# How did Christianity spread so quickly?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-christianity-spread-so-quickly/638456>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [October 21, 2012, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-christianity-spread-so-quickly/638456 "2012-10-21T22:04:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 4

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**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\
**Post date:** [October 27, 2012, 11:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-christianity-spread-so-quickly/638456/61 "2012-10-27T23:35:09Z")

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> [@njtt](#):
>
> In the relative decadence of classical philosophy that followed first the establishment of the empire of Alexander, and then of the Romans, well defined philosophical schools developed – Platonism, Epicureanism, Skepticism, Stoicism – that functioned more as alternatives and rivals to religion rather than as ethical supplements to them. Unlike religions proper, the philosophical schools did not ask you to take too much on faith, did not ask you to believe too many fantastical things, did not expect you to engage in a lot of ritual (although later Neoplatonism is an exception to this last), and provided elaborate rationales for the metaphysical and ethical systems that they set forth.

This is a pretty tendentious reading of Hellenistic philosophy. “Decadent?” Come on.

The philosophical schools required quite a lot of fantastical credulity. Epicureans had to believe radical atomism, and Stoic ethics required the myth of ekpyrosis. The schools themselves were quite compatible with belief in the traditional gods as were most syncretic Greco-Roman religions. Constantine himself probably didn’t grasp the exclusivity of Christianity (Barnes makes some very good arguments in _Constantine and Eusebius_). Christianity eventually got around to providing elaborate rationales for its fantastical claims, but just like the philosophical schools, it took quite a long time to work them all out. It took Christianity a lot longer that it otherwise might have because Christian intellectuals were so ambivalent about their classical heritage. Jerome memorably describes a nightmare in which he was accused of being a Ciceronian rather than a Christian. It took a few centuries of hand-wringing and development of exclusively Christian dialectic for such ratiocination to really take root.

Traditional didn’t need such ratiocination because it was traditional. If ancestors believed it, that was good enough for the Romans. Dangerous innovations need explanation and apology. Of course, when the shoe is on the other foot, we see full-throated rhetorical apologies for traditional religion in the letters of Symmachus.

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