Paul was a tentmaker. But what did his job actually involve? And how did the occupations and status of the first followers of Jesus affect the way in which they did ‘church’? WARNING: video contains scenes of a DIY nature.

The second in a series of four videos to accompany the book Kingdom of Fools. See more at the Kingdom of Fools Vimeo Channel.

This video looks at the working, living and worshipping conditions of the early church.

Nowadays when we think of church, we think of big buildings with pointy towers attached. But for the early church there were no dedicated church buildings. The earliest ‘church’ comes from the town of Dura-Europos and dates from 235 AD. And that was still really a house-church .

In Corinth, the first meeting place of Christians was probably in the workshop of Priscilla and Aquila, who had moved there from Rome and who were in Corinth when Paul arrived sometime in 50/51 AD.
Paul went to the synagogue to debate with the Jews, but the Christians must have had their own meeting elsewhere. We know that when Paul was ‘evicted’ from the synagogue, he moved to the house of Titius Justus. But before then the likeliest place, the first place, is the workshop of Priscilla and Aquila.

This was typical of the first churches. Christians met in homes, warehouses, shops, rented rooms. And this lasted for a long time. When Justin Martyr was interrogated in 165 AD he said that his group met in a room above the bath of Myrtinus.

A couple of churches in Rome also provide evidence. The church of San Clemente dates from 1108 AD, but below it there is a fifth century church. And then below that there is a Roman alley and two buildings, one was a warehouse, the other was a mithraeum – a meeting place for the followers of Mithras. The church may have started in the warehouse, or in the house which replaced it.

Below the church of Santa Prisca in Rome they found another mithraeum which was a room in a house. But they also found that another part of the house – an extension – was an early Christian house church. Presumably the Christians rented this room out. But they were close to their neighbours and in an ordinary building.

You can read more about how they worshipped and where the Christians lived in the book.

This is a remarkable, powerful video. While I was watching it, I kept thinking of Paul’s strange statement that he was:

always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. (2Cor. 4:10–12)

As is the case with lots of Paul’s writing, I’m not sure I entirely understand what he was getting at, but I think it may be something like this video: the immense power and wonder of a man who has come to terms with death – good death. What Philip Gould calls ‘the death zone’ is, in fact, the place where he feels more alive than at any time in his life. In the interview with his daughter, she says

"Dad had been going on about the death zone and how for him time had stood still; how since he had accepted the terminal diagnosis he wasn’t thinking about anything but the moment, the power of his relationships.

That is a profound thing. The power of our relationships is what really matters in life. Relationships with our family, with our spouses, with God, and, with ourselves.

“He was always spiritual, throughout his life,” she says. “My mum and my sister and me are all Jewish. His sister is a church of England priest. But it wasn’t the fundamental thing for him. He had this strong belief that it was not God who judges you at the end of your life but that you judge yourself. Have you lived well?”

As he was a political figure, whether he lived well is a matter of debate. and some of the comments below the Observer article are emotionally charged and very sad, not only for their bitterness but also for their sense of loss and of experiencing deaths which were not so privileged.

But I think that misses the point. ‘The power of his relationships…’ At the end of his life he wasn’t Philip Gould the politician, but Philip Gould the father, the husband, the man. Maybe that was a lesson he had to learn, I don’t know.

But if it was, he learned it well.

I’ve just received a copy of Patience (After Sebald), a documentary about the famously melancholy German writer W.G. Sebald and the walk through Sufolk which became his book The Rings of Saturn.

Rather inappropriately, given the subject matter, I am very excited.

I love Sebald. I love the sense of humour which lurks beneath the melancholy. I love the obscure details, the invetnted facts and connections. I love the quirky, strange photos which crowd the narrative. the fact that you just can’t categorise his books. Are they novels? Travelogues? Fact or fiction? It all seems to blur.

There is a compelling fascination to his slow-moving prose, with its meticulous observation. I think what I love is that he is almost perpetually sudetracked – or you think that he is. So what starts off as a record of a journey through Suffolk – Southwold, Orford, and the world’s most depressing B&B at Lowetoft – takes you through an entirely unexpected landscape of subjects: Thomas Browne, Joseph Conrad, the origins of the first world war, Roger Casement, the Dowager Empress Tz’u-hsi, Edward Fitzgerald and the holocaust.

He is, to put it mildly, an acquired taste. (His novel Austerlitz is over 400 pages long and contains only one paragraph). but there is no-one like him.

I can’t wait to watch it. So while the rest of the family watch The Voice, I shall be watching Patience After Sebald – and reminding myself of a truly unique voice in literature.

• An article about the film with an interview with the director
• The trailer for the film
• Interview with Sebald

In the early church Good Friday was a day of fasting. In the eastern church it wasn’t necessarily Friday: they followed the Jewish Passover festival which could take place on any day of the week. In the west, especially in Rome, the great festival was celebrated on the Sunday after Passover.)

Whatever the case, in the early church it was a day of fasting. The fourth century Apostolic Constitutions says that the day should be marked by a fast. Certainly the baptismal candidates fasted on the day in preparation for their baptism at dawn on Easter morning. The Apostolic Tradition says:

Those who are to receive baptism shall fast on the Preparation of the Sabbath [i.e. Friday]

Apart from that I’ve not been able to find any specific instructions in the church fathers about commemorating Jesus’ death. Detailed liturgy and the idea of the three day festival (called the Easter Triduum) apparently doesn’t evolve until the fourth century.

So, did the second and third century Christians not commemorate Christ’s death? On the contrary. Reading The Apostolic Tradition indicates that they remembered it every single day. It begins first thing in the morning:

If you are at home, pray at the third hour and praise God. If you are elsewhere at that time, pray in your heart to God. For in this hour Christ was seen nailed to the wood…

Pray also at the sixth hour. Because when Christ was attached to the wood of the cross, the daylight ceased and became darkness…

Pray also at the ninth hour a great prayer with great praise… For in that hour Christ was pierced in his side, pouring out water and blood, and the rest of the time of the day, he gave light until evening…

The Apostolic Tradition was written in the early third century (215 onwards) and probably for a church in Rome. There’s a lot of extra stuff in these bits, links to the Old Testament and some symbolism which I haven’t quite grasped yet. But the interesting thing is that Christians for whom The Apostolic Tradition was written were expected to pray at 9 am, 12 noon and 3 pm, and these prayers were tied in to remembering Christ’s death. The practice grew out of the pattern of Jewish worship based around the temple, and is also reflected in Acts 10, where Peter and Cornelius are depicted as praying at these times.

So the implication, in The Apostolic Tradition at least, is that the early church did commemorate ‘Good Friday’, but they did it every day of their lives.

Each day was a memory of Easter. It was Good Friday, everyday.

We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. Now that we do have some time, and know it, I would like to use the time to talk in some depth about things that seem important.
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. Te desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.
Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline

I am rereading these two books, sort of in tandem. Pirsig’s book was written in 1974; Foster’s in 1978. The problem has not changed in the intervening thirty years. We have more information now, more resources, more access to facts and ideas, but in a way that’s the problem. There is so much that it becomes almost impossible to process.

Personally I’ve been trying to use Lent to balance things. I’ve stayed off twitter and t’interweb in the evenings and read books (hence the Pirsig quote). It’s not been entirely successful, but it’s a start. I’m quite good at knowing a little about a lot of things. Processing that information, developing it, using it to dig deeper foundations; that’s a skill I always need to work at.

When I worked in social marketing I was always banging on about the difference between output and outcome. Charities tended to measure success by output – the number of leaflets printed, column inches in the newspapers, radio interviews, packs distributed. But the real success is outcome: whether or not things have actually changed and made a difference.

Churches also have this issue. We worry about numbers: bums on pews. But that’s output. You can have mega churches of thousands of people, but what’s the point if they’re just living the same lives as everyone else? We mistake width for depth. We think that if there are lots of people it will make a difference.

Often you hear this expressed in the idea of Britain as a Christian country. Well, historically the peak of churchgoing in the UK was probably around 1904. And what happened then? Britain was a colonial power engaged in exploiting people on a worldwide scale. Two years earlier we’d had the Boer war, during which we invented the concentration camp, killing an estimated 28,000 people. We still had child labour at a massive scale. Ten years later we colluded with the other European imperial powers to plunge the world into a terrible war. All of which shows that output is not the same as outcome. A churchgoing nation is not the same as a Christian one.

The challenge remains the same. It’s the challenge to really think about things. And thinking is done best in community. For churches that means we should be focussing on discipleship. We should stop obsessing about numbers. The nation doesn’t need width but depth; deep wells are more useful than big, shallow lakes.

Just in case you’re wondering, it’s from The Onion. I love the line about Twitter: “400 billion tweets and not one bit of useful information was ever? transmitted.”