Converted Jerusalem

In his fascinating Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark cites estimates that there were between 10,000 and 20,000 inhabitants of Jerusalem in the first century. Stark uses this to falsify Luke's claims that there were 5000 Christians in Jerusalem (Acts 4:4) and "many thousands" of Jews (Acts 21:20): "Had there been that many converts in Jerusalem, it would have been the first Christian city." (Thanks to my student, Austin Anderson, for drawing my attention to this.)

How the population statistics falsify Luke's numbers is hard to see. Why shouldn't Jerusalem be the first Christian city? If we take Stark's and Luke's estimates as accurate, then Jerusalem is indeed the first Christian city, with between 25-50% of the population converted sometime in the early decades of the church

If true, this significantly alters our picture of the early decades of the church leading up to AD 70. I offer a speculative sketch of what might have happened:

1) Enraged and shocked by the spectacular growth of the Christian community, the Jewish leaders struck out against Peter and John, and this early persecution came to a head in Stephen's martyrdom (Acts 7-8). That led to a wider persecution. Christians were killed, and some Christians fled from the city. It may be that the "diaspora" mentioned in Acts 8 is a much larger exodus than usually thought. If there are already at least five thousand Christians in a city of 10-20,000, and if most of the Christians fled (Luke says "they were all scattered," 8:1), we are possibly looking at a population reduction of between 25% and 50%. Supposing a population of 15,000, and supposing only half of the Christians left the city, we're still looking at a depopulation of nearly 17%.

2) Most of the remaining inhabitants of the city would, of course, be Jewish, and Jerusalem would have turned back to a predominantly Jewish city. Judaism was dominant, and it was a Judaism infused with the kind of zeal that Saul of Tarsus would show. This would be a ripe context for the development of Judaizing, which arises in Judea (Acts 15:1) and was prominent in Jerusalem (cf. Gal 1-2). So, after a quick conversion, there's a Jewish and Judaizing backlash against Christians in Jerusalem.

3) By the time of the Jewish war, there would be few Christians remaining in Jerusalem, and the city would be dominated by the most fanatical Jews.

This reconstruction not only affects our understanding of early Christian history, but might hold some implications for the interpretation of Revelation. Perhaps the harvest of grapes in chapter 14 is the persecution of Acts 8?

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, March 30, 2007 at 02:53 PM

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