The Terrace Houses at Ephesos, Domestic Religion, and Pauline Discourses of Space

Recent work on the first-century private houses in Ephesos has uncovered a trove of sacred objects in their domestic context. Careful recording by archeologists allows us to map the fixed zones of religious activity in these private houses. The evidence suggests that "sacred space" in the context of private houses was not simply created in a "profane" or unmarked domestic context by specific ritual practices, as argued by J.Z. Smith and those who follow him. Parts of the domestic built environment were already "sacred" as fixed locations for religious objects and practices. An important difference from the early messianic Jesus communities, however, is that, for the majority of people in the ancient Mediterranean, domestic religious practices functioned as part of a network of sacred spaces and objects connected to the broader civic environment. The lack of such a network among the ancient followers of Jesus may have influenced their distinctive discourses about sacred spaces, in which civic sacred spaces for the Jesus community are expressed as utopias, or as inversions of dominant discourses.