Cities of God
eBook - ePub

Cities of God

Rodney Stark

Share book
  1. 288 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Cities of God

Rodney Stark

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

How did the preaching of a peasant carpenter from Galilee spark a movement that would grow to include over two billion followers? Who listened to this "good news, " and who ignored it? Where did Christianity spread, and how? Based on quantitative data and the latest scholarship, preeminent scholar and journalist Rodney Stark presents new and startling information about the rise of the early church, overturning many prevailing views of how Christianity grew through time to become the largest religion in the world.

Drawing on both archaeological and historical evidence, Stark is able to provide hard statistical evidence on the religious life of the Roman Empire to discover the following facts that set conventional history on its head:

  • Contrary to fictions such as The Da Vinci Code and the claims of some prominent scholars, Gnosticism was not a more sophisticated, more authentic form of Christianity, but really an unsuccessful effort to paganize Christianity.
  • Paul was called the apostle to the Gentiles, but mostly he converted Jews.
  • Paganism was not rapidly stamped out by state repression following the vision and conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in 312 AD, but gradually disappeared as people abandoned the temples in response to the superior appeal of Christianity.
  • The "oriental" faiths—such as those devoted to Isis, the Egyptian goddess of love and magic, and to Cybele, the fertility goddess of Asia Minor—actually prepared the way for the rapid spread of Christianity across the Roman Empire.
  • Contrary to generations of historians, the Roman mystery cult of Mithraism posed no challenge to Christianity to become the new faith of the empire— it allowed no female members and attracted only soldiers.

By analyzing concrete data, Stark is able to challenge the conventional wisdom about early Christianity offering the clearest picture ever of how this religion grew from its humble beginnings into the faith of more than one-third of the earth's population.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Cities of God an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Cities of God by Rodney Stark in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Theology & Religion & History of Christianity. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
HarperOne
Year
2009
ISBN
9780061739972

Chapter One

Missions and Methods

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 ‘new,’ more ‘enlightened’ 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 characters—Mary 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 ‘authentic’ 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 don’t believe in evidence. They argue that since absolute truth must always elude the historian’s grasp, ‘evidence’ is inevitably nothing but a biased selection of suspect ‘facts.’ 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 ‘true’ as any other account. This is absurd nonsense. Reality exists and history actually occurs. The historian’s 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 ‘new’ 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 “rural person,” or more colloquially “country hick.” 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 “supplements rather than alternatives.”2 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 Shi’ite—these 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, ‘amateur’ missionaries. Others are full-time ‘professionals.’ 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 monotheism—in Egypt during the thirteenth century BCE*—did 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 force—by 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 monotheism—and did so without opposition, because there were few or no converts to resist them.5 Hence, the world’s first missionaries were Jews, and the world’s 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 “first great missionary religion.”8 Maimonides, the famous medieval Jewish scholar, put it plainly: “Moses our teacher was commanded by the Almighty to compel all the inhabitants of the world to accept the commandments.”9 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: “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” Later in Isaiah (66:18–19) God reveals his plan to “gather all nations and tongues” and to send missionaries “to the coastlands far away that have not heard of my fame or seen my glory; and they shall declare my glory among the nations.” And in Psalm 117: “Praise the LORD, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples!”10
These and similar verses inspired the renowned third-century-CE* rabbi, Eleazar ben Pedat, to assert that “God sent Israel into Exile among the nations only for the purpose of acquiring converts.”11 Some of Pedat’s contemporaries even claimed that “converts are dearer to God than born Jews.”12 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: “[T]he multitude of mankind itself have had a great inclination for a long time to follow our religious observances.”13 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, “[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 assume…that a very large number of pagans…trooped over to Yahweh.”17 Thus, Josephus was probably accurate when he claimed: “All the time they [the Jews] were attracting to their worship a great number of Greeks, making them virtually members of their own community.”18
Christian sources also acknowledge the existence of many “God-fearers” in the synagogues, as in the case of Lydia and the women at Philippi.19 Paul began his sermon in the synagogue in Antioch, “Men of Israel, and you that fear God, listen.”20 Later in the sermon he repeated this distinction: “Brethren, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you that fear God…”21 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 ethnicity—not only adult circumcision, but some other aspects of the Law as well.23 For the fact was that religious conversion wasn’t sufficient. Rather than letting other ‘nations’ extol God, the Jewish leadership demanded that all ‘nations’ 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: “All 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.”24
While there are good reasons to suppose that the vast majority of early Christian converts were Jews, the marginal “God-fearers” were among the first to join, once it became clear that Christians didn’t 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: “Or 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.”25 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 ‘world’ 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 Christ’s 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 ...

Table of contents