Jewish Networks in the Spread of Early Christianity: A Mathematical Model of Marcionite and Lukan Christianities

Abstract

The authors reconsider the dynamics of Jewish and non-Jewish networks in the spread of early Christianity. For mathematical modeling of complex processes like these, they apply Lukan and Marcionite Christianities as strictly coded test cases. Despite weak historical evidence, it is obvious that these two movements, which are newly assumed to be contemporaneous, maintained different attitudes to the Jewish background of Christianity and so they probably used Jewish and non-Jewish networks in a different way. While Lukan Christianity, which remained open to the Jewish tradition, may still have utilized Jewish Mediterranean networks, Marcionite Christianity, which rejected the Jewish heritage, probably ignored them. On this reduced historical basis, the authors constructed a mathematical model of temporal spreading on the network which was common for both of the hypothesized types of Christianity. The nodes of this network, representing big cities of the ancient Mediterranean, contain only two different kinds of diffusivity -Jewish and non-Jewish. At the level of the common network which remains stable, the model examines the importance of global centers for the spreading dynamics of early Christianity. On the other hand, the employment of the Jewish sub-network is manipulated over time according to the regular alteration of early Christian generations. This way, the necessity of the Jewish sub-network for the spread of early Christianity is tested.