\n\n\n\n\narihndas-pryce\u00a0replied to your post \u201cI feel like early (and late?) Christianity might be underestimated as\u2026\u201d
\nwhat do you mean by civilizing? not to be snotty, not sure how to phrase is smarter, but it\u2019s a genuine question.\nI think I mean the obvious meaning that lots of people overlook because they\u2019re so used to civilization \u2013\u00a0\u2018a thing that causes a society to move towards a state of civilization\u2019. Civilization is a state of affairs that is less likely to have things like human sacrifices, slavery, and more likely to have things like art and multi-nation scientific research collaborations.
\nI\u2019m not sure if my original post is right. My knowledge of early Christianity\u2019s history is pretty patchy, and I may have made incorrect assumptions. And I definitely don\u2019t think Christianity has an unambiguous record as\u00a0\u2018psychological/cultural event that decreases evil in the world\u2019. But if I had to say whether Christianity is better on this front than the things it was usually competing with, I\u2019d bet yes.
\nMy question is why, if Christianity was so memetically fit, did it take as long as it did to be invented and propagate?\u00a0
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Christianity propagated extremely rapidly!
\nHere\u2019s Rodney Stark\u2019s The Rise of Christianity\u00a0(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996):
\n\n\nStudies of the rise of Christianity all stress the movement\u2019s\nrapid growth, but rarely are any figures offered. Perhaps this\nreflects the prevalence among historians of the notion, recently\nexpressed by Pierre Chuvin, that \u201cancient history remains\nwholly refractory to quantitative evaluations\u201d (1990:12).\nGranted, we shall never discover \u201clost\u201d Roman census data giv\u00ading authoritative statistics on the religious composition of the\nempire in various periods. Nevertheless, we must quantify \u2013 at\nleast in terms of exploring the arithmetic of the possible \u2013 if we\nare to grasp the magnitude of the phenomenon that is to be\nexplained. For example, in order for Christianity to have\nachieved success in the time allowed, must it have grown at\nrates that seem incredible in the light of modern experience?\u00a0 If so, then we may need to formulate new social scientific\u00a0 proposi\u00adtions about conversion. If not, then we have some well-tested\npropositions to draw upon. What we need is at least two plaus\u00adible numbers to provide the basis for extrapolating the probable rate of early Christian growth. Having achieved such a rate\nand used it to project the number of Christians in various years,\nwe can then test these projections against a variety of historical\nconclusions and estimates.\n
\nFor a starting number, Acts 1:14-15 suggests that several months after the Crucifixion there were 120 Christians. Later,\nin Acts 4:4, a total of 5,000 believers is claimed. And, according\nto Acts 21:20, by the sixth decade of the first century there were\n\u201cmany thousands of Jews\u201d in Jerusalem who now believed.\nThese are not statistics. Had there been that many converts in Jerusalem, it would have been the first Christian city, since\nthere probably were no more than\u00a0 twenty thousand inhabitants at this time \u2013 J. C. Russeli (1958) estimated only ten thousand. As Hans Conzelmann noted, these numbers are only \u201cmeant to\nrender impressive the marvel that here the Lord himself is at\nwork\u201d (1973:63). Indeed, as Robert M. Grant pointed out, \u201cone\nmust always remember that figures in antiquity \u2026 were part of\nrhetorical exercises\u201d (1977:7\u20138) and were not really meant to\nbe taken literally. Nor is this limited to antiquity. In 1984 a\nToronto magazine claimed that there were 10,000 Hare\nKrishna members in that city But when Irving Hexham, Ray\u00admond F. Currie, and Joan B. Townsend (1985) checked on the\nmatter, they found that the correct total was 80.
\nOrigen remarked, \u201cLet it be granted that Christians were few in the beginning\u201d (Against Celsus 3.10, 1989 ed.), but how many would that have been? It seems wise to be conservative here, and thus I shall assume that there were 1,000 Christians in the year 40. I shall qualify this assumption at several later points\u00a0 in the chapter.
\nNow for an ending number. As late as the middle of the third\ncentury, Origen admitted that Christians made up \u201cjust a few\u201d\nof the population. Yet only six decades later, Christians were so\nnumerous that Constantine found it expedient to embrace the\nchurch. This has caused many scholars to think that something\nreally extraordinary, in terms of growth, happened in the latter\u00a0half of the third century (cf. Gager 1975). This may explain\nwhy, of the few numbers that have been offered in the litera\u00adture, most are for membership in about the year 300.\n
\nEdward Gibbon may have been the first to attempt to esti\u00admate the Christian population, placing it at no more than \u201ca twentieth part of the subjects of the empire\u201d at the time of Con\u00adstantine\u2019s conversion ( [1776\u20131788] 1960:187). Later writers\nhave rejected Gibbon\u2019s figure as far too low. Goodenough (1931) estimated that 10 percent of the empire\u2019s population\nwere Christians by the time of Constantine. lf we accept 60 mil\u00adlion as the total population at that time \u2013which is the most\nwidely accepted estimate (Boak 1955a; Russell 1958; MacMul\u00adlen 1984; Wilken 1984) \u2013 this would mean that there were 6\nmillion Christians at the start of the fourth century. Von Hert\u00adling (1934) estimated the maximum number of Christians in\nthe year 300 as 15 million. Grant (1978) rejected this as far too\nhigh and even rejected von Hertling\u2019s minimum estimate of 7.5\nmillion as high. MacMullen (1984) placed the number of Christians in 300 at 5 million. Fortunately, we do not need greater\nprecision; we assume that the actual number of Christians in\nthe year 300 lay within the range of 5\u20137.5 million, we have an\nadequate basis for exploring what rate of growth is needed for\nthat range to reached in 260 years.
\nGiven our starting number, if Christianity grew at the rate of\n40 percent per decade, there would have been 7,530 Christians in\nthe year 100, followed by 217,795 Christians in the year 200 and\nby 6,299,832 Christians in the year 300. If we cut the rate of\ngrow to 30 percent a decade, by the year 300 there would\nhave been only 917,334 Christians \u2013 a figure far below what any\u00adone would accept. On the other hand, if we increase the growth\nrate to 50 percent a decade, then there would have been\n37,876,752 Christians in the year 300 \u2013 or more than twice von\nHertling\u2019s maximum estimate. Hence 40 percent per decade\n(or 3.42 percent per year) seems the most plausible estimate of\nthe rate at which Christianity actually grew during the first sev\u00aderal centuries.\n
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\nThis is a very encouraging finding since it is exceedingly\ndose to the average growth rate of 43 percent per decade that\nthe Mormon church has maintained over the past century\n(Stark 1984, 1994). Thus we know that the numerical goals\nChristianity needed to achieve are entirely in keeping with\nmodern experience, and we are not forced to seek exceptional\nexplanations. Rather, history allows time for the normal pro\u00adcesses of conversion, as understood by contemporary social sci\u00adence, to take place.\n
Rodney Stark reviews estimates of Christian populations during this period, and finds them generally consistent with this general framework:
\n\nThere was a\ngreater increase in numbers by the middle of the second cen\u00adtury, but still the projection amounts to only slightly more than 40,000 Christians. This projection is in extremely dose agreement with Robert L. Wilken\u2019s estimate of \u201cless than fifty thousand Christians\u201d at this time\u2013\u201can infinitesimal number in a so\u00adciety comprising sixty million\u201d (1984:31). Indeed, according to\nL. Michael White (1990:110), Christians in Rome still met in\nprivate homes at this time. Then, early in the third century, the\nprojected size of the Christian population picks up a bit and by\n250 reaches 1.9 percent. This estimate is also sustained by a\nprominent historian\u2019s \u201cfeel\u201d for the times. Discussing the process of conversion to Christianity, Robin Lane Fox advised that\nwe keep \u201cthe total number of Christians in perspective: their\nfaith was much the most rapidly growing religion in the Mediterranean, but its total membership was still small in absolute\nterms, perhaps (at a guess) only 2 percent of the Empire\u2019s total\npopulation by 250\u201d (1987:317).
\nAs an additional test of these projections, Robert M. Grant\nhas calculated that there were 7,000 Christians in Rome at the\nend of the second century (1977:6) . If we also accept Grant\u2019s\nestimate of 700,000 as the population of Rome for that year,\nthen l percent of the population of Rome had been converted\nby the year 200. If we set the total population of the empire at\n60 million in 200, then, based on the projection for that year,\nChristians constituted 0.36 percent of the empire\u2019s population.\nThis seems to be an entirely plausible matchup, since the pro\u00adportion Christian should have been higher in Rome than in the\nempire at large. First of all, historians assume that the church in\nRome was exceptionally strong \u2013 it was well known for sending\nfunds to Christians elsewhere. In about 170, Dionysius of\nCorinth wrote to the Roman church: \u201cFrom the start it has been\nyour custom to treat all Christians with unfailing kindness, and\nto send contributions to many churches in every city, some\u00ad\ntimes alleviating the distress of those in need, sometimes providing for your brothers in the mines\u201d (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History\u00a04.23.6, 1965 ed.). Second, by 200 the Christian propor\u00adtion of the population of the city of Rome must have been substantially larger than that in the whole of the empire because Christianity had not yet made much headway in the more west\u00aderly provinces.
\nNow, let us peek just a bit further into the future of Christian\ngrowth. If growth held at 40 percent per decade for the first half\nof the fourth century, there would have been 33,882,008 Christians by 350. In an empire having a population of at least 60\nmillion, there might well have been 33 million Christians by\n350 \u2013 for by then some contemporary Christian wriiters were\nclaiming a majority (Harnack 1908: 2:29). Looking at the rise of\na Christian majority as purely a function of a constant rate of\ngrowth calls into serious question the emphasis given by\nEusebius and others to the conversion of Constantine as the\nfactor that produced the Christian majority (Grant 1977). So\nlong as nothing changed in the conditions that sustained the\n40-percent-a-decade growth rate, Constantine\u2019s conversion\nwould better be seen as a response to the massive exponential wave in progress, not as its cause.
\nSeveral years after I had completed this exploration of the\narithmetic of early Christian growth, when this book was nearly finished, my colleague Michael Willaims made me aware of\nRoger S. Bagnall\u2019s remarkable reconstruction of the growth of\nChristianity in Egypt (1982, 1987). Bagnall examined Egyptian\npapyri to identify the proportion of persons with identifiably Christian names in various years, and from these he recon\u00adstructed a curve of the Christianization of Egypt. Here are real\ndata, albeit from only one area, against which to test my projections. Two of Bagnall\u2019s data points are much later than the end\nof my projections. However, a comparison of the six years\nwithin my time frame shows a level of agreement that can only\nbe described as extraordinary\u2013as can be seen in table 1.2.\n
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\nBagnali\u2019s finding no Christians in 239 can be disregarded.\nObviously there were Christians in Egypt then, but because\ntheir numbers would still have been very small it is not surprising that none turned up in Bagnall\u2019s data. But for later years\nthe matchups are striking, and the correlation of 0.86 between\nthe two curves borders on the miraculous. The remarkable fit\nbetween these two estimates, arrived at via such different\nmeans and sources, seems to me a powerful confirmation of\nboth.\n
That\u2019s rapid growth!
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