Sorting by

×

How the early church spread among converts.

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 [...]

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%). ****************************** 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 [...]

2024-09-04T17:16:39-04:00September 4th, 2024|Spread of Christianity|

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 [...]

2024-08-30T17:17:48-04:00September 3rd, 2024|Spread of Christianity|

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, what are we going to count as Christianity and whom are we going to count as Christians?  Do we count only those who hold to the views that later came to be the dominant understanding of Christianity, for example, that there is only one God, or that Christ was both human and divine at one and the same time, or that the material world is the creation of this God, and so on?  What about other forms of Christianity? What about those people [...]

2024-09-04T17:17:43-04:00September 1st, 2024|Public Forum, Spread of Christianity|

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, [...]

2024-09-04T17:44:36-04:00August 31st, 2024|Spread of Christianity|

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 come at the beginning of the period and the end.  In particular, we we need to figure out how to get from twenty Christians in 30 CE to some hundreds in 60 CE (it's way more than 40%).  The rates of growth will be relatively high early on. Moreover, the rates will almost certainly need to be lower at the tail end of the period.   Suppose we are right that there might be as many as three million Christians in the [...]

2024-08-24T09:35:49-04:00August 29th, 2024|Spread of Christianity|

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 [...]

2024-08-24T09:31:50-04:00August 28th, 2024|Spread of Christianity|

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. The [...]

2024-08-24T09:25:03-04:00August 25th, 2024|Spread of Christianity|

Was Christianity Bound to Take Over the Ancient World?

In retrospect, it may seem that that it was inevitable that the Christian religion would take over the western world, more or less destroying the many Greek and Roman religions that had been around for time immemorial.  Was it?  And was this Christian take over actually a "triumph" to be celebrated? I continue my thoughts with another excerpt from the Introduction to my book The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018). ****************************** In fact, there was no historical necessity that Christianity would, in effect, destroy the pagan religions of the Roman Empire and establish itself as the supreme religion and ascendant political and cultural power of its world.  That is why the question I address in this book is so important.  Why did this new faith take over the Roman world, leading to the Christianization of the West? It is obviously not a matter of purely antiquarian interest, relevant only to academic historians.  What question could be more important for anyone interested in history, culture, or society? To be more specific: [...]

2024-08-24T09:22:44-04:00August 24th, 2024|Constantine, Spread of Christianity|

Who Was The Last Non-Christian Emperor of Rome?

Most people know that Constantine was the first Christian emperor.  Lots of other things they think about him are wrong -- for example, that he decided or helped to decide which books would be in the New Testament or that his conversion was just a political ploy.  I deal with these in my book The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2019).  But this one's right.  He was the first Christian emperor. It's also right that nearly all the emperors after Constantine were Christian.  I say *nearly* because  of one brief but highly noteworthy exception: his nephew Julian, most frequently referred to as Julian the Apostate.  Julian ruled for nineteen months in 361-63 CE.  His short reign was highly significant: Julian tried to turn the empire back to the ways and worship of paganism.  He is called “the Apostate” because he started out as Christian but then opted to worship the traditional gods of Rome.  And he tried to enforce this view on his Empire.  Here is how I describe how he did that (or [...]

The Outrageous Immorality of Early Christians (!) (?)

The question I addressed yesterday: could the obvious benefits of the Christian community – a community of love, fellowship, and mutual support – have drawn converts into it, who very much wanted that kind of thing?  The surprising answer, I think, is no, at least in the early centuries when Christianity was trying to establish a foothold in the world.  There’s another reason for thinking what I do, and it’s not one you would expect. There were reports about the early Christian communities among outsiders.  But it was not that they were a loving and caring group of unusually upright and morally committed people.  On the contrary, the Christians were known to be flagrantly immoral, engaged in heinous, licentious, and murderous behavior.  Hard to believe, but that is the charge we repeatedly find.  Here is what I say about it in my book The Triumph of Christianity.  Brace yourself. *************************************************************   In the early centuries Christians were accused of almost unfathomable outrageous behavior.  Both Justin around 150 CE in Rome and Tertullian some fifty years [...]

Did the Benefits of the Christian Community Win Converts? Readers’ Mailbag.

Here's an important question I have received, along with an answer a lot of people think is counter-intuitive.  It has to do with why Christianity proved so attractive in the ancient world as they were desperately trying to attract converts.   QUESTION:  Please help me understand – didn’t first-century Christians offer more than stories of Jesus and a god to pray to? Didn’t they also offer the care and support of a community? Weren’t they actually supporting and providing for each other’s needs? And if so, wouldn’t this make their religion attractive to others in need?   RESPONSE: As it turns out, my view of the matter is that the answer to the first three questions is a resounding YES; but the answer to the final question – that is, the one that this reader is most interested in and (I would guess) thinks depends entirely on the preceding three – is MAYBE but the implication that this is why they grew and expanded is probably NO.  History is like that sometimes. In my book [...]

Was Christianity a Missionary Religion with No Missionaries?

Early Christians were bound and determined to convert others to their faith, as I indicated in my previous post.  Or at least that’s what their literature suggests; I very much doubt if *everyone* was!  But they certainly did convert people – within four hundred years a tiny handful of the disciples of Jesus’ uneducated and unimpressive disciples had become the official religion of the entire western world. The interest in making converts made this religion unlike anything else in the Roman empire (or outside of it).  Now *that’s* interesting, and different from what we could expect.   But what is also odd to modern eyes is that even though Christianity was evangelistic, there were almost no evangelists.  That is to say, hardly anyone – so far as we know – went on a mission to other places to convert people, with one notable exception.  So how did the Christians manage to convert millions of people?  That’s the subject of this post, again taken from my book Triumph of Christianity. ******************************************** Christians then, starting at least with [...]

Did Superior Health Care Lead to the Dominance of Christianity?

Interesting question from a recent member of the blog:   QUESTION: In the August 5/12 New Yorker, a review of a new book, “The mosquito: A Human History of our Deadliest Predator.” In this review, this sentence: “In the third century, malaria epidemics helped drive people to a small, much persecuted faith that emphasized healing and care of the sick, propelling Christianity into a world-altering religion.” I realize that medical history is not your thing. If nonetheless you’d care to comment, any warrant for this assertion?   RESPONSE:        I don’t know that I’ve ever written about mosquitoes before, either on the blog or anywhere else, but I have dealt with issues connected with ancient health care, and in particular with the theory that superior health care was one of the factors that led Christianity to expand to become a dominant (*the* dominant religion) of the Roman world.   It is an intriguing idea indeed, and was a popular theory for a very brief moment, about when this book reviewed in the New Yorker came out.  [...]

Interview for “Letters & Politics” on The Triumph of Christianity

Here is an interview I did on my book The Triumph of Christianity, back on December 25th, 2018, with host Mitch Jeserich.  The program was called "Letters & Politics," for FM 94.1 KPFA. The theme of my book, as you know, is how the Christians took over the religions of the Roman Empire to become the dominant religion of the west.  Mitch wanted to know about that.  Many years ago, when I started thinking about my book, so did I! Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition:

Constantine and the Christian Faith: My Fourth Smithsonian Lecture

I have found over the years that lots of people have mistaken ideas about Constantine the Great, the early fourth century Roman Emperor who converted to Christianity.  I used to have mistaken ideas myself, until I started reading the sources and examining the scholarship.   For example, Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the empire, right?  (Wrong.)  Constantine is the reason Christianity took over the empire, right?  (Wrong again).  Constantine didn't really convert to Christianity: it was a political move by a savvy politician who remained, at heart, a pagan, right?  (Well, uh, sorry...) It is true, though that the conversion of Emperor Constantine in 312 CE is one of Christianity’s pivotal events, and that by the end of the 4th century, Christianity was proclaimed the official religion throughout Rome, leading to the suppression of other religious traditions. Here is a lecture I gave on Constantine and Christianity at the Smithsonian on Feb. 10, 2018.  It is the last of the series of four that I have given here on the blog, based on my [...]

Why Did Christianity Take Over the World? Smithsonian Lecture 3.

Here is Lecture 3 (out of 4) that I came at the Smithsonian Associates in Washington DC on Feb. 10, 2018, based, again, on my book The Triumph of Christianity.   This lecture deals with the key aspects of the early Christian movement to try to explain its success.  What was it about Christianity that allowed it to take over the entire Christian empire?   People have all sorts of "common sense" answers to the question -- as did I for many years, even as a professional scholar -- which are probably wrong (e.g., Christianity was naturally superior to all the other religions, because of its strict monotheism and strong ethical stance, so naturally people were inclined to convert). The first time I realized the actual answer to the question was when, long ago, I read Roman social historian and Yale professor Ramsay MacMullen's brilliant analysis The Christianization of the Roman Empire.  I pondered the matter for years, read massively on it, and here is what I ended up concluding (very much in line with MacMullen, but [...]

Who Were The “Pagans” Christians Were Converting?

PART TWO of FOUR: Pagan Converts and the Power of God This is the second lecture I gave at the Smithsonian on Feb. 10, 2018, based on my book The Triumph of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept the World.  The premise behind the lecture: as Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire, it converted almost entirely pagans (after the first couple of decades).   Who were these people, and what were they converting *from*?  And why? Paganism is not and was not really a "thing."  The term was designed (by Christians) simply to designate all the ancient religious practices that were not either Jewish or Christian -- that is, it lumped together all kinds of religious practices, thousands of them, as some"thing" opposed to the faith in the Jewish god. But is there anything all these religions spread throughout the  Roman world had in common?  And how did Christians approach people from these traditional religions, religions that each individual would have always assumed was simply right, involving rituals and ideas that had always been part of [...]

Christianity’s Most Important Convert: Lecture at the Smithsonian

PART ONE of FOUR: Christianity’s Most Important Convert: The Apostle Paul In February 2018 I gave a series of four lectures for the Smithsonian Associates in Washington DC, based on my book The Triumph of Christianity.   It was a bit tricky, as these things always are, figuring out which parts of the book to focus on, since each lecture could really be only on one thing, not lots of things.  I decided to give the first lecture on the most important convert in the history of Christianity -- not Constantine (as I argue in the book) but the apostle Paul.  Without that conversion, would we even have *had* Christianity as a world-wide religion?  Good question!   It's hard to know.  But it *is* clear that this was a conversion of massive importance.  Here is the lecture: Viewing for blog members only!  If you'd like to join the blog, we'd like to have you.  Doesn't cost much and you get tons of value -- and every penny goes to charity.  So go for it! Please adjust [...]

2020-04-03T11:14:56-04:00April 8th, 2019|Book Discussions, Spread of Christianity, Video Media|

How Christianity Grew and Grew

This will be the final post on the new boxes in my Introduction to the New Testament; both of these are on a related topic, tied to my book The Triumph of Christianity, so I will include them both there.  One has to do with how miracles allegedly led to conversions of pagans to the new faith; the other charts the rate of growth that it appears the Christian church experienced in the early years.   ********************************************************** Another Glimpse Into the Past Box 26.4  Legendary Confrontations with Pagans As the Christian gospel spread throughout the Roman world, a number of legendary accounts appeared portraying the confrontations between Christian missionaries and their pagan opponents (see Box 9.6).  In these accounts, the Christians’ miracles trump the power of the pagan Gods.  One involves the apostle John in an apocryphal book called “The Acts of John.” John arrives at the magnificent temple of the great goddess of the Ephesians, Artemis, and confronts a large crowd of pagans celebrating the goddess’s birthday, challenging them to a kind of spiritual [...]

Go to Top