Customer Reviews

The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History

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Secularization theorists beware! Stark provides an immensely satisfying theoretical exposition on the rise of Christianity and backs it up with historical data. This book is sure to aggravate the myriad of social scientists who study religion with only ad hoc theoretical frameworks and who use selective data to fit their "explanations." Many religious studies scholars will consider this book "dangerous" simply because it is rigorous and challenges their ad hoc explanations. (Isn't it ironic that intellectuals would consider ideas dangerous?!). I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in how religious organizations grow and expand. Stark's work not only explains why Christianity fared so well in its first several centuries, but helps us understand contemporary movements such as the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. This is historical social science at its best and a must read for anyone interested in the scientific study of religion and/or social movements. Bravo!!

As someone who is trained as both a theologian and a sociologist, Stark has done an excellent job in challenging assumptions (e.g., how the mission to the Jews succeeded rather than failed, how a large number of early converts actually came from the upper classes, etc.) held by many contemporary scholars of early Christianity. Hopefully, this will throw these scholars back into the historical material and have them take a second look.

Excellent book. If you want to learn about the success of Christianity in a social perspective this is the book you have to read. It connects the religious teachings of Jesus and His Church with the expansion of early (and late) Christianity.

Why?

Because, in spite of his subtitle, he actually doesn't wander as far from his sociological academic works into speculative history-cum-apologetics in this book.

He uses sociological studies of current new religions, including growth patterns of the most successful ones like the Mormons, or the Unification Church, the show that Christianity could, with a steady growth rate, have become the majority of the Roman Empire by 350 or so.

That said, he does have a number of weak points to just being wrong in places.

First, in affirming the success of a "mission to the Jews," he makes assumptions about the historicity of the book of Acts that many critical scholars wouldn't accept.

Second, and related to that, he ignores one huge conflict between Paul's writings and Acts when referring to the Apostolic Council of Acts 15.

There, the apolostolic leaders decided Gentiles did not have to be circumcised, but that they did have to abstain from blood (i.e. meats with blood in them) and food sacrificed to idols. NOTE: These were not "optional"; changing these behaviors were to be required of Gentile converts. Yet, in I Corinthians, Paul tells his Gentile audience, in essence: "You want to eat meat that just came from a sacrifice? Go ahead." Now, he does say that if another person offers you meat that they tell you has been sacrificed to an idol, say no **for the sake of that person,** and not because there's anything wrong with it. (I have yet to read an evangelical bible scholar seriously wrestling with this conflict.)

Third, as far as the "marginality" of Hellenized Jews making them prime targets for Christianity, that's pretty weak. Jews had been Hellenizing, and gladly so, for 200 years before Jesus and Paul. Read I and II Maccabees, Mr. Stark, as well as re-reading Daniel. Take note of archaeological finds, such as the zodiacal symbols on the interior walls of the synagogue at Dura-Europus. Note the Greek artistic motifs at some items buried at Qumran, which the latest archaeological research states are Jewish items, not Greek or Roman.

Jews having been Hellenized for that long, any "marginality" was only that which was imposed from the outside by Gentiles, as in Alexandria. Self-marginalized Jews were a definite minority of all believers.

Fourth, he relies on the largely discredited ideas of Jack Finegan, who claimed that ossuaries from the mid-first century showed early, strong Christian influence. The names on the ossuares in question are all common (Yeshua, that's the equivalent of John in English), the alleged "crosses" often appear to simply be quarrying, carving or other non-symbolic marks, and the original examiner of these and other ossuary inscriptions and similar ones, Bagatti, has a history of dating the provenance of objects too early, by decades if not centuries.

As the flack over the James ossuary of the last two years shows, one should take a great deal of care with stone inscriptions.

Besides, if we had New Testament figures with cross signs buried in ossuaries by the mid-first century, this would seem to **undercut** Stark's sociology on how slowly the church grew in its early years. (He estimates 1,400 Christians by the year 50 and 7,500 by the year 100.)

That said, there are good points in the chapter rightly noting that women had much more freedom in early Christianity than in the pagan world (but lost it after the church became institutionalized and patriarchial), and that pagan infanticide was horrendously immoral practice.

Not for people who need A truth. Great for people with an open mind.

Apart from the front cover being something of the sort you'd expect Bartolome de las Casas to use for one of his wonderful historical treatises on how imperialism shook the world, the substance of this work is nothing but dismal!!!! - in a few key respects - but I really only have room to review a couple of these in the here and now. How un-versed this man Rodney Stark actually is on the Biblical tradition is what really gets to me - how he ever got his material published in the first place is really beyond my understanding - but as is common to the knowledge of man during this age - there is much rubbish on the internet! This author knows very little about and has very little sensitivity to the realities of Christianity at the time he professes to be writing about. He states that Christianity was a predominantly urban phenomenon. This is disprovable by far when one looks at the Gospel narratives where a BALANCE of citadel to wilderness existence is alluded to for the communities of Christ Himself. It's a fact that Jesus knew about the practicalities of being in towns and cities but also of the sublime truth resonating from the Creator's heartland in the openness of country. Rodney Stark has absolutely no appreciation for these facts and overlooks them carelessly to the point of slanderously commenting about Christians in exile in Rome saying this garbage on page 10, that they were more concentrated in the city than in the country areas hence the term "paganus" which means "countryman"! This is garbage because the term "pagan" comes from a Greek root word meaning "foreigner" or in Christian interpretation "outsider to the culture". The Latin variation is "gentile". They are interchangeable terms and mean one and the same thing. The Hebrew translation is "Goyem". The Mapuche one is "Winkas". Most Christians would have considered non-Christians "Goyem" or even "Winkas" on the basis they were outsiders to the culture. Christianity in its beginnings was firmly rooted in the tribal tradition of old Israel, which was actually far more wilderness or country-situated than urbanized as such, so Stark's argument about Christianity being preferential for strictly urban environments just falls flat on its face! Moreover, the urban landscapes traditional to Christianity's origins are not the "quintessentially urban" variety you would expect to find in Europe although in some epochs the varying imperialistic influences from the power mongers of the time had exerted unquestionable influence on some of the characteristics of the native urban landscape of these regions. Christianity is not indigenously urban in the Eurocentric sense of the word "urban" as such but has more of an ability to understand the reason and the need to coexist within different types of environments so when the exile from Israel (between 67-72 AD) took place, Christians who fled the political turmoil went to different cities and other far off places and Rome was among these. There are different qualities to the notion of "urban" which cannot be solely measured according to the logic of the Greco-Roman imperial mindset. There is knowledge within the native Christian community about the history being totally different to what mainstream historians have tried to construct as though it was our history. Stark is just plain ignorant of the facts in many areas and seriously needs to refresh his knowledge by choosing to be more open to the truth as it is told from the original perspective. Christianity was birthed as a community which had no permanent roots in any particular urban setting. Its nature was rather nomadic in that communities would travel from one area to another on a regular basis, particularly during the Gospel period. The cultural particularity of the emerging Christian people was territorially away from urbanization but in other matters of social interactivity, passing through cities and towns was a reality and a necessity. There is this thing about the nexus between the Holy city of Jerusalem and the sacredness of the non-urban traditional lands which gives Christianity as a culture an inherent balance in being able to coexist dynamically in these two complementary halves of the whole. That spatial harmony is comprised of the interflow between the two complementary relational loci which help to make up a significant part of the traditional Christian cosmological lifeworld. When in exile, Christians had to confront vastly different sets of politicosocial perimeters, primarily due to the fact they were not on their home territory. This kind of severing from customary links with the land and forced displacement set a whole different set of relational dynamics into motion which had to be re-evaluated in practical terms within the community and between members of the community and outsiders. Many mainstream sociologists and historians have not dared to venture into this area because it confronts too readily their denial of cultural substance where Christian history is concerned. They prefer to think of early Christianity as devoid of any cultural substance and thereby have the rubbishy tendency to portray it as a dead-pan institutional emergence riddled with intellectual idiosyncracies which have very little to do with the humanness of everyday life. This is what angers me the most about such trite, shallow, and ultimately truthless representations about early Christian reality. Not all writers on the subject are this way, thankfully, but some of the more recent ones are just tagging along with this popularized lifeless analysis of a culture that in reality has far more substance to it than what some of these writers lead readers to believe. It's about time you all dispense with using non-indigenous terminology such as "deacons", and "presbyters", "church", "bishops", and "offices" etc. when speaking about early Christian communities because the reality is, that these very terms were not even a part of the daily vocabulary of these communities. Most of these terms are derived from Latin or Greek and whilst both Latin and Greek were the academic languages of the day pretty much similar to how English is in today's world, for the most part however, Christians had their own languages and dialects which they spoke commonly amongst themselves and the culture was primarily one with a strong ancestral oral tradition although it was becoming increasing popular to spread knowledge about the survival needs of the culture out into wider society through the written medium. This is to be also seen as mirrored again to us in today's world. It is very popular now for many indigenous communities globally to make the most of academic resources and mainstream educational strategies to ensure that cultural knowledge is preserved and remains situated in the hands of the communities themselves as well as where deemed appropriate, disseminated out into the wider world.

Stark's writing of the book is problematic because it is cluttered and very hard to comprehend. Although Stark's struggle to combine sociological and historical disciplines can be problematic, this scholarly work is NECESSARY in understanding the controversies of Christianity's historical origins.
Stark's information is concise, thorough, and very informative.

Dangerous. A little learning is a dangerous thing. Rodney Stark has plenty of sociological learning, but little historical. His overall treatment of Judaism is deeply problemmatic, even if he does a decent job in the single chapter that focusses on it.

As with any book done "outside" an author's field, there are hits and misses; in this case the misses are horribly off the mark