NEW ACCOUNTS of early Christianity are everywhere. A book claiming that Jesus got married, fathered children, and died of old age has sold millions of copies. Bookstores are bursting with ânew,â more âenlightenedâ scriptures said to have been wrongly suppressed by the early church fathers. Often referred to as Gnostic gospels, these texts purport to have been written by a variety of biblical charactersâMary Magdalene, St. James, St. John, Shem, and even Didymus Jude Thomas, self-proclaimed twin brother of Christ. Meanwhile, a group calling itself the Jesus Seminar receives national media attention each year as it meets to further reduce the âauthenticâ words spoken by Jesus to an increasingly slim compendium of wise sayings.
But is any of this true? How can we know? Presumably, by assembling and evaluating the appropriate evidence. Unfortunately, far too many historians these days donât believe in evidence. They argue that since absolute truth must always elude the historianâs grasp, âevidenceâ is inevitably nothing but a biased selection of suspect âfacts.â Worse yet, rather than dismissing the entire historical undertaking as impossible, these same people use their disdain for evidence as a license to propose all manner of politicized historical fantasies or appealing fictions on the grounds that these are just as âtrueâ as any other account. This is absurd nonsense. Reality exists and history actually occurs. The historianâs task is to try to discover as accurately as possible what took place. Of course, we can never possess absolute truth, but that still must be the ideal goal that directs historical scholarship. The search for truth and the advance of human knowledge are inseparable: comprehension and civilization are one.
Fortunately, even if the complete truth eludes us, some historical accounts have a far higher probability than others of being true, depending on the available evidence. And it is in pursuit of more and better evidence that I have returned to the history of the early church. The chapters that follow present many revisions and reinterpretations of early Christian history. But the really ânewâ contribution is to test these conclusions by analyzing quantitative data.
Early Christianity was primarily an urban movement. The original meaning of the word pagan (paganus) was ârural person,â or more colloquially âcountry hick.â It came to have religious meaning because after Christianity had triumphed in the cities, most of the rural people remained unconverted. Therefore, in the chapters that follow, the thirty-one cities of the empire having populations of at least 30,000 as of the year 100 are the basis for formulating and testing claims about the early church, based on quantified measures of various features of these cities. When was a Christian congregation established in each city? Which cities were missionized by Paul? Which were the port cities? Did a city have a substantial Diasporan Jewish community? Where did paganism remain strongest, longest? Where were the Gnostic teachers and movements located? These quantitative measures make it possible to discover, for example, whether the Gnostics were clustered in the more Christian or in the more pagan cities.
It is in this spirit that missions and methods are the principal topics of this opening chapter. Nevertheless, the relatively brief quantitative aspects of this and subsequent chapters are very secondary to, and embedded in, large historical concerns.
Missions and Monotheism
Since earliest days, humans have been exchanging religious ideas and practices. For millennia there was nothing special about the spread of religion; it diffused through intergroup contact in the same way as did new ways to weave or to make pottery. Even with the advent of cities, religion did not become the focus of any special effort to proselytize. From time to time, a priest or two probably pursued new followers, and individuals often recommended a particular god or rite to others. But since no one supposed that there was only one valid religion or only one true God, there were no missionaries.1 Nor was there really such a thing as conversion.
In a religious context populated by many gods, to accept a new god usually does not involve discarding an old one. As the celebrated Arthur Darby Nock pointed out, within polytheism new gods are merely âsupplements rather than alternatives.â2 Nock suggested that the word conversion is stretched beyond any useful meaning if it is applied to such relatively trivial actions. Instead, the term should be reserved for the formation of a new commitment across the boundaries of major religious traditions. For example, a shift from polytheism to Judaism, to Christianity, or to Islam is a conversion. So is a shift from one of the monotheistic traditions to another, or (rarely) from one of these traditions to polytheism. However, a shift in patronage from one god of a pantheon to another is not conversion, but reaffliation. The same is true of shifts within the boundaries of a monotheistic tradition, as from Methodist to Baptist, from Orthodox to Reformed, or from Sunni to Shiâiteâthese too are acts of reaffliation. In contrast, missionaries are those who seek converts, who attempt to get others to shift from one tradition to another.3 Some people serve as part-time, âamateurâ missionaries. Others are full-time âprofessionals.â But either sort of missionary is produced only within monotheism.
Even so, not just any sort of monotheism produces missionaries, especially the rank-and-file missionaries on which real success depends. For example, once Christianity became safely ensconced as the Roman state church, its missionary activities very rapidly decayed.4 Likewise, what probably was the first-ever appearance of monotheismâin Egypt during the thirteenth century BCEâdid not produce rank-and-file missionaries, and probably very few sincere professional missionaries either. Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (who adopted the name Akhenaten) attempted to establish worship of an invisible, omnipotent One True God. But he did it by edict and forceâby creating a self-sufficient, state-supported religion and by attempting to suppress the other temples. Upon his death, the priests of the discarded gods combined to destroy all vestiges of monotheismâand did so without opposition, because there were few or no converts to resist them.5 Hence, the worldâs first missionaries were Jews, and the worldâs first converts became Jews.
Jewish Missions
It recently has become fashionable for many secular Jews, being eager to prohibit all religious proselytizing, to deny that Judaism ever was a missionizing faith.6 But, as every orthodox Jewish scholar agrees,7 the historical facts are clear: Judaism was the âfirst great missionary religion.â8 Maimonides, the famous medieval Jewish scholar, put it plainly: âMoses our teacher was commanded by the Almighty to compel all the inhabitants of the world to accept the commandments.â9 It could hardly have been otherwise. The obligation to missionize is always implicit in monotheism and is explicit in the Old Testament. Isaiah (49:6) reads: âI will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.â Later in Isaiah (66:18â19) God reveals his plan to âgather all nations and tonguesâ and to send missionaries âto the coastlands far away that have not heard of my fame or seen my glory; and they shall declare my glory among the nations.â And in Psalm 117: âPraise the LORD, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples!â10
These and similar verses inspired the renowned third-century-CE rabbi, Eleazar ben Pedat, to assert that âGod sent Israel into Exile among the nations only for the purpose of acquiring converts.â11 Some of Pedatâs contemporaries even claimed that âconverts are dearer to God than born Jews.â12 Nor was it only rabbis who praised Jewish missions or noted their success. Writing in the first century CE, Josephus reported the very widespread impact of Judaism on the host cultures of the Diaspora: â[T]he multitude of mankind itself have had a great inclination for a long time to follow our religious observances.â13 That same century Philo wrote at length about converts and missions to the Gentiles, even claiming that many converts left Egypt as part of the Exodus.14 Like Josephus, Philo also described the widespread observance of Jewish customs, and both of them confirmed that it was common for Jews to invite Gentiles to attend services in the synagogues. This was facilitated by the fact that the language of the Diasporan synagogues was not Hebrew, but Greek, and therefore comprehensible not only to everyone residing in Hellenic regions, but also to all educated Romans, since they more frequently spoke Greek than Latin.
As the practice of inviting guests to worship makes clear, Jews in the Diaspora sought converts, and they seem to have been quite successful in doing so.15 The best estimate is that by the first century, Jews made up from 10 to 15 percent of the population of the Roman Empire, nearly 90 percent of them living in cities outside Palestine.16 This would have amounted to from six to nine million people. To achieve these numbers, a considerable amount of conversion would have been required. As Adolf von Harnack recognized, â[I]t is utterly impossible to explain the large total of Jews in the Diaspora by the mere fact of the fertility of Jewish families. We must assumeâŚthat a very large number of pagansâŚtrooped over to Yahweh.â17 Thus, Josephus was probably accurate when he claimed: âAll the time they [the Jews] were attracting to their worship a great number of Greeks, making them virtually members of their own community.â18
Christian sources also acknowledge the existence of many âGod-fearersâ in the synagogues, as in the case of Lydia and the women at Philippi.19 Paul began his sermon in the synagogue in Antioch, âMen of Israel, and you that fear God, listen.â20 Later in the sermon he repeated this distinction: âBrethren, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you that fear GodâŚâ21 The God-fearers were Greeks and Romans like the Roman soldier Cornelius,22 who had embraced Jewish monotheism, but who remained marginal to Jewish life because they were unwilling to fully embrace Jewish ethnicityânot only adult circumcision, but some other aspects of the Law as well.23 For the fact was that religious conversion wasnât sufficient. Rather than letting other ânationsâ extol God, the Jewish leadership demanded that all ânationsâ become fully Jewish; there was no room for Egyptian-Jews or Roman-Jews, let alone Germanic-or British-Jews, but only for Jewish-Jews. Given the remarkable success they achieved, this ethnic barrier to conversion probably was the sole reason that the Roman Empire did not embrace the God of Abraham. It was not a mistake that Paul let Christianity repeat.
The Christian Difference
Nearly every aspect of the early Christian church was shaped by the obligation imposed on the disciples by Jesus: âAll authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.â24
While there are good reasons to suppose that the vast majority of early Christian converts were Jews, the marginal âGod-fearersâ were among the first to join, once it became clear that Christians didnât have to become ethnic Jews. And there lay the monumental difference between these two great missionizing faiths. Early on, Paul had put it this way: âOr is God the God of the Jews only? Is he not the God of the Gentiles also? Yes, of the Gentiles also, since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of their faith and the uncircumcised through their faith.â25 What Christianity offered the world was monotheism stripped of ethnic encumbrances. People of all nations could embrace the One True God while remaining people of all nations.
And so Christians went out to save the world, or at least the âworldâ as defined by Rome, and less than three hundred years later they had converted millions of people and enjoyed substantial majorities in the cities. Ever since, historians have asked: How did they do it? How did this tiny messianic sect from the far eastern edge of the empire overwhelm classical paganism and come to rule triumphantly as the state church?
As will be seen, many factors were involved in the triumph of Christianity, but to begin it is necessary to ask: How does missionizing work? How does anyone actually make converts? Some dismiss such a question by calling the success of the Christian mission a miracle. If so, it was a decidedly incomplete miracle, a miracle entirely at odds with Christâs directive in Matthew assigning the job of converting the world to all Christians, and a miracle that is quite inconsistent with the doctrine of free will.
Networks and Conversion
For generations it was assumed that religious conversions ...