Christian Belief—an Unchanging Essence?

Extract

In about the year A.D. III Pliny sent to the emperor Trajan a report about the behaviour of Christians in Bithynia in which he said that they admitted to having meetings before dawn at which it was their practice carmen Christo quasi deo dicere. Would the Christians have thought this account of themselves to be a fair one? Certainly Pliny was right in thinking that the Christians gave, and professed to give, worship to Christ as divine. But no doubt he would suppose that to them Christ was ‘a god’, just one of the deities whose statues were familiar in the Graeco-Roman world. He could scarcely be expected to grasp that carmen Christo quasi deo dicere involved the attitudes to Christ described by St John or Ignatius of Antioch or Polycarp of Smyrna.