Christianity's Expansion Through Divine Providence

By the year 250, Christians were not only conscious of their religion's rapid growth, but they also cited this rapid growth as evidence of divine providence at work. By post-exilic and diasporic literature like Ecclesiastes, Esther, and Tobit, we're only rarely seeing concerted fantasies about the non-Jewish segment of humanity somehow just going away. The thing is, and I can't say this strongly enough, a religion whose explicit goal and method of procedure was worldwide ideological domination was a new thing in the Mediterranean. If we're not careful, we read some of the last verses of the Gospels without thinking twice about them. And yeah, sure we think