The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion

by Rodney Stark

conversion is primarily about bringing one’s religious behavior into alignment with that of one’s friends and relatives, not about encountering attractive doctrines. Put more formally: people tend to convert to a religious group when their social ties to members outweigh their ties to outsiders who might oppose the conversion, and this often occurs before a convert knows much about what the group believes.

conversion primarily is an act of conformity. But then, so is nonconversion. In the end it is a matter of the relative strength of social ties pulling the individual toward or away from a group.

To convert someone, you must be or become their close and trusted friend. Consequently, when someone converts to a new religion, then they usually seek to convert their friends and relatives, and consequently conversion tends to proceed through social networks.

The doctrine of divine accommodation holds that God’s communications with humans are always limited to their current capacity to comprehend. As St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote in the fourth century, God is so “far above our nature and inaccessible to all approach” that he, in effect, speaks to us in baby talk, thereby giving “to our human nature what is it capable of receiving.”41

At the time Christianity arose “men were looking in certain directions and couched their religious aspirations and beliefs in certain terms. Christianity spoke the language which they understood and set its theology and its ritual in the forms which to its own generation seemed natural.... [T]he Gospel [could not] have won its way if it had not found an echo in the religious searchings and even the religious beliefs of the time.”42

Contrary to prevailing sociological dogmas, religious movements typically are launched by the privileged classes.

Women were especially drawn to Christianity because it offered them a life that was so greatly superior to the life they otherwise would have led.

Thus, by the time of the First Crusade, Christendom had been fighting a defensive war with Islam for more than 450 years!

In any event, there was no “fall” into “Dark Ages.” Instead, once freed of the bondage of Rome, Europe separated into hundreds of independent “statelets.”16 In many of these societies progress and increased production became profitable, and that ushered in “one of the great innovative eras of mankind,” as technology was developed and put into use “on a scale no civilization had previously known.”17 In fact, it was during the “Dark Ages” that Europe took the great technological and intellectual leap forward that put it ahead of the rest of the world.18 How could historians have so misrepresented things? In part, the notion that Europe fell into the “Dark Ages” was a hoax perpetrated by very antireligious intellectuals such as Voltaire and Gibbon, who were determined to claim that theirs was the era of “Enlightenment.” Another factor was that intellectuals too often have no interest in anything but literary matters. It is quite true that after the fall of Rome, educated Europeans did not write nearly as elegant Latin as had the best Roman writers. For many, that was sufficient cause to regard this as a backward time. In addition, during this era only limited attention was paid to classical thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, and that too was taken as proof of widespread ignorance. Another factor contributing to the myth of the “Dark Ages” is that in this era there no longer were large cities having hundreds of thousands of residents, as had ancient Rome and Alexandria.19 I...

As the distinguished medievalist Warren Hollister (1930–1997) put it in his presidential address to the Pacific Historical Association, “to my mind, anyone who believes that the era that witnessed the building of Chartres Cathedral and the invention of parliament and the university was ‘dark’ must be mentally retarded—or at best, deeply, deeply, ignorant.”60

Long before the fifteenth century, every educated European, including Roman Catholic prelates, knew the earth was round.2 Sphere was the title of the most popular medieval textbook on astronomy, written early in the thirteenth century. The opposition Columbus encountered was not about the shape of the earth, but about the fact that he was wildly wrong about the circumference of the globe. He estimated it was about 2,800 miles from the Canary Islands to Japan. In reality it is about 14,000 miles. His opponents knew how far it was and opposed his voyage on grounds that Columbus and his men would all die at sea.

Rather than being some obscure Pole, Copernicus received a superb education at the best Italian universities of the time: Bologna, Padua, and Ferrara. The idea that the earth circles the sun did not come to him out of the blue; he was taught the essential fundamentals leading to the heliocentric model of the solar system by his Scholastic professors. What Copernicus added was not a leap, but the implicit next step in a long line of discovery and innovation stretching back for centuries.

This record of systematic progress is why the distinguished historian of science I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003) noted that “the idea that a Copernican revolution in science occurred goes counter to the evidence... and is the invention of later historians.”10 Most of Cohen’s sophisticated colleagues agree.11 Copernicus added a small step forward in a long process of normal science, albeit one having immense polemical and philosophical implications. It should be noted, too, that the scholars involved in this long process were not rebel secularists. Not only were they devout Christians; they were clergy—most of them were bishops and there even was a cardinal among them. And one more thing, they all were embedded in the great Scholastic universities.

In 1315 Mondino de’Luzzi is known to have performed a human dissection in front of an audience of students and faculty at the University of Bologna. Soon human dissections were being conducted at all the Italian universities. By 1391 the first one was conducted in Spain, and the first in Vienna took place in 1404.15 By midcentury, dissection was a customary part of anatomy classes all across Europe. In 1504, Copernicus took part in human dissections during his brief enrollment in medical courses at the University of Padua.

Many societies pursued alchemy, but only in Christian Europe did it lead to chemistry; many societies developed extensive systems of astrology, but only in Europe was astrology transformed into scientific astronomy.

In most of the rest of Europe there were printers only in the largest cities, but in Germany there were printers even in many of the smaller towns. Hence, in Germany, books and pamphlets did not need to be transported long distances—most of Luther’s writings were available locally as soon as the enterprising printer had obtained a copy elsewhere. In one famous incident, a copy of one of Luther’s tracts was stolen from the printer’s shop in Wittenberg and appeared in print in Nuremberg before the Wittenberg edition came out.

FINALLY, I HAVE TRIED to bring some of the pivotal moments in the Christian journey to life and to expose many falsifications and errors in the traditional tellings. In closing, here are a few of the points I hope readers will consider and remember: • The first generation of the Jesus Movement consisted of a tiny and fearful minority existing amid a Palestinian environment abundant in zealots willing to assassinate even high priests for not being sufficiently orthodox and pious—let alone willing to tolerate Jews who claimed the messiah had come. • The mission to the Jews probably was quite successful: large numbers of Jews in the Diasporan communities outside Palestine probably did convert to Christianity. • Christianity was not a religion based on the slaves and lowest classes of Romans, but was particularly attractive to the privileged. Jesus himself may have been from a wealthy background. • Christian mercy had such profound worldly consequences that Christians even outlived their pagan neighbors. • In a Roman world quite short of women, women greatly outnumbered men among the early Christians. This occurred in part because Christians did not “discard” female infants and Christian women did not have a substantial mortality rate from abortions done in a world without antibiotics or even knowledge of germs. It also occurred because women were more likely than men to convert. • Paganism was not quickly stamped out by a triumphant and intolerant Christianity, but disappeare...