I read that there were very few Christians at the time of Christs death, less than 200. http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_of_early_christian_studies/v006/6.2hopkins.html
This got me wondering why there were so few. The bible has stories of miracles in front of large numbers of people, e.g. feeding the 5000. Why weren’t there more converts ?
Because the Bible is made up.
My guess is that:
(1) the stories about the miracles and the large crowds were at best exaggerated by the gospel writers;
(2) the Christian religion was not spread by Jesus Christ (whoever he was), but by his followers, particularly Saint Paul (the guy who wrote most of the epistles).
I know it’s touchy territory, but I think the obvious answer is that those miracles either didn’t happen or at least didn’t happen in the way the Bible reports them.
A way to defend it from the Christian perspective is be to argue that most of the miracles Jesus performs in the Bible are in private, with very few people around, often in someone’s house or alone with the disciples. Furthermore Jesus sometimes specifically orders his patients not to tell anyone about him: there’s the story of his healing a beggar and ordering him not to tell anyone, for instance.
This argument doesn’t really convince me at all though. With that beggar story I just referred to, the Bible makes a point of saying that the beggar disobeyed Jesus and told a lot of people, leading to Jesus’ fame “increasing across the land”. There are also lots of stories where Jesus performs miracles in public: you mentioned the feeding of the 5000, he turned water into wine to provide for a whole wedding, he frequently heals beggars and lepers in the street and there are often crowds pushing around him asking to be healed.
I guess another defense the Christian could put forward is to dispute the claim that Jesus only had 200 followers: after all, if the Romans saw him as dangerous enough to put to death, he must have had a serious following. But I’d argue that 200 people, especially given they were Jesus’s evangelical disciples willing to commit violence in his name (one of them draws a sword and cuts off a soldier’s ear in the Garden of Gethsemane until Jesus orders him to stop), is more than enough to constitute a threat to the established authority. Ultimately I can’t see any satisfactory answer other than that the miracles either didn’t happen or didn’t happen in the way the Bible claims they did.
Also, at the time of Jesus’s death, there was no such thing as Christianity. Jesus worked more or less within the Jewish religious tradition, and the vast majority of his followers at the time of his death thought of themselves as Jews. And they were…evangelization of the gentiles didn’t really begin until Paul came along (although the apparent first such conversion was made by Phillip).
That’s not what even Hopkins says, though his numbers are the smallest maintained by any scholar of which I am aware. What he says is that the faith was the intellectual property of fewer than 200 people, that is, that it was controlled by that many.
There is no good evidence for the number of Christians in the first century. Hopkins freely says in that same article that anyone who says anything about the number of christians in the first two centuries is speculating, including himself.
Eh, maybe not. IIRC from history classes, the Roman were crucifying “messiahs” all the time, several per month. He wasn’t Jesus Christ, son of God- he was just another rabble-rousing asshole, one of many.
Also, people were happy with the religion they had, and Christians were just another sketchy group of weirdos. Tt takes an uncommon kind of guy to see people getting crucified and fed to lions and say “I wanna be one of them!”
Then as now, I think most people confronted with a putative miracle would look for an explanation that comports with their existing world-view, rather than decide that everything they thought they knew up until then was wrong.
These days, most people would conclude that the miracle was the work of scientifically-derived special effects. Back then, most people would probably have concluded that Jesus was a sorcerer. To believe instead that he (or He) was the incarnate son of an omnipotent, transcendent God requires an immense leap of faith, even in the face of the feeding of the 5000.
He was a very naughty boy?
I know I felt that way the first time I learned about the double slit experiment. I was up NIGHTS trying to reconcile it. Learned to live with it, instead.
I do think this is a big part of why, if the miracles happened as stated, things didn’t grow like wildfire.
How many people are going to change their religion after watching a performance by Penn & Teller?
The crowd of 5,000 weren’t necessarily christians or even believers. They were just looky-loos.
Crowds are commonly recorded in the Bible. There’s the people who had to cut a hole through the roof to see Jesus, or the lady who felt lucky just to touch his cloak. You’ve got Christ entering Jerusalem on a donkey with lots of fanfare and public excitement. Shortly thereafter, they’re ready to see him executed.
In addition, you have several individuals who come to Christ as a teacher (Nicodemus and the rich man, for example) and who are unhappy with the answers and leave.
So you had lots of people in the day before modern medicine and TV who were hoping either for a cure, enlightenment or at least for some entertainment. Maybe a few of them believed, but they didn’t understand what was going on. Jesus never told them anything they could understand - he had to explain the parables to his own disciples.
200 believers at the time of Christ’s death sounds perfectly plausible to me. Frankly, I could believe it was as low as 20.
How did the early church spread? Paul (writing about AD 50) addresses his letters (epistles) to the churches around the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Who traveled around, spreading the word BEFORE Paul? I may be wrong, but Christianity was well on its way, by the time Paul made his famous voyages.
Barnabas and Paul were the big extra-Judean missionaries. The letters in the Bible are to churches that Paul and Barnabas established, mostly. But the thing was that prior to Paul, Christianity was viewed, even by its adherents, as a sect of Judaism. The really big conflict between Paul and the Apostles came because of Paul’s insistence that new Christians didn’t have to basically become Jews first. The Council of Jerusalem (the ostensible first Council of the Church) was all about that controversy.
And, if I’m not mistaken, wasn’t there some kind of clash between Peter and Paul, that being one reason why Paul did so much traveling? After all, Paul never met Jesus directly, unlike Paul.
Paul, as Saul, was a major persecutor of Christians after Jesus’s crucifixion. That’s the MAJOR conflict between them that isn’t doctrine-based. But as far as doctrine, Peter was the leader of the “make them Jewish” segment of the early Church, at least until he got the vision of the table.
Paul had missionary zeal, which is the real reason he traveled. His obsession was to convert the gentiles, and he criss-crossed Asia Minor for years doing just that. At the same time, he was tweaking the churches (which is what a lot of the Pauline epistles were about) that he wasn’t presently at, correcting what he considered errors that had crept in while he was somewhere else.
Paul was uniquely suited to that role, because he had Roman citizenship, which was a passport in itself at the time.
According to a lot of charismatics and pentecostals, and a variety of others (think of kanicbird’s worldview here, not in mockery but as typical of the mindset), there are supposedly a lot of healings and other miracles, including a few people raised from the dead, going on today. And we have a lot more ability to spread the news about such events than did the First Century folks. So why isn’t everybody turning to Christ and believing?
Well, simply because they’re skeptical of such stories, especially second-hand from reporters they consider unreliable, because it doesn’t impact their everyday life – they still need to get the kids to the soccer game, go to work, pay the mortgage or the rent, meet Mr. or Ms. Right, yada yada. Aside from technological advances and the years of history inbetween, the people then were little different from people now. Some were moved and believed, others were skeptical and didn’t, and the vast majority never heard of Jesus or his disciples. The gossip about what Kourophilos was doing with the neighbor boy, or the price of olive oil in Massilia, was simply more important to them.
Jesus preached to Jews who were expecting a messiah that was different than him. The Jews expected a Messiah who who lead an army to kick the romans out of Israel, not preach and heal people. When Jesus was arrested and crucified most people would have been scared to identify as his followers.
Jesus could have attracted large crowds from time to time, and still had only a few dozen (or a few hundred) devoted followers who were willing to devote their lives to him.
Maybe hundreds showed up one day, in hopes of seeing a miracle… then left in disappointment and frustration after not seeing any magic tricks.
Maybe thousands showed up to cheer him when he entered Jerusalem… and then quickly forgot him after he was put to death (“some messiah HE turned out to be”).
In the immediate aftermath of his death, it was natural for people to assume he was just another charlatan or nut job in a long line of them.