¹ See the bibliographical appendix at the end of this article.

² Deichmann, , “Vom Tempel zur Kirche,” 52.Google Scholar

³ Ibid.: “Dieser göttliche Raum (i.e., the Holy of Holies) hat nun die Bedeutung des Mals, das er einst umfassen sollte übernommen. Der Raum umgrenzt den unsichtbaren Gott: es ist der Schritt vom Kultmal zum Kultraum.”

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Wenschkewitz, H., “Die Spiritualisierung der Kultusbegriffe Tempel, Priester und Opfer im Neuen Testament,” Angelos 4 (1932) 71–230Google Scholar. Wenschkewitz's well-known work should now be supplemented with Klinzing's, GeorgDie Umdeutung des Kultus in der Qumrangemeinde und im Neuen Testament (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971)Google Scholar. Discussion: Finney, Paul Corby, “TOPOS HIEROS und christlicher Sakralbau in vorkonstantinischer Überlieferung,” Boreas 7 (1984) 193–225.Google Scholar

⁶ Deichmann, “Vom Tempel zur Kirche,” 54: “So wurde der Gottesdienst losgelöst von einer örtlichen Bindung. … Die Verehrung Gottes ist losgelöst von örtlicher, irdisch-materieller Bindung.”

⁷ Ibid., 55: “Das Heiligtum des Urchristentums konnte daher keine irdische Gestalt, eine architektonische Form, annehmen. Es gab keinen von Menschenhand gebauten Tempel. Ein solcher wäre Götzenwerk gewesen. So blieb die irdische Kultstätte ein reiner Zweckbau. Auch der Kult heiligte nicht den Kultplatz. Das Urchristentum hatte keine sakrale Architektur. Denn für den Sakralbau ist die Heiligung des Ortes Voraussetzung.”

⁸ Ibid., 59 n. 27: “Der Ablehnung eines irdischen, architektonischen Heiligtums in der Zeit der Urkirche ging parallel die Bilderfeindlichkeit.” Deichmann's authorities include Klauser, Th., “Die Äusserungen der alten Kirche zur Kunst: Revision der Zeugnisse, Folgerungen für die archäologische Forschung,” Congresso internazionale di archeologia cristiana Atti 6 (Città del Vaticano, 1965) 223–38Google Scholar; and Koch, Hugo, Die altchristliche Bilderfrage nach den literarischen Quellen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1917)Google Scholar passim, esp. 99: “Es liegt auf der Hand, daβ das Christentum zu einer Zeit, wo es noch keine ‘Tempel’ und ‘Heiligtürmer,’ keine res sacrae hatte, wo es noch alles Dingliche und Stoffliche von der Heiligkeit ausschloss, auch keine Bilder als Kultgegenstände kannte.”

⁹ Eusebius's speech on the church (νεὠς το θεο) at Tyre appears at Hist. eccl. 10.4.1–72 (ed. E. Schwartz; GCS 9.2; Leipzig, 1908). The speech is at once a panegyric of Paulinus, bishop of Tyre, and a theological ekphrasis of the building, now more correctly called an architectural theoria (on the Christian use of the latter topos, cf. McVey, “Domed Church as Microcosm,” 109ff. [see Appendix]); cf. Süssenbach, Christuskult, 75ff., 133ff., which contains the predictable judgment of Eusebian architectural nomenclature: “Wir stehen also vor einer von ausserhalb der Kirche provo zierten grundsätzlichen Wende, nicht vor einer Entwicklungskontinuität. Und das bedeutet, wie schon angedeutet, nicht nur das Hinüberführen einer inoffiziellen Religion in die Öffentlichkeit des Staatskultes, sondern auch den entscheidenden strukturellen Wandel zu einer materiellen Liturgie (shades of Ritschlian idealism!). Schlieβlich fanden wir das neue Sakralbauverständnis, ausgenommen wieder die tyrische Kirchweihrede Eusebs, ja ebenfalls zuerst vom Kaiser formuliert.” The best introduction to Eusebian architectural nomenclature, in my view, is Ludwig Voelkl's “Die konstantinischen Kirchenbauten nach Eusebius” (see Appendix). Panegyric, ekphrasis, and theoria clearly fall within the epideictic tradition, which Eusebius exploited extensively; on the classical models see Burgess, Theodore C., “Epideictic Literature,” Studies in Classical Philology 3 (1902) 89–261.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Süssenbach, “Christuskult,” 83ff.

¹¹ Koch, Die altchristliche Bilderfrage, 93ff.

¹² Von Harnack's attitudes toward early Christian material culture (and toward the study of this subject) are those of the Ritschlian school, although it must be admitted that von Harnack did not write extensively on the subject; cf. his Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, vol. 2 (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1931) 479Google Scholar; also Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums, vol. 2 (4th ed.; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1924) 611–18Google Scholar. On the subject of early Christian architecture, a representative Ritschlian argument was given by Hauck, A., “Kirchenbau,” RE 6 (1901) 774ffGoogle Scholar. Hauck, e.g., was a firm believer in the illegitimacy of both the concept and the reality of early Christian architecture: “Man hat wohl von christlicher Baukunst gesprochen. Aber in der Verbindung der beiden Worte liegt derselbe logische Fehler, wie wenn man von dem christliche Staate spricht. Denn so wenig dadurch, daβ die Bürger eines Staats Christen sind, der Begriff des Staats geändert wird, so wenig wird das Wesen der Baukunst dadurch umgestaltet, daβ sie einem christlichen oder einem nichtchristlichen Volke dient.”

¹³ Süssenbach, Christuskult, 100: “Doch ist soviel klar, daβ wir es hier mit dem Protokoll eines Heiden zu tun haben, der das Gebäude ja irgendwie als religiöse Einrichtung bestimmen muβte. Die Andersartigkeit der christlichen Religion war ihm dazu, wie die Beispiele lehren, sicherlich unbekannt. Ein Christ aber hätte wohl auch hier die entsprechenden syrischen Begriffe für ‘Haus der Kirche’ oder ‘Hause des Gebets’ verwendet.”

¹⁴ Bauer, Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei, 17ff. (see Appendix).

¹⁵ Süssenbach, Christuskult, 103: “Nach dem Gesagten stellt sich mit Konstantin also auch ein völlig neuartiges christliches Sakralbauverständnis ein, das nicht nur im Bewuβtsein der ersten drei Jahrhunderte keinerlei Vorbereitung findet, sondern auch der apostolischen Tradition schärfstens widerspricht.”

¹⁶ Turner, From Temple to Meeting House, 11–12.

¹⁷ Ibid., 12. Turner argues (as does Deichmann) that the temple type, both in concept and in execution, was an intrusive element in early Christianity, foisted upon the church by external, pagan traditions (Ibid., 157–77). He associates the temple type with the phenomenon of civil religion (Ibid., 336ff).

¹⁸ Ibid., 205–26.

¹⁹ Ibid., 309–22.

²⁰ Biéler, André, Liturgie et architecture: Le temple des Chrétiens (Geneva: Labor & Fides, 1961)Google Scholar; cf. also “Rundfrage über den protestantischen Kirchenbau,” Werk 46 (1959) 271–80Google Scholar, a round table discussion organized by the editorial board of Werk.

²¹ Corpus Reformatorum vol. 48 (ed. Baum, W., Cunitz, E., Reuss, E.; Braunschweig: Schwetschke, 1898). At Acts 7:33, responding to the report (Exod 3:5) that God told Moses to take off his shoes because the place he was standing on was holy, Calvin counters: “Respondeo, hunc Dei praesentiae non loco haberi honorem, et hominum causa praedicari loci sanctitatem.” On Acts 7:47–49 he says that people who imagine that God can be tied to a place do him injury, they worship him superstitiously who think that his “numen” can be affixed to a temple; people who worship God, says Calvin, according to their own nature (which is space-bound and place-bound) deceive themselves—men must rise above their place-bound nature to seek God spiritually. At Acts 17:24 Calvin exhorts: go outside of yourself, do not measure God by your own mental capacity, do not form any images of God according to your carnal understanding, set him above the world, distinguish him from created things; the man who does not ascend above the world gropes about in empty shadows and appearances: “In summa, superstitio Deum in templis manu factis habitare fingit.”Google Scholar

²² Calvin, Inst. 1.11.1–15, esp. 1.11.2 (every figurative representation of God contradicts his being): “He (Isaiah) teaches that God's majesty is sullied by an unfitting and absurd fiction, when the incorporeal is made to resemble corporeal matter, the invisible a visible likeness, the spirit an inanimate object, the immeasurable a puny bit of wood, stone or gold.‘

²³ Corpus Reformatorum, vol. 52, cols. 403–5 (Exod 25:8: “Et facient mihi sanctuarium, ut habitum in medio eorum”); cols. 391–93 (Deut 12:5: “Sed locum quem elegerit Iehova Deus vester e cunctis tribubus vestris, ut ponat illic nomen suum ad habitandum, quaeretis, venietisque illuc”).

²⁴ Ibid., col. 392.

²⁵ De som. 1.21–34, 149, 215; De op. mun. 145 ff.: man's mind or soul is the true temple of divinity. Wenschkewitz identified (“Die Spiritualisierung”) two kinds of spiritualization of cultus. The first, on the evidence of the prophets, the Psalms, the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman Jewish apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, and certain New Testament loci, he called “naive.” The second, on the evidence primarily of Hellenistic Stocism and Philo, he called the reflective (or philosophical) type. What we now know (a fact which Wenschkewitz could not have known), on the evidence of the Qumran Scrolls, is that Wenschkewitz's second type was by no means restricted to Jewish Hellenistic philosophers in the Diaspora (such as Philo), but instead it had profound resonances in the home country among late Hellenistic Palestinian Jews; cf. Klinzing, Die Umdeutung.

²⁶ The component parts of this florilegium have never been assembled carefully and commented on in full, but it would be useful to do so. The tradition is attested widely, e.g., Clement, Strom. 7.5.28, 1–7.6.30,1; Minucius Octavius 32; Origen C. Cel. 1.5 (von Arnim, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, frg. 265), but these are only three among dozens of sources that corroborate the existence of this florilegium. This tradition aims to prove that man is the true temple of divinity. Although there are what I have called “die entfernten Vorgänger” (“TOPOS HIEROS,” 212 n. 45) there is no doubt, in my opinion, that the immediate source of this Christian florilegium was the Stoic-Hellenistic doxographic tradition which Greek-speaking Christians had access to under a host of variant forms (Diels, Hermann, Doxographi Graeci [4th ed.; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965]Google Scholar passim) and which Latin Christians also knew through Cicero and his sources in the De natura deorum. For one very famous Christian's exploitation of this florilegium-doxographic tradition, namely Augustine, see the superb article by Courcelle, Pierre, “Parietes faciunt christianos?” Mélanges d'archéologie, d'épigraphie et d'historie offerts à Jérôme Carcopino (Paris: Hachette, 1966) 241–48.Google Scholar

²⁷ Deichmann, Friederich Wilhelm, Einführung in die christliche Archäologie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983) 68ff.Google Scholar

²⁸ Ibid., 85: “Die Darstellung bei Krautheimer (referring to the third mentioned work reviewed here) … wo das Fehlen der religiösen Wurzeln eines Kultbaus in der urchristlichen Periode nicht erkannt ist.” To which the best rejoinder is that Krautheimer had the good sense to refrain from the theological speculations in which Deichmann indulged.

²⁹ The original essay, entitled “The Beginning of Early Christian Architecture,” RR 3 (1939) 127–48Google Scholar, was reissued (with a postscript and additional bibliography) in Krautheimer, Richard, Studies in Early Christian, Medieval, and Renaissance Art (New York: New York University Press, 1969) 1–20.Google Scholar

³⁰ Krautheimer, Early Christian Architecture, 24.

³¹ The legal conditions by which local pre-Constantinian churches (understood as ecclesiae, i.e., corporate entitites under the shadow of religio illicita) acquired real property (a public action requiring, inter alia, the recording of a deed) is a subject bedeviled by a plethora of speculation in the absence of hard evidence. A useful introduction to the subject is Bovini, La proprietà ecclesiastica (see Appendix). On legal problems, specifically the government's view of Christians’ juridical status (i.e., Christians as individuals [citizens or noncitizens] under the law, and Christians as members of a corporate entity that was illegal), see Sherwin-White, A. N., “The Early Persecutions and Roman Law Again,” JTS n.s. 3 (1952) 199–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³² The source, which dates from the early period of the Donatist controversy, is the so-called Gesta apud Zenophilum (Appendix I) which appears in S. Optati Milevitani Libri VII (ed. Karl Ziwsa; Leipzig: Freytas, 1893) 186–88. Munatius (Menetius) Felix, “flamen perpetuus” of Numidian Cirta received orders to confiscate the possessions of certain Christians whose property was housed in a building described as “domus in qua christiani conveniebant.” Munatius confronted Paul, the Bishop of the community, at the house, and the Christians there produced 2 gold lamps, 12 silver vessels, a silver kettle, 7 silver lamps, 2 wax candles, 18 bronze lamps, 82 women's tunics, 38 women's veils, 16 men's tunics, 13 pairs of men's shoes, 47 pairs of women's shoes, and 19 thongs. The library cupboards yielded an additional silver box and a silver lamp. The triclinium yielded 4 jars and 6 barrels and one large tome—the latter may suggest that the meal cult (eucharist?) was celebrated in the dining room. Munatius Felix then went to the houses of certain lectores where he gathered many additional volumes and two fascicules, or parts of volumes. The domus in question was clearly just that, a house that was being used by Christians. He argues that the conditions of domūs ecclesiae varied from place to place, but all shared certain common interior features which are those mentioned in the case of the church at Cirta.Google Scholar

³³ Nat. 1.13.1 (ed. Borleffs, Jan Willem Philip; CChr 1 series latina; Turnholt: Brepols, 1954):Google Scholar

“Alii plane humanius solem Christianum deum aestimant, quod innotuerit ad orientis partem facere nos precationem, uel die solis laetitiam curare.” Clement Strom. 7.7.43,6–7 (ed. Stählin, O. and Früchtel, L.; GCS 17; 2ded.; Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1970):Google Scholar

Ἐπε δ γενεθλίου ἠμέρας εἰχὠν νατολἠ κάχεῖθεν τ φς αὔξεται κ σκότους λάμψαν τό πρτον, λλ καἰ τοῖς ν γνοίᾳ χαλινδουμένοις νέτειλεν γνώσεως ληθείας ἠμέα κατ λόγον το λίου, πρς τν έωθινν νατολἠν αί εὐχαί. ὅθεν κα τ παλαίτατα τν ἰερν δύσιν ἔβλεπεν, ἴνα οἰ παντιπρόσωπον τν γαλμάτων ίστάμενοι πρς νατολν τρέπεσθαι διδάσκωνται..

At 43.8 Clement closes this lovely passage with Ps 141:2: “Let my prayer be counted as incense before thee, and the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice!” Both Tertullian and Clement present their thoughts on this subject in contexts which are literary and theological. This is in contrast, e.g., to the prescriptions concerning liturgical orientation to the east in the Syriac Didascalia apostolorum 57.5–6 (ed. Connolly, Richard Hugh; Oxford: Clarendon, 1929)Google Scholar; cf. Nussbaum, Otto, Der Standort der Liturgen am christlichen Alter vor dem Jahre 1000 (Bonn: Hanstein, 1965) 395ffGoogle Scholar. The lost Greek archetype of this sixth-century Syriac text probably should be dated to the early third century—in any event it might be argued on principle that a church order is likely to be a better reflection of real practices in the early church than is a literary-theological text.

³⁴ Rordorf, “Gottesdiensträume,” 121, 122 (citing Gerkan, A. von at RG 42 [1934] 226ff). At the east end of the south room, no. 4 (Kraeling's so-called Assembly Hall) there is a bema that projects from the east wall. Rordorf, relying on von Gerkan (who is often unreliable) speculates that this platform was surmounted by a “Bischofsstuhl.” This is excessive interpretation but if room 4 was used for church assembly (as seems likely), then one fact is clear: the community faced east.Google Scholar

³⁵ “Origins of the Christian Basilica,” 69–90.

³⁶ White, “Domus Ecclesiae,” 11–18.

³⁷ Ibid., 20ff.

³⁸ Ibid., 21ff.

³⁹ Ibid., 25–40,475–519.

⁴⁰ For a discussion of Church D (containing the Octagon) at Philippi (with reference to earlier work on this structure) see StylianosPelekanides, “ΑΝΑΣΚΑΦΗ ΦΙΛΙΠΠΩΝ, πρακτικ τς ν Ἀθήναις Ἀρχαολογικς Ἐταιρείας (1973) 55–69, esp. 58–65.

⁴¹ Bauer, Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei, with a postscript by Georg Strecker (see Appendix); Koester, Helmut, “ΓΝΩΜΑΙ ΔΙΑΘΟΡΟΙ:: The Origin and Nature of Diversification in the History of Early Christianity,” HTR 58 (1965) 299–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴² For a critical review of Meeks's, WayneThe First Urban Christians (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983)Google Scholar, see Smith, Morton, “Perils of the Paulines,” The Washington Post Book World 13:15 (10 April 1983) 15Google Scholar; for a survey of literature published between 1970 and 1980, see Harrington, Daniel J., S.J., “Sociological Concepts and the Early Church: A Decade of Research,” TS 41 (1980) 181–90.Google Scholar

⁴³ White, “Domus Ecclesiae,” 545ff.

⁴⁴ “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” JRomS 61 (1971) 80–101Google Scholar; and also Bieler, Ludwig, ΘEIOΣ ANHP (1935/1936; reprinted Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967).Google Scholar

⁴⁵ The literature on the philosophical topos is endless. For early Christianity an excellent brief introduction is contained in W. Schoedel, “Enclosing, Not Enclosed: The Early Christian Doctrine of God,” in idem and Wilken, R. L., eds., Early Christian Literature and the Classical Intellectual Tradition (ThH 53; Paris, 1979) 75–86Google Scholar, and idem, “‘Topological’ Theology and Some Monistic Tendencies in Gnosticism,” in Krause, Martin, ed., Essays on the Nag Hammadi Texts in Honor of Alexander Böhlig (NHS 3; Leiden: Brill, 1972) 88–108.Google Scholar