Recently, I wanted to discover what the scholarship says about the size and makeup of the early Christian communities. In my searching, I found and read a provocative article by Keith Hopkins (”Christian Number and Its Implications,” published in The Journal of Early Christian Studies, Summer 1998), which did provide some helpful specifics, though Hopkins tone was unnecessarily combative (he even admits to attempting to “upset fellow scholars, by non-conformity,” a practice he boasts makes him like “an early Christian in pagan society”!), and his reasoning, in many places, is scandalously poor. Also, I think Hopkins puts too much weight on the formative power of demographics. Nonetheless, they do matter, if not quite so much as he insists. And the article did provide a framework – one which I lacked completely – for thinking about how the early Christian communities would have been constituted.
(A.) Methodologically, Hopkins believes most scholars have made an enormous mistake by restricting their hypotheses to the available sources, which, Hopkins insists, are “appallingly” unrepresentative. He plays a probability game to illustrate his point. Supposing there would’ve been about 50 Christian communities in existence between 50 c.e. and 100 (he actually holds that there were probably twice so many), and supposing that these communities wrote/received on average two letters per year during this same period, there would’ve been ten thousand letters written, of which barely fifty survive (.oo5%). This seems to prove his point: we should be wary of drawing hard-and-fast conclusions about the size and dynamic of early Christian movement(s) on the basis of such scant information. (Of course, it’s possible he wrongly assumes the number of communities and/or the number of letters these communities would’ve written/received.)
(B.1) Now to the numbers. Hopkins hypothesizes (admitting that the number is more or less arbitrary) that in 40 c.e., little less than a decade after Jesus’ death, about 1000 people were Christians, virtually all of whom were Jews. (In fact, they almost certainly envisaged themselves as Jews who had found in Jesus the true way to be Jewish).
(B.2) In 100 c.e., he theorizes there would have been about 7,000 Christians, “equal to barely 0.01% of the Roman empire’s population,” gathered in one of the 100 or so communities scattered throughout the eastern Mediterranean basin. These communities would’ve had an average size of fewer than 70 people, of which number 20 would have been adult males, and, on average, 2 would have been literate at some level. (This is supposing that average number of literate persons in the Christian (as well as Jewish) communities was markedly higher than the average number of literate pagans.) Due to lack of resources and fear of (some kind of) persecution, these communities would’ve met in private homesand not in stand-apart religious buildings.
(B.3) In 200, there were, by his estimation, slightly more than 200,000 Christians (or 0.35% of the Empire’s population of roughly 60 million), and probably something like 200 communities. The average size and basic makeup of the communities had not changed from the previous century. However, the communities in large metropolises like Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Carthage – each with a population of above 100,000 – were probably quite large; he estimates about 5-10 thousand members in each of these cities. Also, he figures that “sophisticated literate Christians were likely to concentrate in the bigger towns,” which would mean that many of the smaller communities in the smaller towns would not have had even a single sophisticated reader or writer, and probably only 1 or 2 literate persons.
(B.4) Hopkins also holds that the governmental structure of the primitive Christian communities was shaped in no small part by their numbers and literacy level. The post of lector (reader) in the churches suggests to Hopkins that most believers could not read and so had to have the text read to them. Also, the rise of the episcopate toward the end of the 2nd century corresponds with the increased number of Christians, which coincidentally would have brought in a larger number of literate and educated persons. Before the late 2nd century, there simply would not have been enough educated persons for each Christian community to have a bishop.
(B.5) Given the fact that the vast majority of Christians (indeed, of all people in the Empire) were illiterate, Hopkins concludes that “the texts of the New Testament itself, the New Testament apocrypha and the early Apostolic Fathers must have been written by members of that small stratum, within the top 2% of Roman society, who could write Greek fluently.”
(C.1) Hopkins thinks that Christian praxis, as well as ecclesiastical structure, was shaped by the size and makeup of the Christian communities. Even as late as 100 c.e. – 60 years after Christ – “Christian ideology was the intellectual possession of barely fifty fluent literates.” Hopkins infers that it was the “tiny size of this creative body” that accounts for the “exclusivist and dogmatic character” of Christian ideology and practice.
In its early stages, say during the first century and a half of its existence, Christianity was a set of small and vulnerably fissile cult-groups. Internally, each group may have been held together by a demanding ethic, communal worship, and an encouraging message of hope. And all the groups, as a set, may have been held together by shared oral traditions and a thin stream of beggar-missionaries. But if Christianity was to survive over time as a recognizable entity, some mechanism had to be found to unify these small, scattered andvolatile communities. Writing and belief, or rather writing about belief, became the prime instrument of unification. And the dogmatic style of exclusivism (only my version of the truth is acceptable) was, I argue partly a function of the small average size of each cell and the rarity-value of literate leaders within each. In these circumstances, single teachers might feel encouraged to be dogmatic.
(C.2) There was another way in which the composition and size of the Christian communities shaped Christian praxis. Christians differentiated themselves from Jews and pagans in that Christians were made, not born. This meant that at any one time, “about two-fifths of all adult Christians” were relatively new converts, having been baptized during the previous 5-10 years. This rate of growth put “tremendous strain on the absorptive and instructional capacity of older members,” few of whom were literate.Hopkins agrees with the majority of other scholars that Christianity’s rapid growth in the late 3rd and early 4th century (due, first and oddly, to systematic persecutions and, then, to the “Constantinian shift“) profoundly affected the shape of Christian ideology and praxis. Increase in numbers produced a multitude of problems, external (persecution) and internal (heresy and laxity). After the conversion of Constantine, “for most people being a Christian must have meant something quite different from what it had meant in the first three centuries c.e., and the nature of some conversions may have been, must have been superficial.”
(D.) In conclusion, Hopkins offers five main points in summary, which I will briefly enumerate.
(1) the number of Christians expanded fast, but for a long time remained tiny relative to the total population of the empire.
(2) Christian “house cult-groups” in the first century after Jesus’ death were on average both small and dispersed.
(3) The development and maintenance of Christian religious ideology in the first century after Jesus’ death was at any one time the intellectual property of only a few dozen men, scattered throughout the Mediterranean basin.
(4) The number of Jews was very large compared with the number of Christians, at least until the late third century. This meant that Christians were much more concerned with Judaism (after all, most of them had been – and perhaps still considered themselves to be – Jews) than Jews were with Christianity.
(5) The greatest surge in Christian numbers occurred in the 3rd and 4th centuries, and these growth spurts significantly altered Christian thought and practice.
I’m sure my perspective (21st century first-world Christendom) has always colored my reading of the Pauline epistles, but I always assumed a larger readership than his numbers would reflect. I guess I always assumed a relatively low level of literacy; I seem to remember hearing that most of these were read aloud at large gatherings for this very reason, which I always thought interesting as it makes orality central to understanding the style, particularly the rhythm’s and cadence, of Paul’s writing. It has made me think of the letters as a hybrid bewteen epistolary and public speech genres. In any case, these numbers, accurate or inaccurate, seem small. So does his assertion about the size of those contributing to early Christian ideology.