On "Christianizing Asia Minor" by Paul McKechnie ***

At the start of this work, McKechnie raises an important point--namely that the assumption that early Christianity was largely an urban movement cannot be wholly true. If 10 percent of the Roman Empire was urban and also 10 percent was Christian, that would mean that the cities would have been virtually all Christian. Clearly, much of the Christian world was not in the major cities but in the small towns and in the country. Less attention has been played to these locations, so that's what McKechnie sets out to do in the book, specifically with regard to Asia Minor, and most especially with the region of Phrygia, whose cities were much smaller than those of the western coast (those of Revelation) we are more familiar with. It's a worthy subject. Alas, the work beyond that, I found, difficult to follow.

He pulls from some familiar sources--Pauline letters, some Eusebian comments, Ignatius--and some wonderful secondary sources that I'm glad now to know about. However, much of the discussion stems from examination of gravestones, which lends to the more difficult reading and the greater difficulty in forging conclusions. Some authors are able to look at such things, gather statistics, and forge a cogent argument. That's not the goal here, however. McKechnie is interested in the stories left behind, but it's difficult to gather stories from a few lines across multiple stones. As such, the work seemed quite diffuse and less interesting that I had hoped.