Christians

A fascinating and important aspect of the history of Christians can be found in the form of the early Christian era, which preceded the long period of the dominance that was exercised by the institutions created by Christians for the purpose of disseminating and enforcing the strictures of the Christian faith over the political, social and intellectual life of Europe. This era in the European history of religion set some of the foundations for the practice of the Christian faith in the experience of opposition which was encountered by the early religious practitioners of this faith. Before the number of Christians was widened to include the elite of society the early worshipers in the faith were forced to devise a number of practices and strategies that were designed for the purposes of evading the prosecution being enacted by the Roman Empire against the practice of Christianity. One aspect of the practice of Christian faith which at this time showed the effects of the need to evade Roman prosecution consisted of the means through which Christians found physical structures to act as churches in the absence of the ability to construct and use actual places of worship.

With the official prohibition that was in place against the practice of the Christian faith throughout the Roman Empire, Christians were forced to hold their practices of worship in private residences or in synagogues alongside Jewish worshipers. As the latter practice indicates, at this point in the history of Christianity the relationship between Jews and Christians had not become as hostile as it would later become, as both faced a degree of prosecution, though to differing degrees, from the religious authorities of the time. Later in the history of Christianity and Judaism bitter feelings arose between the two religions, despite their common origins in the Abrahamaic texts compiled in the Bible, over the question of which faith could be considered superior to the other in terms of its correctness. At this time illicit Christian worshipers often created acceptable spaces for the holding of their religious services through a number of improvised strategies, such as using the top floors of private residences which were not readily accessible by the enforcers for political authority, or the idea of holding religious services in courtyards which would be covered with a cloth to prevent people from seeing the worship services which were then ongoing.

One early example of an improvised Christian shrine can be found in the Eastern Syrian city of Dura Europa, where at some point around the year 200 C.E. a church was created through the technique of knocking down the separating wall between two rooms and thus creating a large enough location to serve as an acceptable worship space. The early Christians first obtained the ability to create their own churches in the year 301 C.E., in which Armenia attained the status of becoming the first country in which Christians could know that their faith was the nation’s official religion, thus creating the real history of church architecture.