Thread by @DrPJWilliams

Thread: in Bart Ehrman’s engaging book ‘The Triumph of Christianity’ he makes some approximate calculations of how many Christians there were at various stages.

The numbers he gives for early years appear rather low.

Acts claims there were 120 before Pentecost (1:15)

3,000 more at Pentecost (2:41)

5,000 men (4:4)

Even more (6:1)

Even more + many priests (6:7)

Economy-affecting numbers in Ephesus (19:24-27).

Eventually ‘myriads’ (10,000s) among Jews (Judaeans?) alone (21:20).

Ehrman can reject these as exaggerated, but on his numbers they are not only exaggerated, but we have to suppose that the narratives project onto early periods numbers which didn’t even exists at the (later) time of writing.

Pliny writes to Trajan around AD 112 about Christians and the emperor knows exactly who they are.

However, on Ehrman’s numbers, there would have been under 15,000 Christians in the entire Roman empire at the time.

And yet Pliny states that the contagion of Christianity had thoroughly spread (contagio pervagata est) in villages and rural areas and buyers of sacrificial meat had become extremely rare.

Bithynia wasn’t exactly a leading centre of Christianity.

Tacitus also speaks of the vast number of Christians in Rome in AD 64 just when Ehrman thinks there were little over a thousand in the whole world.

Even allowing for exaggeration of these numbers, Ehrman’s model doesn’t adequately explain the specifics of both the Christian and non-Christian texts.

Rather Ehrman’s numbers, which are similar to those implied by many other scholars, seem adjusted to fit the needs of a historical model which narrows the number of witnesses to Jesus & earliest Christianity so as to increase the plausibility that little early testimony survived.