Notes 
Notes CHAPTER 1
CONVERSION AND CHRISTIAN GROWTH
1. Paul Johnson makes the perceptive point that the Decian persecution, which began around the year 250, was a reaction to the fact that “Christians were now far more numerous” and that their numbers seemed to be increasing rapidly (1976:73).
2. Within the movement she was invariably referred to as “Miss.”
3. Reading the New Testament, especially the letters written by various apostles, one can easily conclude that almost from the start the Christian movement was a very large and flourishing undertaking. Thus when Peter includes in the salutation of his first epistle “the exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia,” the intended audience seems imposingly numerous. Indeed, in Romans 16, Paul names more than two dozen Christians to whom he sends his greetings. My colleague Michael Williams has sometimes asked students in his seminars about the total size of the intended audience for such letters. Invariably, students think it numbers into many thousands. In contrast, I calculate that there would only have been a total of between two thousand and three thousand Christians during the 60s, the decade during which Paul was executed and Peter was crucified. In defense of my projections we must note that whatever the size of the congregations in various cities at this time, they still held their services in private homes—even in Rome. Moreover, a brief return to my experiences with the Moonies may prove instructive here.
Early in the 1960s, after several years of missionizing in San Francisco, Miss Kim decided that the group needed to split into small mission teams, each taking on a new a city. She was concerned that members spent too much of their time with one another and that perhaps more fertile mission fields awaited elsewhere. So in twos and threes her young members struck out on their own—to Dallas, Denver, Berkeley, and elsewhere. And once her teams were established in their new cities, Miss Kim’s expectations were partially met as a trickle of new converts began to come in. Like Paul, Miss Kim wrote many letters—often devoting considerable space to matters of doctrine and interpretation. Moreover, Miss Kim’s letters abounded in greetings. Were I possessed of a selection of these letters, I think they would precisely compare with New Testament letters in terms of the apparent size of the audience. The following fictitious salutation is typical of Miss Kim’s correspondence as I remember it: To sister Ella, to brother Howard, to Dorothy visiting from Dallas, and to all who now partake of the Unification Church in San Jose, greetings in Father's name. But the fact is that there probably were not yet two hundred members in the whole United States when letters like that were being sent by Miss Kim. Ella, Howard, and Dorothy would have been the only Moonies in San Jose, since the partakers Miss Kim often referred to were not yet members, but only people willing to discuss religion with members.
CHAPTER 2
THE CLASS BASIS OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY
1. The most distinguished dissenter was the Yale historian Kenneth Scott Latourette (1937:109-110).
2. Albeit some Marxists still insist not only that Christianity was a proletarian movement, but that this remains the dominant scholarly view (cf. Gager 1975).
3. Unfortunately Arrington and Bitton, despite being devout Mormons, readily interpret the characterization of Mormon converts by their nineteenth-century enemies as scum and riffraff to mean that most Mormons were very poor. Presumably the great trek west caused serious financial losses and subsequent hardship for many Mormons, but that is not pertinent to their social origins and essential class position. Moreover, given where and when the Mormons began, the appropriate comparisons are to people in the immediate environment, which was the frontier, not Park Avenue.
4. I have limited the data to cult movements without ethnic ties. Hence Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Shintoists, Taoists, Bahaists, and Rastafarians were not included.
CHAPTER 5
THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN CHRISTIAN GROWTH
1. It should be noted that while secondary converts are often rather lukewarm about joining in the first place, once immersed in the group they often become very ardent.
2. I am indebted to Laurence R. Iannaccone for pointing out this feature of the King James Version.
3. See: Plato, Republic 5 (1941 ed.); Aristotle, Politics2, 7 (1986 ed.).
CHAPTER 6
CHRISTIANIZING THE URBAN EMPIRE: A QUANTITATIVE APPROACH
1. I began from the fact that both cities had been judged by Chandler and Fox as having fewer than 40,000 residents, else they would have been listed with the others. However, since each city often appears in lists of major cities for this period (cf. Grant 1970), it seems reasonable to suppose that they were not much smaller than 40,000. I found the population of Athens estimated to be 28,000 in the second century by J. C. Russell (1958) in his classic work. Because Athens was in a period of slow decline, it seemed reasonable to guess its population as a bit larger in 100. Hence my figure of 30,000. Since Salamis had an economic boom during the first century (Smith 1857), it seemed safe to estimate it as a bit larger than Athens, which is the basis of my figure of 35,000.
CHAPTER 7
URBAN CHAOS AND CRISIS: THE CASE OF ANTIOCH
1. Max Weber thought it “highly improbable” that Christianity “could have developed as it did outside of an urban” setting (1961:1140).
CHAPTER 8
THE MARTYRS: SACRIFICE AS RATIONAL CHOICE
1. Albeit the notion of preference schedules is only implicit.
2. For a formal derivation of these propositions, see Iannaccone 1992.
3. Many historians familiar with the book When Prophesy Fails (Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter 1956) may wonder why I have not relied on the cognitive dissonance explanation of this phenomenon. Briefly, cognitive dissonance theory predicts that when persons with a strongly held belief are confronted with evidence disconfirming that belief, they typically respond, not by dropping the belief, but by making vigorous efforts to convince others that the belief is true. In the initial application of this proposition to religious prophecies, Festinger and his associates claimed to have observed a small occult group before, during, and after the failure of their prediction that aliens aboard flying saucers would arrive to take the group to other worlds. When this failed to take place, it is claimed that the group redoubled their efforts to spread their message. There have been a number of subsequent tests of the proposition, none of which found the predicted outcome. Moreover, recent critics of the initial publication have questioned whether any such increase in missionizing efforts occurred in that instance either (Bainbridge, in press). What seems entirely clear is that this group would never have formed or eagerly anticipated the arrival of the aliens had the woman whose prophecy of this event appeared in the local press not attracted many strangers who showed up, unannounced, at her door expressing their absolute belief in her prophecy and in her prophetic powers. All of these “converts” were social scientists.
CHAPTER 9
OPPORTUNITY AND ORGANIZATION
1. The following indicates the dates by which Isis was established in various cities:
200 B.C.E.—Alexandria, Memphis, Ephesus, Athens, Smyrna
100 B.C.E.—Syracuse, Corinth, Pergamum
1 C.E.—Antioch, Rome
200 C.E.—Carthage, London
300 C.E.—Mediolanum (Milan)
Never—Gadir (Cadiz), Damascus, Edessa, Apamea
Adequate data are lacking for the other cities.
2. Defined as the degree of cultural diversity, the number and variety of distinctive subcultures.
3. The very rapid growth of Soka Gakkai in Japan gives clear evidence of this. Unlike other Japanese religions, it demands exclusive commitment from its followers. The success of the Mormon Church in Asia is also pertinent.
CHAPTER 10
A BRIEF REFLECTION ON VIRTUE
1. So long as the doctrines are not fundamentalist, than which all doctrines are deemed to be better—a view I do not share.
2. Carlin A. Barton (1993) has made an intriguing attempt to do so.