them. This new religion really belonged to their own time. Its founder had talked with men quite recently. He had lived in a city they knew a good deal about.
There was no dim mist about its origin; no old legends had gathered round it—legends which few, if any, believed.
The story of the religion of Jesus, told so simply, so convincingly, in the four Gospels, had a strange attraction; it went home to the hearts of a vast multitude; it rang true and real.
We know that very soon after the date of the events of the Gospel story the numbers of the men and women who accepted it were great. From the pagan Empire we have the testimony of Tacitus, the most eminent of Roman historians. Writing some fifty years after the first persecution under Nero, a.d. 64, he describes the Christians at the time of that first persecution as "a vast multitude" (ingens multitudo).[1]
Still more in detail the younger Pliny, the Governor of Bithynia, writing to the Emperor Trajan circa A.D. 112-13 for instructions how to deal with the Christians, relates that the new religion had spread so widely in his province, not merely in the cities but in the villages and country districts generally, that the temples were almost deserted.[2] It is, of course, possible that the new faith had found especial favour in Bithynia; but such a formal and detailed representation from an official of the highest rank and reputation to the Emperor of what was happening in his own province, is a sure indication of the enormous strides which Christianity had generally made in the Empire when the echoes of apostles and apostolic men were still ringing in the ears of their disciples. S. John's death only preceded Pliny's letter to Trajan[3] by at most twenty years.
Among contemporary Christian writers we find similar testimony to the vast numbers of Christians in very early times. To take a few conspicuous examples:
