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At the core of the present scholarly consensus on house church lies the argument that each local congregation in the early church was composed of two forms of gatherings: a large gathering with many small house gatherings. A close reading of the Pauline epistles and Acts, however, shows that this reconstruction stands on a surprisingly weak ground. The Pauline churches were not a monolithic phenomenon in their social formation, but complex entities interacting dialectically with their surrounding situations. Among the Pauline churches, the Corinthian community came closest to the modern model of the coexistence of two–church form, because it enjoyed the large space provided by its well–to–do members. The Corinthian formation was more problematic than other church communities without such rich members, however, since the private nature of the Corinthian gathering space jeopardized the public nature of the community. Confronted with this crisis, Paul sharply contrasted public ekklesia with private oikia and this contrast pushes us one step further away from characterizing Paul’s idea of Christian community with singular form. The scarcity of the available data hinders the responsible historians from identifying the early churches with single definitive social formation.
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Paul, Ekklesia, House church, Lord’s Supper, Social models of the early churches
