The House Church at Dura-Europos
Biblical scholars and historians of the early Church strive with very little evidence to reconstruct the nature and practice of the early Christian liturgy. Literary descriptions tell us that, at first, liturgical gatherings were held in private homes. But as early as
AD 150, Justin Martyr describes the liturgy as taking place in special buildings set apart for the purpose, without giving us much helpful description of these house churches. Fortunately, and by something of a fluke, one such house church, or domus ecclesia, in Dura-Europos in Syria, has survived almost intact since the third century.
“Buried Alive”
The building’s backstory is rather curious. Originally built of broad brown bricks in the Parthian fashion, it comprised a series of rooms, single-storied and built around a courtyard, with a staircase leading up to a flat roof, like the one described in the story of Jesus’ healing of the paralyzed man on the mattress. It is built in the typical Mediterranean manner of the times, a pleasant layout for a house if you have the climate for it.
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Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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