(Continued)
We can actually divide the early Christian period (AD 50-313) into three rough stages. At the first stage (50-circa 150), Christians would have mostly met in private houses belonging to individual members. By the second stage (ca. 150-250), Christians were building what we could call ‘house churches’: houses that were renovated and converted into places of worship. The third stage (250-313) saw the introduction of larger buildings and halls (both private and public) as church buildings. Of course, this is just a rough picture, and the development was not felt in all areas: so while during the third stage, certain communities were meeting for worship in these large public halls, other Christians were still using house churches. It’s not just house churches: Christians, like Jews, are also known to meet in open places, markets and hired halls.
You might find it interesting that the earliest surviving structure to be ever identified as a church dates from
the mid-3rd century, located at this desert city in Syria called Dura-Europos. It’s of the house church type, and seems to have been used for only a decade or two before the city was abandoned after its conquest by the Sassanid Persians. In fact, it is our only undisputed surviving example of a house church that dates before Constantine, the other possible examples - Peter’s house at Capernaum,
the double church at Aquileia, the titular churches at Rome - being disputed.
http://www.pitt.edu/~tokerism/0040/images4/ar.96.03626.jpg
What the Dura-Europos house church looked like. It actually seems to be a nice building.
http://www.pitt.edu/~tokerism/0040/images4/ar.96.03627.jpg
The baptistry.
Also, even if there meetings and masses weren’t entirely secret, I have to believe that they were at the very least private. Because groups communicating secrets amongst themselves using art and symbolism is a universal phenomenon, going back to at least the ancient Egyptians and probably a lot further. So when you see artifacts and whatnot depicting fish and anchors and eight-spoked wheels and different crosses and everything else, it just seems obvious they were used strictly amongst, maybe “initiates” isn’t the right word, but amongst people in the know. That seems to suggest at least a certain level of secrecy.
Larry actually addressed this.
But (I was asked), what about the fish symbol, or the anchor? Weren’t these hidden means of signifying Christian faith, e.g., the latter a covert reference to Jesus’ cross (the cross-bar of the anchor forming a disguised cross)? Well, in a word, no. Instead, it appears that these and other items reflect the early Christian tendency to appropriate various symbols, images, and expressions from the Roman-era environment, then assigning to them new Christian meanings. Behind this was the early Christian attitude that their beliefs were prefigured in the creation, in culture, in the prior intellectual history. So, they boldly made these sorts of things their own.
The fish-acrostic illustrates this: The ordinary Greek word for “fish” (ΙΧΘΥϹ) seized upon and read as a kind of short-hand statement of Christian faith: Ιησους Χριστος Θεου Υιος Σωτηρ (“Jesus Christ Son of God Saviour”). As for the anchor, it appears that in this and other phenomena, Christians saw their cross-symbol anticipated, reflected, and affirmed. Early Christians such as Justin also pointed to the shape of the masts of ships, and the T-shape of the human brow and nose, as other reflections of the cross-symbol. This wasn’t being covert; it was instead a bold (perhaps even audacious) affirmation. (Oh, and by the way, another notion “out there” in some scholarly circles is that we don’t have any cross-symbolism or visual references to Jesus’ crucifixion before the 4th/5th century CE. Wrong! That notion simply rests on an incomplete data-set and a certain ideological premise.)
I don’t know, I suppose the fact that the desert fathers packed up and left town might actually suggest the opposite; that they felt too exposed and not secret enough.
Complete monasticism actually started just after the persecutions ended. The fathers went into the desert not so much out of secrecy but more due to a desire to avoid society and achieve union with God in near-total isolation. But even before St. Anthony (the first desert hermit we know of), there were already ascetics who preferred living on the edge of cities and other inhabited places - separate from everyday life but not completely cut off from civilization.
