Proponents and critics of numerically modelling early Christian growth have missed many complexities of this approach. This study re-examines quantitative modelling by conducting "thought experiments," built from initial assumptions to population projections. First, an "apostolic mission" model assumes that Christianity grew via persuasive leaders; it projects a cubic growth curve. Second, a "values reproduction" model ties higher reproduction and conversion to certain Christian values; it projects an exponential curve. Next, a "social reaction" model links growth to interconfessional interactions; it projects a logistic curve. Such formal models reveal numerical parameters of conversion and the impact of various assumptions. Together, they illustrate the variability of early Christian population projections. They also showcase limitations of traditional quantitative modelling, which tends to oversimplify social conditions, to mischaracterise ancient religion, and to inspire teleological reasoning. Newer "network" models can overcome only some of these limitations. Used carefully, however, quantitative methods supplement familiar socio-cultural approaches.How did the Mediterranean world become predominantly Christian? This question has, more than any other, shadowed the study of late Roman history. Generations of scholars have approached it, but each new theoretical angle seems to reopen basic questions.Rest assured, this article is not another attempt to explain the rise of Christianity. It is an effort to reassess a scholarly approach sometimes touted and sometimes derided: formal quantitative modelling.The topic may seem odd. While Adolf von Harnack attempted to measure the expansion of Christianity, most scholars have found insufficient evidence. 1 1.
The School of Antioch has more often been treated as a doctrinal abstraction than a social entity. This study reinterprets the Antiochene phenomenon as a socio-doctrinal network, a group of clerics bound by a call and response of doctrinal language. Conciliar documents and the letters of Theodoret of Cyrrhus showcase this network in operation in the 430s and 440s. For earlier, formative decades, the network must be approached indirectly through historical narrative. In his Church History Theodoret narrates how one bishop-claimant (Meletius of Antioch) and his partisan following (featuring Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia) combined preaching, teaching, and ascetic associations to claim and organize Syrian bishoprics.While sometimes tendentious, Theodoret's narrative presentation finds external confirmation. It suggests that Antiochene doctrines coalesced in a specific social context, a germinating mix of clerical friendships and enmities, and that they developed as part of an intertwined socio-doctrinal dynamic.
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