Kenneth K. A. Silver, 'He walked on 'the other side' of the River Jordan: the early church in ancient Israel and beyond the River Jordan in the 1st to the 4th century AD', pp. 263-337, in Aram Periodical, Volume 29, 1 &2 (2017), The River Jordan, Aram Society for Syro-Mesopotamian Studies. (original) (raw)

This is a study of the importance of Christianity and the Church east of the River Jordan in the 1st to the 4th century AD. The validity of the theory of the important role of early Jewish-Christianity between monotheistic Judaism and Roman paganism was tested against the evidence from archaeology and historical sources. A careful scrutiny of architecture, material culture, Second Temple period burials, churches as edifices, Christian art, and finally, the Jewish-Christian theology, demonstrated that the religious and artistic thinking, and expression of Christian faith until the 3rd century AD was still very much Jewish-Semitic. It was really the uniformity and lack of physical evidence of the pre-Constantinian Church, which stood out the most. Archaeology has thus been unable to prove the existence of purpose-built physical church buildings in the Roman Empire in the 1st and 2nd century AD. The total lack of church buildings in this period indicates that we have been looking at the problem from the wrong angle. Believers in Jesus did not generally speaking assemble in public, and the scriptural references to ‘churches’ that we have in the New Testament and in Eusebius Church History are general references to the existence of larger congregations of Jewish-Christians gathering in private homes of wealthy people. However, because these buildings follow the typical Jewish domestic architecture, it is not presently possible to distinguish them from the archaeological material although they served ‘Christian’ purposes. Therefore, what in the beginning was domestic and private became public and corporate only gradually. This confirms that a distinctive Christian identity started to develop slowly in the course of the 3rd century AD, possibly because Judaism and Jewish-Christianity were drifting towards a divorce. Nevertheless, the process was not completed before the 4th or possibly 5th century AD, as demonstrated by the development of the material culture and architecture. It seems that the first steps towards what has been called normative Christian religious architecture were taken in the first half of the 3rd century AD, ca. AD 230-250, when a new type of church architecture called improved version of the traditional House Church (Domus ecclesiae) emerged.