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 day of Pentecost, the Spirit came upon the disciples and they preached in foreign tongues in some kind of open-air setting, and Jews from around the world heard them and came to believe.  How many Jews?  3000 became Christians that day.

A few days afterward, Peter and John are involved with a great miracle and Peter uses the opportunity to preach to the crowd, and he is remarkably successful.  5000 more Jews convert that day (Acts 4:4)

So here we are less than two months after Jesus’ death, and 8000 non-Christian Jews have converted to believe in Jesus, in Jerusalem.  Really?  Can that be right?

For starters: what was the population of Jerusalem at the time?   Some scholars have argued that it was 80,000, but that seems too high.  One fairly recent study argues that it could be as low as 20,000 (Hillel Geva, “Jerusalem’s Population in Antiquity: A Minimalist View,” Tel Aviv 41 (2013) 131–160).   Now, it is true, in the account of Acts 2, we are talking about converts from Jews who are visiting Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost, not necessarily Jerusalem locals.  But are we really to believe that 8000 Jews either living in or visiting a city of 20,000, or even 50,000, convert to Christianity in under two months?   And that there is no reference to this massive and cataclysmic change of religious commitments in any other source?  That seems highly unlikely.   Acts is inflating the numbers.

But how much?   Were *any* converts being made?  How would we know?

The problem continues later in the book of Acts.   In 21:20, Paul is told by the Christian leaders in Jerusalem that there are “many tens of thousands” (the literal translation of the Greek) of Jews who have become converted.   Again, that seems highly implausible.

Hopkins points to other exaggerations in other accounts.  For example, Paul, in his letter to the Romans (earlier than Acts), says that the gospel has been preached “to all the world” (1:18).  That of course is completely impossible.  By that time it had not been preached to every province of the Roman empire, let alone every city, let alone anywhere else.

Non-canonical Christian authors follow this pattern of exaggeration.   Around 200 CE, for example, the apologist Tertullian, from North Africa, indicates that there are more Christians than pagans in the world.  In his words, the Christians were “almost a majority in every city” (ad Scap. 2).  Or here is a little piece of remarkable rhetoric:

“We are but of yesterday, and we have filled every place among you – cities, islands, fortresses, towns, market-places, the very camp, tribes, companies, palace, senate, forum, — we have left nothing to you but the temples of your gods…   For if such multitudes of men were to break away from you and betake themselves to some remote corner of the world, why, the very loss of so many citizens, whatever sort they were, would cover the empire with shame…. You would be horror-struck at the solitude I which you would find yourselves…..  You would have to seek subjects to govern.  You would have more enemies than citizens remaining.  For now it is the immense number of Christians which makes your enemies so few, — almost all the inhabitants of your various cities being followers of Christ.” (Tertullian, Apology, ch 37).

Historians – whether experts in Roman history, in early Christianity, in anything else of relevance – do not think these statements can be credited for a second.   It Tertullian were right that the vast majority of the empire was Christian, why do we so rarely hear of it in pagan sources?   Why isn’t Christianity seen as a threat that needs to be dealt with?

When pagan sources do discuss Christians, they are always maligned as a small, secretive, exclusive group with no power, prestige, or, even, intelligent members.   They are not presented as a real and present danger, a threat to the religious or moral fabric of society.   Christians are portrayed as weird outcasts completely on the margins of society, lower class, inferior, ignorant, and in a tiny minority.

Even in other Christian accounts.  For example, there are a couple of accounts of real historical figures who were missionaries (only a couple, as I’ll point out!) from the third and fourth Christian centuries – Gregory Thaumaturgus (which is his nick-name: it means “wonder-worker” because he was thought to have converted the masses by doing amazing miracles) and Martin of Tours – who work to convert the pagans of their regions, and these accounts are quite straightforward: there are hardly any Christians around until these guys start doing their thing.

Moreover, we know from unambiguous archaeological evidence that paganism continued to thrive, with virtually no interruption from Christians, throughout the first and second and most of the third centuries.

So the Christian exaggerations (Acts, Tertullian) cannot be of much use in figuring out how many Christians there were at any period or how many people were converting.   Scholars such as Hopkins who want to crunch the numbers have to do it in other ways, as we will see in subsequent posts.