How many anointed have come and gone; how many remain?

by Moster 24 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

• 

  DATA-DOG

  You guys know that there are anointed ( The GB ) and "professed anointed".... ???

  DD
• 

  OrphanCrow

  Careful: Sour Grapes, where in the world did you get this?

  At the end of the first century, there were over 1,000,000 Christians.

  I asked the same question to myself, Careful. Sour Grapes answered with this:

  "According to the World Christian Encyclopedia (1982), it is estimated
  that by A.D. 100 there were 1 million Christians in the Roman Empire
  out of a population of 181 million. This means that by the end of the
  first century less than 1 percent of the population (0.6% to be exact)
  was Christian."

  However, I was still skeptical so I did some more digging. I had found the same quote as Sour Grapes but I do know that going to the subject itself as the source for answering questions about that subject will rarely get a person the correct answer. So I looked some more. And I found this:

  How many Jews became Christians in the First Century?: The failure of the Christian mission to Convert the Jews

  In order to answer that question (how many Jews converted?), the author of the above essay (David C Sim) analyzes estimations of how many Christians were around in the first century in order to arrive at how many Jews would have converted. This is what he says about the number of 1st C Christians:

  Most scholars of Christian origins tend to exaggerate the size and importance of the
  early Christian church. This is understandable in the light of the discipline’s
  intense concentration on the New Testament texts. By confining ourselves in
  particular to the letters of Paul, the Gospels and Acts, it is all too easy to create
  a limited and false impression of the ancient world and the place of the
  Christians within it. Yet the reality is that for all of the first century the Christians
  were a tiny and insignificant socio-religious movement within the Graeco-Roman
  world (Hopkins 1998:195-196). Christianity did of course grow considerably in
  later centuries and it eventually became the religion of the Roman empire, but
  we should take care not to retroject its later size and importance into the initial
  decades of its existence.

  
  Just how small was the Christian movement in the first century is clear
  from the calculations of the sociologist R Stark (1996:5-7; so too Hopkins
  1998:192-193). Stark begins his analysis with a rough estimation of six million
  Christians in the Roman Empire (or about ten percent of the total population) at
  the start of the fourth century. He then argues, on the assumption of 1 000
  Christians in the year 40 that this figure could have been reached through a
  natural and consistent growth of 40 per cent per decade. What makes this a
  feasible rate of growth is that it compares very favourably with the expansion of
  the Mormon Church in more recent times, which has grown at a rate of 43 per
  cent per decade. This method of calculating total Christian numbers in the first
  century renders the following approximate results. There were 1,000 Christians
  in the year 40, 1 400 Christians in 50, 1 960 Christians in 60, 2 744 Christians in
  70, 3 842 Christians in 80, 5 378 Christians in 90 and 7 530 Christians at the
  end of the first century.

  Sims, based on the calculations of sociologist R. Stark, proposes that there were only 7,530 Christians at the end of the first century. That is significantly less than what the Christians claim. Which isn't at all surprising considering that Christians have a tendency to use hyperbole in order to amplify their own importance.
• 

  ttdtt

  Boy I guess the "Great Teachers" wasn't so great after all.

  He and his buddies could not convince at least 144K out of the million Jews in the area, who were waiting for the Messiah, that they should follow him:)
• 

  MrRoboto

  Would you convert if you had not seen the miracles yourself? Basically you are talking about serious apostasy with potentially death as its outcome, you better be right and if you had not seen people being healed, raised from the dead, feeding of thousands from just a little food etc, then you would be very hesitant to take peoples word for it. Then again, maybe the biblical contradictions put people off.
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  careful

  First, how can anyone know how many Christians there were in 100 AD? This web page has widely different estimates, but 1 million seems WAY too high:

  http://blogforthelordjesusreferenceshelf.com/2015/01/16/notes-on-population-in-biblical-times/
  

  Larry Hutado puts the total number at 7 to 10 thousand in 100 AD. Matt Hauge, 50,000. Robert Wilken at 10,000.