The "house church" at Dura-Europos is hardly news, but the number of unsubstantiated assertions Ben Witherington tacks onto the existence of that which (for all we know, as far as I can tell) could very well be no more than one exquisite bathtub is - well, frankly, it's breathtaking.
I'm no expert on Dura-Europos, so if there were someone - who knows more about archaeology, and has access to scholarly publications about D-E - that might want to pick through this one carefully and help the rest of us sort the facts from Ben's claims, I'd appreciate it. Until then, I'm going to ignore it. It should be obvious enough to an intelligent reader that Ben's making very broad assumptions about the facts - whatever their precise details or most likely implications might actually be.
What's really interesting, however, is how much energy Ben's putting into (1) defending non-immersion style baptism and (2) attempting to show that ancient house churches were formally structured and hierarchical in nature. How very reactionary...
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1 comments:
Those are maybe close to HUUGGGEEE assumptions (especially, ledership, sermons, preaching....) Based off of what? Not saying he is incorect but where do we find this in the architecture?
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