Sociologist Rodney Stark has estimated the growth in the number of professing Christians during the first three centuries AD.
It went from roughly a few thousand around 40AD, comprising .0017% of the population – based on an estimated population of 60 million in the entire Roman Empire – to over 6,000,000 by 300AD, roughly 10.5% of the total population, assuming the size of the population remained fairly stable. Why did such growth take place?
While a number of reasons need to be cited in answer to this question, central to this growth – in a day when there was no public mass evangelism apart from what the martyrs shared before death – were the Scriptures.
These ‘barbaric writings’
English Bible scholar Michael Green, commenting on this fact, has noted: ‘From the Acts of the Apostles down to … Origen we find the same story repeated time and again. Discussion with Christians, arguments with them, annoyance at them, could lead enquirers to read these “barbaric writings” [i.e. the Scriptures] for themselves. And once they began to read, the Scriptures exercised their own fascination and power. Many an interested enquirer like Justin and Tatian, Athenagoras and Theophilus, came to Christian belief through finding, as he read, that “the Word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword” and that “the sacred Scriptures are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ”.’
Hilary, a seeker after truth
One early Christian who knew the power and impact of the Word of God in his life was Hilary, born around 316 into a non-Christian home in Poitiers, Aquitaine, and who died in either 367 or 368. He probably became a Christian in his early 20s and went on to serve as a Christian bishop and author. In a very important book that he wrote entitled On the Trinity (356–60), he recalled, at the beginning, how he had been led to Christ.
He recorded that he had been seeking for truth amidst the various religious options in the Roman world, when, in his words, he ‘chanced upon those books which according to Jewish tradition were written by Moses and the Prophets’, namely, the Old Testament. As he read them, he became convinced that there is one true God, the maker and origin of all things, who fills the entire universe, but who cannot be identified with his creation. This knowledge, he tells us, filled his soul with joy. It was a knowledge he readily confessed God had taught him.
Longing for eternal joy
But he longed for more. He longed, in his words, for a ‘hope of everlasting happiness’. For, he reasoned, what good would there be in ‘thinking correctly about God if death were to destroy all sensation’ and all thought. In fact, he began to think that it would not be right for God to have given him knowledge about his aseity, omnipotence and omnipresence if ‘his life might one day end and his death last for all eternity’.
Hilary does not tell us how it was that he began to read the New Testament, what he calls ‘the evangelical and apostolic doctrine’. But he did, and he began to read in the Gospel of John, the first chapter, verses 1 to 14. As he read of the fact that God made the universe by one who is here called the Word and who came into this world and took on human flesh, Hilary says ‘my fearful and anxious soul found greater hope than it had anticipated’.
Hilary came to see that the Word or the Son, or as he is often called in the New Testament, the Lord Jesus Christ, came into this world so that he might die for sinners like himself and so that we may be raised from death to immortality with him. … He allows himself to be nailed to the cross in order that by the curse of the cross all the curses of our earthly condemnation might be nailed to it and obliterated. … Hence, we are born again by God in Christ through his death.
At last, he said, ‘my soul was at rest’, conscious now of his security in Christ and ‘full of joy’ as he contemplated the future. He began to share with others what he had come to believe for himself, that they too might be saved. And he could now say that he had no greater reward than to serve God by proclaiming him to a pagan world that did not know him.
