Interestingly, I've been doing some reading about how and why Christianity took off during the Roman Empire period. The explosive growth of early Christianity was pretty remarkable, and scholars are asking themselves afresh how such a thing happened.

Prevailing theories are complicated, and they hinge on the idea that Christianity was new in its emphasis on proselytizing and exclusivity. Most religions in the ancient world didn't ask followers for exclusive loyalty, and the few that did, didn't really want converts.

But that's only part of the story.

Not only were Christians seeking converts, but they were doing so with a message of hope. Early Christian churches offered community, groups of people who cared for one another to the point of acting as an extended family without respect to ordinary social barriers like class and wealth.

But more than that, early Christians offered their neighbors hope for their eternal future. An eternity of love and happiness.

This was something new under the sun. Combined with proselytizing and exclusivity, Christian numbers rose rapidly and dramatically, in steep geometric progression.

People talk about Constantine converting to Christianity as if that made a huge difference in how things had to go, but scholars mostly don't agree.

Scholarly consensus says that geometric progression would have assured the domination of Christianity one way or the other, no matter what Constantine did.

But you notice what's absent from that discussion?

Fear of hell.

Early Christians didn't have the concept of hell as eternal living torment, or even much concept of hell at all.

That concept developed much later, long after Christianity had been accepted as the inevitable default religion of the area encompassing the empire, east and west.

So the concept of hell was not used for the initial encouragement and explosive growth of Christianity. It was only developed after that explosive growth made converting people with a message of hope unnecessary.

So why was the concept of hell developed?

Since it was evidently not developed in order to seek converts, many say that it was developed to control existing Christians through fear.

That makes a lot of sense to me, meaning it seems to fit available facts.