What outsiders said.

Pliny the Younger, Roman governor of Bithynia-Pontus, wrote to the emperor Trajan about 111-113 CE. Those who had left the movement told him "that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god" (carmenque Christo quasi deo dicere secum invicem). They swore not to commit fraud, theft or adultery, and met later for "ordinary and innocent food". The movement had spread "to the villages and farms", and some had left it "as much as twenty-five years" earlier, which takes Christian practice there back to about 85-90 CE. A hostile Roman official, who executed those who persisted and found "nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition", thus confirms that ordinary provincial Christians worshipped Christ as divine, matching from outside the picture in Paul's letters.