I think you touch upon it with the Codex thing, but looking at what the internet's disintermediation is doing to power structures today: tempting to see a much bigger role to the invention of the alphabet by Semites a few century before Judaism, Christianity, and the like.
Let's say Jesus and the apostles were the first theological startup that fully harnessed the disintermediating power of the alphabet.
Greco-roman gods were oral traditions, Egyptian gods were intangible to the masses through oral traditions and impenetrable hieroglyphs - all had a priestly class, that could read or recite long texts, between god and its subjects.
Christians had a theology tailor-made for diffusion and success with scriptures that could be read by any that wanted to.
The arrival of the alphabet in India had the same effect btw, where brahmins' oral prowess guarded the Vedas out of reach of the masses. Buddhism's diffusion under Ashoka made good use of the Levant-important alphabet and wrote religious texts in vernacular.
So, same strategy: use new tech to get rid of traditional gatekeepers. Then monopolise and monetise even more than they ever did.
Oh, also: far more intolerance and vicious religious wars once the traditional gatekeepers are removed. Sort of like today's politics now that social media replaced traditional gatekeepers.
Nothing is cast in stone though: while the Greco-Roman gods disappeared for good, the Brahmin made a huge comeback after Ashoka. In large part, you guessed it, by accepting diffusion in vernacular texts, though not giving up on oral tradition. Also, Buddhism got concentrated in monasteries, whereas Hinduism 2.0 was a network state (each village had its elders). So, reorganisation under pressure to eventually win is still possible. Perhaps some lessons for our current power structures.
Super interesting point, thx for sharing. I'll think more about this literary disintermediation.
How Hinduism beat back Buddhism is indeed one of the most interesting questions in this topic for which I don't have an answer yet. Your points on it point at some aspects of what happened, thx!
This is an excellent and exciting essay about how Christianity became what it is. Of course, if you truly are a Christian, there's something else at work as well. I am, in a mystical way, sincerely and literally. Nevertheless, I think all of Tomas Pueyo's observations and the way he presents them here (and this is always so with him, but this is a subject I enjoyed even more than most) are excellent, informative, and often enlightening. This is how it worked, in general how such developments happen. He's teased out the determinative mechanics. Thanks. I recommend reading the whole essay.
Don't forget forced conversion of the Indigenous people in the Americas. While not all missionary efforts involved forced conversion which varied enormously by time, place, and colonial power, forced conversion was wide spread throughout most of the Americas.
The Spanish campaigns occurred in Mexico (Aztec territories), Canada, Central America, much of South America, and the present day US states such as California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Florida. In some regions, Indigenous temples and their sacred sites were destroyed or churches were built on top of them. Indigenous ceremonies were often banned. Once baptized, many natives found it difficult or impossible to leave freely. Traditional religions were suppressed, and punishment systems existed for rule violations.
In Canada, it was in the form of boarding schools where children were separated from their parents, forbidden to speak their native languages, taught Christianity, and encouraged or forced to abandon their traditional beliefs. PM Stephen Harper of Canada apologized to the former boarding-school students in the House of Commons back in 2008.
Historians still debate details, but there is a broad agreement that the missions involved significant coercion and indigenous cultural destruction that were mostly successful.
This is one of those articles where I, an (American) Evangelical and a bit of an amateur scholar in Early Christian History, start reading with the expectations of seeing something incorrect or offensive to my sensibilities, and I come away saying “yeah, he’s pretty much right.”
Thoughtful framing... thanks! Beware however that you're confounding "the Christian Church" with "the [Roman] Catholic Church", which finally broke away from the original apostolic Orthodox Church in 1054 after progressive deviation arising from the Roman patriachate's isolation in the west from the main body of the Church in the east. So for example when you write about priest celibacy, that's only a Roman church innovation (note Apostle Peter was married) that was never adopted by the Orthodox Church as a whole.
You show great courage in tackling such a complex issue on a global scale. It is also an extremely sensitive subject. You have handled it with the same care and tact that characterized your previous articles.
Yet one must be willing to take risks and think boldly. Important things need to be discussed.
From a factual point of view, I do not see any major objection that could be raised against your analysis, which is no small achievement given the ambition of the undertaking.
What I liked most is that you explain the phenomenon from first principles, just as you did—as you yourself mention—in your articles about the coronavirus. First principles of software development. This approach has the virtue of simplifying the phenomenon and making it understandable. It produces that feeling of, “Oh yes, now I understand.”
In the case of the coronavirus, I remember you arguing that what was lacking was time. Time was needed to dance with the hammer until the virus was defeated.
And that is essentially what happened. In my country, Spain, we experienced one of the longest lockdowns in the world. Excess mortality—deaths from causes other than the coronavirus itself—was among the highest in the world. It is true that many lives were saved through a recipe that could just as easily have been applied by a Roman emperor or a medieval king.
Could things have been done differently? Could a selective lockdown have been attempted, focusing on people over sixty or those with respiratory conditions? Could the lockdown have been shortened so that the economy would not suffer so severely? Many of us believe the answer is yes. Things did not have to unfold exactly as they did.
Turning to the topic of your article on Christianity, I think there is a risk of becoming a daring, perhaps even reckless, thinker. A perfect retrospective system, in which everything fits together seamlessly—and how could it not, when we are explaining the past?—is deeply seductive. It explains history and makes it intelligible. It reduces contingency to a minimum, or makes it disappear altogether. It also provides a sense of intellectual superiority.
Hegel is a good example. His philosophy was the perfect system: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. But he failed when he believed that, on the basis of his interpretations of the past, he could foresee the future. He even predicted, through his system, the existence of a planet that was never found.
Even so, politically he remained an influential intellectual reference point. His vision of spiritual and material progress culminating in fusion into the One—whether as the dictatorship of the proletariat on the left or the unity of destiny on the right—helped establish the intellectual foundations of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century.
In memory of the victims of those systems, no one can say that they were inevitable. The system may have been intellectually elegant and illuminating, but it was not necessary. We could have done without it.
Hegel—or Heidegger, for that matter—could themselves be analyzed as replicating software.
What is missing from a highly formal systems is embodiment, contingency, and concrete names. Jesus might never have existed. Paul might never have converted. And yet a different form of Christianity might still have emerged. Many things could have happened differently.
What is also missing are the victims, those who were left behind along the way and discarded as errors.
I don't comment on COVID much, but I'll entertain this here.
Governments learned the hammer, but never the dance. They were lazy and intellectually stulted. By April 2020 we already knew that outdoors activities were safe (except superspreader events), so all of that could have been opened up (which it wasn't).
Most standard shopping with masks and opened air circulation would also have been possible. Eating outdoors was possible. That's the 80-20: most of the economic activity could have come back up in mid-2020 instead of suffering years of lockdown. This is the fact that made me lose the most trust in the current version of western democracies.
Agreed that if Christianity hadn't emerged, something else would have (that's the evolutionary concept we were discussing). But the evolution could have been much more progressive than it was. Or maybe not, and the time had come for a global religion, on the back of the Roman Empire? I don't know, we will never know.
For me the key points of all this are that we should see religion as software, that it evolves in versions, and that the leap of Christianity in software virality is shockingly impressive, suggestive of human design.
I completely agree with what you say about COVID. Laziness, incompetence, and above all the failure to take citizens' health seriously were deadly. In Spain, where we have politicians of very low quality in office, we know this all too well. It is entirely possible that, with a scientific approach based on consensus among serious and competent people, things would have turned out very differently.
What distinguishes the software metaphor from Freud’s metaphor of religion as an expression of the repressed? Or from Feuerbach’s metaphor of religion as a sublimation of basic human needs? Or from Marx’s metaphor of religion as the opium of the people?
There must be some added explanatory value in the software metaphor—or theory—over these other approaches. What is it?
Here is where one has to take a risk and put one's ideas on the line. How do you think your theory can be tested empirically? Do you have any experiment in mind, or any observable conditions that could confirm or challenge it?
According to this tradition of social law that was in effect during the time of Jesus, which hand and which side of the face were struck to punish someone carried symbolic meaning that revealed one’s social status. This makes it significant which side of the face—the “right” or the “left”—is struck, whether the person striking uses their “right” or “left” hand, and even which side of the hand is used. For a person of higher status to punish someone of lower status, they must strike the person’s right cheek with the back of their right hand. If the victim, having been struck on the right cheek, turns the other cheek—the left—to be struck again, this would give rise to a significant issue of social justice. This is because, in order to strike the left cheek, the striker must use either the back of their left hand or the palm of their right hand. In Jewish social tradition, the left hand is used only for purification from impurity and can never be used to strike another person. In this case, it would be possible to strike the right cheek with the palm of the right hand rather than the back of the hand. However, striking with the palm of the right hand is a form of punishment reserved only for people of the same social status. In other words, striking a person of lower status with the palm of the right hand—rather than the back of the hand—implies that one is on the same level as that person in terms of status. Thus, turning the left cheek toward the one who strikes the right cheek would expose the striker to this contradictory situation. Essentially, striking the cheek with the back of the hand involves not just a physical blow but also an insult and humiliation. The purpose here is not to injure or cause pain, but to humiliate and belittle the person. Under normal circumstances, a person cannot inflict this form of violence on someone of equal social standing; otherwise, they would be forced to pay a very high fine. For example, according to the Jewish oral legal text, the Mishnah, if a person strikes someone of the same status, the penalty is 200 zuz; if they strike the same person with the back of the hand, the penalty is doubled to 400 zuz.³ This is because striking with the back of the hand is used to admonish and punish those whom the person considers to be of lower status. Masters did this to their slaves, husbands to their wives, parents to their children, and the Romans to the Jews. Here, a kind of rule of inequality applies between those who are not equal in status.
Still digesting this. I’m curious about whether you think any of Christianity’s beliefs are sincere — the way you’ve framed them all as marketing devices is clever and not altogether wrong, but downplays the possibility that there’s real truth there, except for your last line. Maybe Christianity really does aim to treat others with kindness, including women and those of different ethnicities; maybe it does reverence life in and out of the womb, whether or not those beliefs are fully held and practiced by all its adherents.
Also, one quick correction: the Jewish Feast of Passover didn’t “become” Easter. According to the Bible, Jesus was crucified and rose again just before Passover (the Romans came to break the legs of the other two men crucified with Jesus, “since that Sabbath was a high day” — they didn’t want suffering displayed publicly on their feast.)
There’s symbolism there as well, because Jesus’ voluntary death redeemed Christians from death in the same way the original Passover lamb redeemed the Jews from death; they were to smear the lamb’s blood over their doorway so that the angel of death wouldn’t come and claim their firstborn during the final plague brought by Moses in Egypt. Eastern Christianity still calls Easter by its original name, Pascha, which is a Greek translation of the word Passover.
My goal for the article is not to say whether they´re sincere or not, but rather to unveil the underlying mechanics, which are shockingly aligned with growth optimization.
If you ask my personal opinion is that, yes, a lot of it is sincere. Based on historical evidence, it's pretty clear Jesus was a formidable character who truly believed what he said. He just stumbled upon a piece of software that was extremely viral—BECAUSE it was good. People are in general attracted to good, plus it created a strong community that would then help each other more. He converted a zero-sum game into an accretive game. Maybe I should make that more explicit in the article.
Then, the article highlights how many of the changes happened later on, by the Apostles or others. It seems to me like the apostles added a lot of good in the doctrine (eg, we're all the same, as opposed to just Jews being special). But also, literally everything they did was pro-virality. So it sounds like they were adept at finding what was both good and right. In software development, we call that product-led growth: When you design products so that they embed the growth inside.
It sounds to me like, the further we go from Jesus, the more the Church designed for growth as opposed to "what's right".
We also call Easter "Pascua" in (Catholic) Spanish!
I'm not sure why you say Passover didn't become Easter, when it sounds like the examples you share seem to me like they strengthen that it did?
Thank you for the reply. The classical philosophers also made much of truth, beauty and goodness: one leads to the other, so it makes sense that a new religion could have hit on something right, and it would resonate with people and generate more “business” in that direction.
Passover and Easter are both springtime holidays, but Easter is a seasonal celebration of fertility where Passover is a religious celebration of redemption from death. Christian Pascha takes elements from both, but is primarily religious. As you point out, there is a strong tradition of Christianity “baptizing” pagan traditions, such as eggs (dyed red, for the blood of Christ.) I guess holidays are complicated, in more ways than one!
Fascinating. Witty and very well argued. A genuinely new take w much food for thought. Intrigued to hear thoughts on control and domination methods in Church as evolving.
One thing is normal growth, and another is pathological growth. The expansion of Christianity, like that of Islam, the Roman Empire, consumption of coffee, or the current conquest of space—which you have described so well in your geohistory articles—I would say are examples of normal growth.
But there are also pathological forms of growth. Within Christianity: the Crusades, the witch hunts, the Anabaptist rebellion in Münster—diabolical phenomena. Within Islam: radical Islamism, Salafism, and so on. Within consumption hard drugs.
Today, the woke movement, at least in my view, is a pathological form of growth: from tattoos to rapid gender transitions.
One thing is the normal growth of an eye or an arm; another is the pathological growth of a tumor in an arm or an eye.
The growth of the coronavirus was pathological growth.
From first principles, is it possible to distinguish between these two kinds of growth, or are they governed by the same laws? Is the engine of growth the same in both cases? Is the software the same?
You mention in the article that you have developed both growth software and even viral applications. Did you design them in the same way?
I think you assume that the mechanics is the same. Isn’t it?
I have a hard time inducing what pathological growth means with the examples you provided. It sounds like you mean "normal growth is beneficial to the host, pathological growth is costly to the host". If so, it depends a lot on who the host is. The expansion of the Roman Empire was good for Romans, maybe not so good for the Carthaginian population. The growth of Islam was good for Arabs, not so good for Copts.
Your point about the comparison with wokism is not lost on me. The more I wrote this article, the more it was clear Wokism has been following similar paths.
I did design growth software / viral applications with the above framework in mind: from user acquisition to retention and monetization, breaking down each step into more detailed steps that were all optimized. That's how I could see the same framework in religion.
Certainly. The host matters. The issue becomes truly interesting when the same factor behaves beneficially toward one host, yet under different circumstances becomes harmful.
For a beneficial expansion, both physical and moral space are required. The factor operates by optimizing the available empty coordinates.
This is beneficial only up to the point of saturation.
Beyond that point, a mutation occurs. Once the saturation threshold is reached, the factor's activity begins to harm the host rather than benefit it.
Christianity reached saturation long ago. It had to undergo a profound transformation and renewal in order to readapt itself.
The classical design is closed, hierarchical, and tightly integrated. Its relationship with the outside world is only superficial. It is a comprehensive, all-encompassing software system—a closed worldview.
Christianity managed to break with that model. It adopted an open, partial, and flexible design. It grafted itself onto reality. It became a small software system that operates on specific, limited aspects of life rather than claiming to explain everything.
Islam, I believe, has recently reached a comparable point of saturation on a global scale. Any further growth along the same lines is likely to become harmful to the believers themselves.
It therefore needs to readapt.
I believe Islam must follow a similar path if it is to achieve healthy and sustainable growth.
Thanks for the reply. One reason I love your Substack is your openness to hearing how you might fine tune your views. And the graphs!! I’m traveling on a family vacation so I won’t be able to do that for a couple of weeks. If you’re still interested at that point, I’ll be happy to explain myself in more detail.
I think your analysis is fascinating - but it’s leaves out the most interesting phase of Jesus’s church - the part surrounding his crucifixion. What would the log graph look like here? Well, when Jesus entered Jerusalem and was seen as the possible conquering king the Jews wanted he had many thousands of followers. This dropped rapidly as he disappointed the masses. After his shocking arrest and crucifixion almost all deserted him. His support basically dropped to a confused and devastated handful mostly of women. At this point the incentives you mention in favour of Christianity were actually pointing in the opposition direction. Claiming to follow this dead dude would get you outcast from your community and all its support structures - and worse. You would be (and disciples of Jesus were) expelled from the family and community and potentially lost everything. For what? The incentives at this stage were basically zero. Unless there was some massive missing element. What might that be?
It's an interesting phase indeed. I think it's hard to judge because who knows what happened. But the growth story doesn't seem so mysterious? If he did come back (whether because he didn't die, there was a miracle, the witnesses had a vision...), you can easily imagine all the people seeing that as the most fervent missionaries ever. Even if they made it up, what sort of people would do that? Hyperbelievers in JC. And of course, the followers Jesus had before death would be prime targets for conversion with the resurrection story. So it doesn't sound very surprising from a growth perspective, but I agree it should be added to the "value proposition", or early growth measure. Thx!
There are many who believe he did not actually die, but was removed from the cross and hidden. Then he re-appeared and that sparked the resurrection theory. This theory was one of the main pillars of the later Christianity so they left that in, obviously. True or not, it still was a remarkable feat.
Very interesting article for its attention to the mechanism of the spread of the Gospel. Certainly nits to pick but generally they don’t detract from the thesis.
Christianity is dated to Genesis 3:15 when Messiah is promised. Jesus, the Christ was born “in the fullness of time,” a concept very much worth contemplating. God was preparing both the physical and philosophical geography to receive His Son and to accept His work and teaching. As others have noted, Providence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.
Yeah maybe I should add that to the section on anti-forking strategies.
The Church was pretty decentralized early on, so there were lots of texts produced by lots of people about what JC said and meant, and different people would pay attention to different ones, debating what was true or false. A mainstream concensus slowly emerged, wich lots of diverging opinions. The more divergence, the more the mainstream wanted to clarify what was canon and what was not. This was reasonably organic, punctuated by specific councils that would clarify things. The most famous one is the Nicea one, at the behest of Constantine, but the goal was not to decide what made it into the New Testament, but rather to decide what was mainstream and what was heresy. The main outcome of that was to ban Aryan and Aryanism.
Exactly. You can fill several pages with the several heresies and what drove them and what became of them. It would be a very interesting read and yes, it does fit into the Christianity story.
I'm currently working on a series about how the Catholic Church became one of history's great organizational reinventions.
What's fascinating is that your article explains how Christianity spread. The chapter I'm researching starts much later, when the Catholic Church itself is forced to reinvent after the Reformation.
By then, Christianity had already gone viral.
The Catholic Church, however, had just lost roughly 40% of its followers. Luther and the printing press exposed how fragmented and inconsistent the institution had become.
What followed was remarkable. A generation later, after rethinking everything from priest training and governance to doctrine, marriage law and sacred art, the Catholic Church had transformed itself into a far more scalable organization. Just as European powers started expanding across the globe, the Church was suddenly capable of operating on a global level too.
In a way, Christianity's first growth story is about spreading an idea.
The Catholic Church's second growth story is about rebuilding an institution as scalable infrastructure.
Excellent stuff plus with a few good laughs.
I think you touch upon it with the Codex thing, but looking at what the internet's disintermediation is doing to power structures today: tempting to see a much bigger role to the invention of the alphabet by Semites a few century before Judaism, Christianity, and the like.
Let's say Jesus and the apostles were the first theological startup that fully harnessed the disintermediating power of the alphabet.
Greco-roman gods were oral traditions, Egyptian gods were intangible to the masses through oral traditions and impenetrable hieroglyphs - all had a priestly class, that could read or recite long texts, between god and its subjects.
Christians had a theology tailor-made for diffusion and success with scriptures that could be read by any that wanted to.
The arrival of the alphabet in India had the same effect btw, where brahmins' oral prowess guarded the Vedas out of reach of the masses. Buddhism's diffusion under Ashoka made good use of the Levant-important alphabet and wrote religious texts in vernacular.
So, same strategy: use new tech to get rid of traditional gatekeepers. Then monopolise and monetise even more than they ever did.
Oh, also: far more intolerance and vicious religious wars once the traditional gatekeepers are removed. Sort of like today's politics now that social media replaced traditional gatekeepers.
Nothing is cast in stone though: while the Greco-Roman gods disappeared for good, the Brahmin made a huge comeback after Ashoka. In large part, you guessed it, by accepting diffusion in vernacular texts, though not giving up on oral tradition. Also, Buddhism got concentrated in monasteries, whereas Hinduism 2.0 was a network state (each village had its elders). So, reorganisation under pressure to eventually win is still possible. Perhaps some lessons for our current power structures.
Super interesting point, thx for sharing. I'll think more about this literary disintermediation.
How Hinduism beat back Buddhism is indeed one of the most interesting questions in this topic for which I don't have an answer yet. Your points on it point at some aspects of what happened, thx!
This is an excellent and exciting essay about how Christianity became what it is. Of course, if you truly are a Christian, there's something else at work as well. I am, in a mystical way, sincerely and literally. Nevertheless, I think all of Tomas Pueyo's observations and the way he presents them here (and this is always so with him, but this is a subject I enjoyed even more than most) are excellent, informative, and often enlightening. This is how it worked, in general how such developments happen. He's teased out the determinative mechanics. Thanks. I recommend reading the whole essay.
Fantastic, thanks for sharing!
Don't forget forced conversion of the Indigenous people in the Americas. While not all missionary efforts involved forced conversion which varied enormously by time, place, and colonial power, forced conversion was wide spread throughout most of the Americas.
The Spanish campaigns occurred in Mexico (Aztec territories), Canada, Central America, much of South America, and the present day US states such as California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Florida. In some regions, Indigenous temples and their sacred sites were destroyed or churches were built on top of them. Indigenous ceremonies were often banned. Once baptized, many natives found it difficult or impossible to leave freely. Traditional religions were suppressed, and punishment systems existed for rule violations.
In Canada, it was in the form of boarding schools where children were separated from their parents, forbidden to speak their native languages, taught Christianity, and encouraged or forced to abandon their traditional beliefs. PM Stephen Harper of Canada apologized to the former boarding-school students in the House of Commons back in 2008.
Historians still debate details, but there is a broad agreement that the missions involved significant coercion and indigenous cultural destruction that were mostly successful.
Indeed. I only mention in passing, because that's just an extension of state takeover.
I don't know enough about how much coercion was involved. Thanks for providing your perspective on it.
This is one of those articles where I, an (American) Evangelical and a bit of an amateur scholar in Early Christian History, start reading with the expectations of seeing something incorrect or offensive to my sensibilities, and I come away saying “yeah, he’s pretty much right.”
FYI Jesus Saves
Couldn't ask for a better endorsement. Glad to hear!
Thoughtful framing... thanks! Beware however that you're confounding "the Christian Church" with "the [Roman] Catholic Church", which finally broke away from the original apostolic Orthodox Church in 1054 after progressive deviation arising from the Roman patriachate's isolation in the west from the main body of the Church in the east. So for example when you write about priest celibacy, that's only a Roman church innovation (note Apostle Peter was married) that was never adopted by the Orthodox Church as a whole.
Yes, this is because for the first 1000 years, it was the same, and by that time most of these mechanics were done!
Bravo 👏
Dear Tomás,
You show great courage in tackling such a complex issue on a global scale. It is also an extremely sensitive subject. You have handled it with the same care and tact that characterized your previous articles.
Yet one must be willing to take risks and think boldly. Important things need to be discussed.
From a factual point of view, I do not see any major objection that could be raised against your analysis, which is no small achievement given the ambition of the undertaking.
What I liked most is that you explain the phenomenon from first principles, just as you did—as you yourself mention—in your articles about the coronavirus. First principles of software development. This approach has the virtue of simplifying the phenomenon and making it understandable. It produces that feeling of, “Oh yes, now I understand.”
In the case of the coronavirus, I remember you arguing that what was lacking was time. Time was needed to dance with the hammer until the virus was defeated.
And that is essentially what happened. In my country, Spain, we experienced one of the longest lockdowns in the world. Excess mortality—deaths from causes other than the coronavirus itself—was among the highest in the world. It is true that many lives were saved through a recipe that could just as easily have been applied by a Roman emperor or a medieval king.
Could things have been done differently? Could a selective lockdown have been attempted, focusing on people over sixty or those with respiratory conditions? Could the lockdown have been shortened so that the economy would not suffer so severely? Many of us believe the answer is yes. Things did not have to unfold exactly as they did.
Turning to the topic of your article on Christianity, I think there is a risk of becoming a daring, perhaps even reckless, thinker. A perfect retrospective system, in which everything fits together seamlessly—and how could it not, when we are explaining the past?—is deeply seductive. It explains history and makes it intelligible. It reduces contingency to a minimum, or makes it disappear altogether. It also provides a sense of intellectual superiority.
Hegel is a good example. His philosophy was the perfect system: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. But he failed when he believed that, on the basis of his interpretations of the past, he could foresee the future. He even predicted, through his system, the existence of a planet that was never found.
Even so, politically he remained an influential intellectual reference point. His vision of spiritual and material progress culminating in fusion into the One—whether as the dictatorship of the proletariat on the left or the unity of destiny on the right—helped establish the intellectual foundations of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century.
In memory of the victims of those systems, no one can say that they were inevitable. The system may have been intellectually elegant and illuminating, but it was not necessary. We could have done without it.
Hegel—or Heidegger, for that matter—could themselves be analyzed as replicating software.
What is missing from a highly formal systems is embodiment, contingency, and concrete names. Jesus might never have existed. Paul might never have converted. And yet a different form of Christianity might still have emerged. Many things could have happened differently.
What is also missing are the victims, those who were left behind along the way and discarded as errors.
Thanks!
I don't comment on COVID much, but I'll entertain this here.
Governments learned the hammer, but never the dance. They were lazy and intellectually stulted. By April 2020 we already knew that outdoors activities were safe (except superspreader events), so all of that could have been opened up (which it wasn't).
Most standard shopping with masks and opened air circulation would also have been possible. Eating outdoors was possible. That's the 80-20: most of the economic activity could have come back up in mid-2020 instead of suffering years of lockdown. This is the fact that made me lose the most trust in the current version of western democracies.
Agreed that if Christianity hadn't emerged, something else would have (that's the evolutionary concept we were discussing). But the evolution could have been much more progressive than it was. Or maybe not, and the time had come for a global religion, on the back of the Roman Empire? I don't know, we will never know.
For me the key points of all this are that we should see religion as software, that it evolves in versions, and that the leap of Christianity in software virality is shockingly impressive, suggestive of human design.
I completely agree with what you say about COVID. Laziness, incompetence, and above all the failure to take citizens' health seriously were deadly. In Spain, where we have politicians of very low quality in office, we know this all too well. It is entirely possible that, with a scientific approach based on consensus among serious and competent people, things would have turned out very differently.
What distinguishes the software metaphor from Freud’s metaphor of religion as an expression of the repressed? Or from Feuerbach’s metaphor of religion as a sublimation of basic human needs? Or from Marx’s metaphor of religion as the opium of the people?
There must be some added explanatory value in the software metaphor—or theory—over these other approaches. What is it?
Here is where one has to take a risk and put one's ideas on the line. How do you think your theory can be tested empirically? Do you have any experiment in mind, or any observable conditions that could confirm or challenge it?
According to this tradition of social law that was in effect during the time of Jesus, which hand and which side of the face were struck to punish someone carried symbolic meaning that revealed one’s social status. This makes it significant which side of the face—the “right” or the “left”—is struck, whether the person striking uses their “right” or “left” hand, and even which side of the hand is used. For a person of higher status to punish someone of lower status, they must strike the person’s right cheek with the back of their right hand. If the victim, having been struck on the right cheek, turns the other cheek—the left—to be struck again, this would give rise to a significant issue of social justice. This is because, in order to strike the left cheek, the striker must use either the back of their left hand or the palm of their right hand. In Jewish social tradition, the left hand is used only for purification from impurity and can never be used to strike another person. In this case, it would be possible to strike the right cheek with the palm of the right hand rather than the back of the hand. However, striking with the palm of the right hand is a form of punishment reserved only for people of the same social status. In other words, striking a person of lower status with the palm of the right hand—rather than the back of the hand—implies that one is on the same level as that person in terms of status. Thus, turning the left cheek toward the one who strikes the right cheek would expose the striker to this contradictory situation. Essentially, striking the cheek with the back of the hand involves not just a physical blow but also an insult and humiliation. The purpose here is not to injure or cause pain, but to humiliate and belittle the person. Under normal circumstances, a person cannot inflict this form of violence on someone of equal social standing; otherwise, they would be forced to pay a very high fine. For example, according to the Jewish oral legal text, the Mishnah, if a person strikes someone of the same status, the penalty is 200 zuz; if they strike the same person with the back of the hand, the penalty is doubled to 400 zuz.³ This is because striking with the back of the hand is used to admonish and punish those whom the person considers to be of lower status. Masters did this to their slaves, husbands to their wives, parents to their children, and the Romans to the Jews. Here, a kind of rule of inequality applies between those who are not equal in status.
I had heard there was some power dynamics in the "turn the other cheek" thing but had never heard the details. Thanks for sharing, fascinating!
Still digesting this. I’m curious about whether you think any of Christianity’s beliefs are sincere — the way you’ve framed them all as marketing devices is clever and not altogether wrong, but downplays the possibility that there’s real truth there, except for your last line. Maybe Christianity really does aim to treat others with kindness, including women and those of different ethnicities; maybe it does reverence life in and out of the womb, whether or not those beliefs are fully held and practiced by all its adherents.
Also, one quick correction: the Jewish Feast of Passover didn’t “become” Easter. According to the Bible, Jesus was crucified and rose again just before Passover (the Romans came to break the legs of the other two men crucified with Jesus, “since that Sabbath was a high day” — they didn’t want suffering displayed publicly on their feast.)
There’s symbolism there as well, because Jesus’ voluntary death redeemed Christians from death in the same way the original Passover lamb redeemed the Jews from death; they were to smear the lamb’s blood over their doorway so that the angel of death wouldn’t come and claim their firstborn during the final plague brought by Moses in Egypt. Eastern Christianity still calls Easter by its original name, Pascha, which is a Greek translation of the word Passover.
My goal for the article is not to say whether they´re sincere or not, but rather to unveil the underlying mechanics, which are shockingly aligned with growth optimization.
If you ask my personal opinion is that, yes, a lot of it is sincere. Based on historical evidence, it's pretty clear Jesus was a formidable character who truly believed what he said. He just stumbled upon a piece of software that was extremely viral—BECAUSE it was good. People are in general attracted to good, plus it created a strong community that would then help each other more. He converted a zero-sum game into an accretive game. Maybe I should make that more explicit in the article.
Then, the article highlights how many of the changes happened later on, by the Apostles or others. It seems to me like the apostles added a lot of good in the doctrine (eg, we're all the same, as opposed to just Jews being special). But also, literally everything they did was pro-virality. So it sounds like they were adept at finding what was both good and right. In software development, we call that product-led growth: When you design products so that they embed the growth inside.
It sounds to me like, the further we go from Jesus, the more the Church designed for growth as opposed to "what's right".
We also call Easter "Pascua" in (Catholic) Spanish!
I'm not sure why you say Passover didn't become Easter, when it sounds like the examples you share seem to me like they strengthen that it did?
Thank you for the reply. The classical philosophers also made much of truth, beauty and goodness: one leads to the other, so it makes sense that a new religion could have hit on something right, and it would resonate with people and generate more “business” in that direction.
Passover and Easter are both springtime holidays, but Easter is a seasonal celebration of fertility where Passover is a religious celebration of redemption from death. Christian Pascha takes elements from both, but is primarily religious. As you point out, there is a strong tradition of Christianity “baptizing” pagan traditions, such as eggs (dyed red, for the blood of Christ.) I guess holidays are complicated, in more ways than one!
Fascinating. Witty and very well argued. A genuinely new take w much food for thought. Intrigued to hear thoughts on control and domination methods in Church as evolving.
I'll think more about that. The framework that comes to mind is "monopolistic company behavior"...
Hello again Tomás:
Let me see what you think about this.
One thing is normal growth, and another is pathological growth. The expansion of Christianity, like that of Islam, the Roman Empire, consumption of coffee, or the current conquest of space—which you have described so well in your geohistory articles—I would say are examples of normal growth.
But there are also pathological forms of growth. Within Christianity: the Crusades, the witch hunts, the Anabaptist rebellion in Münster—diabolical phenomena. Within Islam: radical Islamism, Salafism, and so on. Within consumption hard drugs.
Today, the woke movement, at least in my view, is a pathological form of growth: from tattoos to rapid gender transitions.
One thing is the normal growth of an eye or an arm; another is the pathological growth of a tumor in an arm or an eye.
The growth of the coronavirus was pathological growth.
From first principles, is it possible to distinguish between these two kinds of growth, or are they governed by the same laws? Is the engine of growth the same in both cases? Is the software the same?
You mention in the article that you have developed both growth software and even viral applications. Did you design them in the same way?
I think you assume that the mechanics is the same. Isn’t it?
Regards,
Thanks!
I have a hard time inducing what pathological growth means with the examples you provided. It sounds like you mean "normal growth is beneficial to the host, pathological growth is costly to the host". If so, it depends a lot on who the host is. The expansion of the Roman Empire was good for Romans, maybe not so good for the Carthaginian population. The growth of Islam was good for Arabs, not so good for Copts.
Your point about the comparison with wokism is not lost on me. The more I wrote this article, the more it was clear Wokism has been following similar paths.
I did design growth software / viral applications with the above framework in mind: from user acquisition to retention and monetization, breaking down each step into more detailed steps that were all optimized. That's how I could see the same framework in religion.
Certainly. The host matters. The issue becomes truly interesting when the same factor behaves beneficially toward one host, yet under different circumstances becomes harmful.
For a beneficial expansion, both physical and moral space are required. The factor operates by optimizing the available empty coordinates.
This is beneficial only up to the point of saturation.
Beyond that point, a mutation occurs. Once the saturation threshold is reached, the factor's activity begins to harm the host rather than benefit it.
Christianity reached saturation long ago. It had to undergo a profound transformation and renewal in order to readapt itself.
The classical design is closed, hierarchical, and tightly integrated. Its relationship with the outside world is only superficial. It is a comprehensive, all-encompassing software system—a closed worldview.
Christianity managed to break with that model. It adopted an open, partial, and flexible design. It grafted itself onto reality. It became a small software system that operates on specific, limited aspects of life rather than claiming to explain everything.
Islam, I believe, has recently reached a comparable point of saturation on a global scale. Any further growth along the same lines is likely to become harmful to the believers themselves.
It therefore needs to readapt.
I believe Islam must follow a similar path if it is to achieve healthy and sustainable growth.
Thanks for the reply. One reason I love your Substack is your openness to hearing how you might fine tune your views. And the graphs!! I’m traveling on a family vacation so I won’t be able to do that for a couple of weeks. If you’re still interested at that point, I’ll be happy to explain myself in more detail.
Glad to hear.
And yes, absolutely! Enjoy the vacation!
I think your analysis is fascinating - but it’s leaves out the most interesting phase of Jesus’s church - the part surrounding his crucifixion. What would the log graph look like here? Well, when Jesus entered Jerusalem and was seen as the possible conquering king the Jews wanted he had many thousands of followers. This dropped rapidly as he disappointed the masses. After his shocking arrest and crucifixion almost all deserted him. His support basically dropped to a confused and devastated handful mostly of women. At this point the incentives you mention in favour of Christianity were actually pointing in the opposition direction. Claiming to follow this dead dude would get you outcast from your community and all its support structures - and worse. You would be (and disciples of Jesus were) expelled from the family and community and potentially lost everything. For what? The incentives at this stage were basically zero. Unless there was some massive missing element. What might that be?
It's an interesting phase indeed. I think it's hard to judge because who knows what happened. But the growth story doesn't seem so mysterious? If he did come back (whether because he didn't die, there was a miracle, the witnesses had a vision...), you can easily imagine all the people seeing that as the most fervent missionaries ever. Even if they made it up, what sort of people would do that? Hyperbelievers in JC. And of course, the followers Jesus had before death would be prime targets for conversion with the resurrection story. So it doesn't sound very surprising from a growth perspective, but I agree it should be added to the "value proposition", or early growth measure. Thx!
There are many who believe he did not actually die, but was removed from the cross and hidden. Then he re-appeared and that sparked the resurrection theory. This theory was one of the main pillars of the later Christianity so they left that in, obviously. True or not, it still was a remarkable feat.
Very interesting article for its attention to the mechanism of the spread of the Gospel. Certainly nits to pick but generally they don’t detract from the thesis.
Christianity is dated to Genesis 3:15 when Messiah is promised. Jesus, the Christ was born “in the fullness of time,” a concept very much worth contemplating. God was preparing both the physical and philosophical geography to receive His Son and to accept His work and teaching. As others have noted, Providence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.
Great article. I would also like to know; who are the apostles and "who" decided which gospels to use for the New Testament.
Yeah maybe I should add that to the section on anti-forking strategies.
The Church was pretty decentralized early on, so there were lots of texts produced by lots of people about what JC said and meant, and different people would pay attention to different ones, debating what was true or false. A mainstream concensus slowly emerged, wich lots of diverging opinions. The more divergence, the more the mainstream wanted to clarify what was canon and what was not. This was reasonably organic, punctuated by specific councils that would clarify things. The most famous one is the Nicea one, at the behest of Constantine, but the goal was not to decide what made it into the New Testament, but rather to decide what was mainstream and what was heresy. The main outcome of that was to ban Aryan and Aryanism.
Exactly. You can fill several pages with the several heresies and what drove them and what became of them. It would be a very interesting read and yes, it does fit into the Christianity story.
Good read.
I'm currently working on a series about how the Catholic Church became one of history's great organizational reinventions.
What's fascinating is that your article explains how Christianity spread. The chapter I'm researching starts much later, when the Catholic Church itself is forced to reinvent after the Reformation.
By then, Christianity had already gone viral.
The Catholic Church, however, had just lost roughly 40% of its followers. Luther and the printing press exposed how fragmented and inconsistent the institution had become.
What followed was remarkable. A generation later, after rethinking everything from priest training and governance to doctrine, marriage law and sacred art, the Catholic Church had transformed itself into a far more scalable organization. Just as European powers started expanding across the globe, the Church was suddenly capable of operating on a global level too.
In a way, Christianity's first growth story is about spreading an idea.
The Catholic Church's second growth story is about rebuilding an institution as scalable infrastructure.
I'm quite sure you'll enjoy the read https://petervw.substack.com/p/strategy-emerges-through-elimination