Rodney Stark - Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome

Maps

Illustrations

The task of the historian is to assemble and interpret the surviving evidence, an often difficult and frustrating quest, as illustrated by the Dead Sea Scrolls. After more than fifty years of effort, parts of them remain irretrievably lost, other parts are indecipherable, and the texts that have been saved still elude our full understanding. But we know a lot more about the context of early Christianity than we did before the scrolls were discovered in the caves at Qumran.

N EW ACCOUNTS of early Christianity are everywhere. A book claiming that Jesus got married, fathered children, and died of old age has sold millions of copies. Bookstores are bursting with new, more enlightened scriptures said to have been wrongly suppressed by the early church fathers. Often referred to as Gnostic gospels, these texts purport to have been written by a variety of biblical charactersMary Magdalene, St. James, St. John, Shem, and even Didymus Jude Thomas, self-proclaimed twin brother of Christ. Meanwhile, a group calling itself the Jesus Seminar receives national media attention each year as it meets to further reduce the authentic words spoken by Jesus to an increasingly slim compendium of wise sayings.

But is any of this true? How can we know? Presumably, by assembling and evaluating the appropriate evidence. Unfortunately, far too many historians these days dont believe in evidence. They argue that since absolute truth must always elude the historians grasp, evidence is inevitably nothing but a biased selection of suspect facts. Worse yet, rather than dismissing the entire historical undertaking as impossible, these same people use their disdain for evidence as a license to propose all manner of politicized historical fantasies or appealing fictions on the grounds that these are just as true as any other account. This is absurd nonsense. Reality exists and history actually occurs. The historians task is to try to discover as accurately as possible what took place. Of course, we can never possess absolute truth, but that still must be the ideal goal that directs historical scholarship. The search for truth and the advance of human knowledge are inseparable: comprehension and civilization are one.

Fortunately, even if the complete truth eludes us, some historical accounts have a far higher probability than others of being true, depending on the available evidence. And it is in pursuit of more and better evidence that I have returned to the history of the early church. The chapters that follow present many revisions and reinterpretations of early Christian history. But the really new contribution is to test these conclusions by analyzing quantitative data.

Early Christianity was primarily an urban movement. The original meaning of the word pagan ( paganus ) was rural person, or more colloquially country hick. It came to have religious meaning because after Christianity had triumphed in the cities, most of the rural people remained unconverted. Therefore, in the chapters that follow, the thirty-one cities of the empire having populations of at least 30,000 as of the year 100 are the basis for formulating and testing claims about the early church, based on quantified measures of various features of these cities. When was a Christian congregation established in each city? Which cities were missionized by Paul? Which were the port cities? Did a city have a substantial Diasporan Jewish community? Where did paganism remain strongest, longest? Where were the Gnostic teachers and movements located? These quantitative measures make it possible to discover, for example, whether the Gnostics were clustered in the more Christian or in the more pagan cities.

It is in this spirit that missions and methods are the principal topics of this opening chapter. Nevertheless, the relatively brief quantitative aspects of this and subsequent chapters are very secondary to, and embedded in, large historical concerns.

Missions and Monotheism

Since earliest days, humans have been exchanging religious ideas and practices. For millennia there was nothing special about the spread of religion; it diffused through intergroup contact in the same way as did new ways to weave or to make pottery. Even with the advent of cities, religion did not become the focus of any special effort to proselytize. From time to time, a priest or two probably pursued new followers, and individuals often recommended a particular god or rite to others. But since no one supposed that there was only one valid religion or only one true God, there were no missionaries. Nor was there really such a thing as conversion.

Some people serve as part-time, amateur missionaries. Others are full-time professionals. But either sort of missionary is produced only within monotheism.

Even so, not just any sort of monotheism produces missionaries, especially the rank-and-file missionaries on which real success depends. For example, once Christianity became safely ensconced as the Roman state church, its missionary activities very rapidly decayed. Hence, the worlds first missionaries were Jews, and the worlds first converts became Jews.

Jewish Missions

It recently has become fashionable for many secular Jews, being eager to prohibit all religious proselytizing, to deny that Judaism ever was a missionizing faith.

These and similar verses inspired the renowned third-century- CE Like Josephus, Philo also described the widespread observance of Jewish customs, and both of them confirmed that it was common for Jews to invite Gentiles to attend services in the synagogues. This was facilitated by the fact that the language of the Diasporan synagogues was not Hebrew, but Greek, and therefore comprehensible not only to everyone residing in Hellenic regions, but also to all educated Romans, since they more frequently spoke Greek than Latin.

As the practice of inviting guests to worship makes clear, Jews in the Diaspora sought converts, and they seem to have been quite successful in doing so.

Christian sources also acknowledge the existence of many God-fearers in the synagogues, as in the case of Lydia and the women at Philippi. For the fact was that religious conversion wasnt sufficient. Rather than letting other nations extol God, the Jewish leadership demanded that all nations become fully Jewish; there was no room for Egyptian-Jews or Roman-Jews, let alone Germanic-or British-Jews, but only for Jewish-Jews. Given the remarkable success they achieved, this ethnic barrier to conversion probably was the sole reason that the Roman Empire did not embrace the God of Abraham. It was not a mistake that Paul let Christianity repeat.

The Christian Difference

Nearly every aspect of the early Christian church was shaped by the obligation imposed on the disciples by Jesus: All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded yo u.

While there are good reasons to suppose that the vast majority of early Christian converts were Jews, the marginal God-fearers were among the first to join, once it became clear that Christians didnt have to become ethnic Jews. And there lay the monumental difference between these two great missionizing faiths. Early on, Paul had put it this way: Or is God the God of the Jews only? Is he not the God of the Gentiles also? Yes, of the Gentiles also, since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of their faith and the uncircumcised through their faith. What Christianity offered the world was monotheism stripped of ethnic encumbrances. People of all nations could embrace the One True God while remaining people of all nations.