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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