A Roman governor’s report
Around AD 112, Pliny, governor of Bithynia (a Roman province on the Black Sea coast of what is now Turkey), wrote to the emperor Trajan to ask how to deal with Christians. His interrogations found people who met before dawn on a fixed day to sing a hymn “to Christ as to a god,” and who bound themselves by oath to do no wrong. It is an outsider’s view of early Christian worship.
But they declared that the sum of their guilt or their error only amounted to this, that on a stated day they had been accustomed to meet before daybreak and to recite a hymn among themselves to Christ, as though he were a god, and that so far from binding themselves by oath to commit any crime, their oath was to abstain from theft, robbery, adultery, and from breach of faith, and not to deny trust money placed in their keeping when called upon to deliver it.