Summary of Rodney Stark's Cities of God

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The history of the early church is often told through the accounts of various books that were written about it. But many historians today don’t believe in evidence, and instead argue that since absolute truth must always elude the historian’s grasp, evidence is inevitably nothing but a biased selection of suspect facts. #2 The world’s first missionaries were Jews, and the world’s first converts became Jews. Jewish missionary activities decayed once Christianity became safely ensconced as the Roman state church. #3 The history of Judaism is clear: it was the first great missionary religion. Jews sought converts, and they were quite successful in doing so. The best estimate is that by the first century, Jews made up 10 to 15 percent of the population of the Roman Empire, nearly 90 percent of them living outside Palestine. #4 The Romans and the Greeks were both God-fearers, meaning they were Jewish monotheists who remained marginal to Jewish life because they were unwilling to fully embrace Jewish ethnicity.