Household: Architecture

"Cornelius replied, "Four days ago at this very hour, at three o'clock, I was praying in my house when suddenly a man in dazzling clothes stood before me." (Acts 10:30, NRSV)

When you read passages like this one in Scripture, what image comes to mind when you read the word "house?" When most of us hear "house," we envision something like the graphic to the right. There is a standalone structure surrounded by open acreage that creates physical distance between our home and the world. Sometimes we put fences around that open space. Sometimes we decorate the open space. (I'm partial to crabgrass and dandelions, but to each his own.) Some folks build decks onto their house to facilitate outdoor recreation. For most of us, the conventional house is this enclosed dwelling surrounded by real estate. However, houses in the cultures that lived around the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago were considerably different than they are today. If you tend to be a visual person like me, it sometimes helps to grasp the concrete realities involved.

Most homes of the New Testament era were called peristyle homes. Wikipedia says, "…a peristyle is a columned porch or open colonnade in a building that surrounds a court that may contain an internal garden." Walls surround the complex, and rooms are along the outer edges with the peristyle in the center. While houses in the Roman Empire's eastern and western portions tended to be peristyle, the Western homes frequently had an atrium. Another contrasting architectural feature was that homes in the East prior to Jesus' time tended to have rooms isolated from the rest of the home to keep women in seclusion. This feature tended to fade in the later part of the Empire era.

The Roman peristyle home with an atrium is believed to be the primary style of home in which house churches of the New Testament met. Technologically they included features like running water and heat. The following diagram gives a generic floor plan:

(From roman-empire.net)

You entered the house (domus) through the vestibulum (#3) and passed through fauces (short corridor, #4) into the atrium (#1). The atrium had an open section in the roof that allowed rainwater to come through and fill a large basin called the impluvium (#5). Here is a picture of an atrium:

(Pompeii. House of Menander. Atrium. Copyright © 1997 Leo C. Curran. For non-commercial use only.)

The cubiculum (#11) of the atrium was the bedrooms. Some might have had a small antechamber where servants would sleep. Here is a picture of a side room, although I am uncertain that this is a bedroom:

(Pompeii. House of the Vettii. Paintings. Copyright © 1997 Leo C. Curran. For non-commercial use only.)

The triclinium  (#7) was the dining room. It would have a three-sided or half-circled couch where people would recline to eat. The tablinium (#8) was the focal point of the domus as you entered through the front door. It featured a table and functioned as an office. It was the room from which the paterfamilias conducted his business and greeted visitors and people to whom he was a patron. When the curtains were pulled back and the doors opened, one could look straight through the atrium, the tablinium (#8), and the peristylium (#2) to the back of the house. At the center of attention was the paterfamilias in his tablinium in the center of the domus. The walls of all the rooms were decorated with elaborate paintings, and the floors had mosaics done in tiles. Having the appropriate décor as you entered the house was crucial to indicating your status within society to your guests. By Jesus's day, the tablinium was falling into disuse, and the dining areas were expanding in size.

At the back of the house, behind the tablinium (#8) was the peristylium (#2), the columned porch area. Off to the sides were often additional rooms like the kitchen and the bath. Somewhere off the peristylium (#2) would be the exhedra or oecsus (#9). This was a space for larger communal meals. Here is a picture of a peristyle from Pompeii:

(Pompeii. House of the Vettii. Peristyle #2. Copyright © 1997 Leo C. Curran. For non-commercial use only.)

Moving back to the front of the house, there would be one or more rooms called taberna (#10). These rooms would be where goods were set out for sale, craftsmen would work, and where goods could be stored. One last feature I want to point out is the lararium. The lararium varied in location. This was the shrine to the household gods, and it was located somewhere in the house (usually in the atrium or peristylium) where the entire household would gather daily for worship.

The square footage of a house could vary enormously. Concerning the ruins at Pompeii, Carolyn Osiek and David Balch observe, "The average property is ten times larger than the smallest, the largest ten times larger than the average." (17) Examination of 234 ruins at Pompeii and Herculaneum revealed homes that ranged from 100 square meters to 3,000 square meters. (201) The specifics of the homes varied, but the basic features I just described were fairly constant.

These homes were often remodeled or torn down and rebuilt. It is believed that the original house churches met in these homes, in either the atrium or the peritsyle. As the number of people expanded, walls would be torn out to make more space. According to Osiek and Balch, it appears that Christians in the mid-Second Century and later began to buy homes and convert them into shells with open space to hold several people. (35) These became the first domus ecclesia buildings dedicated entirely to meeting for worship. But even before the emergence of these domus ecclesia, large numbers could have met together in the peristyle of some homes. Some of the larger homes in Pompeii could easily have handled a couple of hundred folks. The House of Citharist could have accommodated more than 1,100 people. (201) It is inaccurate to assume that all New Testament churches were limited to two or three dozen people.

In the next post, we will look at the inusla and the villa.

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Comments

[Heidi Renee]

Hi Michael - thanks for your nice comment on Scot's blog - the amount to wade through is torturous - so I thought I'd come here and respond so that it was easier to find! :)

[Michael W. Kruse]

Thanks Heidi. I think your observations about how we so frequently operate from mindset of scarcity were very insightful.

[Dana Ames]

The German word for "cathedral" is Dom (pronounce dohm).

One of these days I'm going to study church architecture more closely.

Dana

[Michael W. Kruse]

The Cathedral in the Danish town of Ribe, where my great-grandfather came from is called a "domkirke."

I don't know much of the specifics of St. Peter's Basilica layout but I have read that it, along with other bascilica's based very much on the Roman domus. St. Peter's sort of became the "house church" on steroids.

:)

[Dana Ames]

That was the "old" St. Peters- the one they tore down and replaced with the present building, funds for which the Papacy was raising by was selling indulgences along about, oh, A.D. 1500...

See a rendition of the old one here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Saint_Peter%27s_Basilica

I had never seen it before, but this drawing seems to confirm your hunch. The "new" St. Peter's is shaped like a Roman cross, all enclosed; 1300 years of architiectural history passed, and styles change :)

It's very impressive. In my youth, I climbed to the top of the dome (another related word there, eh?), then went down to the crypts and saw Peter's burial site. One could spend a whole day there and still not take it all in.

Dana

[Michael W. Kruse]

Thanks for the link! Very cool. I'd love to learn more about the specific floor plan inside.

It was my impression, from what I had read, that even the present bascilica gives the sense of a perisytle (a colonnade in the shape of a cross with rooms around the sides) although clearly there is a dome over the peristyle.

What nice memories you have of it. I'll get there someday. :)

[Dana Ames]

Make some plans for it!

I think the the atrium has opened out into, and is now more symbolic as, St. Peter's Square. Bernini's rounded colonnade surrounding the piazza is talked about in the literature as the arms of the (RC) Church open to the world. That makes lovely sense now that we know more about the churches meeting in the atria.

Praying for you and the rest of the committee today as you work.

Dana

[kerryn]

Michael,
pictures too!
(brings back my own special day of touring round Pompeii many years ago!)
thanks for your efforts to explain things so clearly.
looking forwards to more!
(-:
kerryn

[Michael W. Kruse]

Gidday Kerryn

I keep learning more is I try to explain this stuff. That is one of the main reasons I do it. Glad you are getting something out it too!