At Easter 2020, at the height of the Covid crisis, with all the nation’s churches closed to any worship, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby celebrated a broadcast Eucharist at his kitchen table in Lambeth Palace. The Archbishop reinforced the narrative of many in the Church who claimed that the success of online worship proved that Christians no longer needed (if they ever did) the burden of ancient church buildings up and down the land. They could, as they claimed the early Christians did, worship in their own homes, thereby recovering the purity and simplicity of the early Christian Eucharist as a domestic meal. This understanding became a commonplace of the Liturgical Movement and then the liturgical response to the Second Vatican Council. According to Stefan Heid (of the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology), ‘Current research is in virtually complete ecumenical agreement that the original, true Christianity knew neither altars nor sacred spaces and in fact expressly rejected them as a matter of principle’ (10). In this view, only later, through the infiltration of Greek culture and particularly at the ‘Constantinian shift’, was Christianity distorted into a priestly religion, with sacrifices and altars.

Heid argues on the contrary that this interpretation emerges not from original evidence but from the assumptions of a liberal modernity inherently hostile to a cultic reading of early Christianity. This faith did not emerge as a new creation, entirely distinct from its surrounding environment, but in critical continuity with both the Jewish and the pagan cultures and practices which were familiar to the new Christian adherents. Heid displays an exhaustive familiarity with the scholarly literature and the available evidence, drawn from Scripture and literary sources and from art, architecture and archaeology. His thesis is overwhelmingly persuasive.

Both Jews and pagans were familiar with feasts made with sacrificial food; for these, both employed ‘sacred tables’ in addition to dining tables. The Temple had both its Altar of sacrifice and its Table of the Presence for the showbread. The usage of the ‘sacred table’ makes sense in the first and second-century texts that speak of a table or altar in connection with the Eucharist. The understanding of the meal table of the early Eucharist has always been connected with the assumed domestic setting of the house-church, and yet Heid points out that no archaeological or literary evidence for a house-church has ever been found. The one purported example, at Dura-Europos, had ceased to be a family residence and was used exclusively for Christian worship. The evidence points not to multiple house-churches but to one church gathering place with one altar where the one bishop presided in each city, a principle that survived in most cities until the Middle Ages (162).

Christianity rejected the pagan temple and its bloody altar, but it offered at its own altar the ‘unbloody’ sacrifice of the Eucharist. The priest stood upright at the altar; with the people, he raised his hands and his eyes to heaven. Like the ancient altar, the Christian altar was directional towards God ‘who shines as the Sun of Righteousness in the east’ (354). Orientation in liturgical prayer ‘amounts to an obligation that is even traced back to the apostles’ (354). The church in Rome lost this tradition of orientation as a result of the papacy’s exile in Avignon. Finally, in his Epilogue, Heid explores how the Church in the West came to invent the ‘people’s altar’ associated with liturgical renewal, to express its understanding of the Eucharist as meal rather than sacrifice. With other scholars, both Catholic and Protestant, he has come to recognize that the rationale that the ancient Christian celebrant and altar ‘faced the people’ is a ‘legend’, a ‘modern theologoumenon [without] patristic roots’ (441). While the Byzantine and Oriental Churches have maintained the orientation of their churches and liturgies, ‘The Latin Church alone has departed from the ecumenical consensus and gone its own way’ (473).

It was once the proud claim of Anglicans that the Reformation returned their Church to the religion of ‘the Apostles of Christ and other holy Fathers of the Primitive Church’ (John Jewel). Anglican liturgists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were leading scholars of the literary and architectural remains of the Temple and the earliest known Christian church buildings and liturgies. When the archaeology of Christian antiquity became professionalized in the later nineteenth century, the quest for Christian origins took on a denominational character: Would those origins fulfil Catholic or Protestant presuppositions? In the twentieth century, the ecumenical consensus in the West based liturgical renewal on a tendentious reading of the practice of the early Church, and among liberal Roman Catholics it has become the touchstone of the Vatican II Church, to be defended at all costs. Since that time Anglicans have lost their patristic focus and become evermore liturgically introverted and incurious. I fear Heid’s scholarship will fall on deaf ears. Would any amount of scholarly revision prompt a return to the ancient ecumenical consensus?