The earliest church building ever found: Dura-Europus in modern-day Syria

This image of the Good Shepherd is still visible above the
baptistry. More images are available here.

While doing some reading on another topic, I came across the account that Samuel Hugh Moffett relates of the story of the oldest church building ever found, at Dura-Europus, along the banks of the Euphrates River in what is now western Syria, near the border with Turkey. It was located at the site of what had been a Roman garrison, as the Romans pushed eastward into the Persian Empire, before a Persian army expelled them, around the middle of the third century.

It is interesting to note that there was not an “altar” at the front, (as most Roman Catholics would have us believe that “the Mass” was the most ancient form of Christian worship), but the church did feature an almost-immersion-sized baptistery.

Northwest about eight hundred miles from the great rock figures at Bishapur, a small Roman garrison town once stood on the west bank of the Euphrates River, Dura-Europos. About 250 as the legions fell back before Shapur’s advancing Persians, Rome abandoned the fort and the Persians destroyed it. For seventeen centuries its crumbling ruins lay open to the sun and the wandering Bedouins. Then in 1920 a British military detachment digging trenches uncovered a part of the ancient city wall that had collapsed, burying and preserving a narrow strip of the town much as the ashes of Vesuvius had in a much larger way covered Pompeii. Archaeologists carefully removed the fallen wall. A small building they uncovered proved to be unusually significant. It was a Christian church, the first complete church building that has ever been found. It was in remarkable condition. Sometime apparently between 230 and 250 a small group of Christians in that border town had taken a private home, perhaps the house-church in which they had been meeting, as was the Christian custom, and had remodeled it to serve specifically as a church. Because the town was Roman and because Christians were persecuted under Rome, they left the outer rooms plain and undecorated as before, to avoid attracting unfriendly attention. But they had completely transformed an inner room into a chapel. In the very front, beneath a central arch, was a low stone bapistry where new Christians were brought to enter the water as a sign of their dying to sin and rising again in new birth (Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, Volume 1, pg 93)

Ben Witherington cites Ramsay MacMullen in saying that “there could have been no immersing of persons here– unless we are talking infants”, but Everett Ferguson contests this:

The position of the font on the west (shorter) end of the room was emphasized by the canopy covering it. It was 1.63 meters long north to south, and it had a width of 0.948 meters on its north side and 1.065 meters on its south side. The depth was 0.955 meters. An interior step or ledge runs along the east (front) side of the font and on its north and south ends. On the outside facing the interior of the room there was a rubble step. When water was placed in the font after the excavation, the font was shown to be watertight. The question is sometimes asked if the font was large enough for an immersion, but a negative answer perhaps presupposes laying the body out horizontally (even that position is possible on a diagonal of the font for a person of average height at the time. If the baptizand was seated on the interior ledge, was in a kneeling or squatting position, or leaned forward from the waist there was ample space for an immersion. … the alternative question to be asked is why the font was as large as it was if only pouring or sprinkling was performed (Ferguson, “Baptism in the Early Church”, pg 441).

Interestingly, here’s how we know it is a Christian church:

The most spectacular discoveries of all were the paintings on the wall, primitive but clear, not of an oriental monarch destroying his enemies at Bishapur, but of a Good Shepherd who gives his life for his sheep and of a King who conquers death. The pictures are of Christ carrying the lost sheep and of the three Marys coming to the empty tomb (Moffett 93).

As Moffett relates, “Those fragile paintings of the Christians at conquered Dura-Europos, which have lasted as long as the rock-wall carvings of the Persian shah, are a reminder that not all conquest is by force of arms, and that even as Shapur’s armies were moving west, little congregations of Christians were moving east, spreading down the Euphrates across Persia and deeper into Asia” (93).