MAP 6.3 Christian Populations in the Late Third Century C.E.

Christians were still a minority in the Roman world three hundred years after Jesus’s crucifixion. However, certain areas of the empire—especially Asia Minor, where Paul had preached—had a concentration of Christians. Most Christians lived in cities and towns, where the missionaries had gone to find crowds to hear their message. Paganus, a Latin word for “country person” or “rural villager,” came to mean a believer in traditional polytheistic cults—hence the word pagan that modern historians sometimes use to indicate traditional polytheism. Paganism lived on in rural areas for centuries.