Alikin, Valeriy | The Earliest History of the Christian Gathering

The Earliest History of the Christian Gathering: Origin, Development and Content of the Christian Gathering in the First to Third Centuries
Valeriy Alikin

Hardback: Brill, 2010, 342 pp. (Available digitally as an open-access title)

The elements of a worship service in the Christian tradition, although they might be interpreted and ordered differently in various streams of the tradition, remain strikingly consistent: prayer, preaching, singing, and above all, Eucharist. But how did they come to be recognized as standard elements of worship? Valeriy Alikin, in this helpful volume based on his dissertation, takes the reader back to the first three centuries of the church to explore this question, and to understand the form of the Christian gathering in its earliest years. Specifically, Alikin’s two-fold objective in this work is to explore : “the relationship between the early Christian gathering and the assemblies of various associations, including meals taken... and to investigate the content of the Christian gathering during the second and third centuries and to describe how it developed during this period” (2).

Table Fellowship

Following the wave of sociological research on the early Christian era that has emerged since 2000, Alikin notes that: “the local early Christian community, as a socio-cultural phenomenon, functioned as

a voluntary religious association just like many other associations in the Graeco-Roman world of the first century CE” (4). The form of a first-century gathering of an association was a supper followed by a symposium that might have included a speaker, music or drama, or some topic of conversation. “Numerous passages in works by Christian authors show,” Alikin writes, “that until the middle of the third century Christian communities, too, had a communal meal and convivial gathering on Sunday evening as their main assembly” (4). Prior to 2000, there was a tendency in historical research on the early Christian communities to trace the roots of their gatherings to Jewish synagogue practices and Jewish ritual meals. However, in recent years, a shift has occurred and now it is generally accepted that the Hellenistic associations offer a better explanation for the origins of Christian gatherings.

The historical evidence seems to indicate that in the second half of the first century, Christian gatherings were held on Sunday evenings. In the Roman Empire of that era, Sunday was a workday, but for the Christians it was a special day because they gathered to remember Christ after work. Alikin highlights various theories explaining why Christians chose Sunday evenings for their gathering, but he concludes that none of these theories is particularly satisfactory.

Early in the second century, Christians began to feel compelled to meet more frequently than once a week. This movement led to the creation of morning gatherings, which were held on various days of the week, but most notably Sundays. Alikin highlights the parallel trajectories of the rise of morning gatherings and the rise of sedentary leadership (i.e., leaders rooted in a particular place) in the local congregations. “Once Church officials were supported by their congregations,” he writes, “they were in a position to arrange more meetings a week. Many of them did so, not only to build up, strengthen and reinforce their congregation, but possibly also to meet the needs and wishes of members of their congregation” (89).

Initially, these morning gatherings were times of prayer and singing, but in the latter part of the second century, they were expanded to include a celebration of the Eucharist. Because this gathering was in the morning, the Eucharistic meal did not need to be large, and the portions served often were smaller, likely leading to the eventual ritualization of this practice. Also in the mid-third century, there appears to have been a shift in the primary gathering of churches from the Sunday evening meal to the Sunday morning gathering. After this shift, the Sunday evening meal increasingly became “charity meal for the less well-off members of the congregation” (102), and the simpler version of the Eucharist in the Sunday morning gathering became the central practice of Eucharist.

Participatory Worship

The earliest Christian gatherings, through most of the second century, met in homes, and according to the archaeological record, homes were generally not modified or only modified slightly to accommodate church gatherings. “The size of the meeting space in the largest house available,” Alikin infers, “must have determine the size limit of a community” (53). It wasn’t until early in the third century that Christians began to modify homes to accommodate church gatherings. In this earliest era of the church, homes also provided the leadership for the Christian gathering: a gathering would generally be led by the one in whose home the local church gathered. The exception to this would be

instance when an itinerant church leader (apostle, prophet, or teacher) would be in town, and in this case that leader might be asked to lead the gathering. In the late second and third centuries, sedentary leaders began to emerge, an office that was typically referred to as a bishop. In this later period, bishops became responsible for leading the weekly gathering.

Preaching, Alikin notes, “began as an oral contribution to the Christian assembly following the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Originally any participant was allowed to make such a contribution, but already Paul tends to restrict the right to preach and teach to those who were qualified for it by their gifts” (210). In the first century, preaching was permitted by itinerant apostles, evangelists, and teachers, in addition to local preachers. In the second century, the role of preaching gradually became more restricted, limited primarily to the local bishop, a restriction that generally confined preaching not only to those who held office in the church, but also to males. Alikin explains how the nature of the sermon also changed over the first three centuries: “In the first and second centuries the sermon usually had the character of admonition and exhortation. It came to be preceded by and connected with the reading of authoritative texts. In the third century the sermon became increasingly an explanation of the Scripture passage read to the congregation” (210).

Although some historians in the twentieth century traced the early Christian practice of reading scripture in the gathering back to the Jewish practice of reading the Law and the Prophets in the synagogue, Alikin argues that a more likely origin were the readings that occurred in the Graeco- Roman symposia. In the first century, the readings in Christian gatherings were likely limited in general to the reading of apostolic letters. Eventually, the Hebrew Prophets and the Gospels (after they were written) also were incorporated into the congregational readings of the Early Christians. Alikin notes that it seems that the Hebrew Law was not frequently read in Christian gatherings until the third century. In the earliest decades of the Christian era, the reader of texts in the gathering was not a fixed role in the congregation, but rather reading was handled by anyone in the congregation capable of doing so. “By the end of the second century,” Alikin writes, the function of reader became an office in the Church. It soon came to be the first or lowest rank in the career path of ecclesiastical office holders” (182).

Prayer and Other Practices in the Early Christian Gatherings

Many other practices that we consider elemental to the church’s gathering today – including singing, prayers, the holy kiss, collections of money, the laying on of hands and more – were practiced in the gatherings of the early Christians. Almost all of these practices can be traced back to similar practices in the Graeco-Roman associations of that era. Prayers, and especially Eucharistic prayers, in the early Christian gatherings “had no fixed form: they were extemporized by the leader of the congregation or itinerant officials” (253). The story of Jesus instituting the Lord ’s Supper (for example, as Paul describes it in I Corinthians 11) was not a standard part of the Eucharistic prayers of the early Christians until the middle of the third century.

Alikin’s historical work in this volume is a striking reminder that we have great freedom in the structuring of our church gatherings. His work also challenges us to consider why the Eucharist and other practices within the gathering became ritualized and controlled selectively by those who held offices in the local congregation.