Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§9.7 The Historical Context
house, 228 as did the earliest Christian gatherings. 229 At the same time, there is no
good reason to discount the literary evidence that there were buildings evidently
set aside for communal gatherings, and called either 'synagogues' or 'prayer
houses'. 230 And the floor plans of the buildings most securely identified as 'synagogues',
with rows of benches along one or more of the walls, are hardly what
we would expect for private dwellings. 231 These were no doubt buildings used
for town assemblies, but probably also as a school room 232 and for social/festive
events — in modern parlance not so much the village church as the village hall.
This correlates well with what we envisaged earlier (§8.6a), and we can quite appropriately
imagine the retelling of stories about and teaching of Jesus in such
gatherings, whether in the village assembly itself or in gatherings of Jesus' own
followers. 233 The difference, like the difference between 'church' = people and
228. The 'apparent contradiction', between the dearth of early Second Temple synagogue
remains and the large number of references to synagogues in ancient literary sources,
'disappears if we assume that, in the first centuries, large private houses were used as places of
worship alongside other buildings that came to be utilized for worship and other matters requiring
public assembly' (Meyers, ABD 6.255); m. Ned. 9.2 talks of a house being made into a synagogue.
Similarly Hachlili, 'Early Jewish Art', 449-50; Riesner, 'Synagogues in Jerusalem'
186. Crossan and Reed conclude: 'There certainly were synagogues ... in the villages of Galilee
at the time of Jesus, gatherings of Jews for communal and religious purposes, but who
knows what their architectural form looked like?' (Excavating Jesus 26).
229. Acts 2.46; 12.12; 18.7; Rom. 16.5; 1 Cor. 16.19; Col. 4.15.
230. Philo, Prob. 81 ('sacred places which they call synagogues'); Flacc. 48 ('sacred
buildings'); Luke 7.5 (the centurion 'built the synagogue for us'); Acts 18.7; Josephus, War
2.285, 289; 7.44. Josephus also recalls a general assembly (sunagontai pantes) in Tiberias in
the prayer house (proseuche), a very large house or building (megiston oikema) (Life 277; also
280, 293). A first-century CE inscription from Berenike (Libya) uses the term synagöge twice,
once in the sense 'congregation', the other in the sense 'building' (G. Lüdertz, Corpus
jüdischer Zeugnisse aus der Cyrenaika [Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1983] no. 72; conveniently in
Oster, 'Anachronism' 187-88; Oster 186 lists the range of terms used in inscriptions and papyri
as well as Philo and Josephus). See also Schürer, History 2.439-40. Kee is much too resolute in
his unwillingness to recognize that a building may be referred to in some of the NT texts other
than Luke 7.5 ('Defining' 14-20); see particularly Oster's rejoinder to Kee ('Anachronism',
here 194-97). Martin Hengel's argument is plausible that the term 'synagogue' came to be used
for the place of assembly, not just the assembly itself, during the first century CE — 'Proseuche
und Synagoge. Jüdische Gemeinde, Gotteshaus und Gottesdienst in der Diaspora und in
Palästina' (1971), Judaica et Hellenistica: Kleine Schriften I 171-95.
231. See n. 220. Sanders is particularly critical of Kee's arguments (Jewish Law 77-78,
341-43 n. 29; Judaism 198-202; 'Common Judaism and the Synagogue'); also K. Atkinson,
'On Further Defining the First-Century CE Synagogue: Fact or Fiction? A Rejoinder to H. C.
Kee', NTS 43 (1997) 491-502 (here particularly 499-501).
232. Philo calls the meeting house didaskaleion, that is, 'place of teaching' (Mos. 2.216;
Spec. Leg. 2.62; also Legat. 312). See also Schürer, History 2.417-22.
233. Such gatherings are probably already indicated in the various references to the as-
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