The Second Church: Popular Christianity A.D. 200-400.

• Author: Van Dam, Raymond
• Position: Book review

The Second Church: Popular Christianity A.D. 200-400. By RAMSAY MACMULLEN. Writings from the Greco-Roman World Supplement Series, vol. 1. Atlanta: SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE, 2009. Pp. xii + 210, illus. $24.95 (paper).

How quickly and how extensively did Christianity spread in the early Roman empire? Modern scholarship typically (even if sometimes unwittingly) still follows the estimates of Adolf Harnack in his The. Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, published over a century ago. Harnack concluded that Christians were about ten percent of the population in the Roman world in the early fourth century. Almost three centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus, this seems to be a stunningly low outcome, especially since it would imply that when the emperor Constantine became a supporter of Christianity, he was precariously out in front of the movement. But since Harnack knew the future, he could afford to be patient in his estimates. As compensation for this slow progress he also listed a series of attributes that he claimed made Christianity superior to other ancient religions. Harnack clearly thought of Christianity as sui generis, a uniquely attractive religion whose eventual success was somehow preordained. In many modern discussions it is likewise still difficult to avoid slipping into an implicit teleology about the inevitable rise of Christianity.

Harnack based his analysis on a deep familiarity with literary texts and rarely mentioned monuments and archaeology. This omission is understandable, because early Christian archaeology at the time was still a developing field. Since then Christian archaeology has flourished along with the expansion of late antique studies in general. Ramsay MacMullen now takes full advantage of recent archaeological publications in order to propose a different pace for the spread of Christianity: "it is the physical remains that explain things" (p. 77). The surprise is that rather than arguing for an acceleration, he proposes an even less extensive and more limited impact than Harnack's model.

MacMullen emphasizes the low number of early churches. In addition, all were small. At Dura on the Euphrates River, for instance, a city with a population of several thousand, the large meeting room in a house that had been modified to serve as a church in the mid-third century could accommodate only about seventy-five people. Even though from the era of Constantine more churches were...