Video Transcript: House Churches in Earliest Christianity
So we have looked a little at the human organization of families, and with children and slaves, and we've looked at some structures of buildings of houses, people, how people actually lived. So let's now take a look at house churches, let's get down to the thing that we're very interested in how these house churches lived in earliest Christianity and how they were formed. Paul's favorite name for a community is Ecclesia. That's what he calls them all the time, the ecclesia in so and so's house, the ecclesia in the city of Corinth. And it's, it's his favorite word. The the letter of James also refers to a Christian assembly as a sunagoge the synagogue, it's another word that means assembly. And Ecclesia has a particular civic meaning in a free city, state, Greek city states it's the assembly of citizens. It's like a town meeting of citizens, and he adapts that word to the Christian assembly. So it carries the connotations of a participative assembly of free people who can exercise their rights. And that is that is really the I think the connotation that people would have had when Paul refers to it that way. So we think that the primary place for the meeting of the Christian assembly is in working households. As I said, sometimes it seems as if it's in a hall, there's an allusion in Acts to Paul meeting in renting the Hall of Tyrannis for two years for his his lectures, you know that. So that would be another case of meeting in a public place. But for the most part, we think that they found hospitality in somebody's house. Not necessarily one of those very lavish houses, the way you saw in the pictures, could be a very ordinary, normal, smaller, modest kind of house, which would limit the number of people then who could participate. But remember that if you're meeting in a working household, that means that it's working, it's a working household, that everything else is going on there. They are preparing food, they are spinning and weaving and producing cloth. They are doing all those kinds of things. They're marrying, and their children are born. And there are children running around, pulling some of those toys that you saw in the previous picture. People are dying. They're holding funerals. Because both weddings and funerals were household observances. They didn't go anywhere else for that. The ritual when when someone died is was to hold a vigil, very short vigil. There's no embalming here, you see, so burial, came pretty soon, but there would be a vigil. And then there would be a procession to the cemetery, which was outside the city walls, usually. But it all takes place in houses. And one of my, my co editors on one of the books about this, who herself was raising several children, said that she imagined people walking in the front door to attend a house church meeting and tripping over the children's toys that were left in the front hall, or being very distracted during the meeting of the assembly by the screams of a woman in a back room giving birth. So you have to factor in these kinds of things, that everything wasn't neat and orderly, because these were places where families really did live. So we think that we from from what we read, and what we know, there was a weekly assembly for worship. It was on the first day of the week, the Jewish first day of the week after the Sabbath. And that was because of course of the understanding that the resurrection of Jesus took place on that first day of the week. That's all the narratives of the empty tomb say that it was the first day of the week after the Sabbath. So that's the day on which they would meet. Now, there were other, shall we say, private religious groups and organizations that also had their favorite meeting times. And the work day, I should say to the, the day off was very irregular. Except for Jews, of course, there was the Sabbath. But the for in the Roman calendar tended to work in segments of 10 days, and then day off that kind of thing. So different people were taking a day off at different times, and you simply had to leave work if you were going to do this? Well, most of the time, no, I think it was probably late afternoon after the workday was over. The workday began very early, very early and knocked off around three or four in the afternoon, usually, because of the heat, and simply the way, it was the way the system worked. So probably these assemblies were later in the afternoon, which was dinnertime anyway, for major dinners. So once a week, on the first day, after the Sabbath, they would all come together in one of these houses. And there, they would certainly greet each other and then settle in for the meal. And you remember seeing houses, the floor plans of houses, and I would point out where the dining room was. And the dining room I said, was always the room that had the the best view of the of the peristyle of the garden in the middle. So I asked myself, How many people could these houses hold for a meeting like this? Well, they could hold as many as you could set up in the dining room and around the the open center, you know, the the garden, the peristyle. And usually in Roman dining rooms, it was set up for reclining at table, you've seen pictures of this, I'm sure of people on couches, and you reclined on your left arm and you ate with your right hand, and there would be a table there in front of you. But I wonder, you know whether they really set up reclining situations for everybody. But my suspicion is that people who didn't fit into the dining room would be at chairs and tables, which is also a way that they that people ate when it wasn't a formal meal. And of course, they're would all be made of wood and has long since disappeared. But my after studying this for a long time, my image is is that that certain people would be invited into the dining room to recline on the couches. Certainly, the hosts hostesses of the house, whoever's house it was, would be there. If you had your founding apostle like Paul visiting, he certainly would be there, and perhaps other honored guests, and then most people really would, would be out in the in the peristyle. Now question, were they segregated by social status? Did the slaves have to all eat together at the end of the peristyle? Or were they integrated with their own family units? We don't know. We just don't know about that. And children were the children all together were they running around in circles around their parents. We don't know about that either. So so we have this meal, which I'm going to come back to in a minute the order of that, but to look first at the other activities that went on in the house church. And one of them certainly is instruction. Those interested in joining the community would have a series of a period of instruction first, and they would have to go somewhere for that. And, and my assumption is that that would be the house. And then also after baptism, they would be continuing instruction for a while. And that would also continue so you'd have a lot of meetings going on in the house. Hospitality when you had members of the community who were traveling somewhere where there was another Christian community, I think they must have known who to ask for in the city where you're going go to the the Jewish neighborhood or the Greek neighborhood or whatever it was and ask for so and so and ask for hospitality there because there's Some evidence that they were in their hotels, but they really they didn't seem to be very good. So hospitality in somebody's home would be a much better thing. So again, you would have a guests coming in. And and if this house was couldn't accommodate them, they would know somebody else in the community that would. So hospitality for visitors, and networking. So and so arrives in the city, a member of the community and wants to create is in a certain business and wants to create connections with somebody in the same business in that city. Oh, I know somebody who can put you in touch with them. So that's what I mean by networking by creating networks that are helpful for the for other members of the community. So those are some of the activities I think that went on in the house church. Now to go back to the the meal, the weekly meal, they certainly had had to adapt Roman meal customs. They have a tradition of what Jesus did and said, as his last meal with His disciples. And that constitutes a formula. And you see it in I Corinthians 11, Paul says that on the night before he died, he didn't this. So that it already in Paul's time, the time of the writing of I Corinthians was probably in the 50s of the first century. There's a formula. And that formula doesn't change much when you compare it to the accounts in the Synoptic Gospels. in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, for what Jesus did at the supper, there's a basic unity there, even though there are many variations on the wording. So they've got that, to, to be the moment the the sacred moment of the sharing of the of the bread and the cup. And in the Roman banquet, the Roman meal, first, there is eating, you come in, you get your feet washed, you recline or sit wherever you're going to be. And, and I should say too that in the Roman custom of banqueting, there's a real sensitivity about place about where people are placed. And there's the the hostess in or hostess in one position, and next to them, and then from there on down. And the prime place is right next to the host or hostess, and you get the best view of the garden, from the angle where you are. So there's, there's that sensitivity to place, you remember the story in the Gospel about the the man, that is the parable that Jesus tells about somebody who chooses the first place. And then then the host comes in and says, No, you're not supposed to sit there, he's supposed to sit there. And and, and there's shame then because he has to move to another workplace. So there were very definite places established in the in the dining room. And, and they would come in and they would be placed by the host or by a slave, they were a slave would be a steward who would tell people where to go where to where their place is, and they begin with eating. And there my supposition is that at the end of the, the meal part of it, they would have this the special words over the bread and cup for the Eucharist. as they transition into the second part of the banquet, which is the time when the wine is brought in. So perhaps the first cup would be the cup with the Eucharist. And then there is the drinking and drinking and discussion. And after people have had several cups of wine, the discussion gets better, you know. So that's the sort of the, the pattern of the banquet. So my supposition is that the order of the Eucharist is the opposite of what we have. We have first word and then table. I think they probably had it the opposite that it was first table, and then word that the the reading of the Scripture and the comment on the Scripture and the sharing of news and all of that took place during the session after the meal after the eating in which they're still in place. And they're they're serving wine. And I think that that order switched when Eucharist was taken out of the household context and put into a context of an of an assembly in a hall. And that seems to have happened sometime at various stages in the second century. So that that's strictly my own. Thinking about that, though? I think I'm not alone on that. And but this is this is speculation about what actually happened at the meal. Now, the question who who presides at the meal is another the, the the owners of a house would be the the natural presiders at the meal, they would be the ones who would lead with the eating, they would be the ones who would recite the narrative of the Lord's Supper, and share the the bread and the cup, they would be the ones who would lead the reflection, the reading of the word not necessarily read themselves, but to be the, the leaders of the ones who move it forward, the, the readers would be people who were skilled at reading. Because Have you ever seen an ancient manuscript, there's no punctuation, and there are no spaces between words, there are just letters, capital letters. And you, you can't just look at it and start reading out loud. To read it out loud, you really have to already know the text, you have to be familiar with it. So reading public reading now, I'm not talking about personal read now. But public reading was quite a skill. And as I said, you had to be familiar with the text first. So even if it's a letter from Paul, you know, the group meeting somewhere in somebody's house in Corinth, and Paul has sent them a letter, which is circulating among the house churches in Corinth, you can't just get up and look at this thing and read it you, the reader has to be prepared first. And the reader then is the person who, who is perhaps perhaps begins the commentary on it. Or perhaps it's the the owners of the of the House who say, Well, what do you think he meant by that? And then there would be common sharing of, of interpretation, what are the things we would love to have is community's answers to Paul's letters. You know, he writes a letter and he says, I want you to do this, and this and this. And they presumably wrote a letter back to him. And we don't have that. So we don't know, with with one or two exceptions. There are a couple of times actually, in I Corinthians where he says, Now you said in the letter. And so we have one of their questions, but we don't really have their answers to his letters. So in terms of what happens in a house church, that's, that, I think, is the gist of it. Now, I want to talk about this a little, I want to talk about this in the next segment, actually, about the different kinds of people we know, belong to these house churches. And certainly, there were, there were slaves from households, there were some households that would come all together, free and slaves. There were some slaves that came from households with nobody else there from that household. It's a very mixed bag. But if everyone was treated, the same in terms of seating and food served, and all that kind of thing. What happens when they go home? And it's not all the same, and the slaves are still expected to be slaves and to serve everybody else. I suspect that caused some friction. So we will continue this discussion when we're talking about particularly about women in house churches, which I didn't say much about here, except that sometimes the house is owned by a woman, in which case, she is then the ordinary presider at the meal. So, to be continued,