The early church's social practices as evidence

Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (1996), documents a pattern of early Christian behaviour that is hard to explain by collective sustained delusion.

During the Antonine Plague (~165 to 180 AD) and the Plague of Cyprian (~250 to 270 AD), Christians stayed in cities to nurse the sick when others fled. Mortality among Christians was lower than expected because basic care saved lives. The reputation of the movement grew. Christians prohibited infanticide and exposure absolutely; pagan Rome routinely killed unwanted infants, especially female ones. Christian populations had different sex ratios from the surrounding culture, with compounding demographic effects.

Christianity gave women materially higher status: restricted divorce, restricted child marriage, care for widows, female martyrs honoured equally. It made the movement disproportionately attractive to women. On slavery, while not calling for legal abolition (institutionally inconceivable in Rome), it taught spiritual equality (Galatians 3:28; Philemon). Slaves and free shared the eucharist and were buried together. The eighteenth and nineteenth century abolitionist movements are the long working out of this seed.

The first organised hospital in human history was Basil of Caesarea's Basiliad (~370 AD). The medieval and modern hospital network trace to Christian theological motivation.

A movement built on a known lie does not produce this behaviour. People who knew they were lying would not nurse plague victims at mortal risk, would not raise foundlings, would not prefer execution to recantation. The social practice is internally consistent with sincere belief in a real resurrection.

Reading

• Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity, 1996.
• Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, 2019.
• Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, 2014.