The Triumph of Christianity

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Suppose our figures are roughly correct that in the year 100 there were possibly 7,000 to 10,000 Christians. How does that figure in the overall population of the empire? Were Christians likely to have been seen as a growing threat? Recall, the empire (by rough calculation) numbered something like 60 million. If there were 10,000 Christians, that would make the Christian portion of the population about 0.0167 percent—that is, 1/60 of 1 percent. The vast majority of Romans had never heard of Christians. The idea that Christians were about to take over would have been laughable.

  If by 200 CE Christians numbered in the vicinity of 160,000 people, that still would be just a tiny fragment of the population: 0.267 percent, or somewhat over 1/4 of 1 percent. Even though the church was growing by relative leaps and bounds, it still would have been a completely unknown quantity to most Romans. It was only in the third century that the numbers began to grow significantly (think compound interest), and then to avalanche in the fourth.

  In Hopkins’s study he poses the interesting questions: How many actual Christian communities were there in the early decades, and how many writings did they generate? Both are very hard to answer. In his comprehensive survey of all of our surviving literary sources, Harnack was able to identify about 50 Christian communities by name by 100 CE. How many communities were not mentioned by our sources? I would assume most of them. So were there 150 communities in the empire by then? Or 300? We don’t really know.

  But suppose there were 50. Hopkins plays with the figures and comes up with some fascinating ideas. We know that early Christian communities were in contact with one another, often simply by writing a letter, one community leader to another (often in the name of the community itself). And so Paul wrote letters to his communities and we know that his communities wrote letters to him, as he himself indicates in 1 Corinthians 7:1.

  Let’s say that, between the years 50 and 150 CE, these 50 known communities each wrote just two letters a year. That’s not much. I would think they wrote more. But Hopkins asks us to suppose they wrote on average only twice. That would mean that over that century there would have been 10,000 Christian letters sent back and forth. How many of these letters do we have today? About 50.

  Hopkins’s numbers seem to me—and probably to him—far too conservative. Suppose there were actually 200 communities in the year 100. That seems plausible: if there were just over 8,000 Christians, then that would mean each community would have, on average, about 40 members. It is hard to imagine a community being much larger than that, since Christians were still meeting in private homes, and few places could accommodate even three dozen persons. But suppose there were 200 communities, and suppose they each wrote a letter just once every three months, or four a year. That would mean that there would have been 80,000 Christian letters produced in the period, represented now in just the 50 that survive. The sheer number boggles the mind.

  Hopkins is also interested in the question of how many people in these communities could actually read or write these letters. He points out that, as a rule of thumb, any ancient community would be made up of 30 percent adult males, 30 percent adult females, and 40 percent children. The people who could read would be found principally among the adult males. The best indications suggest that maybe 20 percent of the adult male population could read. If the numbers in the preceding paragraph are right—that an average community consisted of forty people—then twelve of those would be adult males. That would suggest that just two or three people in the community were literate.

  Those would be the ones who did the writing. And the reading. Letters sent back and forth to the churches would not have been read by most Christians but to them by the literate two or three. One of those two or three would in almost every instance have been the “bishop” or leader of the church. He (always a male, so far as we know) would be a leader precisely because he had the skills needed to lead, and those skills would have involved some degree of education. Thus although Christianity was from the outset a religion that depended, to an unusual extent, on literature, most Christians were illiterate, as was most of the population of the empire. Those without an education were dependent on others for the reading—and interpretation—of the texts that were used in their communal worship.

  THE GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH: IN SUM

  Even though the numbers of Christians and the rates of growth are, of necessity, rough estimates, they do appear to coincide with the surviving data, both the literary evidence evaluated at length by Harnack and others after him as well as the material remains from Christian antiquity: inscriptions on stone, writing on papyri, and an assortment of archaeological finds.16 We may not be able to chart Christian growth with precision, but we can do so approximately, and even these imprecise finds are highly suggestive.

  Several points bear repeating. It would not take a divine miracle for Christianity to win over the empire. Christians may well want to claim it was a miracle, that it was ultimately God’s doing. The historian has no way of evaluating that claim. But the triumph of Christianity would not have required supernatural intervention. It would have required a steady rate of growth as people converted for reasons I laid out in the preceding chapters.

  There was no need for massive conversions at large evangelistic rallies. We have almost no record of any full-time evangelists after the days of Paul, of missionaries or organized missions of any kind. People converted because they knew other people who were Christian—people connected to them in their daily lives, members of their families, friends, neighbors, coworkers. Many Christians were quite happy to talk about their new faith, about the great miracles that had been worked by and for those who believed, the divine power that was more readily available to those who worshiped the Christian god than to anyone who worshiped any other divine being. These Christians proved convincing. Not massively, just occasionally. That is all it took.

  Perhaps most surprising is the fact that the ultimate triumph of Christianity did not require the conversion of the emperor Constantine. As I have been stressing throughout this book, that conversion was indeed important, one of the most breathtaking moments in Christian history. Christianity went from persecuted minority to favored religion, nearly in one fell swoop. Certainly this opened the floodgates in the sense that now the upper classes within the Roman administration—that rarefied 1 percent of the educated, cultured, and wealthy elite—could see their way to adopting the Christian faith. Christian buildings could now be constructed with no dread of reprisal. The masses could join the faith without fearing for their lives or property. And Christianity grew enormously—from, say, two and a half or three million at the beginning of the fourth century to thirty million at the end.

  But it would be a mistake to think that it was Constantine’s conversion alone that facilitated the Christianization of the empire. If Christianity had simply continued to grow at the rate it was growing at the time of the emperor’s conversion—or even less—it still would have eventually taken over.

  It is impossible to say what would have happened if Constantine had not converted. One could argue that, had the Romans been even more determined to stamp out the faith, they could have done so. Or one could argue the opposite: that even more rigorous Roman opposition would have hardened the Christians’ resolve and made them more fervent in the propagation of their religion, making true Tertullian’s claim that the blood of martyrs was the seed of the church. We will never know what might have happened.

  But we do know what did happen. Constantine converted at an opportune moment. Christianity was poised to grow exponentially even as its rate of growth slowed. The masses did begin to pour in. The emperor showered favors on a religion that excluded the possibility of all other worship. From that point on, looking at the matter in hindsight, the pagan cults of Rome were doomed. An exclusive commitment to the one God of the Christians destroyed the other religions in its wake. Within eighty years of Constantine’s conversion, the transformation would be both massive and official. Rom
e would become predominantly and officially Christian.

  Chapter 7

  Christians Under Assault: Persecution, Martyrdom, and Self-Defense

  Even though the church experienced remarkable growth during its first three centuries, the empire’s transition from paganism to Christianity was by no means smooth. The pagan world did not yield to this new faith quietly. From the very beginning, with the pre-Christian activities of Paul up until the conversion of Constantine, Christians encountered firm, sometimes even feverish opposition. Some of this opposition entailed nothing more than social shunning and verbal attack. But sometimes it involved actual physical assault, either by enraged mobs or by Roman officials intent on punishing those who claimed the name of Christ. Eventually the imperial authorities tried to stamp out the religion altogether. In this chapter we will examine these setbacks along the road to Christianity’s triumph.

  At the outset I need to stress that organized opposition to the Christians came, for the most part, in isolated incidents. The church did not experience perennial violent persecution. The idea that Christianity was an illegal religion under constant surveillance by a state apparatus that inflicted martyrdom on many thousands of believers, forcing the church underground into the Roman catacombs—all this is more the stuff of Hollywood than of history. Christianity was not declared illegal in the empire before the middle of the third century. There were no empire-wide laws or decrees issued by the central authorities in Rome that proscribed the faith. Christians did not, as a rule, go into hiding. For the most part they lived perfectly normal lives in the midst of other people who practiced a wide variety of other religions. The catacombs were not meeting places for Christians forced to congregate in clandestine cells for fear of violent persecution. Persecution itself was rare, and there were relatively few casualties.

  But it did happen on occasion, and there were indeed some ghastly incidents involving trials, tortures, and horrific executions. One might wonder why they happened at all. There were thousands of other religions in the empire. No one was required to worship just one god or another. It was no crime to add a god to the hundreds already revered—not even the god of the Christians. Nor was it a crime to consider a human being, such as Jesus, a god. Many pagans did so with impunity. Given the wide variety of religious cults in the empire, and the abundant tolerance in open display every minute of every day, both among the general populace and by the ruling authorities, why would Christians occasionally find themselves—or, more commonly, hear of others—arrested, tried, and tortured? And why was the judicial goal not to get them to confess to a crime they had committed but to force them to stop committing it?

  First, we should recall that even though Roman authorities were highly tolerant of religious differences, they were not infinitely so, as the Roman suppression of the Bacchic rites in Rome in 186 BCE demonstrates. Any religious cult perceived to be flagrantly immoral or dangerous to society was subject to official intervention. Its members could be tried and punished, and the cult itself could be locally proscribed. The Christians discovered this early in their history. On occasion throughout this period—most dramatically, as we will see, in 250, 257 to 258, and 303 to 313 CE—authorities intervened to disrupt the Christians’ religious practices and force, or try to force, its adherents to abandon the faith. This was not because the Christian religion was illegal per se; it was because the Christians were perceived as dangerous, either to the social well-being of a local community or, eventually, to the ongoing health of the entire empire.

  EARLY PERSECUTION OF THE CHRISTIANS

  We have already discussed the persecution of Christians by the Jewish antagonist Paul, who experienced violent opposition himself after his conversion. That discussion will suffice for the question of how and why non-Christian Jews, in the early years of the church, opposed the movement. In this chapter we shift our focus to Roman persecution. As one might expect, the earliest references to such persecution come to us in the New Testament and are once more related to the missionary work of the apostle Paul.

  Just as Paul tells his readers in Corinth that he had on five occasions “received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes minus one,” he says that on three other occasions he was “beaten with rods” (2 Corinthians 11:24–25). This was a form of Roman corporal punishment. Paul never explains the nature of the charges or of the judicial proceedings leading to these punishments. We do, however, find several episodes in the book of Acts that address the issue.

  As we have seen, Acts is not a disinterested historical account of what happened in the early years of the Christian movement, even if it is often uncritically read in that way. The episodes it narrates may or may not have occurred. But for it to “work” as a piece of literature in its own first-century setting, Acts certainly had to be plausible to its readers. Even if its accounts of what happened in the lives of Paul and the others may not be accurate in their specifics, they do represent the sorts of things that could have been expected to happen. These would include Paul’s experiences of Roman persecution.

  One of the earliest episodes can illustrate the point. In Acts 16, on his second missionary journey, Paul and his companions are in the city of Philippi, where they encounter a young female slave who is possessed by a demon that allows her to predict the future. Her owners make a nice income from her peculiar abilities. But she hounds and publicly maligns Paul, who, after several irritating days, exorcises the demon (Acts 16:16–18). The slave’s owners are incensed at having lost their business. Seizing Paul and one of his companions, they drag them before the local magistrates and charge: “These men are Jews and they are disturbing our city; they are proclaiming customs that we as Romans are not allowed to accept or practice” (Acts 16:20–21). The crowd joins in on the attacks, and the magistrates decide that punishment is in order. They sentence the apostles to be stripped naked, beaten with rods, and thrown in prison.

  As one comes to expect in the book of Acts, later that night God intervenes on behalf of his chosen ones, causing an earthquake that shakes off their shackles and opens the doors of the prison, allowing them to walk out free.

  The divine earthquake may not be creditable, but the general tenor of the persecution is. The views and activities of the Christians are seen as “un-Roman,” harmful, and dangerous, leading local magistrates to take appropriate action. These actions are not based on laws that had been passed against the Christians. There were no such laws. Followers of Jesus were sometimes considered troublemakers and treated accordingly. Roman officials had the authority to deal with such issues on their own, with rather broad latitude. They could punish those causing problems—or even those thought likely to cause problems—without having to consult legal codes or precedent.

  Other sources show that it was not long before simply being known as a Christian could lead to serious opposition. Within the New Testament we find the little book of 1 Peter, one of the real gems among the early Christian writings. Comprising a mere five chapters, this book places an unusually strong focus on the issue of anti-Christian opposition.1 The word “suffer” occurs more in this book than in the entire twenty-eight-chapter book of Acts.

  We learn here that some Christians are paying a price for their faith. We need to assume this means some kind of local opposition, as there is no indication whatsoever that the author has in mind an empire-wide persecution. But the suffering was real:

  Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial that has come upon you as if it is something unexpected, but insofar as you share in the sufferings of Christ, rejoice, so that you may also rejoice and find joy when he is revealed in glory. You are blessed if you are reproached for the name of Christ . . . . None of you ought to suffer as a murderer, thief, evil-doer, or mischief-maker. But if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but glorify God by this name. (1 Peter 4:12–14)

  The author is vague concerning what this suffering entailed. It is clear, in any event, that it was awful: he calls it a “fiery ordeal.�
�� And it could come upon the community simply because it was Christian. This kind of suffering was acceptable and pleasing to God, whereas criminal and mischievous activity obviously was not.

  Some light may be cast on this “ordeal” by an earlier comment in which the author tells his readers they are no longer to live according to “human passions but by the will of God.” The Christians’ friends and neighbors do not appreciate this kind of new lifestyle. But the author insists:

  The past time is sufficient for doing what the gentiles prefer, going about in licentiousness, desires, addiction to wine, reveling, carousing, and lawless idolatry. They are surprised when you no longer accompany them in wild profligacy and they verbally attack you. (1 Peter 4:3– 4)

  It may well be that in the early stages of the Christian movement, as converts moved their allegiance from families, friends, and neighbors to their new Christian community, they upset and angered those left behind, who then abused them for it. It is hard to know exactly how this might have led to corporal punishment, but it may be that the secretive meetings of Christians and their antisocial behavior began not only to upset individual members of the wider community but also drew the attention of local magistrates, who suspected nefarious activities.

  Questions of legitimacy eventually concerned not only the ethical and social activities of the Christians but even more their religious cult itself, the worship of just one god and the refusal to participate in the religious life of the larger community. That this became the salient issue in pagan opposition to the Christian community becomes crystal clear from sources outside the New Testament.

  THE PERSECUTION OF PLINY