More on conversions coming from miracle stories -- as reported by Christians, in their later legendary tales.  You might object (or probably will object) that if these tales are legendary, they don't show how people actually converted.  My point is not that these relate real events, but they show how Christians (the story tellers and authors) understood  how/why people converted, and it is striking that in virtually every case, it is precisely because of miracles, not other things.  (In my next post I'll talk about tales connected with actual historical figures).  Again, this is from my book Triumph of Christianity. ****************************** Once we move outside the New Testament the tales of conversion-inducing miracles continue.  Few are more intriguing than the conversion of the entire city of Edessa in Syria, allegedly because of miracles worked by Jesus’ follower Thaddaeus. In no small part the tale intrigues because it starts with Jesus himself, before his death, and a personal letter he sent to the king of Edessa, Abgar, in response to the king’s written request to be healed [...]

I've been arguing that Christians eventually converted the Roman empire because of their great miracles.  But, well, I'm an atheist and I don't believe in miracles. So how exactly does that square up?  How can miracles convert anyone if miracles don't happen? Well, as it turns out, it absolutely can happen (and it doesn't take a miracle!)  Before continuing on to demonstrate the centrality of miracles to the Christian take-over of the Roman world, I pause here for some reflection on how it works.... Again this is from my book Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), slightly edited. ****************************** How are we to credit the Christian stories of miraculous conversions?   Anyone who wants to accept these stories at face value will say they happened.  But what about anyone else?  Anyone, say, who doesn't believe in miracles? We are confronted with three inescapable facts, all of which need to be accounted for.   First, it cannot be denied that people did convert to the Christian faith, eventually in massive numbers.  Second, the early Christian accounts of [...]

Miracles.  Who woulda thought.... In previous posts I've given some of the common explanations people given to explain how Christianity ended up taking over the Roman world, all of which seem plausible (Christians attracted people because of their community life, better health care, etc) but, in my view, not sufficiently supported by the existing evidence.  I've also I've indicated that I have a decided view of the matter: that it was because of Christian "miracles."  That seems a bit odd for an atheist to argue, but, well, hear me out. Here I begin to explain it (this will take a couple of posts).  All this is taken, with minor edits, from my book Triumph of Christianity (Simon and Schuster, 2018), which makes the full case.  I begin with the paragraph that ended my previous post. ****************************** The best place to look for actual evidence of why Christianity succeeded are the actual accounts of conversions from the early church.  These are relatively abundant and scattered throughout the decades and centuries with which we are concerned.  Moreover, these [...]

One modern explanation for why Christianity overcame all the pagan religions of the Roman world is that it provided better health care than anyone else, leading to its greater survival rate.  I have to admit, when I first read about this, I thought "Whoa!  Never heard THAT one before!" It's an intriguing thesis and, I think, almost certainly wrong.  But intriguing nonetheless!  Here's what I say about it in Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), briefly edited for our purposes here. ****************************** One benefit of joining the church recently touted as particularly important for Christian growth was the availability of better health care.  This was one of the many controversial proposals set forth by sociologist of modern religion Rodney Stark, in his popular discussion, The Rise of Christianity,[1] Stark  applies his sociological training to the question and makes some intriguing suggestions.  He points out that epidemics swept through the Roman world on more than one occasion during the period that Christianity was gaining members.  The terrible plague that ravaged the empire during the [...]

On very rare occasions, pagan opponents of Christianity during the first three centuries commented on the movement, and in one case at least, explain why it was having some success in converting people.  Here is what I say about it in Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), lightly edited here. ****************************** The first extensive discussion of the Christian movement from a non-Christian source (not disinterested, of course!) comes from the end of the 170s. We do not have this source as a stand-alone document.  It is a book quoted, instead, by a Christian author, the great theologian Origen of Alexandria, who cited it precisely in order to refute it.  The book had been written by an otherwise unknown pagan intellectual named Celsus. Celsus’s work was called “The True Word.”  In it he assails Christianity as a foolish and dangerous religion that lacks all academic credentials and poses ominous problems, particularly because it leads people astray from traditional religions.  Celsus’s attack was direct and incisive.  He had read the Christian Gospels and with rapier-like wit [...]

In my earlier posts I tried to show that the two key factors in the success of Christianity in taking over the Roman world were that Christians (well some/lots of them), unlike everyone else in their world, were eagerly trying to make converts and insisted that anyone who accepted their religious beliefs and following their religious practices had to abandon the views/practices they had always had. That's not the view that scholars long held; and it's striking to me that -- unlike some other areas of historical study -- the older view still seems to be widely accepted for those who think it is just "common sense."  Here is how I talk about it in my book The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018). ****************************** Older scholarship was virtually unified on the question of why Christianity succeeded.  It filled the spiritual vacuum created by the collapse of paganism, which fell under its own weight.  At this point in antiquity, the view held, no one could any longer believe the ridiculous myths of the pagans or [...]

Did Christians hold massive evangelistic rallies?  Is that how they converted the Roman world?  Did they send out hundreds of missionaries to go door-to-door with  their good news?  Maybe use TikTok? Here I pick up on the question of how Christianity spread in the early centuries, from my previous post, with an excerpt again from Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018).   ******************************   Christians then, starting at least with Paul, came to be missionary, convinced they had to convert the world.  Goodman maintains it was Paul himself who came up with the idea.  He was the innovator, “the single apostle who invented the whole idea of a systematic conversion of the world, area by geographical area.”[1]   At the same time, this is what makes it so striking and unexpected that outside of Paul’s work itself, we do not know of any organized Christian missionary work – not just for the first century, but for any century prior to the conversion of most of the Empire.  As MacMullen has succinctly put it: “After Saint [...]

I just now got off the phone with a reporter for the London newspaper the Independent who is writing an article on new developments in our understanding of why Christianity spread so widely in the Roman world.  (The Independent is one of the few newspapers anymore that has some articles of substance in addition to the exciting and/or depressing news of the day, given with a decided slant.)  He wanted to know what new information, archaeological finds, and or analyses have appeared over the past seven or eight years and I had to tell him that, well, I didn’t know of any.  (!)  He was surprised, but suggested a few things he had come across (“Christians had better health care/community support” etc), and I had to inform him those were old ideas. Not wanting to go away empty-handed, he asked me my views about the question, Why did Christianity take over the Roman world?  He knew I had written a book on it, but he hadn’t read it, so I went into my standard spiel [...]

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 [...]