Not just another snake cult

History turns a corner at Pentecost

Photo by Cullan Smith on Unsplash

In Conan the Barbarian, there’s a scene where a street merchant whispers nervously to the hero about the rise of Thulsa Doom’s followers.

“Two or three years ago it was just another snake cult,” he says. “Now they’re everywhere.”

It’s a good line, and an even better insight. Most new religious movements start like that.

Small, strange, half-forgotten within a generation. Gone by the next. The history of human belief is littered with the ashes of short-lived sects, forgotten prophets and failed revelations.

Now and then, though, one of them doesn’t fizzle. It catches.

History Doesn’t Always Drift; Sometimes It Pivots

An inflection point is when history stops ambling along and changes suddenly. Things don’t slowly evolve after an inflection point; they change course altogether.

The Columbian Exchange is a textbook case. After 1492, plants, animals, people, and diseases began crossing the Atlantic in both directions. Potatoes and maize transformed European agriculture. Horses and cattle remade the Americas. Smallpox wiped out millions. Entire civilizations collapsed, and new ones emerged.

The same is true of the rise of Islam in the 7th century or the Black Death in the 14th. These weren’t extensions of existing trends. They were turning points after which nothing would be the same again.

Christianity’s Breakout Began at Pentecost

The Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection are the beating heart of Christian belief. These are the moments on which the faith itself stands or falls. But when it comes to temporal history, the real inflection point is Pentecost.

Whatever one believes about what happened that day, something very sudden and strange clearly occurred. It has influenced world history more than any event before or since. More than any war or conquest or disease.

Pentecost Was an Existing Festival

Pentecost began as a Jewish harvest festival known as Shavuot, held fifty days after Passover to mark the firstfruits of the wheat harvest. When Greek became the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean, Jews in the Hellenistic world began calling it Pentēkostē — “the fiftieth day.” Over time, the feast took on deeper meaning and came to commemorate God’s giving of the Law to Moses at Sinai.

So by the first century, Pentecost was both a celebration of abundance and a remembrance of divine covenant. It was one of the three great pilgrimage festivals that drew Jews from across the empire to Jerusalem.

The New Testament Describes a Miraculous Event

The first Pentecost following the death and claimed resurrection of Jesus occurred after he had ascended into heaven. Before his ascension, he had promised his followers that something would happen to equip them for the task ahead. So they waited in Jerusalem, unsure of what that promise meant.

Then, on the day of the Pentecost festival, it came. A sound like a rushing wind. Flames appeared above the heads of the disciples, who began to speak in languages they had never learned.

Outside, the city was packed with Jewish pilgrims from across the empire — Parthians, Egyptians, Romans and Arabs. Each heard the message in their own language. Peter, the uneducated Galilean fisherman who had once denied Jesus, now stood in the street and proclaimed the word of God. By day’s end, the group had grown by thousands.

So says the Book of Acts. Whether you believe that account or not is one thing. What cannot be denied is that the followers of Jesus were no longer the scared, confused adherents of just another snake cult. The verifiable history of the next three centuries speaks for itself.

The Expansion That Followed Looks Miraculous, Too

In the decades after Pentecost, Christianity spread outward from Jerusalem into the major urban centres of the eastern Mediterranean. By the 40s and 50s AD, missionary figures like Paul of Tarsus were establishing congregations in cities such as Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus and Rome.

These communities were composed of both Jews and Gentiles, united not by ethnicity or social class but by belief in the crucified and risen Jesus.

Roman sources from the period, including Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny the Younger, confirm the presence of Christians in Rome, Bithynia and Asia Minor by the end of the 1st century.

By the early 2nd century, Christianity had become a visible and sometimes disruptive force in the empire. Pliny, governor of Bithynia around 112 AD, wrote to Emperor Trajan seeking advice on how to deal with Christians. He described them as numerous and stubborn but not inherently criminal.

Ignatius of Antioch, a bishop executed under Roman authority, wrote letters en route to his martyrdom that show a well-developed network of churches with common practices and internal leadership. The faith had taken root in Syria, Asia Minor, Greece and Rome, with evidence of early Christian presence in Egypt and North Africa as well.

Growth Kept Going Even When the World Pushed Back

Incredibly, all of this growth occurred in a legal and social climate that was, at best, indifferent and, at worst, hostile. Christians refused to honour the emperor as divine, which made them politically suspect. They were slandered, scapegoated and occasionally persecuted, most notoriously under Nero following the fire of Rome in 64 AD.

Yet despite these obstacles, the movement did not die out. It expanded. The original apostles themselves became symbols of this defiant growth. All but one were martyred for their faith, yet not one recanted.

Their deaths only seemed to fuel the movement’s expansion. By 130 AD, scholars estimate there were tens of thousands of Christians scattered across the empire in tight-knit communities. By 200 AD, estimates suggest around 200,000. From there, the growth curve steepened despite intermittent persecution. By 250 AD, there may have been as many as a million Christians worldwide.

It Spread Without Armies, Power or Privilege

Religions have spread rapidly and extensively before and since. But in the ancient world, this kind of expansion almost always followed military conquest, imperial expansion or royal patronage.

Christianity eventually came to enjoy the benefits of those things. Often, it was to its detriment. But that was not the case in its first three centuries.

Still, the growth continued. Christianity took root far beyond Judea and Galilee. It reached India, where the so-called St Thomas Christians formed a community that survives to this day. It reached Armenia, where a king embraced the new faith and declared it the religion of his kingdom. In Ethiopia and the Caucasus, in the ports of Egypt and the streets of Rome, churches sprang up quietly and persistently.

None of this should have happened. Not like this. Not to an illegal faith with no army, no homeland, no worldly power. And yet it did.

And it kept growing like that until the next great inflection point in world history when, on the eve of battle, a certain claimant to the Western Empire looked up at the sky and also saw something weird…