at how Paul ends up in Rome. And he's obviously telling us something. He's showing us how Acts 1 .8 is carried out. The program of Acts 1 .8, you will be my witnesses, in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth, is beginning to be carried out in the book of Acts.

Now, the church's relationship to the Roman Empire, in the book of Acts, is a fairly peaceful one. The problem for the church comes from the synagogue. It comes from the Jewish quarter. It's Paul's consistent missionary strategy that he go to the synagogue first when he goes to a large urban area.

I should have mentioned, by the way, that Christianity is an urban religion in these centuries. It's not without significance that the word pagan comes from the Latin word paganus, which means country dweller.

It's obvious that that is telling us something socially. That the early church made its impact, first of all, in the city. Paul himself is an urban creature. If you look at his missionary strategy as it's laid out in the book of Acts, and certain portions of his letters, for instance Romans 15, it's quite clear that Paul focused on going to large urban centers.

Antioch, Ephesus, Philippi, Corinth, Rome, all these are big cities in the ancient world. Rome is close to a million people at this period in time. Ephesus, 200 ,000. Antioch, probably similar size. Philippi and Corinth are a bit smaller, but they're still large urban centers.

The church is an urban phenomenon in these early years. And the problem, or the struggles that the church has in the book of Acts, is not with the empire, with Roman government, but with the synagogue.

And probably the classic passage, and let me read to you, if you have a Bible with you, you can follow along, and I'm reading out of the New Living translation, is Acts 18, verses 12 through 16. Acts 18, verses 12 through 16.

And it says, and this records a portion of Paul's ministry in Corinth, and we read that Paul had been there about a year and a half, and opposition arose from the synagogue. Acts 18, verse 12. When Galileo became governor of Achaia, some Jews arose in concerted action against Paul and brought him before the governor for judgment.

They accused Paul of persuading people to worship God in ways that are contrary to the law. But just as Paul started to make his defense, Galileo turned to Paul's accusers and said, listen, you Jews, if this were a case involving some wrongdoing or a serious crime, I would be obliged to listen to you, but since it is merely a question of words and names and your Jewish laws, you take care of it.

I refuse to judge such matters. From the point of view of a man like Galileo, his full name actually is Lucius Junius Galileo, a very important Roman official, and I'll develop that in a second. From the point of view of a man like Galileo, Roman, as he looks at this case that has been brought before him, what he sees on the one side are Jews.

What he sees on the other side is also a Jew. And what he hears them quarreling about is that a certain person named Jesus is the Christos, or the Messiah. Now, he obviously was probably speaking to both groups in Greek, and that word Christos, the anointed one, he would have understood what the word meant, but he probably never heard it before.

It was not a word that was used in secular circles outside of Greek-speaking Jewish synagogues, and as far as he's concerned, it's a matter of words. It's not a matter for Roman law, and he dismisses the case.

Now, what is significant about this incident is that Galileo was, as I said, a fairly highly placed Roman official, governor of Achaia. He was probably the most important figure, Roman figure, political figure, that Paul had met to that point in his life.

Possibly not, but he probably was. He was the younger brother of a man named Seneca, a very well known Roman philosopher, and also a man who functions as the tutor to the emperor Nero. In other words, a decision made by Galileo as governor of Achaia would have enormous precedent.

It's also interesting to note that within probably 12 years of this event, Galileo would be dead, having been executed by Nero. But what's significant here is that in these early years of the church's existence, the Roman state, as it looked at the developing church, as it encountered it here, and there are other places in the Book of Acts where you find, in fact, the last nine or so chapters is devoted to Paul's encounter with significant Roman governors like Felix and Festus and so on.

As the Rome looks at the church, well, there's quarrels going on among the Jews. There's nothing really that they need to be involved in. All of that changes in the year 64 AD. And, in fact, historians can date the actual days on which it changes.

It's the nights of July 17th and 18th. That was a period in which in July 64 AD there was what is known as the Great Fire of Rome. As I said, Rome was a city of about a million people. Ninety percent of the city was wood.

When we think of Rome today, ancient Rome, we think of all the marble and stone structures, but that's what's lasted. In the period we're looking at, we're thinking of most of the city being wood, packed close together, apartment buildings of 15, 16 stories high.

And on the night of July 17th, there was a fire that broke out downtown Rome, and there was a stiff wind that night, and the Roman fire department, fairly crude in terms of its equipment, was unable to contain the fire.

The fire reduced to ash about a third or so of the city before it was finally brought under control. The Emperor Nero was not in the city at the time. He was away at one of his private villas. Hearing about the fire made no interest to move back to the city until he discovered that some of his own property was in danger of being burned down, and he hastened back to the city.

And then, after the fire had been brought under control, a day or so later, another fire broke out. And it broke out on the property of a man who was the head of the Praetorian Guard, a man named Ophonius Tigellinus, T-I-G-E-L-L-I-N-U-S.

Now, Ophonius Tigellinus was a fairly odious man, at least all the Roman historians have given us any character sketch of the guy. He's a fairly odious figure. Nero had met him down at the amphitheater.

Nero, for the first eight years of his reign, he had come to power in 54, after his mother, Agrippina, had murdered his stepfather. He eventually did murder his mother as well. He's an interesting character in his own right.

The first eight years or so of his reign, up to about 62 A .D., he was not interested in being emperor. His two main passions in life were drama and horse racing. And he spent a lot of time down at the amphitheater racing horses, getting to know horse breeders and so on.

And he meets this character, Ophonius Tigellinus, who was a horse salesman. Take the liking to him. And in the mid-sixties, when he begins to take an interest in running the empire, he actually kills his mother in 62.

She'd been pretty well running things. Ophonius Tigellinus was promoted to the head of the Praetorian Guard and the head of the Roman Imperial Secret Service. And the Praetorian Guard was the elite Roman regiment who were basically supposed to guard the person of the emperor.

And Ophonius Tigellinus, as we had a time to look at his life, he was a fairly odious individual, carried out a reign of terror in Rome, executing anybody who believed any sort of treasonable remark against the emperor.

And so this fire breaks out on his property about a day or two later, and it's awfully fishy. Especially in view of the fact that there are a lot of people who have heard the emperor Nero say on a number of occasions that the city of Rome really was a ramshackle of a city.

It really needed to deserve, the whole thing should be leveled and rebuilt in pure marble to befit his glory. And it would appear that Nero got a brilliant idea that the fire could be used to do this.

The first fire, it's almost clear, was a mistake. It was an accident, but once it had been brought under control, the second fire breaks out suspiciously on the property of Ophonius Tigellinus, and it reduces another third of the city to ash.

But the rumour starts to go around that the emperor has tried to burn down the city, and he realises that if it was his plan, the second fire has backfired, and he needs a scapegoat. And it's the Roman historian Tacitus writing about 60 years later, a man from the patrician class, the aristocracy, a man who would access the legal documents, who tells us the following.

And he's talking about this rumour that Nero had tried to burn the city down. Therefore, to kill the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits and punished with the utmost requirements of cruelty a class of men loathed for their vices whom the crowd styled Christas.

Christas, from whom they got their name, had been executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate when Tiberius was emperor, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a short time, only to break out afresh, not only in Judea the home of the plague, but in Rome itself, where all the horrible and shameful things in the world collect and find a home.

First of all, those who confessed were arrested. Then, under information, a huge multitude was convicted, not so much on the grounds of incendiarism, starting the fire, as for hatred of the human race.

Their execution was made a matter of sport. Some were sewn up in the skins of wild beasts and savaged to death by dogs. Others were fastened to crosses as living torches to serve as lights when daylight failed.

Nero made his gardens available for the show, and held games in the circus, mingling with the crowd or standing in his chariot in charioteer's uniform. Hence, although the victims were criminals deserving the severest punishment, pity began to be felt for them, because it seemed that they were being sacrificed to gratify one man's lust for cruelty, rather than for the public welfare.

That is the oldest, apart from one other text, that we have from a secular Roman source of the existence of the Church. It describes a fairly horrifying persecution. What is important about the text is that it sets a precedent.

It sets a precedent for warfare, if I can use that term, between the Church and state. A number of things are interesting here. First of all, it is clear, independent attestation of the historicity, or the historic fact, that there was a person who was called Christ, who was crucified, under the reign of, in the reign of Tiberius, the successor of Augustus Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea.

There is in the Nineteenth Creed, we'll look at it later in the lecture series, there is a statement about Pontius Pilate, and about Christ being crucified under, in the reign of Pontius Pilate, and it's a very important statement.

It points to the fact that the early Christian message was rooted in history. It's a historical message. It's not something that a group of individuals have sat around and dreamt up. It's not a fable, a myth.

It has historical rootage. Secondly, the text indicates that Christians were disliked by many Romans because of their vices. He mentions one vice here, their hatred of the human race. It's a surprise to read that, because the core message of the early church was love.

And what he's obviously reflecting is the fact that Christians refused to worship the Greek and Roman gods, but it was those gods who secured the welfare of the empire. Therefore, the typical Roman would reason, who maybe didn't know Christians firsthand, if these people don't worship the gods, and the gods are the only way of securing the security and welfare of the empire, these people must not like the empire, and must not like us Romans.

Therefore, they hated the human race. Other vices, two other charges that Christians were generally leveled at Christians were cannibalism, and here a misunderstanding of the Lord's Supper. The Lord's Supper, whatever the practice in the New Testament, after the New Testament period, up until around the year 300, the Lord's Supper was always done behind closed doors, with people who were not yet professing believers not present.

The Lord's Supper was a closed event for those who were members of a local church. And one could easily see how people would get the idea, maybe they might hear their friends, or neighbors, or if they were slaves, they might hear their master, and so on, talking about the eating of the body of Christ, and drinking the blood of Christ, and completely misunderstanding.

The other charge that was frequently leveled against the church was incest. Cannibalism, incest, hatred of the human race, and tied to the hatred of the human race, atheism. Incest was a charge because, again, a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding of Christians calling each other brother and sister, a misunderstanding of the word agape, or love.

Not a usual word used for love in the Roman Empire, and the associations or misunderstandings of the Christians were into incest. And always, there was the typical human problem, and sadly often found among Christians, of believing the worst.

Believing the worst. A willingness, if you didn't know Christians first hand, a willingness to believe all kinds of scandalous rumors about them. And so this is a very important precedent. It sets the scene for now, for what would be 250 years of persecution.

It's hard to believe that long. Not continuous, not empire-wide all the time, but from 64 AD down to the year 312, when Christianity is declared to be a tolerated religion. To become a Christian meant you had to take into consideration the distinct possibility that you would be martyred.

And we have a large number, in the 50s or 60s, of accounts of martyrs. Many of them written by Christians in the law courts, as Christians were on trial and they're writing down remarks of the judges trying them, and the responses of Christians, and then the subsequent actual martyrdom of believers.

And they make for very sobering reading. Stamps on the church, the fact that she is a church of martyrs. That there is something worth dying for. The truth about Christ is more important than life itself.

And we're not going to extensively look at that during this series of lectures, but it's something to bear in mind, because it has been said today, and all the evidence I've seen points to the truth of this, that there will be more martyrs in this century for Christianity than in any of the previous centuries.

We live in incredible freedom. And yet there are men and women who are Christians around the world today, for whom a meeting like this would be utterly and completely impossible. Or if they did, then they would be running the risk of possible death or martyrdom.

And one can think of some of the very strongly fundamentalist Islamic countries where this would be the case. Or even countries like India, where a missionary and his two children were recently burned to death by a fanatical Hindu group.

And so, as we look at the early church, its face and the fact of the martyrs of the early church, it's not something that we want to leave behind and simply say, this is just part of our history. It stands forever on the church, that there are some things worth dying for.

There are some things more important than life itself. And for us who are Christians in a fairly wealthy culture, and for us who are Christians in a culture that is thankfully one in which there are rich traditions of democratic freedom, we can easily lose sight of these things.

Now, we want to, and I'm going to spend about 15 minutes and then I'll draw to a close and we'll have a few questions. I want to look at a document that was written in the late 2nd century called the Letter to Diogenes.

And the church was not slow to begin to respond to persecution in a variety of ways. And one of the ways was to write defenses of the faith. And this is an apologetic document. It's an apology. An apology in the old, classical sense of that word, meaning a defense of the faith.

No, no. Giving an excuse, but laying out why those who believed the truth of Christianity were Christians. Now, I haven't given you it all, and we're not going to be able to read it all, or even probe all of it, and so I'd encourage you to look at it when you go home and maybe later in the week.

But let's read a few of the texts. And the first one is the first chapter. And let me call them chapters, and there are little numbers within those chapters which we can call verse divisions. And the first chapter lays out for us the reasons why the author is writing this letter.

Since I perceive, Most Excellent Diogenes, that you are exceedingly zealous to learn the religion of the Christians, and are making very clear and careful inquiring that those who believed the truth of Christianity were Christians.

Now, I haven't given you it all, and we're not going to be able to read it all, or even probe all of it, and so I'd encourage you to look at it when you go home and maybe later in the week. But let's read a few of the texts.

And the first one is the first chapter. And let me call them chapters, and there are little numbers within those chapters which we can call verse divisions. And the first chapter lays out for us the reasons why the author is writing this letter.

Since I perceive, Most Excellent Diogenes, that you are exceedingly zealous to learn the religion of the Christians, and are making very clear and careful inquiring about them, both who is the God in whom they trust and how they worship him, so that all disdain the world and despise death, and neither account those to be gods who are seen such by the Greeks, nor observe the superstition of the Jews, and what is the affection which they have for one another, and why it is that this new race of men, or mode of living, has entered into our world now and not formerly, I welcome this eager desire in you, and I ask of God, as it shows in us the power both of speech and of hearing, that it may be given to me, so to speak, that you may be edified as much as possible by your hearing, and to you, so to hear, that I, by my speaking, may suffer no regret.

Now, this translation was done back in the late 1940s, when translations were sometimes more literal than one would like. All of that is one sentence in the original Greek, and the translator has taken it one sentence in English.

We just don't write like that today, and we don't translate that today, and so it's quite a mouthful. And what is being said here? Well, first of all, we don't know who wrote the letter. We have no idea.

It's fairly cultured Greek. It's quite clear that the Christianity is penetrating the upper classes, those who have had the opportunities of a superb education, but we don't know who wrote it. Probably in the Eastern Mediterranean, probably a natural Greek speaker, which would be in the Eastern Mediterranean.

We do know from other evidence, which I'm not going to go into, that it's written in the last quarter of the second century, 177 to 200. Who Diogenes is? We've got no idea who he is either. Scholars have written all kinds of books and articles on who this fellow might be.

One of the commonest arguments is that he was the tutor, or one of the resident philosophers, in the imperial palace of Marcus Aurelius, the emperor at the time. But we don't know. What we do know is that Diogenes has asked three questions, and they're very important questions.

The first one is, who is the god you worship? Such that, and it's got three little subsections, such that you're not afraid to die. And we'll see that one of the evidences that the writer gives for the truth of Christianity is the martyrs.