In this talk by Gabriel Rossman, he attempts to explain the development of Christianity over its first six centuries from a highly localized charismatic sect to a hierarchical structure spanning much of the world. Rossman conceives of the formation of the Catholic Church as an illustrative case of large social structures forming in three overlapping stages. In the first stage, an organizational form diffuses via imitation, as with the Greek-speaking churches of Acts and the epistles. In the second stage, what had been horizontal relations develop hierarchies, but only of local scope, in this case the “monarchical bishops” of the early second century attested in Ignatius. In the third stage, local hierarchies themselves concatenate into a hierarchy of hierarchies, with the Christian case being metropolitan bishops and eventually the pope having authority over other bishops. Rossman compares the Church to other large-scale organizations that developed more recently via a similar pattern, such as the Federalist Party, the Guadalajara Cartel, and the National Food Truck Association. He will also discuss his attempt to digitize the Series Episcoporum Ecclesiae Catholicae, a dataset from which he estimates the number of dioceses over time.

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