Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World, (Simon & Schuster, 2018) 335 pp. In his latest book Ehrman tackles the question of how an obscure Jewish sect came to conquer the Roman Empire and dominate the western world. It is a subject which can stir up both triumphant apologism and vehement condemnation. But in this book Ehrman, a first rate and highly accessible public educator, does what a true historian should do: seeks to understand the past, sift what mostly likely happened and explain why, with judicious commentary but without judgement.

Constantine the Villain

Ehrman has an ambiguous status as far as New Atheist activists are concerned. On one hand, most of his popular works are praised and held in high esteem by them for making clear the reasons scholars do not take the arguments of Biblical literalists seriously and exposing the flaws in fundamentalist apologism regarding the origins and nature of the New Testament’s texts and testimony. On the other he is denigrated by many New Atheists because he has the temerity to do exactly the same with the fringe theorists and apologists at the other extreme – the Jesus Mythicists. For the former he is lauded, cited and quoted. For the latter he is all too often reviled, scorned and rejected. Ehrman himself regards this dichotomy with characteristic amused sangfroid and gives the impression he feels that if he annoys the extremists at both ideological extremes, he is probably getting things about right.

In this, his latest book for a popular audience, Ehrman sets out to summarise the scholarship on how and why Christianity went from a tiny Jewish sect to the religion that conquered the Roman Empire, and to add some synthesis and analysis of his own. For Christians the answer to this question is straightforward – it is because Christianity is the one true faith and Jesus was/is God himself. For them – even for the ones who analyse the historical dynamics much as Ehrman does in this book – everything that happened from the execution of Jesus onward has to be seen through the prism of Christianity’s inevitable triumph. For the rest of us, however, the triumph of Christianity can indeed seem extraordinary and some of those with an anti-Christian bias feel the need to “explain” it purely by reference to nefarious politics and violence. And the villain of these stories is usually the Roman emperor, Constantine the Great.

There is no avoiding Constantine when tackling this subject, and Ehrman’s analysis rightly brackets his story with a detailed analysis of the conversion of Constantine and then with a dissection of its impact. As the emperor who turned the fortunes of Christianity around thanks to his conversion to the faith, Constantine has had an exalted if not always unambiguous status in Christian historiography. The Orthodox traditions have always maintained the most rosy view of him, which is hardly surprising given that he has, with his mother Helena, been elevated to the status of a saint in most of the eastern churches. The western Catholic tradition, perhaps thanks to the theological and historical buffer of the Great Schism of 1054 and an enduring suspicion of Byzantine “Caesaropapism”, venerates the sainted Helena but has a slightly less enthusiastic view of Constantine. Even the Catholic Encyclopaedia details his various murders and mutilations and notes primly “where the policy of the State required, he could be cruel”. Protestant historiography tends to be even less enthusiastic; ranging from a rather more disapproving and qualified acknowledgement of his role in the history of the Church to outright condemnation.

Reservations about the consequences of Contantine’s sponsorship of Christianity actually have a long pedigree and date back to well before the Protestant Reformation. Francis of Assisi is said to have traced corruption in the Church back to Constantine’s conversion and even no less a champion of papal authority as Bernard of Clairvaux expressed grave reservations about the impact of the (alleged) “Donation of Constantine” that was thought to have transferred authority over the western Europe to the Popes. More radical medieval critics like Wycliffe and Jan Hus laid the foundations for Protestant reformers like Melchior Hoffman and Gottfried Arnold, who saw the conversion of Constantine as the point where “true Christianity” was subverted and suppressed by a pagan corruption of the true faith. The Protestant idea that Constantine hijacked Christianity was taken up by later secular critics like Voltaire, Gibbon and Burckhardt and this developed into the notion that Constantine’s conversion was not genuine and was purely a ploy aimed at harnessing Christianity for his cynical political ends.

And this has become a mainstay of New Atheist historiography, almost to the point where it is stated as unvarnished fact. In God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens writes with typical breezy assurance of how “[Christianity] was eventually adopted for political reasons by the Emperor Constantine, and made into an official faith” (p. 64) and similar statements can be found on various atheist fora, usually bolstered by statements about how politically powerful Christianity made Constantine due to the huge and increasing number of Christians in the Empire and references to how “he didn’t get baptised until on his deathbed” or even claims that this baptism was either against his will or did not actually happen at all.

This scepticism about the sincerity and even the authenticity of Constantine’s conversion and the questioning of his motives is at least in part due to a modern difficulty in grasping ancient approaches to belief, though it is also further evidence of how atheism in the English-speaking world is firmly rooted in stolidly Protestant views of history. Ehrman tackles the tricky historical question of Constantine’s vision or visions that we are told led to his conversion. He arrives at the sensible conclusion that Constantine did indeed have a vision or dream, or perhaps several of them, and that it was his interpretation of them that changed, moving from an idea that he should devote himself to Sol Invictus to the idea that Sol Invictus and the god of the Christians were one and the same and finally to a more orthodox grasp of the Christian God. The conflicting accounts of his vision/visions by Eusebius and Lactantius can be explained, Ehrman argues, by the fact that Constantine later in life filtered his memories of what he experienced through his eventual Christian understanding.

Ehrman also tackles the idea that his conversion was not sincere at all and was a cynical political ploy. Those who try to argue this line point to the fact that his triumphal arch in Rome and many of his coins include pagan imagery, note Constantine’s distinctly unchristian and sometimes murderous oppression and refer to that deathbed baptism. Surely, they argue, this is all evidence that Constantine was “really” a pagan and his “converson” was all a cynical political ploy. These arguments are fairly easily dispatched and Ehrman does so succinctly. On the issue of his continued use of pagan iconography, Ehrman notes that Constantine’s conception of who exactly his god was seems to have evolved from a “henotheistic” focus on Sol Invictus to an understanding that Sol and Jesus were the same deity and finally to a more orthodox Christian theology. He also notes that it would have been politically expedient to keep his iconography traditional and not to flaunt his new faith, especially in the earlier years of his reign when he was still consolidating his grasp on power. To this it should be added that, like most late antique monuments, the Arch of Constantine recycled elements and images from earlier structures, including reliefs from monuments to Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, and the “pagan” imagery tends to be found on these elements of the structure. For example, the panel depicting an emperor sacrificing a pig, sheep and bull is not original to Constantine’s monument and seems to have been taken from an arch celebrating Marcus Aurelius’ Marcomannic Wars. The depictions of Winged Victory are original to the arch, but are modelled on those of the Arch of Septimius Severus and are merely conventional. The inscription on the Arch, on the other hand, seems to be deliberately neutral on religious matters, referring rather vaguely to how Constantine was “inspired by the divine”, without specifying any divinity in particular. Ehrman is also probably quite correct in his notes on the iconography of Constantine’s early coinage, but it should also be noted that coins are notoriously conservative in their imagery and inscriptions. Roman coins continued to to refer to “the Senate and People of Rome” long after the Empire became a military dictatorship and then a despotic monarchy. And British coins to this day carry the inscription “F(idei) D(efensor)” which, ironically, originally celebrated this title being bestowed by Pope Leo X on the (then) staunchly Catholic Henry VIII in 1521.

As for Contantine’s rather unchristian executions of members of his family, Ehrman notes that this is hardly evidence that he never converted, asking “are we to imagine that someone is not a Christian if they behave badly?” (p. 34) This may be evidence that he was not a good Christian, or perhaps that he found being a Christian and being a Roman emperor in a period of ruthless politics was a difficult juggling act, but it is not evidence that he never converted. On the contrary, the pagan historian Zozimus claimed he converted largely because his crimes were so heinous that only Christianity gave him a chance to redeem himself despite their enormity. Finally, Ehrman notes correctly that death-bed baptisms were far from unusual in a period in which baptism was seen as the end point of a conversion, not its beginning. In the fourth century, once a person was baptised, the opportunity for the forgiveness of sins was limited and so many people delayed it until very late in life as a result, which seems to be what Constantine did. To pretend that this meant he was not a believer before this is absurd. As Ehrman notes, Constantine ended persecution of Christians, he showered Christian clergy with benefices and donations, he commissioned and financed the building of a network of churches, several of them monumentally large buildings, he restored confiscated Christian property, he commissioned twenty expensive copies of the Bible, he personally intervened in settling the Donatist and Arian controversies and he built a new city as his capital in which he did not allow pagan worship but which he filled with new churches and Christian monuments. His 26 chapter Oration to the Saints makes it absolutely clear that he was a fully fledged believer, given it is basically a defence of Christianity over paganism. And pagans were also quite clear that he was a Christian as well, as Zozimus’ sneer about Constantine’s sins noted above shows. The idea that his conversion was not sincere is simply not sustainable.

The Demographics of Conversion

Ehrman devotes a substantial portion of his book (and a detailed appendix) to the crucial question of how Christianity went from a tiny Jewish sect of perhaps a few dozen adherents to a major religion of millions that dominated the Roman Empire in just four centuries. The analysis here is central to this topic because it tends to drive two ideas central to the issue of the conversion. Firstly, did Constantine convert at least partially because Christianity had already won so many adherents by 312 AD that it gave him a demographic and therefore political edge over his rivals? Secondly, was it his conversion that tipped the balance and made Christianity suddenly so favoured that it won believers thanks to him and his successors and turned the fortunes of Christianity around completely in the fourth century? Ehrman’s answer to both these questions is essentially “no”.

The question of how many Christians there were in the Empire on the eve of Constantine’s conversion is one that has been tackled from various angles over the last century or so, and Ehrman gives a good summary of these approaches and their findings. He notes the work of Adolf von Harnack (1850-1930) who pioneered the question, mainly by analysis of literary sources. For example, von Harnack noted a letter from the mid third century of the Bishop of Rome, Cornelius, who writes that the church community in Rome had 46 presbyters, 7 deacons, 4 sub-deasons, 42 acolytes, 52 exorcists, readers and doorkeepers and supported 1,500 widows, orphans and other needy people. From these figures, von Harnack concluded that the Christian population of Rome under Bishop Cornelius was around 30,000 in a city with a population of one million, and using similar references from other cities he eventually arrived at a well-substantiated estimate that the overall percentage of Christians in the Empire was 7-10%. Assuming a population of the Empire of around 60 million in this period, this gives us approximately 4-6 million Christians overall.

Alternatively, and more recently, Ramsay MacMullen used archaeological analysis of the number and size of churches in the mid fourth century to arrive at a much smaller estimate; as low as 2-5%, however this is based on some assumptions about the use of church buildings rather than “home churches” and the regularity of worship for the average Christian in this period, all of which have been challenged. Roger Bagnall has used another approach via onomastics, or the study of personal names. Given that some names (e.g. Theophilus, Peter, Paul) are uniquely Christian, tracing their usage and spread can help map the spread and growth of the new faith. Using another tack again, sociologist Rodney Stark has used the growth of modern religious movements as a model to estimate how quickly a sect like Christianity could grow over four centuries. On the whole, Ehrman favours Stark’s approach, though with some caveats regarding Stark’s assumptions about the ancient world. He notes that families tended to convert together and, using a version of Stark’s calculations concludes, that by this organic growth alone, Christianity could go from just 20 adherents at the time of Jesus’ execution to 3.5-4 million by 312 AD and then a whole 25-35 million (half or more of the population of the Empire) by 400 AD. He notes:

“I need to stress that we are not talking about implausible rates of growth, even though the numbers at the end of the period are staggering. For the fourth century, if the rate really was around 25 percent per decade, that would only mean that every hundred Christians would need to convert just two or occasionally three people per year.” (p. 172)

The implications of these calculations are significant. To begin with, Ehrman favours estimates somewhat lower than the higher end figures of von Harnack and Stark and arrives at a total of c. 6-7% of the population being Christian at the time of Constantine’s conversion. Secondly, and perhaps slightly more unusually, he notes that even if Constantine had not converted, Chrisitianity would still have gone from this relatively low percentage of the population in 312 to over half of the Empire by 400 simply by continuing something like the rate of organic exponential growth it had seen in the previous three centuries. Ultimately, Christianity was always going to win the demographic war eventually.

This is because of a key difference between Christianity and its plethora of pagan alternatives. As a consequence of both its Jewish roots and its early apocalyptic fervour and urgency, Christianity developed an element which is not seen in its rivals – exclusivity. A pagan usually worshipped any number of gods and might do so at different times for different reasons. So someone may have a family deity or a local divine spirit which they honoured out of tradition, but may also have sacrificed to Neptune before a sea voyage or to Mars Gradivus before marching to war. Even if the same person came to develop a special personal devotion to a single god, say Apollo, this did not mean he denied the existence of other gods, discouraged his family or neighbours from worshipping them or refused to offer incense to some other deity if invited to do so. As Ehrman puts it:

“If someone asked you how you identified yourself, you would not have said, ‘I’m a worshipper of Apollo’, any more than you would have said ,’I’m a consumer of sea bass.’ You might indeed have worshipped Apollo on occasion just as you might have sometimes eaten sea bass, but that was not how you identified yourself.” (pp. 120-1)

But Christianity was different, thanks to the critical distinction between “adhesion” and “conversion”. A polytheist acknowledged and sometimes worshipped all kinds of gods. Even a pagan henotheist acknowledged gods other than their own, though focused their devotion on their god of choice. But a Christian either denied the very existence of other gods or condemned them as demons and not actual gods at all – either way, they avoided all other worship, condemned it as wicked and identified themselves exclusively as followers of Christ. And it was this unique exclusivity that was the real driver of Christianity’s steady and eventually overwhelming exponential growth. Ehrman summarises the argument of Ramsay MacMullen on this point:

“Suppose two persons were each promoting a new cult, one the worship of Asclepius and the other the worship of Jesus. A crowd of a hundred pagan polytheists gathers to hear each devotee extol the glories of his god. In the end, the two prove to be equally successful: fifty of the crowd decide now to worship Asclepius and fifty others decide to worship the Christian god. What happens to the overall relationship of (inclusive) paganism and (exclusive) Christianity? If our two hypothetical speakers are equally persuasive, paganism has lost fifty worshippers and gained no one, whereas Christianity has gained fifty and lost no one. Christianity is destroying the pagan religions in its wake.” (p. 126)

It is this accidental but ultimately highly effective combination of exclusivity and evangelical outreach that proved the key combination for Christianity and which drove the demographic exponential curve that saw it conquer the Roman Empire.

Conversion and Politics

This brings us back to the two questions posed earlier. Firstly, do these demographic conclusions support the idea that Constantine was “really” motivated purely by politics and saw the Christians as a substantial power base? It seems very clear that they do not. Even if we accept the higher estimates Ehrman discusses, Christians represented a small percentage of the population and, if we accept Ehrman’s or MacMullen’s much lower figures, the idea that Christians formed any substantial basis for a bid for Imperial power becomes even more unlikely purely on the numbers alone. It becomes completely absurd if we look at who these Christian were. All the evidence indicates that, at least prior to Constantine and his successors, Christianity was substantially a lower class cult. While it had a few aristocratic and learned adherents – who have more prominence largely because the writings of some of them are our main sources of information – the majority of Christians were slaves, “foreign” non-citizens and, substantially, urban plebeians. That Christians were so low class was a perennial comment by pagan observers as well as a source of satire and a basis for at least some anti-Christian polemic. And, unlike in modern politics, popular support from the lower classes played very little role in bolstering the claim of a fourth century Roman emperor. In Constantine’s time, an emperor challenged for and maintained the often precarious business of staying on the imperial throne via the support of the Roman army, the senators and the equestrian class, not the plebeians, slaves and non-citizens.

Since Augustus’ establishment of the Principate at the end of the civil wars of the first century BC, the Roman Empire had effectively been ruled by a aristocratic military junta, though one that covered itself with a thin fiction of constitutional legitimacy and some last trappings of the old Roman Republic. The fiction slipped occasionally, such as in the civil war of 69 AD where a new military strongman took control, but on the whole it was convenient enough for everyone for it to be maintained. This lasted until the third century AD, when the whole facade collapsed and Rome descended into the “Military Anarchy” – a 50 year period in which there were dozens of rivals for the imperial purple and 26 emperors rose and fell in rapid succession, some only lasting months, and the Empire came to the brink of total collapse. The Empire was reunited by force by Aurelian and then stabilised by the extensive reforms of Diocletian, but by then it had been transformed into something closer to an absolute monarchy and the emperorship had become both more centrally powerful and understandably far more paranoid about usurpers.

This was the kind of Empire that Constantine inherited. Diocletian’s experiment with two emperors and their subordinate “caesars” had broken down and Constantine emerged as the sole ruler by out-manoeuvring and then eliminating his co-emperors. He did this largely because he had the support of the Roman army’s officer class, or initially at least enough of it to give him an edge over his competitors. That support came from the western legions’ devotion to his father and then from his own proven skill as a general and he was careful to never lose the army’s support. The other key to keeping the throne in this period was the support of the equestrian class. These were the educated administrative elite who kept the Empire running, and after the reforms of Diocletian there were even more administrators than ever, given the institution of the diocesan system designed to reduce the local power of provincial governors by breaking the Empire into smaller administrative units. By the time Constantine came to power the thing the equestrians desired more than anything was stability and no return to the previous century’s chaos, and Constantine maintained a rigid policy of uniformity and conformity as a result.

The key point here is that both the military officer class and the equestrians were mostly pagans. There were some Christians in both echelons, but far fewer than in the lower strata. This means that the idea that Constantine, as Hitchens claimed, “adopted [Christianity] for political reasons” is clearly nonsense. Constantine gained nothing politically from appealing to the politically-insignificant plebeians and with only 6-7% of the total population Christian, such an appeal would have been minimal even if the plebs did wield some kind of power. But they did not – the military and the equestrians did, and they were even more pagan than the plebs. This means Constantine adopted Christianity despite its political disadvantages, not because it gave him a political edge. Hitchens’ claim, parroted by many New Atheists, is a pseudo historical fantasy.

As difficult as it may be for many modern people to understand, ancient people actually did take devotion to the gods very seriously and they saw that devotion as a kind of bargain. They promised due respect to the deity in question: maybe a one-off sacrifice before starting a business venture or perhaps a lifetime of particular (though not exclusive) devotion to that god. In return they asked for the god’s favour. Constantine does seem to have had some visions, dreams or religious experiences at key junctures, which he attributed to the Christian god, and so to have made this kind of bargain. As his military and political success continued, he continued to attribute it to the favour of this god. His understanding of this deity also seems to have evolved and then grown in theological sophistication as leading Christians sought to shape his faith, but ultimately the first Christian emperor remained an old soldier who repaid victory on the battlefield with devotion to a deity. This may be alien to us (thus the tendency toward anachronistic “political” explanations for his conversion), but it is how these things worked in the ancient world. The past is a foreign country, after all, where they do things differently.

The second question Ehrman tackles is whether, once Constantine converted, his conversion tipped the scales in Christianity’s demographic favour. After all, by Ehrman’s own calculations, the number of Christians in the Empire went from 3.5-4 million in 312 AD to a whole 25-35 million by the end of the fourth century. Given that persecution of Christians ended, Constantine and his successors sponsored the new faith and showered it with financial and political support and, increasingly, restrictions were placed on public pagan worship, surely this was what boosted Christian numbers to the point where they were in a majority by the time Theodosius made Christianity the state religion? Ehrman’s calculations indicate that, while there may well have been a political boost, the organic growth of Christianity means it would achieved these numbers anyway, regardless of Constantine’s conversion or even if his sons and successors had also remained pagan. I must say this was one of the more surprising findings of his analysis for me, though one that I did find convincing.

Reasons for Conversions

The appeal of Christianity for Constantine himself is one thing, but why had it appealed to millions of Romans in the centuries before his conversion; to the extent that most of them abandoned their previous religious beliefs completely? Traditional Christian answers have varied, with a heavy Catholic emphasis on the pious example of martyrs, a strong Protestant focus on active evangelistic preaching and missions and both claiming the example of Christian charity, morality and piety as the key factors. While some modern critics (e.g. the notorious Catherine Nixey) pretend there was not much persecution and so few actual martyrs, this exaggerates things and there certainly was a cult of martyrs who were held up as exemplars of Christian devotion. But this was mainly in the second half of the third century and the example of the martyrs seems to have been more for internal inspiration rather than a great inspiration for new converts. Ehrman also makes the point that, contrary to the popular view of early Christianity, there is actually very little evidence of much organised or large scale evangelical missions or concerted missionary activity. He notes that “outside of Paul’s work itself, we do not know of any organized Christian missionary work – not just for the first century, but for any century prior to the conversion of the empire” (p. 118). This may seem surprising to many readers, but he is right in saying that the few examples we do have – Gregory Thaumaturgus in Pontus, Martin of Tours in Gaul or Porphyry in Palestine – are individual zealots and exceptions rather than the rule. All other examples of missionary evangelism, which range from the possibly legendary (Thomas in India) to the solidly historical (Wulfila’s mission to his fellow Goths) tend to have been outside the Empire.

This seems to have been because there was far less need for organised and concerted preaching within the Empire, due to the way networks of patronage, community and family worked in late Roman society. As Edward J. Watts’ excellent The Final Pagan Generation shows, late antique society was an interwoven fabric of family, sponsors, patronage and favours and so religion, like everything else, was a highly communal and shared business, rather than a matter of private and personal conscience. Within this framework, Christianity did not need large scale, organised evangelism – the faith spread organically, family by family, from sponsor to subordinate and from patron to client.

But there still must have been attractive elements that enabled this transition. If it was generally not the example of martyrs or the rhetoric of public preachers, what was it? Ehrman takes the sources at their word and points out that, over and over again, they claim the main thing that changed people’s minds about Christianity was its miracles. Again, to the sceptical modern this sounds highly unlikely given that we assume that all miracle stories are invented and that miracles do not occur. This assumption was not shared by ancient people, however, and in a world where disease was not understood and spirit possession was widely accepted, a faith that began with and centred on stories of holy men performing exorcisms and faith “healings”, both actual and apocryphal, would have great appeal. As Ehrman says:

“Few people could claim to have observed any of these spectacular miracles of faith. But that was not necessary. All that was needed was belief that such things had in fact happened, and possibly that they continued to happen. …. The more the stories were told with conviction, the more listeners were likely to think they were true.” (p. 158)

Again, the scepticism about such things of modern non-Christians makes it very easy to overlook how much prominence Jesus’ status as a wonder-worker and miraculous healer had in pre-modern Christianity, and how much emphasis the miraculous powers, achieved through faith in him, had in the stories of Christian saints and heroes. But in a hostile and often deadly pre-scientific world, these stories had genuine persuasive power.

Ehrman examines another strand of traditional historiography regarding the attraction of Christianity in this period: the idea that the Christian community provided a highly supportive safety net in a culture of social networks, and one that was uniquely charitable, caring and supportive. The support of widows and orphans, care of the sick and homeless, the provision of funerals for the poor and the care of graves were all noted as benefits of belonging to the Christian community and emphasised as duties for all Christians under the coordination of the bishops. But Erhman does not see this a major factor in winning adherents, quoting von Harnack: “We know of no cases in which Christians desired to win, or actually did win, adherents by means of the charities which they dispensed.” (p. 136) and then concluding “we have little evidence to suggest that people widely, if at all, joined the church because of the communal benefits they would receive.” (p. 137)

Some reviewers feel Erhman has missed a beat here. In a generally very positive review in The Spectator, history writer Tom Holland wonders whether Erhman’s emphasis on his status as a non-Christian scholar necessarily makes him neutral and draws attention to a similar book to Ehrmans’ by the Christian scholar Larry Hurtado – Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World. Both scholars note that Christianity placed an emphasis on ethics that was not found in the pagan cults (though was found in the more rarefied and elite sphere of the various philosophical schools). Holland observes:

“It is left to Hurtado, though, to tease out what the implications of this might be for anyone looking to explain the appeal of Christianity to potential converts. That the poor should be as worthy of respect as the rich; that the starving should have a claim on those with the reserves to feed them; that the vulnerable — children, prostitutes, slaves — should not be used by the powerful as mere sexual objects: all of these novel Christian doctrines must surely have had some influence on ‘the triumph of Christianity’ among the teeming masses of Roman cities.”

Unsurprisingly, Hurtado agrees with Holland on this point, though is careful to note that his book is not really an analysis of what made Christianity attractive, per se, but rather what he feels made it distinctive. Overall, I think Holland may have a point, but it is a pity that Erhman seems to have brushed this kind of motivation aside so briefly. It was a point worth more detailed exploration. Erhman quotes von Harnack’s The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (1902) and moves on to say “we have little evidence” to think these things were a factor, but we actually do have some. His dismissal of Julian’s claim that these things did attract converts on the grounds that he was raised a Christian and so was an “insider” seems a little glib. Similarly, the pagans Tertullian depicts saying “these Christians, see how they love one another” may be hypothetical, but the hypothesis needs to be somewhat credible to have much rhetorical effect. There is a danger in making out that the breadth of Christian charity was utterly unique, as this kind of thing spills over into Christian apologetics rather too easily and early Christianity was far more of its time and culture than it was distinct from it. But this element did feel as though it needed rather more than a couple of hurried pages.

Conversion and Coercion

Ehrman’s final chapter takes the story beyond Constantine and looks at the impact of his successors, both the Christians who maintained and expanded his pro-church policies and the single pagan, Julian, who tried to reverse them. It is a useful summary in that it is objective; noting the increasing tendency toward imposing restrictions on pagan practice without falling into the crazed histrionics and exaggerations of modern polemicists like the aforementioned Catherine Nixey and similar ranters. He notes the various laws constricting public sacrifice and worship by pagans and the orders for the closure of temples. But unlike Nixey et. al. he is careful to guide his readers on how these edicts need to be understood:

“These laws were directed to specific locales, not empire-wide, and there existed no state apparatus to ensure they were carried out. As a result, they had but little effect: paganism continued, unchecked, in most places. But the laws do show the will of the emperor , and this would not have gone unnoticed. Conversions away from paganism continued apace.” (pp. 246-7)

His notes on the brief reign of Julian and his abortive attempt at reversing the tide of Christian conversion is fairly standard stuff, though he makes a few interesting points. For example, he notes that while Julian’s prescription against Christians teaching the pagan classics to schoolboys seems relatively benign, it was actually a very clever stratagem, pointing out it meant “no longer could Christians teach the principal subjects of instruction …. [which] meant the next generation of elites would be trained exclusively by pagans” (p. 249).

Of course, Julian’s death in battle and the succession of a second generation of Christians meant his attempts at reversal failed, though Ehrman’s demographic calculations imply they were doomed anyway. Ehrman notes the increasing intolerance and tendency toward coercion that developed in Christianity as the later fourth century progressed, quoting Firmicus Maternus urging the emperors Constantius II and Constans to “castigate and punish” paganism while citing bloodthirsty Old Testament injunctions against “idolatory”. But he also notes that this was far from the universal attitude, also quoting Gregory of Nazianus’ far milder observation that “I do not consider it good practice to coerce people instead of persuading them”. (p. 256) Again, unlike the ranters, Ehrman wants his readers to understand this period, not stir up modern prejudices against it. In contrast to Nixey, for example, when he describes the destruction of the great temple of Serapis in 391 AD he actually bothers to tell the whole story, complete with the gang of pagan zealots who had holed up in the temple and were torturing and killing Christian captives – a rather pertinent detail that Nixey carefully excluded from her version of the story. His account of the murder of Hypatia is less clear though. He gives it in the context of anecdotes of Christian anti-pagan violence and presents it as evidence that “pagan religions in Alexandria may have been on the defensive” (p. 263). But then he details how she was caught up in the political struggle between Cyril and Orestes (both Christians) and makes it clear that this was a political murder. So it seems rather sloppy to then conclude it was the “murder of a pagan philosopher at the hands of a Christian mob” (p. 265) when it is clear from the evidence and even from Ehrman’s own account that paganism, philosophy and Christianity actually had very little to do with this political tit-for-tat assassination.

On the whole, however, his analysis is balanced. He notes the instances of violence and the evidence of some destruction of temples and statues, but overall comes to the same conclusion of most objective historians: Christianity did not win out because of violent coercion. In conclusion, he quotes Michele Renee Salzman’s observation that “it is hard to accept the interpretation advanced by certain scholars that physical violence, coercion, was a central factor in explaining the spread of Christianity” (p. 274).

He is equally fair in his assessment of what was lost because of the conversion of the Late Antique world to Christianity, noting that while many works of literature were indeed lost due to a declining interest in them by Christian scholars, many were also preserved by those same scholars and noting “such pagan works may have been lost anyway, without the Christianization of the empire” (p. 285). After all, as I’ve detailed elsewhere, loss is actually the norm for most pre-modern texts. Unsurprisingly, Ehrman does not fall into the trap of Christian apologism and its attendant denigration of the Classical world found in some of the work of people like Rodney Stark or David Bentley Hart. But, refreshingly, he also avoids the opposite mistake of misty-eyed romanticisation of the Classical past and corresponding demonisation of the Christians, found in Nixey and the ranters. He concludes:

“In this book I have tried to explain the triumph of Christianity without making it a triumphalist narrative. As a historian, I do not think the Christianization of the Roman Empire was inevitable and I do not celebrate it either as a victory for the human race and a sign of cultural progress on one hand, or a major sociopolitical set-back and cultural disaster on the other. I think it is impossible to say whether the world would have been a worse place or a better one had it not happened.” (p. 282)

This, and the whole book, strikes me as eminently sensible and well-founded, though it is likely to leave the zealots on both sides grumbling. And that is usually a sign that something like the right balance has been struck.