moment, however, I am interested in his definition of what constitutes a
missionary religion, and his argument that Christianity was successful pre-
cisely because it was such a religion. First, the definition: as Goodman
(1994, 1–7) describes it, a missionary religion is characterized by at least
three components (see also Vaage, chapter 1).
1.A commitment to proselytization: Members of such a religion share a self-
conscious desire to make converts and to incorporate them into the
group. In a helpful typology of mission, Goodman differentiates this
proselytizing form of mission from three other types, namely, informa-
tive, educational, and apologetic.
2.A universal scope: Potential converts are not limited to any ethnic group
or social class. The goal is to convert the whole world, or at least as
many outsiders as possible.
3.An organized and systematic program: This universal goal is approached by
means of a systematic and centrally coordinated missionary enterprise.
A missionary religion, then, is one characterized by and committed to a
universal program of proselytization.
Goodman believes that early Christianity is to be seen as a missionary reli-
gion in this sense (though not without some significant qualifications, to
which we will return below), and that this is what accounts for “the phe-
nomenal spread and eventual victory of the Church within the Roman
Empire” (1994, 160). Further, this aspect of Christianity is due in large
measure to Paul: “Only familiarity makes us fail to appreciate the extraor-
dinary ambition of the single apostle who invented the whole idea of a
systematic conversion of the world, area by geographical area” (Goodman
1994, 106). This view—that the ultimate success of Christianity in the
Roman Empire is the result of an organized and systematic program of
mission that goes back in significant measure to Paul himself—has been a
commonplace in early church history. Take Harnack, for example, whose
classic study of the expansion of Christianity devotes a whole chapter to “the
Christian missionaries” (Harnack 1904, 398–461; cf. M. Green 1970, 166–93);
or, more recently, MacMullen, who contrasts the attitudes within pagan-
ism with those of the “Judaeo-Christian tradition, in which despatch of
emissaries from a central organization, and other formal aspects of mission-
ary activity, were perfectly at home” (1981, 98).
As Leif E. Vaage argues in the first chapter of this book, however, there
are good reasons to doubt such a picture of a systematic and centrally
organized mission. Indeed, the case against the traditional view is made
most forcefully by MacMullen himself, who, in a subsequent work (1984),
has abandoned the position represented by the statement quoted in the pre-