The Dynamics of the Growth of Christianity in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries CE : Designing a System Dynamics Model of the Influence of Pandemics on Early Christian Population
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | It has been argued that the Antonine Plague and the Plague of Cyprian had a significant impact on the composition of the population of the Roman Empire during the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. The impact of those pandemics is deemed so significant that it might have led to the ideal conditions under which Christianity became the dominant religion in the whole Mediterranean. Recent adoption of the methods of mathematical and computational modelling by the humanities allowed to precisely demonstrate some phenomena related to the Antonine Plague and the Plague of Cyprian. However, the potential significance of pandemics in the growth of the early Christian population was not yet tested through such methods. The aim of this paper is to present a project that would systematically evaluate the extent to which those notions are realistic. To achieve this, a set of epidemiological system dynamics models of varying complexity is proposed and discussed, which could utilise the current advances in epidemiology and the demographics of the Roman Empire to present selected scenarios of the pandemics of the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE and their influence on the growth of Christian population. |