As Christian communities established themselves as recognizable communities in cities, they often did not endear themselves to people. This was not because they lived austere lifestyles which made a painful contrast to a world of debauchery and luxury around them; that is a later Christian caricature which ignores the austere and world-denying character of much Greek thought in the early empire. Nor was it because they indulged in much public proclamation or systematic soliciting of converts, in the manner of modern Evangelicals. After the descriptions of such activity in the New Testament,
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