Why Did Christianity Spread in the Ancient World?
- Apr 10
- 2 min read
In the numerous interviews and podcasts I’ve done about The Golden Thread since the publication of vol. 1 last August, I’ve often been asked to explain how and why Christianity spread in the ancient world. I’m not sure why this subject comes up so often, unless my interviewers are trying to gauge just how Christian I am. I suspect some of them want to know whether I’m capable of a giving a secular, causal account in terms of socio-economic factors acting on fringe populations in the ancient world—an explanation that will leave interviewers and listeners undisturbed in their agnosticism. Maybe I’ll try to explain the appeal of the Christian message in religious terms or even reach up to heaven to invoke the plan of Divine Providence, like that nun or Sunday-school teacher they half-remember from their early adolescence. They will then be free to dismiss me as a religious crank, addicted to the foolishness of Christ, in the Apostle Paul’s phrase.
Answering questions about the spread of Christianity is more of a problem for Christian historians than may at first appear. The problem was raised at a more profound level many years ago by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in an early essay entitled “Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?” MacIntyre argued that a religion like Christianity isn’t able to be understood from a detached, skeptical, ‘scientific’ point of view. The way a skeptic frames his question excludes the “form of life” of the religious person, and no amount of open-mindedness will succeed in helping him understand the “insider” perspective of the religious person. He’s just not going to “get” Christianity unless he has some personal experiences of sin, grace, redemption, and revelation. This in my view is one reason for the natural affinity of Christianity and Platonism, as Augustine discovered. Unless you believe in the ontological priority of soul to body, mind to matter, the only account you can give of the life of the spirit is going to be reductive. It will end up as an exposé of delusion and tribal orthodoxies…