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Loading...To start on my reflections on the rise and spread of Christianity, it might be useful to talk for a while about a particular article that has been highly influential both for my own thinking and more broadly in the contemporary discussion among scholars. The article was 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 who called themselves Christian who thought there were two gods? Or thirty-six gods? Or 365 gods? What about those who called themselves Christian who thought that Christ was a human being but was not really divine? Or those who said he was divine but not human? Or those who said there were two beings, one of them divine and one of them human, whose temporary combination we call “Jesus (the human) Christ (the divine)”? Do we count the Marcionites? The Sethians? The Valentinians? The Ebionites?
In the fourth century the heresiologist (= heresy hunter), Epiphanius, a rigorously and rigidly orthodox Christian (i.e., one who toed the theological line that ended up becoming the only acceptable form of faith), wrote a book called The Panarion. That is a Greek-word that means…
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There are converts, and there are partial converts–but partial converts are not meaningless to the growth of Christianity. If somebody is open to Christian ideas, that person is a potential ally. Somebody who will be less likely to actively resist the rise of the new faith.
I think Christians themselves must have been having this argument back then, don’t you?
“Whoever is not against us is for us.” Mark and Luke (somewhat different phrasing in each).
“Whoever is not with me is against me.” Matthew.
I don’t know whether either statement was actually made by Jesus, but I know that they have radically different meanings. And they reflect radically different attitudes towards belief. The first says “If somebody is willing to listen to our ideas, consider them, that person is a friend, and may come to believe as we do over time.” The second says “We can only accept as allies those who agree with us in all particulars.” That’s a debate–and when you want to win a debate in a religion, you put your argument in the mouth of someone everyone in that religion is bound to respect.
I would personally tend to put the most faith in Mark’s version, since it’s the oldest, and closest to the source. And of course because I’d much rather that was what Jesus said. But he might have said both at various times, or neither at any time. To me, that disparity reflects not merely a disagreement over what Jesus said, but over what Christians of that time were saying to each other.
That’s what makes the study of Christianity in Antiquity both exciting and frustrating. It’s like a cold-case detective, who after years and years of following various leads, returns to the family of the victim and says “we don’t know who did it, but they were most likely this type of person.”
I’ve long thought it must take a very special kind of scholar to specialize in a field like this – knowing how much simply *can’t* be “proven,” or even established with as much probability as in other fields that can’t be exact. Most people would find it maddening! I’m thankful there are scholars like you, willing to go all out to get *as close as possible* to historical truth.
Dr. Ehrman, this is an issue that seems to be on-going. I notice that some conservative Protestants will regularly distinguish between “Christians” and “Catholics”, as if to suggest that Catholics aren’t Christians. This may be an intentional dismissal of Catholics, or it may simply be a vestige of the Reformation. Regardless, this sort of litmus test is certainly not unique to Christianity. Indeed, it is such a regular characteristic of all social movements that we social scientists actually have a term for it: schism. Just about every social group or movement we study at some point or another has a schism if not multiple schisms throughout its history. Moreover, we notice that schisms tend to happen when a group or a movement gets its first taste of power; namely, when a movement has diminished its opposition to the point where they begin to turn on themselves. They also tend to schismatize upon the death of a unifying figure; for instance, when Islam schismatized along successional lines after Muhammed’s death; when the Bolsheviks schismatized between Stalin and Trotsky upon Lenin’s death; and when the Mormon’s schismatized between the LDS and the FLDS upon Joseph Smith’s death. It’s such a regular occurrence that when a group doesn’t schismatize, but instead remains relatively stable, that seems odd.
Yes, when I was an evangelical, we didn’t think Catholics were Christian!
You might not have been pleased to hear what some of us Catholics thought about evangelicals in my parents’ time, though we’ve gotten a tad more ecumenical since then. Our pastor had a good sense of humor, and liked to make Lutheran jokes. All in good fun.
“My view is that it is best simply to say that if someone considered themselves worshipers of the Christian god, we’ll count them as Christian”
I’m not sure if the above count includes the earliest followers of Jesus but I think that they considered themselves Jewish and worshipers of the Jewish God. I don’t think they would have thought of themselves as anything but Jews.
I agree. They would have considered themselves Jews who believed Jesus was the savior; and by my definition that would have made them Christian (whether they called themselves that or not)
I don’t think it is right to claim someone was a Christian if he merely believed in the Christian God. Please check me on this line of thinking: For the Jewish followers of Jesus, “messiah” did not mean “savior”–at least not in the Christian sense. The messiah was not expected to be a savior of sinful souls from the wages of their sins. If the followers of Judas the Galilean, who all believed in God, had claimed that, after his crucifixion, they had experienced him and if they had looked to scriptures for explanations of how their messiah (“Christ” in Greek) could have been crucified and if they had believed he would return in order to defeat the enemies of the Jews, re-establish the nation Israel and ushered in the Kingdom of God, what you’re saying would justify calling them Christians too. One can imagine, when there were Christians after Jesus’ death, someone saying, “I believe in the Christians’ God–it’s the Jews’ God–but not in Jesus Christ as savior. So I’m not a Christian.” Perfect sense, right? My point has always been that it would also take, at the very least, not just a belief that Jesus would return to finish the job but that his job would be different; it would be the one Paul’s Gospel takes it to be (whether he inherited it or not)–the salvation of souls, offering the gift of eternal life and release from the wages of sin. That was not what the Jewish followers of Jesus would have been thinking during his lifetime. They were not Christians. Nor were those, after his death, who thought that, crucified or not, he would return in power and glory to defeat the enemies of the Jews, re-establish the nation Israel and ushered in the Kingdom of God–not if they did not believe his death had any salvific power. Believing in the Christian God might have been necessary but certainly not sufficient for calling someone a Christian.
I think Yeshua (Jesus) of Nazareth believed himself to be (in my pidgin Hebrew) the Meshiach, translated as the Messiah, but I don’t think he considered himself divine, except in the sense that all Jews believed then and now that they are the sons and daughters of God; made in His image, etc. In ancient Israel there were many and sometimes conflicting views of the Messiah, including king, prophet, warrior, priest and various combinations thereof. How did we get from messiah to savior, which is certainly a legitimate translation, but seems to me a more focused and operational definition?
Savior would not be a translation of “messiah.” I sketch the rise of early Christain views of Jesus from being messiah to being seen as savior, Lord, God, etc. in my book How Jesus Became God.
The problem of how to define a group for the purpose of formulating or analyzing an argument has been very interesting to me as of late, because of the kinds of political, religious, and scientific discussions I’ve been having lately. I think Venn diagrams sometimes help, and I would like to see greater use of them. In politics, I think about some arguments equating the group “illegal immigrant” to the group “criminal,” rather than defining groups and analyzing overlaps. It has occurred to me that many people will define (and redefine) a group based on the argument they want to support. A usual case is a fundamentalist who excludes Christians who accept evolution when they want to argue that The Theory of Evolution is an atheistic theory and who include Deists as Christians when they want to argue that the founding fathers were Christians. So, I guess how one defines the group depends in part on what one is arguing, although I think that is not exactly kosher on some level. Since there is no external and objective referee of the definition, I guess you can choose any reasonable subjective definition and expressly define the boundaries of the different groups. I can see a chapter defining various groups of “Christians,” another chapter zooming in on the general spread of “Christian” ideas, and still other chapter(s) focusing on the spread of proto-Orthodox and then Orthodox Christianity. There are certainly other ways of defining Christianity, such as a ideas held in common among all the various groups, but that doesn’t really seem to address a complete set of ideas held by any real Christians. I’m looking forward to another good read and to seeing how you handle this preliminary issue.
It’s interesting that the literary and social elite took over a message that began with a poor, uneducated man. Why take an interest in someone like Jesus? Is it because Christianity was growing so much that they had no choice but to take notice? What do you think made Christianity attractive to the elite crowd?
Ah, I’ll be dealing with that! (Short answer: for the first century: virtually nothing!)
Wow… Obviously I never thought about it and how complicated!
Is it known the population of Rome at the time of Emperor Nero, for exemple? I ask because I wonder if from that one can make a fair estimate of the number of Christians. I just read on, well, wikipedia :o) what Tacitus wrote in regards to the fire of Rome. According to the translation he uses words such as “popular”, “immense multitude”… In addition, is it fair to say that already in 64 AD there was a group of people that were singled out as Christians (as opposed to anything else like Jews, pagans or whatever) and that this group was at least large enough to be noticed? Of course that doesn’t give us numbers though.
Obrigada!
It’s usually thought that the Roman empire was about 60 million, and Rome itself about 1 milliion
Archaeologists are able to estimate the size of an ancient city’s population by the layout and size of its buildings. For instance, the size of a granary is a good indicator for the number of mouths it can feed.
How about Jerusalem? In the past “experts” claimed anywhere from 100,000 to 1 million (especially at Passover), but in Biblical Archeology Review there’s a new estimate of 40,000 people, with not many more at festivals. Do you have an opinion on this?
Some have argued as few as 20,000. I don’t really have a strong opinion, but somewhere in the low tens of thousands seem plausible to me. It did swell in size during Passover especially.
Wow! I had never thought about this thought provoking problem of how to count Christians, but it is very interesting. Keep going,
It’s hard to believe that no follower of Jesus before Paul thought to write anything to other followers, about Jesus and his significance. Is there any evidence to suggest what some of these writings may have been? Could Q have been in circulation when Paul began writing? How long before the mid 90s might the Signs Gospel that forms the narrative portions of John have been in circulation? Also, do you agree with John Dominic Crossan that a common Passion narrative is behind the Synoptics and John? If so, is any reconstruction of that narrative possible and how old might it be?
Yes, it seems likely that *someone* wrote something. But we have nothing! We don’t really know when Q was written (except it was before Matthew and Luke) or the Signs Gospel (assuming it existed, as I do)
Isn’t likely the 10-15% did not hold across the board – or more specifically in Galilee or even Palestine?
Yes , the usual number for Palestine at the time is around 3%!
What about Crossan’s hypothesis of the common Passion source?
I have never been convinced that there was a Cross Gospel at the basis of the canonical Gospels and the Gospel of Peter.
I think the best way to proceed would be to look at the people everyone agrees to have been Christian. Is there any disagreement about whether Constantine was Christian?
That used to be a big scholarly debate, but not so much any more. He was definitely a Christian, even if he sometimes did things that some Christians don’t think were very Christian!
Interesting problem. I would think that both ends of the spectrum would be useful. A broad, inclusive definition to get some sense of how fast the influence of Christianity is growing in any sense of the term. And a more conservative definition to get a sense of how fast Christianity as we know it today was spreading, or at least how the mainstream was growing.
Hi Dr. Ehrman.
I know of people today who conceive of the Trinity like three players on the same basketball team in that each god is separate (thus three gods), but I guess with the same “team goal” in mind making them a single godhead. Was this ever one of the early Christian “heresies” that came from Jewish Christians? It seems difficult to believe that Jews would have ever conceived of God in this way. ???
No one likened it to three players in a game, but many did say that the three were unified not in essence but in purpose and will.
Thanks! How did these folks get around the idea of being polytheists if three were unified in will and purpose? I recall a discussion that Christians were considered atheists due to their rejection of the “gods.” Just struggling to comprehend how a Jewish monotheist could ever go this route…unless it was a much later development??
Yes, that was the problem they faced! And that’s why the doctrine of the Trinity developed in a different direction, the more Christian thinkers thought about it. But then the quesiton was how to preserve the “threeness” while focusing on their being only “one”
Wait–so are you saying that the earliest Christians (who definitely would have been Jewish) did in fact believe in three separate gods with one will and that it later evolved into a singular god with three hypostases? Sorry, just trying to clarify. Thanks again!
There were certainly Christians who said Christ was God and God was God and that they were not the same. Eventually Christian theologians came to insist that all that is true, but that there was, nonetheless, just one God. But there were others who argued that Father and Son were different hypostasies, absolutely! (In part that’s what the Arian controversy was over)
Anthropologist study hunter-gather tribes that still exist today and/or that there are good records of going back into the 19th century – doing so sometimes with intent to consider what past hunter-gather societies were like, say, 10,000 years or 20,000 years ago.
So I’m surprised that you have not yet mentioned the possibility of examing contemporary Christianity in regions of the world where it might make for a somewhat suitable analog to ancient Hellenistic/Roman society.
What comes to my mind is a Christian minister that my church congregation has supported for several decades, Paul Renganathan in Chennai, India. Paul converted from Hindu relgion to Christianty 30 years ago and like his name sake became an extraordinary evanglist of extraordinary accomplishment (and in many and even most respects exclipsing the Paul of the New Testament).
https://www.facebook.com/paul.renganathan.9
Every time when Paul comes to visit he has amazing things to relate about his minsty work (we have had our own memebers go to visit him on several occasions – he has never exagerated anything he reports).
What strikes me about Paul’s situation in that part of the world today is that it seems so very much like the conditions that Christianity found itself in in the Roman world of the first few centuries.
So I find it odd that serious academic scholarship does not go and look for modern analogs by which to conduct research on Christianity and then apply that toward its historical context of origin and growth (see if anything lines up which might guide further insights).
Interesting idea. There *have* been studies by cultural anthropologists on *some* aspects of relevant features of Xty, e.g., the study of Cargo Cults to see how millenarian movements work….
Do you think the term “the Way” from Acts (or possible John “I am the way…”) is very early or was coined much later since Acts and John are written/edited relatively late? Do you think it more likely one or more of the Jesus groups used it or both Jesus groups and Christ myth groups?
It’s a great question. I don’t really know! And I’m not sure there’s any way we can tell, since it’s found only in Acts.
Did early Christians treat each other same depending on race? I would assume the Jerusalem church would be quite diverse with people from Europe, Asia and Africa. Would there have been Ethiopians (Kingdom of Aksum) there as well since they traded with the Roman Empire?
Race was a very different penomenon in antiquity. It was not for the most part skin based but was a broader issue of ethnicity. Some of the top Christian theologians, for example, were from North Africa (Tertullian; Augustine) and would have been black. This was never an issue for them or anyone else. More imporant for issues of ethnicity / race were customs of dress, food, taboos, etc.