The Rise of Christianity
The idea that Christianity started as a clandestine movement among the poor is a widely accepted notion. Yet it is one of many myths that must be discarded if we are to understand just how a tiny messianic movement on the edge of the Roman Empire became the dominant faith of Western civilization. In a fast-paced, highly readable book that addresses beliefs as well as historical facts, Rodney Stark brings a sociologist's perspective to bear on the puzzle behind the success of early Christianity. He comes equipped not only with the logic and methods of social science but also with insights gathered firsthand into why people convert and how new religious groups recruit members. He digs deep into the historical evidence on many issues - such as the social background of converts, the mission to the Jews, the status of women in the church, the role of martyrdom - to provide a vivid and unconventional picture of early Christianity.
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- Another great book on this topic is Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Christianity-Marginal-Religious-...
Stark is mostly interested in the period of time between Jesus and Constantine and brings a ton of historical and sociological evidence to bear on the question. A really amazing book. Learned a lot about Rome from it.
- > why would you suddenly become interested just because some percentage of the general public is?
Maybe the author has something to do with it? :) People like good books, and good books make dull topics seem interesting.
A good author can make a dry topic really interesting. "The Other God" for instance--how many people are going to be interested in a book about the history of dualist religion? But it turns out to be a real page-turner.
A good author can apply their skills in a surprising area and create a very interesting book. For instance, "The Cleanest Race" isn't just about North Korea, it's also about doing comparative analysis on propaganda. To me, this doesn't make the topic narrower, it makes it broader. People like me who aren't interested in comparative analysis find out it's an interesting tool when applied to something I'm interested in, and I imagine if you were the other way around you'd enjoy the book too.
I found out about "The Rise of Christianity" from a Catholic friend of mine, and now it's one of my favorite books, despite not being a Christian. The author took a pretty dry topic (the early history of Christianity) and made it interesting by applying modern sociology and anthropology to it. That he writes well and comes to interesting conclusions makes it a good book.
- Thanks for the conversation, but I can't really keep this going because of the format of HN. Feel free to PM me on reddit though (same username). I will leave you with this:
> I'm not sure where you get that the church == Paul
I meant more like, Paul is responsible for the shift from the Jewish bearing to the Gentile one. He preached to the Gentiles and made the religion palatable for them. He got into huge fights with the other Church founders about this, and was treated very harshly by the Jewish authorities who would beat him and kick him out of their towns.
Here is an excerpt from the well regarded 'The Rise of Christianity' by WHC Freund[0] (page 110):
"By 64, however, the new religious movement had taken root. Without detracting from the work of Peter, John, and the other disciples in the decade following the crucifixion, the credit belongs to Paul. Jesus was indeed the very ground of his being, but Paul had never experienced Jesus’ ministry, and his interpretation of it gave Jesus’ message a new and unex¬ pected dimension. He transformed the proclamation of God’s kingdom to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 15:24) into a world move¬ ment. Despite all handicaps, Paul judged precisely the prevailing mood of very many fellow Dispersion Jews. The Galatians, as we have seen, re¬ ceived him with rapture (Gal. 4:14). On the mainland of Europe the Chris¬ tians of Philippi were devoted to him. He offered a religion which, though basically Jewish, was stripped of the encumbrances of the Mosaic Law and its Pharisaic interpretations, a religion that had sufficient in common with Stoic ethics and the worship of the mystery cults to attract adherents on the outer fringes of the synagogue and even beyond. The ideal of a community in which there was neither bond nor free, Jew nor Greek, but which was united through love in a Savior (cf. Gal. 5:6), and freed thereby from the Law, the power of fate, and the malevolent astral lords of time, could also become the ideal of many of the inhabitants of the Greco-Roman world. The Savior whom Paul preached was not a savior god of current pagan myth but a historical figure invested with deity."
* https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=743C87B7EF43F2FBA7F3EC6...
