The Emperor Hadrian's Rescript to Minucius Fundanus

Abstract

THE PRESENT garbled form of Hadrian's Rescript to Minucius Fundanus1 has been blamed for the failure of scholars to understand the meaning of this seemingly unimportant document.2 The difficulty of its interpretation has perhaps been the principal reason why this Rescript has been relatively neglected in comparison with Trajan's Rescript to Pliny. Little importance has been attached to it perhaps because its real meaning has not been grasped. This difficulty is well illustrated by widely different interpretations, each having a different view of the Christian problem of this period. There have generally been two main lines of approach in interpreting this document and the post-Rescript situation. One group of interpreters3 believe that Hadrian's Rescript assured Christians of freedom from any legal prosecution for the profession of their religion and provided that they could be tried and punished only for crimes committed against the common laws. The representatives of the other point of view4 interpret the Rescript as giving the Christians no freedom at all from legal prosecution for professing Christianity. The followers of the first interpretation generally maintain that the legal basis of the persecutions in the first two centuries was the ius coercitionis of the higher magistrates, while the representatives of the second generally believe that, during the same period, special legislation was the juridical basis of the Christian trials. Both these diametrically opposed interpretations of Hadrian's Rescript claim to be equally supported by essentially the same Imperial document. The text5 of the Rescript is certain in its essentials and can be easily