I know that I could research here but it’s such a vast topic and I don’t want to just run into Christian perspectives and so many works have their own slant on things. Hopefully some here can enlighten me. From what I understand, Jesus’ followers were a small band of people in a small Jewish community at the far reaches of the Roman empire. How do we get from that to the Christian Church dominating that empire? Entire calendar were changed for one man in one small area full of people wanting him dead. Of course, from what I understand there isn’t a great deal of evidence of his existence, which makes the popularity later even more surprising. How did it happen?
The most important early figure was almost certainly Paul
Secondly Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire in the 300s.
It’s somewhat of a chicken/egg question, but I’d still put Constantine first. Once you get the ruler, he’s going to make the subjects follow suit. Christianity spread far and wide mainly because the rulers were converted.
Well you’re talking nearly three centuries between the beginning of Christianity and its adoption by the Roman Empire. That’s a huge amount of time to expand your following, much more time than something like Marxism needed to take over huge swaths of the world.
And Cecil gives you some ideas.
I knew about Paul’s preaching work, though he was discouraged for m doing it and killed for it. I had read about Constantine, I believe, but didn’t know how it all got to be so big and dominant. I have more reading to do. I don’t even believe in the Bible or Christianity anymore, but realized that somehow it went from tiny to dominant and wondered how. Thanks for the links!
Beyond specific figures, it’s worth looking at the Roman Empire as far as communication and travel go. Much of the Bible are letters written by people like Paul and mailed across the whole empire. This wasn’t impossible at other times, but Rome certainly made it easier than it had been before, or than it would be after.
I’m a believer, so I see unique circumstances and divine intervention… but if you’re not, you might say that Christianity was the one out of a thousand that survived. Prophets were a dime a dozen in Jesus’ time - there are couple of them mentioned in the Bible, including John the Baptist. John had a sizable following before his beheading and would have been forgotten except for his connection to Jesus. Statistically, it’s not so far-fetched that one of these prophets might stick and Christianity had the right mix of meme, messenger and medium to be the one. (Or, again, maybe it’s just that the one true prophet was remembered, being God and all that.)
One thing that made christianity noteworthy at the time was their emphasis on charity. Their religion specifically mandated that they be Good Guys even to the point of their own harm. So apart from the whole martyr thing, they often practiced what they preached and people noticed. Another significant aspect was that at one point, it was decided that christianity was to be open to everyone, not just Jews. This was controversial, but it really helped create a new, separate identity for christianity so that it was no longer a “Jewish cult.” This also helped separate it from being a Middle east thing, making it easier to take root in Greece and other European locations.
A slightly more detailed version would be:
It’s fairly likely that Jesus preached a very strong position of forgiveness and tolerance.
A lawyer named Paul had persecuted the early Christians. Then, one day, he fell seriously ill. A Christian named Ananias healed or took care of him, despite his having been a former persecutor of the Christians. Paul came out of this both a convert to Christianity and believing himself to have received all of the teachings of Christ (though none of the biographical stuff) through divine intervention.
Paul, as a lawyer, was a good orator and writer. He started to preach to the non-Jews and was very successful in converting people to his brand of Christianity. Later, he was able to support Jesus’ disciples financially and had them accept that he had received a vision from Christ (though, he was only allowed to preach to non-Jews).
It’s unclear exactly how many followers Jesus had. It seems likely that his family - brothers, cousins, mom, etc. - were faithful to him. And he seems to have picked up a few followers from St. John the Baptist (like Peter) - and John seems to have had a genuinely decent number of followers. But, after his death, a number of different people tried to take his spot, so his followers ended up splitting between the different groups. Possibly, these followers were pretty easy-going about which of the John-ists they were following. (Note: In the Bible, Jesus is said to have been friendly with John, but to not be a follower or copier of John.)
Of his followers, it seems likely that only St Thomas really tried to spread the religion much beyond that core group. He traveled to Syria, maybe India, and maaaaaaybe Japan, teaching Christianity.
So, really only Paul was really out there establishing churches, proselytizing, and converting people. When he was eventually sent to Rome, to be executed, he was such a good talker that he was able to get his sentence pushed for two years, and he was able to convert a number of Romans during that time. Though, through his whole career, he traveled all throughout the empire, converting people.
300 years later, there were a good number of Christians. It may not have been a majority religion anywhere, but it did have presence in a number of places. And, it seems, Constantine’s mother was a Christian and may have brought him up that way.
He ended up being a general of the Roman army and, on one outing, ended up winning an amazing battle, which he decided was thanks to Jesus’ god of peace and neighborly love. Following this, he legalized Christianity, removed financial support from all of the Pagan religions, gave land to the Christian church, began to build a city just for Christians, and ordered the composition of the New Testament. Some say that he may not have reaaaally viewed himself as a Christian, but he certainly seems to have gone pretty gung-ho for it.
In end effect, he took Christianity from a minor religion to a major one, throughout the Roman empire.
Other people have already talked about Paul and Constantine, so I won’t repeat it here. Keep in mind also that people like Philo had been busy for quite some time with spreading Judaism throughout the ancient world. There are portions of the Bible and certain rabbinical stories floating around that are now thought to have been re-written to make them more appealing to Greco-Roman audiences… So it’s not like Jesus existed in a vacuum. Many people outside Israel knew about Judaism and the expected messiah.
FWIW, you might also want to check out Nietzche’s genealogy of morals. The Pagan religions of the time (in Greece, Rome, and elsewhere) tended to value strength and power. We see this illustrated very clearly in their mythology, where these Homeric characters are basically born with superhero powers.
Christianity inverted the dominant morality to make a system more appealing to the masses. Imagine you are a poor farmer. You do not have strength, power, wealth, or learning. There is basically no chance that you will ever move up in the world. What’s worse, people keep saying that because you do not fit their idea of what a “good” person looks like, you are intrinsically worthless as a human being.
So what do the poor people of the world have in abundance? Besides poverty? Humility, charity, meekness, all that stuff. Jesus came along and says that to have wealth is immoral, while the meek shall inherit the Earth. Now he has inverted the value system. You, the impoverished farmer, are “good” because you are poor and meek. The other people are “bad” because they have wealth and power. If asked to choose between the two, it isn’t hard to see why the working class Joes of the world were willing to flock to a religion that praised them for their weakness and condemned the upper-class elites.
The special status of Jews within the Roman Empire was one major aid. (Barring the times when there was a Jewish revolt going on.)
All other religions within the Empire had to work within the Roman polytheistic system, including Emperor worship when requested.
The Jewish people were exempted from this. There was a surprisingly broad tolerance of their “peculiar” practice.
Some of this was inherited from the Greeks. Jewish religion was oftentimes left alone by the successor states of Alexander’s empire. This lead to the largest Jewish community being in Alexandria, Egypt of all places. When the Romans took over Egypt, they didn’t want to rock the boat so they continued the tolerance practices from there and elsewhere.
As a result, Jews moved fairly easily around the Empire. With Rome having a good sized population.
Without these “prepared” communities, Christianity would have had a tough time spreading thru the Empire.
Two early Christian practices played major roles.
First by spreading thru mothers (the Church being far more woman friendly then). Mothers influence the religion of their children. This contrasted with the Roman state religion which was the realm of men. (Vestal Virgins and such didn’t run the top levels of the religion.)
Second was the practice of aiding the poor. Once a Christian group got set up somewhere, they started collecting money from the richer members and distributing food, etc. to the poorer members. Starving people saw this and gravitated into the groups. There was a lot of alms giving from the Emperor and other rich Romans, but not as targeted to members within a group nor as reliable.
Both Buddhism and Islam spread very quickly too, didn’t they?
A good product and good PR, plus a willingness to change unpopular tenents (e.g. circumcision) and adopt Roman celebrations and give them a Christian spin (e.g. St. Valentine’s Day & Christmas).
Wow, RealityChuck might have just summed up hundreds of years in one sentence. Nicely done!
Based on the Wikipedia article, it looks like it took about 700 years until the Emperors of China started to notice and support it, after first introduction. From there, countries subservient to China started to pick it up (while it waned in India).
Islam spread rapidly, but they utilized military force and diplomacy to achieve that success. They were hot right from the git go.
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It appeared to me that the small following that Jesus managed to free some from (religious/political) authority was also recognized by authority as a real threat, so what Jesus taught (The Way) was co-opted by Paul and others under the banner of Christianity and back under the ruling authorities of this world. Not to say what Paul did was wrong, but his mission, given by God was not to spread The Way, just, and only just the name and Paul did it the only way he knew coming from a strong Jewish leadership position, created a temple system.
It was a period of general religious revival. There were other religions winning converts in the Mediterranean world at the same time (including a revival of classical paganism). They’ve now mostly been forgotten because Christianity won out in the long run and suppressed its rivals.
I think a big factor in Christianity’s success was its focus on the afterlife. Most religions of the time placed a much higher emphasis on the rewards you would receive in this life. Worship Jupiter and you’ll win battles, make money, have a big family, grow lots of crops, and not die of some horrible disease was the standard sort of message. And it was relatively effective because most people seemed to care more about what tangible rewards they were getting in this life than what hypothetical rewards they would receive in the afterlife.
But there were large groups of people who were not doing well in this life. And for them, having been shut out of success in this life, the promise of rewards in the afterlife seemed like a good deal. It’s no coincidence that Christianity won a lot of converts among slaves, poor people, and women.
Regarding the message, I imagine that the notion of an eternal life was quite attractive to some. Also, Paul was clearly a great promoter, but I’d guess that Jesus was a terrifically charismatic guy. With all the various cultists and preachers out there, he must have have had amazing powers to grab a crowd and move people. Some guys just have it. I presume he did.
Another major factor was that the Romans had a big respect for tradition. They thought following the ways of your ancestors was a good thing, irrespective of what those ways were. So while they didn’t agree with Jewish traditions, they were impressed by the fact that the Jews had traditions that went back so far.
I don’t think it was so much as an issue of early Christianity being different than modern Christianity as it was that early Christianity existed in a different world than the modern world.
In modern western society, we assume egalitarianism as the default. We expect men and women to be treated equally so misogyny in old religions seems wrong to us.
But the ancient world was much more hierarchical and people accepted that. Back then, telling women they could aspire to be second-class citizens behind men was a progressive message. It was the same with slaves; Christianity acknowledged the existence of slavery (as did everyone else) but put forth the progressive idea that you shouldn’t abuse your slaves unjustly.
Jesus may have been a charismatic speaker. But he really didn’t convert a lot of people. Most estimates are that he only had a few hundred followers at most in his lifetime. The real growth of Christianity occurred after Jesus’s death.