There are a lot of things that I’m really very interested in that I’m not very good at.  As a kid I was passionate about baseball.  I was an All Star every year up to high school, but I really wasn’t all that great.  I was just better than most of the other kids, who *really* weren’t great.  It was a rather low bar.  Same with tennis.  Same with a lot of things – even into adulthood. As an adult I’ve long had an attraction to numbers, but I’m not very good at them.  I’m fascinated by them, but I can’t work out much of any kind of sophisticated mathematical formula to save my soul.  That’s why last week I asked for some help on the blog.  I needed someone to come up with a formula for me to crunch some numbers.   And several people obliged.  Many, many thanks to all who helped.  I’m very much in their debt.  It’s amazing to me the kinds of expertise that are out there.  Some of my respondents [...]

I have been discussing the fascinating article by Keith Hopkins, “Christian Number and Its Implications,” about how many people converted to Christianity at certain points of time (say, from ten years after Jesus’ death to the time the emperor Constantine converted in the year 312).  As we have seen so far, the first problem Hopkins deals with is how to count – that is, who counts as a Christian?  Hopkins takes the (in my opinion) justifiable and sensible view that if someone considered themselves to be a follower of Jesus (whether they were proto-orthodox, or Sethian, or Marcionite, or Ebionite, or anything else) they should be counted. The second problem, as we have also seen, is that our sources don’t give us any reliable statistics, or indeed statistics of any kind.  Instead, our sources (and, by the way, without sources we have no evidence, only guess work, even if it is educated guess work) are highly prone to exaggeration.  And so the book of Acts indicates that within a couple of months, some 8000 Jews [...]