Pretty much yes. The first churches were really house churches. At first Christians literally just met to worship at someone’s house (Acts 2:46; 5:42; 1 Corinthians 16:19; Romans 16:5; Philemon 2; Colossians 4:15) or in synagogues (which in some cases could actually just be someone’s house), but around the mid-2nd century onwards you see houses being converted and renovated into actual religious buildings.
christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-37/where-did-christians-worship.html
We often imagine that Christians were always in hiding because they were persecuted, but in reality, the level of persecution varied from place to place: for the first 250 years of Christianity, persecutions were isolated and localized affairs. So in some places, the government officials might actively hunt Christians down, but in others they were generally left unscathed.
It was a crime to be Christian, and Christians had bad publicity in many places, but Christians were always not sought out, and those that were found were not all put to death: some were acquitted. (Let’s just say that there were Christians who had a martyr complex: they
actively tried to get themselves arrested and killed. That proved off-putting for some officials.) If anything, Christians were more in danger of getting lynched by mobs than be legally executed. State-sponsored empire-wide persecutions were not a thing until the late 3rd-early 4th century.
The house church in the town of Dura Europos in Syria had frescoes in them. And then there’s also the artwork in the catacombs.
Early Christian art was mainly two-dimensional: wall and panel paintings. At best, you had carvings in high relief on stuff like coffins (sarcophagi). That explains why the Eastern Churches still uses icons to this day. There were a few pieces of three-dimensional statues (more like statuettes actually), but those were very rare. Early Christians were apparently more uncomfortable toward three-dimensional statuary because it reminded them of the statues of pagan gods and the monuments of emperors.
**It’s actually ‘anti-Judaism’. Technically speaking, anti-Semitism is hostility against Jews as a people, as an ethnic group. Anti-Judaism is opposition to or Judaism.
Let’s just say that Christian anti-Judaism had its start in the rhetoric of the apostles themselves (1 Thessalonians 2:13-16; Acts 2:22-38; 3:12-26; 4:8-22; 5:29-32), who were Jews taking a page from the Jewish Scriptures. They called out their fellow Jews for rejecting Jesus the Messiah, inspired by the traditional biblical pattern of calling Israel for its disobedience and/or the rejection of its prophets (e.g. Nehemiah 9:26; 2 Chronicles 36:14-16). That’s why the two most Jewish gospels of the four canonical ones, the gospels of Matthew and John, are at the same time the most ‘anti-Jewish’.**
Of course, there was some regional variation in Christian anti-Judaism: they tended to be higher in areas where there are more Jews for Christians to encounter, dialogue and/or heckle with than in areas with only a minimal Jewish presence. (Notice a pattern here?) It’s no surprise that the Church Fathers who exhibit the more overt kind of anti-Judaism come from these religiously and culturally diverse areas: Rome, Syria, Asia Minor.
Now as the Church expanded over the Empire and became more ‘international’, the original Jewish context of this became more and more obscured, to the point that in a post-Constantinian world, where Jews have become a minority and Christians have dominated Europe, anti-Judaism had oftentimes segued into full-blown anti-Semitism.
In other words, when Christianity started becoming less ‘Jewish’, the original Jewish context of the rhetoric (“you rejected Jesus”) was forgotten, but the rhetoric remained, now stripped of its original context. And that’s why Christian anti-Semitism (the horrible kind, the kind we should all condemn and agree was not good) arose.
