Miracles converted millions of people to the Christian faith in the ancient world.  What about the fear of hell?

Here’s how I talk about it in my book Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster)

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One of the reasons stories of miracles proved so effective in making converts is that Christians combined them with the claim that God’s manifestation of power in the present foreshadowed what he would do in the future.  The present life may have been filled with pain and suffering: people were starving; they were afflicted with blindness, loss of hearing, paralysis, the ravages of disease, or abject poverty; they were attacked by hordes of evil demons.  Life could be, and for many it was, a wretched existence, a cesspool of misery.  But God’s miracle workers

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