The Triumph of Christianity (19 page)

Notice that many Christians made their identity as such obvious by flocking to meet or to serve those facing martyrdom and that the authorities seem to have ignored them. This was in keeping not only with the usual policy to not seek out Christians—as Trajan told Pliny—but also with the primary Roman tactic of persecuting the church top-down. The Romans assumed that the bishops and clergy were the active elements of the church and should they be destroyed, the masses of ordinary Christians would simply drift away. This was no doubt true of the pagan temples and perhaps for the Oriental faiths. But it was a misreading of Christianity where behind each bishop, priest, and deacon there was a line of lay persons ready and able to replace them. Indeed, the church was an independent social sphere wherein high status was entailed by positions within the group, whatever one’s status outside—a separate world wherein a high city official and a slave could meaningfully call one another “brother.” And within this Christian status sphere, no higher rank could be accorded than that of a “holy martyr.”

Martyrdom and Credibility

L
ET US NOW SHIFT
our attention from the martyrs to their audiences. The fundamental problem facing all religions is one of credibility. Ultimately, all religions require an act of faith—that adherents be willing to believe in a supernatural realm that is not directly observable. Hence many religions feature testimony from those who have had a personal experience that supports the claims about the supernatural. Typically these involve an appeal for supernatural help that appears to have been answered: tales of miraculous survival, of recovery from injury or illness, sometimes even of victory in battle. In this way people offer others proof that their religion “works,” and hence that its fundamental premises must be true.

Of all the proofs and all of the testimonials, nothing approaches the credibility inherent in martyrdom. How could mere mortals remain defiant after being skinned and covered with salt? How could anyone keep the faith while being slowly roasted on a spit? Such performances seemed virtually supernatural in and of themselves. And that was the effect they often had on the observers. Christian viewers could “see” that the hand of God was on the martyrs. Many pagans also were amazed: the distinguished physician Galen wrote of Christians that “their contempt of death... is patent to us every day.”
⁵⁴
Accounts of martyrdom make frequent mention of pagans having gained respect for the faith from having observed, or even having taken part in, the torture of martyrs. The pagan onlookers knew full well that they would not endure such tribulations for their religion. Why would so many Christians do so? Were they missing something about this strange new faith? This sort of unease and wonderment often paved the way for new conversions.

Conclusion

I
T SEEMS FITTING TO
quote the introductory sentences written by Eusebius in
The Martyrs of Palestine
⁵⁵
—his account of some who suffered during the Great Persecution. “These holy martyrs of God... accounted a horrible death more precious than a fleeting life, and won all the garlands of victorious virtue.... And the spirits of the martyrs, counted worthy of the kingdom of heaven, are come to the assembly of the prophets, and are precious.”

Thus were the Roman authorities overmatched.

Chapter Nine
Assessing Christian Growth

T
HROUGH THE CENTURIES, MANY HISTORIANS
have supposed that in order to achieve the size that it must have reached by the fourth century, Christianity had to grow at an incredible rate. The authoritative German historian Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) agreed with St. Augustine (354–430) that “Christianity must have reproduced itself by means of miracles, for the greatest miracle of all would have been the extraordinary extension of the religion apart from any miracles.”
¹
Can that be true?

As with nearly all discussions of Christian growth, no actual numbers were offered by Harnack and he made no attempt to calculate what rate of growth actually would have been required to achieve this “miracle.” Had he done so, he would have discovered that no miracle was needed, albeit exponential growth curves often seem miraculous to those unfamiliar with this form of arithmetic.

In any event, it seems appropriate to pause here to create a plausible statistical model of Christian growth in the Roman Empire. It is impossible to extend such a model to include growth in the East since there is far too little to go on, but it must be kept in mind that there probably were
substantially more Christians in the East than in the West
at all points in time until after the Muslim conquests (see chapter 12). The validity of the model of Christian growth in the empire is tested in various ways and then the geography of Christian growth is examined: how did it spread across the empire? When geography is combined with the model of growth, it is possible to estimate the probable size of the Christian population in the city of Rome over time and thereby to more fully appreciate the emergence of Christians as a powerful political force.

Ancient Statistics

O
NE OF THE MAJOR
impediments to writing ancient or medieval history is the lack of reliable statistics. Not only are numbers very seldom provided in the sources, the few that are given usually are absurd. For example, Josephus (37–100
CE
) claimed that when the Romans conquered Jerusalem in 70
CE
, 1,100,000 residents of the city were killed and another 97,000 were enslaved.
²
In truth, there probably never were even 40,000 people in Jerusalem, and many of them are known to have escaped. To further confuse matters, some numbers in the ancient sources probably are accurate: Josephus may well have been correct in reporting that 960 Jewish zealots, including men, women, and children, perished at Masada.
³

One reason ancient statistics are so few and implausible is that although “[officials] actually were interested in statistics... the literary-minded persons who wrote history... were not interested.”
⁴
A second reason is that until modern times, writers often did not mean for their numbers to be taken literally, but simply used them to suggest “many” or “few”—Fulcher of Chartes (1059–1127), for example, surely knew that six million French knights had not set out on the First Crusade (a number larger than the entire population of France).

It is impossible to know how many people actually saw Jesus or heard him preach. Although one prominent scholar has claimed that everyone in Palestine had been evangelized by Jesus during his ministry, or more than eight hundred thousand Jews,
⁵
the total could not have been more than a fraction of that number since Jesus spent nearly his entire ministry in and around the tiny villages of a small portion of Galilee, itself a small province. Of course, the issue is not how many heard, or even heard of Jesus, but how many accepted him as Christ. Fortunately, we do have a very plausible report of the total number of Christians soon after the Crucifixion. Acts 1:15 reads: “In those days Peter stood up among the brethren (the company of persons was in all about a hundred and twenty).”

That total is consistent with the early days of most new religious movements since it seems that conversion is a person-by-person phenomenon that only slowly gains momentum through social networks. Sudden, mass conversions simply don’t happen. It is true that a generation ago many social scientists believed in the reality of mass conversions—they wrote of “mass hysteria,” “herd instincts,” “mob psychology,” “collective madness,” and the like. But no one could cite a certified example of such phenomena. Consequently, even social scientists have relegated such notions to the dustbin of useless concepts.
⁶
Thus the claim in Acts 2:41 that in response to a public sermon by Peter, “about three thousand souls” were baptized that day and added to the community of Christians, must be dismissed as hyperbole. Even had so many come forward (which is extremely unlikely), the primary result would have been three thousand wet Jews and pagans—far more was involved in becoming an authentic Christian than hearing a sermon and getting a quick dunk in the river. Ignoring this claim of a mass baptism, and giving credence only to Acts 1:15, is consistent with Howard Clark Kee’s estimate “that participation in the Jesus movement in Gentile cities during the first generation numbered in dozens, or scores at most.”
⁷
I propose that there were a total of about a thousand Christians in the empire in the year 40.

There are no other relevant numbers, plausible or not, offered in the New Testament. Still, it is possible to infer that the total number of Christians grew slowly until late in the second century from the fact that there are no indications of any church structures.
⁸
“The earliest church building in the city of Rome that can be dated [was] built in the mid-third century.”
⁹
Instead, Christians still met in one another’s homes: “there might be several meeting places in a city, but the space for each congregation cannot have been large.”
¹⁰
Thus the distinguished Robert Wilken suggested that by about the year 150 “Christian groups could be found in perhaps forty or fifty cities within the Roman Empire. Most of these groups were quite small, some numbering several dozen people, others as many as several hundred. The total number of Christians within the empire was probably less than fifty thousand.”
¹¹

A century later, the Christian population may have amounted to about 2 percent of the population of the empire, or slightly more than a million members, according to Robert Lane Fox.
¹²
Many historians have proposed an estimate of the size of the Christian population for the year 300, and all are in close accord at about 6 million.
¹³
And it is generally agreed that by the year 350, Christians were in the majority—if barely—amounting to somewhat more than 30 million who were at least nominal Christians. These milestone estimates appear in table 9.1.

A Model of Growth

I
S IT POSSIBLE TO
discover a simple model of Christian growth that fits this set of milestones? Yes. Starting with a thousand Christians in the year 40, and assuming that Christianity grew at a rate of 3.4 percent per year, the result is a projected model of growth that hits each milestone nearly exactly, as can be seen in table 9.1.

Table 9.1: Christian Growth in the Roman Empire
(Growth Projected at an Annual Rate of 3.4 Percent)

* Based on a stable imperial population of 60 million.

It would be hard to imagine a closer matchup between the various historical estimates and this model. Of course, were it available, the actual Christian growth curve probably would be somewhat lumpy, some years falling a bit below 3.4 percent and some other years exceeding that rate. But the extraordinary overall fit suggests that any departures must have been very modest and short-lived. Keep in mind that this is a growth rate, not a conversion rate. It is made up of conversions and fertility, minus deaths and defections.

This projection shows that there need not have been anything miraculous about Christian growth. Rather, many contemporary religious bodies, including the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons, have sustained well-documented growth rates as high as or higher than 3.4 percent a year for many decades.
¹⁴
As for objections that there were far more than a thousand Christians in the year 40,
¹⁵
if there were more, then the needed rate of growth would have been substantially lower. For example, had there been ten thousand Christians in the year 40, a rate of growth of only 2.65 percent would have sufficed to pass the thirty million mark by 350. But that rate produces a model that is extremely out of line with the intervening milestones, making it far less plausible. In any event, there was plenty of time for Christianity to achieve its growth by way of the conventional network process.

In addition to meeting the milestones, this model based on 3.4 percent growth so closely matches several available bodies of actual data that it must be granted considerable credibility. For example, the projections agree very closely with estimates made by Roger S. Bagnall of the percent of Christians in the population from the year 239 through 315 based on an analysis of the percentage of Christian names among those appearing in Egyptian documents.
¹⁶
A second basis of comparison is even more compelling. Carlos R. Galvao-Sobrinho
¹⁷
has published data on the number of Christian epigraphs appearing on gravestones in the city of Rome, broken down into twenty-five-year groupings.
¹⁸
A time series analysis using the Roman data and the projections of the Christian population of the empire, beginning in the year 200 and ending at 375 resulted in an incredibly close matchup. As can be seen in the graphed Z scores shown in figure 9.1, the two curves are virtually identical and produce an almost perfect correlation of.996.

It should be noted that, of course, this curve could not have kept rising indefinitely, and it soon must have decelerated as the number of potential converts declined. Furthermore, not only is it impossible to convert more than 100 percent of a population, in this instance significant numbers of residents of the empire never converted to Christianity. Many Jews did not; organized paganism lingered for centuries; and millions of people in rural areas seem never to have gone beyond merely adding Jesus to their pantheon of gods (see chapter 15). Consequently, the complete growth curve would resemble the S-shaped curve that has been found to so typically apply to the diffusion of various phenomena through a population.

The Geography of Christian Growth

A
LTHOUGH
J
ESUS PREACHED IN
the villages and from the hillsides in Galilee, within twenty years after the Crucifixion, early Christianity had become overwhelmingly an urban movement. Paul’s missionary journeys took him to major cities such as Antioch, Corinth, and Athens, with occasional visits to smaller communities such as Iconium and Laodicea, but no mention is made of him ever preaching in the countryside. In fact it was centuries before the Christians devoted much effort to converting the rural peasantry. By then, of course, many rural people had been Christianized by friends and neighbors who had returned from a sojourn in a city where they had become Christians. However, for the first several centuries it is important to assess the Christian growth curve as heavily weighted to the cities, for that fact maximized the visibility as well as the local impact of Christian communities. Both factors would have been enhanced by the intense congregational nature of Christianity—whatever their numbers, they gathered regularly and coordinated their participation in civic life.

Figure 9.1: Christian Epigraphs in Rome and Membership Projections
Z Scores