A Wee Bit of History

Having listened to his mini-lecture on ancient house churches and their contested relevance to modern Christian experience, I said I would share Fr Thesis's thoughts and so I am (note: he appears here under his real name ...)!

As Fr Thesis points out, under our current circumstances there is a lot of 'loose talk' (you always get 'loose talk' when there's a war on) about how our current dispersed and scattered state is compelling us to return to the condition early Christians found themselves in when they worshipped in private dwellings, and how good this is for us. 'The church is the people, not the building', as though we might forget. And, as he further points out, this is very wide of any recognisable mark. His first argument is the most telling: the original house-churches were not all-family affairs, as we are forced to retreat to at the moment (if we have a family and are not just miserable singletons), but precisely allowed the expansion of that family unit into something more inclusive. That was the point. 'Who is my mother and my brothers?' said Our Lord, I recall.

Peter draws attention to the class-based nature of a lot of the early Christian groups we know about, such as the church in the household of Prisca and Aquila mentioned repeatedly in the Book of Acts, or the gatherings that go so awry in Corinth. These householders were wealthy enough to own nice big properties they could put at the disposal of the nascent Church, and he is right, this is the image we tend to have in our minds. But oddly most of the Christian meetings we get glimpses of in the Scriptures don't take place in those settings: those gatherings occur in upper rooms, the most famous of course being the one the disciples use in Jerusalem which may or may not be either the site now called the Cenacle or the rival one at the Syriac church of St Mark elsewhere in the city. When Dorcas dies in Joppa she's laid out in an 'upper room' and that's where the church meets to mourn her. I especially like the account of the raising of Eutychus who gets bored to sleep by St Paul in a church meeting in 'Troas' and falls from a window, is 'picked up dead' and then snatched back from death by Paul's prayers. The room, lit by many lamps, from which poor Eutychus falls is so far up it's on the third storey. Now, these buildings were not the domus of the wealthy, which were always laid out on one level apart from the odd office or bedroom: these are the structures inhabited by more humble classes, the insulae or apartment blocks which could go up pretty high. I don't know enough about the internal organisation of Roman dwellings to say much about this, but these accounts seem to hint at a pattern of a biggish room above others within the same apartment. Most of Roman literature focuses on life in the villa or domus, but this is obviously something different. (Incidentally, what the Bible calls 'Troas' is probably the small Roman city of Alexandria on the Aegean coast of what's now Turkey - Troas was a region rather than an actual place).

Another point that occurs to me is that although the development of the early house-church was at least partly driven by the need of Christian groups to have a place to meet unmolested, there was also a eucharistic impetus. Once the sharing of a symbolic meal becomes the central element in a Christian gathering, around which the believers' experience of Jesus is organised, there needs to be somewhere to do it - somewhere with a table, or at the very least, somewhere people can sit on the floor and pass bread around in a tolerably reverent atmosphere. You can't do that in the synagogue (even if you want to keep attending synagogue worship) and you can't do it very easily hanging round in places like Solomon's Portico (Acts 5.12). The bespoke church building is not a deviation from the ideal model of the primitive house church, it's a clear development from it propelled by the same motivations.

It's a truism of spoilsport historians like me that most of the time history exhibits development rather than exciting rupture. Development brings us to where we are now; and, as I've said, I can't see the physical dispersal of the Christian community as anything other than an impoverishment, a wounding, even if God will bring good things from it as he always does. Our situation in 2020 is nothing like that of our 1st-century forebears, and why should it be - any more than 1st-century medical practice should dictate the procedures of modern hospitals?