Why Did Early Christians Build So Many Churches?

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When the American archaeologist Howard Crosby Butler led his Princeton University expeditions through Syria in the early 20th century, he was amazed by what he found. Scattered across the landscape were numerous well-preserved churches, often several within a single community (see The Dead Cities of Christian Syria). This realization raised an intriguing question that still fascinates archaeologists and historians today: Why did these ancient communities build so many churches?1 The traditional explanation has focused on theological differences, suggesting that various Christian denominations each needed their own space for worship. However, recent research offers a more complex explanation that tells us […]

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Endnotes

1. For a fuller treatment, see Jacob Ashkenazi, “Why So Many? Analysing Church Multiplicity in Late Antique Southern Levant,” Levant 57.1 (2025), pp. 101–111.

2. See Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2012); and Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977).