I have pretty clear ideas about what it was about Christianity that made pagans want to convert to the faith, so that over the course of 300 years Christianity went from something like 20 people who believed Christ’s death is the only thing that could bring salvation (right after his immediate disciples came to think he had been raised from the dead) to some 5,000,000 around the time Constantine joined the church.

But most people find my views (I’ll restate/explain them in a later post) a bit hard to believe (OK: reminder/foreshadowing:  Miracles!) (really??) (yup!  I’ll explain).  There are other views that seem easier to digest, and one that has been very popular over the past years and decades continues to seem commonsensical to people today: once people learned how amazing it was to belong to a Christian community, they too wanted to join up.

I’ll admit, on the surface, it sure seems to make sense.  But … Here is how I discuss it in Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018).

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It is often thought and widely claimed that one of the main reasons pagans converted to Christianity was because of the inherent attractiveness of the church community.  Pagan civic cults did not involve much of any community.  They did entail ceremonies performed in public in the presence of others.  But there were no weekly community meetings, opportunities for fellowship, or planned times of discussion, reflection, and sharing of concerns.

That was different within Christianity.  Much like the Jewish synagogues out of which they grew, Christian churches entailed regularly scheduled weekly meetings.  Converting to become Christian was not an isolated individualistic affair, a matter of private spirituality.  It meant joining the church.  The church was not a place – there were no buildings for Christian gatherings until the middle of the third century, so far as we know.  Prior to then, and probably for a good while afterward, most churches met in private homes and in outdoor areas such as cemeteries.

Rather than being a place, the church was a community.  A tightly-knit community.   A community as tightly knit as the nuclear family.  In fact, Christians were often encouraged to replace their families with the members of their new community.  The founder or leader of the church was a “father”; fellow believers were “brothers” and “sisters” in one big family.  Moreover, these were self-consciously communities of mutual love and respect.  They provided material support for their needy members.  They provided moral support for everyone who came.

Such, at least, were the claims of Christians who wrote about the church.  Whether all this was entirely true is another question.  But numerous scholars have maintained that the obvious attractions of this kind of community would have drawn in outsiders, eager to join for the enormous social benefits.  Classical historian E. R. Dodds once claimed that the nature of the Christian community “was a major cause, perhaps the single cause, of the spread of Christianity.”[1]

Support for this view might seem to come from a comment by the late fourth-century Emperor Julian, known to history as “Julian the Apostate” since he abandoned his Christian faith to adopt and promote traditional pagan religions.  Julian was the only pagan emperor after Constantine; he ruled for nineteen months from 361-63 CE.  He was, in fact, Constantine’s nephew and had been raised in the church.  But he rebelled upon taking office and was intent to re-convert the empire to paganism, as we will see more fully in chapter nine.

In one of his letters Julian laments the success of the Christian church and attributes it to the benefactions that Christians bestowed on others, expressing his wish that pagan religions could follow the Christian example of community and communal giving.  In this citation he refers to Christians both as “atheists” – since they do not revere the gods – and “Galileans”:

Why do we not observe that it is their benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead, and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done most to increase atheism?  … It is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galileans support not only their own poor but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.

And so, it has been argued, Christian communal life ultimately attracted adherents.  There are, however, difficulties with this view.  For one thing, as a young man Julian himself had been actively involved in the church and so knew of its workings from the inside.  His was not an outsider’s report.  He may well have believed that charity drew people in, but it is striking that the advantages of church membership are never mentioned as a reason for conversion by any Christian on record.   As Adolf von Harnack concedes, for example, based on an exhaustive evaluation of all our literary sources: “We know of no cases in which Christians desired to win, or actually did win, adherents by means of the charities which they dispensed.”[2]

That is not to say that benefits did not accrue to those who came into the church.  On the contrary, there is good reason to suspect that numerous people found the Christian church very gratifying indeed, in no small measure for the social, emotional, physical, and intellectual benefits it bestowed.  But there is a difference between benefits that might encourage insiders to remain within the confines of the community and benefits that might entice them to join in the first place.  Keeping someone in is the not the same as bringing them in.

The early Christian churches were closed communities.  Outsiders were not allowed to join in worship services.  They did not know the inner workings of the church or the full advantages of what it had to offer.  Indeed, as we will see later, stories about what happened within Christian communities could be considerably repugnant, rather than attractive.   In short, we have little evidence to suggest that people widely, if at all, joined the church because of the communal benefits they would receive.  Something else probably made the Christian religion attractive.

 

[1] E. R. Dodds, Pagans and Christians in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine (New York: Norton, 1965) pp 137-38.

[2] Adolf Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, tr. James Moffatt (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908) vol. 2, p. 480.