School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemFrom house church to tenement church: domestic space and the development of early urban Christianity( 2010)The thesis attempts to posit a solution to the widely attested gap in our current knowledge regarding the physical circumstances in which the first urban Christians met and established a tangible presence in their social world. Whilst the literary record points to the phenomena of the ‘house church’ in multiple localities across the Roman world, there is a paucity of archaeological evidence for houses large enough to accommodate the numbers involved, and no attested record of purpose-renovated or purpose-built meeting places until well into the third century. The application of a relatively new approach in the sociological investigation of ancient communities, known as social networking theory, is applied to understand the social circumstances under which communities were formed and cohered around a common cultic practice or figure in the ancient world. This sheds light on the manner in which such groups formed and adds to our knowledge of both the social and physical circumstances experienced by the first generations of Christians in the urban environments of the Graeco-Roman city during the critical stage of the development of the group’s architecture, occupying the period c. 50 -150 CE. The possibility that the insula or apartment block may provide a suitable locale on both physical and social grounds, is then discussed appealing to both literary and archaeological evidence.