Subexponential growth of early Christianity

Abstract

This paper presents a simple mathematical model for the growth of the Christian population in the Roman Empire during the first to fourth centuries. The model has a subexponential growth rate of order $e^{o(t)}$, where $o$ denotes the "little-o" asymptotic bound, but still superpolynomial, and it fits available Christian population estimates with good accuracy.

6 pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (2)

• Effective containment explains sub-exponential growth in confirmed cases of recent COVID-19 outbreak in Mainland China
• The power of a good idea: quantitative modeling of the spread of ideas from epidemiological models