Rebuilding the Foundations
One must, of course, leave room for those rare conversions resulting from mystical experiences such as Paul’s on the road to Damascus. But these instances aside, conversion is primarily about bringing one’s religious behavior into alignment with that of one’s friends and relatives, not about encountering attractive doctrines.
Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 254-256.
Of course, one can easily imagine doctrines so bizarre as to keep most people from joining. But, barring that, conversion is primarily an act of conformity—but so is nonconversion. In the end it is a matter of the relative strength of social ties.
Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 256-258.
By now dozens of close-up studies of conversion have been conducted. All of them confirm that social networks are the basic mechanism through which conversion takes place. To convert someone, you must first become that person’s close and trusted friend. But even your best friends will not convert if they already are highly committed to another faith.
Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 276-278.
Evangelism, Jewish
The world’s first missionaries were Jews, and the world’s first converts became Jews.
Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Location 156.
But, as every orthodox Jewish scholar agrees, the historical facts are clear: Judaism was the "first great missionary religion."
Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 159-160.
Maimonides, the famous medieval Jewish scholar, put it plainly: "Moses our teacher was commanded by the Almighty to compel all the inhabitants of the world to accept the commandments."
Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 160-161.
These and similar verses inspired the renowned third-century-CE* rabbi, Eleazar ben Pedat, to assert that "God sent Israel into Exile among the nations only for the purpose of acquiring converts." Some of Pedat’s contemporaries even claimed that "converts are dearer to God than born Jews."
Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 167-170.
Jews in the Diaspora sought converts, and they seem to have been quite successful in doing so. The best estimate is that by the first century, Jews made up from 10 to 15 percent of the population of the Roman Empire, nearly 90 percent of them living in cities outside Palestine.
Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 177-178.
Josephus was probably accurate when he claimed: "All the time they [the Jews] were attracting to their worship a great number of Greeks, making them virtually members of their own community."
Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 182-184).
Evangelism, Pagan
"Of any organized or conscious evangelizing in paganism there are very few signs indeed[;] ... of any god whose cult required or had anything ordinarily to say about evangelizing, there is no sign at all."
MacMullen, R. 1981. Paganism in the Roman Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. p. 98-99. As cited by Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 3639-3641.
God-fearers (in Acts)
The God-fearers were Greeks and Romans like the Roman soldier Cornelius, who had embraced Jewish monotheism, but who remained marginal to Jewish life because they were unwilling to fully embrace Jewish ethnicity—not only adult circumcision, but some other aspects of the Law as well.
Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 187-189.
Great Commission
How does anyone actually make converts? Some dismiss such a question by calling the success of the Christian mission a miracle. If so, it was a decidedly incomplete miracle, a miracle entirely at odds with Christ’s directive in Matthew assigning the job of converting the world to all Christians, and a miracle that is quite inconsistent with the doctrine of free will.
Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 207-209.
My note: This is a bizarre quote. One, the Great Commission is addressed only to the Eleven. Two, Cities of God argues that "most conversions are not produced by professional missionaries ... but by rank-and-file members who share their faith with their friends and relatives" (locations 282-283). Doesn't the quote above contradict this latter one?
Missionaries
In contrast, missionaries are those who seek converts, who attempt to get others to shift from one tradition to another. Some people serve as part-time, 'amateur' missionaries. Others are full-time 'professionals.' But either sort of missionary is produced only within monotheism.
Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 146-148.
For example, once Christianity became safely ensconced as the Roman state church, its missionary activities very rapidly decayed.
Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome . HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 149-150.
What Christianity offered the world was monotheism stripped of ethnic encumbrances. People of all nations could embrace the One True God while remaining people of all nations.
Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 201-202.
Mysteries of the Faith
Indeed, Philip Jenkins suggested that in the early church, central Christian doctrines, including the crucifixion and resurrection, were "holy truth...not to be lightly shared, and at least some churches prevented converts to Christianity from hearing the gospels and their mysteries until they had been formally initiated into the new religion, by means of baptism."
Jenkins. (2001). . Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 79. In Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 267-270.
Urban/Rural Christianity
Early Christianity was primarily an urban movement. The original meaning of the word pagan (paganus) was "rural person," or more colloquially "country hick." It came to have religious meaning because after Christianity had triumphed in the cities, most of the rural people remained unconverted.
Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 124-126.
... a consensus has formed among historians of the early church that regardless of biblical assurances to the lower classes, the early Christians were drawn mainly from the ranks of the privileged.
Stark, Rodney. (2009). Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Locations 219-220.