The Second Church: Popular Christianity, A.D. 200–400 (review)

At first sight, the thesis of this book seems improbable, so contrary is it to received wisdom—that, in the centuries covered here, only some 5 percent of Christians attended Sunday worship on a regular basis, with the other 95 percent finding fulfillment for their piety in occasional celebrations in cemeteries and especially in connection with the tombs of martyrs and other saints. The latter observances sometimes were held out of doors, frequently located on private property beyond the control of the ecclesiastical authorities, and could accommodate large numbers of people. Yet the thesis must be taken seriously, not only because it is put forward by a distinguished figure in the world of early Christian scholarship but also because it is carefully supported by a wealth of evidence—archaeological, epigrammatic, and literary. To arrive at his figures, Ramsey MacMullen calculates the likely capacity of extant places of worship against estimates for the Christian population of specific cities and towns, and provides in an appendix a detailed list of buildings throughout the ancient Christian world erected prior to 400, with measurements of their size, where that information is available (pp. 117–31). But there is much more to this relatively short book than simply these calculations. MacMullen presents an imaginative picture of the worship practices of ordinary Christians of the period that helps bring to life the often thin narratives of standard liturgical textbooks and is well worth reading for that reason alone.

But what of the validity of his central thesis? Were such a small proportion of nominal Christians regular attendees at Sunday worship? Recent studies by other scholars have certainly made historians take more seriously how central the cult of the saints and memorials to the departed were to ordinary Christians, rather than relegating those subjects to the sidelines as in former times. What MacMullen argues is that all these people cannot also have been in church every Sunday, because there would not have been room for them. In general, that seems to have been so. But perhaps some caveats might be acknowledged. First, there is at least some evidence for the continuance of house-churches in the fourth century (to which MacMullen pays only very scant attention—e.g., p. 87) and for the unwillingness of some of these small congregations to move to the new and larger church buildings favored by the bishops. That might account for some—although certainly not all—of those he reckoned were not in attendance. Second, his calculation of the space needed by each individual in the church buildings appears rather generous. If we presume that people generally stood, rather than sat or knelt, and were often rather tightly crowded together, then the proportion of the population that could have been accommodated may have been somewhat higher than he supposes. Third, although his figures may be accurate for the fourth century, they may be less reliable for the third on account of the much less available evidence for this period. In spite of these points, the conclusions reached do appear to embody a large measure of truth that should make historians of early Christian life and worship adopt a rather different approach to the subject in future.