They "got there first" and until recently their interpretation of the evidence left to us in literature, documents, and objects has been the accepted interpretation. And naturally, their interpretations were filtered through the mindset of Roman Catholic theologians.
*These men saw everything they looked at as reinforcing the Catholic view of the church. Unfortunately (and incredibly), when Protestant archeology and even evangelical archeology emerged, they bought into these Catholic interpretations without question - and even taught them. The view of church history (A.D. 100 to 280) passed on even in our best seminaries was that of a church elaborate in ritual, with a powerful and well-defined clergy and a prescribed liturgy. It was a scenario that made the believers of that time look terribly religious, pious, and ascetic. We were taught that a distinct, powerful clergy overlorded virtually everything.
I came face to face with the Roman school of archeology just after finishing my first year in seminary at Ruschlikon, Switzerland. I spent that summer in Rome, and I was privileged to be able to get a personal guided tour of the catacombs by a priest versed in the history of the catacombs. We took candles and descended into that fantastic labyrinth. Along the way, he pointed out the Christian graffiti left on the walls, allegedly during the middle and late 200s and early 300s.
At one place he pointed to a Latin inscription and said, "This is early second century." With horror, I read the inscription: "Peter and Paul, pray for us." Every instinct in me rebelled. I just knew the statement scribbled on the ceiling of that underground trench was not part of the mind-set of second-century Christians.
*Recent redating of this graffiti puts that very inscription after the Constantine era. What we were being told was this: The second, third and fourth centuries were as full of ritual, clergy, liturgy, sobriety, austerity, pomp, and sacerdotalism as the fifth, sixth and seventh. That interpretation buttressed Roman Catholicism mightily, and the Protestants, blushing with embarrassment at such Catholic one-upmanship, could only mumble sadly, "Well, after A.D. 100 there was a great falling away of the faith."
And when Protestants themselves get tied up in pomp, ritual and clerical rule, they even point to the practices ascribed to the second and third century church. After all, it appears that it was doing nicely even though it was full of formality and dominated by an active ministry and a silent laity. Well, it's not so.
*During the last decade archaeologists have been turning up new and revolutionary findings which have caused the archeological community to begin, for the first time, to re-examine past interpretations of known data. What has emerged is nothing less than stunning. Some of the recent archaeologists who have been instrumental in the complete reinterpretation of second century Christianity are evangelical, others are liberal; but the conclusions are the same.
As one scholar recently wrote in the Chicago Seminary Theological Review: "Trying to find out what the early church was like by studying the theologians of the second, third and fourth centuries would be the same thing as someone five thousand years from now reading nothing but the writings of Barth, Tillich and Neibuhr, and drawing from their writings a picture of what twentieth-century Christianity was like." (There is virtually nothing in these men's writings that describes what the church is like today.)
The Roman school declared that church buildings have been with us from the second century on. It further taught that the church buildings erected during the Constantinian era were built on the sites of previous church structures. This dogma was universally accepted as fact. But recently, Christian archeology has gone back to reinvestigate those sites.
*The findings: Without exception, there was no church building or any other kind of Christian meeting place to be found buried beneath any Constantinian-era church buildings. Archaeologists found either virgin land or pagan temples or marketplaces or maybe even an occasional Pizza Hut, but no evidence anywhere of any kind of building used for Christian gatherings. The implications were staggering-and still are!
*They are a call to the whole church, Catholic and Protestant, to rethink the nature of what we call "church." In one way, the most remarkable discovery was that of a single Christian meeting place-the only one ever found from the pre-Constantine era! Even it was not a church building, but a home that had been converted into a meeting place for Christians. The site is a town in Syria with the odd name of Duro-Europa.
Exhaustive studies have been made of this building. The upshot is this: It was just a home used in the mid-200s as a place for Christians to gather. One of its peculiarities: A wall had been torn out between two bedrooms to make one large room that would hold about seventy-five people sitting on the floor. The point? Until Constantine, there was no such thing as a church building or "Christian" architecture. A church building had never been dreamed of in a dream.
*That which we know as the Christian faith was a living room movement. The Christian faith was the first and only religion ever to exist that did not use special temples of worship; it is the only "living room" religion in human history.
