ABSTRACT
For all students of the religious history of the Roman Empire the emergence and spread of Christianity must be a great challenge to explanation and understanding. Among a welter of significant factors which contributed to this phenomenon, one, it seems to me, stands pre-eminent. Other religions spread either because worshippers moved or because non-adherents happened to find them attractive. Christianity spread primarily because many Christians believed that it was positively desirable for non-Christians to join their faith and accrete to their congregations. It is my belief that no parallel to the early Christian mission was to be found in the ancient world in the first century. There is no space here to describe the differences, which seem to me to be crucial, in the activities of contemporary pagan priests or philosophers. Nor is there room to elucidate the possible internal motivation for mission within the early Church. The aim of this chapter will be purely negative. Many scholars have claimed that the idea of a mission to convert was inherited by the early Jesus movement from contemporary Judaism. 1 I feel that the evidence for such a claim is flimsy and may fruitfully be re-examined.
