Golden Epistles of the Ancient Christians

to a public and authentic document original: documentum publicum und avthenticum in their defenses against the heathens. For Tertullian writes of it in his Apology Tertullian (c. 155–220 AD) was a prolific early Christian author from Carthage., nearly at the beginning, in Chapter 2:

We also find that any formal inquiry original: Inqvisition against us has been forbidden. For when Pliny the Younger original: Plinius Secundus governed the province, and certain Christians had been condemned and others stripped of their rank, he became startled by their very numbers and inquired of Emperor Trajan as to what should be done further. He reported that, apart from their stubbornness in refusing to offer sacrifices, he had learned nothing else regarding their worship services except for their gatherings before dawn to sing to Christ as God, and to bind themselves to a code of discipline original: Zucht by which they forbade murder, adultery, fraud, breach of trust, and other vices. To this, Trajan replied in a decree original: rescribirt; a 'rescript' was an emperor's formal answer to a legal query that while such people should not be sought out through formal inquiry, they should nevertheless be punished if they were brought before the court.

Whereupon Tertullian judges this decree original: Rescript most emphatically based on legal principles original: principiis Juris, as will be shown below after the text itself in the section on its application.

3. Many other Christian writers also refer to this letter and use it for all sorts of useful observations, such as Eusebius Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260–339 AD), often called the "Father of Church History." in Book III of his Church History original: Hist. Eccl., Chapters 32 and 33. He recounts from it how the persecution subsided somewhat thereafter, though not entirely, because the enemies were still permitted to denounce the Christians—