evidence from Cyprian for the existence of only three Spanish
Christian communities in the mid-third century. For the same
period, and from the same body of evidence, we know that there
were dozens of Christian communities in north Africa. Other
disparities are suggested by the sources. Pliny the Younger’s
famous letter to the emperor Trajan about Christians in Bithynia
in north-western Asia Minor at the beginning of the second
century mentions that Christianity had attracted ‘many people of
every age, every social rank, both men and women’, that it had
spread not only to the towns but also to ‘the villages and coun-
tryside’, and that consequently pagan temples had been ‘almost
entirely deserted’ (Letters10.96.9–10). What are we to make of
this picture of the backwoods of Asia Minor apparently teeming
with Christians? Perhaps Pliny (or the staff who reported details
to him) was exaggerating. At any rate, we cannot take his account
at face value (see chapter 6’s case study). No other contemporary
source written by a pagan gives anything like a comparable picture
of Christian success: in their accounts of Nero’s anti-Christian
pogrom in 64, Suetonius simply mentions the movement in
passing, without pronouncing on numbers, while Tacitus only
implies (by virtue of the numerous punishments inflicted upon
them) that there was a large group of Christians in Rome in Nero’s
time. Certainly, neither Suetonius nor Tacitus makes any mention
of Christians as a serious threat in their own day.
How are we to account for the description of Christianity
as being strong in some parts of the empire, but weaker in others?
It is likely that this discrepancy simply reflects a reality where
Christianity expanded at different rates and from different starting
points in different provinces. Some indication of variable growth
can be surmised from plotting on a map the places where Chris-
tian communities are known from sources such as Eusebius,
Cyprian, and the lists of bishops attending church councils.
(Examples of such maps can be found in Lane Fox 1986: 274–5,
which is based on Meer and Mohrmann 1959: 10–11.) The results
of such an exercise are striking for two reasons that Robin Lane
Fox has characterized as the scatter and density of Christian
CONTEXTS FOR THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY1
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