Reddit reviews The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries

This is a great book about just that. A sociologist was interested in how quickly Christianity spread. He started out skeptical, but actually became a believer as he researched it.

https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Christianity-Marginal-Religious-Centuries/dp/0060677015

• I cannot comment specifically on all crucifixions throughout the Roman Empire, but I can talk about the one's done near Judea, Mesopotamia, Egypt and where present day Turkey and Syria are. Here, crucifixions were almost always public (I say "almost" simply to show that there could have been exceptions, but from every case and situation I've ever seen, it was always public)
  
• Jesus' followers absolutely would have been allowed to stay and watch, however, they probably were afraid to. The crime the historical Jesus was probably executed for was declaring himself a king thereby making himself an enemy of the state. Likewise, his followers could have been viewed in a treasonous way similarly.
  
• It's hard to say how many criminals could be crucified at one time. Most would be left up there for at least a week and sometime even longer. The largest mass number of crucifixions at one time that I've ever seen a record of was during the Slave Rebellions on the Roman Peninsula that ended around 71 BCE in which over 5,000 former slaves were crucified between Rome and Capua.
  
• When I say "mass grave" I mean to refer to the idea that somewhere outside the city gates (this is true of several Roman cities) there is usually an area where the bodies of executed criminals were buried. However, many cities did not have such sites and instead, they left the bodies on the cross until they decomposed and were eaten by scavengers. John Dominic Crossan's “The Dogs Beneath the Cross,” chap. 6 in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography actually goes through this in detail and even says that perhaps wild dogs actually ate the bodies as we knew they typically did in other places. I think we have such a hard time understanding this because for us in today's society, even criminals get burials. Ehrman (as cited earlier) actually tries to explain this himself, saying:
  
  >Crucifixion was meant to be a public disincentive to engage in politically subversive activities, and the disincentive did not end with the pain and death— it continued on in the ravages worked on the corpse afterward.
  
  
  > Ehrman, Bart D. How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (p. 157). HarperCollins.
  
  
• Please keep in mind we are discussing generalities. There is always a chance that Pilate could have allowed Jesus' body to be taken off the cross, it's just historically speaking, unlikely.
  
• There probably isn't enough evidence to know if Jesus' execution was abnormal or normal to be honest. The Romans, although diligent in their writings, were not as concerned with writing about executions than writing about people of importance (remember, they didn't view Jesus as important, I am not saying he wasn't important). To quote Ehrman again, "It is unfortunate that we do not have from the ancient world any literary description of the process of crucifixion, so we are left guessing about the details of how it was carried out." [Ehrman pp 158]. However, it would not seem to be far fetched from our other limited examples that have survived. A complete study of Roman crucifixtion can be found in Crucifixion (Facets) by Martin Hengel.
  
• This last question is an interesting one. Had the crime been reported during any other week of the year, it would have been unusual for a Rabbi with only a few followers (it's estimated by Rodney Stark, a sociologist, who wrote The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries that he likely had 20-30 devote followers at the time of his execution) he probably would not have been executed. Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea typically lived in Caesarea, the Roman Capital of the region. He only stayed in Jerusalem during the week of Passover when religious insurrection was likely to occur. Because of this, Pilate had to keep order, so if it was being reported to him that a man was raising a rebellion against Rome and declaring himself king, yes, he could easily be executed for this for his "crimes against the state."
  

Rodney Stark's book "The Rise of Christianity" suggests a few ways in which Christian morality was superior to pagan morality:

1. Prohibition of infanticide. Under Roman law, the father had the right to abandon the child to the elements at birth–resulting either in death, or the child being taken in by baby-farmers who would raise the child to be a slave. Girls disproportionately were the victims of this. And the mothers had no say. Christianity condemned this as murder.
   
2. End to forced abortion. In ancient Rome, abortion was not a woman's "right to choose", it was a man's – a woman's husband or father had the legal right to compel her to have an abortion, and women often died in the process. By outlawing abortion, Christianity brought an end to forced abortion of women.
   
3. Like many cultures, ancient Roman culture had strong sexual double standards – women were expected to be chaste, men were not subject to the same expectations. Christianity couldn't completely eliminate these double standards, but by insisting that men and women were subject to equal obligations of chastity, managed to make some dent in them. By contrast, the pagan religions were mostly silent on sexual morality
   
4. Pagans would frequently abandon those sick with contagious diseases out of fear of catching it themselves. Christians would selflessly nurse the sick, even though by doing so they risked succumbing to the disease themselves. Many people survived contagious diseases due to nursing by Christians, and many pagans ended up converting as a result. Christian morality said there was an obligation to care for the sick, even at risk to one's own life – pagan morality largely didn't

I think that Intelligent Design explains things at least as well as evolutionary theory, maybe better. I personally have trouble seeing that evolution has any explanatory power or benefit to science. The explanations seem to be almost always "just so" stories. How did birds develop flight? When the protobirds were jumping off of trees some had feathery mutations and they landed further away. Eventually this sort of thing led to perfectly formed feathers and wings. (The cursorial theory of flight is just as bad as this arboreal one). When one looks at biology and see some new enzyme or organelle, one always asks what it does, what it's purpose is. This is a tacit acknowledgement of underlying intelligent design. This is how we make progress in biochemistry. When we assume things are due to random evolutionary processes, then science stagnates - e.g. examining junk DNA for function. (But this is a bit of a tangent now and I don't want to get derailed too much.)

I think that the main answer to your question is that each organism has exactly what it needs for its job. An earthworm does not need anything that it doesn't have. Why should it have amazing eyesight? If it had amazing armour like a crocodile, then it would mess up the food chain as birds couldn't eat it. I don't know details about everything : for example the different digestive systems that you're talking about. A lot of the time, the answer is the main one that I've mentioned already, combined with the need to have a balanced ecosystem. (By the way, if you think designing one organism is complex, how about a self-sustaining self-healing ecosystem). Here are some examples:

If our noses were as good as dogs, we probably couldn't live in cities. We'd be appalled at the terrible smells everywhere. But dogs don't seem to mind. If we could digest cellulose like termites or cows and horses we would have had the current population explosion much sooner. People would have eaten every non-poisonous green plant there is. We are like that - short term self-preservation and self-gratification no matter what the long term consequences are - e.g. no more trees on the planet. We don't need the best of everything because we can compensate for it using our brain. We don't need to see better than we do. We need to be able to see up close - we can do very intricate needlework and soldering unaided (until we get old), we need to be able to read clearly and quickly, we need to be able to see well in the middle distance and reasonable well in far distance.

The other part of answering your question involves my viewpoint of God, which I rarely bring into these discussions, preferring instead to focus on science. I think that we have things like external testicles, good enough eyes, no photosynthesis in our skin, etc. to make us limited, to prevent us from being invincible like superheroes. I think that God has made it so that we need to eat plants instead of being an intelligent plant so that we are part of the ecosystem and look after it because it provides for us. We need to learn dependency because we always want to wrest control for ourselves and become superhuman. This dependency also manifests itself in the need for sleep. A supreme designer could have made it so that we (and animals) don't need to sleep, but the need for sleep makes us weaker. We are defenseless when we are asleep. There are also all sorts of social implications and benefits to sleep: homes, families, time off work, etc. Men are already stronger than women and the main aggressors and abusers; having external testicles that are incredibly painful when injured is a way of adding a bit more weakness. I mean, even having external testicles, why should they be so painful? After procreating it makes no sense. It would be better if it just felt like banging your elbow.

There are some things that I have issues with still. The main one being testosterone. Why would God make it so that the drive for sex is so strong that it results in the subjugation of half of the human race? Prostitution, sex trafficking. Why would be make it so that testosterone results in such extreme aggression, warfare, violence?

It's also hard to figure this out because we are moving away from biology (why does our thumb work how it does), to behaviour. When we move to behaviour (bringing God into things and the Christian world view), we need to consider human nature and the Fall. As part of humanity's initial rebellion against God, things broke and got shattered. This is probably when many parasites became harmful, diseases began etc. It's hard to know for sure as we don't know the details. And yet we still see that things are generally well designed (immune system, the eye, liver, etc). So while the Fall brought suffering and aging and death, it didn't radically degrade us biologically (oh dear, I really don't want to get into this, because we don't know that much about the details). The main thing is that human nature has changed. This is a vitally important thing that we need to recognize and account for. Human nature has a dark side that can't be erased, that can't be fixed by scientific progress and discovery. People thought that rationalism and the scientific revolution would fix all our problems. That we would be just, humane, noble. That there would be no more wars (the war to end all wars), that education could solve violence, crime, abuse, famine. But it doesn't work. This is why we are happily destroying our planet (see /r/collapse) and we won't act until it is too late. I don't think a non-Christian view of human nature works nor explains things as well as the narrative that has the Fall. We are a mixture of good and bad. We all have a shadow side. It's only by turning back to God, by looking at Jesus and following him that we can fix our human nature, that we can be transformed into new people, and even then it takes time and work. Religion (incl. Christianity) that just makes a bunch of rules cannot do this. We already have rules in society and they're broken regularly. Islam is all about rules, but they're filled with hatred and lust just as much as anyone else. The unbelievable spread of Christianity over the first 300 years from being only in Jerusalem to infiltrating the whole Roman empire happened because of changed human nature, not self-promotion, politics, campaigns. Something very unusual happened that we don't really see Christians doing any more today (at least in the West). The sociologist Rodney Stark explains it.

I hope that this was interesting. I need to get off reddit and do other work!

> it's always been taught to me that this is absolutely never ok no matter what

I didn't know that. which protestant church do you adhere to?

anyway for historic reasons it just seems madness to me. christianity literally spread through mixed marriages firstly between christians and the pagan romans (see this book for a reference) and after that through the marriages between the christians and the barbaric people (see queen Theodolinda as an example) and most of the time the christian one was the woman.

anyway marriage is just a help for living your life in a relationship that can resemble the relationship with Christ. I don't see anything wrong in marrying someone not christian. (especially if he is not ideologically against religion).

I listened to the audiobook of this book and was pissed. Orson Scott Card was just using the characters to espouse his points of view through the mouths of children, and apparently all the African Christians weren't good enough to save their own country (at one point the African survivor character bemoans that his Christian family and villagers weren't nice enough to help each other when they were sick) or help or anything because the American Christians wanted to break the stupid quarantine to come in and help. But the real kicker was when the stupid American kids and the stupid American Catholic mom start talking about this book like it was actual and undisputed fact. Aargh! I don't think I'd ever rage quit an audiobook before. I'm seriously turned off by OSC's writing now and I don't think I'll read any of his new books.

If you want a sociological take on this, check out Rodney Stark's book The Rise of Christianity. I don't personally agree with his take on everything, but it is a bit different from the answer you would usually get from Christians.

It's more than "not horrifyingly inhumane". It's overwhelming loving and beneficial. That's the Gospel. Or part of it. The other part is sharing that not just the body but the soul can be saved. And Christ has reconciled us to God and defeated death and wrongness. And one day all will be set right. You say that even wanting to preach the second part as well as the first is dishonest and manipulating the poor. I disagree. The first, food, as much physical wholeness as we can offer, is offered and the second, which is Christ, spiritual wholeness, but the first is offered even if the second is rejected.

The modern idea to even consider the poor and disenfranchised, as a philosophical proposition or a quest of the heart, is largely rooted in Christian thought. Christian presuppositions are inseparable from much of the foundations of Western ethics. For this reason it is accurate to say the Enlightenment accepted Christian morals but rejected the Christian God.

Here's one book examining the sociological reasons for the success of Christianity. Among them are Christianity's treatment of women and the poor.

Now, Christendom, the political reaching of those places impacted by Christianity has not had a great track-record. But in days where everyone claimed the title "Christian" how can we not expect atrocities committed in the name of Christ? For, sadly, atrocities happen everywhere.

What's unique is the love Christianity brings.

It's what inspired Christians like William Wilburforce to convince his country to commit virtual econocide by ending slavery-- which was brought about by "Christian" men with hearts after gold rather than God.

I may never convince you. I will probably never convince you. But, honestly, that's all I have time to write now. It's short. It doesn't explain the impact of the Christian heart for the downtrodden at all.

Please read this:

>The Parable of the Good Samaritan
>25 And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” 27 And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” 28 And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”
>
>29 But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. 32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. 34 He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. 35 And the next day he took out two denarii [1] and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ 36 Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”

Remember, Samaritans were hated by the Jews. Think of the significance of this and tell me that Christianity does not value loving the "least of these".

As I began to say, I may never convince you. I believe it will only be once you see for yourself Christians truly loving their neighbor that you will see it is not only possible but a direct outgrowth of our belief.

Highly unlikely. There's not even good evidence most of the apostles were martyred. Furthermore, the beauty and utility of marterdom was also a core idea of Second Temple Judaism, and despite people trying to get themselves martyred, it happened much less than you probably think. There's only about 5 named individuals we're confident in, and, for example, one of the most preminant scholars of early Christianity (Rodney Stark) estimates the total at less than 100.

Also, we have records of exactly nobody claiming to have seen Jesus in the flesh, only people claiming many years later that other people claimed to have seen him, and Paul claiming a spiritual vision.

I highly recommend picking up one of Stark's books to get a sympathetic but rigerous view of the actual history of early Christianity and why it grew, which will help you understand your religion quite a bit more. Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity, The First Three Thousand Years is another good history, though IMHO not quite as informative as it doesn't follow the sociological factors quite as closely. Those are both solid books by excellent historians who are more positive toward Christianity than average for experts in the field, and I think you'd find them useful.

Anther view on this is how diseases helped to spread Christianity in the early ages. The basic idea was how the Christian community took better care of each other and were more likely to stay behind(and alive) in the cities to take care of those who were sick. For the most part people abandoned the sick out of fear, the sick then died of malnurishment, dehydration etc. As the non Christians fled the city the percentage of Christians in these cities significantly which then raised the number of converts (people are more likely to convert whenever the majority of the people they are in contact with are Christian).

Rodney Stark writes about this fairly extensively in The Rise of Christianity A book he wrote before converting in which he was trying to explain how Christianity could go from not existing to being the official religion of Rome in a matter of ~300 years.

Here are a few that will get you started. Watch out for overly confessional triumphalist works.

• Why Christianity Happened by Crossley
  
• A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles By Stanley Kent Stowers Augustine screwed us all up by internalizing Paul's letter to the Romans. This book looks at the original reading of Romans (esp. when one accounts for speech-in-character and resists an ahistorical psychoanalyzing of Romans).
  
• The Rise of Christianity by Stark
  
• The Corinthian Body by Martin
  
• The Birth of Christianity by Crossan
  
• In Memory of Her by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
  
• They Story of Christianity by Gonzalez
  
• Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity by Stowers You don't understand the letters in the New Testament until you understand how letters functioned in GR Antiquity.
  
• Christians as the Romans Saw Them by Wilken.

Perhaps you would find this book interesting:

The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries

As for the "problems", I guess that's what this debate sub is for, right?

From his about page at Amazon:

> Rodney Stark is one of the leading authorities on the sociology of religion. He grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota, where he began his career as a newspaper reporter. Following a tour of duty in the US Army, Stark received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he held appointments as a research sociologist at the Survey Research Center and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. For many years, the Pulitzer Prize nominee was professor of sociology and professor of comparative religion at the University of Washington. In 2004 he became Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University.

His book entitled The Rise of Christianity approaches the subject from a sociological perspective. Even the book's top critical review sings his praises.

Personally, I haven't read a word from him. Now that I know a little more about him I'll check out, at least, the aforementioned book.

He doesn't seem to be an apologist but I may discover that he is after reading his book.

> 1. However the claims of divinity and supernatural powers have a high burden of proof which requires multiple independent sources. ... I would need more than that in order to believe the mystical claims about Jesus.

Can you clarify? I've already had a similar conversation before on Reddit, and in that case the other guy wouldn't specify how high he would raise the bar before he would believe. I think it's fair to be more skeptical of supernatural events than other events, but I don't think it's fair to raise the bar so high that it is pretty much impossible to have enough historical evidence for a certain miracle like the resurrection.

> The gospels ... that have been manipulated by others in numerous translations to further their own agendas.

What does this manipulation look like exactly? The gospels were produced in a dominantly oral culture - they were meant to be read out loud to a fairly large audience which already knew the rough outlines of the story, and would respond negatively if the storyteller would introduce significant innovations in the story. Or are you talking about later interpolations made by scribes (most of which are pretty insignificant)?

> 2 . Some of the things you've claimed are not true, like the authorship of the gospels.

Which claim of mine is not true? I claimed there are good reasons to accept the traditional authorship of the gospels and then proceeded to give two reasons. Wikipedia doesn't contradict those reasons. It doesn't seem like you have debunked anything at all.

> 3 . The early Christians obviously were people who needed a message of salvation due to the how difficult life was back then. It was a religion that appealed to the masses who were powerless and a heavenly reward was pretty much all they had to look forward to.

All this was already provided for by Judaism, so this cannot explain any supposed innovation of early Christians; and in any case, there is simply no evidence that the disciples were just desperate to believe in something. In most cases where people are pressured to believe something instead of accepting it on evidence, they will recant when faced with torture or death (this happened for example with two of the three witnesses who supposedly saw Joseph Smith interact with the angel Moroni), but this didn't happen with Christianity, although opponents of Christianity would have immediately seized upon such a recanting.

Christianity didn't have extraordinarily many converts from the poor, by the way; it seemed to have attracted people from every social class (see eg. Rodney Stark's Rise of Christianity or the first chapter of Linda Woodhead's Introduction to Christianity).

> And the speed of Christianity's rise during the time period is tempting for someone who wants power and lots of believing followers.

Yeah, I'm not buying that line of reasoning - if Christianity were set up to exercize power over its adherents, its creators certainly did their best to diminish their own power by including egalitarian ideas like in Galatians 3:28, or perhaps the more famous Matthew 20:25-28:

> 25 Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 26 Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— 28 just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

In any case there is no evidence of a conspiracy to gain power and again one could say that the opponents of Christianity would have seized upon that idea if there was any substance to it.

> 4 . I can't really respond to your comment fully without any sources to support your claims.

Are you referring to primary sources (eg. the gospels, Paul, Josephus) or secondary writings, ie. what scholars have written about early Christianity?

> This argument is a common one however and really it boils down to believing the bible is true because it says it's true. That's circular reasoning.

I don't think that's a fair assessment. You might have a point if I were just arguing "the bible is reliable because it says so in the bible" which is indeed circular. But I'm merely proposing a historical analysis of the gospels and some other documents. If you discount that, you could reject practically any historical document on the same charge of circularity.

The Rise of Christianity has some good information on the plague of Galen, infanticide, and similar demographic differences between the pagan and Christian populations. It also talks about how Christians nursing people back to health during the various plagues contributed both to their mystique (pagan priests would flee out of town at the first sign of plague, something that caused a PR crisis), as well as to greater life expectancy. This also led to a demographic gain against the pagan population.

The plague of Galen was in 165-180, and the plague of Cyprian was in the 200s. They seriously depleted manpower in Italy, resulting in the importation of "barbarian" people into the empire to meet their needs. They both took place before Constantine, though it's notable that they were scapegoated for the Cyprian plague.

The plague of Justinian didn't start until the 500s, well after the collapse of the Western Empire, which is why I was objecting to it being included in the causes of the collapse.

The idea of charity being an obligation for all people did not exist before Christianity. Pagans practiced infanticide on infants and temple prostitution. Charity was not considered a virtue. Jews valued charity, but gentiles were only held to the standard of the Noahide laws. Christianity as unique in sayingn charity towards all humans was the duty of every human being. Even today in India, charity is not considered a virtuous behavior. https://www.amazon.com/Shame-Sin-Christian-Transformation-Antiquity/dp/0674660013

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https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Christianity-Marginal-Religious-Centuries/dp/0060677015/ref=sr_1_3?crid=G9Y01KR7DTWV&keywords=rodney+stark+the+rise+of+christianity&qid=1558108879&s=books&sprefix=rodney+stark+%2Cstripbooks%2C159&sr=1-3

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Many of the morals we take for granted-sexual monogamy, infanticide being evil,, charity being good-were unique to Christiainity