I return now to Roman historian Keith Hopkins’s fascinating and influential article “Christian Number and Its Implications.”   As I pointed out, for the sake of his article, and after checking it out for plausibility, Hopkins accepts the calculations of Rodney Stark that if Christianity started with 1000 believers in the year 40 CE, and ended up being 10% of the empire (6 million believers) by the time of the Emperor Constantine, you would need a growth rate of about 40% per decade, or, as Hopkins prefers putting it 3.4%). ****************************** Obviously, as I’ve stated, but need to stress again, we cannot be and are not really thinking that there was a steady rate of growth, that every year there was the same percentage of increase.   We’re talking big numbers over a long range of time, so the *average* rate of growth is just that, an average.  Some years there may have been a loss of numbers, other years a huge spike.  So take that as given.  But if we *were* talking about [...]

I have started discussing the fascinating article by Keith Hopkins, “Christian Number and Its Implications” (see my last post).   After discussing some of the problems with knowing how to “count” Christians (i.e., who counts as a Christian), he reflects for a bit on the problems presented to us by our sources of information.   The basic problem is that our sources don’t *give* us much information!   No one from the early Christian church was a statistician and no one kept records of how many people were being converted.   And the comments we find that are of any relevance turn out to be so broad, generalized, and suspicious as to be of no use to us at all. Sometimes, a source will give numbers, but they clearly cannot be trusted.   Take the book of Acts.   This is our first account of early Christianity, and, of course, became the “canonical” account.   According to Acts 2 (this and the following are examples that *I’m* giving; they are not found in Hopkins), just 50 days after Jesus’ death, on the [...]

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. ******************************   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, [...]

One scholar (Rodney Stark, mentioned in my previous post) calculated the rate of growth of early Christianity to be about 40% per decade from the very beginning to about the time of the conversion of Constantine.  There is nothing implausible about a religion growing that quickly per se; the Mormon church did for most of its history until recently.  But there are problems with it and I deal with these in my book Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018).   I continue the discussion here. ****************************** The problems with Stark's rate of growth come at the beginning of the period and the end.  In particular, we we need to figure out how to get from twenty Christians in 30 CE to some hundreds in 60 CE (it's way more than 40%).  The rates of growth will be relatively high early on. Moreover, the rates will almost certainly need to be lower at the tail end of the period.   Suppose we are right that there might be as many as three million Christians in the [...]

One of my favorite parts of my book Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018) is the Appendix, where I explain how to figure out how quickly early Christianity grew.  Did thousands of people convert in the first months of the religion (as in the book of Acts)?  Were there millions of Christians by the second century?   How can we know?  Or can we know? For some reason, even though I'm not a serious math guy, I've found the question interesting just on the level of the numbers.   Unusually intriguing, in fact.  Here's how I talk about it there. ****************************** In 1996 Rodney Stark published a book for general audiences called The Rise of Christianity.[1]  In it he explained sociological factors that, in his judgment, led to the triumph of Christianity in the Roman world.  The book was not well received by experts in the field of early Christian studies, who noted numerous flaws in Stark’s reasoning and, especially, in his uncritical use of ancient sources.[2] But even though Stark is not a historian of ancient [...]

Most of us have never reflected on how awful, difficult, and heart-breaking it must have been for many, many people in the Roman world see their cherished and meaningful religions destroyed in front of their eyes by the ongoing triumph of Christianity.  But it's worth thinking about.  Here is how I discuss it in the final part of the  Introduction to my book The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018). ****************************** Nowhere in modern times have the losses occasioned by clashes of religions and cultures crystalized more dramatically than in the city of Palmyra, Syria, where, in 2015, representatives of ISIS captured the city, executed a number of its inhabitants, destroyed archaeological remains, and ravaged its antiquities, torturing and beheading their chief conservator.  Nothing of equal savagery has ever affected the site.   But this is not the first time Palmyra endured an assault by religious fanatics who found its sacred temples and the holy objects they contained objectionable.  For that we need to turn the clock back seventeen hundred years. The [...]