24. Roman Colonnade Houses

Gatherings

Colonnade Garden By definition, the word "Colonnade" denotes a long row of columns that are straight or curving. Colonnades exist today in many modern buildings like the British Museum in London and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Roman colonnade houses in ancient Roman times surprise many by their size and occupation numbers. For example, in Pompeii, situated to the south-east of Rome on the coast of Italy, the House of the Citharist is 10,215 square feet, and the House of Menander is 3,340 square feet. They do seem significant even by modern standards. Christian scholars traditionally assume upper limits in Roman colonnade houses of 30 to 50 people in a household worship service, and indeed, some homes could be quite crowded by so many. But if we calculate the numbers in these large colonnaded houses, gatherings of the whole church in a city can still be over a thousand! Therefore, it is a mistake to set a hard upper limit of 30 to 40 for the number of Christians who might celebrate the Lord's Supper. In Roman houses with colonnade gardens, it can be a much larger number. Ralph P. Martin and Peter H. Davids in the "Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Development" assert that many Christian assemblies are certainly much smaller than forty. Others can be significantly larger. ✞

Wealthy Patrons

Mansion Martin and Davids also write, "We have focused on the larger colonnade houses because many writers have assumed that they did not exist." In the New Testament, Gaius is the head of a synagogue in Corinth. Erasmus is an aedile or an officer of the Roman Republic responsible for maintaining public buildings and regulating civil ceremonies in the same city. Priscilla and Aquila, who own one house in Asia and another in Rome, and Phoebe, a notable woman in the church at Cenchreae, and Saint Paul's patron, and many others, are wealthy enough and probably own colonnade houses in several places. However, since we cannot visit them, we will never know. ✞

Ostentatious Residences

Jerusalem House "The need for all early Christian assemblies to be small and private is a modern projection not justified by Roman domestic culture or architecture." The so-called Palatial Mansion in Jerusalem is an example of an ostentatious residence that can comfortably accommodate the sorts of meetings described in the Acts of the Apostles. It is a 6500 sq ft home in the Second Temple area in Jerusalem. It is, in essence, a palace. Some Roman houses cover more than five thousand square feet and include an upper level for dwellings and a lower basement for water installations, including pools, baths, and cisterns. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD has, unfortunately, made reconstruction impossible. ✞

Christian Colonnade House

Christian colonnade houses in the Early Church are sometimes huge in total square feet by today's standards. There were four main room types. Although Greek houses are typically small and of a standard layout, the "Roman Domus houses" includes many large colonnade houses and extensive gardens. Professor Andrew Wallace-Hydrill analyzes three blocks of homes in Pompeii and Herculaneum, a total of 234 houses, dating from 79 AD, the year of Vesuvius' eruption. He then describes four different dwellings, varying from 900 to 9,000 square feet or larger. No architectural format is standard. ✞

Typical Layout Types

Type 1 is a shop and backroom;
Type 2 has three rooms, one of which is the main room;
Type 3 has the main room and a rear garden.
Type 4 has both the main room and a colonnade garden and may have a horticultural plot, a second main room, and a second colonnade garden.

Survey of Homes

Colonnade House Of the 254 houses surveyed, fifty-eight are Type 4, with surprisingly between 3,100 and 27,000 total square feet, which would be very expensive and luxurious even by today's standards. In the sample, fifty-seven houses are Type 3. The "average" size in these two cities is between 1500 and 3,105 total square feet, which is about the size of a large modern North American detached family home. ✞

Pompeii Greek House

Pompeii Greek House Victim The Pompeii Greek house and colonnaded gardens give us some idea of Roman times' luxurious living conditions. The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD buried many Pompeii Greek houses. A typical one of them provided access from the street through a narrow opening, with stables on one side and a porter's room. In this arrangement, the central corridor accessed a colonnaded garden, dining rooms, guest rooms, and space for the houses' male heads to receive guests and conduct business affairs. ✞

Garden Complex

Pompeii House Carolyn Osiek and David L. Balch in "Families in the New Testament World - Households and House Churches" describe the inside layout and luxurious living conditions of the larger Pompeii Greek houses. "Beyond this grouping of rooms, through a passageway, and another garden was another complex of rooms consisting of the women's rooms, slave quarters, and rooms for domestic activities called the women's quarters collectively." The Early Church used the Pompeii colonnade garden and Herculaneum house for meetings before the Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD. The volcano's eruption destroyed two ancient Roman cities near Naples in Italy called Pompeii and Herculaneum. Pompeii was initially founded in the 6th or 7th century BC and was a thriving vacation destination of twelve to fifteen thousand people at the time of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Pompeii and Herculaneum were only discovered in the late sixteenth century by the architect Domenico Fontana (1543-1607 AD.) Their remains have revealed many well preserved and excellent examples of upper-middle-class Roman homes called a "Domus" along with colonnade gardens. Pompeii was buried under between thirteen and twenty feet of volcanic ash and Herculaneum by approximately fifty feet of volcanic lava during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius." ✞

Frozen in Time

Vesuvius Over Pompeii Pompeii City reveals life in the year 79 AD in a very particular way down to the wall paintings, wooden furniture, and even preserved people, dogs, and horses in the volcanic ash and lava. Asia Minor archaeological work at Ephesus and Priene, an ancient Greek city founded by Alexander the Great, is fascinating. However, the remains are not in the same well-preserved state as Pompeii or Herculaneum. To the New Testament student, these sites bring to mind the congregations of Saint Paul, who often hold his meetings in similar buildings. E. Earle Ellis (1965-2010), an American Biblical scholar in his book "Pauline Theology - Ministry and Society," explains the unusual size and extent of many of the houses and gardens of this time found among the excavations. ✞

Houses and Gardens

Herculaneum House Interior "At Herculaneum, the atria house averaged about 25 x 30 feet in size. The colonnade gardens were about 33 x 50 feet, including surrounding porches about 9 feet wide. Pompeii's colonnade gardens were somewhat larger, the atria being 31 x 42 feet, and the colonnade gardens 55 x 67 feet. At Ephesus, the excavated dwellings appeared to be equally impressive, with the twenty-four column cloister garden of one grand mansion measuring 4,500 square feet." ✞

Greco Roman House

Greco Roman House Roman homes owned by significant benefactors have small, unimpressive fronts with house room access to wide open garden spaces for seating friends. Carolyn Osiek and David L. Balch write that although Acts does not draw a correlation between the priests and the house assemblies, they find a consistent pattern of converts who could be significant benefactors of homes as places for the community to gather. Water installations such as those in the Palatial Mansion can also function for Christian baptisms. The mild, brief, rainy Mediterranean winters and long, hot, dry summers create an environment where, for seven to eight months of the year, the most pleasant place is outside, in the shade by day and under the stars by night. Thus the Greco-Roman house's basic design of the early imperial period features rooms arranged around a central court to which they have access. The front door and whatever small windows open onto the street are unprepossessing. Even some of the largest and most impressive urban houses preserved have surprisingly small, dark, and airless rooms for sleeping and other indoor functions, except dining. ✞

House Court Access

Ancient Pompeii The Early Church's Roman home allows house court access to ornate fresco meeting rooms where the Household of Faith probably meets. Numerous spaces arranged around a courtyard in the spacious Palatial Mansion in Jerusalem have access from the street. Ornate frescoes testify to strong Hellenistic or Greek influences similar to Pompeii. Two prominent features are worth mentioning. The large reception hall measures twenty-four feet wide and thirty-three feet long (792 square feet), and access from the courtyard is through a buffer room to reach other areas. E Earle Ellis explains, "This reception hall could have accommodated seventy-five people. By passing through this room, they accessed three other smaller rooms from the household courtyard. The ornamental frescoes produced by adding color to fresh wall plaster of ionic columns bearing a schematic Doric frieze in these rooms suggest a public character." "Fresco" is an Italian word meaning "fresh." The Sistine Chapel in Vatican City contains a famous fresco, "The Last judgment," produced by Michelangelo's same process (1475-1564 AD). The reception hall and the smaller adjoining rooms in the Palatial Mansion in Jerusalem would have comfortably accommodated about one hundred people." ✞

Ritual Baths and Baptism

Hand Washing A distinctive feature of this house is the water installations on the lower level. In addition to a small, tastefully decorated bathroom, there are two large ritual baths, each with a double entrance. The Israeli archaeologist Nahman Avigad (1905-1982) suggests Acts 6.7, which reads, "So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly. And a large number of priests became obedient to the Faith," emphasizes the ritual cleanliness in the Christian household which borders on "a cult of immersion." This view seems to discount the changing power of the Christian Gospel, the conversion of so many, and baptisms that would follow. ✞

^Top Page

Next

Previous