White L. Michael. The Social Origins of Christian Architecture. Volume 1. Building God's House in the Roman World: Architectural Adaptation Among Pagans, Jews, and Christians

The John Hopkins University Press, 1990. — 113 p. — (Harvard Theological Studies 42).Early Christianity seems not to have had a highly developed institutional character. Christians met in the homes of individual members, and there was no such thing as a church building. By the fourth century, however, Christianity had become an official Roman religion, and a new architectural form, the basilica, would soon become the standard throughout the Roman world. In this volume Michael White uses literary, archaeological, and documentary sources to set the architectural history of the early church within its wider cultural context, showing how the change from house churches to public basilicas coincided with crucial developments in the social aspects and religious practices of the emergent Christian movement.