ABSTRACT
Sociologists and historians have shown through statistical data that over the first centuries Christianity spread slowly and consistently, at about 40 percent per decade or about 3.42 percent per year. A more complicated source of information about quiet Christians comes from Christian texts that claimed to describe the life and teachings of Jesus and his followers. Of course, a text, whether a letter or a sermon, was written by one person, so they offer the view of the author. However, texts are not one-way communications. Just as today, authors can write, but it takes readers to complete the communication. The accounts of violence against Christians and people’s reactions to it allow people to discover some of the important traces of silent early Christians. The periodic persecutions produced very visible martyrs, but the numbers of the dead were small compared to the growing numbers of quiet Christians.
