It has been some time since I actually read this, so I’m working through a whole pile of reading and trying to make some sense of my sometimes bad memory. It all runs together…actually that was the original purpose of this blog to begin with, as a sort of aide memoire for my “literary life”.
Stark is by training and profession a sociologist, and by his own admission merely a “history buff”, who is interested in, among other topics, the history and development of religions, particularly the early Christian church. In this book, which is scholarly but accessible, Stark examines the development of the early Church and attempts to answer “How did it happen?” That is, how did this small movement around an itinerant Jewish mystic grow to become the official state religion of the very empire that executed him only three centuries later, and the dominant religion in the Western world? Without restating all of his theses and evidence, I’ll give brief sketches of a couple of his ideas.
One central notion is that religious conversions do not generally take place en masse as the author of Acts might suggest (e.g. Acts 2), but rather via family and social networks. Stark uses as his model two contemporary religious movements: the Mormons/LDS church, and the Moonies, and assumes (rightly I think) that people today aren’t fundamentally that different from people in the ancient world. In these contemporary movements, we see that people become adherents to these faiths in the ways that we would expect, that is by personal and family relationships. Someone visits a new church on the invitation of a friend, likes it, invites another friend or their spouse, and so on. Stark goes on to show that this pattern was likely most predominant among Hellenized Jews, that is Jews living in the Greek-speaking world outside of Israel, who would have found the early Christian faith not that different from their Jewish faith.
In looking at the LDS church, Stark points out that the Mormon faith has grown by about 40 percent per decade. If one applies those numbers to the early Christian church, one can easily come up with a numerical progression that supports the historical evidence about the size of early Christian communities in the first and second centuries. So we don’t need mass conversions to explain the spread of the Christian faith in the ancient world — basic arithmetic will do the job nicely.
Stark also shows the ways in which the new Christian faith was simply better than the competing pagan religions in the Greek world in terms of the quality of life it engendered. Women were treated better, marriage was valued more, as was marital fidelity. Perhaps most persuasively, Stark shows how Christian communities, by their solidarity with one another and their treatment of the sick, would have survived much more effectively two devastating plagues that struck the ancient world and killed large numbers of people. Christians would have survived in greater numbers because of their providing basic care for those who were ill, unlike their Pagan neighbors who would have fled at the first sign of disease and would have abandoned their sick family and friends to their own fate. Likewise, non-Christians who were cared for would be drawn to this religion which had literally “saved” them from death. Combine this increased survival rate with the documented growth rates, and one can quickly come up with very impressive numbers over a couple of centuries.
Stark also convincingly shows how Christianity was, at its inception, ultimately an urban movement that grew most rapidly among the educated and semi-elite, and less among the poor. This is a surprising claim, and one that I found less persuasive, and it is certainly ironic given the central idea of Jesus’ message of resistance to the domination systems that were the source of enormous suffering among his people.
An interesting and mostly persuasive book.