Bart’s Public Blog that provides membership samples.
How Significant Was Early Christianity?
I return now to Roman historian Keith Hopkins’s fascinating and influential article “Christian Number and It’s 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 (60 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 a steady rate, there [...]