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Essay on How/Why Christianity spread during its first 300 years
One of the most significant features of Christianity, apart from its theology, ethics and ecclesiastical structures, is the number and location of its followers. These followers, called "Christians", are individuals, and they have distinct ethnic identities, speak identifiable languages, and make their homes in specific geographic locations. Throughout the history of Christianity, whole villages, tribes and peoples have embraced the Christian message. Consequently, groups of followers, including their ethnicity and language, can be named, located, listed, counted, mapped and tracked over time. As a result, Christians as a whole, at any given time in history, have a definable geographic boundary and a demographic or statistical centre. In practical terms, a single geographic point on earth can be seen as the statistical "centre of gravity" of all Christian followers at any given date, and the place where the numbers of all Christians living to its north, its south, its east and its west are exactly the same.
Although modern Turkey is 98 percent Muslim, it is a good place to look for the origins of Christianity. Pergamon, one of its ancient cities, is 1,200 miles from Rome, then the center of the world; it is along the route followed by the first missionaries as they traveled 840 miles from Jerusalem. By 60 C.E., there were about 3,000 Christ-believers out of the 45 to 90 million people in the Greco-Roman world.
Paul may have known most of them. Today there are more than 2 billion Christians in a world population of 6 billion.( Harnack, A. 1908) Christianity is the most practiced faith in Europe, the Americas and Australia, and the fastest growing faith in Africa. Islam, the next largest faith,has more than 1 billion adherents. One of the most attractive things about first-century Christianity, experts say, was its mantra: "For God so loved the world......
