A revised doctoral thesis from Leiden University (2009) under Professor Henk Jan de Jonge, this study offers an encyclopedic survey of the early Church's “weekly meeting” from its origins up to Cyprian (d. 258 CE). The book argues that the early Christian gathering was modeled after a set pattern of banqueting in Greco-Roman voluntary clubs and associations––a deipnon (communal dinner) followed by a symposion (later drinking session). Although he inserts a caveat against dividing the ancient Mediterranean world into the old and untenable dichotomy of “Hellenistic” and “Jewish” cultures (4), the author nonetheless writes, overly polemically at times, against studies seeking “the synagogue on the Sabbath as the cradle of the Christian Sunday evening service” (7). In this regard, the book's methodology follows a strict but dubious rule for historical scholarship: “A theory which can derive the early Christian gathering both as a whole and with its individual components satisfactorily from one single tradition is preferable to theories that explain this gathering using several different traditions, such as Jewish meals, the supposed synagogue service and the Hellenistic banquet” (289).

The first chapter, “The Origin of the Weekly Gathering in the Early Church,” highlights the essential similarities and differences between the early Christian gathering and the gatherings of other religious associations in the Greco-Roman world, focusing on dining customs (summarized in a chart on page 9). The survey attempts to answer several questions about first-century practice: why Sunday became the day for Christian gatherings; what the domestic physical space of the gatherings entailed; what form the ritual order of events took; and who presided over the meetings? As to the question of Sunday, the author concludes: “The choice of Sunday evening for this group event is best explained by the existence of the Jewish family meal on Saturday, which forced Christians to choose another evening for their group supper. They chose the next day because they felt their Christian supper to be more important for them than the Jewish family meal on the Sabbath. . . . The Christian Sunday therefore originated as an addition to the Sabbath, not as a continuation of the Sabbath” (49). Chapter two, “The Gatherings of Christians in the Morning,” continues this line of investigation, turning to the phenomenon of early Christians meeting in the morning in addition to Sunday evening, a practice said to begin in the second century (79).

Chapter three discusses the origin and development of the Lord's Supper (the Eucharist) and the agape. Much of the discussion is an exegesis of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians in light of the Didache. An original conclusion is that “Paul and the Didache undeniably follow one common tradition” (110), in which the original unity of the bread symbolized the unity of the congregation rather than that of Christ's body: “the Eucharist of the Didache is older than the Lord's Supper known to Paul. . . . The features of the meal as mentioned by Paul (the interpretation of the elements as Jesus' body and blood; the attribution of this interpretation to Jesus; and the attribution of the institution of the meal to Jesus) represent a secondary development in the interpretation of the meal” (113). The rest of the chapter surveys the Lord's Supper in the second and third centuries, for example, contrasting the interpretation of the Eucharist in “the majority Church” (138) with the opposing Docetic interpretations in “Gnostic” writings (especially the Gospel of Philip). The remaining chapters trace the development of additional communal practices in the early Christian meetings that became fixed rituals: Scripture reading (chapter 4), preaching (chapter 5), singing and prayer (chapter 6), and various other actions like the holy kiss, laying on of hands, anointing with oil, liturgical acclamations, almsgiving, and healings (chapter 7). “All these actions,” the author contends, “can be shown to have their counterpart in customs practiced at banquets held by Graeco-Roman clubs and associations” (288).

I found the book frustrating to read. The constant claim of a single “origin” for the practice of early Christian gatherings is more asserted than proved, and the encyclopedic analysis moves too rapidly from text to text without close reading. For example, the analysis of Paul and the Lord's Supper (1 Corinthians 11) simply blames the conflicts at Corinth on “the individualistic and selfish behaviour” of the wealthier members of the congregation, who refuse to divide the food “in equal portions among the participants” (105). A closer, contextual reading finds the problems that Paul addresses are the sorts of conflicts that would naturally emerge when wealthier members follow the ordinary structures of household order and social rank, in which the hosts provide both greater quantity and better quality of food and drink to their social betters and equals than to participants of lower status (see Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, 2d ed. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003], 159). Blaming the conflict simply on individual “misbehavior” misses an opportunity to read the passage in the context of Greco-Roman banqueting practices, the very goal of the monograph.

But more serious is the book's overarching approach to church history. Although the author occasionally notes the problem of constructing history “simply as a linear process” (92), he nonetheless presents a story of the Church as single institution––the “majority Church” (138); the “regular Church” (177)––which mirrors Irenaeus's model of a single true Christianity from which heretics diverged. And, the author's quest for a single “origin” of a ritual practice would have benefited from the nuanced work of Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).