BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Christianity in Pagan Homes

Early Christian house churches were not “neutral” spaces

It is well known that early Christian communities gathered in private homes. Dedicated church buildings did not appear until much later, with adapted house churches such as Dura-Europos (c. 240 CE) emerging in the third century and purpose-built basilicas becoming common only in the fourth. C.M. Thomas begins her column, “Niche Interests: Household Shrines at Ephesus” in the Summer 2026 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, with an observation that, in hindsight, seems obvious: the homes in which Paul and other early Christians worshiped were already shaped by generations of religious practice. Early Christian house churches were not, as she puts it, “empty canvases.”

Thomas grounds her argument in the Terrace Houses at Ephesus, a complex of luxurious, multistory Roman residences built into the city’s hillside. Their remarkable state of preservation—including walls standing to first- and sometimes second-story height—offers one of the clearest archaeological records of everyday domestic life in the first centuries CE.

Excavations uncovered wall niches that functioned as permanent household shrines, often containing statuettes, reliefs, incense burners, lamps, and small altars. Surveying several apartments, Thomas notes that niches appeared in roughly 35 to 50 percent of preserved ground-floor rooms. They clustered in spaces associated with movement or vulnerability—doorways, staircases, kitchens, bedrooms, wells, and courtyards—revealing that ritual was woven into everyday life rather than being confined to a single sacred room.

The evidence is particularly compelling because many objects were found in situ in the Terrace Houses. A relief of a mounted hero (see image above) remained in the same niche for an astounding 250 years until the house was destroyed by an earthquake. Hellenistic banquet reliefs, already more than a century old when the apartments were constructed, continued to occupy household shrines for another four centuries. In another unit, busts of the emperor Tiberius and his mother Livia stood above an altar and offering table, demonstrating that imperial worship was also part of domestic religious life.

The archaeological evidence also complicates any instinct to describe these houses as “pagan.” Within a single home, archaeologists found depictions of heroes, rulers, snakes, and ancestors, as well as local cult imagery and ritual installations that carried different histories. These objects did not necessarily belong to one unified religion as their inhabitants would have understood it. Rather, they reflected an accumulation of family traditions, civic obligations, inherited heirlooms, protective rituals, and local practices embedded within the life of the household. The distinction between “religious” and “ordinary” space was therefore much less pronounced than modern assumptions may suggest.

The riot at Ephesus (Acts 19:12–41) and Paul’s exhortation for believers to turn “away from statues to the living God” (1 Thessalonians 1:9, Thomas’s translation) become more concrete with the archaeological finds from Ephesis in view. From Paul’s perspective, the diverse images found throughout homes could all be classified as “statues” or “idols” from which believers should turn away. For the families who inhabited these apartments, however, those same objects likely carried multiple meanings. A centuries-old relief may have functioned as a focus of religious devotion, but it could also have been an inherited heirloom, a memorial to an ancestor, a symbol of cultural identity, or simply part of what made that house feel like a home. Conversion, therefore, involved more than adopting new beliefs; it required renegotiating the objects inside the house. Removing an image meant more than rejecting an outside deity; it could also mean disrupting generations of family memory and domestic practice.

By recovering the everyday domestic context in which early Christians may have lived, the archaeology of Ephesus reveals conversion not as a movement from one neatly bounded religion to another, but as a complex renegotiation of the objects, spaces, and practices that shaped everyday life. Thomas’s article ultimately reminds us that the categories we use—Christian versus pagan, sacred versus ordinary—can obscure the realities of lived religion. The homes of Paul’s converts were not empty stages that Christianity filled; they were places already full of tradition. Religion was entangled with acts of everyday life—as ordinary as walking through your front door.

Subscribers: Read the full article “Niche Interests: Household Shrines at Ephesus” by C.M. Thomas in the Summer 2026 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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Lauren K. McCormick is an assistant editor at Biblical Archaeology Review and a specialist in ancient Near Eastern religions, visual culture, and the Bible. She holds degrees in religion from Syracuse University, Duke University, New York University, and Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on religion and the public conversation at Princeton University.

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