Loading...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 soon after his death coming to believe that he was raised from the dead, and if, as historians widely assume, something like 10% of the empire was Christian when the emperor Constantine converted – so, 6 million people in the year 312 – the growth rate over the period needs to be 56% per decade. But here’s the thing: even if you assume there were, say 40 people who suddenly came to believe in Jesus’ death and resurrection in the year 30, the growth rate doesn’t change *that* much, just from about 56% to just under 53%.
I should stress that we’re talking about ballpark figures here. Suppose in fact there weren’t 6 million Christians in 312 but only, say, 5 million? The percentage of growth would instead of being just under 52% would be just under 52% per decade, or 4.25% per year. That means that every year, your 100 Christians need to introduce just about four more people into their church. That doesn’t seem at all implausible to me, especially for a missionary religion.
There are lots and lot of other factors to consider, though, and some of the blog’s readers have raised a number of them. For starters…
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About those families/slaves/dependents “really” being Christians… I can’t guess what you’re going to say. But I think there’s a big difference between children raised “from the cradle” as Christians, and family members or slaves who were adults – already holding different beliefs – when the head of the household converted. The children would probably grow up *believing* the new doctrines (whether or not they found anything appealing in them!); their elders probably wouldn’t. (And weren’t slaves sometimes able to buy their freedom?)
The NT doesn’t indicate that there were only 20 followers after Jesus death that soon came to believe in his resurrection. It indicates that there were well over 500. I mean, you may not accept that number, but that’s what it indicates.
The Gospels of course don’t say anything about a massive appearance to 500 (in fact, they seem to preclude it); that’s only in Paul. But Paul doesn’t indicate *when* this took place. In any event, I’m not taking it as a historical datum. He apparently has heard this somewhere, but it was not a tradition in wide circulation (otherwise we’d expect to see someone else mention it). The Gospels have only the eleven and a group of women believing right after Jesus’ death.
Dr. Ehrman, I can’t help feeling that you (and Rodney Stark) have been going about this the wrong way. It seems to me more like a logistical problem than a mathematical one. That is to say, when it comes to memetic spread (the speed and tenacity with which a new idea works its way amongst a population) there’s really two important variables: how fast one can pitch the idea (in units of time), and the probability of acceptance (from zero to 1). So if we assume that it takes on average one day to proselytize to one person in order to effectively pitch the Christian message, and if we assume that roughly 1 in 4 people pitched to will convert, then one missionary could conceivably convert one person every four days on average. At that rate 10 missionaries would become 3.2×10^130 missionaries in only one year! Now that’s growth. So, as you can see, the growth isn’t the mysterious part. It’s the starting parameters that are the question. That is, how much time on average did it take to pitch the message to someone and what were the odds they would convert? If you knew that, the rest is simply math.
Yes, I agree. One problem is that what we need to know is precisely what we don’t know. My sense is that very few people converted “on the spot,” but only after long conversations, debates, and reflection. But it’s hard to show, since in our sources, someone hears about Jesus and gives up everything he’s ever believed, cherished, and held dear for decades on the spot!
That’s the image we get of Jesus. But the image we get from Paul in Acts is that he argued and debated with people for hours if not days to convince them of the gospel message. And as we can see from his epistles, that message required constant reinforcement to prevent converts from slipping back into their old ways.
Sometimes, in Acts, but not always. People often convert on the drop of a hat (see ch 2 and 4:4). Myguess ist athit would take months of preparation in most cases.
Ehrman, are you enjoying working with all these numbers and equations? The number of variables makes this seem like quite a project. I do think, as you have alluded to, that considering all of the variables the Christian revolution was dynamic, but I am interested in comparing the picture painted in the rate of growth if we accept the NT account of there beginning mass conversions at the beginning.
Yes, I think the numbers are interesting because they put the project in a whole new perspective, and show us what we are actually looking at, even if our guestimates are very rough. (You can change the numbers and the rates and still get a basic sense, much better than when you just htink that thousands were somehow converting one day)
Your last two paras. hit the spot for me.
It’s all about contexts. In modern (?western) societies, especially when talking about evangelicals/fundies (even more mainstream?) conversion is a personal issue, i.e. a personal commitment, a belief, and so on. So we have adult baptisms into ‘the faith’ with individuals making personal decisions (whether of their own free will or not is another matter). Actually, PEW research et al tends to suggest that many Christains don’t know what they actually believe about their own religion. And my life experience tends to support this.
In the wider scheme of things it seems to me that this is not the case. I am in the UK, where we have a substantial number of different religions. Reliable and responsible media carry frequent reports of young people born into a religion and culture who, having been exposed to a different culture and questioning the religious beliefs they were brought up with, struggle to leave. In some religions, the penalty for apostasy is death.
Only a few hundred years ago, the penalty for being the ‘wrong sort’ of Christian was also death. This mindset continues today – amongst Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example.
But, I venture to suggest, this ‘personal commitment’ wasn’t a relevant factor – so if your husband, or ‘Lord and Master’ (not much difference) went Christian, so did you.
I suspect that it has always been thus. Near where I live are the hills from where the original blue stones which formed the original stone circle at Stonehenge were taken 200 miles to the Salisbury plain. The tribes which did it (a feat of stunning commitment) presumably believed in the same gods. Not much room for individuql commitment or dissension there. If you belonged to a tribe, you subscribed to their religion (but you could add a bit of your own if you wanted to revere great-granny).
I have no evidence whatsoever to support this view, but I suspect that conversion to Christianity was not such a big deal, perhaps it just meant adding another god to the ones you worshipped. Certainly not the ‘forsaking all others’ deal it may be today. (My previous post re modern day Cypriots happily accepting God and Aphrodite refer).
In Victorian (and earlier, I’m sure) England, ‘head of households’ would lead their family and servants to church services. I believe (but I can’t quote evidence) that in the US slave owners would ensure that slaves followed the ‘Christian’ path. Were the attendees ‘Christian’? Well, as a very smart guy once said ‘It depends which Gospel you read’.
Trying to put this into the context of the time – a generally misogynistic and very class-concious time – Paul and the other missionaries perhaps wanted to address the ‘heads of households’ and men of substance. And it seems that Paul had access to them (cf. his exploits in Paphos). Convert these men and you have them (who’d challenge them?), their family, their slaves, those who depend on them for a living. (And you don’t have to give up worshipping Aphrodite – some Cypriots never have).
Christians? No, probably not in the sense that your modern evangelicals would ever accept (but then, some wouldn’t accept unmarried people having sex) but in the historical scheme of things ‘Christians’ they surely were.
Sorry, Bart, these random thoughts probably don’t take your mathematical progress any further at all!
Very interesting. Thanks
You seems to posit lots of assumptions I’d say are incorrect. Christianity was not the kind of religion you could add to all the others you were devoted to. That seems to be something that happened more after Constantine converted. But in the early days Christians were being killed because of the very fact they would not admit to the worship of any other gods.
Also, I’ve heard that many slave owners in the day did not want their slaves having any religion.
This is really interesting. I had not thought about the effect of deaths nor of births into Christian families. The question gets complicated quickly, but I guess the main point is that the growth rate did not have to be huge and unbelievable. Obviously, one of the main things that many of us were taught about Christianity is that it must be true to have spread like it did. Hmmm?
It is important to consider how the WAY people became Christians changed over time. Early conversions would mainly be extremely sincere ones (whether you believe there was widespread persecution or not).
I think one of the factors the makes very rapid growth (in terms of percentage) in the earliest years a realistic possibility is that when there were only 20 Christians living in a city like Jerusalem, there are a lot of potential targets for conversion. By contrast, if you are living in a small city, and a large percentage of the city are converts already, there are far fewer people that could be converted. Moreover, the some percentage of the remaining non-Christians are likely to be particularly resistant to conversion. Thus, it seems that as Christians become a larger percentage of the population, the rate of growth has to slow. So, it may be that there was very rapid growth in the first decade (e.g., 500% per decade say from 20 to 1000 Christians between the years 30 to 40) followed by a period of more modest growth leading up to Constantine (around 40% growth for the ears 40 to 300), that further slowed.
Paul wrote in I Corinthians that Jesus appeared to Cephas, to The Twelve, then 500 brothers and sisters at the same time. Even if the numbers aren’t accurate, there’s the perception that it’s true. There could have been 1,000 Christians in the first year considering all of the excitement surrounding Jesus’ death: people are having visions and other types of spiritual experiences, miracles stories are circulating, he’s quickly obtaining divine status, he’s coming back soon to bring justice….lots of attractive qualities, especially to women and the poor.
I’m sure I don’t have the full picture of how Stark arrives at his numbers because I haven’t read his book, but it looks like a mess to me. Mormonism is not quite 200 years old and is an offshoot of Christianity which has endured for nearly 2,000 years. Christianity makes up 32% of the world’s population. The growth rate seems irrelevant in the long run. Over half of the world’s religious population is tied to Jesus Christ in some way. Does Stark say anything about that?
If Mormonism grows at the rate that it grew since the 1830s, then in a century or so it *will* be half the population of the U.S.
If the Pew Survey is correct, Christianity as a whole has declined by 8% and will continue to do so. I wonder if this has ever happened before in our country. That puts us in a unique position in history. I definitely feel the oddness of our time and place with religion, politics, civil liberties, etc… I don’t even know what’s happening sometimes.
I don’t think we know what it was really like for people when he died–for how many and how they reacted. Jewish messianic expectations did not include the notion that he’s be divine and being resurrected does not make one divine. The first time we know of anyone attributing divine qualities to the risen Christ is about the year 50, from Paul. He apparently had his vision much earlier–just a few years after Jesus’ death–and says he received his Gospel from others (which Bart believes). But from whom and from how many? If Jesus had been performing miracles during his life, people would already have been talking about them so would that have been part of the “excitement surrounding Jesus’ death”? Or do you just mean the miracles of the reported resurrection? Did people soon after his death believe he would return soon to bring divine justice? I don’t think we know that. I think the main response to his crucifixion would have been astonishment and depression over for most Jews who had admired him and believed him to be the messiah. And how many people would have believed the few stories about him being resurrected?
Besides growth resulting from personal evangelism, what role might the text driven/bookish nature of Christianity (especially during the latter part of the 300-year period under investigation) have contributed to the stats/spread of Christianity?
Not sure! I’m interested in both issues, but I’m not sure if/how they are related.
The mass conversion numbers in Acts do seem exaggerated when you stop and think about it, but are you going to be ruling these out altogether? There are, after all, more modern stories of mass conversions, like during the preaching of Charles Finney. I think some of those stories are also probably exaggerated but I, myself, became a Christian (now, ex) during the Jesus movement of the 70’s so I know from personal experience that these things do happen.
True! But then again, Finney was preaching to people from a Christian environment, very different from the context of early Christian preaching.
When Paul started persecuting Christians, surely there had to be enough of them around to make him take notice. I would think somewhere in the hundreds. And wasn’t this in the first couple of years?
My sense is that he converted about three years after Jesus’ death. So yes, there would have to be enough of them — presumably outside of Palestine — to be recognized as a nuisance and/or problem.
And therefore worthy of persecution.
Wow! That’s VERY interesting. That suggests that the two dozen or so (/) followers of Jesus who came to believe in his resurrection were very effective in persuading others of their belief, and that either they themselves traveled outside Palestine or they brought over to their cause others who did.
Anyway, it seems from Paul’s letters that the number of churches, with lets guess dozens of members, was large enough to get Christianity into the tens of thousands decades later just with the miracle of compounding and a modicum of proselytizing. So if one asks “why did this religion succeed when most fail?” the answer must focus in on the first decade after the crucifixion. And what’s most puzzling about that, and essential to the success, is how these ill-educated (well, the ones we know about) Aramaic Jewish peasants managed to appeal to people like Paul–Greek speaking, educated, and diasporic, if that’s a word.
The breakout from Galilee into Jerusalem and thence to parts north–that’s the great puzzle. Once that happened, the road to being big enough to bring Constantine on board was not obstacle free, but already well under construction. (Or so it seems to me at the moment, but knowing as little as I do, it’s easy to tell a just-so story.)
considering how news and rumors travel before tv and internet. Story: When I was in 2nd grade over one spring weekend a kid that didn’t attend my school playing on some of the playground equipment(1977 safety standards mind you) fell and died. On Monday it was told to me on the Bus then at school then so-on and so-on. I would assume most news and rumors moved at similar speed in Roman times as a kids elementary school social structure. At death sure the count was 20-40 but soon as the word spread of the death alone to the many the encountered Jesus in the form of gatherings like attendees of the loaves and fishes, already baptized, Mt. side teachings and Temple leaders Jesus exclaimed to. Interactions after his death would sound “remember that guy that feed us last year, he died and 3days later returned from the dead”. Seems to me that weeks later even before ascending he’d have tens of thousands of followers. If ofcourse it all happened exactly as the Bible tells us it did.
Does archaeology help at all? Are there known Christians tombs that could give a hint?
Ah, wish that it would help. We don’t start getting significant material remains till the third century, unfortunately.
Ironically perhaps, here in the UK we’ve just passed a significant milestone as the numbers go the other way, and just as dramatically:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/23/no-religion-outnumber-christians-england-wales-study
wow.
Conversation then as now probably was emotional and symbolic: Reminds me of a bumper sticker that I saw today that seems to say it all: God, Guns, and Guts