Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome by Rodney Stark

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The early rise of Christianity has been a topic of intense controversy ever since Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but historians can now examine this proliferating church trend in unprecedented detail. In this book, Rodney Stark, the author of The Victory of Reason, describes how Christianity grew to become the largest religion in the world. Embedded in his absorbing narrative are numerous surprising revelations. For example, he typifies Gnosticism as a failed effort to paganize Christianity and notes that Paul, known as the Apostle to the Gentiles, mostly converted Jews. A major book by a leading expert in the field.

From the Publisher

How did the preaching of a peasant carpenter from Galilee spark a movement that would grow to include over two billion followers? Who listened to this "good news," and who ignored it? Where did Christianity spread, and how? Based on quantitative data and the latest scholarship, preeminent scholar and journalist Rodney Stark presents new and startling information about the rise of the early church, overturning many prevailing views of how Christianity grew through time to become the largest religion in the world.

Drawing on both archaeological and historical evidence, Stark is able to provide hard statistical evidence on the religious life of the Roman Empire to discover the following facts that set conventional history on its head:

*Contrary to fictions such as The Da Vinci Code and the claims of some prominent scholars, Gnosticism was not a more sophisticated, more authentic form of Christianity, but really an unsuccessful effort to paganize Christianity.
*Paul was called the apostle to the Gentiles, but mostly he converted Jews.
*Paganism was not rapidly stamped out by state repression following the vision and conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in 312 AD, but gradually disappeared as people abandoned the temples in response to the superior appeal of Christianity.
*The "oriental" faiths - such as those devoted to Isis, the Egyptian goddess of love and magic, and to Cybele, the fertility goddess of Asia Minor - actually prepared the way for the rapid spread of Christianity across the Roman Empire.
*Contrary to generations of historians, the Roman mystery cult of Mithraism posed no challenge to Christianity to become the new faith of the empire - it allowed no female members and attracted only soldiers.

By analyzing concrete data, Stark is able to challenge the conventional wisdom about early Christianity offering the clearest picture ever of how this religion grew from its humble beginnings into the faith of more

Kirkus Reviews

Historians should count-literally. So argues Stark (Social Sciences/Baylor Univ.), who sets out to provide an account of Christianity's early rise through the use of data, not speculation. His own counting reveals that early Christianity was an urban phenomenon, propagated in a pattern that can be validated by statistics. Utilizing a variety of facts garnered largely by other researchers-collections of grave inscriptions, for example-the author relies on statistical analysis to prove or disprove various hypotheses. In many cases, his efforts simply prove what most people already assume, e.g., that Christianity was first successful in port cities. But this approach also provides several surprises. Pairing data with a fresh reading of scripture, Stark argues that early Christianity spread not so much within the gentile population as among the Hellenized Jews of the Diaspora. He views the early Christian church in relation to three other historical forms of faith: Greco-Roman paganism, quasi-monotheistic "eastern" religions and the heresies that most scholars today lump under the term "Gnosticism." Stark argues that Christianity (and Judaism) possessed a variety of superior strengths in comparison to polytheistic religions. Cults of Isis and Cybele may have acted as forerunners for monotheism and paved the way for Christian conversions, but they were not in themselves capable of prompting full-scale monotheism. As for Gnosticism, the author dismisses modern attempts to reconstruct this movement and provides reasons for viewing it as a weak, disjointed batch of heretical schools, never a real threat to orthodoxy. Stark appears to be setting up a platform for future historians rather thantrying to present a comprehensive study. This leaves readers asking for more-if nothing else, whetting the appetite for more statistically driven research. An intriguing read.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0061349887
  
• ISBN-13: 9780061349881
• Format: Paperback, 288pp
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Pub. Date: October 2007
• Edition Description: Reprint
• Sales Rank: 158,320

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Cities of God

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

Missions and Methods

New accounts of early Christianity are everywhere. A book claiming that Jesus got married, fathered children, and died of old age has sold millions of copies. Bookstores are bursting with 'new,' more 'enlightened' scriptures said to have been wrongly suppressed by the early church fathers. Often referred to as Gnostic gospels, these texts purport to have been written by a variety of biblical characters--Mary Magdalene, St. James, St. John, Shem, and even Didymus Jude Thomas, self-proclaimed twin brother of Christ. Meanwhile, a group calling itself the Jesus Seminar receives national media attention each year as it meets to further reduce the 'authentic' words spoken by Jesus to an increasingly slim compendium of wise sayings.

But is any of this true? How can we know? Presumably, by assembling and evaluating the appropriate evidence. Unfortunately, far too many historians these days don't believe in evidence. They argue that since absolute truth must always elude the historian's grasp, 'evidence' is inevitably nothing but a biased selection of suspect 'facts.' Worse yet, rather than dismissing the entire historical undertaking as impossible, these same people use their disdain for evidence as a license to propose all manner of politicized historical fantasies orappealing fictions on the grounds that these are just as 'true' as any other account. This is absurd nonsense. Reality exists and history actually occurs. The historian's task is to try to discover as accurately as possible what took place. Of course, we can never possess absolute truth, but that still must be the ideal goal that directs historical scholarship. The search for truth and the advance of human knowledge are inseparable: comprehension and civilization are one.

Fortunately, even if the complete truth eludes us, some historical accounts have a far higher probability than others of being true, depending on the available evidence. And it is in pursuit of more and better evidence that I have returned to the history of the early church. The chapters that follow present many revisions and reinterpretations of early Christian history. But the really 'new' contribution is to test these conclusions by analyzing quantitative data.

Early Christianity was primarily an urban movement. The original meaning of the word pagan (paganus) was "rural person," or more colloquially "country hick." It came to have religious meaning because after Christianity had triumphed in the cities, most of the rural people remained unconverted. Therefore, in the chapters that follow, the thirty-one cities of the empire having populations of at least 30,000 as of the year 100 are the basis for formulating and testing claims about the early church, based on quantified measures of various features of these cities. When was a Christian congregation established in each city? Which cities were missionized by Paul? Which were the port cities? Did a city have a substantial Diasporan Jewish community? Where did paganism remain strongest, longest? Where were the Gnostic teachers and movements located? These quantitative measures make it possible to discover, for example, whether the Gnostics were clustered in the more Christian or in the more pagan cities.

It is in this spirit that missions and methods are the principal topics of this opening chapter. Nevertheless, the relatively brief quantitative aspects of this and subsequent chapters are very secondary to, and embedded in, large historical concerns.

Missions and Monotheism

Since earliest days, humans have been exchanging religious ideas and practices. For millennia there was nothing special about the spread of religion; it diffused through intergroup contact in the same way as did new ways to weave or to make pottery. Even with the advent of cities, religion did not become the focus of any special effort to proselytize. From time to time, a priest or two probably pursued new followers, and individuals often recommended a particular god or rite to others. But since no one supposed that there was only one valid religion or only one true God, there were no missionaries.¹ Nor was there really such a thing as conversion.

In a religious context populated by many gods, to accept a new god usually does not involve discarding an old one. As the celebrated Arthur Darby Nock pointed out, within polytheism new gods are merely "supplements rather than alternatives."² Nock suggested that the word conversion is stretched beyond any useful meaning if it is applied to such relatively trivial actions. Instead, the term should be reserved for the formation of a new commitment across the boundaries of major religious traditions. For example, a shift from polytheism to Judaism, to Christianity, or to Islam is a conversion. So is a shift from one of the monotheistic traditions to another, or (rarely) from one of these traditions to polytheism. However, a shift in patronage from one god of a pantheon to another is not conversion, but reaffliation. The same is true of shifts within the boundaries of a monotheistic tradition, as from Methodist to Baptist, from Orthodox to Reformed, or from Sunni to Shi'ite--these too are acts of reaffliation. In contrast, missionaries are those who seek converts, who attempt to get others to shift from one tradition to another.³ Some people serve as part-time, 'amateur' missionaries. Others are full-time 'professionals.' But either sort of missionary is produced only within monotheism.

Even so, not just any sort of monotheism produces missionaries, especially the rank-and-file missionaries on which real success depends. For example, once Christianity became safely ensconced as the Roman state church, its missionary activities very rapidly decayed.⁴ Likewise, what probably was the first-ever appearance of monotheism--in Egypt during the thirteenth century bce*--did not produce rank-and-file missionaries, and probably very few sincere professional missionaries either. Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (who adopted the name Akhenaten) attempted to establish worship of an invisible, omnipotent One True God. But he did it by edict and force--by creating a self-sufficient, state-supported religion and by attempting to suppress the other temples. Upon his death, the priests of the discarded gods . . .

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