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How Many Churches? How Many Letters?

In his important and stimulating article, “Christian Number and Its Implications,” Roman historian Keith Hopkins next begins to think about the implications about the size of the Christian church at different periods.  One point to emphasize is that there was not simply one church.  There were lots of churches in lots of places, and it is a myth to think that they were all one big cohesive bunch.  On the contrary, they were often (as we see in our records) often at odds with each other. But even more than that, even within one city – if it was large enough (think Rome or Antioch for example) there would have been more than one church.  And why?  Because there would have been too many people to meet in one place. The first time we have any evidence of a church “building” – that is, what we today normally think of as a church (the Baptist church on the corner; the Methodist church up the street) – is not until the middle of the third Christian [...]

How Significant Was Early Christianity?

I return now to Roman historian Keith Hopkins’s fascinating and influential article “Christian Number and It’s 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 (60 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 a steady rate, there [...]

Whom Do We Consider a Christian?

Who counts as a Christian?   When I was a hard-core evangelical at Moody Bible Institute, we had a pretty clear and straightforward answer:  if you have not been born again and accepted Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, you were not a Christian.  No matter what you believed or where you worshiped or how you lived. This meant, among other things, that most people who called themselves Christian were not really Christian.   Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians – most of them were not really Christians.  Roman Catholics were certainly not Christians.   Greek Orthodox?  Not even close.  Mormons?  You gotta be kidding. At the time I knew people who had an even more rigorous definition: if you did not know the exact day and hour in which you had accepted Christ as your Lord and Savior, then you hadn’t done so, and were not saved.   Some were even more strict: you not only had to have accepted Christ, you had to have been baptized by immersion – dunked in the water, as an adult.  Anyone who had not [...]

Playing with the Numbers (of Christians)

I have been musing on the rate of growth of the Christian church during the first three hundred years, and have pointed out some problems with Rodney Stark’s discussion.   I won’t go over all that again here.   I will say that his argument tends to be very convenient for his … argument.  What he points out is that a growth rate over time of about 40% grows the church from about 1000 Christians in the year 40 (that’s a number I find problematic) gets you to about 6 million Christians in the year 300, and that is almost exactly the rate of growth of the Mormon church since it was started in the 19th century.  Stark is an expert on the Mormon church, from a sociological perspective; and so it is not surprising that he is particularly drawn to this statistic. But if you crunch the numbers a bit more realistically, there still is sensible set of figures that emerge.  If, as the NT actually indicates, Christianity started out with about 20 of Jesus’ followers [...]

How Many Christians Were There?

There are a lot of things that I’m really very interested in that I’m not very good at.  As a kid I was passionate about baseball.  I was an All Star every year up to high school, but I really wasn’t all that great.  I was just better than most of the other kids, who *really* weren’t great.  It was a rather low bar.  Same with tennis.  Same with a lot of things – even into adulthood. As an adult I’ve long had an attraction to numbers, but I’m not very good at them.  I’m fascinated by them, but I can’t work out much of any kind of sophisticated mathematical formula to save my soul.  That’s why last week I asked for some help on the blog.  I needed someone to come up with a formula for me to crunch some numbers.   And several people obliged.  Many, many thanks to all who helped.  I’m very much in their debt.  It’s amazing to me the kinds of expertise that are out there.  Some of my respondents [...]

The Rate of Christian Growth

I have been discussing the fascinating article by Keith Hopkins, “Christian Number and Its Implications,” about how many people converted to Christianity at certain points of time (say, from ten years after Jesus’ death to the time the emperor Constantine converted in the year 312).  As we have seen so far, the first problem Hopkins deals with is how to count – that is, who counts as a Christian?  Hopkins takes the (in my opinion) justifiable and sensible view that if someone considered themselves to be a follower of Jesus (whether they were proto-orthodox, or Sethian, or Marcionite, or Ebionite, or anything else) they should be counted. The second problem, as we have also seen, is that our sources don’t give us any reliable statistics, or indeed statistics of any kind.  Instead, our sources (and, by the way, without sources we have no evidence, only guess work, even if it is educated guess work) are highly prone to exaggeration.  And so the book of Acts indicates that within a couple of months, some 8000 Jews [...]

Paul in a Nutshell and NT Views of Crucifixion: Readers Mailbag May 13, 2016

In this week’s Readers Mailbag I will deal with two rather massively significant questions, one on the life and message of Paul and the other on the different understandings of Jesus crucifixion in the New Testament. If you have any question(s) you would like me to address in the future, let me know! *******************************************************************   QUESTION: I am wondering what you would consider the most important things to know about the Apostle Paul.   Sometimes when I am forced to give a succinct answer to a question, it can have a lot of value.  So while I will be going into some depth in the Sunday School class, including referencing some of your work, I would love to hear your expertise on Paul distilled into a brief summary (if at all possible).   RESPONSE: Right!  Obviously some scholars have written very long books on Paul’s life, message, and mission.  So, let me give here the very basic essentials, as I see them, in bullet point form. Paul started life as a highly religious Jew, zealous to [...]

Trolling Advice!

Dear Readers and Fans of the Blog: I have gotten a number of comments/complaints about trolling and thought I should just tell you my policy in case you think I should change it.   I have two competing principles that I try to keep in balance on the blog.  On one hand, I want readers to say what they really, genuinely think and to have a chance, then, to air their views.  On the other hand, I don’t want simply to post snide comments by people trolling.  And so the rather informal policy I’ve adopted is to post negative comments (so that I’m not censoring) two, three, or four times as they come to me; after I’ve had enough, I warn the person; after that I simply don’t post their comments. Does that sound reasonable?  Or do you think I should (a) simply not post negative comments; (b) post absolutely every negative comment I get; or (c) something else? The reason I’m concerned is that you, the readers, drive the blog, and are its raison d’être.   [...]

2016-05-11T08:34:25-04:00May 11th, 2016|Public Forum|

Help!!

Is anyone on the blog a professional mathematician or statistician?  (I'm not looking for someone who's good with numbers but with someone who makes a living out of it.)  If so, and you'd be willing to help me out with a question that probably any sophomore in high school could handle, could you send me a private email at [email protected] ?

2016-05-10T13:11:05-04:00May 10th, 2016|Public Forum|

Who Counts as a Christian?

To start on my reflections on the rise and spread of Christianity, it might be useful to talk for a while about a particular article that has been highly influential both for my own thinking and more broadly in the contemporary discussion among scholars.   The article was written by a prominent and deservedly acclaimed British historian, Keith Hopkins, a long-time professor at Cambridge University.  It was called “Christian Number and Its Implication,” and it appeared in the Journal of Early Christian Studies in 1998. Hopkins begins his article by reflecting on the fact that it’s very difficult to know even what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the numerical growth of Christianity.   For one thing, what are we going to count as Christianity and whom are we going to count as Christians?  Do we count only those who hold to the views that later came to be the dominant understanding of Christianity, for example, that there is only one God, or that Christ was both human and divine at one and the same time, [...]

My Progress on the Book

I’m at one of my favorite points in the writing process for my next book.  Maybe it’s not right to say I’m at a point in the “writing,” since I haven’t written a word yet and won’t be writing a word for a while.   But writing is so much more than actually hammering out words on a keyboard.  The huge bulk of the work involves doing the research.   And I’m at one of my favorite points just now, the long transition period between one phase of reading and another, preparatory to the writing itself. I’ve described various aspects of my writing process before, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever explained how I sequence my reading for a new project.   For me, it’s a two-stage sequence.  I’ll explain it in reference to the current book on the Christianization of the Empire (I’ve been calling it the Triumph of Christianity, but I’m not sure I’m happy with the title any more.  Doesn’t matter.  A book’s title is like the interior trim on the house you’re building [...]

2020-04-09T13:22:03-04:00May 9th, 2016|Book Discussions, Public Forum|

Life After Death in Rome, and other Questions. Readers’ Mailbag May 6, 2016

In this week’s Readers Mailbag I address three rather divergent questions, one on ancient tombstone inscriptions that indicate that many people in the ancient world did not believe in an afterlife, one on the Temptation narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and one on the process of having a book edited in preparation for publication.  If you have a question you would like me to address, just ask – and I’ll add it to the list!   QUESTION: I’m curious…what sort of “inscriptional evidence” on ancient tombstones would seem to rule out belief in an afterlife? RESPONSE This question was asked in response to something I said, that even though in ancient Greek and Roman mythology there are discussions of the afterlife (e.g., in the Odyssey, book 11; Plato’s Myth of Er in book 10 of the Republic; and so on), there are reasons for thinking that most (or at least many?) people in antiquity believed that life was the end of the story.  And I indicated that this is because of inscriptions [...]

The Conversion of Constantine and Beyond

I am now nearly finished discussing the Prospectus that I floated before several publishers this past summer for my new book The Triumph of Christianity.   My original idea, as you will see below, was to start with the earliest disciples of Jesus, right after his death, who came to think he had been raised from the dead – I’m happy to call them the “first Christians,” even though a lot of scholars object to calling anyone “Christian” until much later; I just don’t have those qualms – and to discuss the spread of Christianity up to the key moment in history, the conversion of the emperor Constantine nearly three hundred years later in the year 312 CE.  Constantine’s conversion, in this way of looking at things, was the turning point.  After that, the Empire was on the path to becoming Christian. I have since changed my mind and decided to go past Constantine up to the end of the fourth century.  But before explaining that, here is how I end my original Prospectus. ***************************************************************** The [...]

Final Exam for New Testament Class (2016)

Let’s see how you do on my Final Exam!   Yesterday I gave the final for my Introduction to the New Testament class.   Here it is.   My sense is that as for every course, unless you actually take it, even if you know a good bit about the subject matter, it would be very hard to do well on the final, since, well, the final is geared specifically to the course.   But some of this is more or less “common knowledge” for those well versed in the field. The exam had three sections that were equally weighted: the first is a string of identifications, the second and third were essays.   I allowed some choice in what to answer to provide some flexibility.   Students had three hours to complete the exam.  Some students finished in an hour and a half, a few stayed till the very end. So … how would you do?   ****************************************************************************** Reli 104 New Testament  Bart D. Ehrman Spring 2016   Final Exam   IDENTIFICATIONS Define ten of the following terms in fifty [...]

2017-11-13T21:00:38-05:00May 3rd, 2016|Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

Why Christianity Succeeded

I have been laying out the Prospectus for my proposed book The Triumph of Christianity that I circulated to several publishers last summer, and I am now at the very heart of the matter, the explanation (as I saw it then) for why Christianity succeeded so massively in the Empire during its first three centuries. Here is what I said: ****************************************************************** There were two key factors specific to Christianity that facilitated the growth of the Christian church. These two factors could not be found in other religions of the empire. And in tandem – this is a very important point: they worked in tandem – they led to the spread of Christianity and the demise of all the other religions of the empire. The factors: Christianity was evangelistic and it was exclusivistic. Religions in antiquity were not evangelistic, in part precisely because they were not exclusivistic. A broad survey of ancient writings makes it completely clear: most people did not much care whether you adopted their religious practices or not. No one insisted that you [...]

My Debate with Richard Bauckham – Round 2

Here is round two (two out of two) of my debate with Richard J. Bauckham join on the radio show "Unbelievable," a weekly program aired on UK Premier Christian Radio and hosted by Justin Brierley.  Richard was in the station's London studio, I was on the phone.   Here we pursue other issues related to whether the Gospels of the NT represent distorted memories or if, for the most part, they can be trusted to be reliable because they are based on eyewitness testimony.  Richard and I disagree about the matter, as about oh so many other things! Richard J. Bauckham is a prominent New Testament scholar and professor emeritus of New Testament studies at St. Mary's College, University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He retired from teaching in 2007 to pursue his research and writing. Please adjust gear icon for 1080p High-Definition:

2017-11-13T21:00:57-05:00May 1st, 2016|Bart's Debates, Public Forum, Video Media|

The Death of Paul in Acts and Unrelated Topics: Readers’ Mailbag April 29, 2016

I will be dealing with three very different questions this week in my Weekly Readers’ Mailbag:  why does the book of Acts not narrate the deaths of Peter and Paul; what is the difference between the Day of Atonement and the Passover; and how I dealt with discrepancies and contradictions when I was an evangelical Christian in college.  If you have any questions for me to address, pass them along!   QUESTION: If Acts was written after 75 CE why do you think Acts doesn’t contain details of Paul’s and Peter’s deaths?   RESPONSE: I get asked this question a lot – maybe five times this month!  I’m not sure why.  But it’s something people seem to be interested in, and in part that’s because some conservative evangelical scholars want to claim that Acts was written before Paul’s death in around 64 CE (since otherwise the author would “surely” have narrated his death), and that therefore Luke’s Gospel (written by the same author) was written before then, so that both Luke and Acts are nearer [...]

The Early Growth of Christianity

I continue here the brief overview of the book that I’m now working on, The Triumph of Christianity.  To this point I have identified the problem that the book is trying to resolve (how Christianity grew from a small group of illiterate Jewish peasants from Galilee to becoming something like 10% of the entire Roman Empire within 300 years), some of the earlier attempts to solve the problem, and one of the fundamental issues involved, the movement from being a Jewish sect to being a gentile religion. Now I get more to the heart of the matter.  The first section below talks about how quickly the religion would have had to grow from the time of its founding to become such a large religion by the early fourth century; the next section begins to deal with the issue of how it all happened. Again, this is all lifted directly from my original Prospectus.  Whether the book will end up being structured like this is, well, anyone’s guess…. ********************************************************************* The Rate of Growth of the Christian [...]

From Jewish Sect to Gentile Church

I have been discussing and excerpting the Prospectus I wrote this last summer on my book that I have tentatively titled, The Triumph of Christianity.  Here I discuss the beginning of the Christian mission, and how “Christianity” went from being a small Jewish sect to being a large number of gentile communities (with special emphasis on the work of Paul). ************************************************************************* From Jew to Gentile: The Rise of Christianity (two chapters) This section will discuss the very early years of the Christian movement as it shifted from being a sect within Judaism to being a largely gentile religion, all within the space of about 50 years. By everyone’s reckoning, Christianity began among a group of Jesus’ Jewish followers who believed that he was the messiah of God.   In this section I will need to provide background to what the term “messiah” meant to ancient Jews.  I will not give an extensive account of Jesus’ life and teachings, only enough to show what his overarching message was and how he acquired adherents to that message during [...]

Roman Religion as the Context for Christianity

I have started to indicate how I laid out my prospectus for my next book The Triumph of Christianity, as I developed the idea this past summer.  Remember: the prospectus was designed to get a publisher (or hopefully more than one) interested in publishing the book, and was based on, and presupposed, already a good bit of research.   The prospectus was to show what the book was to be about, why it is both interesting and important, and how it would be, tentatively, be laid out. The qualifier, “tentatively,” is very important.  The book has to cohere from the outset.  But the reality is that as an author does more and more and more research, certain areas of interest emerge more clearly, and the final framing of the book is often quite different from the tentative sketch of the prospectus.  Still, it is important to give a publisher a good sense of what the book will look like – what it will argue and how it will argue it. In my previous posts I have [...]

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