Rodney Stark overturns many prevailing views about the early church by revealing the true story of how Christianity grew from a renegade rural movement into an urban revolutionary force that won over the Roman Empire. </P>

Based on the very latest scholarship, Stark brings new, authentic, and sometimes startling facts to bear on such ongoing biblical discussions as: </P>

&bull;Gnosticism was not a more sophisticated, more authentic form of Christianity, but really an unsuccessful effort to paganize Christianity.</P>

&bull;Paul was called the apostle to the Gentiles, but mostly he converted Jews.</P>

&bull;Paganism was not rapidly stamped out by state repression following the conversion of Constantine, but gradually disappeared as people abandoned the temples in response to the superior appeal of Christianity.</P>

&bull;The 'oriental' faiths&ndash;&ndash;such as those devoted to Cybele and to Isis&ndash;&ndash;prepared the way for the rapid spread of Christianity across the Roman Empire.</P>

&bull;Contrary to generations of historians, Mithraism posed no challenge to Christianity to become the new faith of the empire &ndash;&ndash; it allowed no female members and attracted only soldiers.</P>

Cities of God goes beyond an ordinary revision of history by an in&ndash;depth analysis of quantitative data. Since early Christianity was primarily an urban movement, the thirty&ndash;one cities of the empire having populations of at least 30,000 as of the year 100 serve as the basis for testing hypotheses about the early church. </P>

Cities of God demonstrates how quantitative methods resolve many debates about early church history and can lead to the discovery of unanticipated relationships. Where we have traditionally thought Christianity was spread by mass conversions due to St. Paul's sermons and force of personality, we learn that it's spread was, in fact, gradual and logical. Whereas many recent scholars want to argue for gnosticism as a supressed competing form of Christianity, Stark argues that it was, in fact, a form of paganism and died a natural death from lack of converts. For the first time, a scholar has collected the hard data that challenges the common beliefs about the earliest days of how Christianity spread to become the largest religion in the world.</P>