The Source:
Keith Hopkins, ‘Christian number and its implications’, in Sociological Studies in Roman History, edited by Christopher Kelly, Cambridge 2018
Originally: Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998)
[INTRODUCTIONS]
… One tentative but radical conclusion [of this article] is that Christianity was for a century after Jesus’ death the intellectual property at any one time of scarcely a few dozen, perhaps rising to two hundred, literate adult males, dispersed throughout the Mediterranean basin. A complementary conclusion (of course, well known in principle, but not often explored for its implications) is that by far the greatest growth in Christian numbers took place in two distinct phases: first, during the third century, when Christians and their leaders were the victims of empire-wide and centrally organised persecutions; and then in the fourth century, after the conversion of Constantine and the alliance of the Church with the Roman state under successive emperors. The tiny size of the early Church and the scale and speed of its later growth each had important implications for Christianity’s character and organisation. …
… One of my main objectives in this paper is to show how the same ‘facts’, differently perceived, generate competing but complementary understandings. For example, leading Christians were highly conscious of their sect’s rapid growth and understandably proud of their ‘large numbers’. But many Romans, both leaders and ordinary folk, long remained ignorant of and unworried by Christians, probably because of their ‘objectively’ small numbers and relative social insignificance. Such differential perceptions often occur, then and now. Perhaps these discrepancies were all the more pervasive in a huge and culturally complex empire, with very slow communications. So, the Roman or religious historian has the delicate job of understanding and analysing these networks of complementary but conflicting meanings – and at the same time, the exciting task of finding, inventing or borrowing best methods for constructing critical paths through or round our patchy knowledge of what inevitably remains an alien society.
My first task is to calculate the size and growth in the number of Christians during the first four centuries AD. …
[MH: The bulk of the chapter is taken up with this calculation. I only exhibit a few interesting conclusions and focus on the hypothesised implications or functions.]
[MH: In his book ‘Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300–1300, published 2022, Peter Heather devotes a section of Chapter 1 to demolishing the sociological ‘numbers model’ which Hopkins cautiously discusses here. My own view currently (!) is that Hopkins’s broader hypotheses about the sociopolitical ‘utility’ of Christianity—summarised below—are not invalidated ipso facto by any errors in the numbers or in subsequent historical interpretations of the ‘real’ motives of successive emperors.]
… Origen [c.185–c.254], in the middle of the third century, wrote: ‘It is obvious that in the beginning Christians were small in number’ (Against Celsus 3.10). …
… Let us make an arbitrary estimate that in AD 40 about one thousand people were Christians — though of course at this stage of Christian evolution it is probable that they would have envisaged themselves as Jews who also believed in the divinity of Jesus. Actually, not a lot hangs on the exact numbers either at the beginning or the end, as will become clear when we consider figure 12.1 … Our primary purpose overall in this article is to think through the implications of Christian growth, not to measure it precisely (that is impossible), nor even to explain it. …
Absolute Numbers, Proportions and Persecutions
According to figure 12.1, in AD 100, there were only about 7,000 or so Christians, equal to barely 0.01 per cent of the empire’s population (roughly say 60 million). And in 200, there were only just over 200,000 Christians, barely 0.35 per cent of the total population. Let me stress once again that these are not truth statements; they are crude probabilities attached to very rough orders of magnitude. They are numerical metaphors, good for thinking about Christians with. Such estimates imply that, practically speaking, for the whole of this period, Christians were statistically insignificant. …
… The statistical insignificance of Christians, in relation to the rest of the empire’s population, allows us to complement and correct the perspective of surviving Christian writers. Christians themselves could properly see that their religion was expanding successfully and very fast. And they sometimes … made exaggerated and self- inflating claims to that effect. But their absolute numbers long remained small. The same facts, differently perceived, generated variant accounts. From an official, upper-class Roman point of view, Christians did not matter, except as occasional individual or local nuisances, or as scapegoats, sacrificed to placate unruly crowds. …
… From a Roman government point of view, it was not worthwhile persecuting Christians systematically. And from a Jewish perspective … Christians were only a minor annoyance. …
… As I see it [MH: after long/detailed historical analysis omitted here] the image of persistent persecution which Christians manufactured for themselves was more a mode of self-representation or a tactic of self- unification than an objective description of reality. I am not saying that persecutions did not happen. Sure they did, occasionally and sporadically. And the fear of persecution probably sat like a huge cloud over Christian prayer meetings. It may even have kept many Christians from openly professing their faith.
But persecutions were also useful. Fear of them pulled Christians together, sorted the sheep from the goats, decreased the risk of insincere hangers-on and helped enthuse the survivors that being a Christian was really worthwhile. Being persecuted was collective proof of Christian radicality and an instrument of togetherness. Besides, martyrdom was a special, Christian type of heroism. Mostly, you didn’t actually have to die for your faith, though you could parade your willingness — if the need arose. But you had to admire those who, like Christ, were willing to, or had died, for their faith.
So the traditional question: ‘Why were the Christians persecuted?’ with all its implications of unjust repression and eventual triumph, should be rephrased: ‘Why were the Christians persecuted so little and so late?’ Our answer should recognise that, for most of the first three centuries AD, Christians were protected from persistent persecution, both by the Roman government’s failure to perceive that Christianity, mattered and by its punctilious legalism, which prohibited anonymous denunciation through the courts. At a formal level, Roman legalism protected Christianity against large-scale persecution for well over a century. Informally, in unofficial assaults and mass disturbances, Christians were persecuted, but, as I have said, only occasionally and sporadically. So too were Jews.
In these unofficial attacks, it was, I suspect, pagan perception of Christians’ behaviour as idiosyncratic (their refusal to attend traditional public festivals, their private meetings, their rigid morality and secret gestures), more than their beliefs, which provoked repression. In a publicly committed, polytheistic society, Christians seemed, to those who noticed them, a new-fangled and oddball group of monotheists. Besides, Christianity could expand so fast only by winning adherents from old-established practices/gods and by drawing attention to how very different Christians were from everybody else. Small wonder if this combination of ostentatious difference and successful proselytism provoked occasional outbursts of hostility.
In the first two centuries after Jesus’ death, Christians needed Roman persecutors, or at least stories about Roman persecutors, rather more than Romans saw the need to persecute Christians. Christianity survived and prospered, partly because of its intrinsic virtues, but partly also because Roman persecutions allowed Christians to nurture a sense of danger and victimisation, without there ever having been a real danger of collective extirpation.
Christianity was also often protected by Roman officials’ insistence on a legalism which effectively shielded Christians against arbitrary prosecutions. And that protectivism itself persisted, because the Roman government long failed to realise that it needed to protect itself against religious subversion as much as, or more than, against barbarian invasions. The religious frontier was largely undefended, because well organised attacks along it were unexpected.
But it is only when we play this game of numbers and proportions that we see most clearly that the third century was the critical period of Christian growth. According to the figures tentatively projected in figure 12.1, Christian numbers grew in the third century from about 200,000 to over 6 million. Or put another way, it was only in the third century that Christianity gained the prominence that made it worthwhile persecuting on an empire-wide scale. But by the time the Roman government finally began to realise that Christianity posed a significant threat and started systematic persecution of Christian leaders and their property [AD 250–300 examples given], Christianity was too embedded to be stamped out easily. And it was particularly in this period of persecutions, in spite of temporary losses, that Christianity grew fastest in absolute terms. In other words, in terms of number, persecution was good for Christianity. …
[SECTIONS OMITTED]
Age, Sex and the Role of Women
According to modern historical demographers, ancient populations were usually made up, roughly speaking, of 30 per cent adult males, 40 per cent adult females and 30 per cent children of both sexes under age 17. Mortality was particularly high among infants and children under 5, but by modern standards continued to be very high in adult populations. For example, roughly speaking, half of those surviving to the age of 15 died by the age of 50. Sickness and death, and presumably the fear of death, were pervasive. Hence, crudely speaking, the significance and appeal of immortality. These basic figures are fundamental for understanding the structure and growth of early Christian communities and house cult- groups. …
… some ancient critics of Christianity and modern scholars have argued that women were particularly prone to conversion to Christianity; and it is clear from the earliest Christian writings that women played an important role in primitive Christian house cult-groups. Of course, it is arguable that women, marginalised in a male-dominated Roman society, were more likely to join a marginal religion, such as Christianity, as a covert form of rebellion. But to my eyes, the homology (marginal women, marginal religion) seems more rhetorical than descriptive. And ancient pagan criticisms that Christianity was particularly attractive to women and slaves were a literary cliché, expressing a depreciatory attitude towards women and Christianity more than cool observation.
… What are the implications of the small average size of early Christian house cult-groups and communities? First, in small groups it is easier to enforce discipline, to foster internal collusion about the benefits of belief, to give mutual reassurance and to diminish the role of free riders, i.e. those who undermine collective commitment by seeking the benefits without paying the costs of membership. In other words, small groups can more easily maintain a collusive sense of the superiority of their own vision and of the benefits of their own beliefs and lifestyle.
Secondly, the relative importance of women in the workings of the primitive Church, albeit disputed, may have been a function of the small numbers in each cult-group, as well as of differential recruitment.
But, per contra, it is extremely difficult for dispersed and prohibited house cult-groups and communities to maintain and enforce common beliefs and common liturgical practices across space and time in pre-industrial conditions of communications. The frequent claims that scattered Christian communities constituted a single Church was not a description of reality in the first two centuries AD, but a blatant yet forceful denial of reality. What was amazing was the persistence and power of the ideal in the face of its unachievability, even in the fourth century. …
Literacy and Stratification
… The general literacy rate in the Roman empire as a whole was kept down by the gap between various native languages (Egyptian, Aramaic, Punic, etc.) and the administrative and upper-culture language of the Roman conquerors, Greek and Latin. Urban literacy rates were in all probability significantly higher than rural rates; and there was considerable regional variation (the eastern Mediterranean was more literate than the western Mediterranean). Most literacy was at the basic, slow and functional end of the literacy range. Fluent, sophisticated literacy was concentrated in, but was not the exclusive privilege of, the ruling strata.
A brief analysis of Roman stratification might be helpful here.
The Roman empire was a preponderantly agricultural society, with 80 per cent or so of the population engaged in farming and 15 per cent of the population living in towns. The stratification pyramid was very steeply pitched, i.e. there was a huge gap between a small, powerful and rich élite and the mass of rural and urban poor. For example, a middling senator at the end of the first century AD had an income sufficient to support 2,000 families at subsistence level.
In between the élite and the mass, there was a sub-élite (inevitably a shadowy, but still a useful concept) of unknown size, which comprised middling landowners, merchants, professionals, such as lawyers, doctors, architects, professors of rhetoric and philosophy, middling and lesser administrators, army officers, scribes, school teachers and eventually Christian ideologues. These sub-élites were probably particularly concentrated in the metropolitan centres (Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Carthage), in the larger cities… and in merchant ports … and the university town of Athens.
The steepness of the stratification pyramid and the relatively small size of the Roman middle class meant that people in intermediate positions could both be despised by their superiors and appear privileged to those beneath them. It is also worth stressing that sophisticated literacy correlated significantly with wealth and high social status, but high status, literacy and wealth did not completely coincide. There were some slaves and ex-slaves, for example, who were low in status, but who were literary sophisticates, just as there were rich landowners who were, or were thought to be, cultural boors.
It is sometimes argued that Christianity particularly appealed to people with high status inconsistency; it may be correct, and particularly important for the first phase of Christian expansion, but cannot account for the rate of expansion in the empire as a whole. [references cited]
Now for proportions and numbers. As usual in Roman history, little is known for sure. But the ruling élite of senators, knights and town councillors (decuriones) can be estimated at just over 1 per cent of the adult population, comprising some 210,000 adult males.
[FOOTNOTE: Any such calculation must be vague, since there was/is no single valid definition of Roman ruling strata. But if we combine senators, knights and town councillors (100 for each of 2,000 towns), we get a total of say 210,000 adult males (i.e. 1.2 per cent) out of 17 million adult males in the empire. I use adult males as a unit of calculation for convenience. In fact, some towns did not have as many as 100 town councillors, and their wealth differed dramatically according to the size and wealth of the town.]
There is no particular advantage in estimating the size of the sub-élite, since its bottom boundaries are necessarily fuzzy. But I speculate that it constituted say another 2 per cent of the total population, of whom at most half (another 200,000 adult males and far fewer females) possessed a sophisticated and fluent literacy.
This relatively low percentage of literary sophisticates, compared with the modern industrial world, reflects the level of Roman social evolution (the percentage of literates at any level in the Mediterranean basin as a whole had been near zero a thousand years earlier) and the relative absence from Roman society of a middle class. That said, the proportion of sophisticated literates may seem low, at <2 per cent of adult males, but it is also, I think, a generous estimate, if they constituted between a fifth and a tenth of all literates at whatever level (and if literates constituted 10–20 per cent of the male population). By this tentative reckoning, there were about 400,000 literary sophisticates (of different levels) in the Roman empire.
[FOOTNOTE: Since not all town councillors (or even bishops) could write, let alone rank as sophisticated literates, this estimate seems overgenerous.]
Let’s now apply these general, albeit hypothetical, literacy rates to Christians. The basic problem is that we know very little about the social standing of early Christians. But we can follow several clues. It seems generally agreed that Christianity did not initially attract converts from among the ruling strata of senators, knights and town councillors, or not in significant numbers, at least until the third century.
Complementarily, the self-presenting profile of primitive Christianity is repeatedly anti-rich (Luke 6:24: ‘Woe to you that are rich’), anti-ruling powers (e.g. Revelation 17, in which Rome is portrayed as ‘Babylon the great, mother of harlots and of earth’s abominations’ (17:5)), and artisanal.
[FOOTNOTE: Cf. James 2:5– 6: “Listen, my beloved brethren. Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him? … Is it not the rich who oppress you, is it not they who drag you to court?”]
Jesus himself is represented as the son of a carpenter, a simple man at home in the villages of Galilee, Paul is proud of earning his living as a tent-maker, the apostles are drawn from a set of illiterate fishermen and tax collectors. Pagan critics of Christianity accused them of avoiding the educated (a charge which the third-century Origen denied strenuously) and of recruiting particularly among tradesmen, illiterates, women and children.
Or, put briefly, in this view primitive Christianity was aimed at the poor and was led by the underprivileged. It was, and was seen as, a religion of opposition.
These arguments have both strengths and weaknesses. To be sure, as Christianity grew, it had to recruit from among the poor; and Christian writers themselves acknowledged that the bulk of the faithful were illiterate. How could it have been otherwise, if the sect was to grow so fast? But two counter-arguments also seem compelling. First, the texts of the New Testament itself, the New Testament apocrypha and early Apostolic Fathers must have been written by members of that small stratum, within the top 2 per cent of Roman society, who could write Greek fluently.
The New Testament writings are of course not part of high classical culture; they do not match the careful court writings of essayists like Seneca, historians like Tacitus or rhetoricians such as Dio Chrysostom. The Gospels are written in ostensibly, one might even say ostentatiously, simpler, instrumental prose; but Matthew and John, at least, are consciously artful, while Paul is idiosyncratically inventive.
Complementarily, the rhetoric of simplicity and the appeal to the foolish and poor was just that, a rhetorical play. It made the best of Jesus’ humble background in the urban world of Hellenised culture in which the gospel message was sold. But why was the message so successful, how could it remain virtually unchanged in its primary focus, as Christianity went socially up-market? I wonder if the answer lies partly in the steepness of the social pyramid and in the tiny size of its middle class.
Roman society demanded an uncomfortable mixture of pervasive deference to superiors and openly aggressive brutishness to inferiors, not just slaves. It was a world of deference and condescension, of curt commands and pervasive threats. It was in this world that nearly everyone, even a middling senator with an income which could support thousands, could imagine himself to be poor. Poverty is best seen as a subjective, not an objective category. …
… Even if we grant that Jews in the first century were exceptionally educated, compared with pagans, and that this tradition had some initial effect on primitive Christianity (after all, it too became a religion of the book), the characteristic was not central to Christian self- identity. Early Christians did not establish their own specifically Christian elementary or secondary schools. Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that Christians were, roughly speaking, no more literate or only marginally more literate than the sub- populations from which they were recruited.
In sum, let us suppose, generously, that 20 per cent of Christian adult males were literate at some level or other and that 2 per cent of Christian adult males were sophisticated, fluent literates. Female literacy was, I assume, very significantly lower, even, from a statistical point of view, negligible. The estimate for sophisticated literacy is especially generous, if our argument is granted that almost no Christians, in the first two centuries AD, were recruited from the ruling élite of senators, knights and town councillors (though obviously some came from the sub-élites). The consequences of these proportions can be analysed for Christians as a whole and for typical communities and house cult-groups, at different periods.
The implications of these literacy rates are quite startling. In 100, there were, according to the numbers estimated in figure 12.1, about 7,000 Christians, of whom about 30 per cent = 2,100 were adult males. Of these, say 20 per cent = 420 could read and write at varying levels of literacy. But only 2 per cent, that is 42 adult Christian males, were fluent and skilled literates.
Of course, the reasoning is too speculative to be trusted in detail; the number 42 is here a symbol for a small number of unknown size. But even if we double or treble it, in order to flatter the social composition or literary skills of primitive Christianity, and add in some female skilled literates, we can still see that intellectual Christianity, that is, the part of Christianity which is preserved and transmitted in the sacred texts, was composed, explained and developed by a tiny group of specialists, very thinly spread across the eastern and central Mediterranean basin.
If we split these 7,000 Christians of AD 100 among one hundred or so communities (and more house cult-groups), each on average with seventy members, the implications are striking. Each community had, on average, twenty adult male members, of whom two were literate at some level. But many or most Christian communities (and a fortiori even more house cult-groups) simply did not have among them a single sophisticated reader or writer. After all, sophisticated literate Christians were likely to concentrate in the bigger towns.
By 178, according to the numbers posited in figure 12.1, there were about 100,000 Christians, of whom 30,000 were adult males, split among say 200 or more town communities and significantly more house cult-groups. By this time, the total number of sophisticated literate adult males who were Christian had burgeoned to 600. And by the end of the second century, it was, by these calculations, well over 1,000.
Indeed, we can see in the surviving literature that Christian writers were now trying to assimilate their writings to classical upper-class pagan culture. And there were enough Christian sophisticated literates overall, even with bunching in larger towns, for us to imagine that each community had one sophisticated literate leader. I think the imaging of Christian growth proposed here has some implications for the evolution of the episcopacy. Only towards the end of the second century was it possible to find an educated leader for each Christian community.
Christians and Jews
… What I [have been arguing on the basis of numerical calculations] is that … whatever the associative affinities between Judaism and Christianity, and whatever the sympathetic appeal of monotheism to both and however distressed Jews were after AD 70 at the apparent failure of God’s special relationship with Israel, we can now easily say that most Jews stayed Jewish, or at least they did not embrace Christianity. So Jews and their leaders could have sensibly considered Christians as only a minor irritation.
To be sure, in some Jewish prayers, heretics (including by implication Christians) were routinely cursed every day; but it is by no means clear (although mentioned by Justin) that such curses were universally practised by all Jewish groups in the second century. Much more striking is the absence of explicit mention of Christians in the mass of rabbinical writings. Or put another way, most Jews did not become Christians and most Jews before 300 did not obviously care about Christianity.
But complementarily, in the early period, I suspect until about 150, most Christians were ex-Jews or their descendants, and that is one reason why Christians fixated on the Judaeo-Christian boundary as a major problem. Or put crisply, Jews mattered much more for Christians until the fourth century than Christians did for Jews. …
On the Social Production of Religious Ideology
My argument is that the number of Christians and the number and size of Christian cult-groups or communities materially influenced the style of Christian ideology. By ideology, I mean here a system of ideas which seeks to justify the power and authority of a set of ethical prescriptions and metaphysical explanations and also, of course, to justify the power and authority of a particular set of interpreters of these ideas.
Let me proceed by crudely contrasting Judaism and Christianity. Christianity was different from all religions of the Roman world. Like Judaism, it was (or claimed to be) monotheistic. Like Judaism, it was exclusivist, in the sense that its leaders claimed that believers in the one true god could not, or should not, pay homage to any other god. Unlike Judaism … Christianity was dogmatic and hierarchical; dogmatic, in the sense that Christian leaders from early on claimed that their own interpretation of Christian faith was the only true interpretation of the faith, and hierarchical in that leaders claimed legitimacy for the authority of their interpretation from their office as priests or bishops. ‘Obey your bishop’, Ignatius of Antioch ordered (allegedly in the early second century), ‘so that God may heed you’.
Christianity, by contrast, never accepted tolerance of diverse belief as an ideal, though of course Christians too as individuals were often inclined or forced to accept variety in practice. And it was this very intolerance as a defining characteristic of Christianity which eventually made it such a useful, if expensive, tool of state control. Christian ideologues, from Paul onwards, repeatedly attempted to lay down the law. Each claimed that his own interpretation of Christian belief was right, and that anyone who disagreed was wrong and should be excommunicated.
In the beginning, leaders of the primitive Church had little (or insufficient) power to enforce their views. But the very idea that correct belief identified the true Christian and that incorrect belief pushed the believer who wanted to be a Christian beyond the pale became entrenched as a core defining characteristic of early Christianity. By the end of the second century, leaders tried to enhance their authority by claiming that the catholic Church had held constant and unified beliefs since apostolic times. There was a direct line of legitimacy stretching from God to Jesus to the apostles and from them to bishops of the ‘united’ orthodox Church. Christians invented, or gave unprecedented force to, the idea of orthodoxy and heresy.
And as soon as the Church gained extra power from its alliance with the state in the fourth century, Christian leaders persecuted those Christians whom they considered deviant (and the boundaries shifted unpredictably) more assiduously than pagan Romans had usually persecuted Christians.
The centrality of correct dogma, as a defining characteristic of Christian praxis, was a religious innovation. It arose, I think, from the circumstances in which Christianity evolved.
Two factors seem important: first, number and dispersion, and second, the continuously rapid rate of growth. Let us deal with each factor in turn. Members of the Christian Church were spread in small groups all over the Mediterranean basin. Numbers, as we have seen, are necessarily speculative; but it seems reasonable to imagine that, in the first century or more after its birth, Christianity was typified by having more than one hundred smallish house cult-groups or cells, each with less than a handful of fluent literates. Indeed, on the figures crudely proposed in the first part of my paper, it is possible to think that in AD 100 Christian ideology was the intellectual possession of barely fifty fluent literates.
It was the tiny size of this creative body and the small cult-groups within and between which they worked which together account for the exclusivist and dogmatic character of their self-representation.
In its early stages, say during the first century and a half of its existence, Christianity was a set of small and vulnerably fissile cult-groups. Internally, each group may have been held together by a demanding ethic, communal worship and an encouraging message of hope. And all the groups, as a set, may have been held together by shared oral traditions and a thin stream of beggar-missionaries.
But if Christianity was to survive over time as a recognisable entity, some mechanism had to be found to unify these small, scattered and volatile communities. Writing and belief, or rather writing about belief, became the prime instrument of unification.
And the dogmatic style of exclusivism (only my version of the truth is acceptable) was, I argue, partly a function of the small average size of each cell and the rarity value of literate leaders within each. In these circumstances, single teachers might feel encouraged to be dogmatic.
Of course, the drive towards unification did not succeed completely, ever. The house cult-groups and communities were too diverse and too diffused over different regions with their own cultural traditions, and individual Christian believers were too passionate and inventive for unity ever to be achieved in reality.
But the ideal and illusion of unity as a church and as a grand (apostolic) tradition persisted and had a powerful effect on Christian organisation and self-representation. Christian church leaders repeatedly tried, at least from the middle of the third century onwards, to achieve unity of belief and practice.
The continuous, rapid rate of growth of Christianity, envisaged in figure 12.1 (3.4 per cent cumulative per year), implies that at any one time about two- fifths of all adult Christians had become converts, and so new members of house cult-groups or communities, during the previous ten years.
This rate of continuous growth put a tremendous strain on the absorptive and instructional capacity of older members. And it helps us understand the idea, which so differentiated Christians from pagans and Jews, that Christians were made, not born. At any one time in the first three centuries of Christianity, if the numbers in table 12.1 are anywhere near right, a significantly large proportion of the adult members of the Christian Church were new members, pupils, volunteers.
But volunteers could both join and leave, or be ejected. So Christianity shared with devotees of a polytheistic cult (but not with Judaism) the possibility of temporary attendance. But membership of pagan cult was by and large a function of locality and performance, not belief. Pagans performed local cult, as a matter of course, by living in a city or village, by growing up as polytheists. They could voluntarily opt into extra religious performances, as the desire or need took them. …
… Christian leaders … expected … internal piety from their followers. But, in addition, they expected and exacted formal commitment to specific beliefs about Jesus’ godhead and redeemership, and their own hopes of salvific redemption and immortality. This demand constituted a radical break from both Judaism and polytheism. Why? Two explanations seem important, one genetic (in the Genesis sense), the other functional.
Genetically, Christian leaders’ fixation on their common beliefs arose from their extraordinary nature: Jesus was both human and divine, he suffered death to save humanity; by believing in him as the son of God, we will be saved. By both Jewish and pagan standards, this message was extraordinary. No wonder it played a crucial role in Christians’ self-definition.
Functionally, concentration on formal statements of belief made it much easier to join communities spread around the Mediterranean. A simple test (do you believe x and y?) could be administered and their justifications could be elaborated, by letter. The dispersed and vagrant leadership of the primitive Church could maintain the illusion of homogeneity through writing about their beliefs. Of course, it took some time to decide exactly what the identifying beliefs were (the creed was not formalised until the fourth century) and what the test of belonging should be or how it should be administered. But the innovative principle that their religion was founded on a shared belief (rather than, or as well as, on a shared practice) remained constant for centuries.
Concentration on belief rather than on practice originated in part as a device for differentiating Christians from Jews, just as Sunday and Sabbath differentiated them (though both sects remained similarly distinctive in the Roman world, by having a weekly holy day). But functionally speaking, belief statements were an economy travel package, so much more easily transportable between widely dispersed, fast growing and freshly established cult-groups than detailed rules of legal observance which needed a solid body of long-time practitioners to socialise new adherents.
Simple capsules of Christian belief statements could be so much more easily absorbed by a constant flood of new recruits than complex rules of daily life or even of liturgical practice. Or, put another way, it was much simpler to learn how to be a Christian than to learn how to be a Jew.
And we must remember that according to the crude numbers outlined in figure 12.1, 40 per cent of the adult members of any Christian community had become new members in the previous decade. Christianity was a religion which, because of the rapidity of its expansion, always had to be questioning its members about the nature and degree of their adherence.
This strategy of privileging belief over practice carried high risks. The high risks arose from the need to maintain coherence by expelling (or threatening to expel) deviants. Expulsion or the threat of expulsion seriously increased the risk and incidence of heresy and schism.
I don’t think that anyone in the middle of the second century could have reasonably predicted that the policy of dogmatic exclusivism would end up with a triumphant monopoly.
The success of the strategy was discovered only over time; it was not purposively invented as a marketing device. Yet, in balance, the costs of maintaining orthodoxy were mitigated, especially in small groups, by the advantages of inculcating a heightened sense among the survivors that they were the sole inheritors and the correct propagators of the one true Christian message. And in the medium term, concentration on belief allowed a constant elaboration and sophistication of what these beliefs implied and how they fitted in with each other. This elaboration of belief, which we call theology, allowed a gradual rapprochement between Christian leaders and pagan philosophy. And this gradual rapprochement gave the Christian message a socially acceptable veneer.
Sophisticated elaboration of Christian ideology also allowed or even encouraged an internal differentiation among the Christian faithful, so that ideological specialists could gain symbolic capital, material rewards and ecclesiastical power from their intellectual proficiencies.
For all its pretensions at universality, Christianity particularly rewarded its élite; indeed, such differential rewards were a necessary part in Christianity’s political success and influence.
The Implications of Mass Conversion
Rapid growth in the absolute numbers of Christians occurred only in the third and fourth centuries. According to the estimated numbers in table 12.1, there was an increase of about 1 million Christians in the first half of the third century, 5 million new Christians in the second half of the third century and 30 million plus in the fourth century. From such figures, it becomes easier to judge the scale of what church historians often claim for the growth of Christianity. The problems of internal adjustment, and the cumulative impact of paganism on Christian practice, must have been tremendous. But for the moment, let us put scepticism aside. Let us assume that the straight growth line is roughly right.
Now we can see that it was only in the third century, when the number of Christians grew from say 220,000 to over 6 million, that the Church gained the resources and numbers to justify building churches devoted to meetings. And in most towns, it was only then that internal differentiation evolved to a degree which could maintain a hierarchy of bishops and priests, working exclusively as priests and supported by the contributions of the faithful.
But the increase in numbers brought its own troubles. Visibility and bulk provoked the first serious attempts by the central Roman government to destroy Christianity in 250–1, 257– 60 and after 303. And amazingly, if these growth figures are anywhere near right, then the persecutions or contemporary conditions (civil wars, barbarian invasions, rampant inflation, repeated plagues, urban decline), or their combination, encouraged an unprecedented growth in the numbers of Christians. Success in achieving growth also prompted a battle royal among Christians themselves, between the traditional rigourists, who wanted to maintain the old ways of the devoted small community, and the laxists, who wanted growth in numbers, even if that meant sacrificing moral standards.
The conversion of the Emperor Constantine, the continued Christianity of his successors and the alliance of the church triumphant with the Roman state brought about a still more dramatic increase, of say 30 million people, in the membership of the Church during the fourth century. But by then, for most people being a Christian must have meant something quite different from what it had meant in the first three centuries AD and the nature of some conversions may have been, must have been, superficial.
The utility of the Christian Church to the state was, I imagine, discovered only over time, by Constantine and his successors. It was not necessarily foreseen by any one of them. But it is worth noting that successive Sasanian kings [who ruled Persia] towards the end of the third century moved the Iranian empire towards religious (Mazdaean) exclusivism and the systematic persecution of religious ‘deviants’. It seems that the two rival and hostile empires, Iran and Rome, were moving along a similar path at roughly the same time. Was it because both empires needed a greater degree of symbolic unity in order to squeeze greater resources from their subjects?
In the long run, Christianity gave to the Roman state a degree of symbolic unity and exploitable loyalty which it had previously lacked. Christianity had more combinatory power and more power to demand self-sacrifice than the previous combination of localised polytheisms, vague henotheism and emperor cult. Christian rulers and their henchmen now had the legitimacy and authority of a powerful and interventionist God to support their authority and the enforcement of state regulations. The Roman state endorsed and then borrowed Christian intolerance.
In the medium term, a unified religion helped the Roman state to secure the self-sacrifice required of both soldiers and taxpayers. Sacrifice, so their leaders said, was demanded by God. The Christian religion became, in other words, a supplementary weapon of political and social control, used alongside law, violence and taxation.
Christianity also helped provide a cohesiveness of religious discourse among enthusiasts, which, rather like political discourse in modern developed states, bound competitors together via their minor differences. One advantage of religious over political discourse was that, at least overtly, enthusiasts were not discussing the redistribution of resources (always a tricky issue in a pre-industrial society with a limited disposable surplus), but the irresolvable issues of the nature of God or of life after death. … Christianity also allowed successive emperors to switch patronage from an over-privileged traditional aristocracy to fresh swathes of often newly Christianised supporters.
The disadvantages of Christianity, from a political point of view, lay mainly in transition costs, in the alienation of the conservative and pagan upper classes and in the difficulty of effecting a thoroughgoing mass conversion. The superficiality of Christianisation in broad areas of the Roman world was revealed only three centuries later, when Islam swept triumphantly through exactly those regions where it is alleged Christianity first took deepest root. The Church was also prone to zealous schism and dissent. The combination of alienation, superficiality and division meant that the Church could not always deliver to the state the political loyalty of its putative believers. It has also been argued that the Christian Church was itself expensive to the state in tax immunities, diversion of ability and non- productive life-styles, particularly at a time when the empire was desperately trying to defend itself against barbarian incursions. There may be something in these arguments, but the survival of the eastern empire, for close on a thousand years after the conversion of Constantine, indicates that the internal costs of religion were not excessive.
Summary
… I have come to five main conclusions.
First, the number of Christians expanded fast, but for a long time remained tiny relative to the total population of the empire. The disparity between number and proportion helped produce two different but complementary accounts; Christians thought of themselves as successful but persecuted, while leading Romans long remained ignorant of their activities. Stories about persecution, rather more than persecution itself, were an important factor in Christian self-representation and togetherness.
Secondly, Christian house cult-groups in the first century after Jesus’ death were on average both small and dispersed. The small size of the groups helped maintain enthusiastic vigour and ethical rigour among converts. The rapid growth and expansion of the religion depended upon the creation of an easily administrable test of membership, encapsulated in brief statements of belief. This emphasis on belief combined with ethical practice was a significant religious innovation. It was, I argue, a function of dispersion, small numbers and rapid growth.
Thirdly, given general rates of literacy among the Roman population, and even allowing for somewhat higher rates among Christian converts, it seems likely that the development and maintenance of Christian religious ideology in the first century after Jesus’ death was at any one time the intellectual property of only a few dozen men, scattered throughout the Mediterranean basin. The maintenance of identity between groups depended therefore upon writing, and particularly upon the writing of letters. The smallness of the group of educated devotees helped give early Christianity its intense internalised character.
Fourthly, the number of Jews was very large compared with the number of Christians, at least until the late third century. Because enthusiastic cult-groups, according to modern evidence [MH: examined earlier, disputed by Peter Heather (2022), omitted here], expand usually along family and social networks, i.e. among relatives and friends, it seems likely that Jews were the main early customers for conversion to Christianity. But differences in experience between Christians and Jews (as between Christians and Romans) helped generate complementary, but contrasting, accounts. In the early days, most Christians were ex-Jews or their descendants. So Christians, at least until the completion of the New Testament texts (roughly speaking, the middle of the second century), were preoccupied with their relationship to Judaism. But Jews, the vast mass of whom remained immune to Christianity, for a long time largely ignored the existence of what was for them a marginal group. This discrepancy of experience helps explain why Christians continued to use the Jewish Bible as their main authenticating text. The main focus of Christian expansion moved to the gentiles only during the second century. This change of focus perhaps helps explain why the letters of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles, both of which celebrate the mission to the gentiles, were finally included in the canonical New Testament.
Finally, the greatest surge in Christian numbers (in absolute terms) occurred in two stages, in the third century and fourth centuries. Surprisingly, the first mass, centrally organised and reputedly severe persecutions coincided with considerable Christian growth. In terms of number, persecutions helped Christianity. And then the mass of Christian conversions, which followed the alliance of the Christian Church with the Roman state under Constantine and his Christian successors, was on a huge scale and was sufficient significantly to change the nature of Christian practice. It is customary to consider Constantine’s conversion and adoption of Christianity as a state-favoured religion in terms of his personal sincerity or his perception of Roman interests. It is extremely interesting that Iran, Rome’s most powerful enemy, had gone along the same road of trying to create an exclusive monopoly of state religion barely thirty years before Constantine’s conversion.
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