There are many, many stories in this book and the reader might wonder: which was correct? It is important to state at the beginning that this book will take no position on this question. It will absolutely not attempt to adjudicate over which of these stories – of murderous Jesuses, or Marys with miraculous powers – is more plausible. These texts are not of interest to the historian because they are believable – all break the laws of nature merrily and frequently – but because they were (and in some cases still are) believed. To dismiss them because their theology or message seems implausible would make this a work of theology, not history.
The reader might also wonder which of these narratives, in the beginning, was more popular and important. These are hard questions. Many of these stories would go on to be very popular indeed: some would be read across several continents for several centuries. But their popularity took time to develop. This book looks at the early stages in the evolution of a religion and – as in the early evolution of any species – the absolute numbers involved are tiny.
Simply because a species becomes all-conquering does not mean it was always so. The gospel narratives known today were popular from the beginning. But so too were others. Evolution is unpredictable. At times, the ancestors of Homo sapiens teetered close to extinction. The race, after all, is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Time and chance happen to them all. The religions that humans have embraced have risen and fallen with similar rapidity and unpredictability. In the first century AD, it would not have been immediately obvious which form of which ancient religion would eventually outcompete all the others. Of course religious believers – then and now – would beg to differ. They usually know which religion is best: their own. The early followers of Christ knew this clearly. But then so too did many followers of Zeus and Mithras. To the disinterested observer, the matter is much less clear.
Which of these Christian stories was more popular? The simple answer is that, in the earliest years, none was very popular at all. One (very rough) estimate puts the total number of Christians in the year 100 AD at around seven thousand. The number of fully literate Christians able to read these stories has also been estimated and it is smaller still: perhaps under a hundred. This is clearly a wild guess (or in academic parlance, a heuristic) but it is telling nonetheless.
Few, in the first centuries of Christianity, would have been able to confidently predict which of its stories would win out over all the others. But eventually, time and chance had their say and the race was won by some of them. We know those stories, still, today. This book is the story of the others.
Where possible, this book will avoid using such freighted terms as ‘heretic’ and ‘heretical’ and ‘orthodox’ and ‘pagan’. When they are used, they will often be in inverted commas – though, since context often applies its own inverted commas, and since relentless use of quotation marks can start to feel fussy, they will not always be used; if they are not there, they can and should merely be assumed.
This book does not touch on early Christianity’s relationship to Judaism. An excellent introduction to this topic remains Géza Vermes’s Jesus the Jew. Nor does this book touch, except tangentially, on the early Church’s ferocious rhetoric against Jewish people, nor the anti-Jewish laws and edicts that Christian rulers often passed and enforced against Jewish people in these centuries, for that vast topic would deserve a book to itself. However, for those who are interested, reading the Theodosian Code is not a bad place to start.