Loading...I’ve been discussing just how quickly early Christianity appears to have grown in the earlier centuries. Now the rubber hits the road. In this excerpt from my book Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018)I explain both what the rate of growth must have been and even more interesting — the main point for me, really — is how many Christians there were in the world at various points of time. I for one found and find the answers a bit surprising.
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Thus it appears that the beginning of the Christian movement saw a veritable avalanche of conversions.[3] Possibly many of these are the direct result of the missionary activities of Paul. But there may have been other missionaries like him who were also successful. So let’s simply pick a sensible rate of growth, and say that for the first forty years, up to the time when Paul wrote his last surviving letter, the church grew at a rate of 300% per decade. If the religion started with twenty people in 30 CE, that would mean there were some 1280 by the year 60. That is not at all implausible as a guess, but it is way too precise – so let’s just say 1000-1500 Christians. But growth cannot continue at that rate. If it did, a century later, in the year 160, there would be well over a billion Christians in the world.
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Dear Bart,
In one of your recent podcasts (https://youtu.be/r3h3FupiaU4?si=EyxDxP2eE7hB3xLW&t=663) you discuss how Tacitus has been interpreted by scholars when he claims that Christians were “the hatred of the human race”. You say you’re “not quite sure if that means the human race hated them or they hated the human race – I think it could be either one – most Scholars today seem to think he means that the Christians hated the human race”.
I’ve seen the minor view expressed by Martin Hengel and Joel Marcus, but their reasoning didn’t strike me as convincing. I discussed this with a colleague of mine who is a Latin (and Tactius) specialist, and he doesn’t think that Latin supports this interpretation, but he also rejects it on the grounds of what we know about Tacitus – he frequently charges others with misanthropy (especially the Jews) and it looks like he’s doing so again with the Christians.
I’d like to ask if you see any arguments in favour of the minor position that presents any difficulties for the majority view?
Many thanks.
It’s a simple grammatical question that you commonly find with genitives. Is odio humani generis a subjective or an objective genitive? Do Christians do the hating or receive the hating? Just as if I say “the love of God compels me to do this” do I mean God’s love for me or my love for God? Could be either way, grammatically. The only way to make the determination in every case like this (which is every case!) is context. I used to *assume* Tacitus must have meant “the human races hatred of the Christians” but in the context it almost cretainly meant “The Christian’s hatred of the human race”
Thanks, Bart – that’s very helpful.
I agree the context supports that interpretation, so I’m relieved I wasn’t barking up the wrong tree!
I do not think there were only twenty christians in 30 CE.
Paul’s conversion was about 3-4 years after that. Before his conversion he was a persecutor of the church, so it seems that the christians in the years between Jesus death and Paul’s conversion were already identified as a group and being persecuted. Also, since Paul’s conversion was in Damascus (Gal 1:17) it seems that by the time the cult was already established outside Galilee.
All this would be odd for such a small group.
On the other hand, I think 3 million christians in Constantine times is too much.
A relatively small but well-organized group could overcome entire empires, like the thousand of Greeks with Alexander that seized the Persian Empire (25 millions inhabitants) or the Russian communist Party that, being about 250,000, ended up ruling the Russian Empire (> 100 millions).
In the wake of the Great Persecution, Diocletian abandoned Nicomedia because it was ‘unsafe’, two mysterious fires in the imperial palace were too much.
By the beginning of the 4th century the christians were more dangerous for an emperor than the Praetorian Guard, and Constantine knew it.
The claim that Paul initially persecuted Christians is likely just a lie, and together with Paul’s later conversion to Jesus, they formed a literary technique of suppressing first and then promoting, aimed at enhancing the credibility of Jesus’ resurrection.
But we know that Jesus has absolutely no power to resurrect, so we know that this is just a complete lie.
It is highly likely that Paul was originally a fellow member, an unimportant member, which prevented him from attending the Last Supper.
I truly believe in Paul as a former persecutor of Jesus’ followers.
Paul would never have invented such a thing; in fact, I think his conversion did not happen after the ‘last’ appearance of the risen Christ to Paul (1 Cor 15:8). That is the lie.
It was when Paul realized how much the early Christians could endure that he decided to live on rather than persecute them (“If you can’t beat them, join them”).
The author of Acts says how Paul “was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women” (Acts 8:3). Is it an exaggeration? Paul is the real hero in Acts; what would be the reason for portraying him in such a bad way? Maybe there were memories of his brutality. The unknown ones who visited his Galatian church apparently knew about his days as a persecutor (Gal 1:23).
Paul’s affection for punishment did not change after his ‘conversion’; to his churches in Corinth he asked, “What do you wish? Shall I come to you with a rod, or with love in a spirit of gentleness?” (1 Cor 4:21)
My logic is as follows:
Because we know that Jesus could not appear to Paul at all, there is no reason for Paul’s transformation, so Paul was lying: he had not transformed at all, he had always been a member of Jesus’ team.
”we know that Jesus could not appear to Paul at all”
——– What you mean WE Kemosabe!
What you mean WE Kemosabe!
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It means me, charrua, and many others who agree with this.
You have to believe in reality
Just because a real resurrected Jesus did not appear to Paul does not mean that didn’t have a vision of a resurrected Jesus that he mistook as a reality. Certain people believe stuff that isn’t real all the time, including that they were abducted and probed by aliens.
2 Cor 10:4-6
Jesus told his brother Simon: “And he saith unto them, Come ye after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Simon dropped the net and followed him.
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If Simon followed Jesus, then the people he fished should be considered as those fished by Jesus. So is it possible that after Jesus taught him the skills, Simon himself led a small group to independently fish people?
So Jesus was the general manager of the headquarters, and Simon was the branch manager?
What Simon are you talking about?
Simon/Peter, the character in those literary works we call ‘gospels,’ depicted as Jesus’s first follower and the ‘rock’ for building the church (Matthew 16:18-19)?
Or Cephas/Peter, the man Paul met in Antioch, as it is written in Galatians?
For me, there is a BIG difference.
Cephas was a real, historical man referred to in a letter from a cult leader (Paul) trying to fix things in one of his communities of followers.
Now, read carefully Galatians 2:11-14.
How is it that the Great Peter (Cephas), the rock of the church, ‘DREW BACK and separated himself, FEARING the circumcision party’?
Who were the ones he feared so much? Just ‘certain men… from James.’
But, wait, those ‘men… from James’ did not know who Peter was? The rock, the number one in the apostles’ team! The first to join Jesus!
Cephas’s behaviour in Antioch is totally incompatible with the depiction of Peter in the gospels.
Bart once suggested that ‘Cephas may have been someone other than Peter,’ but most scholars did not agree (mainly because of John 1:42).
What I mean is that the dozen or so disciples of Jesus were likely not always by Jesus’ side, but rather divided into smaller teams to conduct business.
What I mean is that if we consider the dozen or so disciples of Jesus as mid-level personnel, they were likely to still lead low-level personnel.
These low-level personnel were unknown and not qualified to attend the Last Supper. I suspect that Paul may be a low-level personnel.
I think the key to the problem is realising that the gospel’s Peter is ONLY BASED UPON the historical Cephas.
The author of the Gospel of Mark (I think he was part of a Pauline community) created the so-called inner circle of apostles (Peter, James, and John) based upon Paul’s three pillars (James, Cephas/Peter, and John; Galatians 2:9), changing the historical James ‘the brother of Jesus’ for the fictional ‘son of Zebedee’ and downgrading him to a second place because of the differences that arose between Paul and the real James (a strict ‘judaizer’).
As many scholars have pointed out, the story of how Peter joined Jesus (Mark 1:16-18) was modeled upon the one recorded in 1 Kings 19:19-20 when Elisha met Elijah.
Was Peter really a fisherman?
Jesus says, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.”
I think it was the other way around; early Christians were in fact ‘fishers of men’ and so made Peter a fisherman—the historical Cephas had never cast a net in his life.”
Why is this so important to you? I may be missing something, but Paul was a good salesman and apologist. That is it.
You seem to use reasoning with conflation to fit a particular narrative.
It might be useful to look at the growth rates of more modern groups, such as the Mormons, to get a sense of how new religions grow. I wonder what the “event horizon” is: the threshold between growth rates too low to ensure long-term survival – new religions that just fizzle out – and the growth rates of religions that survive for the long haul
Yes, this is one of things that Rodney Stark and other sociologists of religion do. Stark was especially struck by the fact that the Mormon church had grown at roughly 40% per decade from its inception to the time of his writing, the same rate Xty would have had to grow over the first three hundred years.
how come 40 gospels were written and were the writers of the non-canonical gospels have a tradition about how persecuted they were? so were people saying “they were persecuted, why would they just make up stories about jesus…” ?
i think it was robert miller who said on myth vision that even the writers of the non-canonical gospels had tradition about how persecuted they were.
Persecution is not a topic dealt with in the non-canonical Gospels per se, though there may be occasoinal allusions to suggest it. (Off hand I’m trying to think of any such allusions and nothing just now is coming to mind; the Gospels are about the life and death and resurrection of JEsus rather than Xn persecutions.)
Interesting speculation. Was death rate considered in these calculations? If by 60 CE there are 1000-1500 Christians, I would assume there had to be a sizable number of Christians that died over 30 years. If factored into the equation, then the growth rate would have to be higher. Or am I missing something.
Yup, that’s the sort of thing sociologists contend with all the time when working out population growth figures…
There were no genuine Christians after AD135, when the last Hebrew bishop was booted out of Jerusalem. By then the center of power over the so-called ‘church’ had shifted to Rome. After the need for the gospel ended in AD70, the number of genuine, Israelite Christians would have been declining, not increasing. It’s the godless and powerless Greek form of Christianity that spread all over the world and destroyed entire cultures, not the authentic Israelite group of apocalyptic doomsday preppers that consisted of Jesus’ and Paul’s followers prior to AD70.
Seeing posts like this just make me cringe. The error is so blatant, but your scholarly pride and presentism prohibits you from seeing that authentic Christianity was not a single, linear, uninterrupted religion that began with a few Jews and became universal. Genuine Christianity was always an Israelite group. The metanarrative in the New Testament is about the gathering and restoration of the twelve tribes before the end of the age of the old covenant religious system and temple community. The metanarrative about people rejecting pagan gods and choosing the bible’s god came much, much later, long after the real Christianity had disappeared into obscurity.
Nero famously blamed the Christians for the great fire of 64AD. If there were only 1000-1500 christians in the world in 60AD, then how many could there have been in Rome and would that really be enough to be singled out like that? I think Nero’s accusation is generally understood to be a way of deflecting blame but that only works if the general population knew about the accused and in such a large city, I would have thought that a group of at most a few hundred would not be widely known.
It’s hard to know. When Paul writes a letter there a couple of years earlier, and greets 28 people individually (26 of them by name) and speaks in a couple of cases of their Christian families and of “churches” meeting in their homes. This was a church Paul had never visited yet, and these appear to be just the ones he knew about there. So it seems like there must have been (well?) over a hundred christians there at the time. It’s not clear how many Nero would have killed, but it’s not necessarily more than a couple of dozen (he names three modes of execution)
“twenty people in 30 CE”
this really sounds low but for devising your theory. …
From my naivete, I always assumed at Pentecost was a huge gathering as some attendees even began the “Church in Rome”, etc.
But having no idea how “Christianity” grew from 30-300, at least we get a viable theory from a best selling scholar!