Various religions have been popping up randomly seemingly as long as humans have been humaning- interestingly, not just with humans but our Neanderthal cousins, with signs of some form of religious practices with those Neanderthals going back at least 150,000 years. But one religion founded about 2,000 years ago triggered a marked shift in the way many in the world view religion and interact with a deity. Starting out as a sect of Judaism, fast-forward just a handful of generations of humans later and Christianity had evolved into its own distinct religion well on its way to dominating the Western world and beyond. And hasn’t really stopped since, statistically the world’s #1 religion with over 2.3 billion adherents in its various branches. So what made Christianity take off to then unprecedented levels, going from 1 person to millions in such a short span, and then billions beyond, where countless thousands of other religions in history don’t or sometimes only briefly rise and then fizzle out? Well, I’m glad you asked, because this is one of the more fascinating topics on so many levels we’ve ever covered here. So, quiet down your children, have a seat in a pew up front, and let’s dive into it all, shall we?
In the Beginning…
To begin our discussion today, it’s important to understand the context of the religious world when Jesus began his ministry, which was vastly different from what most of us think about religion today, largely because of Jesus, funny enough.
Going back a bit, our earliest archaeological evidence for human religion at all seems to be various forms of animism. Later shamanism and ancestor worship came to rule the day with most hunter-gatherer groups. Sometime between roughly 10,000 BC. and 5000 BC religious thought seems to have begun to evolve and definitely took a large leap forward directly after. For example, the ancient Mesopotamian region of Sumer can be classified as one of the oldest civilizations in the world, and it is here that we find more structured beliefs beginning to form. They primarily followed the belief that there were many gods who existed in human forms, or anthropomorphic polytheism. Sumerians also built temples where priests ruled in a theocratic system. But despite that, the people of ancient Mesopotamia viewed their gods as people they lived in harmony and equality with, rather than as vastly superior beings in the sense that a modern person would say when thinking about their god and religion.
Fast-forwarding a couple thousands years, many cultures and communities had adopted a slightly more formal system of faith and worship. Most pertinent to the topic at hand today we have Greek mythology, which can be traced back at least as far as the Bronze Age, or 3000 BC, with Roman mythology following sometime after this.
Important to point out on this, however, as noted by the Metropolitan Museum, is that the “ancient Greeks had no single guiding work of scripture like the Jewish Torah, the Christian Bible, or the Muslim Qu’ran. Nor did they have a strict priestly caste. The relationship between human beings and deities was based on the concept of exchange: gods and goddesses were expected to give gifts [in exchange for votive offerings.]”
Thus, the Greeks and Romans would often worship in sanctuaries to whatever god best suited them in a given moment based on their needs or wants at that time. But there doesn’t seem to have been typically any strong sense of loyalty or love between a given god and those people worshiping, or vice versa. Or, at least, not like we tend to think today when discussing religions.
But then along came Judaism, which, while elements of it can be found going back to roughly 4,000-5,000 years ago, the codified form of the Judaism that we are familiar with today seems to have only preceded Christianity by about a 1-3 centuries, though oral traditions along this line existed for possibly as much as a few thousand years before. But the point is, it was the codification of the religion, whenever it happened, and the requirement to worship only one god, that made it relatively unique in the history of religion at the time and would soon change the world via one of its sects.
This all brings us to that sect- Christianity.
Around 2,000 years ago countless individuals were popping up around Judea purporting to be the prophesied messiah of Judaism. One of them, however, in Jesus of Nazareth, through his teachings, created a Second Temple Judaic sect which, in turn, inspired others to repeat his message even after his crucifixion, and it spread like wildfire from there.
Did Jesus Actually Exist and Say Anything He Said?
Now, before we get into the nuts and bolts of how Christianity spread so fast, which is extremely fascinating and probably going to surprise many, both Christian and secular, on some points, based on the fact that one recent British survey found that about 40% of people in the nation did not believe Jesus ever existed, we should probably start by addressing the question of if there is any proof the founder of Christianity actually lived.
We’ve already done a rather lengthy and ultra deep dive video on the subject completely coincidentally titled: Is There Any Proof Jesus Actually Existed? so we won’t go much into it here other than to say briefly, while it might come as something of a surprise to some, historians, from atheist to agnostic to Jewish to Christian, pretty much all universally agree that the Jesus described in the New Testament, did, in fact, exist, and even that it’s extremely likely that at minimum a few key significant elements of his life as described in the New Testament also very likely did happen. As professor emeritus of Jewish studies and Archeology at Duke University, Dr. Eric Meyers states, “I don’t know any mainstream scholar who doubts the historicity of Jesus. The details have been debated for centuries, but no one who is serious doubts that he’s a historical figure…. Those who deny the existence of Jesus are like the deniers of climate change.”
In other words, while there’s maybe no smoking gun per se, the preponderance of evidence makes it as certain as we can be about anything that happened two thousands years ago.
Obviously saying that isn’t going to convince anyone definitively, but this piece is already quite long and nearly 2 million of you already watched that video, so we don’t really want to rehash all the reasons why this is the consensus here. If you want a lot more detail on why most historians think this, do go check out our video on the subject after watching this one.
But suffice it to say for now, there does appear to have been a specific Jesus of Nazareth who was born around two thousand years ago, appears to have been baptized at some point by John the Baptist, who also very much seems to have existed, Jesus then created a new branch of Judaism at some point in there, then was crucified on the order of Pontius Pilate. Pretty much all other facets of Jesus’ life are up for debate and no writings from Jesus himself have survived through today.
On this note, some put forth from the fact that we don’t have any surviving writing from Jesus that we can’t really say he said or did anything reported in the works compiled into the New Testament, nor use them as a guide to his real message, whatever that was. On the other hand, nobody really argues that Socrates didn’t say at least in general some of what his students later said he said. Despite that the parallels here are pretty spot on, with the only documentation of anything Socrates said written down long after his body had been converted into microbial feces, with some of Socrates’ students spreading his message from there. We just take the word of Plato, Xenophon, etc. that what they wrote Socrates said is in the ballpark of accurate to what he actually said. And, in fact on this one, it’s known quite definitively Plato, for example, used Socrates as a bit of a character at times to insert his own ideas. That’s not to mention the rather contradictory accounts of some of the things Socrates supposedly said, and even that his very personality varied from different sources who knew the very real man Socrates.
Going back to Jesus, the things Jesus supposedly said we have similar discrepancies on accounts, even within the approved accounts compiled into the New Testament, let alone some of the other stuff some of his relatively early followers said he said or did that have survived but are not included in the New Testament. All of this isn’t surprising given much of it was written down in the ballpark of a few decades or more after his crucifixion, very clearly at least in part using other records that no longer exist, including of the oral variety, as their basis.
However, none of these discrepancies which theologians from then to now have been wrestling with matter for our story today. In part because the core elements that ARE important here for Christianity’s spread we have independent accounts of common Christian behavior at the time that seem to line up pretty strongly with the overarching alleged core teachings of Jesus as recorded in the works of the New Testament.
Thus, similar to Socrates, it seems reasonable enough to assume at least the broad elements of Jesus’ teachings are in there, even if it’s possible others inserted their own ideas or twists or interpretations after the fact, or simply aren’t quoting him absolutely verbatim in some cases. Afterall, trying to remember what you had for breakfast a week ago is hard enough, let alone writing down something your teacher said to you word for word even earlier in the same exact day he said it. Remembering the core idea is certainly not nearly as difficult. But word for word? Discrepancies are to be expected and are absolutely found here as noted. Thus similar to Socrates, exactly what Jesus said verbatim is unknowable to anyone except the great Dr. Emmett Brown.
But, again, luckily for us, it is these broad elements we need to focus on when discussing why Christianity spread like wildfire, as well as further context of the era and region and what religions were like before this that was so starkly different than what we typically think of as religion today.
One Chicken to Rule Us All
This brings us to religion in Rome and their provinces at the time, which a fun little brief aside here given its insane ramifications to us today, commonly included watching chickens eat to make many legally binding, major governmental decisions.
Meaning yes, whether some chicken ate some given bit of feed on a given day in history quite literally fundamentally altered everything since for all humanity. And not just in obvious ways of those decisions going one way or the other. And not even only because of the occasional widespread deaths or life based on these decisions and how the tiniest change a few thousand years ago even on just one person’s offspring can have an absolutely massive ripple DNA effect a couple thousand years later. But also just the tiniest change of what one person does on a given day will in turn change their reproductive outcomes after completely.
For example with men, with a few hundred million sperm cells made per day and up to a similar amount per expulsion, and just one of those winning the day at best when an egg even present, let’s just say even one time different and time of day, etc. ejaculating many years before- let alone diet, stress, etc factoring in- even if all other life factors stay the same after this, this changes everything after for that man’s future offspring based on a different sperm cell winning the day even if it met the same egg later that the other sperm cell would have.
Which is one of many reasons many time travel stories never work, outside of the film About Time which addresses this fact explicitly as a key plot point. And don’t even get us started on how insanely fast the Earth is currently moving through the universe making any time machine also needing to either factor that in perfectly or be a space ship. For reference, along with orbiting around the sun at 66,600 mph, the Earth is also rotating at its axis at about 1,070 miles per hour. On top of that, our whole solar system is rocketing through space around the center of the Milky Way at around 560,000 mph. On top of that, our galaxy is hurtling through space at close to 700,000 mph with respect to our local group of galaxies. On top of that, for all we know, our entire Universe is hurtling through some unknown medium at some other ridiculous velocity.
The point being, jump even a single second back in time and your time machine better be a space ship or somehow factor all that complex motion in absolutely perfectly to put you back on the surface of the Earth. And even then on that later point, the Earth is moving crazy fast in a complex way. Does your existing relative motion when you jump back in time continue at the same rates? Because, if not, even if you target the surface of the Earth correctly, you’ll be a bug on a windshield.
But we digress.
The point being, one of many fun facts embedded in this one is that it’s very likely most of us here today would not be if some chicken in Rome had chosen to eat, or not eat, on a given day differently than what they ultimately chose. Turns out those chickens really did have the power of the gods and fate at their beaktips.
How Roman Religion Worked
But in any event, more broadly, priests in Rome were not professional priests in the sense that they almost always held other jobs, usually in politics as senators, but also in the military and business.These offices were organized into colleges such as augurs who could read signs from the gods, all the way to pontifices who had control over the calendar and could dispense law.
The Romans also believed in local gods, or Genius Loci, Spirits of the Place. Every place had a god, and it was important for Romans to identify a place’s god and apply and adapt worship and rituals. For example, Greek rites were recognized separately from native Roman rites, and the priests even dressed differently for them.
Beyond concrete Olympian or early gods, in the 3rd century BCE, the Romans also began to worship personifications of abstract concepts. For example, they worshiped a personification of Rome itself called Roma. They also worshiped Concord, Faith, Honor, Hope, and Victory, who we also know by the later Greek name Nike. It’s even thought that Venus originally started as a personification before she became associated with the Olympian Aphrodite. This worship of personifications shows how flexible the Roman religion could be. Internal developments were accepted with outside additions as Rome expanded. The colleges always handled the incorporation of foreign gods into Roman life, and their cults were permitted, with, as far as we can tell today, an extremely large measure of acceptance of all religions and practices.
On that note, it is technically fair to call the Christian god one of the Roman gods, as he rose to prominence locally under their rule and ultimately was not just incorporated, but became the chief god of Rome and killed all the others.
Take THAT Jupiter.
Going back to the Jews and Rome’s extremely liberal view of religion, while the Romans had a lot of trouble with the Jewish people regularly rebelling, for the Romans, the Jews had an ancestral religion, and so because their religion relatively uniquely didn’t allow worshiping other gods and was sort of grandfathered in, they were exempt from things like emperor worship or worshiping the Roman gods. This was extremely significant because without this ancestral religion protection, the refusal to show respect to the Emperor and Rome via taking part in sacrifices to them would have been tantamount to treason, which is going to come into play later.
In general, however, after Augustus helped solidify the emperor worship in Rome, Roman citizens and provincials were allowed to worship other gods, as long as the Emperor was worshiped as well as a way to demonstrate loyalty to the emperor and Rome. This is why we see in native temples in Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia statues of the Roman Emperors in temples built during the Roman Empire.
Moving on from the classic gods, around the time Christianity popped up, a variety of so-called “mystery religions” were gaining traction, of which Christianity was one, generally taking a more individual approach to religion, rather than the communal Roman religions. Also very uniquely for the time, much like the Jewish god, these also tended to require members to worship only their respective god, though most at least acknowledged the existence of other gods, with Christianity being an exception here.
With that general religious environment set, this all brings us to what Jesus and his followers said and did that set their religion apart from all the innumerable rest and helped it grow like crazy.
How to Win Friends and Influence People
First of the keys to the religions’ success was the general message, which the early followers of Christianity seemed to adhere to to an almost finatical level. And that is this: If you were in need, it was not just considered the right thing to do in the religion for followers of Christ to help you, even if it hurt or even killed them to do so, but was the second most important commandment of God and more or less tied to the first as a way to practice the most important commandment.
And, importantly to the spread of the religion- it did not matter if you were a follower of Christ or not. If you are a human being in need, Jesus demanded his followers help that person regardless of what nation they were from, what they believed or thought, or even if they were your mortal enemy.
Specifically, when Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, he allegedly responded, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Given this last statement, this partially reshaped how everything that was said in the sacred texts of Judaism at the time should be interpreted according to Jesus, as well as was used by early Christians and many today as a guiding precept for how to interpret everything else Jesus said.
On this note and for clarification and insanely important to the spread of Christianity, when then asked who your neighbour is to love, the response was the parable of the Good Samaritan.
We’ll spare you the details of the complex relationship between the Jews and Samaritans other than to say- Important to the story at hand, and a context almost always lost on modern readers, is that the Samaritans and Jews at the time were hated enemies.
Going back to the story, after some of the most respected members of the Jews in a priest and a Levite saw this man lying on the side of the road, they simply moved to the other side and kept on walking, leaving him to die. As to why, it’s generally speculated that to touch the bleeding, injured man would have made them ritualistically unclean. Or maybe they just couldn’t be bothered. Either way. They didn’t help their fellow Jew.
But when the Samaritan saw him, despite it being his hated enemy and throwing out any concern about touching someone unclean, he took the man and made sure he was extremely well cared for until he was healed up, treating him like a beloved family member. With the message seemingly being, especially when combined with some of Jesus’ other overt philosophy that comes up again and again- literally everyone is your neighbor, even your hated enemy. With Jesus commanding at the end of this one for the person discussing it with him to “Go and do likewise.”
Jesus then expands on this in his famed Sermon on the Mount. Where he states, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so?”
Perhaps the most stark example of how some of the specifics of this message, particularly the parable of the Good Samaritan, was seemingly lost on modern groups was the case of WWII when Nazis’ initial plan was not to exterminate the Jews, but simply make them leave. Most Jews then ultimately wanted out owing to the beginnings of persecution and applied to immigrate to nations the world over including America where according to Pew Research Center 91% of Americans at the time identified as Christian. In the end, not even needing to get metaphorical with this particular example on all the interesting implications of what was being said with the story of the Good Samaritan, if we just want to go literal- it’s a story of a foreign individual taking in a Jew because the Jew was desperately in need of help. And this whole “Love thy neighbour” thing quite literally was, as noted, the second most important commandment according to Jesus himself AND how you demonstrate the first most important commandment…
But they and pretty much every other nation of the world outside of Germany’s ally in Japan, funny enough who took in a lot of Jews and refused Nazi appeals to persecute them, were like “Ya, no thanks. We don’t want the Jews here.” This continued even after the holocaust was in full swing and the nations of the world were quite well aware of it and what was happening to the Jewish people as we’ve covered in our video Did the German People Know About the Holocaust When It was Happening?
But, going back to the very beginnings of Christianity, from accounts we have surviving today, not just Biblical, but secular as well, it seems Christians at the time both well understood the implications of the parable and that it applied to even foreign hated enemies, and took it all insanely seriously, ultimately creating something of a social welfare system for themselves and anyone else they encountered in the process, which was critical to the spread of the religion, especially given the context of the era where such a thing was mostly non-existent and life was extremely harsh in some ways, with one Emperor even lamenting the Christians were making the Roman leadership and religions look bad on this. More on this in a bit.
But for the early Christians, when people were sick and dying of some disease and often left to die, the Christians seem to have been the ones leaping to their aid and caring for them. Afterall, beyond Jesus’ commands there, by their belief in his very example, if God himself had demonstrated his love of mankind through sacrificing his very life for them unconditionally, it was thought Christians should do the same, even if it cost them everything right down to their life. As Jesus allegedly said to his disciples shortly before his crucifixion: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command.”
In a nutshell, unlike the pagan gods, whose relationship with mankind was purely transactional with usually no real love for each other on either side, the Christian god loved all mankind, and thus the best way to please him and show your love for him was to, in turn, love and sacrifice for all mankind.
And that’s exactly what the early Christians seem to have done. As noted in a letter by Dionysius of Alexandria in 260, “Most of the Christians in our city showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of others. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending their every need, helping and comforting them — and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pain.”
From this, you can see why there are so many stories of people being healed both by Jesus himself and beyond to his disciples and other followers. If you want to go the miraculous route as the source, that’s all good, but also, just the fact that these people were caring for these individuals at all when the more normal for so many of the era and region was just to be left to die, especially if they were thought to be suffering from a catchable disease. Care for them, however, and some got better. And you better believe those some who did were often eager to join up and pay it forward. And note here, there were two major epidemics in Rome, one in 165 and one in 251, which resulted in allegedly up to about 1/3 of the Roman population dying during each, so always plenty of people who needed help.
Late second century Christian author Tertullian goes on of the general Christian behavior and force for good in the regions they existed in, “Though we have our treasure-chest, it is not made up of purchase-money, as of a religion that has its price. On the monthly day, if he likes, each puts in a small donation; but only if it be his pleasure, and only if he be able: for there is no compulsion; all is voluntary. These gifts are… not spent on feasts, and drinking-bouts, and eating-houses, but to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and of old persons confined now to the house; such, too, as have suffered shipwreck; and if there happen to be any in the mines or banished to the islands or shut up in the prisons, for nothing but their fidelity to the cause of God’s Church, they become the nurslings of their confession.”
Tertullian sums up, “One in mind and soul, we do not hesitate to share our earthly goods with one another. All things are common among us but our wives.”
If you’d like a more secular corroboration of this behavior, enter 4th century Emperor Julian who loathed the Christians very openly and tried to institute pagan charities to counter what the Christians were doing. Specifically, in 362 in a letter to the High-priest of Galatia he outlined his plan. And embedded in it, he commented on why he thought the Christian religion was so successful and had, during his lifetime, absolutely exploded in numbers and taken over Rome. In his opinion, this was driven primarily by the Christians’, to quote, “moral character, even if pretended.” Further that, “I think that when the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious Galileans” -note here “Galileans” was one of many early terms for Christians- “observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence…. The impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.” He also states, Christianity “has been specially advanced through the loving service rendered to strangers and through their care of the burial of the dead. It is a scandal that there is not a single Jew who is a beggar and that the [Christians] care not only for their own poor but for ours as well; while those who belong to us look in vain for the help we should render them.”
Not just relentlessly helping those in need regardless of race, religion, or even if they were your mortal enemy who might just murder you for doing it as they would come to find out when persecuted, the Christians were also apparently relentlessly positive in the face of anything life threw at them right down to rejoicing and praying for blessing upon their very executioners while being persecuted. After all, Jesus had allegedly demanded it in the whole “bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven” thing.
Aristides of Athens writes in a letter to Emperor Hadrian only about 100 years after Jesus’ crucifixion, noting of the propensity of Christians to be Professor Positives no matter what. “Every morning and all hours on account of the goodness of God toward them, they render praise and laud Him over their food and their drink; they render Him thanks. And if any righteous person of their number passes away from this world, they rejoice and give thanks to God and they follow his body as though he were moving from one place to another. And when a child is born to them, they praise God, and if again it chances to die in its infancy, they praise God mightily, as for one who has passed through the world without sins.”
As to what they had to be so happy about in the face of anything, it was the promise of not just an afterlife, but one of distinction and better than anything this world full of all its suffering could offer. This was in stark contrast to the afterlife offered by the pagan gods, if in some cases any afterlife at all.
Aristides also notes of general Christian behavior in the early going, “They abstain from all impurity in the hope of the recompense that is to come in another world. As for their servants or handmaids or children, they persuade them to become Christians by the love they have for them; and when they become so, they call them without distinction, brothers. They do not worship strange gods; and they walk in all humility and kindness, and falsehood is not found among them; and they love one another. When they see the stranger they bring him to their homes and rejoice over him as over a true brother; for they do not call those who are after the flesh, but those who are in the Spirit and in God.”
In short, for those who interacted with them, the Christians had an incredible reputation for honesty, integrity, and kindness no matter what. A rather powerful testimony and way to endear people to them and their message.
And going back to even pretty extreme levels of self sacrifice in some of this, he states, “And there is among them a man that is poor and needy and if they have not an abundance of necessities, they fast two or three days, that they may supply the needy with the necessary food.”
Jesus on Women, Slaves, and Roman Spicy Time
An important thing to explicitly point out when talking about in that previous passage by Aristides with regards to how Christianity spread so rapidly was the bit about “as for their servants or handmaids or children… they call without distinction, brothers.”
That is to say, all were equal in the eyes of God, even women, children, and slaves. Why this message would appeal to the massive number of slaves or former slaves in Rome is, perhaps, obvious, especially with Christians treating them as relative equals and with extreme kindness. But on the women’s side, it’s important to explicitly point out what life was like for women at the time in many parts of Rome, Judea being one of the slight exceptions or, at least, relatively speaking. Women were still even here best to be neither seen nor heard in many cases.
But in general, in Greek and Roman societies women were extremely gender segregated. While of course different city-states in Greece and regions of Rome had marked differences, in the general case, Greek women were isolated from other men as much as possible. They were not even typically allowed to eat at a table if another man other than their husband was eating at it. The Greeks also had officials, the Gunaikonomoi, whose job it was to control and police women. This included everything from policing women’s dress and conduct in public, and private settings, to also supervising female religious rituals and female behaviour in ceremonies.
On the other hand, Roman women had more of a public presence, lived less gender segregated lives and could socialize with men outside of their family and marriage. However, this didn’t mean they were as liberated as the men. If an elite woman was too involved in society, her husband was often accused of weakness, and the weakness of one elite man threatened the delicate class order. As such, women were still fairly strictly controlled in Roman society, and even though the level of control was less than in Greek society, it still was in massive contrast to how women were treated within the Christian church in the very beginning where all were equal in the eyes of their God, including, as we’ll get into in a bit about the nuts and bolts of how they spread the religion so effectively, women sometimes being deacons in the church, quite literally counted among the church leaders.
This is all something that obviously didn’t exactly stick as the centuries went on, and still occasionally is a controversial thing in some sects of Christianity today where the idea of a female pastor or priest makes some clutch their Bibles and cry heresy. But in the earliest going, there are a number of both secular and non-secular references to women seemingly leading their local churches which were always gender mixed.
Christianity also required husbands to have a certain level of obligation to their wives, not just in the practical sense, but more or less as the other half of one body, and demanded that the women be respected as such, as well as the husbands to be faithful to their woman in all ways. This latter was a wholly foreign and rather revolutionary concept to most Romans. But as you can imagine, all of this seemingly appealed to many women of the nation to an extreme degree.
Going back to the whole faithful to your wife thing and how some Romans originally responded to this by being convinced Christianity was some sort of weird and perverse sex cult because of how bizarre a concept this was to them, it’s not that Greeks and Romans didn’t have very strict rules and taboos to regulate sexual mores. Just like in Christianity, adultery was a great transgression. However, in Greek and Roman religion, adultery meant something different than what it means to us today, largely because of Christianity. For men of Rome, adultery was sleeping with another man’s wife. Further, chastity for a Roman man did not mean abstainment from sex, but rather moderation when sleeping with socially approved partners from any gender and, to an extent at least, age. On that note, for Roman men, they perceived sexual acts not so much defined by male and female, but passive and dominant. And key here was that elite men must always be dominant, and never passive, and your station in life played a massive role in who you could play with in the bedroom and what you could get up to there.
On this note, even with the vast sexual freedom males enjoyed, in theory they were expected to show a level of moderation, as this was considered an elite virtue that proved you were worthy of your station and responsibilities in society. If you can control your desires and not give into them as much, you can control the people under you and handle your difficult duties well and responsibly. Someone who didn’t have such good self control, and excessively indulged in their base desires, was seen as lesser for obvious reasons.
This wasn’t just about sex, but applied to all facets of life. And, in truth, unequivocally someone who has more self discipline and typically lets their principles and the like control their actions instead of their urges and emotions of the moment generally will go much further in life and usually will make a better leader. So checks out why the Romans had clearly observed this general fact of life, and felt this way when it came to a man’s sexual practices and, ideally, some level of moderation and self control.
Noteworthy the Christians borrowed to an extent this idea of abstainment being a virtue for similar reasons, but restricted it even further to simply your wife or, if you were incredibly good at self control, and thus more disciplined and virtuous in their view because of it, no one at all.
As for women, well, we have a very different picture. Adultery for women was similar as it is today- sleeping with any man not their husband. Further for most Greeks and Romans, contrary to a common perception today, sexual relations between women was generally seen as unnatural and associated with prostitutes. We do not know why this association was made, but we do see a stereotype of women who have sex with women as very commonly being ugly prostitutes in surviving literature. Even 7th century BC poet Sapho of Lesbos whose poetry ultimately inspired the term “Lesbian” was portrayed in later Roman and Greek literature as such. We also know that elite women were usually not afforded the option of homosexual relationships the way men were, although it definitely happened anyway. In these cases it was not considered adultery, but it was overall frowned upon in many parts of Rome. The point of all of this being- women were, once again, heavily controlled and restricted in most ways.
Of course, most of these sexual mores and practices changed with the advent of Christianity from Jesus’ teachings, as well as really pushed by a later Christian who, outside of Jesus, was arguably the most important Christian of all with regards to defining and spreading the religion- enter Paul of Tarsus.
Paul, who was originally himself a great hater and persecutor of Christians, but was converted around 36 AD, among other things, completely redefined chastity for these societies. Sex in general was discouraged, but in the words of Paul in his Letter to the Corinthians “It is better to marry than to burn.”
Or, as noted in one of our favorite quotes from famed Protestant reformer Martin Luther when discussing the absurdity of requiring priests to be completely celebate, he wrote, “Nature never lets up… We are all driven to the secret sin. To say it crudely but honestly, if it doesn’t go into a woman, it goes into your shirt.”
Going back to Paul, in the same letter to the Corinthians, he pushed the relatively groundbreaking idea in the region at the time to limit the sexual partners of men to just their wives.
Once again, somewhat ironically, as alluded to, many Romans saw the early Christians as a wild sex cult because of all this, not just from the Christians’ weird views on sex, in their opinions, but also because of the very gender-mixed gatherings where women were seemingly equals, which was all seen as a front for twisted sex rituals. This was a charge some early Christian martyrs attempted to disprove by castrating themselves…
Of course, Paul won at the end of the day and many of the Greek and Roman sexual practices taken for granted over the millennia rapidly disappeared thanks to this shift in thinking and the idea of monogamous relationships for not just women, but men won the day.
In all this, let’s just say Christianity was extremely appealing to women of the region beyond any promises of afterlife, as it elevated their station significantly in their families and Christian community, provided an outlet of practical support for them if they had no husband or the like, and provided extra obligations for their husbands towards them commanded by God himself.
For example Paul states in his letter to the Ephesians, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her… In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body. ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’… each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”
That said, old habits die hard, and in his letter to the Corinthian churches Paul also notes, “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”
Nevertheless, while maybe not going all the way to being equal in practical matters when it came to the woman’s husband, this was a massive improvement for the station for women in this region of the world, and particularly when it came to even leadership roles within the Church as noted. And even more so when looking at Jesus’ treatment of and interactions with women, which might fly over the heads of modern readers, but in his day was one of the more controversial aspects of his ministry.
There are numerous examples of this described in the New Testament. For example, in one instance Jesus, as a Jewish rabbi, didn’t just degrade himself by speaking with a random woman publicly, but it was a Samaritan woman no less, and one who by Jewish law likely deserved to be stoned to death and was definitely considered unclean. And on top of all of this, he went and shared a water container with this hated foreign, sinning, unclean woman. And perhaps most scandalous of all- he openly discussed theology with her.
As summed up by Pope John Paul II of this, “This is an event without precedent: that a woman, and what is more a ‘sinful woman’, becomes a disciple of Christ. Indeed, once taught, she proclaims Christ to the inhabitants of Samaria so that they too receive him with faith. This is an unprecedented event, if one remembers the usual way women were treated by those who were teachers in Israel; whereas in Jesus of Nazareth’s way of acting such an event becomes normal.”
Yet another example was the story of sisters Martha and Mary, with Martha left to do all the work of preparing food and the like, while Mary lounged around and listened to what Jesus had to teach. When Martha asked Jesus to make Mary help her, Jesus replied, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
Again, to a modern reader, nothing too significant there, but in the context of the time and how women were treated, teaching a woman theology in any detail beyond the practical she needed to know for the governance of her life, and on top of that having her education in theology take precedence over her duties in her home, let alone that Jesus was so openly socializing with both sisters in that home, was extremely out of the ordinary.
Jesus also very openly had many female disciples following along with him and seemingly playing prominent roles in his ministry. And when various scenarios as with the aforementioned Samaritan woman popped up, he had a tendency to rebuke those rebuking him for his interactions with these women, or for those who tried to denigrate the women.
For example, while dining with a Pharisee, Jesus allowed what is assumed to have been a prostitute, and thus unclean in the eyes of the Pharisee, to not just interact with him verbally, but also most scandalously of all allowed her, an unclean woman, to touch him. When the Pharisee rebuked Jesus for this, stating, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.” Jesus replied implying the woman was actually greater in his eyes than the holier than thou Pharisee, noting, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”
In the end, Paul would seemingly sum up Jesus’ stance towards all people, “There is not any Jew nor Greek, not any slave nor free, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Thus, tallying it up so far, the religion was not just appealing to the middle and lower classes and slaves for its more or less social welfare system, promise of a better life after death, and general message of kindness and love to all humans no matter what- which humans as a whole almost always respond well to if done genuinely- but also elevated half the population from a station of almost total subservience to a relative equal. And even where they weren’t considered quite fully equal with their husbands, commanding the men to love the women as they would themselves, and for husbands to be faithful to only them.
Even today, notable Christians who’ve stuck to in the ballpark of these ideals almost always are pretty well universally beloved by the masses if well known. Perhaps the poster child of this being Fred Rogers, aka Mister Rogers, who not coincidentally was a Presbyterian minister, charged with continuing his work on creating and contributing to wholesome children’s television programs as his ministry. And a prominent modern mimicker of Jesus’ core ideals and how the early Christians seem to have behaved you’ll be hard pressed to find, in the public sphere today.
A Timeless Model That Still Works Today- A Mister Rogers Story
As an example, modeling the early Christian behavior towards all people, Mister Rogers, who as a core of his ministry advocated accepting and loving everyone for who they are, knowingly hired gay individuals to work on Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. While that wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy today, at the time his show originally aired in the 1960s, doing so was decidedly outside of the norm, even more so because it was a children’s show run by a Presbyterian minister. In fact, two of those gay cast members, John Reardon and Francois Clemmons became close friends of Mister Rogers himself, with the latter, Clemmons, having a recurring role on the show as well.
Going back to even more overt Christian themes that seem to mimic the early Church’s behavior, Clemmons cites two noteworthy instances that he felt really encapsulated Fred Rogers. The first was during a 1969 episode of the show in which Mister Rogers, who was sitting with his bare feet in a children’s pool, asked Clemmons on air to join him in resting his feet in the water, with the pair then singing, “Many Ways to Say I Love You” as they sat together. Clemmons said of this, “The icon Fred Rogers not only was showing my brown skin in the tub with his white skin as two friends, but as I was getting out of that tub, he was helping me dry my feet…. The significance of Fred doing that for a black, gay man is not lost… I felt unworthy, like Peter in the Bible. Why did he choose me?”
For the uninitiated, this was Mister Rogers following Jesus’ explicit command, and in so doing putting himself in a subservient role to a gay black man in the 1960s on a national TV show aired for children. Mister Rogers clearly had some balls… Or just a really centered view of his faith and strong convictions in it. Maybe a bit of both.
As for the following Jesus’ command part, this once again comes back to one of the most important parts of the early Church’s practices, where Jesus washes his disciples feet, despite some of their objections to him prostrating himself before them in this way. But then Jesus says, “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you…”
And further driving the entire point home, in John 13 stating, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Wrapping up Mister Rogers’ personification of this, similar to the early Christian church and how much this behavior resonated with people, many years later when Mister Rogers was as ever finishing his program with “You make every day a special day just by being you, and I like you just the way you are.” Clemmons stated that Mister Rogers was looking not at the camera, but at him when he said it. Afterwards, Clemmons said he walked over to Mister Rogers and asked him, “Fred, were you talking to me?” To which Mister Rogers replied, “Yes, I have been talking to you for years, But you heard me today.” Clemmons, who had long felt like there was something wrong with himself because he was gay, stated “It was like telling me I’m OK as a human being. That was one of the most meaningful experiences I’d ever had.”
The result of all of this? You certainly can find a lot of people who maybe don’t enjoy Mister Rogers’ show because of its slow pacing and being slightly antiquated in some ways, but find one person who doesn’t admire the man himself and what he was teaching once they learn of him in any depth? You’re going to have a REALLY hard time.
And this, my dear viewers, is EXACTLY how the early Christian church seems to have similarly endeared themselves to the masses, with the people of that era, at least the ones who directly encountered it and weren’t just going off rumors of bizarre Christian behavior, eating it up the same as people today when humans act like this in a genuine way.
As noted in the Book of Acts, “And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need… they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people.”
Well, many. Not everyone, particularly not those of the elite class. For example, noted second century opponent of Christian theology Celsus would write in his The True Word mocking the popularity of Christianity among women and the lower classes, stating they were made up of “only foolish and low individuals, and persons devoid of perception, and slaves, and women, and children, of whom the teachers of the divine word wish to make converts.” And that “the following are the rules laid down by them. Let no one come to us who has been instructed, or who is wise or prudent (for such qualifications are deemed evil by us); but if there be any ignorant, or unintelligent, or uninstructed, or foolish persons, let them come with confidence. By which words, acknowledging that such individuals are worthy of their God, they manifestly show that they desire and are able to gain over only the silly, and the mean, and the stupid, with women and children.”
Needless to say, he was not a fan.
Nevertheless, as Justin Martyr, whose tacked on last name totally should come with a “spoiler alert” for his life’s story, would write to Emperor Antonius Pius, they hoped to win their enemies over with their good actions, stating, “…before we loved money and possessions more than anything, but now we share what we have and to everyone who is in need; before we hated one another and killed one another and would not eat with those of another race, but now since the manifestation of Christ, we have come to a common life and pray for our enemies and try to win over those who hate us without just cause.”
We should also explicitly point out that despite what Celsus said, it wasn’t actually just the commoners and oppressed joining up, though those do seem to have been the quickest and majority of adherents in the early going for obvious reasons. However, Paul namedrops a number of prominent individuals hosting some of their gatherings, such as the City Treasurer of Corinth, Erastus, and Gaius of Corinth, who had to have been very wealthy as it’s stated he at one point hosted all of the churches of Corinth at once in his home.
But to sum up the philosophical portion of why the religion spread so well- we have a message of love and kindness to all, even your mortal enemy, and helping anyone in need in any way they needed, even if this meant you had to sacrifice your own well being to do so. You also have the promise of an amazing afterlife where even the lowest stationed individual in the world could take equal part if they joined up. And you have a message that we are all equal in the eyes of God and God loves us all equally, thus, so should we, including loving and treating even slaves and women as you would love and treat yourself.
From all this, you can see why this would already be of great appeal to many.
But wait, there’s more.
Rescuing Babies
Let’s now dive into some of the more practical methods of spreading the religion.
First, not just gaining advocates in those in need and the downtrodden of the Earth, Christians also were gaining children on board in droves, and not quite the way you might think in just making them. But also, because abortion was a bit of a risky procedure historically, a common practice in the region at the time was to quite literally toss babies who weren’t desired out with the trash, particularly female babies. This method of abortion starkly contrasted with the teachings of the early church where even babies were equal in the eyes of God to adults, and thus they felt it was their Christian duty to rescue these babies and other abandoned children, male or female, which they seemingly from accounts frequently did- taking the newborns placed to die via exposure and other abandoned children and raising them as their own.
Go Ye Therefore, And Teach All Nations
Next up, we have a key facet of all of this which if had not occurred, Christianity probably wouldn’t have spread as it did no matter the philosophy and the other practical methods utilized. And that was the Apostle Paul’s decision to focus on pushing the religion beyond the Jews. This was something Jesus had already to an extent seemingly done in some isolated instances, but for some in the immediate church after his crucifixion, this was a controversial move.
And, indeed, before the resurrection, when Jesus sent his disciples out, he allegedly specifically told them not to do this. Stating, “Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
However, after the crucifixion and resurrection, he allegedly stated that because “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth” at this point, it was now time for them to branch out beyond Israel under the New Covenant which was meant for all humans. Stating, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”
Nevertheless, for some Christian Jews at the time, the idea was still a little controversial vs. continuing to focus on converting more Jews to their new sect of Judaesim first.
Even more controversial was that Paul also made the barrier to entry into the religion lower, declaring that Gentiles joining up needn’t adhere to any Jewish laws or traditions, which was a huge shift in the religion away from a branch of Judaism and into its own separate thing. This also had practical benefit in that any males who wanted to join the religion no longer had to have their nether regions snipped, which was not only extremely painful, but also in the era before antibiotics also carried some level of risk in joining. We can only imagine before Paul’s declarations here, potential converts were probably like, “I totally am on board with this message of love and kindness, but what’s with the obsession with genital mutilation? Especially snipping off such an extremely functional and pleasure nerve filled bit of my happy stick?”
Showing how quick the transition was from here, during a Jewish revolt in Judea that lasted from 132-135 AD, the Romans persecuted the Jews practicing their religion, but at this point ignored the Christian Jews in all this, already seeing them as something distinct from the orthodox Jews.
But in essence with all of this, Christianity took many of the great philosophical ideas in Judaism, reinterpreted portions of them and expanded on it all, and then took away the ethnic barrier that prevented the Jewish religion from spreading. No longer was it a religion local to a region or culture of pencil sharpening, but was something available to any human, anywhere, even if they preferred their gherkin to stay girdled. With the new nation, as it were, being not about your literal family or local populace of your region, but a community and family in Christ anywhere you were.
And there was extreme power in this, as we’ll expand upon in a bit how well this worked out for Christians… Well, at least until centuries later when various political leaders would get involved and decided to mess the entire “love everyone, even your enemy” idea up and used Christianity as an excuse to go murder, rape, and pillage neighboring lands in the name of God…. We’ll get to that. Stick with us.
But for now, once Christianity spread beyond the Jews, the idea that you could go anywhere Christians were in the world and find someone who would treat you as a beloved brother or sister was a powerful incentive to join up.
But wait, there’s more!
Jesus can Kill Zeus. Zeus Cannot Kill Jesus
On top of all this, among the Gentiles of Rome, beyond all the stuff mentioned before which would appeal to many people, there is a clear distinction here on why it thrived and the pagan religions just couldn’t in the same way. Specifically, as alluded to, the pagan religions of the region in the general case required no strong loyalty to a specific god. You could worship one today and a different tomorrow. Christinaity was different, requiring a rejection of all other gods. The practical effect of this was that as it grew, the worship of other gods diminished, in contrast to the pagan gods where if one became prominent for a given thing, it didn’t diminish the others at all. In other words, Christianity could kill pagan gods, but pagan gods could not kill Christinaity.
Christinaity also had a core, very quickly to be written down, doctrine that could apply anywhere to any peoples. Pagan gods, once again, tended to be relatively local, with no good way for them to spread globally, and traditions surrounding them were very loose and ill defined, with the gods mostly little caring what humans got up to and, at best, lending a helping hand for a given one if a sacrifice to them was good enough, with no real love between the two parties here- mostly purely transactional. It further typically required the god to do something to help you, instead of the god’s followers, if any aid was to be given.
Thus there was, in the general case, no strong sense of loyalty for most to any of the gods, unlike the Christian God who gave everything for all mankind, unconditionally no less, and also offered similarly unconditional love. No sacrifice needed, nothing transactional. Just love him back and love your fellow man the same to demonstrate this love for God as quite literally the two most important facets of the religion that, according to Jesus himself, encapsulated all the rest. From a practical side, this also meant God’s followers had your back in all things, whether you joined up or not, or whether God himself wanted to otherwise more directly help you or not. You still got helped.
Further, evangelizing about a given pagan god just wasn’t really a thing like it was with Christianity either. On top of this, there wasn’t really a good reason to dedicate yourself to the pagan gods in the same way in the general case. But Christianity offered an incentive to do so in not just immortality, but also promise of something better after you died if you did so. And, again, perhaps the most powerful factor of all- a community of people dedicated to helping you if you had some need, which for so many under Roman rule was a constant.
Jesus of Skywalker
That’s not to mention the story itself was extremely compelling and a tale already rather familiar to Roman audiences from so many of their own legends. In this case, a boy from humble origins living in the desert meets an older wiseman in Obi-Wan the Baptist who initiates him, then directly after that individual rises to great prominence fighting against the forces of evil, including utilizing special powers he ultimately comes to possess to help those oppressed under that evil forces’ rule. Just when victory seems assured, the powers that be cast him down brutally. But after he goes away for a little bit, he returns and triumphs not only over those forces, but saves all mankind through his actions and sacrifice. Give him a lightsaber and we’re pretty sure we’ve got a blockbuster on our hands. Or, at least, if Disney isn’t put in charge of it.
In the end, some version of the Hero’s Journey plot line is one that has seemingly appealed to humans as long as we’ve been writing stuff down, ESPECIALLY if the given tale is based on a true story. Thus, Jesus’ life story, whether embellished or not we leave to you, either way was extremely familiar and appealing to those who heard it then and now.
In the end, Rabbi Berel Wein on JewishHistory.org sums up this section of the rise of Christinaity very succinctly, stating, “In a world dominated by Roman cruelty — where the majority of the world’s population were slaves or vassals to Rome; where the idea of human freedom (as we in the Western world know it) was unimaginable – if you spoke in terms of Jewish moral values (love, fairness, honesty), albeit minus the lifestyle that embodies it, you had a ready audience. If you said that slaves are as good as masters; that the poor are as good as the rich; that the weak are as great as the mighty; and that God loves everyone; and that everyone could make it to eternity – people were going to listen.”
Thus, no surprise, once Christianity was very explicitly opened and targeting the non-Jews, from here, Christianity began to spread rapidly, although perhaps not as rapidly as the New Testament writings seem to indicate, with there seeming to be some exaggeration here.
For example, in Acts, Peter supposedly converts three thousand people on the day of the Pentecost, and not long after another five thousand more, with allusions to similar numbers later. The problem with this is there were only about 20,000-75,000 people in all of Jerusalem when Peter was giving these sermons. Thus, most religious scholars think converting 8,000 of them in two sermons, plus multitudes more after, is a bit of an exaggeration by the authors after the fact. As that kind of growth rate would have seen Christianity become the dominant religion in Rome massively quicker than its extreme rise already made happen. We’ll get into the math of it all a bit, because the numbers side of this, despite being math, we promise is actually really interesting and a powerful life lesson embedded.
Secret Sauce- The Immutable Power of the Dinner Party to Change the World
But going back to their nuts and bolts method of spreading, while parts of the New Testament talk of mass conversions, this really wasn’t necessary, nor how the church actually spread beyond perhaps the initial seeding surge from such speeches in new regions. So how did they do it if mass conversions weren’t on the table?
Well, they put something else on the table- Enter the humble dinner party.
In a time before any Christian group had a central church, people’s homes were where they gathered. These so-called “house churches” were where those from all backgrounds and genders were invited to participate as equals and partake in communion.
This was something Jesus himself seems to have modeled not just in the Last Supper, but frequently in his ministry before- Essentially getting together, singing, praying, good discussion and, of course, good food. By accounts we have today, this was seemingly with everyone pitching in what they could in something of a potluck type scenario, similar to what many church groups still do today, though often now at a central church building rather than at people’s homes. Although, as the author of this piece can attest from growing up with Christian missionary parents, regular dinner gatherings in people’s homes for similar purposes is still a common practice alive and well. Humans of all eras love to socialize turns out.
Back in the early going with the Christian church, this also would have encouraged more to come who didn’t have much in the way of food as well, and also as previously alluded to, another key facet of these gatherings was trying to make sure everyone’s needs were met in all ways, not just at the dinners, whether someone was a declared Christian or not. Further, if one of the brethren could not attend, one of the jobs of the appointed deacons (from the Greek for “servant” and leaders of the house churches) was to make sure those who couldn’t attend still had the benefit of the food, so making sure they got a portion of it whether they could come or not.
On this note, Pliny, writing to Emperor Trajan about the Christians in 112 AD describes these dinner meetings among Christians and some of their early core doctrine, and even mentions not just women, but slave women serving as leaders. As for the source of Pliny’s information in the letter, he states it was from former Christians he induced to worship the Emperor instead. He states they told him, “they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit, fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food — but ordinary and innocent food….”
Note on this last remark of being “innocent food”, there were rumors at the time that Christians were resorting to cannibalism owing to the practice of eating bread and drinking wine symbolic of Jesus’ body and blood which was shed for all mankind in their theology.
To confirm all Pliny was told by these former Christians, he also states, “Accordingly, I judged it all the more necessary to find out what the truth was by torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses. But I discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition.”
As for the typical gathering day, according to the aforementioned second century Christian Justin Martyr, “Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead.”
That said, some have speculated it may have actually been Saturday by our reckoning, because at the time, the marking of the start of Sunday for the Jews was sundown of Saturday, and there are plenty of references of these gatherings occuring at night, which was something of a necessity given many of the Gentiles involved, including the slaves, worked all day and so would not have been able to attend until well into the evening.
On this practice of often meeting at night, seemingly in secret in their homes, also as alluded to, this for a time garnered some amount of suspicion among the pagan rulers as to what they were getting up to, from the alleged cannibalism and rumors of being a sex cult, thanks to women and men gathering together, to that early Christians practiced incest, with this one presumed to derive from their practice of calling each other “brother” and “sister” and more or less treating everyone as family regardless of blood relation.
Going back to the Sunday meetings though, this probably wasn’t the only time they commonly met. As noted in Acts where it states, “And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people.”
The power of all this when applied to cities everywhere can be summed up in the Epistle to Diognetus written in the 2nd century AD, “They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all others; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. … They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death and restored to life. They are poor yet make many rich; they are in lack of all things and yet abound in all; they are dishonored and yet in their very dishonor are glorified. They are evil spoken of and yet are justified; they are reviled and bless; they are insulted and repay the insult with honor; they do good yet are punished as evildoers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by the Jews as foreigners and are persecuted by the Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred.”
“Meeting Physical Force With Soul Force”
Speaking of hatred, one thing that some argue hindered the spread of Christianity and others argue encouraged it, was the persecution the early Church had to endure. As to the former argument, it’s that nobody wants to be tortured and brutally executed, so it likely stopped some from joining up and others who joined to ultimately renounce their Christianity in the face of such. As to the latter argument that it helped the spread of Christianity, you had this group who predominantly were doing nothing but loving everyone and exhibiting extreme integrity, who were then being brutally tortured and executed for no good reason, and despite this were still rejoicing and being loving, forgiving, and even blessing their very torturers and executors.
In essence, the Christians took what we might call the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Civil Rights movement approach of refusing to compromise their core values and refusing to back down or be quiet, but otherwise responding to brutality and oppression with largely messages of peace, love, forgiveness and unity. A classic way to win the masses to your cause, and it’s no coincidence that this partially Christian led branch of the Civil Rights movement utilized this same tactic early Christians did.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, who by the way was a Baptist Minister, would elaborate, “But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force” and to “continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.”
In the end, you fight back with force in cases like this, it just makes you and your people the enemy, not just to those in power, but now to the masses as well. Of course, these masses may already at first hate you because they have been taught you are evil. But either way, the only way to win in this case is to physically dominate your oppressors and the masses. Essentially a true violent revolution. Not a great plan if you’re the extreme minority.
However, if you respond to violence and hate and oppression with peace, love, kindness, and forgiveness? While it may not end well for you on an individual level, the other humans watching, or even doing it to you, are certainly going to notice. Nobody likes to see themselves as the bad guy and if your supposed enemy won’t back down, but also won’t fight back with force, and also is just being loving towards you in response to your hate and violence? Well, even the worst of humans will quickly start to look at themselves in the mirror and say, “Hans… are we the baddies?”
And even if they don’t, an awful lot of people watching it all unfold will and you’ll ultimately convert many of them to your cause instead of making enemies out of them by physically fighting force with force as, for example, the non-Christian Jews largely did under Roman occupation. Those Jews lost. Brutally. Again and again and again, and made countless enemies along the way in the process. Jesus and his Jewish followers did not, very quickly coming to rule Rome by this style of passive, and loving resistance.
At the end of the day, a universal precept of life coming through in all of these events- you can’t always change someone’s heart or mind. But if hearts or minds are going to change, it’s almost always through genuine kindness. Which, once again, just so happened to be one of the cores of Jesus’ message- love and kindness to all, no matter what.
“Hew Out of the Mountain of Despair a Stone of Hope”
As for more specifics of this persecution, it should be noted that contrary to popular belief, it’s not totally clear there was any widespread persecution of Christians in the earliest church, though there were absolutely isolated pockets of it. But as for the mass persecution, thanks to Rome being so accepting of all religions, the first evidence of mass persecution didn’t occur until the reign of Decius in the 3rd century.
As for the isolated persecution before this, perhaps the most famous instance of this was documented by Senator Publius Cornelius Tacitus, who was born a couple decades after Jesus’ crucifixion and, in his Annals (115 AD) in chapter 44 of book 15, he discusses Christians being targeted as a scapegoat by Nero. Stating,
“…Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind… Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were being destroyed.”
To explicitly highlight here, even Tacitus, an opponent of Christianity, states the brutal treatment for seemingly no good reason resulted in the masses watching feeling not hatred for the Christians, but compassion for them, and a dislike for Nero instead because of the persecution.
But on the whole, in the first couple hundred years, the Christians were first treated more or less as a branch of Judaism, which was highly protected in some ways. And later as their own thing, a rather unique religion in a number of ways, with some finding their practices, to quote Tacitus, “abominations”, but otherwise mostly let be. Although it seems like at least some of these “abominations” were centered around the aforementioned rumors of cannibalism, sexual depravity, etc.. Thus many were persecuted for these misunderstandings and the societal threat the rising rather bizarre cult seemed to offer in allegedly spreading such practices.
But to try to clear up the misunderstandings where there was persecution, Justin Martyr would write in his letter to Emperor Antonius Pius, “we demand that the charges against the Christians be investigated. If these are substantiated, we should be justly punished. But if no one can convict us of anything, true reason forbids you to wrong blameless men because of evil rumors. If you did so, you would be harming yourselves in governing affairs by emotions rather than by intelligence. . . . It is our task, therefore, to provide to all an opportunity of inspecting our life and teachings. . . . It is your business, when you hear us, to be good judges, as reason demands. If, when you have learned the truth, you do not do what is just, you will be without excuse before God.”
As for this lack of widespread persecution, beyond Rome being very accepting of most all religions, it probably also helped that in this early going Christians went out of their way to follow Roman laws thanks to Jesus’ famed “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” speech.
Paul would also write in Romans “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended… But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason…. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience.“
And if you thought that passage has been wildly abused by anti-revolutionaries under oppressive rulers, you’d be correct. A classic example of taking a quote out of context. Nuance in everything and context, particularly the reason Paul was saying that and to whom at the time, matters.
But suffice it to say for the point here, the early church was mandated to be good Roman citizens insofar as it didn’t interfere with their faith, and otherwise just do the right thing not just because the state might require a given thing, but because doing the right thing is never the wrong thing, even if it costs you your life according to these early Christians.
Further, the early church writers seem to have gone out of their way to absolve Rome of things like the crucifixion of Jesus, explicitly blaming the Jewish leadership instead, despite the execution having to be for a crime against the Roman state, as at the time the Jewish leadership did not have the ability to dole out capital punishment.
Thus, while the early Christian church were seen as quite odd in their beliefs and practices, they weren’t otherwise making trouble, so seemingly for much of the early going they were largely ignored outside of specific isolated instances like in the Nero example and various misunderstandings about what they got up to in their secret nightly gatherings.
“Shake the Foundations of Our Nation Until the Bright Day of Justice Emerges”
Things changed, however, during the reign of Decius, where he attempted to enforce a measure of conformity in the 3rd century AD, requiring all citizens take part in various state religious ceremonies. None of this was specifically targeting Christians, just meant to target anyone who wasn’t overtly showing their support of Rome and the Emperor via taking part in animal sacrifice to their gods and Emperor.
Unfortunately for a subset of the Christians of Rome, this conflicted with their beliefs, so they refused. And because they had no such ancestral protection of their religion to be exempt from such sacrifices, it subjected them to the death penalty. In contrast, any Christian willing to take part in the Roman civic religion were allowed to continue to practice their own religion as well. And it is noted by famed “Father of Church History”, Eusebius, who lived through all this that many did just this, participating in Roman rites to follow the law, and then back to their faith right after, which the Roman rulers were completely fine with these Christians and they were allowed to otherwise continue to practice their Christian faith. It wasn’t the Christian faith that was the problem inherently, it was the perceived disloyalty to Rome.
As the aforementioned Celsus would write in his The True Word, the Christians “must make their choice between two alternatives. If they refuse to render due service to the gods, and to respect those who are set over this service, let them not come to manhood, or marry wives, or have children, or indeed take any share in the affairs of life; but let them depart hence with all speed, and leave no posterity behind them, that such a race may become extinct from the face of the earth.”
Emperor Decius was just taking this notion and running with it.
That said, an irony in all this, as noted by second century Christian scholar Tertullian in his Apology, the ones who refused to take part in emperor worship still typically overtly supported the emperor. Stating, “We pray, too, for the emperors, for their ministers and for all in authority, for the welfare of the world, for the prevalence of peace, for the delay of the final consummation.” He also notes that they self regulate their actions and of their community to try to be only good deeds and be boons to Rome and the World, and that “The tried men of our elders preside over us, obtaining that honour not by purchase but by established character. There is no buying and selling of any sort in the things of God.”
From here, there was a relatively brief period of widespread persecution, but this was quickly followed by the so-called “Little Peace of the Church” during the reign of Gallienus, followed by the Great Persecution which finally did specifically target the Christians, lasting just under a decade under Diocletian.
As a little fun fact- it was largely because of Diocletian and his persecution of the Christians that we have the dating system we have today of BCE (Before Common Era) or BC (Before Christ), and CE (Common Era) or AD (Anno Domini, meaning “in the year of the lord”). We’ll have more on the ironic story of how a guy who hated Christians accidentally gave us a brand new dating system based on their faith in the Bonus Facts at the end of this video.
“Free at last! Free at last Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
Going back to the widespread targeting of and persecution of Christians in Rome under Diocletian, this was allegedly in part a response to advice Diocletian received at the oracle of Apollo at Didyma. Previous to this, he had purportedly only advocated banning Christians from such things as the military and ruling body. Afterward, he switched to an escalating policy of persecution to try to get Christians to worship the Roman gods. This began simply via seizing Christian’s property, destroying their homes, burning all Christian texts, etc. When this sort of thing was ineffective, they progressed to arresting and torturing Christians, starting with the leaders. When that didn’t work, Christians began to be killed in various brutal ways including occasionally being torn apart by animals for the amusement of the masses (Damnatio ad bestias). Just good family fun.
However, none of this had the intended effect. Quite the opposite, which all leads us up to Constantine who pretty much directly after changed everything by not only legalizing Christian worship, but also joining up, or at least claiming he did (there is some debate on whether he was a practicing Christian or simply using the religion as a political tool).
But as for Constantine and his conversion, some point to his mother supposedly being a Christian and influencing him on this which, again, Christianity was insanely popular with the ladies of the era, so maybe. But either way, he allegedly had a vision during the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, which ultimately secured him the title of Emperor of the West. Eusebius writes,
“About the time of the midday sun, when the day was just turning, he said he saw with his own eyes up in the sky and resting over the sun, a cross-shaped trophy formed from light, and a text attached to it which said, ‘By this conquer.’ Amazement at the spectacle seized both him and the whole company of soldiers which was then accompanying him on a campaign he was conducting somewhere, and witnessed the miracle.”
In the aftermath Constantine allegedly became a Christian thanks to him crediting the Chrisitian god with his victory, though still allowed more traditional Roman religious practices, even among many of the high officials of the empire, with the edict that “Let no one disturb another, let each man hold fast to that which his soul wishes…”
That said, things did change as his reign progressed, with by the end some of the Roman temples being torn down, though this could have been more just in response to declining numbers among supporters of the pagan gods. Whatever the case, Constantine also granted certain privileges to Christians, from tax breaks to financial backing, to placing Christians in high positions in the empire, to having basilicas constructed. Reflecting more Christian values at the time, there were also subtle changes in the empire like more humane treatment of certain prisoners.
However, while things were now safer in Rome for the Christians, this, ironically, resulted in a huge spike of persecution of Christians in Rome’s enemy in Persia. Particularly allegedly after Constantine himself wrote to Shapur II encouraging him to provide protection for Christians in his realm, which allegedly saw Shapur go completely the other way supposedly writing his military leaders to target the Christians as “They inhabit our territory and agree with Caesar, our enemy.”
In all this, while some point to Constantine as the reason Christianity would very quickly thereafter dominate Rome and beyond, this isn’t really accurate at all, as we’ll get into shortly when we talk about the mathematics of it all. Even if Constantine had continued the oppression of the Christians it is likely absolutely nothing would have changed in their growth and by the end of the century they likely would have ruled Rome anyway.
What if the Color Blue to You Isn’t the Same Color Blue to Me?
What Constantine did do that changed Christianity forever, however, was call together various leaders of the churches in the First Council of Nicaea. This was the first major attempt to codify what it meant to be a Christian and define the orthodoxy for the entire religion, something that previously was generally done by individual groups within the Church, with a variety of beliefs connected, not really any different than today with countless denominations with sometimes similar and in other cases wildly different beliefs, but generally all still considering themselves some form of Christian regardless of what any other groups of Christians say.
This diversity and disagreement on exact beliefs is reflected in the earliest writings we have surviving today as previously noted. But also explicitly mentioned, for example, when Paul wrote in First Corinthians, “it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brethren. What I mean is that each one of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’”
While Paul appealed to all Christians to “agree and that there be no dissensions among you… that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment” evidence seems to be that the descension from here only grew, and by the 4th century something needed to be done about it. Or, at least, Constantine certainly thought so.
Given that it all concerned matters near and dear to people’s core beliefs, the debate at the council was apparently rather contentious, with one account even having one church leader, Arius, allegedly getting slapped upside the head at a certain point. Further, he and his supporters were exiled after the council owing to their version of Christianity being incompatible with what the rest of the bishops agreed on should be included in church doctrine. Or, at least, what most of them agreed on. Three more of the bishops Theognis, Eusebius, and Maris signed off on it all, perhaps not wanting to be exiled themselves, but their conviction in it was ultimately doubted and they were later exiled anyway by Constantine, the same as Arius and his other supporters.
Among countless things they sorted at that gathering was the squabbling in the early Church over whether Jesus was divine or just a prophet or God. And further from there whether he was always divine or because of his ministry and work on Earth made divine by God. As will come as no shock to you if you’ve ever been to most branches of Christian churches today, the Nicene council decreed Jesus was not only devine, but always so.
From here for a time there was a lot more cohesiveness on church doctrine, relatively speaking anyway, and those who didn’t follow it like the Gnostics and countless more were soon to be considered heretics for their beliefs and ostracized. For example, the gnostics’ sin seems to have been placing their emphasis on the message of Jesus in terms of the philosophy, rather than anything particularly otherwise special about the individual himself beyond what he was teaching. Whereas the Pauline Christianity, which won out, placed heavy emphasis on Jesus’ execution and subsequent resurrection and what that all meant for Christians.
The Most Powerful Force in the Universe
This all finally brings us to the math of it all, which I promise is interesting or we wouldn’t be putting it in here. So stick with us.
As to the numbers, while it’s notoriously difficult to nail down precise figures for how many Christians there were at a given time, it’s generally estimated that around 300 AD, just before Constantine, around 10% of the Roman populace considered themselves Christian, which would be roughly 6 million Christians. By the end of the century, this had risen to around 50%.
All thanks to Constantine, right?
Well, in fact, as noted, this was probably more correlation, rather than causation. And the rate of conversions actually seemed to slow markedly after Constantine did his thing.
But either way, it really is just basic math, not too dissimilar to compounding interest in finance. If you crunch the numbers on that growth rate from Jesus and his core followers kicking it all off to 30 million by the end of the 4th century, it only requires about a 3.5% increase per year from the time of Jesus’ crucifixion to then. Thus, at no point is any mass conversion necessary and at a certain point even just population growth within Christian families can cover a decent portion of that. You just need a good core message that appeals to people- in this case being kind of loving and promise of salvation after death- good way to deliver that message- in this case via very personal dinner gatherings where those invited are treated as family and given food and aid should they need it- and let the magic happen from there-,in this case not requiring any magic at all. Noteworthy even in modern times we see similar with, for example, up until a couple decades ago the growth rate of the Mormon Church from inception with about 6 members in 1829 through the early 2000’s with 16 million followed this trendline almost exactly.
For more specifics, if you started with a mere 200 Christians around 30 AD around the time of Jesus’s crucifixion, and added 3.5% compounding annually, by year 100 you’d have about 2,000 Christians. By 150 AD, 12,000. By 200 AD, 70,000. By 250 AD, 387,000. By 300 AD, about 2.1 million. Just a few decades later by the 300 year mark that 2.1 million will have risen to 6 million. And by 400 AD nearly 70 million, though this final number would have been about double the estimated actual Christians at this time, again fascinatingly indicating the growth rate actually slowed markedly after Constantine stopped oppressing the Christians and even offered tax breaks and the like if people joined.
Granted, on this fluctuation and precise numbers, clearly the growth rate wouldn’t remain constant and a variety of real world factors were likely involved from decade to decade in growth rates. But the point of all this being, there was no remarkable mass conversion growth rates needed, and even when Constantine’s efforts should have seen even more mass conversions, it seems the growth rate actually slowed, rather than accelerated.
We’ll leave it to the sociologists to figure out why. But as for the math- the power of compounding interest in its full glory. Invest early kids!
But to sum up the Roman side of all this, author of The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark, would state, “Christianity served as a revitalization movement that arose in response to the misery, chaos, fear, and brutality of life in the urban Greco-Roman world. . . . Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent problems. To cities filled with the homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachment. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. And to cities faced with epidemics, fire, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services. . . . For what they brought was not simply an urban movement, but a new culture capable of making life in Greco-Roman cities more tolerable.”
“It Becometh a Tree, So That the Birds of the Air Come and Lodge in the Branches”
From here, Christianity continued its seemingly rapid growth spreading throughout the Western world and beyond. Even as the leaders of the various branches of the Church at times in history, shall we say, strayed far from Jesus’ original message and used their church more as a means for personal power and conquest, rather than a beacon of love in the world. Or sometimes just as a means of giving bored knights who were running amok in nations something to do to get them out of town as in the Crusades…
That said, the church was still often a boon to society at the local and individual level and continues even through today. For every Spanish Inquisition and Crusade, we have Christian groups and individuals like a John Quincy Adams pushing hard in government to end slavery because it contradicted his faith. With Adams being, according to one contemporary southerner, the “acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed.” And, indeed, he ultimately laid the groundwork for what Abraham Lincoln and his supporters did shortly after Adams’ death. Or we have ordained ministers like the aforementioned Martin Luther King Jr. and Mister Rogers utilizing the core message of Jesus in the way they did as a positive force in the world. And, of course, countless millions more who never make any headlines, but through their day to day actions practicing their faith in this way change the world subtly in positive ways.
Going back historically, early monasteries were also centers of education and advancement in science from medical to physics to even botany, helping to teach locals how to better farm their region and making advancements in all manner of areas. Sticking to their roots, the church also often sponsored things like hospitals, inns, orphanages etc, as well as helped to provide food to the poor and those in need during famines in their respective regions.
Of course, as alluded to, once the masses were generally on board and the church became more and more powerful as a political unit, for some among the leaders, they were clearly less interested in the faith itself, and instead how it could be used to manipulate the masses and gain more power, even quite literally sometimes throwing out completely the two commandments Jesus said all the laws of the prophets could be encapsulated, in loving God and demonstrating this in loving even your mortal enemy as yourself. Instead, certain church leaders often whipped the masses up to just go and conquer, pillage, and even murder their enemies instead. And sometimes not even your foreign enemy, just people, even your own literal neighbors sometimes, who thought differently than the leaders wanted.
Noteworthy some biblical scholars claim Jesus accurately predicted this in his handful of parables about the growth of the church. For example, in one of them, he notes it is “like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and put in his own garden. It grew and became a large tree, and the birds of the sky lodged in its branches.”
While there are many interpretations of this, famed theologian and founder of now quite expansive Calvary Chapel which has rapidly grown to over 1,000 churches, Pastor Chuck Smith, would note, at first referring to a preceding parable: “What are the birds? They are the ones, the evil ones, who came and plucked up the seed so it could not take root, could not grow. From this expositional constancy birds are always used in a bad sense in [Jesus’] analogies… or comparisons [in the parables]. So inasmuch as in the previous parable He pointed out, that there were gonna be tares that are going to be growing along with the wheat in the kingdom, He is only further illustrating the same thing, as the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, but somehow it has abnormal growth. It grew bigger than what it really is intended to be… That there will be this abnormal forced thing of man, not representative of the true righteous kingdom of heaven, and it will become a shelter for all kinds of evil purposes, as the church has been used today as a shelter for all kinds of evil purposes…. Jesus is giving a series of parables in which He is illustrating the same truth, or making the same warning all the way along, that the church is not going to be perfect. That there will come into the church evil influences, that will actually permeate themselves through the entire church.”
Which whether that’s a correct interpretation or not, is pretty much what happened once the church became a major power in history, and something that hasn’t really stopped through today.
While, again, countless individuals within the faith then and now still adhere to the core precepts of love God and your neighbor (whether foreign or even people you don’t agree with their lifestyle) and treat all humans as your brother or sister, let’s just say, particularly when the church is being leveraged for political reasons, those doing so almost universally tend to toss that message aside, not at all being the people Mister Rogers knew they could be.
“The Beautiful Symphony of Brotherhood”
In the end, as Jesus requested of his followers, Fred Rogers very much explicitly didn’t care what someone’s nationality was, skin color, race, sexual orientation, if they thought differently than him, or any of it. He had compassion for and loved people just the way they were and went out of his way to help them in what ways he could as his core message, belief, and ministry as a Presbyterian minister. This was the same exact message and way of being that caused Christianity to go from 1 to millions and beyond in just a handful of generations of humans in the face of sometimes extreme persecution. And for similar reasons saw Mister Rogers himself beloved by pretty much everyone because he actually practiced this in a genuine way.
Putting the politics of it all aside, as long as that is still is the predominate attitude and message of the individuals within the Christian faith, one would assume regardless of any of anyone else’s respective beliefs, Christianity isn’t going anywhere any time soon, as it’s a message that, at its core, appeals to most humans from a philosophical and moral standpoint, especially the ones who have seen firsthand why compassion and kindness towards your fellow man is necessary and important to humans humaning as effectively as we can. Which, by virtue of the fact that a large number of humans will always be in the middle or lower classes by definition and have experienced the need for such compassion and aid, is always going to be most humans.
Thus, as long as Christniaity as a whole doesn’t stray too far from those core tenants, it’s seemingly not going anywhere. And if it does stray from those core tenants required by its founder…. Well, is it even actually Christianity anymore? Afterall, as Jesus noted of how his disciples could be recognized, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
In the end, whether tied to a religion or not, never underestimate two things in life- the immutable power of compounding interest to change the world, and the just as powerful ripple effect of genuine kindness, compassion, and unconditional support of your fellow humans, no matter where they are from, who they are, or any differences between themselves and you. Whether divine or not, Jesus’ core message was certainly timeless, simple, and to the point- “love one another” as you love yourself. It’s an idea most of us can get behind. And, well, that was true even 2000 years ago. So people did.
Bonus Fact:
How Animals Tearing People Apart Gave Us Our Date System
Going back to Diocletian and his persecution of the Christians, it is largely because of this that we have the dating system we have today of BCE (Before Common Era) or BC (Before Christ) and CE (Common Era) or AD (Anno Domini, meaning “in the year of the lord”). Prior to the 6th century AD, many Christians who didn’t use an Anno Mundi (in the year of the world) type system relied on Roman dating, either marking dates from the year legend had it that Romulus and Remus founded Rome (753 BC) or by relying on the date system established under none other than the Roman emperor Diocletian (244-311), based on the accession of Diocletian.
Naturally, most Christians even through the 6th century weren’t too fond of Diocletian because of the whole brutally torturing and murdering them thing…. Although jeez, hold a grudge much? That was like a fortnight ago! … But either way, they didn’t want to use a dating system that referenced him.
So how did they change it?
Easter was/is the most important holy day of the Christian tradition, and it was decided at the First Council of Nicaea (AD 325) that it should occur each year on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. In order to forecast when exactly the holiday fell each year, Easter tables were created.
And so it was that in AD 525, the monk Dionysius Exiguus of Scythia Minor was working on his table to determine when Easter fell when he decided to eliminate reference to Diocletian by listing his table’s first year as Anno Domini 532, explicitly stating this was referring to the year directly following the last year of the old Diocletian-based table, Anno Diocletiani 247. How Dionysius came up with 525 years since Jesus was born at the time he was calculating his table (532 years from when the table’s dates began) isn’t clear, but he wasn’t far off the range most biblical scholars today think, with the more modern estimates tending to ring in somewhere between 6 to 4 BC for the actual birth of Jesus.
From here, the Anno Domini system, sometimes called the Dionysian Era or Christian Era, began to catch on among the clergy in Italy relatively soon after and spread somewhat among the clergy in other parts of Europe. Most notably, in the 8th century, the English monk Bede (now known as the Venerable Bede) used the dating system in his wildly popular Ecclesiastical History of the English People (AD 731). Shortly after this, Anno Domini was used officially under the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne (AD 742-814) and in the 11th century, it was adopted for official use by the Roman Catholic Church. And that was that.
As for the whole CE thing, the first CE was actually for “Christian Era” and was used interchangeably with “Vulgar Era”, which just meant “ Common Era”, first used interchangeably with Anno Domini in the Latin works of Johannes Kepler in the early 17th century. When “vulgar” ultimately took on a different meaning in English, “Vulgar Era” quickly got phased out in favor of just saying “Common Era” which was handy given the other practice of CE already being “Christian Era”. Naturally this CE meaning “Common Era” and BCE terminology was much more popular among Jews, rather than BC and AD, and by the late 19th century had started to catch on among many other groups for similar reasons.
Today the two things are still interchangeable, but that hasn’t stopped people on both sides waging a Holy War over which to use, seemingly forgetting that the entire point of words and abbreviations and the like is simply to communicate ideas in a way everyone understands what you’re saying. On the one hand, like it or not, the current dating system IS based on Jesus in part. Changing the name doesn’t change that. But also, everybody knows what you’re saying if you say CE too, and if someone doesn’t want to reference Jesus for whatever their personal reason well, who cares? To each their own. More power to you. Names change. People think differently. No need to cry about it. Love one another, remember. It really doesn’t matter as pretty much everyone on either side knows what you’re talking about if you use either one. But I guarantee you will always piss off some from one side or the other if you use one or the other. As we have no doubt done in THIS piece by using BC/AD. You quite literally can’t win in the public sphere on this one. But this isn’t like meters vs feet where one side or the other may not understand if you don’t say both. Everybody understands either way. So it doesn’t matter. Americans say Tomato, the British say Tomato. Nobody cares… Except in Internet Comments. Which, fun fact, sometimes we like to use AD and CE randomly in the same piece here just to watch the world burn… Listen, we don’t get out much. Got to take joy in the little things in life.
Expand for References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_of_Christianity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_of_Christianity_and_Judaism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Kokhba_revolt
https://www.history.com/news/5-ways-christianity-spread-through-ancient-rome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusebius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_the_Great_and_Christianity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_pagans_in_the_late_Roman_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Christian_thought_on_persecution_and_tolerance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arian_controversy
Lessons for Today’s Church from the Life of the Early Church
https://www.history.co.uk/articles/things-you-didn-t-know-about-early-christianity
https://ehrmanblog.org/the-outrageous-immorality-of-early-christians/
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/early-christians-odd-too/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Christianity
https://factsanddetails.com/world/cat55/sub352/item1418.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_universalism
https://michaelfbird.substack.com/p/what-was-it-like-to-a-christian-in
https://www.bluffton.edu/courses/humanities/1/celsus.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism
https://ehrmanblog.org/the-rate-of-christian-growth/
https://bigthink.com/the-past/how-christianity-conquered-rome-through-simple-math/
https://vridar.org/2010/08/27/why-christianity-spread-so-rapidly-to-become-the-main-religion-of-the-roman-empire/
https://religionunplugged.com/news/2022/3/28/this-is-still-a-question-that-scholars-debate-why-did-early-christianity-rise-so-rapidly
https://www.chantrou.net/post/d-100-how-did-christianity-spread-so-fast
Ten Reasons for the Rapid Spread of Christianity, Part 1: Social Factors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Roman_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Roman_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Milan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_background_of_the_New_Testament
https://www.jewishhistory.org/the-spread-of-christianity/
https://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/the-spread-of-the-early-church-11629561.html
What is the Difference Between BCE/CE and BC/AD, and Who Came Up with These Systems?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Christianity
The Secret to the Early Church’s Explosive Growth (It’s Not What You Think!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertullian
https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2024/05/what-was-the-first-religion/
https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/smith_chuck/c2000_Mat/Mat_013.cfm
https://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/empire/christians.html
http://mediterraneannetworks.weebly.com/spreading-christianity-how-a-new-cult-grew-big-in-three-centuries.html
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/why/starksociology.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus%27s_interactions_with_women
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