He's not alone in demonstrating that Paganism continued to thrive during Justinian's reign and even beyond and scholars have become more and more aware of Pagan survivals and these survivals demonstrate beyond all shadow of a doubt that Pagans loved their gods and loved their religion – which destroys the underpinnings of the "conversion" entirely.

But he has worked hard to earn our contempt. Let us not deny him what he so justly deserves.

And F— Bowersock. F— him in the head. (Hey, this is one of the few places where someone might actually know who I'm talking about, so I have to get that one in somewhere…)

Another very interesting source is Charles W. Hedrick, Jr.'s "History and Silence: Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity". In Chapter 3, "Unspeakable Paganism", he goes into some detail describing a now very deeply entrenched revisionist (his word) movement among classical scholars that was spearheaded by Alan Cameron way back in 1966. Cameron attacked the idea that there had been a Pagan resurgence in the late 390's, and insisted that already by then Graeco-Roman Paganism was essentially dead, and that it had never really put up any fight against Christianization in the first place: "reaction of any kind is conspicuous by its absence." Cameron says that the primary reaction of Pagans to Christianization was "apathy".

These two ideas are very closely related (1) Paganism was never persecuted by Christians, and (2) Pagans did not resist Christianization. In fact the two ideas are essentially joined at the hip: either Paganism was suppressed or it wasn't.

Alan Cameron's revisionist position is now very widely and uncritically subscribed to by people who are not specialists. Ronald Hutton's name comes to mind.

For the idea that Christians persecuting Pagans I relied on MacMullen (1997) where he dates the idea's inception to 1986 with Noethlichs, and says that “Christian readiness for action carried to no matter what extremes has not always received the acknowledgment it deserves in modern accounts of the period” and that “prior to the 1980s, readers will be hard put to find Firmicus’ word ‘persecution’ describing the conduct of the Christian empire toward its non-Christian subjects.” He notes that R.M. Price in 1993 attributes the “’absence of continuous religious strife’ to ‘a general determination in Late Roman society to minimize the diviseness of religious differences’ (yes, by extermination)."

I'm aware of Gibbons views and I think MacMullen shows he is as well by pointing out that "Whatever might have been said back in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, by the twentieth it had become clear and agreed on all hands that nothing counted after Constantine save the newly triumphant faith." I can only conclude he is talking there about Gibbon.

I can't explain the absence of Bury in his account. He does say "hard-pressed" and not "impossible" so I suspect here too he has Bury in mind when he speaks, even if he does not mention him by name. He includes Bury' work in his bibliography but perhaps it is because Bury wrote early in the 20th century and his account did not gain wide acceptance; people went on believing what they had always believed: the Pagans persecuted the Christians. The idea didn't begin to gain traction until the '80s.