a shift in patronage from one god of a pantheon to another is not conversion, but reaffliation. The same is true of shifts within the boundaries of a monotheistic tradition, as from Methodist to Baptist, from Orthodox to Reformed, or from Sunni to Shi’ite—these too are acts of reaffliation.

The word Gnosticism comes from a Greek word meaning “one who knows,” and what such a person knows is called gn–osis,4 which “does not refer to understanding of truths about the human and natural world that can be reached through reason. It refers to ‘revealed knowledge’ available only to those who have received secret teachings of a heavenly reveal

Early Christianity was primarily an urban movement. The original meaning of the word pagan (paganus) was “rural person,” or more colloquially “country hick.” It came to have religious meaning because after Christianity had triumphed in the cities, most of the rural people remained unconverted.

conversion is primarily about bringing one’s religious behavior into alignment with that of one’s friends and relatives, not about encountering attractive doctrines. Of course, one can easily imagine doctrines so bizarre as to keep most people from joining. But, barring that, conversion is primarily an act of conformity—but so is nonconversion. In

Unfortunately, far too many historians these days don’t believe in evidence. They argue that since absolute truth must always elude the historian’s grasp, ‘evidence’ is inevitably nothing but a biased selection of suspect ‘facts.’

the world’s first missionaries were Jews, and the world’s first converts became Jews.

Moon’s claims were sufficient to place him outside the Christian tradition per se, and thus his followers qualified as converts. The sociologists, as they began to observe the group, carefully studied the Unification Church doctrines, as presented in a scripture written by Rev. Moon called The Divine Principles. (It had been translated into English

By now dozens of close-up studies of conversion have been conducted. All of them confirm that social networks are the basic mechanism through which conversion takes place.36 To convert someone, you must first become that person’s close and trusted friend. But even your best friends will not convert if they already are highly committed to another fa

As Williams so carefully documented, when the many manuscripts and movements usually categorized as Gnosticism are examined closely, various clusters of characteristics can be identified, but the only element common to all is that each is remarkably heretical, which is how they were quite properly judged by their contemporaries—not just “one heresy