The Triumph of Christianity
Page 33
Suppose, then, that the rate slows to something like 25 percent to around 30 percent. If there were 2 million by 300 CE, a rate of 31.1 percent per decade would get to 30 million by 400 CE; if there were 3 million by 300 CE, then a rate of 25.9 percent would get us there.
Obviously all this is simply tweaking the rates given by Stark in order to provide a bit more reality to the situation, in light of what we know about (a) the starting number of Christians in the world, (b) the necessarily rapid (but not unimaginable) rate of growth early on, and (c) the slowing rate of conversion as the number of converts rises. Anyone can tweak the numbers further—indefinitely, in fact, for one who really likes to play the numbers game. But the reality is that at a certain point the educated guessing simply becomes wildly speculative guessing. So, based on some educated guessing, we have ballpark figures. Nonetheless, they are striking. Given the precise rate adjustments I’m using—starting in 30 CE (300 percent); in the year 60 CE (down from 300 percent to 60 percent), 100 CE (down to 34 percent), and 300 CE (down to 26 percent)—here is how the numbers of Christians would break down over time (rounded up to the nearest 1,000 starting with 150 CE):
30 CE—20 Christians
60 CE—1,280 Christians; say 1,000 to 1,500
100 CE—8,389 Christians; say 7,000 to 10,000
150 CE—36,000 Christians; say 30,000 to 40,000
200 CE—157,000 Christians; say 140,000 to 170,000
250 CE—676,000 Christians; say 600,000 to 700,000
300 CE—2,923,000 Christians; say 2,500,000 to 3,500,000
312 CE—3,857,000 Christians; say 3,500,000 to 4,000,000
400 CE—29,478,000 Christians; say 25,000,000 to 35,000,000
About the Author
© DAN SEARS, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
BART D. EHRMAN is the author or editor of more than thirty books, including the New York Times bestsellers Misquoting Jesus and How Jesus Became God. Ehrman is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a leading authority on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity. He has been featured in Time, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post, and has appeared on NBC, CNN, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the History channel, the National Geographic channel, BBC, major NPR shows, and other top print and broadcast media outlets.
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ALSO BY BART D. EHRMAN
Jesus Before the Gospels
How Jesus Became God
The Other Gospels
The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction
Forgery and Counterforgery
Did Jesus Exist?
The Apocryphal Gospels
Forged
Jesus, Interrupted
God’s Problem
The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot
Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene
Studies in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament
Misquoting Jesus
The Apostolic Fathers
Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code
A Brief Introduction to the New Testament
The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings
Christianity in Late Antiquity
Lost Christianities
Lost Scriptures
Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium
The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture
The Text of the Fourth Gospel in the Writings of Origen
Didymus the Blind and the Text of the Gospels
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Notes
INTRODUCTION
1 For information about the temple, its excavation, and the historical background to its destruction, see the report of Barbara Gassowska, “Maternus Cynegius, Praefectus Praetorio Orientis and the Destruction of the Allat Temple in Palmyra,” Archaeologia 33 (1982), 107–127.
2 Ibid., 113.
3 For a fuller statement, see Troels Myrup Kristensen, Making and Breaking the Gods: Christian Responses to Pagan Sculpture in Late Antiquity (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2013), 89–106.
4 Gassowska, “Maternus Cynegius,” 119.
5 Eberhard Sauer, The Archaeology of Religious Hatred in the Roman and Early Medieval World (Stroud, UK: History Press, 2009), 157.
6 I will explore the issues of gain and loss more explicitly in the Afterword.
CHAPTER 1
1 There are numerous authoritative biographies of Constantine. Among the most hard-hitting accounts written by scholars for scholars are the following: Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1981); Timothy Barnes, Constantine: Dynasty, Religion and Power in the Later Roman Empire (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014); and Harold A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2000). Somewhat more accessible to the general reader but fully authoritative are Noel Lenski, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and David Potter, Constantine the Emperor (New York: Oxford University, 2013). See also the interesting account of Paul Stephenson, Constantine: Unconquered Emperor, Christian Victor (London: Quercus, 2009).
2 See, for example, Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian, The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
3 I am not using the term “pagan” in a derogatory sense but simply to refer to the broad array of non-monotheistic religions embraced by virtually everyone except Jews (and then Christians) in antiquity. See further my discussion on pp. 76–78.
4 We will be discussing pagan religions more fully in chapter 3. For general overviews, see the brief treatment of A. D. Lee, “Traditional Religions,” in Lenski, ed., The Age of Constantine, 159–79. For a particularly useful book-length discussion, see James B. Rives, Religion in the Roman Empire (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2007). A terse but helpful overview is Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). Now classic is the elegant book by Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: Knopf, 1987). A valuable full assessment can be found in the two-volume collection of sources and analysis of Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For my comments about paganism as an “ism,” see also James B. Rives, “Christian Expansion and Christian Ideology,” in W. V. Harris, ed., The Spread of Christianity in the First Four Centuries: Essays in Explanation (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2005), 15– 41.
5 Among the many authoritative accounts of the period, see the useful and detailed studies in Alan Bowman, Avril Cameron, and Peter Garnsey, Cambridge Ancient History, The Crisis of Empire: 193–337, 2nd ed., vol. 12 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
6 There have been scholarly controversies over how, precisely, the system was supposed to work. I am following the reconstruction of Barnes, Constantine: Dynasty, Religion, and Power, 63.
7 See the works cited in note 1 for this chapter.
8 Not only was the opposing army commanded by Maximian, the highly experienced father of Maxentius, but so too had been most of Severus’s own troops several years earlier. They appear to have continued to have felt close loyalties to their previous general, and so deserted to him when the opportunity arose.
9 Galerius had never been to Rome and apparently did not r
ealize just how large it was. He did not bring enough troops for a siege.
10 See the references given in note 1 for this chapter. The two main primary sources from Eusebius are his Church History—see Eusebius, The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, trans. G. A. Williamson, revised and edited by Andrew Louth (London: Penguin, 1965)—and a biography of Constantine (the only one of him to survive from antiquity) called The Life of Constantine: see Eusebius, Life of Constantine, trans. Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1999). Quotations are taken from this translation.
11 See Lee, “Traditional Religions.”
12 Eusebius, Life of Constantine, chapters 13–18, 27.
13 A translation of the panegyric, along with the others delivered to Constantine during his career, can be found in C. E. V. Nixon and Barbara Saylor Rogers, In Praise of Later Roman Emperors: The Panegyrici Latini (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
14 See the references in note 1 for this chapter. The account is found in Eusebius, Life of Constantine, 1.27–32.
15 In his comments Eusebius seems to intimate that this was based on a private audience with the emperor, but more likely it was a public event, probably a dinner of the bishops who had attended the Council of Nicaea (discussed in chapter 8) after the completion of their work in 325 CE. This means, of course, that Constantine’s recollections of his vision were revealed to Eusebius and the others some thirteen years after the event itself.
16 Eusebius, In Praise of Constantine 8.1; see also Eusebius, Life of Constantine 1.47. The most recent and the fullest discussion of Constantine’s visions is Raymond van Dam, Remembering Constantine at the Milvian Bridge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Van Dam applies recent developments in the studies of memory to argue that it is really impossible, at the end of the day, to know what, if anything, actually happened. The accounts of the visions are hopelessly at odds with one another, and even if we just stick with one or the other, there are enormous problems. The fullest version of Eusebius, for example, presents Eusebius’s biased reporting of what he claimed he heard Constantine say many years after the fact. But Constantine had reasons of his own (i.e., biases) for shaping his story the way he did. Moreover, he was remembering the past in light of all of his thinking and experiences in the meantime, so that his recollections of the past may not be an accurate reflection of what happened, or what he thought happened, at the time.
17 See the discussions in Rambo and Farhadian, The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion.
18 See note 16 for this chapter. As to what Constantine actually saw (if anything), there have been numerous suggestions over the years, none as tantalizing or widely discussed as one made by a German scholar named Peter Weiss, who argued that Constantine may have seen a “solar halo.” Solar halos are an unusual but completely normal optical phenomenon in which the light of the sun is refracted by millions of ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere. The sun is surrounded by a bright halo—you can see many instances online—and sometimes appears to have rays shooting out in a few or in many directions. You can imagine seeing the phenomenon and thinking that the sun looks like a laurel wreath, or even a cross. Sometimes the phenomenon lasts as long as two hours, appearing suddenly and disappearing as quickly. Did Constantine and the soldiers with him have such a vision? Some scholars have maintained it is at least possible. Others have argued there is no way to verify any such “naturalistic” explanations of allegedly “supernatural” occurrences and pointed out that all such explanations are hopelessly speculative. Weiss’s article was first published in German in 1993. The article was translated by A. R. Birley, with some revisions by Weiss, as “The Vision of Constantine,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 16 (2003), 237–59.
19 See, for example, Potter, Constantine the Emperor: “In 312, Constantine’s God was both the Sun and the Christian God. It may not have been hard to make this leap, for in some Christian communities the sun god was already equated with Christ” (pp. 158–59).
20 Eusebius suggests that Maxentius had designed the bridge to collapse under stress and planned to draw Constantine and his forces onto it as a trap. But the plan backfired when his troops were routed and needed to make a hasty retreat back to the city. It is an intriguing claim but rather difficult to credit.
21 In addition to Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, see H. A. Drake, “Constantine and Consensus,” Church History 64 (1995), 1–15.
22 Rather than being an imperial edict issued from Milan, it was a letter from Licinius based on an agreement he and Constantine had reached at a meeting they had held earlier in Milan.
23 See the fuller discussion in chapter 8.
24 English edition in Mark Edwards, Constantine and Christendom (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003).
25 See note 21 for this chapter.
CHAPTER 2
1 Biographies and studies of Paul are legion. For a fuller account of my perspective, see Bart D. Ehrman, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). A classic in the field, approaching Paul from the perspective of social history rather than theology, is Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). A helpful but very brief book-length treatment is E. P. Sanders, Paul: A Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Longer (massive) and more recent is E. P. Sanders, Paul: The Apostle’s Life, Letters, and Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress, 2015). Another recent and informed contribution is Albert Harrill, Paul the Apostle: His Life and Legacy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
2 The seven undisputed letters: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. On the issues of forgery in antiquity, the matter of terminology (is it appropriate to call such works forgeries?), and the dubious authorship of the Pauline letters, see Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2012).
3 See my discussion in Forged, 202–209.
4 For a dating of the book in the early second century, some six decades after Paul’s death, see Richard Pervo, Dating Acts: Between the Evangelists and the Apologists (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2006).
5 For overviews of Judaism in the time of Paul, see Shaye Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, 3rd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2014) and E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE to 66 CE (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992).
6 This has long been the contention of E. P. Sanders, a premier scholar of both Paul and ancient Judaism. See his books cited in notes 1 and 5 for this chapter. His classic statement of this view is in his scholarly monograph Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977).
7 See the discussions of Cohen and Sanders in the books cited in note 5 for this chapter.
8 See my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
9 There are numerous book-length treatments just on the chronology of Paul’s life and ministry. One widely used treatment is Gerd Luedemann, Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles: Studies in Chronology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984).
10 A number of scholars object to calling the early followers of Jesus “Christians,” since many of the distinctive features of Christianity—especially its cardinal doctrines—had not yet developed. On the other hand, the same could be said for centuries, and yet no one hesitates using the term “Christian” for followers of Jesus in, say, the year 250. My view is that the very basic notions that made the Jewish followers of Jesus distinct among other Jews were already in place by the time Paul converted. These were the beliefs that Jesus’s death had somehow brought about salvation with God and that God had then raised Jesus from the dead and taken him up to heaven to “sit at his right hand.” Such views were known to Paul even before he himself became a follower of Jesus, and I thi
nk there is no harm in calling anyone who subscribed to them a Christian (without denying, of course, that the person could also be a Jew). The term “Christian” first appears in the New Testament in Acts 11:26 and 1 Peter 4:16.
11 For an account of Jewish messianic expectations at the time, see John Collins, The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1995).
12 See my discussion in Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2014).
13 The Greek could also be translated “revealed his son in me.” If that is the proper translation, it would mean that the revelation of God occurred within Paul—that is, it was a personal insight that he received, in his own mind.
14 I do not mean to imply that his thoughts occurred in a vacuum. Since Paul had been persecuting the Christians, he already knew, of course, that they claimed Jesus was the one favored by God who had been raised from the dead. The thought processes that I describe here are how he figured out for himself how this was possible and what it all meant.
15 Harrill, Paul the Apostle, 26.
16 One particularly helpful study of Paul’s mission is Terence L. Donaldson, “ ‘The Field God Has Assigned’: Geography and Mission in Paul,” in Religious Rivalries in the Early Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity, ed. Leif E. Vaage (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), 109–37.