Were There House Churches in Early Christian Times?

Abstract

It has long been conjectured that worship among the first Christians took place largely in private houses, and hence that domestic dwellings were informal proto-churches. This assumption has recently been challenged by a bullish thesis of the German scholar Stefan Heid, who argues that the sacraments always required an altar and that only one altar ever existed in any given local community. Heid believes that there is no such thing as a house church and that they are a scholarly fantasy of a naive reformed cast. This article examines the archaeological and philological evidence and suggests that (a) Heid’s assertion that a permanent altar was always used in the sacraments among the first Christians is uncertain; (b) the difficulty of accommodating hundreds of souls in houses is not an argument against the effectiveness of house churches, since they could have proliferated in proportion to the number of converts; (c) the furniture, posture, and density of worshippers in private houses are unknown but in all events adequate for proto-liturgical sacraments; and (d) the biblical formula of “church in the house” (ἡ ἐκκλησία κατ’ οἶκον) can indeed mean house church, especially as it embraces the concept of a “tenement church.” The article concludes that while Heid has some useful arguments, they provide no proof that house churches did not flourish in the early Christian period against much evidence that they did.