Daily Reading for January 20 • Fabian, Bishop and Martyr of Rome, 250
By the third century C.E., Christianity had become a widespread religious movement that crossed ethnic, class, and gender lines throughout the Roman Empire. While population numbers for the ancient world are notoriously elusive, conservative estimates suggest that by the year 300, Christians may have numbered in the several millions (out of a population of about 60 million). Despite the highly rhetorical presentation of Christian apologists and historians from these early centuries, however, this rapid growth was neither uniform nor coherent. In its first centuries, Christianity was characterized by diversity and marginalization. From its origins, different groups understood the significance of “faith in Christ” in radically different ways and expressed their belief in different forms.
In addition to this internal diversity, various forms of antagonism from the dominant culture around them meant that Christians were often viewed with suspicion and mistrust. After all, they met in private homes, performed secretive rituals of initiation and communion, and stayed away from the public religious festivals of their friends and neighbors. Organized, government-sponsored persecution was rare in the first two hundred years of Christianity (although no less painful for being rare), but localized and sporadic attempts to root out religious subversives resulted in violence against some Christian communities. Our earliest account of martyrs (witnesses) who died rather than renounce Christianity appear in the mid-second century, and the circulation of martyr texts provided a theological and political framework within which Christian resistance and opposition to “the world” crystallized. This sense of marginalization cut across the diversity of Christian beliefs and practices: the perceived Christian conflict with the “powers of this world” perhaps predominated for a time over the internal pressures and contradictions of diversity within the movement.
From the introduction to Christianity in Late Antiquity: 300-450 C. E.: A Reader by Bart D. Ehrman and Andrew S. Jacobs (New York: Oxford, 2004).