To his credit, the book makes several important contributions, including a
focus on socially transformative events like plague, drought, and sanitation
in addition to the usual crises of political-economic disorder, civil war, and
barbarian invasion. Stark also seriously considers the role of women as dis-
tinct from men, and this suggests important avenues of future investigation.
Stark addresses many important and mostly neglected aspects of the ancient
Greco-Roman world.
However, Stark uses history extremely selectively, citing only what sup-
ports his conclusions. The relevant history would consume far more than this
one chapter, and Stark’s book likewise lacks sufficient depth. Although some-
what attentive to history, Stark also embraces speculation, using an invented
data set to represent ancient demographics in place of a thorough evaluation
of the historical record. While imaginative, it remains purely speculative.
Quantitative data is simply not available from antiquity. Thus, I will con-
centrate on the substantive historical aspects and his overall argument. This
chapter does not allow the space to refute each individual component.
My critique counters Stark factually, that Stark lacks the necessary knowl-
edge of the ancient world – and theoretically – that Stark’s reasoning amounts
only to assumptions. Stark essentially argues that the ancients recognized
Christianity as an intrinsically superior religious product that, although it
required greater personal commitment and sacrifice than its pagan competi-
tors, compensated for the greater difficulty and risk with greater rewards –
earthly charity and eternal life through divine salvation. Furthermore, he
argues that the strong sense of self-sacrifice deeply impressed the pagans.
In opposition, I argue that the success of Christianity compared to pagan-
ism depended not on intrinsic quality of beliefs or membership criteria, but
on extrinsic politics, an argument that Elaine Pagels makes about the triumph
of Christian Orthodoxy over Christian Gnosticism in the same timeframe under
discussion here (Pagels [1979] 2004). In place of rational-choice theory, I offer
a class and culture based theory which argues that (Orthodox) Christianity
succeeded because it became a direct expression of the power interests of the
ruling class, and furthermore succeeded because it assimilated, rather than
replaced or destroyed, pagan cultural traditions. Christianity arose gradually,
and paganism died gradually, with extensive intermingling along the way.
Eventually, as Christianity became the politically dominant religion well within
Stark’s 300–476 CE timeframe, his “years of crisis,” it enforced a religious
monopoly, a fact which renders the concept of rational-choice irrelevant.
224 • George Lundskow