Pliny’s Letter to Trajan

In a letter to Emperor Trajan, Pliny the Younger (ca. ad 110–112) inquired how he should handle suspects informed against as Christians. Pliny had tortured two maidservants called “ministers” (ministrae) to learn the details of their crime and found “nothing but a depraved and extravagant superstition” (Letters 10.96.8). That a Roman provincial governor treated these women as spokespersons for Christianity suggests he took them to be “ministers” (equivalent to διάκονοι, diakonoi) in the clerical sense. This reference in a classical source uninterested in the ecclesiological issue of women in ministry seemingly reduces the validity of the argument denying that women like Phoebe or those of 1 Tim 3:11 functioned as deaconesses.