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Number Upper Houses

The occupation numbers of 10,215 for the House of the Citharist and 3,340 for the House of Menander are shocking, since many have accepted upper limits of 30 to 50 people in a house worship service, and indeed, these grand houses would have been quite crowded by so many. But if we calculate a half or a quarter of those numbers, gatherings of the whole church in a city theoretically could still have been of considerable size. It is unwise to set a hard upper limit of 30 to 40 for the number of Christians who might celebrate the Lord's Supper in a Roman triclinium plus colonnaded gardens.

Many Christian assemblies were certainly much smaller than forty; others could have been significantly larger. We have focused on the larger spaces because many writers have assumed that they did not exist. Gaius, head of a synagogue in Corinth; Erasmus, perhaps an aedile in the same city; Prisca and Aquila, who owned a house in Asia and another in Rome; and Phoebe, Paul's patron, theoretically might have owned houses like some of those discussed above, although since we cannot visit them, we will never know.¹ The need for all early Christian assemblies to have been small and private is a modern projection, not justified by Roman domestic culture or architecture.

The so-called Palatial Mansion in Jerusalem is an example of an ostentatious residence that could easily have accommodated the sorts of activities described in Acts. The house covered more than five thousand four hundred square feet and included an upper level for dwelling and a lower basement or water installations (pools, baths and cisterns.)The structure probably included a second level, an upper story of rooms, but the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 has made reconstruction of this level impossible. Imagine you are in a large upper class Roman home as described above. What would the worship be like?

¹"Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Development" editors Ralph P. Martin and Peter H. Davids.

"Number of Upper Houses."

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