ABSTRACT
Christianity continued to spread from generation to generation and place to place in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Its mission remained consistent: to initiate people, Christians and non-Christians alike, into a sacred world centered, as one of the earliest missionaries put it, on 'God in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us'. A thumbnail sketch of early Christian expansion might well start with numbers. The earliest source, the Acts of the Apostles, tracks the growth of Christianity from 120 converts gathered in Jerusalem just after Jesus' death (Acts 1:15) to many thousands (Acts 21:20) by the sixties of our era. Growth was not just in numbers, neither was spread only geographically; Christians advanced socially. Religious conversion remains a subject of intense scholarly interest. An eyewitness, the Christian to whom Perpetua confided her diary, recounts the deaths of the five.
