And how would you know they’re numbers were constantly up? Are you privy to some information that I’m not.
Their numbers were constantly up because I can count. Three hundred years from the birth of Christ, Constantine pretty much settled the issue of Christianity in the Roman Empire, and it only grew from there.It is accepted by most experts that there were about a million Christians at the end of the first century (pretty good growing…though that means that they comprised less than 1% of the population) and by the third century (Constantine’s time) there were something like 62,000,000 Christians, or over 10% of the population of the Roman Empire. Now THAT’S good growing. After that, of course, it became the official government religion and all bets were off.
I submit that, quite obviously, the intense persecution of the Christians did very little to curb growth, and in fact encouraged it; the one thing about persecution is that in order to persecute something, you have to be aware of its existence. Once one is aware of something, curiosity tends to sneak in–and people who learned about it liked it–and joined it. The risk of doing so only served to validate it. Human nature.
That doesn’t make persecution a good thing. Quite the opposite; for because of this need to see one’s own persecution as validation for one’s own beliefs, then persecution of OTHER peoples has to be poo-pooed…torture a Christian for being a Christian? Why, that’s persecution and the Christian dies a martyr; his faith is validated. Torture a priestess of Diana for being true to her beliefs? Why, she is a pagan and deserved it; that’s not persecution, that’s justice!
Discriminate against a Catholic and call her an idol worshiper? Why, that’s persecution and unjust! Should a Muslim terrorist shoot a Christian in the streets…that’s persecution in it’s purest form.
However…send a mob of 200 men in black face to murder a man in jail because they don’t like the fact that he is the leader of the Mormons? Why, he was a con man and deserved it, and he had the nerve to defend himself by shooting back. That’s justice. He brought it on himself. He deserved it…that’s not persecution.
Kick a Catholic out of his home and make him sell it at an extreme loss (or just abandon it altogether) under an order of ‘extermination’ making it illegal for him to live in a place under pain of getting shot? Why, that’s the rankest persecution. If it’s a Mormon, or someone you disagree with, though–that’s different. It’s somehow the Mormon’s fault.
Or, to take the thing and turn it around (I AM a Mormon, after all, and can thus be biased in this) Governor Bogg’s Extermination Order (don’t look at me, he named it, I didn’t.) was persecution–but it did not prove that Mormonism is true. It just proved that persecutors persecute. They do it because they don’t like difference, and think that they have a right to punish the different.
I’m trying to state that in the first century a lot of Christians were put to death (there was intense persecution) so their numbers at first were probably not as high as they would have been if these deaths had not occurred, however, eventually with less persecution as time went by those numbers would regulate themselves.
Except of course a growth from one million to 62 million was never matched, percentage wise, ever again in the history of the church, even when the government was forcibly making people convert TO Christianity. In fact, it grew faster UNDER that intense persecution that it has since. Do the math: 100 AD saw 1 million Christians. 300 AD saw 62 million Christians. That means what…that every two hundred years the Christian population multiplied 62 times. If that growth rate continued, we would have had three BILLION Christians at the beginning of the 6th century…and we only have 2.1 billion Christians on the planet at the moment. I’m not very good at math, so please excuse me, but lessee…2.1 billion from 62 million in 1700 years… that’s a growth rate of about 1.2 million Christians a year, averaging it out. However, the rate of Christian population increase over that two hundred years between 100 and 300 AD? That’s 31 million converts a year. As bad as my math is, it would be difficult to argue that persecution inhibited growth and that acceptance encouraged it.
I do believe that persecution in many instances brought visibility for the fledgling community but I think it took time for it to take effect. Here’s what I found that pretty much deals with the topic we are discussing:
In the same vein, does persecution always cause church growth? Not always. In 1993, I did considerable research on the history of the Church in Russia and, to my surprise, I learned that the membership of the Evangelical Christian Baptists (registered and unregistered) in the Soviet Union had dropped from approximately 1,000,000 in 1926 to just under 249,000 in 1993. In Albania, the Church was virtually wiped out during the rule of Enver Hoxha. Only a dozen or so Christians were found to have survived Albania’s attempt to create a completely atheistic state when religious liberty was restored a decade ago. The Communists almost succeeded. It would be naïve to say, then, that persecution always leads to church growth.
The Communists handled it differently. They didn’t persecute the way the early Christians were. They co-opted, instead. They took the children and taught them from infancy that there was no god but the state; few could fight that: not persecution for believing, but rewards for not. Even so, there are survivors, and that’s pretty miraculous.
