FIG. 01 the trail, step by step
Choose a phrase, and the trail draws itself in the order things happened: Christ against all the Jesus wordings, or any one wording on its own. Click any step for the detail.
A wording does not appear everywhere at once. It turns up in one kind of writing, then another, and only later in what ordinary people type into a search box. Pick a phrase and watch its trail draw, step by step: Christ against Jesus by default, or one wording at a time.
What the trail is. Each step is one dated thing: the first time the wording reached a kind of writing (scholarship, preaching, a denomination's teaching, church email lists, everyday speech), the year it took hold in books, the year it passed the Christ wording there, and when people began searching for it. Steps run left to right in the order they happened.
Who was online. The lower chart is Pew Research Center's measure of how many American adults used the internet. It is there to answer an obvious objection: that a phrase is missing from search only because nobody was online yet.
The shaded periods behind the trail are the study's own division of the story into three periods. They are an argument about what the periods mean, not something the numbers discovered.
Dates are not causes. Two things happening close together is not proof that one produced the other. Some entries also rest on one person's recollection; those are marked.
The wording spread through email lists in 1995. That only works if people were on email, and if few of them were on the Web yet.
FIG. 02 American adults using the internet
Pew Research Center surveys. Each point is one survey, and the figures move a little with when the survey ran and how the question was worded. The shaded stretch is 1994 to 1997, when the doctrinal change and the first church email lists happened.
FIG. 03 what people online were actually doing, 1995 against 1996
Each pair of bars is one activity, measured among people who were already online. Email was ordinary before the Web was: in 1995 two thirds used email while only one in five had ever used the Web.
Chronology and periods from the study's catalog. Internet figures: Pew Research Center. Where the numbers come from.