Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [6]
Furthermore, according to noted historian Gibbon, as related by Taylor, by the middle of the 3rd century, there were at Romethe hotbed of Christianity-only "'one bishop, forty-six presbyters, fourteen deacons, forty-two acolytes and fifty readers, exorcists and porters. We may venture, (concludes the great historian) to estimate the Christians at Rome, at about fifty thousand, when the total number of inhabitants cannot be taken at less than a million . . .' It should never be forgotten, that miraculously rapid as we are sometimes told the propagation of the gospel was, it was first preached in England by Austin, the monk, under commission of Pope Gregory, towards the end of the seventh century. So that the good news of salvation, in travelling from the supposed scene of action to this favoured country, may be calculated as having posted at the rate of almost an inch in a fortnight."U, And as Robin Lane Fox says:
... in the 240s, Origen, the Christian intellectual, did admit that Christians were only a tiny fraction of the world's inhabitants ... If Christians were really so numerous, we could also expect some evidence of meeting places which could hold so many worshippers. At this date, there were no church buildings on public ground ... 17
If the rest of the Empire is factored in, it is estimated that by the middle of the third century Christians constituted only perhaps two percent of the total population. 18
Also, as noted, there were in fact few martyrs, and the early forgers of Christianity were impressed not by such alleged martyrdom but by the position of power they would earn by their "conversion." In actuality, Christianity did not spread because it was a great idea or because it was under the supernatural guidance of the resurrected "Lamb of God." Were that so, he would have to be held accountable, because Christianity was promulgated by the sword, with a bloody trail thousands of mile long, during an era called by not a few a "shameless age."
Like so much else about Christianity, the claims of its rapid spread are largely mythical. In reality, in some places it took many blood-soaked centuries before its opponents and their lineage had been sufficiently slaughtered so that Christianity could usurp the reigning ideology. Pagan Europeans and others fought it tooth and nail, in an epic and heroic effort to maintain their own cultures and autonomy, in the face of an onslaught by those whom the Pagans viewed as "idiots" and "bigots." As Walker says:
Christian historians often give the impression that Europe's barbarians welcomed the new faith, which held out a hope of immortality and a more kindly ethic. The impression is false. The people didn't willingly give up the faith of their ancestors, which they considered essential to the proper functioning of the earth's cycles. They had their own hope of immortality and their own ethic, in many ways a kinder ethic than that of Christianity, which was imposed on them by force. Justinian obtained 70,000 conversions in Asia Minor by methods that were so cruel that the subject populations eventually adopted Islam in order to rid themselves of the rigors of Christian rule. As a rule, heathen folk resisted Christianity as long as they could, even after their rulers had gone over to the new faith for its material rewards. . . . Certain words reveal by their derivation some of the opposition met by missionaries. The pagan Savoyards called Christians "idiots," hence