Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

"Many councils thought it advisable, before dealing with the various necessities of the Church, to set down in corroboration the faith of the three hundred and eighteen Fathers of Nicaea."

Page Number: 298.
The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers.
Contributors: Gerhart B. Ladner - author. Publisher: Harvard University Press.
Place of Publication: Cambridge, MA.
Publication Year: 1959.

"He that throws rubbish in this enclosure
has the anathema from the Three Hundred
and Eighteen Fathers, as an enemy of God".

Published: March 18, 1894
Copyright © The New York Times
"Early Christian Cursings"
Reports of inscriptions ....

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesm ... =true&ip=0

Chapter One: Conversion and Christian Growth

//

For a starting number, Acts 1:14-15 suggests that several months after the Crucifixion there were 120 Christians. Later, in Acts 4:4, a total of 5,000 believers is claimed. And, according to Acts 2 1:20, by the sixth decade of the first century there were “many thousands of Jews” in Jerusalem who now believed. These are not statistics. Had there been that many converts in Jerusalem, it would have been the first Christian city, since there probably were no more than twenty thousand inhabitants at this time—J. C. Russell (1958) estimated only ten thousand. As Hans Conzelmann noted, these numbers are only "meant to render impressive the marvel that here the Lord himself is at work” (1973:63). Indeed, as Robert M. Grant pointed out, “one must always remember that figures in antiquity... were part of rhetorical exercises” (1977:7-8) and were not really meant to be taken literally.

///

Origen remarked, “Let it be granted that Christians were few in the beginning” (Against Celsus 3.10, 1989 ed.), but how many would that have been? It seems wise to be conservative here, and thus I shall assume that there were 1,000 Christians in the year 40. I shall qualify this assumption at several later points in the chapter.


Now for an ending number. As late as the middle of the third century, Origen admitted that Christians made up “just a few” of the population. Yet only six decades later, Christians were so numerous that Constantine found it expedient to embrace the church. This has caused many scholars to think that something really extraordinary, in terms of growth, happened in the latter half of the third century (cf. Gager 1975). This may explain why, of the few numbers that have been offered in the literature, most are for membership in about the year 300.

Edward Gibbon may have been the first to attempt to estimate the Christian population, placing it at no more than “a twentieth part of the subjects of the empire” at the time of Constantine’s conversion ([1776-1788] 1960:187). Later writers have rejected Gibbon’s figure as far too low. Goodenough (1931) estimated that 10 percent of the empire’s population were Christians by the time of Constantine. If we accept 60 million as the total population at that time—which is the most widely accepted estimate (Boak 1955a; Russell 1958; MacMullen 1984; Wilken 1984)—this would mean that there were 6 million Christians at the start of the fourth century. Von Hertling (1934) estimated the maximum number of Christians in the year 300 as 15 million. Grant (1978) rejected this as far too high and even rejected von Hertling’s minimum estimate of 7.5 million as high. MacMullen (1984) placed the number of Christians in 300 at 5 million. Fortunately, we do not need greater precision; if we assume that the actual number of Christians in the year 300 lay within the range of 5-7.5 million, we have an adequate basis for exploring what rate of growth is needed for that range to be reached in 260 years.

Given our starting number, if Christianity grew at the rate of 40 percent per decade, there would have been 7,530 Christians in the year 100, followed by 217,795 Christians in the year 200 and by 6,299,832 Christians in the year 300. If we cut the rate of growth to 30 percent a decade, by the year 300 there would have been only 917,334 Christians—a figure far below what anyone would accept. On the other hand, if we increase the growth rate to 50 percent a decade, then there would have been 37,876,752 Christians in the year 300—or more than twice von Herding’s maximum estimate. Hence 40 percent per decade (or 3.42 percent per year) seems the most plausible estimate of the rate at which Christianity actually grew during the first several centuries.

This is a very encouraging finding since it is exceedingly close to the average growth rate of 43 percent per decade that the Mormon church has maintained over the past century (Stark 1984, 1994). Thus we know that the numerical goals Christianity needed to achieve are entirely in keeping with modern experience, and we are not forced to seek exceptional explanations. Rather, history allows time for the normal processes of conversion, as understood by contemporary social science, to take place.


///

[Final Stats]


Table 1.1
Christian Growth Projected at 40 Percent per Decade

Year / Number of Christians / Percent of Population
40 1,000 0.0017
50 1,400 0.0023
100 7,530 0.0126
150 40,496 0.07
200 217,795 0.36
250 1,171,356 1.9
300 6,299,832 10.5
350 33,882,008 56.5
a Based on an estimated population of 60 million.

[my formatting]


Rodney Stark (1996) The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press