Churches in Ancient Christianity
Authors: Last Richard 
Published: April 2015

The English term, “church,” derives from the Greek, kuriakon (κυριακόν) (“that which belongs to the lord”), and is the traditional English translation for a variety of Greek and Latin terms that were used to designate gatherings of Christ-believers in antiquity, including the eventually-dominant ekklēsia /ecclesia (1 Cor 1:2), as well as synōdos (NewDocs 6.26.19), thiasōtai (Eusebius, E.C. 1.3.12), synagōgē (Jas. 2.2), koinōnia (Origen, Cels. 1.1), hetaeria (Pliny, Ep. 10.96), and corpus (Tertullian, Apol. 39). The reality that these designations also denoted Greco-Roman associations (including Judean synagogues)––and that titles for church offices were already employed by private associations––prompted earlier research to explore terminological convergences between ancient churches and private associations, and to investigate the extent to which ancient churches were modeled after Greco-Roman associations (e.g., Hatch, The Organization of the Early Christian Churches) and synagogues (e.g., Burtchaell, From Synagogue to Church). Some recent scholarship on ancient churches has abandoned the quest to determine their identity (e.g., as associations, synagogues, philosophical schools), and now consults analogous data for the heuristic purpose of raising new questions about church structure and practices from ancient associations about whose practices we know much more (e.g., Kloppenborg, “Membership Practices in Pauline Christ Groups”). Other researchers continue to speak about the identity of churches as associations (e.g., Alikin, Earliest History of the Christian Gathering) or as unique from associations (e.g., Klauck, Hausgemeinde und Hauskirche im frühen Christentum). This bibliography covers ancient churches from the earliest period up to 313 ce––the so-called ante pacem era. In these centuries there was diversity from church to church but some commonalities existed at the foundation of diverse ancient church practices: the earliest churches were gatherings of Christ-believers (and invitees of various kinds) for liturgical activities such as prayer, reading, preaching, teaching, hymns (1 Cor 14:26; Didache 8–10; Justin, Apology 66–67) and social purposes such as eating, drinking, and vying for honor (1 Cor 11:17–34; 2 Peter 2:13; Ignatius, Smyrneans 8:2–4; Pliny, Epistles 10.97; Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 25; Tertullian, Apology 39). It has been suggested that liturgical practices were rather uniform in churches (Salzmann, Lehren und Ermahnen) but this theory has not persuaded most scholars (Rouwhorst, “The Roots of the Early Christian Eucharist”). Likewise, meal practices in early churches, while perhaps deriving from a common Greco-Roman banquet tradition, nonetheless might have been structured differently from church to church (McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists). In terms of architecture, it is traditionally thought that pre-313 ce churches met almost exclusively in un-renovated houses and, later, renovated houses (Filson, “The Significance of the Early House Churches”) but Adams, in his 2013 monograph, Earliest Christian Meeting Places, highlights the usage of rented space and other un-renovated meeting venues––and therefore identifies spatial diversity––in this period.