A Social History of the Early Church

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This book is not an exhaustive treatment of the subject – not a compendium of everything there is to know about the Roman empire and the place of the earliest Christian groups within it.

But it is designed to fill in some of the blanks and whet your appetite to find out more. There is a whole smörgåsbord of resources at the back of this book that will take you further into an amazing world.

In some ways this is an old-fashioned book in that it’s designed to be read consecutively, from chapter 1 to chapter 8. You can dip in and out using the contents page, and you should be able to find the fact or insight that you are looking for. But reading the whole thing will give you a good overview, a flavour of the daily lives of those ordinary men and women who were the first to join the Christian church in the cities around the Roman world from the mid-30s to the mid-60s AD.

The evidence about the Christian communities we look at in this book comes almost exclusively from a collection of letters written by a leader of the Christian movement, a tent-maker from Tarsus in modern-day Turkey, a fiery Jewish intellectual who had been an opponent of the Christians in the early days but who changed his mind following an encounter on the Damascus road that he claimed was with the risen Jesus. His name was Paul.

We also include evidence from other parts of the New Testament, especially the Acts of the Apostles, a history of the early Christian movement written by a close associate of Paul’s called Luke.

A fresh page

The church was born in the years near the beginning of the imperial age. Octavian had become Augustus Caesar, princeps (or emperor) of Rome, in 27 BC. It was a time of hope and expectation, of economic growth and grinding poverty, of expansion and consolidation of the most spectacular empire the world had ever seen.

Archaeology, Artefacts, and Books

How do we know about the past? This apparently simple question has spawned a library filled with books on the methods of historians and how scholars sift and weigh the evidence to create a narrative of bygone ages.

There are two types of evidence available to people who study the ancient world, the world of the early church. These are often called physical and literary.

Physical remains refer to anything that can be dated to a particular period – buildings, statues, household goods, and documents. The Roman world comes to life in such places as Pompeii and Ostia in Italy, Ephesus and Aphrodisias in Turkey, Athens and Corinth in Greece, Caesarea Maritima and Jerusalem in Israel/Palestine.

Archaeologists are able to piece together the evidence yielded by such sites to create stories of the everyday lives of the people who occupied these sites when they were living communities. It is not a precise science, however. The archaeological record is patchy, and teams of scholars have to work with what they can handle and combine it with what they already know of the period they are studying in order to generate theories which are then tested against subsequent research.

Literary evidence refers to the contents of books and papers, inscriptions on walls, and other written records. Among the literary remains that we have from the world of the early Christians are the writings that comprise the New Testament, twenty-seven books and letters that were written over a fifty-year period from the late 40s AD. But we also have the writings of Roman historians and philosophers, those of Jewish thinkers (such as Philo and Josephus), and collections of commercial records and personal correspondence that are turned up from time to time by archaeologists.

One such collection is a wealth of papyrus documents unearthed in the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus that has thrown light on the concerns of ordinary householders and government officials, many from the time of the Roman empire.

There are two problems with literary evidence. The first is that we invariably only have copies of documents, not the originals. This is because the materials that books and scrolls are written on do not last. So copies have to be made to preserve the ideas. It means that we can never be absolutely certain when a particular document was first written. We have to piece together the likely date from physical evidence and what we know about the life and circumstances of the author. The major exception to this are the many papyri that are original documents of all kinds, including personal letters, contracts, bills of lading and so on.

The second is that writers have a particular view of things, seeing the world their way, which is not always the way other people see it. So when Roman writers tell us about the lives of the poor, it is difficult to know how objective they are being since they were invariably members of the privileged elite.

In this book, we make the best use we can of the evidence at our disposal, both physical and literary, to create a narrative of the world of the early church.

Jesus of Nazareth had been born in the reign of Augustus, probably around 6 BC, and had begun his ministry under the emperor Tiberius. The church began emerging in the mid-30s in the cities at the eastern end of the empire – Jerusalem, Caesarea, Antioch, and Damascus. By the AD 40s it had reached Rome, Athens, the cities of Galatia (the central part of modern-day Turkey), Thessalonica, and Philippi. In the 50s it reached Corinth, Ephesus, and the Mediterranean islands.

The church found a small foothold in the back streets of these bustling cities. This is a description of the soil in which it took root and the lives lived by the earliest urban followers of Jesus.

CHAPTER 1

AN URBAN MOVEMENT

The world of the early Christians was an urban one. This is not to say that everyone in the Roman world lived in a city. In fact only about a fifth of the empire’s population lived in urban areas. Nor were there necessarily no followers of Jesus who lived on farms or in tiny villages: there probably were. But we only really know about the progress of the first Christians in cities.

Apart from the letter of James, which was written to scattered communities in rural Galilee and Judea, everything we know about the lives of the early Christians comes from an urban context. So we read of Philemon living in Colossae, Timothy in Ephesus, and Phoebe in the port city of Cenchrea; we have two of Paul’s four letters to the Roman city of Corinth in Greece and another to the Roman colony of Philippi. Even Peter’s letters and John’s Apocalypse are written to small Christian groups living in cities across Roman Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey).

The Acts of the Apostles tells the story of how the Christian movement spread across the cities of the empire, starting in Jerusalem and ending in Rome itself, with its focus on the ministry of Paul and his colleagues (especially in chapters 13–28), who work almost exclusively in Roman cities, places such as Pisidian Antioch, Corinth, Philippi, and Thessalonica.

The reason for this is that the Roman empire was an urban empire. Rome was the largest city the world had ever known. Even before the birth of Jesus, its population was nudging a million. There would only be another city as big when London topped the million mark in the late eighteenth century.

Rome was not the only substantial city in the empire. Antioch, Alexandria, Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, Pergamum, and Sardis were all significant conurbations, though considerably smaller than the capital, with populations of between 50,000 and 200,000.

Cities were the places where power lay. Rome, of course, was the centre of the world as far as Romans (who called the shots across most of the known world at the time) were concerned! It was the seat of power (where the emperor lived and the senate met), a place of immense wealth, the centre of a spider’s web of imperial trade that spread east and west across most of the known world, even beyond the borders of the empire itself to India and China.

It was also teeming with the urban poor who lived in makeshift homes in overcrowded ghettos. Indeed, population density in Rome and other ancient cities was higher than it is in most modern cities. Rome was more like Mumbai than Paris. Its population was crammed into a small space, making its streets narrow and crowded and its buildings overflow with people. The density of population was of the order of 730 people per hectare compared with just 452 for Mumbai. And all ancient cities were similar.

Films depicting the lives of emperors and the Roman elite – such as Ben Hur and Gladiator – give the impression that life in the empire’s cities was pretty comfortable, if not opulent. Even slaves appear to have eaten and dressed well! But for most urban dwellers in the first century, life was hard, with daylight hours given over to trying to find enough to live on. Living conditions were rudimentary, with little in the way of home comforts or basic sanitation.

Earning a crust

Historians are divided on what economic life was like in the first Christian century. Some argue that the Roman empire was a vast single market, with goods being traded from city to city and ships criss-crossing the Mediterranean, loaded with anything from basic foodstuffs to luxury cloth and exotic spices. In this market, many people got rich but even the poor were able to scrape a living.

Others suggest that economic life was decidedly primitive, that there was really nothing approaching a market economy. Rather, wealth resided in land and was controlled by a few well-established, extremely wealthy families. Such trade as there was, was small-scale and in the hands of humbler people; it was certainly frowned on by members of the ruling elite.

As with a lot of historical debates, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. There was not a market economy such as we see in the world today. But there was a lively trade in both raw materials and manufactured products. In particular, Rome was a vast market for grain, oil, and wine, as well as manufactured goods such as pottery and clothes. It also imported vast quantities of building materials in the first century as successive emperors built and rebuilt the city, making it ever more glorious.

This meant that the port of Ostia on the coast, twenty-two kilometres to the west of the capital, developed during the first century into a thriving centre of trade with links to every corner of the far-flung empire.

Most cities – probably including Rome itself – were regarded as the conurbation plus the agricultural land that surrounded it, where much of the food for the city was grown. This means that many city people still worked the land, walking each morning from their urban garrets to farm small plots of land. Most of these were tenant farmers, but a few would have been sons or slaves of the landowners themselves.

However, as cities grew, more and more people earned a living away from agriculture. Historians have identified more than 200 different jobs from Rome’s tombstones (see chapter 3). These monuments generally mark the remains of skilled people, often men (and it is largely men) who had started as slaves, been trained in trades, and then either earned or bought their freedom and continued in those trades until their deaths.

But most of Rome’s citizens were unskilled wage-labourers, selling their muscle daily to anyone who needed it. These people were referred to as mercennarii, which is the root of our word mercenary, and they would be paid by the day to do a variety of tasks, the most common of which was carrying things around. They might be hired to carry supplies from a rich landowner’s house to his tenants working the fields outside the city; or they might be hired to collect goods bought in the market and carry them to the new owner’s home.

Of course, a major way such unskilled workers earned a living was by labouring on building sites. Throughout the first century, Rome and many other cities across the empire were transformed by massive municipal building projects. For example, a single construction project undertaken by the emperor Claudius employed 30,000 men for eleven years as diggers. The work was hard and badly paid, but at least it ensured that most of these men and their families could eat.

Chapter 7 will cover in more detail the Roman economy and how rich or poor people were. Here, we will attempt to get an overview of ancient cities, looking especially at Rome, Ostia, and Pompeii in Italy, before glancing across the sea at Corinth, Ephesus, and Antioch at the eastern end of the empire.

As Augustus tightened his grip on power over his long reign, he made major changes to the way the city of Rome looked. He claimed that he had come to a city built of brick and left it a marble marvel. And across the empire, local elites aped what Augustus and his successors did in Rome, to show that they were proud and loyal members of this powerful new empire. In this way, Roman imperial rule was felt in the architecture, culture, and street life of cities across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Visitors to most Roman cities across the empire would have found the layout and architecture familiar; they would have known where to go to find the seat of government, to buy or sell goods, to get a meal, or to have a good night out.

A close-up view

Cities were geographically small, tightly packed, and densely populated, drawing to their gates people of all nationalities seeking to earn a crust or make something of themselves. Most were laid out on a grid system, with straight main roads intersecting each other frequently. But city streets were narrow. In Rome there was a law that required streets to be three metres wide – wide enough for several people to pass, but probably not two carts. Even major thoroughfares, such as the Appian Way in Rome, were only four and a half metres across and these were the main supply routes into cities, crowded with carts, animals, and people. Most of the time they would have felt like a stadium at a sporting championship.

Although the Romans are famed for their sanitation, the grim reality was that most drainage consisted of open ditches that ran down the middle of these narrow streets and were filled to overflowing with household waste of all kinds, including the contents of chamber-pots and buckets emptied from second- and third-floor windows first thing in the morning – despite laws prohibiting it. Such was the stench in Rome and other imperial cities that those rich enough retreated in the summer months to villas in the countryside or on the coast to escape the risk of illness as well as the rank odour of the city.

Most households drew their water from public fountains or wells. In Pompeii these were plentiful, with water being brought into the city via an aqueduct and then distributed to a network of fountains situated at the intersections of main routes. It meant that most of the city’s inhabitants were never further than 1,000 metres from a source of water for cooking, drinking, and bathing. Not all city-dwellers were as fortunate.

The buildings that lined these narrow streets came in all shapes and sizes. Most were blocks that occupied a whole site between street intersections and are known as insulae (see p. 25). Until the second century in Rome, these buildings tended to be only two or three storeys high. The ground floors, facing the street, housed shops and bars, while the rooms behind and upstairs were used as living accommodation of varying size and quality.

These buildings were generally constructed from wood and stucco and hence were very flammable. There were also no chimneys and many families cooked in their one room on a low brazier, venting the smoke to the outside via the doors and windows (if any) of their apartment. Not surprisingly, fires were frequent in the poorer, more overcrowded parts of all cities. Early in his reign, Augustus established guilds of fire-fighters who would patrol the city’s streets at night with buckets, ladders, and primitive siphons for spraying water in the hope of stopping fires before they took hold and burned through an entire area. About 7,000 men were recruited as so-called vigiles, housed in the various regions of the city.

They did the best they could, but even that many men could not prevent the great fire of Rome in AD 64, which started in the Circus Maximus and raged for nine days, in total severely damaging ten of Rome’s fourteen districts, three of which had to be completely demolished. In the rebuilding that followed, streets were widened in the hope of preventing the spread of flames from building to building. Rome was not alone in being the victim of devastating fires. Antioch in the east suffered three accidental conflagrations