In the mid-third century, while the oracles still spoke and Apollo answered his clients, villagers in the Arsinoite nome of Egypt were troubled by questions of a different nature. When God brought the world to an end after six thousand years, would they enjoy a thousand years of fleshly pleasure in their own bodies, or was the reign of the saints to be disembodied and less robust? The question had divided and split their communities. A local bishop had argued the case for a fleshly resurrection and based it fairly on the Book of Revelation. He had published his argument as a challenge to those teachers who turned the text into allegory, and after his death, his argument had lived on, winning credit among the teachers of the local Christians. Perhaps it would have survived indefinitely, had it not encountered a tireless visitor. When Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, came down to the district on other business, he heard the argument, disliked it and summoned the “elders and teachers” in the presence of Christian “volunteers.” They brought him their bishop’s book “like some weapon or unassailable wall,” Dionysius recalled, and for three whole days, from morning to night, he took its statements one by one and proved that they were unfounded. Finally, the leader of their doctrine stood forward and declared himself convinced. The contrary view was routed; the hearers relaxed in agreement: there could never, they all accepted, be scope for sex after death.1
This incident takes us far from the pagan cults and beliefs which we have confronted. Thinking pagans had worried more about the beginning of the world than about its possible end. There was no question of the body being “resurrected”: the facts were obvious to anyone who opened a grave and saw bare bones. There had been no three-day debates, no refutations of views which were “heretical.” No pagan philosopher had travelled from his city to small townships in order to establish the meaning of Greek texts for the local residents. These villages, wrote Dionysius, had been torn “for a long while by schisms and apostasies of entire churches”: schism, like heresy, was entirely alien to the pagan religiousness which we have examined. The visiting bishop, Dionysius, was a highly educated teacher who knew school philosophy and the art of rhetoric. Yet he responded to the villagers’ interest. He commented graciously on their “love of truth,” their “sensible stand,” their “following of an argument,” qualities, he said, at which he had “marvelled enormously” in such people. In these communities, Christian doctrine had touched and divided simple men and women whom higher education never reached. To learn philosophy, these people would have needed money and the time to migrate to Alexandria. To learn the Christian faith, they had only to attend to their local elders and teachers, who preached for no fee in their village. If they went astray, a great Alexandrian bishop, visiting from the city, might spend three days correcting their errors.
On this occasion, they were talked out of a belief which had a long and respectable history.2 Initially, it had been a Jewish belief, part of the various chronologies for the world’s ending. On early authority, an elaborate “saying” of Jesus had been quoted in support of a fleshly millennium, although the Gospels never preserved its words. In the 130S, the philosophically minded Christian Justin defended the notion vigorously, as did Irenaeus a generation later. Yet the belief still troubled fellow Christians. Dionysius explained away the plain words of Revelation as an allegory, and when Irenaeus’s tract against heresy was translated into Latin in the early fifth century, the translator omitted the millennium from its text. To many thinking Christians it had become an embarrassment.
Those who direct attention to the end of the world invite dispute over its nature and disappointment over its timing. In a brilliant image, Paul had compared the End with a mother’s birth pang. The End, his image implied, was inevitable in a world already pregnant with its own destruction, but nobody could know exactly when it would strike. When his converts in Thessalonica began to be persecuted, they mistook their suffering for the first tribulations of which Paul had spoken. Forged letters, as if from the Apostle, encouraged their mistake. There were other false alarms in the following centuries, and a constant spate of Christian forgeries, but none was so tragic as these, the first on record. The End, meanwhile, was elusive. “We have heard these things even in the days of our fathers,” Christians were already saying in the 90s, “and look, we have grown old and none of them has happened to us.” In the 130s, Justin addressed a book to the “most cultured and philosophic” Emperor, Pius, in which he greatly enlarged the world’s time span: God, he explained, was delaying the End because he wished to see the Christians spread throughout the world. By 200, Tertullian admitted that fellow Christians were praying that the End would not occur in their lifetime. By the 250s, the birth pang took a novel turn. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, explained to fellow bishops in North Africa that they should not be too depressed by the evidence of Christian misbehaviour. It was itself the harsh prelude and a proof that the End was about to break.3
Persecutions still revived an immediate hope or fear, but by the mid-third century most people considered the End to be beyond their own horizon. Jesus had denounced all attempts to know the “times and seasons,” and Christian leaders had rejected the various arts of futurology. Yet the End was soon given a date with the help, once again, of contemporary Jewish traditions.4
One day, the Psalms had said, was “like a thousand” and the Creation had lasted for six days. The world, then, would persist for six thousand years, to be graced by the seventh day of rest, the thousand years’ reign of the Saints on earth. When, though, would the six thousand years end? Had they finished already, or was there still time to run? There was no limit to the evidence, if people looked carefully at Scripture.5 Hippolytus, an elder at Rome, greeted the third century with an array of ingenious arguments. When carefully studied, the measurements of the Jews’ Ark of the Covenant amounted to five and a half cubits, the symbol of five and a half thousand years. Had not John also written that the birth of Christ occurred “about the sixth hour,” halfway through a day? Five kingdoms had already fallen, according to Revelation, and amounted to five thousand years: “half a day,” to the Lord, was a further five hundred. When the “incorruptible ark” of Jesus’s body replaced the old ark of the Jews, five and a half thousand years had therefore passed and a further five hundred remained before the End in 500 A.D. This chronology was not without a purpose. An alternative dating had fixed the six thousandth year in 202, the occasion of Hippolytus’s calculations. The year caused some false starts, but when it passed without further event, hopes were deferred to the alternative, 500. To Christians of the mid-third century the End had receded over the horizon.
While the End refused to begin, where were Christians to be found? The scenes in the Arsinoite nome raise basic questions of their class and language, geography and distribution. Bishop Dionysius preached in Greek, yet many of the villagers knew Coptic: he referred to elders and teachers in the “villages,” yet he himself came from a great city. Was his audience the more prosperous Greek population from the nome’s bigger townships, mere “villages” to an Alexandrian’s eye, or did they also derive from the humbler, more uniform “villages” which we know from excavations and which were to contain Christian churches by the age of Constantine, fifty years later? The area was not isolated. In the 260S, shortly after Dionysius’s bishopric, we have papyrus fragments of a letter which a well-placed Christian had written from the city of Rome to “brethren” in the Arsinoite nome.6 It approves their purchase of linen cloths, befitting the linen workshops which we know in the town of Arsinoë. It refers to a “father” and a man in Alexandria who was to hold the brethren’s proceeds from sales of the linen. Another man would hold money in Alexandria to refund the author’s expenses. This three-cornered business links a Christian visitor in Rome with Christians in the Arsinoite nome: the two men in Alexandria bear the same names as a mid-third-century bishop and his successor and are probably none other than these famous Church leaders. The text reminds us what wide contacts Christians from the area enjoyed soon after Dionysius’s visit. It is characteristic of our evidence for the presence of Christianity: mysterious, oblique, yet attached to the endless travel of people, goods and ideas in the Roman Empire and its areas of contact.
The number and identity of Christians before Constantine are disputed subjects because most of the relevant evidence is of this type. We have scraps of information which remind us of the possibilities, and in this chapter, I will pick and choose among them, citing the scraps which seem to be most significant. The broad question of scale is the most difficult to decide, because we have only one statistic.7 A staff of 154 ministers of varying rank (including fifty-two exorcists) and “more than fifteen hundred widows and poor people” were said by the bishop of Rome to be supported by Rome’s Christians in the year 251. The statistic does at least derive from a letter which the bishop wrote himself. From these figures, Gibbon guessed that the Christians in Rome numbered 50,000 in a city of a million inhabitants and suggested a general ratio of one Christian to every twenty pagans. The guess was too high, not least because widows and the poor were strongly represented in the Church’s membership. Even if the figure is more or less right, we cannot project a total for Rome, the capital, onto other populations in the Empire. Rome was an exceptional city, a magnet for immigrants and visitors, where Christians had rapidly put down roots. Elsewhere, Christians were distributed patchily, if at all: in the mid-third century, there was still no bishop and no church in Salona (Split) and before the 250s, no Christians in Libya or in certain villages in the Mareotic district, connected by a road to Alexandria, which they almost adjoined.8
When describing their religion’s success, Christian authors, from Acts onwards, were quite uncritical in their use of words like “all” and “everywhere.” This habit lends particular weight to the one contrary assertion: in the 240s, Origen, the Christian intellectual, did admit that Christians were only a tiny fraction of the world’s inhabitants. We can support his remark with two general arguments, one from silence, one from archaeology.
Although we have so much incidental material for life in the Empire, the inscriptions, pagan histories, texts and papyri make next to no reference to Christians before 250: the two fullest histories, written in the early third century, do not even mention them.9 If Christians were really so numerous, we could also expect some evidence of meeting places which could hold so many worshippers. At this date, there were no church buildings on public ground, yet the tradition of regular attendance at services was very strong. Christians met in enlarged private houses or rooms.10 There might be several meeting places in a city, but the space for each congregation cannot have been large. Around 200, a fine Christian novel imagined how one Theophilus, a rich patron in Antioch, had to send for the builders and enlarge his reception rooms as soon as Christians entered his house and started to multiply. The scene was plausibly imagined, but how large was the increase? At Dura-Europos,11 out east on the Euphrates, this expansion can be followed on site. The Christians began to use a decent private house which had recently been built round a courtyard with rooms of fashionable pagan decoration, including a frieze of the god Dionysus’s exploits. It may be right, then, to place their earliest meeting place elsewhere in the building, in a small room off the courtyard which was able to hold some thirty people. During the 240s, a bigger hall for sixty people or so was being made down the courtyard’s west side by knocking two rooms into one, just as the Christian novel remarks. Perhaps the earlier room was now reserved for teaching while a small baptistery was equipped next door and decorated with symbolic paintings. The street door was marked with a red cross to signify a Christian “church house,” private, but with community uses.
At Dura, during the 240s, the space for a Christian meeting increased from a capacity of thirty persons to one of sixty. Members, no doubt, were impressed by their “great” advance. Statements by Christians about their “growth” should be read with a very critical eye for the figures from which they begin. The point is well made in a “biography” whose accuracy is beset with difficulties but whose taste for the miraculous is not in doubt. In the Christian Empire of the fifth century, we have various versions of a “life” of Porphyry, bishop of Gaza, which purports to be written by Mark, the deacon. Perhaps it was, in its original Syriac form, though the question is still open.12 On any view of its origins, the text was concerned to emphasize the wonders which amazed pagan Gaza between 392 and 420, eighty to a hundred years after Constantine’s conversion. A first miracle is said to have won 127 converts in the city, a second, 64; the Greek version of the text goes on to tell how later wonders brought another two hundred people to God. It is not too important for our purpose whether this text is historical: what matters is that its author thought this scale of conversion was suitably remarkable. Gaza was a staunch pagan city, but other places were not graced with stories of evident “signs and wonders.” If one or two hundred converts were an amazing harvest from a miracle, we can only wonder how many were won where miracles were less obliging.
Although Christians’ numbers are elusive, the volume of their writings is conspicuous. In the later second and third centuries, most of the best Greek and Latin literature which survives is Christian and much more has been lost. Its authors wrote largely for Christian readers, but we must not mistake eloquence for numerical strength. The general arguments still point in the other direction. To read these books is to attend to a small, but extremely articulate, minority.
It is one of this minority’s achievements that there are still so many histories of the Christians’ expansion and mission, but hardly a note of the people who tried being Christians, could not bear it and gave it up. Christians have made their history into a one-way avenue, with the further implication that “paganism” and Judaism were so gross that nobody would have wished to return to them. Yet c. 110, Pliny was greatly exercised by former Christians in his province of Bithynia and Pontus who had lapsed up to twenty years earlier. It was because of them that he wrote to Trajan and acquired the famous rescript which governed the Christians’ standing before the law. He does not tell us what modern historians assume, that these Christians had only lapsed for fear of persecution. We know of individuals who lapsed for other reasons: the well-born Peregrinus, who became a Cynic philosopher; Ammonius, who taught Origen his philosophy; perhaps Aquila, who is said to have been baptized but returned to the Jewish faith and retranslated the Greek Scriptures, excluding Christian misinterpretations; and the young Emperor Julian, who left Christianity for Platonist philosophy and cult.13 We do not hear of anyone who left Christianity for simple paganism without any accompanying philosophy: perhaps this silence is significant and a lapse from Christianity did always lead to a favour for some systematic belief. Much the most attractive belief was full-fledged Judaism. We hear very little of Jews who became Christians after the Apostolic age, but much more of Christians who flirted with Jewish teaching: the shift was especially easy for women, who could convert without the pain of being circumcised. The acts of Church councils in the Christian Empire bring the continuing problem of these Christians back into view, long after Christianity had ceased to be persecuted. Histories of Christianity still tell a story of unimpeded growth, but the picture was always more complex at its edges. There were losses as well as gains, although Christianity, like all growing “movements,” had more to say about the gains. By no means everybody who started to take an interest in Christianity “became” a Christian or died as one. The long process of “becoming” and the continuing losses at the margin are further arguments for keeping the Christians’ numbers in perspective.
Nonetheless, Christians spread and increased: no other cult in the Empire grew at anything like the same speed, and even as a minority, the Christians’ success raises serious questions about the blind spots in pagan cult and society. The clearest impressions of their growth derive from the Church historian Eusebius, who was writing after Constantine’s conversion, and from the maps which can be drawn of Christian churches in North Africa: these maps are based on the list of bishops who attended an important Church council in the year 256.14 The council’s acts survive, although they do not give a complete list of the North African churches, as the bishops from certain areas did not attend the meeting.15
Eusebius has been most influential because he divided the Christians’ expansion into phases. The first surge, he believed, occurred with the Apostles’ mission, the second in the 180s, the third shortly before Constantine’s conversion. In this chapter, the second of these phases concerns us most. In the 180s, we do happen to know of Christians in more prominent places and there does seem to be a rise in the number of such people in Rome, Carthage and Alexandria.16 Perhaps Eusebius was overimpressed by mention of their names and assumed that numbers as a whole were growing: like us, he had no records or statistics on which to base his ideas of a widespread growth. However, an increase in prominent Christians is itself an interesting change and will need to be set in a broader context.
The idea of these phases of growth obscures a simpler question: was Christianity growing apace in the towns which it had reached in the age of St. Paul, not only growing among a few prominent people but advancing like an ever-rolling snowball among the anonymous majority, people who persevered and in due course were baptized? Or was it entering more towns, where it simply won some two hundred souls in the first ten years who intermarried, attended one or two little house-churches, chose a bishop and added another static Christian dot to the map? It is clear that numbers grew in Rome between Paul’s death and the long list of bishops and minor clerics in 251. In other large cities, Carthage or Alexandria, we should allow for a similar growth, although its rate and scale are elusive. Elsewhere, Christians scattered widely, and by itself, their diffusion would account for a general impression of their increase. In 256, two of the three secular provinces of North Africa had at least 130 bishops: when plotted on a map, they cover most of the known townships and often inhabit towns less than ten miles apart.17 This dense pattern of bishoprics is most remarkable, but it does not make the Christians into a local majority. Although it shows how widely their presence was scattered, this particular pattern may have arisen from aspects of their local history and organization. This fact, too, needs a context, but it need not be one of dramatic, continuing growth.
It is in terms of its scatter, rather than its density, that early Christianity can best be studied. Although there are many obscurities, there is just enough evidence to refine explanations, refute older theories and narrow the possible answers. There is a notable unevenness between the East, where we know a little, and the Latin West, where we know almost nothing. It has been suggested that in the West Christianity spread especially with traders from the Greek East, and that in North Africa it developed closely from the existing Jewish communities and then prospered through this strong Semitic heritage which was shared by the Punic-speaking population in the Roman province.18 Neither theory seems so convincing nowadays, although it is not clear how they should be replaced. We know next to nothing about the earliest Christians in Spain, Germany and Britain: in the 180s, Irenaeus of Lyons did refer to “settled” churches in Spain, Gaul and Germany as if they had been formally founded. Tertullian can hardly be trusted when he stated c. 200 that Christians were to be found among “all” German and northern tribes and that they existed in northern Britain beyond the reach of Roman rule. We can suspect, instead, that they were at least known in southern Britain, though the date and historicity of the first British “martyr,” St. Alban, are highly disputable.19
The theory of traders and Eastern migrants to the West encounters similar problems. It is in Rome and Lyons that we have evidence for Greek-speaking Christians with Greek names, and in Rome, certainly, the faith had arrived from the East before St. Paul. However, we do not know if these Greek Christians had already been converted before they came West or whether they were only converted after settling: the “traders” are not distinguishable. It has recently been argued that in Lyons, Christianity in fact arrived from Rome, not the Greek East, weakening the argument still further.20
In North Africa, the likeliest guess is that Christianity did reach the main city of Carthage with Greek-speaking migrants: later details of the Church’s liturgy support this Greek origin and do not conform to Roman practice.21 In the more western region of Mauretania, the Christians’ origins are much more obscure, and it has recently been suggested that here the churches looked to Rome, not Carthage or the East.22 Throughout the African region, the theory of a strong Jewish contact and legacy is still unproven. It touches on a great uncertainty. West of Rome, in North Africa, Gaul and Spain, there is no sound evidence that there were any settled communities of Jews at all in the Apostolic age. There are a few incidental hints that this silence is significant.23 It may well be that the Jews had in fact spread into the West before the wars with Rome wrecked their homeland in 70 and 135, but as yet, we cannot exclude the alternative, that Christians and Jews arrived in the West together, competing, if not for converts, at least for patrons and places of settlement. The idea of a strong Jewish legacy in African Christianity, appealing to Punic-speaking Semites,