Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] How many christians were there in 100 CE? 100 and 5253 hundred.
[00:00:08] Written by Bart Ehrman, read by Mike Johnson.
[00:00:12] I've been discussing just how quickly early Christianity appears to have grown in the earlier centuries. Now the rubber hits the road. In this excerpt from my book triumph of Christianity, I explain both what the rate of growth must have been and even more interesting. The main point for me really is how many christians there were in the world at various points of time. I for one found and find the answers a bit surprising.
[00:00:40] Thus it appears that the beginning of the christian movement saw a veritable avalanche of conversions.
[00:00:47] I am exceedingly grateful to James Bell for constructing a population growth calculator for me and for his interesting reflections on the rates of christian growth. And a footnote, possibly many of these are the direct result of the missionary activities of Paul, but there may have been other missionaries like him who were also successful. So lets simply pick a sensible rate of growth and say that for the first 40 years, up to the time when Paul wrote his last surviving letter, the church grew at a rate of 300% per decade. If the religion started with 20 people in 30 CE, that that would mean there were some 1280 by the year 60. That is not at all implausible as a guess, but it is way too precise. So lets just say 1000 to 1500 christians. But growth cannot continue at that rate. If it did, a century later in the year 160, there would be well over a billion christians in the world. So we can probably assume there was a burst of initial enthusiasm generated by the new faith, both among people who had heard Jesus preach during his public ministry and among those evangelized through the extraordinary missionary work of Paul and possibly others like him. After Pauls death, there was almost certainly a rapid decline. The change would not be immediate or steady, but were dealing with ballpark figures here say it went down on average to 60% per decade for the next 40 years. Up to the end of the first century, there would still be a lot of energy and enthusiasm among those who thought not only that Jesus saved them from their sins, but also that he was coming back very soon, creating a kind of urgency for their message. This would be a rate of growth just under 5% per year every year. Each group of 20 people need to make just one convert. At a rate like that. There would then be something like 8389 christians in the world in the year 100 CE. That sounds about right, but again is impossibly precise. So lets just say 7000 to 10,000.
[00:02:55] There is no point and no way to do a breakdown decade after decade. Clearly, growth cannot be sustained at 60%, since that would give us over 100 million christians in the year 300. When we think that there might have been two or 3 million. To get to 2 million, there would need to be a growth rate of 31.5% per decade. Of those 200 years, for 3 million, there would need to be not much more, just 34.2% per decade. Just as our earlier numbers were far too precise, so too are these rates of growth. But the matter is complicated by the obvious fact that very small differences in percentage lead to unrealistic numbers of conversion. So for broad illustration, we can simply suggest a rate of growth between 103 hundred CE as between 30 and 35% per decade, with huge fluctuations over time in different places, all based on external and internal circumstances.
[00:03:56] In the fourth century, when massive conversions occur, in part because of Constantine and the favors he showered on the church, the rates of growth must have slowed down. Otherwise, again, by the end of the century, there would be more christians than inhabitants of the empire. In a time when we know for a fact there were still a large number of pagans, as both pagan and christian authors attest, it may seem counterintuitive that we would get a slower rate of growth after the conversion of Constantine. Wasn't that the event that changed everything? Well, not exactly. One reason the rate of growth declined. This may seem ironic, is because the numbers of converts increased. The more people who converted to become christian, the fewer non christians there were to convert. And so they could not convert at the same rate simply because there were not as many of them. Suppose, then, that the rate slows to something like 25% to around 30%. If there were 2 million by 300 CE, a rate of 31.1% per decade get to 30 million by 400 CE. If there were 3 million by 300 CE, then a rate of 25.9% would get us there. Obviously, all this is simply tweaking the rates given by stark in order to provide a bit more reality to the situation in light of what we know about a the starting number of christians in the world b the necessarily rapid but not unimaginable rate of growth early on, and circumental the slowing rate of conversion. As the number of converts rises, anyone can tweak the numbers further indefinitely, in fact, for one who really likes to play the numbers game. But the reality is that at a certain point, the educated guessing simply becomes wildly speculative. Guessing. So based on some educated guessing, we have ballpark figures. Even as such, they are striking. Given the precise rate adjustments I'm using starting in 30 CE with 300% in the year 60 CE, down from 300% to 60% 100 CE down to 34% and 300 CE to down to 26%. Here are how the numbers of christians would break down over time, rounded up to the nearest 1000, starting with 150 CE 30 CE 20 christians 60 CE 1280 christians so say 1000 to 1501 hundred CE 8389 christians say 7000 to 10,150 CE 36,000 christians say 30 to 40,200 CE 157,000 christians say 140 to 160,250 CE 676,000 christians say 600 to 700,300 CE 2,923,000 christians say 2.5 to 3.5 million 312 CE 3,857,000 christians say 3.5 4,000,400 CE 29,478,000 christians say 25 to 35 million it.
