Rodney Stark - The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History

The Rise of Christianity

The Rise of Christianity

A SOCIOLOGIST

RECONSIDERS HISTORY

RODNEY STARK

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright 1996 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stark, Rodney.

The rise of Christianity : a sociologist reconsiders

history / Rodney Stark.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-02749-8 (CL : alk. paper)

1. Church historyPrimitive and early church, ca. 30-600.

2. Sociology, ChristianHistoryEarly church, ca. 30-600.

I. Title

BR166.S75 1996

306.6701dc20 95-44197

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-02749-4 (cl.)

ISBN-10: 0-691-02749-8 (cl.)

eISBN: 978-0-691-21429-0

R0

FOR FRANCES AND KEITH

Illustrations

Preface

I HAVE ALWAYS been a history buff, but for most of my career I never really considered working with historical materials myself. I was content to be a sociologist and to spend my time trying to formulate and test more rigorous theories concerning a range of topicsmost of them involving the sociology of religion. Then, in 1984, I read Wayne Meekss The First Urban Christians. I bought it on impulse from the History Book Club, and I liked it very much. I was extremely impressed, not only by the many new things I learned about the subject, but also with Meekss efforts to utilize social science.

Several months later I got lucky again. I came across a religious studies book catalog. In addition to Meekss book, it listed other new titles in early church history. Here are the three new books I ordered that day: Christianizing the Roman Empire, by Ramsay MacMullen; The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, by Robert L. Wilken; and Miracle in the Early Christian World, by Howard Clark Kee. It would be hard to select three better books on the early Christian era. And, along with Meeks, these authors convinced me that what the field really needed was a more up-to-date and more rigorous brand of social science.

A year later, when I sent off a paper entitled The Class Basis of Early Christianity: Inferences from a Sociological Model, I informed the journal editor that my primary purpose was to discover whether I was good enough to play in the Greco-Roman League. Thus I was delighted when several historians of the New Testament era responded so favorably to the essay that they invited me to write a paper that would serve as the focus of the 1986 annual meeting of the Social History of Early Christianity Group of the Society of Biblical Literature. That paper laid out my heretical view that the mission to the Jews had been far more successful and long-lasting than the New Testament and the early church fathers claim. After formal responses to the essay by John Elliott, Ronald Hock, Caroline Osiek, and L. Michael White, I was engaged in a long question-and-answer session by the discussants and by many members of the large audience. Having long been accustomed to social science meetings where no one bothers to attend the sessions, I was quite unprepared for the intellectual dialogue that took placeit was the most rewarding three hours I have ever spent at an academic meeting. Moreover, at least for me, it answered the question of whether I had anything to contribute to the study of the early church.

I am not a New Testament scholar and shall never be. Nor am I a historiandespite my recent venture into American religious history (Finke and Stark 1992). I am a sociologist who sometimes works with historical materials and who has, in preparation of this volume, done his best to master the pertinent sources, albeit mostly in English. What I am primarily trying to contribute to studies of the early church is better social sciencebetter theories and more formal methods of analysis, including quantification wherever possible and appropriate. Thus in this book I shall try to introduce historians and biblical scholars to real social science, including formal rational choice theory, theories of the firm, the role of social networks and interpersonal attachments in conversion, dynamic population models, social epidemiology, and models of religious economies. Conversely, I shall try to share with social scientists the immense scholarly riches available from modern studies of antiquity.

I am indebted to many scholars for advice and especially for guiding me to sources that I would not have found because of my lack of formal training in the field. I am particularly indebted to my sometime collaborator Laurence Iannaccone of Santa Clara University, not only for his many useful comments, but for many of the fundamental insights that underlie was the result. Darren Sherkat, of Vanderbilt University, made useful suggestions about several of my forays into the arithmetic of the possible. Finally, Roger S. Bagnall, of Columbia University, steered me away from several unnecessary speculations.

I should also like to thank Benjamin and Linda de Wit, of Chalcedon Books in East Lansing, Michigan, for finding me copies of many classicsoften many versions of the same one. Being dependent on translations, much to my surprise I found myself burdened with too many translations. On my shelves are four translations of Eusebius, for example. There are very marked differences among them on many of the passages I have quoted in this study. Which to use? On the basis of prose style, I much preferred the 1965 translation by G. A. Williamson. However, my colleagues with formal training in the area explained that Eusebius actually wrote very dull, awkward prose and thus I ought to rely on the Lawlor and Oulton version. I am not convinced that translators need to capture the dullness of the original if they are true to the meaning of each passage. After making many comparisons I adopted a rule that I have applied in all instances when I have possessed multiple translations: to use the version that most clearly expressed the point that caused me to quote the material, as long as the point is not unique to a particular translation.

Working with the famous ten-volume translations of The Ante-Nicene Fathers, edited by Roberts and Donaldson, made me appreciate fully my debt to multiple translations. This was especially true as I wrote about abortion, birth control, and sexual norms in ; whenever the church fathers wrote candidly on these matters, the Roberts and Donaldson version translated the original Greek into Latin rather than into English. Reading Clement of Alexandria, for example, one encounters frequent blocks of type in Latin. From Jaroslav Pelikan (1987:38) I discovered that this was a very old tradition. Hence Edward Gibbon reported in his Autobiography that my English text is chaste, all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language (1961:198). Fortunately for those of us for whom learned languages are obscure, there exist more recent translations, written by scholars having less refined sensibilities than Gibbon or the Victorian gentlemen from Edinburgh. In all, it was a most instructive experience.