I’ve got posts up at the Blogging Aquinas blog on the first two chapters of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Shorter Summa. Surely there’s someone who can drop by and help me relieve my ignorance? I’m actually going to try to post something there every day, as I work through the book; we’ll see how it goes.

This is a fascinating book.

Subtitled, somewhat flamboyantly, “The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome,” Stark’s book takes a quantitative and statistical look at how Christianity spread between Christ’s death and the year 250 AD. That sounds dry, but it’s anything but.

Stark begins by selecting the thirty-one major cities of that time, and then quantifying various facts about them. Did they first have a Christian community by 100 AD? by 180 AD? by 250 AD? Were they port cities or inland? Were they more or less Hellenic in culture? Were they centers of the cults of Isis or Cybele? Did they have sizeable Jewish communities? Then, given these and other data items, he begins to test a number of statistical hypotheses. For example, his results support the hypotheses that Christianity tend to first appear in port cities, and in cities that were part of the Jewish Diaspora. These are obvious conclusions, and most historians would agree with them; but as it notes, if his quantitative method is valid it should give the obvious answer when the answer is really obvious.

It’s his later conclusions that I found most interesting. He spends a great deal of time on the early Christian heresies, especially those which are collectively termed “gnosticism” these days. Some writers, notably Elaine Pagels, have in recent years claimed that there were many Christianities in the early days of the Church, that the Catholic Church suppressed the gnostic Christians, and that perhaps the gnostics had as much right to the name of Christian as those who retained it. Stark investigates this position and finds that it was far otherwise.

A digression. There are quite a few documents found in the last century that have been termed “gnostic”, mostly because it’s a convenient term. Of these, some had sizeable groups associated with them; some had small groups; of others, nothing of their authors or readers is known. The more sizeable groups all tended to share a similar set of beliefs: that the physical universe was not created directly by the One God, but by an evil deity, subordinate to the One God and disobedient to him, called the Demiurge. According to these groups, our souls are creations of the One God, but our bodies and all the things of the physical world are irredeemably evil. This led some groups to extreme asceticism, and others to extreme debauchery—if body and soul are separate, why not let your body do what it likes?—but on the evils of the physical world they were agreed.

Stark compares the locations of known “demiurgist” groups with those of known Christian congregations, and also with those of non-gnostic Christian heresies, the Marcionites and the Montanists. He finds that Marcionite and Montanists groups appeared in the same places as Christian congregations, which is what you’d expect of Christian heresies; they were drawing on the same pool of potential converts, and also from the orthodox groups. The presence of the Manichees and the Valentinians shows a significantly different pattern. These groups are correlated solely with the larger cities (then, as now, more able to support oddball groups), and particularly with those cities in which paganism remained strong the longest. He finds no significant correlation between the presence of Christian and gnostic congregations.

The conclusion is obvious: although the gnostic groups used semi-Christian imagery, they were not really an outgrowth of Christianity at all. On the contrary, they were outgrowths of classical paganism.

As I say, interesting stuff. Moreover, Stark provides all of the numbers (including the correlation coefficients, regression results, and so forth) that underly his conclusions (in an appendix, I hasten to add—the casual reader need not fear). I studied quite a bit of statistics once upon a time, and though I’ve not used it recently I’ve no doubt I could repeat his results with a bit of work, given the data in the book itself.

The book’s not perfect; I had a few quibbles here and there, and being a work of social science it naturally looks only at human-scale explanations and mechanisms, the truly divine being out-of-scope. That’s to be expected, though, and within those limits I think the book is outstanding.