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The Christian Building at Dura-Europos: Rethinking the Archaeology of the World’s Oldest House Church

July 2024 (128.3)
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The Christian Building at Dura-Europos: Rethinking the Archaeology of the World’s Oldest House Church

128.3
David K. Pettegrew
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In his final report of the excavations at Dura-Europos, Syria, the scholar Carl Kraeling established the site’s Christian Building as the ancient world’s preeminent example of a domus ecclesiae, a house converted into a church through architectural adaptation. In Kraeling’s interpretation, a private domestic structure (House M8A) built in 232 CE was later remade as a community-owned church through a single, deliberate program of modification. This article engages with legacy ideas about the Christian Building, unexplored archival records, and recent studies of Dura-Europos to rethink the building’s phases, functions, and dating. I argue that House M8A was not the domus ecclesiae that Kraeling envisioned—wholly, instantly, and permanently converted to a church—but a Christian house that retained a domestic aspect even as it was adapted for religious activity. The article proposes new phases for the building and advances an earlier chronology for its construction in the late second or early third century CE, a time that better fits revised estimates of Dura’s Roman development. This reinterpretation of the world’s oldest domestic church building bears significant repercussions for our understanding of early Christian architecture and communities and underscores the value of critical thinking and revisiting legacy ideas in archaeology.

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The Christian Building at Dura-Europos: Rethinking the Archaeology of the World’s Oldest House Church
By David K. Pettegrew
American Journal of Archaeology Vol. 128, No. 3 (July 2024), pp. 341-379
DOI: 10.1086/730388
© 2024 Archaeological Institute of America

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