The Patient Ferment of the Early Church

The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire

Kreider, Alan

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781493400331
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

How and why did the early church grow in the first four hundred years despite disincentives, harassment, and occasional persecution? In this unique historical study, veteran scholar Alan Kreider delivers the fruit of a lifetime of study as he tells the amazing story of the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Challenging traditional understandings, Kreider contends the church grew because the virtue of patience was of central importance in the life and witness of the early Christians. They wrote about patience, not evangelism, and reflected on prayer, catechesis, and worship, yet the church grew--not by specific strategies but by patient ferment.

Part 1
Growth and Patience

1
The Improbable Growth of the Church

In the first three centuries the church was growing. Contemporaries commented on this; the second-century AD Epistle to Diognetus observed that Christians “day by day increase more and more.”1 At the turn of the third century, in Carthage in North Africa, the theologian Tertullian with extravagant exaggeration referred to the Christians as “a great multitude of men—almost the majority in every city.”2 Fifty years later, in his Sunday homilies in Caesarea in Palestine, the great Origen made confident statements about the church’s worldwide growth:

Behold the Lord’s greatness. . . . Our Lord Jesus has been spread out to the whole world, because he is God’s power. . . . The power of the Lord and Savior is with those who are in Britain, separated from our world, and with those who are in Mauretania, and with everyone under the sun who has believed in his name. Behold the Savior’s greatness. It extends to all the world.3

No one disputes that the early church was growing, but its growth is hard to measure. For a long time scholars assumed that Christian growth was so rapid that in the early fourth century, on the eve of the emperor Constantine’s accession, five to six million people—between 8 and 12 percent of the imperial populace—were Christian. The most confident statement of this approach was given in the 1990s by a sociologist, Rodney Stark, who calculated that for the church to reach this level, it grew across the first three centuries by 40 percent per decade.4 Stark’s confidence has attracted wide assent but also withering criticism, not least from ancient historian Ramsay MacMullen, who has demanded solid, archaeological evidence and posited a much smaller Christian number by AD 310.5 Debates and speculations will continue as scholars study particular areas in detail. For now, we can safely assume three things:

• Christian numbers were growing impressively in the first three centuries.
• This growth varied tremendously from place to place. In certain areas (parts of Asia Minor and North Africa) there were considerable numbers of Christians. But in other areas there were few believers. And some cities, such as Harran in Mesopotamia, were known to be virtual “Christian-free” zones.6
• By the time of Constantine’s accession, the churches not only had substantial numbers of members; they extended across huge geographical distances and demanded the attention of the imperial authorities.

It is not surprising that this movement—both growing and worldwide—was buoyant and confident.

We tend to assume this growth and to forget how surprising it was. Nobody had to join the churches. People were not compelled to become members by invading armies or the imposition of laws; social convention did not induce them to do so. Indeed, Christianity grew despite the opposition of laws and social convention. These were formidable disincentives. In addition, the possibility of death in persecution loomed over the pre-Constantinian church, although few Christians were actually executed.7 In many places baptismal candidates sensed that “every Christian was by definition a candidate for death.”8 More generally, as Kate Cooper has pointed out, Christians knew that they, as members of a “dubious group,” were vulnerable to being “turned in” by their neighbors or by others who wanted to see them deprived of privileges.9 In the 240s Origen commented about the “disgrace among the rest of society” that Christians experienced.10 Christians had to be cautious.

Nevertheless the churches grew.11 Why? After 312, when the emperor Constantine I aligned himself with Christianity and began to promote it, the church’s growth is not hard to explain. But before Constantine the expansion is improbable enough to require a sustained attempt to understand it. The growth was odd. According to the evidence at our disposal, the expansion of the churches was not organized, the product of a mission program; it simply happened. Further, the growth was not carefully thought through. Early Christian leaders did not engage in debates between rival “mission strategies.” The Christians wrote a lot; according to classicist Robin Lane Fox, “most of the best Greek and Latin literature which remains [from the later second and third centuries] is Christian.”12 And what they wrote is surprising. The Christians wrote treatises on patience—three of them—that we will study in this book. But they did not write a single treatise on evangelism. Further, to assist their growing congregations with practical concerns, the Christians wrote “church orders,” manuals that provided guidance for the life and worship of congregations. The best treatment of how a second-century Christian should persuade a pagan to become a believer was published in London in 1970!13

In places where we would expect to find instructions to engage in mission—for example, a growing church’s catechetical materials preparing people for baptism—we look in vain for references to evangelization. The best surviving summary of catechetical topics, Cyprian’s To Quirinus 3, contains 120 precepts for catechumens in Carthage, but not one of them admonishes the new believers to share the gospel with the gentiles. Early Christian preachers do not appeal to the “Great Commission” in Matthew 28:19–20 to inspire their members to “make disciples of all nations”; they assume that the “apostles” (Jesus’s eleven plus Paul) had done this in the church’s earliest years and that it had already been fulfilled in the church’s global expansion.14 When writers referred to the Matthew 28:19–20 text, it was to buttress the doctrine of the Trinity or to address the issue of baptism, not to inspire missionary activity.

To be sure, the Christians continued to use the word apostolos, but it had lost its connection to mission. Except for the very early Didache (11.2, 5) in which traveling “apostles” were a part of the community’s life, Christian writers thought of apostles as bishops who in succession protect the apostolic truth, not as missionaries who embody and carry out the apostolic task.15 In the mid-third century the large and influential church in Rome had a substantial staff containing scores of presbyters, deacons, subdeacons, acolytes, exorcists, readers, and doorkeepers—but not a single apostle.16 Nor did it or any other church known to us have accredited “evangelists” or “missionaries.”17

Of course there were no missionary societies at that period and no parachurch mission agencies. Surprisingly, there are only two missionaries whose names we know. The Alexandrian teacher Pantaenus’s journey from Egypt to India appears legendary, but there seems to be more history behind Origen’s student Gregory, who in the mid-third ce...