Loading...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).
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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 Paul, the Church had no mission.”[2]
That may be hard to believe, but in fact, if
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Thanks Dr Ehrman. Ulfilas (Note 3), I believe, converted the Germanic barbarians to Arian Christianity. Ultimately, that made a tremendous impact in that it kept Europe Christian, even after the Western Empire fell. I guess, over time, many of the Arians became orthodox which settled the ‘apple cart’ so to speak. I think Ulfilas’ contribution is rarely acknowledged. Without him, we might still be worshipping Wotan and Thor 😉
Bart,
The conversions of pagans were seemingly easy to acquire compared to converting the existing Jewish populations.
From the existing writings, the apostles never seem to gel as a coordinated team, but some of them (Peter and possibly Philip and Thomas) seemed to have garnered some recognition as evangelists. The other apostles faded away. I find it hard to believe that Peter, John, Philip and/or Thomas would have sought gentiles over jews for converts. Yet someone established a church in Rome before Paul arrived and it was not Peter. Is there any evidence that ANY of the 11/12 apostles would have abandoned Judaism as a requirement to ‘follow Jesus’?
If not, other than Paul+all Paul’s followers and possibly ‘John’, is there any evidence of any other 1st century missionary/evangelist who was known to have catered to the pagan populations and bypass Jewish requirements?
It seems to me, from reading between the lines in Romans 15 & 16, that Paul not only established churches, but he also established a broad missionary network that strategically targeted various major locations across the Mediterranean, organically growing the churches.
No, no evidence that any of the eleven left Judaism. And the only names of “evangelists” we have connected with the Gentile mission are Paul and his associates (with a few exceptions such as Simon Magus). Most people were converting not because of missionaries but because of regular ole Christians telling their family, friends, and neighbors about their new religion. (Just as today most people who convert to Mormonism is because of people they know, not the two guys who knocked on their door)
You forgot the most successful (and infamous) missionary of that time period, who was also from Pontus: Marcion!
Maybe you were only counting “proto-orthodox” Christian missionaries?
Yes, Marcion was important, absolutely, in the second half of the second century. It’s a bit hard to know, though, whether he was converting pagans or other Christians (i.e convincing them of his views). And presumably most Marcionites were converted not by him but by friends and neighbors who had joined his movement (as was true of the other forms of Xty as well.)
Dr. Ehrman, in the fundamentalist church I was in many years ago, there developed an emphasis in some circles on “grassroots evangelism,” encouraging everyone in the church to share their faith (which usually meant trying to convert people from other denominations). This was often presented as a necessary obligation of every Christian. One slogan was “‘go ye’ means go me.” Do you think the early Christians felt an obligation to share their faith, or was it just something that occurred more organically?
I wish we knew — we have so few records. But my sense is that there was an obligation (since they thought their families, friends, and neighbors were otherwise going to hell) but not one necessarily pushed the way it was/is in fundamentalist circles. So maybe both obligatory and organic?
This is probably somewhat outside your primary field of research, so I am not necessarily expecting a detailed answer, but I have often wondered about something related to the historical expansion of Islam.
Although Islam eventually became a strongly universal religion, it seems to me that, especially in its earlier centuries, it did not always emphasize missionary activity in the same way Christianity often did. In some respects, it even feels somewhat closer to Judaism in its strong communal and identity-forming character. Yet despite this, Islam spread with extraordinary speed across vast regions.
What I find especially fascinating is that, in many of the areas where Islam expanded, older religious traditions — including Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and in some places even Buddhism — gradually diminished or disappeared. I realize that the process was undoubtedly complex and varied from region to region, but I often wonder what combination of social, political, economic, and religious factors made such a large-scale transformation possible………
How would Christianity compare to secret cults in that way? Weren’t many of them actively proselytizing and trying to gain new members? Why did they fail where Christians succeeded?
It doesn’t appear that members of the “mystery religions” were particularly evangelistic, at least in the same way as Xns. As with all ancient religions, the devotees of one god or another were happy for others to join their amazing and beloved cult, but there was little reason to be persuasive about it since all the gods deserved worship.
This is very enlightening. You are saying that Christianity was promoted informally, contrary to door-to-door. I grew up being taught that door-to-door was the man and most important form of preaching the news as instructed by Jesus in Luke 10. Of course, I now know that Luke 10 was written after Paul’s letters. Great post.
I think this social-network model makes a lot of sense and helps correct modern assumptions about organized missionary campaigns in the early church.
One complement to the picture comes from the sociologist Rodney Stark, who argued that Christian communities may also have grown because their moral practices became visible within those same networks, especially during times of disease, poverty, and social instability. People did not only hear Christian claims; they experienced Christian care.
I find Stark’s point about epidemics especially moving: when those with enough wealth could leave a disease-stricken city, Christians often stayed to care for the sick who were left behind. That involved real cost, and possibly real danger. In a world that so often protects itself first, that contrast still feels sharp and not only as history.
The social explanation does not reduce Christianity to “nothing but” sociology. The historical mechanism and the truth-question are related, but not identical.
Yes, I’ll be talking about Starks in future posts. It’s an intriguing argument (health care, etc.), but I don’t think it works.
The Ten Commandments prohibit idolatry, and Judaism and Islam still seem to observe this prohibition quite strictly. Since Christians also generally respect the Ten Commandments, I have often wondered how many Christian traditions came to accept images and statues of Christ.
I understand that Christians often explain this by saying they are not worshiping the image itself, but using it to remember, honor, or focus on Christ. At the same time, as someone looking at this from the outside, I sometimes find the distinction difficult to understand, since people in other religious traditions, in Buddhism and even in Canaanite religion, might also say that their images function as representations rather than objects worshiped in themselves.
So my question is not meant as criticism, but as a genuine historical and theological question: how did Christians come to distinguish acceptable images of Christ from what they regarded as idolatry? Did this distinction develop gradually?
I have also wondered why much Christian art depicts Jesus as long-haired, bearded, and almost Anglo-Saxon-looking. Is this mainly the result of later European artistic tradition, especially since this image seems different from both the historical Jesus and typical Roman men?
I think pretty much for the reasons you say. The problem with idols is not that they were statues but that they were worshiped. Ancient Christians opposed to idolatry did not worship statues of God or Christ.
Since other religions have also made lots of converts, maybe there is something about humans that leads them to seek what religions and groups have to offer them.
A question about these early Christians: There are many many examples, all the way back to supposed sayings of Jesus that describe the church as a nuclear family in different ways. In some, the whole church is Jesus’ future spouse. In others, Christians are said to be brothers and sisters.
I am interested in the latter one. If Christians are siblings ‘in Christ’, is Jesus a fellow sibling? A parent? Or absent from this doctrine?
The idea, I think, is that he is THE “son of God” and his followers are also now sons and daughter of God because of him.
Trouble stalked the Apostle Paul. All that he wanted to do was to travel from town to town to the Jewish synagogues and to share his testimony. When he said that the Jews were not God’s favored people, the reaction was violent. This violence generated controversy. Controversy generated publicity. Publicity generated “converts”. Believe it or not, Paul said that organized religion was not God’s Plan. Paul said that there is no “Plan of Salvation”. Of course, Paul said that the Greek gods were myths, too. That generated controversy. That was perceived as a type of “atheism”. That generated controversy. Paul said that only one GOD existed, and this deity has a moral law for everyone. The Creator-God has jurisdictional authority over every person without discrimination for race, wealth, gender, slave or free, etc. In the Greco-Roman Hellenistic culture, that was as controversial as proclaiming Intelligent Design and Binary Genders in today’s culture. Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne are called racist bigots for claiming that evolutionary biology produces sexual identity. Controversy generates publicity. Publicity generates “converts”.