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Heartache and Loss: When a Religion is Destroyed
Most of us have never reflected on how awful, difficult, and heart-breaking it must have been for many, many people in the Roman world see their cherished and meaningful religions destroyed in front of their eyes by the ongoing triumph of Christianity. But it’s worth thinking about. Here is how I discuss it in the final part of the Introduction to my book The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018). ****************************** Nowhere in modern times have the losses occasioned by clashes of religions and cultures crystalized more dramatically than in the city of Palmyra, Syria, where, in 2015, representatives of ISIS captured the city, executed a number of its inhabitants, destroyed archaeological remains, and ravaged its antiquities, torturing and beheading their chief conservator. Nothing of equal savagery has ever affected the site. But this is not the first time Palmyra endured an assault by religious fanatics who found its sacred temples and the holy objects they contained objectionable. For that we need to turn the clock back seventeen hundred years.
August 25, 2024
The Conversion of the Emperor Constantine
Constantine was the first Christian emperor. In my book The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), I devote two chapters to how, when, and why he converted (and if he did!), and to what difference it made to the world. Here is a taste of it for those of you interested in checking out the book. And for those of you who are not. ****************************** Few events in the history of civilization have proved more transformative than the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity in the year 312 CE. Later historians would sometimes question whether the conversion was genuine. But to Constantine himself and to spiritual advisors close to him, there appears to have been no doubt. He had shifted from one set of religious beliefs and practices to another. At one point in his life he was a polytheist who worshiped a variety of pagan gods — gods of his hometown Naissus in the Balkans, gods of his family, gods connected with the armies he served, and the gods of Rome itself. At […]
August 27, 2024
How Fast Did Early Christianity Grow? Doing the Math
One of my favorite parts of my book Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018) is the Appendix, where I explain how to figure out how quickly early Christianity grew. Did thousands of people convert in the first months of the religion (as in the book of Acts)? Were there millions of Christians by the second century? How can we know? Or can we know? For some reason, even though I’m not a serious math guy, I’ve found the question interesting just on the level of the numbers. Unusually intriguing, in fact. Here’s how I talk about it there. ****************************** In 1996 Rodney Stark published a book for general audiences called The Rise of Christianity.[1] In it he explained sociological factors that, in his judgment, led to the triumph of Christianity in the Roman world. The book was not well received by experts in the field of early Christian studies, who noted numerous flaws in Stark’s reasoning and, especially, in his uncritical use of ancient sources.[2] But even though Stark is not a historian of ancient […]
August 28, 2024
How Many Early Christians Were There and When? Crunchin’ the Numbers
One scholar (Rodney Stark, mentioned in my previous post) calculated the rate of growth of early Christianity to be about 40% per decade from the very beginning to about the time of the conversion of Constantine. There is nothing implausible about a religion growing that quickly per se; the Mormon church did for most of its history until recently. But there are problems with it and I deal with these in my book Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018). I continue the discussion here. ****************************** The problems with Stark’s rate of growth
August 29, 2024
How Many Christians Were There in 100 CE? 150? 250? 300?
I’ve been discussing just how quickly early Christianity appears to have grown in the earlier centuries. Now the rubber hits the road. In this excerpt from my book Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018)I explain both what the rate of growth must have been and even more interesting — the main point for me, really — is how many Christians there were in the world at various points of time. I for one found and find the answers a bit surprising. ****************************** Thus it appears that the beginning of the Christian movement saw a veritable avalanche of conversions.[3] Possibly many of these are the direct result of the missionary activities of Paul. But there may have been other missionaries like him who were also successful. So let’s simply pick a sensible rate of growth, and say that for the first forty years, up to the time when Paul wrote his last surviving letter, the church grew at a rate of 300% per decade. If the religion started with twenty people in 30 CE, […]
August 31, 2024
The Next Ten Commandments Platinum Guest post by Douglas Wadeson MD
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Tags: Platinum
September 6, 2024
If You’re Counting Christians, Who Counts as a Christian?
When I first started thinking about the the rise and spread of Christianity, I was particularly struck by an article written by a prominent and deservedly acclaimed British historian, Keith Hopkins, a long-time professor at Cambridge University. It was called “Christian Number and Its Implication,” and it appeared in the Journal of Early Christian Studies in 1998. ****************************** Hopkins begins his article by reflecting on the fact that it’s very difficult to know even what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the numerical growth of Christianity. For one thing,
September 1, 2024
Major Change on the Blog! Announcing our New CEO: Jen Olmos
I am very pleased to announce a major development with the blog that will move us forward to new heights as we continue to strive to make scholarship on the Bible and early Christianity available to a wide range of non-scholars, and in doing so (especially!) to raise money for charities dealing with hunger, homelessness, and illiteracy. As many of you know, the blog started in April 2012 with just me and Steven Ray, the technology expert who originally designed and ran the site. At the time, I thought we’d raise maybe $20,000 a year for our charities. Now over twelve years later, we have two hard-working employees, Diane Pittman (COO) and Benjamin Porter (CTO), along with ten dedicated volunteers. We also have thousands of members, and we are raising something like $500,000 / year. It’s been quite a development. And still — till this day (and for all eternity) — every penny we bring in from all the membership fees (which are completely tax deductible) goes directly to our charities. We pay our overhead […]
August 27, 2024
Exaggerating the Numbers of Early Christians
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 […]
September 3, 2024
Were Christians Statistically Insignificant in the First 200 years?
I return now to Roman historian Keith Hopkins’s fascinating and influential article “Christian Number and Its 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 (6 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%). ******************************
September 4, 2024
How Strikingly Few Early Churches Were There? How Amazingly Many Christian Letters?
In his important and stimulating article, “Christian Number and Its Implications,” Roman historian Keith Hopkins next begins to think about the implications about the size of the Christian church at different periods. One point to emphasize is that there was not simply one church. There were lots of churches in lots of places, and it is a myth to think that they were all one big cohesive bunch. On the contrary, they were often (as we see in our records) often at odds with each other. But even more than that, even within one city – if it was large enough (think Rome or Antioch for example) there would have been more than one church. And why? Because there would have been too many people to meet in one place. The first time we have any evidence of a church “building” – that is, what we today normally think of as a church (the Baptist church on the corner; the Methodist church up the street) – is not until the middle of the third Christian […]
September 5, 2024
How Many of Those Early Christians Could Read?
How many Christians by near the end of the New Testament period – say, 100 CE – could read and write? In his intriguing article “Christian Number and Its Implications,” Roman historian Keith Hopkins tries to come up with some ballpark figures. As you may recall, he is assuming that there were Christian churches in about 100 communities in the world at the time (we have references to about 50 in our surviving texts, and he is supposing that maybe there were twice as many as we have any evidence for); and he agrees that if Christianity started out with about 1000 believers in the year 40 then with a growth rate of 3.4% per year, by the year 100 there would be just over 7000 Christians in the world. That would mean the 100 churches would have an average of 70 believers. (Some of course would be larger – think, Rome – others would be much smaller; we’re talking averages here. And if Rome did have, say 120 believers, they would be meeting in […]
September 10, 2024
New Insights into the New Testament 2024: A Conference you DON’T Want to Miss!!
In case you haven’t heard, there is a very excieting event coming up that surely *anyone* connected to the blog will be deeply interested in: a two-day remote Bible conference for non-scholars, called “New Insights into the New Testament,” consisting of ten lectures (each with a live Q&A), on the Life and Letters of Paul, delivered by some of the most highly qualified New Testament scholars in the known universe, in terms accessible to layfolk. It will be Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 21-22; anyone who comes will get the conference as a recording for life-time use; anyone who wants the recording and can’t come can do that too! We are nothing if not flexible. This will be our second annual New Insights Conference. We had well over 2000 come to the inaugural event last year, and heading into it we weren’t sure how it would be received. Oh boy was it received well. The presentations were crisp, clear, and informative, by world-renowned scholars, all of whom know how to communicate serious advances in scholarship in […]
September 2, 2024
Jesus Interrupted: My Most Thorough Explanation of Critical Scholarship on the New Testament
What do professional scholars know about the Bible, what do religious professionals (ministers, e.g.) learn about it in seminary/divinity school, and why don’t they (usually/normally/ever) tell their congregations about it? That is the topic of my book Jesus Interrupted (Harper One, 2009). I consider it my most thorough overview of the range of problems found in critical scholarship on the Christian scriptures. In this thread of posts I’ve been explaining the topics/contents/ideas of my various books in case anyone wants to read/reread them. In many ways I consider this one the most important: it deals with contradictions, divergences, forgery, problems of using the Gospels to know about the historical Jesus, how/why we got this canon of Scripture, the later theological creations of Christian thinkers that most readers wrngly assume are in the New Testament, and ultimately the question of whether it is possible to know all this material and yet still be a believer. I’ve decided to excerpt the opening chapter of the book to give a good sense of what it’s about — this will take […]
September 11, 2024
What Seminarians Learn About the Bible (Often to Their Surprise)
In this post I explain how prospective pastors and teachers beginning work in seminaries and divinity schools start learning things about the Bible they never would have imagined – or if they did imagine it was only to reject out of hand. As with the previous post, this is an excerpt from the first chapter of my book Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them), (HarperOne, 2009). ****************************** The approach taken to the Bible in almost all Protestant (and now Catholic) mainline seminaries is what is called the “historical-critical” method. It is completely different from the “devotional” approach to the Bible one learns in church. The devotional approach to the Bible is concerned about what the Bible has to say—especially what it has to say to me personally or to my society. What does the Bible tell me about God? Christ? The church? My relation to the world? What does it tell me about what to believe? About how to act? About social responsibilities? How can […]
September 12, 2024
Critical Problems With the Bible, in a Nutshell
What’s it like for a devoted seminary student to be confronted with critical problems of the Bible for the first time? Here I continue the discussion with an excerpt from my book Jesus Interrupted (HarperOne, 2009). ****************************** For students who come into seminary with a view that the Bible is completely, absolutely, one hundred percent without error,
September 14, 2024
Major Contradictions (and Other Problems) in the Old Testament
In my previous posts I’ve dealt with some of the critical problems with the New Testament that many students have to grapple with (often for the first time) when they take seminary courses on biblical studies during their ministerial training. One of the big questions I address in my book Jesus Interrupted (HarperOne, 2009) is why pastors who learn such things in seminary don’t say anything about them in their churches after graduation, not even in adult education classes. Isn’t one of the objectives of education to get educated? In this post I continue with an excerpt from the book dealing with comparable problems in the Old Testament. **************************** These kinds of problems turn out to be even more common in the Old Testament, starting at its very beginning. Some people go to great lengths to smooth over all these differences, but when you look at them closely, they are very difficult indeed to reconcile. And why should they be reconciled? Maybe they are simply differences. The creation account in Genesis 1 is very different from […]
September 15, 2024
Why Don’t Pastors Teach What They Know about the Bible?
That’s the KEY question I address in my book Jesus Interrupted (2010). Here is an excerpt from the Intro where I press it head on : ****************************** One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don’t have the original copies of any […]
September 17, 2024
Jesus, the Law, and a New Covenant (Lecture)
For some reason I don’t understand (maybe someone can explain it to me), one of the most frequently watched lectures I’ve ever given was on “Jesus, the Law, and the New Covenant.” This was keynote address for the Mendenhall Symposium, in honor of the eminent scholar of the Hebrew Bible, George Mendenhall, on October 6, 2016 at the University of Michigan. The symposium focused on issues on the law and covenant in the the Ancient Near East, the Hebrew Bible, and second-temple Judaism, with prominent scholars in these fields presenting papers on key aspects of the subject. This is not a topic I normally talk about (I never had lectured on it before and, now that I think of it, have never done so since) and … and well, it’s not one I would have guessed would be widely viewed. But anyway, it is. If you haven’t seen it, here it is. And if you have seen it, well, here it is again.
Tags: Jesus, lecture, new covenant, the Law
September 18, 2024
Can We Get Rid of Our Presuppositions?
Here’s a set of questions I get asked a lot, expressed here with particular clarity by someone on the blog a while back. QUESTION: What are presuppositions? Why do we all have them? And how do we make sure we have the right ones, or at least good ones. Having come out of Fundamentalist circles I heard so much about “presuppositions”, “worldviews”, “presuppositional apologetics” and so on. Seems the argument goes “Well, we all have presuppositions. No one is free of them. Therefore it is just as valid to come to historical and scientific issues with the presupposition that the claims are all true. Just as unbelievers come to the evidence with the presuppositions that there are no such things as miracles.” And this is my…
September 19, 2024