The Triumph of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept The World

Bart D. Ehrman, “The Triumph of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept The World,” Simon & Schuster, 2018, 294 pp.

The author, Bart Ehrman, is no longer an evangelical, nor even a Christian; he considers himself an historian. It appears that he educated himself right out of being a believer, not an uncommon path.  In 32 years, he’s managed to write or edit more than 30 books and is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.   Ehrman’s outreach to a popular audience is needed, if only because throughout history average Christians have proved oddly unwilling to dig into the particularities of their faith, beyond familiarizing themselves with a few tentpole doctrines. Ehrman is not trying to convince Christians of the errors of their ways—he is only providing historical context for what really happened.

In “The Triumph of Christianity,” Ehrman describes Constantine’s 4^th century Edict of Milan as the Western world’s first known government document to proclaim the freedom of belief. At the time, Ehrman notes, “Christians probably made up only 7 to 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire.” A mere hundred years later, half the empire’s “60 million inhabitants claimed allegiance to the Christian tradition,” and so ended Christian support for freedom of belief.

Very little about the historical triumph of Christianity makes sense. When Constantine converted, the New Testament didn’t formally exist and Christians disagreed on basic theological concepts, among them how Jesus and God were related—this disagreement led to Arianism.  Ehrman rejects the idea that Constantine’s conversion made much difference; the empire, he writes, would most likely have turned Christian in time without him. So how did Christianity triumph? To put it plainly, Christianity was something new on this earth. It wasn’t closed to women. It was so concerned with questions of social welfare (healing the sick, caring for the poor) that it embedded them into its doctrines. And while there were plenty of henotheist pagans (that is, people who worshiped one god while not denying the validity of others), Christianity went far beyond henotheism’s hesitant claim upon ultimate truth. It was an exclusivist, evangelist, faith that foreclosed — was designed to foreclose — devotion to all other deities. Yet it was different from Judaism, which was just as exclusivist but crucially lacked a missionary impulse as well as the circumcision requirement that was a major turn-off.

Christian believers go from roughly 1,000 in CE 60 to 40,000 in CE 150, to 2.5 million in CE 300. Ehrman allows that these raw numbers may look “incredible. But in fact, they are simply the result of an exponential curve.” At a certain point, math took over. (Mormonism, which has been around less than 200 years, has seen comparable rates of growth.)

My Notes:

Pg. 4f:  The ancient triumph of Christianity proved to be the single greatest cultural transformation our world has ever seen.  Without it the entire history of Late Antiquity would not have happened as it did.  We would never have had the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, or modernity as we know it.  …Christianity changed the way (western) people look at the world and choose to live in it. 

Pg. 36:  The First Council of Nicaea, (325), the first ecumenical council of the Christian church, met in Nicaea (now İznik, Turkey). It was called by the emperor Constantine I, an unbaptized catechumen, who presided over the opening session and took part in the discussions. He hoped a general council of the church would solve the problem created in the Eastern Church by Arianism, a heresy first proposed by Arius of Alexandria that affirmed that Christ is not divine but a created being. Pope Sylvester I did not attend the council but was represented by legates.  (The Nicene Creed came out of this meeting and Christ was ruled to be the son of God).

Pg. 43ff:  Paul was born a Jew, probably in Tarsus, and his native language was Greek. He was the most important Christian convert of all.  The idea of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection was around before Paul arrived on the scene (so Christianity cannot claim Paul as the originator).  Paul’s significance is in his belief that salvation was not tied to explicit Jewish identity but was also available to Gentiles.  Also, Gentiles did not have to be subject to Jewish rituals, especially circumcision.

Pg. 72:  One can argue that without Paul Christianity might not have happened.  Paul is so significant because he came to believe that the death and resurrection of Jesus brought a salvation that was not tied to explicit Jewish identity; the salvation of Christ was efficacious for gentiles as well as Jews; that converts did not first have to convert to Judaism and begin to follow the prescriptions of Jewish law and custom. 

Pg. 81:  Romans would frequently assimilate the gods of the people they conquered.  This remarkable openness of religious perspectives made it possible for conquered people to continue living their lives with less cultural disruption.  In the Roman world, there was no such thing as conversion.  People just added more gods to their pantheons. 

Pg. 86:  The Christians insistence that there is only one God is the main logic behind the Roman persecution of the Christians.  Ancient religion was principally concerned with averting the gods’ anger and anger was almost always aroused by neglect.  Because Christians refused to worship the gods, there was hell to pay.  It is in this polytheistic world that Christianity began and this book tries to explain how that could be. (P. 104…)

Pg. 88:  Modern Western monotheisms are all religions of the book: the Torah, the New Testament, and the Qur’an.  There was nothing like them in the Roman world.

Pg. 92:  In the second half of the twentieth century, scholars came to realize that it was difficult to draw a clear and definitive line between practices one might call magical and others that might be called religious.  Magic involves many of the same techniques and strives to attain many of the same ends as religion. 

Pg. 105f:  Why did Christianity succeed?  Older scholarship was virtually unified on the question.  Christianity filled the spiritual vacuum created by the collapse of paganism, which fell under its own weight. 

Pg. 170f:  The author takes statistics estimating the growth of Christianity from Rodney Stark’s popular book: “The Rise of Christianity” remembering the entire population of the Roman Empire at this time was approximately 60 million.

30 CE – 20 Christians

60 CE – 1,000-1500 Christians

100 CE – 7,000-10,000 Christians

150 CE – 30,000-40,000 Christians

200 CE – 140,000-170,000 Christians

250 CE – 600,000-700,000 Christians

300 CE – 2.5 million-3.5 million Christians

312 CE – 3.5 million-4 million Christians

400 CE – 25 million-35 million Christians

Pg. 178:  The idea that Christianity was an illegal religion under constant surveillance by a state apparatus that inflicted martyrdom on many thousands of believers, forcing the church underground into the Roman catacombs—all this is more the stuff of Hollywood than of history. Christianity was not declared illegal in the empire before the middle of the third century.  There were isolated local persecutions but nothing empire wide.

Pg. 189:  Not revering the city or state gods meant not being faithful to the city or state.  It was the ancient equivalent of refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance. But it was far more dangerous as the gods could harm the city or state.  Christian’s insistence on the exclusivity of their God was what caused the dissension.

Pg. 198:  In 64 CE a fire started in the Roman circus, spread to surrounding neighborhoods, and raged for six days.  It eventually destroyed Nero’s palace on the Palatine Hill and completely leveled seven of the fourteen districts.  It has been suspected that Nero was behind the entire episode so he could rebuild the city as he wanted.   Nero used the Christians as his scapegoat.

Pg. 240f:  Constantine, contrary to popular belief, did not make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.  At the time only four million of the sixty million in the Empire were Christians.  He was content to practice Christianity himself, to support and promote the activities of the church, to intervene in ecclesiastical affairs when issues of unity arose, to fund the building of churches, and to provide social and economic advantages to Christian clergy.  Probably the most important thing he did for Christianity was to see that his sons were raised in the Christian tradition.  (Of course, he did execute his eldest son and then his son Julian tried to reimpose paganism on the empire but died after only 19 months in office.)

Pg. 267:  In John 8:42-44, Jesus declares the ‘the Jews” are not the children of God but offspring of Satan, murderers, and liars.  By the fourth century, Christians in charge of the empire began acting out this hateful intolerance of Jews, leading to the ugly history of Christian anti-Judaism still seen in parts of the world today.

Pg. 274f:  No century of Christian history was more transformative than the fourth.  In 303 CE, the Roman emperor Diocletian declared war on the Christian church and instigated the most massive persecution it ever endured.  In 312 CE, the emperor Constantine himself converted to become a Christian and his co-ruler Licinius issued a declaration of complete toleration for all religions, pagan and Christian.  In 325 CE, Constantine ruled over a council of bishops at Nicaea called to resolve the deep but nuance theological disputes of the day.  In 341 CE, the Christian emperor Constantine II issued the first legislation banning pagan cultic practices.  In 361 CE, the pagan Julian ascended the Imperial throne and spent nineteen months attempting to suppress Christianity and reinstate paganism.  In 363 CE, the Christian emperor Jovian replaced him, and from that time on there would never again be a pagan ruler of the empire.  In 392 CE, Christianity became the state religion.  By the end of the fourth century, about half the population was Christian.