Historiography of the Christianization of the Roman Empire

Illustration of a Roman round temple (1884)

Christianization of the Roman Empire began around AD 30–40, slowly, and amidst opposition, in the Roman province of Judaea in the region of Palestine. Beginning with fewer than 1000 people, Christianity grew at an estimated average rate of approximately 3.4 percent per year, compounded annually, reaching approximately 200,000 people by the end of the second century, half of the empire's population by 350, and eventually encompassing the majority of its 6–7 million people in the fifth century. Scholars in the fields of Late Antiquity and sociology approach this remarkable change with the question Rodney Stark says is central: "How was it done?"

This particular process of religious and cultural change ended sometime in the fifth to sixth centuries either from reaching a saturation point, or from the Fall of the Western Roman Empire (AD 476), from the ending of Ancient Christianity, which occurred sometime between the fourth and sixth centuries when medieval Christianity began, or from some combination of these events.

Ancient Christianity grew within Roman culture as an aspect of that culture, and as a result, Christianization was not a one–way process. Christianity absorbed some aspects of its cradle culture which also overlapped changes within Graeco-Roman polytheism. How much Christianity contributed to changes in polytheism (commonly called paganism), and how much polytheism contributed to changes in Christianity, are also questions of Christianization. Until the end of the twentieth century, the primary theory of Christianization revolved around Constantine the Great (r. 306 to 337). As the first Christian emperor, early historians thought Constantine imposed his religious views on the rest of the empire, forcefully causing the decline of paganism, so that Christianity owed its eventual "triumph" to that imposition. This is referred to as the "top-down" model. Recent scholarship has altered the accepted picture of the decline of paganism by demonstrating that these religions remained vibrant in the cities until the fifth and sixth centuries. These were city-based civic religions, yet, paganism survived the fall of the empire in the rural areas into the sixth and seventh centuries, and in Greece, Roman polytheism survived until the tenth century.

Seeing the third century, instead of the fourth, as the critical century for Christian growth, and paganism as active and evolving rather than declining, has led most modern scholars to move away from the top-down model and look elsewhere for a more complete explanation. In the twenty–first century, a sociological model has developed which sees "how it was done" as the result of new ideas which were coupled with the social force created by the church's charitable practices, moral standards, and its written and verbal discourse.

Various models of Christian growth and Pagan decline

According to Roger Bagnall, the rise of Christianity did come, at least partly, at the expense of paganism. This story has traditionally been told in terms of contest and conflict between them, but in reality, Graeco-Roman polytheism was not one uniform entity, nor were its many versions uniformly hostile to Christianity. According to R. A. Markus, "The image of a society neatly divided into "Christian" and "pagan" is the creation of late–fourth century Christians, and has been too readily taken at its face value by modern historians". A decline of paganism is not simply the inverted image of the rise of Christianity "like children at the opposite ends of a see-saw". Paganism had its own history and its own dynamic.

Roman religion changed

Greek and Roman Gods and Goddesses

Religion as it is understood in the modern world did not exist in the Graeco-Roman world. Roman religion in the early Roman Empire was polytheistic and local, with rituals varying between localities. Most religious practice was embedded in, and inseparable from, the city. Ritual was the main form that worship took. Politics and religion were intertwined and many public rituals were performed by public officials. Respect for ancestral custom was a large part of polytheistic belief and practice, and members of the local society were expected to take part in public rituals.

A combination of external factors such as war and invasions, and internal factors such as the formal nature and political manipulation of traditional religion, was said to have created the slow decline of polytheism, beginning in the second century BC, in the model asserted by most nineteenth and twentieth century scholars. This older model says decline left a vacuum in the personal lives of people that they filled with other forms of worship such as the imperial cult, various Graeco-Roman mysteries such as the Dionysian Mysteries, the Eleusinian Mysteries and the cult of Cybele, Mithraism, the worship of Isis and Christianity. The more modern view sees the cults and mystery religions as variations of the same basic Roman religion "offering optional extras rather than radical alternatives".

There is consensus among scholars that religious identity became increasingly separated from civic and political identity, progressively giving way to the plurality of religious options rooted in other identities, needs and interests. Roman historians such as J. A. North, observe that Roman imperial culture began in the first century with religion embedded in the city-state, then throughout the imperial period, it gradually shifted to religion as a choice. Roman religion's willingness to adopt foreign gods and practices into its pantheon meant that as Rome extended its power, conquered territory, and absorbed local populations, it also gained some of the local gods. The different groups who worshipped these different gods offered traditional Romans choices with different characteristics, experiences, insights, and stories. Politically, the empire needed and required religious unity, whereas culturally, the early civic model of religion became "increasingly out of place". In this way, the Roman Empire created divergence for itself between culture and politics. This was long thought to be a contributor to pagan decline.

Nature caused decline

Kyle Harper focusses on four catastrophic natural events as causes of decline and the eventual demise, not only of the pagan religions, but of the empire itself: the Antonine Plague in 154, the Plague of Cyprian in 251, and the Plague of Justinian (541–549), along with the Late Antique Little Ice Age (535–547) which created food shortages.

Prolonged intensive warfare unavoidably results in the migration of local populations. As the Roman Empire expanded its boundaries through conquest, it also forced migration, depopulation and repopulation for military purposes. This expanding empire was built on the fringes of the tropics, and its brilliant Roman roads, which produced an abundance of trade, also unknowingly created an interconnected disease ecology that unleashed pathogenic evolution. The empire was soon engulfed. Pandemic contributed to even more massive demographic changes, which in turn, quickly led to economic crises as evidenced in the real price levels of agricultural products, land and the debasement of silver coin. Mischa Meier writes that the effect of these disasters must have been catastrophic for the people and the economy throughout the empire, but its effects were especially felt in its impact on religion in the East. The plague and its demographic changes reinforced the cultural and religious processes that were changing the eastern Roman Empire into the Christian Byzantine empire.

The top-down model

See also: Constantine the Great and Christianity and Religious policies of Constantine the Great

Constantine the Great in Oria (Retouched)

Edward Gibbon wrote the first version of the top-down model of Christianization in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire published in 1776. Gibbon saw Constantine I as driven by "boundless ambition" and a desire for personal glory to impose Christianity on the rest of the empire – from the top down – in a cynical, political move. For Gibbon, "The religion of Constantine achieved, in less than a century, [315-400] the final conquest of the Roman empire". This was a widely held view for over 200 years.

According to Seth Schwartz, numbers of Christians at the end of the third century show that Christianity's success predated Constantine. Sociologist Joseph Bryant asserts that Christianity had already changed from its first century instantiation as a "marginal, persecuted, and popularly despised" sect into the fully institutionalized church "capable of embracing the entire Roman empire" by the time Constantine adopted it. Without this transformation, (that Peter Brown has called "the conversion of Christianity" to the culture and ideals of the Roman world), Brown says Constantine would never have converted. E. A. Judge provides a detailed study demonstrating that a fully organized church system existed before 315, leading Judge to conclude that "the argument Christianity owed its triumph to its adoption by Constantine cannot be sustained".

Gibbon worked from texts – documentary sources – that were mostly Christian; these present the rise of Christianity in terms of an inevitable and irresistible "conquest". He included what other materials were available to him, but in the eighteenth century, fields like numismatics were just beginning. Twentieth and twenty–first century developments in numismatics, epigraphy, archaeology, and art history, (as well as whole new fields of scholarship such as functional sociology, legal anthropology and social anthropology), have produced "an abundance of evidence unavailable to Gibbon".

That abundance of evidence indicates paganism did not end in the late fourth–early fifth century as Christian sources claimed and Gibbon accepted. According to the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology: "The conversion of the Roman world to Christianity now appears as a much longer and less thorough process" than previously thought. Bayliss records that "Even by the 6th century, pagans can still be found in prominent positions of office both locally and in the imperial bureaucracy".

According to T. D. Barnes, twentieth century scholarship has shown that "a true understanding of Constantine only became possible in the 1950s". Peter J. Leithart asserts that Constantine was a sincere believer. He was an autocrat, as were those emperors before and after him, but that did not equate to a demand that everyone become Christian. Leithart writes that Constantine "did not punish pagans for being pagans, or Jews for being Jews", and that he was not in favor of suppression of paganism by force. Pagans remained in important positions at his court. Constantine never engaged in a purge. There were no pagan martyrs during his reign.

The conflict model

Further information: Battle of the Frigidus

In his 1984 book, Christianizing the Roman Empire: (A.D. 100–400), and again in 1997, Ramsay MacMullen argues the conflict model (a contemporary version of Gibbon's "top down model") which asserts that widespread Christian anti–pagan violence, as well as persecution from a "bloodthirsty" and violent Constantine (and his successors), caused the decline and eventual demise of paganism through forced conversion in the fourth century. In the twenty first century, the conflict model has become marginalized. Lavan and Mulryan indicate that archaeological evidence of religious conflict exists but not to the degree or the intensity previously thought. Salzman asserts that, in light of current scholarship, violence can not be seen as a central factor in explaining the spread of Christianity in the western empire.

The fourth and fifth centuries are richly documented by Christian sources which discuss violence yet contain only a handful of incidents of Christian-pagan violence. None include forced conversion. The ancient Christians rarely committed violence against persons. They wanted to see themselves, and to have others see them, as "pious, peaceful and law-abiding citizens". According to Alan Cameron, most violence committed by Christians was against property, was unofficial, perpetrated primarily by monks and radicals, and done without the support of Christian clergy or state magistrates. (Salzman says pagans were more likely to commit violence against persons with the support of municipal elites.) There are only a few examples of Christian officials having any involvement in the destruction of pagan shrines. In the 380s, one eastern official (generally identified as the praetorian prefect Cynegius), used the army under his control and bands of monks to destroy temples in the eastern provinces.

Harold A. Drake says Christians did pick up the practice of book burning from the pagans, but many assertions of Christian violence have been modified, (such as temple destruction), and many have been overturned by modern scholarship. Christian hostility toward pagans is understood by most modern scholars as far from the general phenomenon previously assumed. In a comparative study of levels of violence in Roman society, German ancient historian Martin Zimmermann, concludes there was no increase in the level of violence in the Empire in Late Antiquity. Christianity sought to legitimize its new power through rhetoric that often became hostile and contemptuous, whereas acts of violence were usually isolated and rare.

In Gaul, some of the most influential textual sources on pagan-Christian violence concerns Martin, bishop of Tours (c .371–397), the Pannonian ex-soldier who is "solely credited in the historical record as the militant converter of Gaul". These texts have been criticized for lacking historical veracity, even by ancient critics, but they are still useful for portraying the world of late fourth century Gaul. The portion of the sources devoted to attacks on pagans is limited, and they all revolve around Martin using his miraculous powers to overturn pagan shrines and idols, but not ever to threaten or harm people. Salzman concludes that "None of Martin's interventions led to the deaths of any Gauls, pagan or Christian. Even if one doubts the exact veracity of these incidents, the assertion that Martin preferred non-violent conversion techniques says much about the norms for conversion in Gaul" when Martin's biography was written.

Archaeologist David Riggs writes that evidence from North Africa reveals a tolerance of religious pluralism and a vitality of traditional paganism much more than it shows any form of religious violence or coercion. Force and compulsion were not seen as constructive, or even realistic options, as much as persuasion was. Both Christian clergy and Roman magistrates preferred the power of words and the use of positive incentives: "persuasion, such as the propagation of Christian apologetics, appears to have played a more critical role in the eventual "triumph of Christianity" than was previously assumed".

Temple destruction and recent archaeology

Further information: Persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire § Temple destruction and conversion

Archaeological evidence for the violent destruction of temples in the fourth century, from around the entire Mediterranean Basin, is limited to a handful of sites. For example, the Serapeum of Alexandria is the only temple destroyed by human violence in this period in Egypt. Christianity was thriving there, and Cameron writes that the Roman temples in Egypt "are among the best preserved in the ancient world".

There is regional variation in the destruction of pagan shrines. In the Greater Levant such destruction was substantial, though most of it occurred after the mid-fifth century. Richard Bayliss, archaeologist, has stated that the significance of this is that it can no longer be argued that a universal 'fall of the temples' was caused by Constantinian legislation.

Roman temple, Maiden Castle

Most recorded incidents of temple destruction are known from church and hagiographical accounts. They are eager to portray their subjects as engaging in violent acts in order to emphasize their piety and power. For example, the temples of Zeus at Apameia and of Marnas at Gaza City are said to have been brought down by the local bishops around this period, but the only source for this information is the biography of Porphyry of Gaza which is considered a forgery. Temple destruction is attested to in 43 cases in the written sources, but only 4 have been confirmed by archaeological evidence.

Archaeologists Lavan and Mulryan write that, "As a result of recent work, it can be stated with confidence, that temples were neither widely converted into churches nor widely demolished in Late Antiquity".

The Legislative model

Main article: Persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire

Scene of sacrifice in honour of Diana. Fresco from the triclinium of House of the Vettii in Pompeii

Imperial laws of the 5th-century Theodosian Code are the cornerstone of the 'Legislative model' which argues that the Christianization of the Roman empire and the decline of paganism were imposed from the top down through legal coercion, repression and discrimination. While it is difficult to date with any confidence any of the laws in the Code to the time of Constantine a century earlier, most scholars agree that Constantine issued the first law banning animal sacrifice, which was then reissued by his Christian successors with much the same "fierce denunciations of blood sacrifice". Blood sacrifice of animals was the element of pagan culture most abhorrent to Christians, though Christian emperors often tolerated other pagan practices.

The Imperial laws collected in Chapter 10, Book XVI of the Theodosian Code, focus on two things: they condemn the practice of sacrifice, and threaten temples that continued to allow it. Since officials could not indiscriminately intrude in an individual's private space, imperial laws were intended to create an "atmosphere" in which pagan sacrifice would be considered unacceptable and even dangerous in a public setting. Brown notes that the language of these laws "was uniformly vehement", and the "penalties they proposed were frequently horrifying", evidencing the intent of "terrorizing" the populace into compliance. Of several fourth-century pagans whose testimony survives, the emperor Julian, the Antiochene rhetor Libanius, and the historian Eunapius of Sardis all make it clear that to make a public sacrifice under Christian emperors was an act of daring.

Although minor and discreet sacrifices continued to be performed privately by individuals, public killings of animals seem to have largely disappeared from civic festivals already by the time of Julian, and evidence for public sacrifices altogether runs out by the end of the century. While archaeologist Luke Lavan writes that blood sacrifice was already declining in popularity by the time of Constantine, Scott Bradbury asserts that the complete disappearance of sacrifice "in many towns and cities must be attributed to the atmosphere created by imperial and episcopal hostility". The decline in prestige of pagan priesthoods in an increasingly Christian environment, and the starving of funds assigned to the cults, would also have played a part.

A hostile atmosphere toward sacrifice did not create an atmosphere in favor of the coercion of pagans in general. For 200 years, no emperor legalized the enforced conversion of pagans until Justinian in 529. A law that applied only to the easternmost provinces of the Empire, issued in November 392 by the emperor Theodosius I (or his praetorian prefect Rufinus) decreed an unprecedented ban on most forms of pagan worship. Otherwise, Bradbury says the anti-sacrifice laws do "not appear to have encouraged or permitted vigorous action to suppress pagan rites" in the West.

According to legal anthropologist Caroline Humfress, the legislative model's idea of "an empire-wide 'legal system' being imposed from above" does not accurately reflect the social and legal realities of the Roman Empire before Justinian. Humfress asserts that Roman imperial law, though not irrelevant, was not a determining factor in Roman society overall.

The Code provides important evidence of the intent of Christian emperors to promote Christianity, but it does not have the ability to tell how, or if, these policies were actually carried out. Imperial commands provided magistrates with a license to act, but those magistrates chose how, or whether to act, for themselves, according to local circumstances. Ordinary people were unlikely to make use of, or even be aware of, imperial laws; they could instead use local traditions, and other laws such as Jewish or Egyptian law, or even appeal to other local forms of authority. The Roman Empire lacked an equivalent of modern prosecutors or a police force, and Roman administrative authorities tended to be lax in enforcing the punishments. Even bishops intervened. There is no record of anyone being executed for violating anti-sacrifice laws before Tiberius II Constantine (r. 574–582) some 250 years after Constantine I.

Laws that favored Christianity

According to Michelle Salzman, the top–down model underestimates the strength and independence of the elites of the senate while it also over-estimates the influence of the emperors. Emperors were influential, but their influence had practical limitations. The senatorial aristocracy was composed of men and women who shared a culture based on status, wealth, power, and prestige; they wielded significant influence with tremendous resources. Salzman asserts that no emperor had the ability to force religious change on this group "even if they wanted to".

No emperor of the fourth century legalized force to convert pagans. Historians have theorized that emperors coerced aristocratic conversion through other means such as appointments to public office, but no emperor promoted only Christians to either high or low offices, and even the most assertively Christian emperors continued to appoint pagans to positions of high office. Another theory has suggested aristocrats were pressured by the anti-pagan laws Christian emperors made, but laws were most often issued in response to local problems brought to the emperor's attention by provincial governors and local deputations, rather than as the result of an emperor's own policy initiative.

Pat Southern has written that, generally speaking, the empire's inhabitants were not directly affected by Constantine's religious change. Yet indirectly there was an impact. His main approach to religion was to use enticement by making the adoption of Christianity beneficial. Having begun its growth 300 years before Constantine amidst opposition, the "Imperial patronage, legal rights to hold property, and financial assistance", granted to the church by Constantine and those emperors after him who followed his example, were important contributions to the church's success over the next hundred years.

Laws that favored Christianity increased the church's status which was all important for the elites. By absorbing aristocratic values and attitudes into Christianity, emperors who modeled Christianity's moral appeal with aristocratic honor made it attractive to the aristocratic class. David Novak concludes, as does Salzman, that this began largely because Constantine had tremendous personal popularity and support even amongst the pagan aristocrats. That prompted some individuals to become informed about their emperor's religion. This passed along through aristocratic kinship and friendship networks and patronage ties. The sociological view of conversion is that "conversion tends to proceed along social networks formed by personal attachments". A very few senators became Christian right away, but Salzman documents the shift to the predominance of Christians in the aristocracy as not taking place until the 360s under Gratian.

The Socio–economic model

The fourth century developed new forms of status and wealth that included moving away from the old silver standard. Brown says Constantine consolidated loyalty at the top through his spectacular generosity, paying his army and his high officials in gold and thereby flooding the economy with gold. The imperial bureaucracy soon began demanding that taxes also be paid in gold. Greed became rampant as the ruling elite "drove a primitive system of taxation and markets to its limits" to acquire gold. This created multiple problems.

"The fourth century scramble for gold ensured that the rural population was driven" hard says Brown. Eighty percent of the population provided the labor to harvest 60% of the empire's wealth, very little of which ever trickled down to them. This contributed to unrest. Constantine and his successors reached out to the provincial elite enlarging the Senate's membership from about 600 to over 2,000. This also contributed to unrest.

In response to all of this, bishops became intercessors in society, lobbying the powerful to practice Christian benevolence. After 370, wealth and cultural prestige began moving toward the Catholics.

Sociological model of Christian growth and Pagan evolution

Further information: Christianity in late antiquity, Christianity in the 4th century, Christianity in the 5th century, and Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire

The conversion of Rome, according to the study of sociology, was accomplished through a combination of ideas and social forces never before seen in classical culture. For the Roman Empire, early Christianity was not only a new religion, it was a new kind of religion: a movement of highly appealing and powerful new ideas, similar to ideas that had previously been exclusively reserved for the philosophical schools. These new ideas were promoted at all levels of community, and they generated debate within the varied ranks of Roman society. That contributed to social change as it swept away the old distinction between the educated elite and the masses.

According to Peter Brown, the emergence of ethical monotheism in a polytheistic world was the single most crucial change made in a culture experiencing many great and tumultuous changes. The content of Christianity was at the center of this age, Brown adds, contributing to both a "behavioral revolution" and a "cognitive revolution" which then changed the "moral texture of the late Roman world". A reorientation of culture took place through a conscious dismantling of concepts of hierarchy and power. E. A. Judge writes that "the extensive social welfare program of the churches attracted ... widespread popular acceptance". Ideas and social practices such as mercy, charity, asceticism, and the practice of debate in the synod became institutionalized. In Judge's view, it was the powerful combination of new ideas and the social impact of the church that formed "the fulcrum for the conversion of Rome".

For many years it has been axiomatic that the Roman elite ceased to have any real belief in the traditional forms of Roman polytheism, and as a result consigned it to neglect and decline. James B. Rives, classics scholar, has written that: "Evidence for neglect and manipulation could readily be found, and a standard list of examples gradually took shape, ... But, as more recent scholars have argued, this evidence has often been cited without proper consideration of its context; at the same time, other evidence that presents a different picture has been dismissed out of hand".

Over the last thirty years, evidence has expanded to include "inscriptions, coins, sculpture and architecture" which have "exploded" the many assumptions that underlie narratives of decline, says Rives. This has "completely altered" the picture of late antique paganism, from decline and neglect, to the view of traditional public cults as remaining vibrantly alive throughout antiquity. This late Antique world is one in which religions, including both Christianity and polytheism, adapted by evolving.

Context

The division between the diversity in Roman culture and the empire's political need for strength in unity was long thought to have produced decline, but in recent decades, modern evidence has indicated that variety produced religious vibrancy instead. For example, for many years, the imperial cult with its worship of human rulers as though they were gods was regarded by the majority of scholars as both a symptom and a cause of the final decline of traditional Graeco-Roman religion. It was assumed this kind of worship could only be possible in a system that had become completely devoid of real religious meaning and it was, therefore, generally treated as a "political phenomenon cloaked in religious dress".

Scholarship of the twenty-first century has shifted toward seeing it more as a genuine religious phenomenon. S. R. F. Price used anthropological models to show the imperial cult's rituals and iconography are elements of a way of thinking that people came up with for themselves as a means of coming to terms with the tremendous power of Roman emperors. The emperor was "conceived in terms of honors ... as the representation of power" personifying the intermediary between the human and the divine. According to Rives, "Most recent scholars have accepted Price's approach".

The term "imperial cult" implies a coherent system when there was, instead, a wide range of practices and images. These established some association between the emperor and his household on the one hand, and the divine sphere on the other, but in several very different ways. The imperial cult served as a way for local elites and other representatives of Roman power to negotiate status. In western provinces, it was "an instrument of centralized policy". Recent literary evidence reveals emperor worship at the domestic level with his image "among the household gods". As a result, there are innumerable small images of emperors from a wide range of media that are now seen to have "potential religious significance".

Rives adds that "epigraphic evidence reveals the existence of numerous private associations of ‘worshippers of the emperor’ or ‘of the emperor’s image’, many of which seem to have developed from household associations". Private cults of the emperor were previously greatly underestimated. It is now recognized that these private cults were "very common and widespread indeed, in the domus, in the streets, in public squares, in Rome itself (perhaps there in particular) as well as outside the capital".

Evolution through negotiation, accommodation, adaptation, and transformation

According to most modern scholars, the fourth century of Roman empire was not an age of decline. Instead, it was an age of tremendous activity and change, where the empire reinvented itself; it was an age of cultural and religious ferment comparable to the Reformation of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Christianity was just one of many religions attempting to respond. This sometimes included polytheism directly transforming itself by adopting Christian practices. Scourfield explains that "what happens in the course of the [fourth] century is most aptly described in terms of negotiation, accommodation, adaptation, and transformation".

The Neoplatonist movement that reinterpreted Plato began with Plotinus in mid–third century Egypt, and by the time of the fifth–century Athenian school, "Neoplatonism had undergone a process of theologizing". This evolution in Platonic thought was accompanied by a corresponding influence on Christianity. Christian thought and writings adopted much from Plato between the third and fifth centuries.

These occurrences evidence "complex and highly transformative negotiations between the classical tradition and Christianity". R. A. Markus has asserted these changes also led to "The End of Ancient Christianity," between the age of Augustine in the fourth century and Gregory the Great in the sixth, as it evolved into its medieval form.

After Constantine, the borders between pagan and Christian began to blur. Robert Austin Markus explains that, before the fourth century, churchmen like Tertullian saw the social order as irredeemably 'pagan' and "hence to be shunned". But the Edict of Milan (313) had redefined the imperial ideology as one of mutual religious tolerance. What counted as pagan had to be rethought. By the time a fifth-century pope attempted to denounce the Lupercalia as 'pagan superstition', Clark says "it fell on deaf ears: to many Christians, the festival was now simply an enjoyable 'secular' ritual". Late Antiquity witnessed the "vigorous flowering of a public culture that Christians and non-Christians alike could share" with the differing religious traditions co-existing and tolerating each other through most of the period.

Pros and cons of the sociological model

Christianity began with perhaps a thousand people in the 30s–40s, growing rapidly to about 200,000 people by the end of the second century at what sociologists Rodney Stark and Keith Hopkins describe as a compounded annual rate. Stark asserts 3.4% per year while Keith Hopkins uses what he calls "parametric probability" to reach 3.35% annual growth. This is an estimated average, not a fact, that in reality would not have been constant but would have varied up and down. Keith Hopkins adds that rapid growth in absolute numbers occurred only in the third and fourth centuries.

The third century saw the empire's greatest persecution of Christians while also being the critical century of church growth. Among contemporary historians of the Roman world there is a general consensus that, by the time Christianity was legalized in 315, approximately ten percent of the population of the empire, (somewhere between five – seven million people), had converted. The percentage of Christians in the empire then rose, by the year 350, to about half of the 60–70 million people that populated the empire of the ancient Mediterranean world. Five to seven million in the year 300, at 3.4%, compounded annually, reaches thirty million in less than half a century.

Robert Couzin, who has studied numbers of Christian sarcophagi in Rome, explains that "more sophisticated mathematical models (for the shape of the expansion curve) could affect certain assumptions, but not the general tendency of the numerical hypotheses".

Roger S. Bagnall found that, by isolating Christian names of sons and their fathers, he could trace the growth of Christianity in Roman Egypt. While Bagnall cautions about extrapolating from his work to the rest of the Roman Empire, Stark writes that a comparison of the critical years 239–315 shows a correlation of 0.86 between Stark's own projections for the overall empire and Bagnall's research on Egypt.

A minority has argued that moral differences between pagans and Christians were not real, and therefore could not have had sociological impact. For example, Ramsay MacMullen asserts that any real moral difference would need to be observable in Roman society at large, and he says it was not, offering as examples Christian failure to make any observable difference in slavery, increasingly cruel judicial penalties, corruption and the gladiatorial shows.

Slavery

Early Christianity never openly called for the abolition of slavery, and while G. Francois Wessels writes that it "must be conceded" that abolition was not a possibility in Paul's day, it must also be affirmed that many of the early Christians were slave owners who had no objection to the long–standing institution. Christians of Antiquity advised acceptance of what could not be changed, service to others with a loving attitude, and a focus on true freedom in Heaven. Their stated purpose was to change the heart of man, not the social order, and ancient Christians did not think of their movement in terms of social reform. However, Christians did have some impact on the world of slavery in which they lived in at least two ways and possibly more.

The first can be seen in Paul's Epistle to Philemon, which indicates that Christianity worked to transform the slave-holding household to recognize Christian brotherhood and manumit (an established Roman practice of freeing slaves) accordingly. Wessels explains: "Onesimus, a slave, had run away from his master Philemon, but both had become Christians, and Paul sends Onesimus back home with a letter. In that letter Paul insists on Philemon's acceptance of Onesimus, no longer as a slave, but as a 'beloved brother'. Marianne Thompson has argued convincingly that "a reading of the letter to Philemon which views Paul as asking for Onesimus' spiritual reception as a brother in Christ, without the setting free of his body as a slave, assumes a 'dualistic anthropology' in Paul which his writings do not confirm".

"Paul's understanding of the church as a 'body' meant that, once Onesimus was accepted into the group as a brother, it would become impossible to treat him as chattel and sell him off if the price was right". J. H. Roberts also asserts that "The phrase, 'you will do even more than I say', can really only have one meaning: Philemon should set Onesimus free". The cumulative weight of Paul's many suggestive phrases support this view. If the information in Colossians 4:7–9 is historical, the slave Onesimus was, accordingly, freed. Kyle Harper argues that a "broad religious impulse toward manumission runs as a submerged current through the eastern provinces".

Christianity also impacted the world of slaves through its adoption of slavery as metaphor. There are no ancient sources written from the point of view of the slave, but Christian rhetoric is filled with that metaphorical perspective. John Chrysostom's surviving corpus alone mentions slavery over 5,000 times. Chrysostom, as one example, wrote baptismal instructions for churches in his jurisdiction, telling the officiating priest to stop at various points to remind the catechumens of how the act of baptism frees them. In Tate's view, "Through their baptism, the catechumens became not only free, holy, and just, but even sons of God and joint-heirs with Christ. Repeated so often, in such an important context, this message must have made a major impact on the thinking of Christian congregations and those with whom they interacted".

Outside of defeated enemies, there were three primary sources of slaves. The first most prolific was natural reproduction (childbearing), since a child born to a slave was automatically a slave, without option, themselves. Chris L. de Wet writes that Chrysostom attempted to "guard the sexual integrity of the slave by desexualizing the slave's body and criminalizing its violation. Slaves were no longer morally neutral ground – having sex with a slave while married was adultery and if unmarried, fornication". These teachings, along with the proliferation of chastity among slaves who became Christian, and the spread of ascetism through Roman society, may have lessened their sexual use and their reproductive value and impacted slavery directly.

The next best source of slaves was from the abandonment of unwanted children called exposure because the babies were exposed to the dangers of the wilds. These children were often picked up by strangers to be raised and sold as slaves. The third method was kidnapping. Christians interfered with these methods for resupply through new laws and actions taken against them.

Chrysostom supported the obedience of slaves to their masters. He also told his audience, which consisted mostly of wealthy slave holders, that "Slavery is the result of greed, of degradation, of brutality, since Noah, we know, had no slave, nor Abel, nor Seth, nor those who came after them. The institution was the fruit of sin". MacMullen has written that slavery was "rebuked by Ambrose, Zeno of Verona, Gaudentius of Brescia, and Maximus of Turin", among others. Evidence indicates this oft repeated Christian discourse on slavery shaped late ancient feelings, tastes, and opinions concerning it, and this may have indirectly impacted its practice.

It is generally accepted that slavery began a decline in the second century which became more decisive as time passed, but this is usually attributed to economics rather than ideology as actual numbers of slaves have not been established.

Inclusivity and exclusivity

Koester asserts that "the Christian community in the letters of Paul, begins with a baptismal formula, which says in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, neither slave nor free. This is a sociological formula that defines a new community ... [giving] even the lowliest slave personal dignity and status". Keith Hopkins points out that real communities of real people would have diverged from the Christian ideal even though the ideal would have influenced practices. Wayne Meeks asserts that evidence from Pliny the Younger and others demonstrates that early Christian communities were, in fact, highly inclusive in terms of social stratification and other social categories, much more so than were the Roman voluntary associations. From the beginning, the Pauline communities cut across the social ranks. This deliberate breaking of rank was imposed by Paul the Apostle. His understanding of the meaning of the Crucifixion of Jesus and the paradox of Christ created a new order unprecedented in classical society.

A key characteristic of these communities was the use of belief to construct identity and social boundaries. Believing was the crucial and defining characteristic that set a "high boundary" that strongly excluded the "unbeliever". Trebilco asserts that these high boundaries were set without social distancing or vilification of the outsiders themselves, since context reveals "a clear openness to these 'outsiders' and a strong 'other regard' for them". Strong boundaries for insiders, and openness to outsiders, are both held in very real tension in New Testament and early patristic writings.

On the one hand, the term for sinner (Template:Lang-grc), meaning the immoral, is another NT term for those 'on the outside'. Its use was undermined by Jesus, who showed that any 'outsider' could become an 'insider'. Jesus did not classify everyone as sinners, but he did call for those who considered themselves insiders to repent. Paul extended the term's application to everyone, arguing that even 'sinners' can become insiders.

On the other hand, the exclusivity of Christian monotheism formed an important part of its success enabling it to maintain its independence in a society that syncretized religion. E. R. Dodds has suggested that the Crisis of the Third Century led to anxiety that was appeased by a "totalist" creed. According to Praet, this gave Christianity the powerful psychological attraction of elitism.

Several ways of referring to outsiders in the New Testament can be called 'low-boundary' terms which recognize the need to accommodate and converge with wider society. A range of social contacts between insiders and outsiders was seen as permissible, but Paul writes this while at the same time maintaining a high boundary for insiders as differentiated by their moral standards and group purity. Paul did not want Christians divorced from society, and does not call for social withdrawal, but he also wanted Christians to be different from society in the strongest ways possible.

Christianity was unhindered by either ethnic or geographical ties, was open to being experienced as a new start for those who needed one, was open to both men and women, and rich and poor; baptism was free, there were no fees, and it was intellectually egalitarian, making philosophy and ethics available to ordinary people who might not even have known how to read. Many scholars see this inclusivity as the primary reason for Christianity's success.

Women

Further information: Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion

Christian charity Thorvaldsen Louvre RF3698

Ross Kraemer argues that Christianity offered women a new sense of worth. The Pauline epistles in the New Testament provide evidence of women as true missionary partners in expanding the Jesus movement. The women named as leaders contributed directly to that endeavor with roles like those of men. For most women, activities that contributed to the rise of Christianity still tended to revolve around the household. Women moved in and out of houses and shops and marketplaces, taking risks, leading people, including children, outside the bounds of the "proper authorities". Their combination of boldness, affront, and the natural concealment of going about their ordinary daily business, allowed the everyday friendships and personal interactions of ordinary women to help spread Christianity.

Exposure, which was the abandonment of unwanted female infants (and imperfect males), was an accepted fact of Roman life. In 1968, J. Lindsay reported that even in large families "more than one daughter was practically never reared." Stark adds that, "A study of inscriptions at Delphi made it possible to reconstruct 600 families. Of these, only six had raised more than one daughter". There was also a high mortality rate among women due to childbirth. Abortions were also a major cause of the death of women. Elizabeth Castelli writes that, "The ascetic life, especially the monastic life, may have provided women with a mode of escape from the rigors and dangers of married and maternal existence, with the prospect of an education and (in some cases) an intellectual life, and with access to social and economic power that would otherwise have eluded them".

The conversion of women to ascetic Christianity constituted a true break with Roman tradition. This is evident in the sanctions and labels their antagonists used against them. A survey of the literature of the early period all show female converts as having one thing in common: that of being in danger. Women took risks to spread the gospel. Power resided with the male authority figure, and he had the right to label any uncooperative female in his household as insane or possessed, to exile her from her home, and condemn her to prostitution. Kramer theorizes that "Against such vehement opposition, the language of the ascetic forms of Christianity must have provided a strong set of validating mechanisms". Women were considered one of the marginal classes in the Roman Empire, so it is likely this attracted large numbers of those women who were discontented with their lot.

Widows were especially critical to growth in Christianity's first generation, and in the literature from the second century, there is conclusive evidence of groups of women, with some "exercising the office of widow". Nathan explains that "a widow in Roman society who had lost her husband and did not have money of her own was at the very bottom of the social ladder". The practical support the early church provided to those who would, otherwise, have been in destitute circumstances "was in all likelihood an important factor in winning new female members".

Sexual morality

MacMullen concludes that Christianity did make a moral difference in Roman Empire in the area of sexual conduct: "Here we see an absolutely remarkable impact on manners and morals that was to shape also the whole millennium to come". Classics scholar Kyle Harper states it this way: "the triumph of Christianity not only drove profound cultural change, it created a new relationship between sexual morality and society ... The legacy of Christianity lies in the dissolution of an ancient system where social and political status, power, and the transmission of social inequality to the next generation scripted the terms of sexual morality".

Both the ancient Greeks and the Romans cared and wrote about sexual morality within categories of good and bad, pure and defiled, and ideal and transgression. These ethical structures were built on the Roman understanding of social status. Slaves were not thought to have an interior ethical life because they had no status; they could go no lower socially. They were commonly used sexually, while the free and well-born who used them were thought to embody social honor and the ability to exhibit the fine sense of shame and sexual modesty suited to their station. Sexual modesty meant something different for men than it did for women, and for the well-born, than it did for the poor, and for the free citizen, than it did for the slave — for whom the concepts of honor, shame and sexual modesty were said to have no meaning at all.

In the ancient Roman Empire, "shame" was a profoundly social concept that was always mediated by gender and status. "It was not enough that a wife merely regulate her sexual behavior in the accepted ways; it was required that her virtue in this area be conspicuous." Men, on the other hand, were allowed live-in mistresses called pallake. This permitted Roman society to find both a husband's control of a wife's sexual behavior a matter of intense importance, and at the same time see that same husband's sex with young boys as of little concern.

The Greeks and Romans said humanity's deepest moralities depended upon social position which was given by fate; Christians advocated the "radical notion of individual freedom centered around ... complete sexual agency". Paul the Apostle and his followers taught that "the body was a consecrated space, a point of mediation between the individual and the divine". This meant the ethical obligation for sexual self-control was to God, and it was placed on each individual, male and female, slave and free, equally, in all communities, regardless of status. It was "a revolution in the rules of behavior, but also in the very image of the human being". In the Pauline epistles, porneia was a single name for the array of sexual behaviors outside marital intercourse. This became a defining concept of sexual morality. Such a shift in definition utterly transformed "the deep logic of sexual morality".

Harper concludes that there are risks in over-estimating the changes in old sexual patterns that Christianity was able to promote, but there are risks, too, in underestimating Christianization as a watershed."

Judicial penalties and clemency

"Roman Hall of Justice", Young Folks' History of Rome, 1878

In another challenge to the sociological model, MacMullen asserts that "under the Christian emperors cruelty rose" because the number of capital crimes did, and their threatened methods of execution became increasingly harsh. It is possible to identify a mounting severity in criminal law, but Peter Garnsey says it takes place throughout the entire imperial period, beginning under Augustus in the first century. Garnsey asserts this was a result of the political change from a Republic to an autocratic empire.

Harries points out that Roman justice was always harsh. It was a common belief of those in the Roman Empire that severity was a deterrent of undesirable behavior. As an example of this, Harries writes of the SC Silanianum, a particularly harsh law passed in 10 AD, which foreshadows and helps to explain how Roman laws of the empire developed and grew harsher throughout the imperial age.

The SC Silanianum was originally aimed at slaves who murdered their masters, but its reach and its harshness grew as time passed. Its history documents the establishment of a legal tradition of increasing harshness, since ancestral customs – the Mos maiorum – were the most important source of Roman law.

While the Roman empire was becoming ever more brutal, the Judeo-Christian concept of mercy introduced a new cause of tension between church and state. On the one hand, increasingly harsh penalties for an ever enlarging number of capital crimes were published by emperors. On the other hand, emperors also wanted to be seen as generous in offering mercy and clemency.

Beginning in the first century under Augustus, the established Roman understanding of mercy and clemency (clementia) began a transformation that was completed in the fourth century. Christian writers had embraced the concept of clemency and used it to express the mercy of God demonstrated in salvation. The use of clementia to indicate forgiveness of wrongs and a mild merciful temper becomes common for writers of the Later Roman Empire.

Bishops, generally, opposed the death penalty. Such a penalty was consistent with the authority of the state, but it was inconsistent with the expansion of the Church through the 'correction' of its enemies. Arrests and punishments of heretics normally went through the bishop, and Augustine's correspondence after 405 contains many references to him using the bishop's right to intercede for those the state condemned. He used his personal influence with Imperial officials to make sure the death penalty for Donatist terrorists was, above all else, avoided. The state responded with the law of January 409 which laid down that crimes of violence against the clergy might be denounced by anyone; "in this way the authorities could politely by-pass the 'bishop, the persuader of mercy' in arresting and punishing culprits". As Peter Brown says: "When it came to the central functions of the Roman state, even the vivid Ambrose was a lightweight".

Because Christianity did not grow outside Roman culture but grew within it, it ameliorated some of Rome's harsh justice and also adopted some of it. Augustine of Hippo urged Donatus (the heretical African bishop) to practice Christian mildness when dealing with enemies. He praised Marcellinus, who presided over an Imperial inquiry into the Catholic-Donatist controversy, for having conducted his investigation without using torture. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, advised his correspondent Studius, a Christian judge, to show clemency, citing as a model Jesus' treatment of the adulteress. However, neither Augustine nor Ambrose advocated for the abolition of torture or the reduction of harsh penalties for law breaking, and in some cases such as the Donatists, can be said to have adopted and supported it.

Garnsey has recognized that "Augustine, Ambrose, and other church leaders of progressive views clearly had a beneficent influence on the administration of the law, [but] it is evident that they did not attempt to promote a movement of penal reform, and did not conceive of such a movement".

Punitive punishment or loving discipline

See also: Charity (virtue)

Further information: Augustine of Hippo § Coercion

Saint Augustine Disputing with the Heretics painting by Vergós Group

In a challenge to the assertion that the practice of charity contributed to social change and the spread of Christianity, MacMullen has written that there was hardly any charity amongst Christians toward heretics. One example often used in demonstration of this view is Augustine's support of the state's use of coercion in dealing with the Donatists. Brown says this has led to modern liberals describing Augustine as the "prince and patriarch of persecutors". Frederick Russell asserts that Augustine's views came out of a loving desire to heal and help the Donatists.

The harsh realities Augustine faced can be found in his Letter 28 written to bishop Novatus around 416. Donatists had cut out the tongue and cut off the hands of a Bishop Rogatus who had recently converted to Catholicism, also attacking an unnamed count's agent who had been traveling with Rogatus. Russell says Augustine confesses he does not know what to do. By this time, he had spent twenty years verbally appealing to the Donatists using popular propaganda, debate, personal appeal, General Councils, appeals to the emperor, and even politics, and all attempts had failed.

The empire responded with force and coercion, and Augustine eventually came to support that approach. Augustine did not believe coercion could or would convert someone, but he did observe that it softened the "stubborn Donatists" enough to make it possible to reason with them. He thought that reason would then lead to voluntary agreement, true repentance, and change. Augustine's personal sufferings and his "conversion through God's pressures" are part of what led him to decide there was value in suffering for discerning truth.

Augustine approached the infliction of punishment, and the exercise of power over wrong-doers, by analyzing such issues in ways similar to modern debates on penal reform. Brown says Augustine thus becomes an eloquent advocate of the ideal of corrective punishment aimed at the reformation of the wrongdoer.

Augustine lived in a harsh, authoritarian age of punitive punishment, yet he placed limits on the type of coercion that could be used for heretics, recommending what was common practice in the home, school and ecclesial court at the time. He opposed all the extreme forms of torture and maiming and capital punishment common to the empire of the time.

Russell asserts that Augustine's response on coercion was context dependent. H. A. Deane says there is a fundamental inconsistency between Augustine's political thought and "his final position of approval of the use of political and legal weapons to punish religious dissidence", and others have seconded this view.

What is singularly significant for Christianization is the recognition that it was the "rivalry between the two factions that caused the landscape of Roman Africa to be ‘covered with a white robe of churches’." The Donatists survived until the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb in the closing years of the seventh century.

Corruption

Despite corruption having a long history in Roman society, Ramsay MacMullen "attributes to the fourth century ...the spread of an ethos of venality (greed and bribery) and the displacement of aristocratic networks of patronage by the indiscriminate exchange of favors for money". He has asserted that this practice shows the church, and Christians in government, were universally corrupt in the fourth and fifth centuries. MacMullen's thesis has produced considerable scholarly criticism that has been dubbed the "corruption debate".

Modern studies have employed many of the same sources as MacMullen, but have arrived at virtually opposite conclusions. For example, in the 1960s, political scientists examined the processes of modernization in the empire, along with those practices considered "corrupt" by modern Western standards, and found that what modern historians have termed "corruption" might in some ways, "and sometimes systematically, have a beneficial impact on a range of important goals: 'nation-building', economic development, administrative capacity, and democratization."

Tim Watson concludes that, "Even if agreement can be reached on what exactly constituted "corrupt" behavior, there is simply not enough data" in the sources to settle the corruption debate. He adds that this, in turn, has given rise to the tendency of modern historians of this ancient period to adopt their own personal perspectives.

Care for the poor

Christian Charity-Daniel Rauch-2-Hermitage

Christians showed the poor great generosity, and "there is no disputing that Christian charity was an ideology put into practice". Prior to Christianity, the wealthy elite of Rome mostly donated to civic programs designed to elevate their status, though personal acts of kindness to the poor were not unheard of. The ancient world has no trace of any organized charitable effort for feeding and clothing the poor, visiting prisoners, or supporting widows and orphan children. Nevertheless, Salzman asserts that the Roman practice of civic euergetism ("philanthropy publicly directed toward one's city or fellow citizens") influenced Christian charity "even as they remained distinct components of justifications for the feeding of Rome well into the late sixth century".

Christian and non-Christian witnesses testify to the zealousness of Christian communities for almsgiving and charity. "That the later church in Rome was actively involved in charity and renowned for its work with the needy is attested". Hart writes that the emperor Julian, who was hostile to Christianity, is recorded as saying: "It is [the Christians'] philanthropy towards strangers, the care they take of the graves of the dead, and the affected sanctity with which they conduct their lives that have done most to spread their atheism."

Steven C. Muir has written that "Charity was, in effect, an institutionalized policy of Christianity from its beginning.  ... While this situation was not the sole reason for the group's growth, it was a significant factor".

Gladiators

Reims - musée Saint-Remi (15)

MacMullen has written that, "the role of Christianity in the abandoning of most western gladiatorial combat was nil." However, as Meijer explains, while gladiator shows were never effectively officially politically abolished, Christians did speak out against them, and the rising number of Christians in the population in the late fourth century caused the popularity of the games to decline. It is likely the games ended from this lack of public support before 440.

Health care

Two devastating epidemics, the Antonine Plague in 154 and the Plague of Cyprian in 251, carried off a large number of the empire's population, though there is some debate over the seriousness and impact of these events. Graeco-Roman doctors tended largely to the elite, while the poor mostly had recourse to "miracles and magic" at religious temples. Christians, on the other hand, tended to the sick and dying, as well as the aged, orphaned, exiled and widowed. Many of these caretakers were monks and nuns. Christian monasticism had emerged toward the end of the third century, and their numbers grew such that, "by the fifth century, monasticism had become a dominant force impacting all areas of society".

According to Albert Jonsen, a historian of medicine, "the second great sweep of medical history [began] at the end of the fourth century, with the founding of the first Christian hospital for the poor at Caesarea in Cappadocia." By the fifth century, the founding of hospitals for the poor had become common for Bishops, Abbots and Abbesses.

Helmut Koester argues that, "One should not see the success of Christianity simply on the level of a great religious message; one has to see it also in the consistent and very well thought out establishment of institutions to serve the needs of the community". Through almsgiving and other acts of charity, Christianity established a realm of mutual social support for those that joined the church. Koester asserts this was "probably an enormously important factor for the success of the Christian mission".

Community

According to Stark, "Christianity did not grow because of miracle working in the marketplaces ... or because Constantine said it should, or even because the martyrs gave it such credibility. It grew because Christians constituted an intense community" which provided a unique "sense of belonging". Praet has written that, "in his very influential booklet Pagans and Christians in an Age of Anxiety, E. R. Dodds acknowledged ... 'Christians were in a more than formal sense 'members one of another': I think that was a major cause, perhaps the strongest single cause, of the spread of Christianity".

Prior to the year 100, Christianity was composed of, maybe, one hundred small household churches consisting of around seventy members each. By 200, Christian numbers had grown to over 200,000 people; communities with an average size of 500–1000 people existed in approximately 200–400 towns. The earliest dated church building to survive comes from the mid-third century. Most churches remained house churches. Hopkins explains that "In the huge cities of Rome and Alexandria, and in Antioch and Carthage, each with a population of above 100,000, Christian communities were probably substantial". In most other towns, Christian communities must have remained quite small.

Christian community was not just one thing. Experience and expression were diverse. Yet early Christian communities did have commonalities in the kerygma, the rites of baptism and the eucharist. As far back as it can be traced, evidence indicates the rite of initiation into Christianity was always baptism. In Christianity's earliest communities, candidates for baptism were introduced by a teacher or other person willing to stand surety for their character and conduct. Baptism created a set of responsibilities within each Christian community, which some authors described in quite specific terms. Candidates for baptism were instructed in the major tenets of the faith (the kerygma), examined for moral living, sat separately in worship, could not receive the Eucharist, and were generally expected to demonstrate commitment to the community and obedience to Christ's commands before being accepted into the community as a full member. Celebration of the Eucharist was the common unifier for Christian communities, and early Christians believed both of these practices came directly from Jesus of Nazareth. According to E. R. Dodds "A Christian congregation was from the first a community in a much fuller sense than any corresponding group of Isis followers or Mithras devotees. Its members were bound together not only by common rites but by a common way of life".

Joseph Hellerman observes New Testament writers as choosing 'family' as the central social metaphor to describe their community. In doing so, they redefined the concept of family. In both Jewish and Roman tradition, genetic families were generally buried together, but an important cultural shift took place in the way Christians buried one another: they gathered unrelated Christians into a common burial space, as if they really were one family, "commemorated them with homogeneous memorials and expanded the commemorative audience to the entire local community of coreligionists".

Community on a larger scale is evidenced by a study of 'letters of recommendation' that Christians created to be taken by a traveler from one group of believers to another. Security and hospitality when traveling had traditionally been undependable for most, being ensured only by, and for, those with the wealth and power to afford them. By the late third and early fourth centuries, Christians had developed a 'form letter' of recommendation, only requiring the addition of an individual's name, that extended trust and welcome and safety to the whole household of faith, "though they were strangers". E. A. Judge writes of the fourth century diary of Egeria which documents her travels throughout the Middle East, seeing the old sites of the Biblical period, the monks, and even climbing Mount Sinai: "At every point she was met and looked after". The same benefits were applied to others carrying a Christian letter of recommendation as members of the community.

The Jewish ethic and its foundation of community as family is what made "Christianity's power of attraction ... not purely religious but also social and philosophical". The Christian church was modeled on the synagogue. Christian philosophers synthesized their own views with Semitic monotheism and Greek thought. The Old Testament gave the new religion of Christianity roots reaching back to antiquity. In a society which equated dignity and truth with tradition, this was significant. Paula Fredriksen of Boston University asserts that it is "because of Diaspora Judaism, which is extremely well established [in the empirical age], that Christianity itself, as a new and constantly improvising form of Judaism, is able to spread as it does through the Roman world".

Martyrdom

Main article: Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire

See also: Christian martyrs

Faithful Unto Death by Herbert Schmalz

Theologian Paul Middleton writes that:

 ...accounts of martyrdom are contested narratives. There is no neutral way in which to tell martyr stories, as they inevitably create heroes and villains ... even in the early church, martyrdom has always been contested. Moreover, any quest to distinguish objectively between true and false martyrdom essentially represents the imposition of the values or identity claims of the compiler, narrator or even editor.

Keeping this in mind, it is possible Justin was correct when he wrote: "it is plain that, though beheaded and crucified, and thrown to wild beasts, and chains, and fire, and all other kinds of torture, we do not give up our confession [of Christ]; but the more such things happen, the more do others and in larger numbers become faithful, and worshippers of God through the name of Jesus". The Roman government practiced systematic persecution of Christian leaders and their property in 250–51 under Decius, in 257–60 under Valerian, and after 303 under Diocletian. Keith Hopkins concludes that "it was in this same period that, in spite of temporary losses, Christianity grew fastest in absolute terms. In other words, in terms of number, persecution was good for Christianity".

Miracles

In MacMullen's view, miracles and exorcisms form the most important (and possibly the only) reason for conversion to Christianity in the pre-Constantinian age. These events provide some of the best documented ancient conversions. However, there is a drop-off in the records of miracles in the crucial second and third centuries. Praet writes that "as early as the beginning of the third century, Christian authors admit that the "Golden Age" of miracles is over". Yet Christianity grew most rapidly at the end of that same third century indicating that the real impact of miracles in garnering new converts is questionable. In Praet's view, even if Christianity had "retained its miraculous powers", the impact of miracles on conversion would still be questionable, since pagans also produced miracles, and no one questioned that those miracles were as real as Christianity's, yet there is no record of anyone converting to paganism because of them.

Kerygma (central message)

Main articles: Kerygma and Christian theology

The Christian Graces, Faith, Hope & Charity. Die Christlichen Grazien, Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe (front)

Christian writers were not homogenous in their views and demonstrated widely differing trends in their theology, yet J. N. D. Kelly has asserted that, from the beginning of Christianity, there was a broad outline of doctrine that was seen as sacrosanct: the life and teachings of Jesus, his sacrificial death, and his physical resurrection. These were accepted by early believers as handed down from those Apostles who had known Jesus and been taught by him. Together with the Hebrew Bible, these provided the central message, otherwise known as the kerygma, of the early church.

N. T. Wright argues that this kerygma was revolutionary. According to Matthew R. Malcolm, it is in the writings of Paul where the concept that the power of God is manifested in a reversal of power can be found. This redefines love as an "other-regarding sacrificial act", which also redefines the nature and practice of power and authority as service to others. It is all grounded in what Wayne Meeks describes as the claim "the ultimate power and structure of the universe" has manifested itself in human society by giving up power for love. Meeks concludes "this must have had a very powerful, emotional appeal to people".

This central message included the assertion that Christian salvation was made available for the purpose of eternal life. Ancient paganism had a variety of views of an afterlife from a belief in Hades to a denial of eternal life completely. Afterlife punishments can be found in other religions preceding Christianity. One scholar has concluded "Hell is a Greek invention". Philosopher and philologist Danny Praet asserts that much of the Roman population no longer believed in Graeco–Roman afterlife punishments, so there is no reason to expect they would take the Christian version more seriously. While it may not have been a major cause of conversion, writings from the Christians Justin and Tatian, the pagan Celsus, and the Passio of Ptolemaeus and Lucius are just some of the sources that confirm Christians did use the doctrine of eternal punishment, and that it did persuade some non-believers to convert.

While the Christian teaching of bodily resurrection was new, (and not readily accepted), most Christian views of an afterlife were not new. What they had was the novelty of exclusivity: right belief became as significant a determiner of the future as right behavior. Ancient Christians backed this up with prophecies from ages old documents and living witnesses, giving Christianity its claim to a historical base. This was new and different from paganism. Praet writes that anti-Christian polemics of the era never questioned that: "[Jesus'] birth, teachings, death and resurrection took place in the reigns of the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, and until the end of the first century, the ancient church could produce living witnesses who claimed to have seen or spoken to the Savior". Many modern scholars have seen this as one of the major reasons for Christianity's success.

Subsequent transitions

Roman Empire with dioceses in 400 AD

In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the structure and ideals of both the Church and the Empire were being transformed through a long period of symbiosis. Many scholars have claimed that Christianity of this period identified itself with so many Roman values that it ensured the "dignity" of Rome would survive its collapse in its new baptized form of the Catholic church of the Middle Ages – as if Christianity simply took the place of Rome. This emphasis on continuity is what Kimberly Bowles calls "the swap sale model of change", as if one practice or social role was simply exchanged for its Christian equivalent. Brown says this assumes a misleading intent: "accounts of the Christianization of society that are framed in this manner fail to do justice to the elements of novelty that also accompanied the rise of Christianity in the later empire" and to the aspects of Rome that died.

The shift from persecuted minority to "official" religion of the empire forced Christians to find new ways of defining what it meant to be Christian. The fourth century developed the cult of the martyrs in an effort to connect the past, present and the future of Christianity; it then transformed into the cult of the saints in medieval Christianity. This led to the creation of a new religious map of the territory of empire centered on Christian churches, relics and pilgrimage routes. Pagan temples, altars and other pagan sites were increasingly converted or destroyed after the mid-fifth century. Markus writes that this period also included a shift away from the "massive" Greek and Roman secularism common to John Chrysostom's and Augustine's fourth century world. By the time of Pope Gregory I (540 – 604), "there was little room for the secular in it".

Early Christian habits of giving were originally part of what broke down the traditional social boundaries, as all believers, of all classes, contributed to care for the poor, the church, and the clergy, and thereby built the church. This had created, in its early centuries, a distinctive Christian style of giving by communities made up of ordinary people and the modestly wealthy. Strong bonds between the clergy and the rank and file existed within these communities, as their leaders were not an elite with arcane secrets, but were instead teachers and friends, selected, according to Tertullian, "not by purchase, but by established character (Apology 39, 1989 ed.)". This meant that, for its first three centuries, Christianity was free from economic dependence on state support, and was still able to give a lesser role to wealth and the wealthy.

All of that began changing between 380 and 430 when money, power and prestige began shifting toward the bishops and the church. Traditional aristocracies were collapsing, and the truly wealthy elite began joining the church communities in large numbers. Christianity preached and taught on helping the poor. This motivated increased giving, making the church a kind of administrative "middleman", and in any bureaucracy, middlemen always get a cut. The church became increasingly wealthy. The weight of wealth after the fifth century turned Christianity in a new direction. What followed was an age of managerial bishops, administrators, and their clerical staffs.

Clergy became increasingly separate and different from the laity. These new kind of leaders held to the notion that the wealth of the church remained sacred because of its connection to the ancient past and how it began, but as Peter Brown explains: the "surface appearance remains the same, but the inner structures that support that surface have changed entirely". In Late Antiquity, people had felt no need for special holy men who could access the divine for them, but the gradual "magicization" of the church's sacraments and devotions also increased the role of "holy men" who could provide that special access. For the laity, that meant their donations, which had been for maintenance of the church and the poor, instead became donations for the dead to insure their salvation after death.

The end of the Christianization of the Roman empire marks the change from Ancient Christianity to medieval Christianity. Multiple factors contributed to this. Population decline, and the economic effects of an increase in the army and a decrease in the number of landowners, which affected all of Roman society, along with important changes within Christianity itself, began in the fourth century. The collapse of centralized Roman political authority in 476, and invasions and mass migrations of various Germanic peoples forming new kingdoms, furthered change, while most scholars agree that Islamization of the 7th century, marks the full paradigm shift that separates medieval Christianity from that of Antiquity. With the beginning of medieval Christianity, Rome became an idealized memory, Christianity's goals changed, and Ancient Christianity came to an end.

See also

• Christianity and other religions
• Christianity and paganism
• Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire
• Religious policies of Constantine the Great
• Religious policies of Constantius II
• Persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire
• Persecution of pagans under Theodosius I
• Anti-paganism policies of the early Byzantine Empire
• Restoration of paganism from Julian until Valens
• Revival of Roman paganism
• History of Christianity
• Christianity and violence
• History of Christian thought on persecution and tolerance
• Timeline of Christianity

Bibliography

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Further reading

• Athanassiadi, Polymnia (November 1993). "Persecution and response in late paganism: the evidence of Damascius". The Journal of Hellenic Studies. 113: 1–29. doi:10.2307/632395.
• Bourne, Frank C. (1972). "Reviewed Work: Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire by Peter Garnsey". The American Journal of Philology. 93 (4). doi:10.2307/294354.
• Bowman, Alan; Wilson, Andrew, eds. (2011). Settlement, Urbanization, and Population. OUP. ISBN 978-0-19-960235-3.
• Brown, Peter (2016). Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity (Richard Lectures) (2nd Revised ed.). University of Virginia Press. ISBN 978-0-8139-3828-8.
• Egmond, Florike (1995). "The cock, the dog, the serpent, and the monkey. Reception and transmission of a Roman punishment, or historiography as history". International Journal of the Classical Tradition. 2 (2): 159–192. doi:10.1007/BF02678619. S2CID 162261726.
• Errington, R. Malcolm (1988). "Constantine and the Pagans". Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies. 29 (3): 309–318. ISSN 0017-3916.
• Fögen, Thorsten; Lee, Mireille M. (2010). Bodies and Boundaries in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-021253-2.
• Fugger, Verena (2017). "Shedding Light on Early Christian Domestic Cult: Characteristics and New Perspectives in the Context of Archaeological Findings". Archiv für Religionsgeschichte. 18–19 (1): 201–236. doi:10.1515/arege-2016-0012. S2CID 194608580.
• Greenhalgh, P. A. L.; Eliopoulos, Edward (1985). Deep into Mani: Journey to the Southern Tip of Greece. Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-13524-0.
• Harper, Kyle (2017). The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (illustrated ed.). Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-8891-7.
• Jones, A. H. M. (2012). "Census Records of the Later Roman Empire". The Journal of Roman Studies. 43 (1–2).
• Lamoreaux, John C. (1995). "Episcopal Courts in Late Antiquity". Journal of Early Christian Studies. 3 (2): 143–167. doi:10.1353/earl.0.0052. S2CID 145577363.
• MacMullen, Ramsay (1981). Paganism in the Roman Empire (unabridged ed.). Yale University Press. p. 129. ISBN 978-0-300-02984-0.
• MacMullen, Ramsay (2019) [1990]. "Judicial Savagery in the Roman Empire (Chiron 1986)". Changes in the Roman Empire: Essays in the Ordinary (Princeton Legacy Library ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 204–217. ISBN 978-0-691-65666-3.
• McEvoy, Meaghan (2010). "Rome and the transformation of the imperial office in the late fourth–mid-fifth centuries AD". Papers of the British School at Rome. 78: 151–192. doi:10.1017/S0068246200000854. S2CID 193212492.
• McLynn, Neil B. (1994). Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-08461-2.
• Middleton, Paul (2006). Radical Martyrdom and Cosmic Conflict in Early Christianity (Reprint ed.). A&C Black. ISBN 978-0-567-04164-7.
• Miller, Patricia Cox (2005). Women in Early Christianity: Translations from Greek Texts (reprint ed.). CUA Press. ISBN 978-0-8132-1417-7.
• Moore Jr., Barrington (2001). "Cruel and Unusual Punishment in the Roman Empire and Dynastic China". International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. 14 (4): 729–772. doi:10.1023/A:1011118906363. S2CID 140998834.
• Peters, Edward (2018). Torture. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-1-5128-2169-7.
• Pharr, Clyde, ed. (1952). The Theodosian Code and Novels, and the Sirmondian Constitutions. Princeton University Press.
• Plummer, Robert L. (2006). Paul's Understanding of the Church's Mission: Did the Apostle Paul Expect the Early Christian Communities to Evangelize?. Wipf and Stock. ISBN 978-1-59752-723-1.
• Scheidel, Walter, ed. (2001). Debating Roman Demography (illustrated ed.). BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-11525-5.
• Rhee, Helen (2005). Early Christian Literature Christ and Culture in the Second and Third Centuries. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-203-00154-7.
• Stark, Rodney (1991). "Christianizing the Urban Empire: An Analysis Based on 22 Greco-Roman Cities". Sociological Analysis. 52 (1): 77–88. doi:10.2307/3710716.
• Stark, Rodney (2003). One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (illustrated, reprint ed.). Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-11500-9.
• Tellbe, Mikael (2009). Christ-believers in Ephesus: A Textual Analysis of Early Christian Identity Formation in a Local Perspective (illustrated ed.). Mohr Siebeck. ISBN 978-3-16-150048-0.