We do not need to suppose that Christ groups considered themselves to be associations like these in order for comparison to be useful.

Thousands of such associations are attested in the Mediterranean world, known by a large variety of names- thiasos, synodos, koinon, plēthos, synagōgē, collegium, coetus, corpus, to name only some of the most common. By “association” I mean a small face-to-face group of persons united by a common occupation, or devotion to a deity, or a diasporic identity. How can we move forward on these and other questions? Until we discover other Christian sources, we will not have any direct data. For issues of size and venues of meetings, financial practices, burial practices, group demography, and other matters, however, we are not without resources, since we have indirect data through comparison with similar groups.Ĭomparison of Christ groups with other small groups or associations in Mediterranean antiquity may help to set some parameters to our imagination. But Gaius is never called an euergetes or prostates by Paul, but a xenos (which means guest, not host), and Phoebe, who is called a prostatis, is said to be the patron of the ekklesia at Cenchreae and of Paul personally, not the ekklesia at Corinth. Guesses range from thinking that groups had supposedly wealthy patrons such as Gaius of Corinth or perhaps Phoebe of Cenchreae, who funded the entire group, to conjectures that groups were funded by voluntary contributions of those who had resources. We are even less well informed about financial practices since, again, our sources say almost nothing about how Christ groups were financed. There are other phrases such as hoi ek ton NN (those who belong to NN, Rom 16:10–11), which unfortunately tell us even less about the location of these Christ followers. As Peter Oakes has rightly argued, it seems illegitimate to infer from four occurrences of the phrase that the standard venue of the meetings of Christ groups was domestic space.

The second problem is that the phrase he kat’ oikon NN ekklesia occurs only at Rom 16:5, 1 Cor 16:19, Col 4:15, and Phlm 1:2. Such expressions are unclear in two respects: to what does oikos refer-a villa, domestic space, workshop, or some other space? Oikos is simply insufficiently precise to allow us to imagine with any security how large these oikoi were and therefore how many persons these spaces could accommodate. The authors of New Testament books were not especially interested in conveying such information, or when they touched on it, they used such vague expressions as he kat’ oikon NN ekklesia (“the ekklesia that is in the oikos of NN”). (I use “Christ groups” rather than “Christian groups” for a simple reason: The use of “Christian” of persons in the first century misleadingly implies that there was a distinct “religion” called Christianity, distinct from Judaism or any other ancient “religion.”) In fact, there is remarkably little direct data on any of these topics from the documents in the New Testament, Apostolic Fathers, and other literature prior to the fourth century CE. A common misconception about early Christ groups is that we know quite a lot about them-their approximate size (50–100), their meeting places (private houses), and the ways they functioned financially.

He kat oikon