Christianity in the roman empire.

[Theodosius the Great]

Find an accurate date is going to be very hard to do. The histories from the region are going to have been santized. The church would not want anyone know how many pagans there were or how harshly the church persecuted them to "entice" them to convert.

That’s the most base assertion I’ve read to date coming from you. It rests on nothing more substantial than your antipathy toward the early Church.

You presuppose that the Romans conducted some kind of regular census that recorded everyone's religious affiliation. This was never done, hence there were no “histories” to be “sanitized” with regard to numbers which were at any rate notoriously unreliable in secular histories of the Later Empire.

Even more deplorable is your statement about the church “persecuting” pagans to stimulate its growth. The Church did not persecute pagans. Persecution was the province of the state which through several centuries of practice became refined into an art. Christians did not become a simple majority through persecuting pagans. The only pagans who were targeted by the state were those among the ruling classes - a tiny number. The rustics were not harassed in any way for their beliefs.

The growth of the Church isn’t hard to explain. First of all, Christianty from its earliest days was a missionary religion. It gainned converts at first from the lower classes but quickly began to spread into the higher social circles. Even pagans like Galen admired some of their mores. Secondly, practicing Christians refrained from abortion and birth control unlike their pagan counterparts. Finally, the Emperors’ new adherence to Christianity gave the Church a huge prestige boost. They made Christianity a socially and politically respectable alternative to paganism in goverment circles. Ambition, therefore, proved more efficacious than anything coercion might achieve. Though that isn't to say that advancement required one to be Christian. Even Theodosius appointed many pagans to high profile government positions.

~Theo