Prayer

[Minimalist]

For the spread of early Christianity, would be my guess. A couple examples are when the disciples were traveling around and spreading the word, each person heard the message in their own language. Also, what happened to Paul, who then went on to write part of the gospels. I imagine trying to spread a new faith 2000 years ago when you're just a small group of poor people would be very hard. I imagine that's why they had all that extra help spreading the word that we don't have the need for anymore today.

Try again.



http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=95

There is another problem for Christians who want to say that the explosive growth of early Christianity must be due to God. Compared to Christianity, atheism grew even faster during the 20th century. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia (the most respected source for religious demographics):

The number of nonreligionists…  throughout the 20th century has skyrocketed from 3.2 million in 1900… to 918 million in AD 2000… From a miniscule presence in 1900, a mere 0.2% of the globe, [atheism and agnosticism] are today expanding at the extraordinary rate of 8.5 million new converts each year, and are likely to reach one billion adherents soon. A large percentage of their members are the children, grandchildren or the great-great-grandchildren of persons who in their lifetimes were practicing Christians.

At the early Christian rate of 40% per decade and 3.2 million in 1900, non-believers would have only numbered 74 million in 2000, not 918 million. The growth rate of non-belief in the 20th century was 76% per decade.

Not only were 'xtians' a small group in the early 4th century they also lacked any sort of cohesion.

"Christians, needless to say, utterly detest one another; they slander each other constantly with the vilest forms of abuse, and cannot come to any sort of agreement in their teaching. Each sect brands its own, fills the head of its own with deceitful nonsense...".

Celsus, c 180 AD

(These words brought to us by the noted xtian writer, Origen, c 250 AD)

Despite church bullshit reality seems to be that there were numerous groups using the umbrella term "christian" and it was not until one of them backed the right horse in the struggle between Constantine and Maxentius and were rewarded for their loyalty by Constantine that they were able to begin stomping out the so-called "heretics" and by later in the 4th century use their position to shut down the classical world.

This absurd notion of "missionaries" converting one sorry ass at a time is the worst kind of Hollywood horseshit.