Modern theorists of diasporas have identified two competing classical models or archetypes. The first centres on the classical Jewish paradigm of diaspora, which William Safran believes should be the normative standard for classifying diasporas. Robin Cohen has challenged the Jewish paradigm as the sole archetype by focusing on the ancient Greek experience of dispersion, rooted in commercial and colonial expansion as much as in persecution and involuntary exile. These classical diasporas of the first and second kind are revisited in this analysis. But these archetypes do not exhaust the types of dispersion found in the ancient world. Indeed, the burgeoning study of modern diasporas fails to see a ‘third kind’ of classical diaspora, rooted in the experience of the early and persecuted Christian Church, which offered an integrative understanding of the human good rather than a separatist one overemphasizing one’s ethnic culture. This new response, termed in this study the ‘Classical Diaspora of the Third Kind’, enabled the growth of Christian civilization throughout 2,000 years of history, a period of largely ‘hidden’ diasporic experience. This article sheds light on how the early Christian experience with dispersion meets various criteria set out by Safran and Cohen, and how it also substantially transformed the ethnic and political dimensions of Greek and Jewish diasporic experience through its pilgrim thesis and its ‘spiritualizing’ of the diasporic phenomenon, providing modern students of diaspora a fresh way to appreciate various historical examples of dispersion and to understand various aspects of contemporary diasporas.