Sociologist Rodney Stark has estimated the growth in the number of professing Christians during the first three centuries AD.
It went from roughly a few thousand around 40AD, comprising .0017% of the population – based on an estimated population of 60 million in the entire Roman Empire – to over 6,000,000 by 300AD, roughly 10.5% of the total population, assuming the size of the population remained fairly stable. Why did such growth take place?
While a number of reasons need to be cited in answer to this question, central to this growth – in a day when there was no public mass evangelism apart from what the martyrs shared before death – were the Scriptures.
