Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 39

Were Christians Statistically Insignificant in the First 200 years?

I return now to Roman historian Keith Hopkins’s fascinating and influential article “Christian Number and Its Implications.”   As I pointed out, for the sake of his article, and after checking it out for plausibility, Hopkins accepts the calculations of Rodney Stark that if Christianity started with 1000 believers in the year 40 CE, and ended [...]

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Exaggerating the Numbers of Early Christians

I have started discussing the fascinating article by Keith Hopkins, “Christian Number and Its Implications” (see my last post).   After discussing some of the problems with knowing how to “count” Christians (i.e., who counts as a Christian), he reflects for a bit on the problems presented to us by our sources of information.   The basic [...]

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New Insights into the New Testament 2024: A Conference you DON’T Want to Miss!!

In case you haven't heard, there is a very excieting event coming up that surely *anyone* connected to the blog will be deeply interested in: a two-day remote Bible conference for non-scholars, called “New Insights into the New Testament,” consisting of ten lectures (each with a live Q&A), on the Life and Letters of Paul, [...]

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If You’re Counting Christians, Who Counts as a Christian?

When I first started thinking about the the rise and spread of Christianity, I was particularly struck by an article written by a prominent and deservedly acclaimed British historian, Keith Hopkins, a long-time professor at Cambridge University.  It was called “Christian Number and Its Implication,” and it appeared in the Journal of Early Christian Studies [...]

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How Many Christians Were There in 100 CE? 150? 250? 300?

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 [...]

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How Many Early Christians Were There and When? Crunchin’ the Numbers

One scholar (Rodney Stark, mentioned in my previous post) calculated the rate of growth of early Christianity to be about 40% per decade from the very beginning to about the time of the conversion of Constantine.  There is nothing implausible about a religion growing that quickly per se; the Mormon church did for most of [...]

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How Fast Did Early Christianity Grow? Doing the Math

One of my favorite parts of my book Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018) is the Appendix, where I explain how to figure out how quickly early Christianity grew.  Did thousands of people convert in the first months of the religion (as in the book of Acts)?  Were there millions of Christians by the second [...]

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Major Change on the Blog! Announcing our New CEO: Jen Olmos

I am very pleased to announce a major development with the blog that will move us forward to new heights as we continue to strive to make scholarship on the Bible and early Christianity available to a wide range of non-scholars, and in doing so (especially!) to raise money for charities dealing with hunger, homelessness, [...]

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The Conversion of the Emperor Constantine

Constantine was the first Christian emperor.  In my book The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), I devote two chapters to how, when, and why he converted (and if he did!), and to what difference it made to the world.  Here is a taste of it for those of you interested in checking out the [...]

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Heartache and Loss: When a Religion is Destroyed

Most of us have never reflected on how awful, difficult, and heart-breaking it must have been for many, many people in the Roman world see their cherished and meaningful religions destroyed in front of their eyes by the ongoing triumph of Christianity.  But it's worth thinking about.  Here is how I discuss it in the [...]

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