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Dura-Europos Church (House Church)

البيت المسيحي في دورا أوروبوس

One of the oldest known churches in the world, a house converted into a church in the 3rd century, with a painted baptistery.

At Dura-Europos on the Euphrates, excavators in the 1930s found a house that is one of the oldest known Christian churches. An ordinary residence, it was converted in the first half of the 3rd century into a meeting place for the Christian community: two rooms joined into an assembly hall and another made into a baptistery.

The baptistery's wall paintings are among the earliest Christian images known — the Good Shepherd, Christ healing the paralytic and walking on water, and women approaching the tomb. Like the synagogue, it survived because buildings along the wall were buried before the Sasanian siege.

It is the earliest identified Christian house church, an ordinary house converted to worship between AD 233 and 256, following the local Durene plan of rooms around a square mud-brick courtyard. Before the city was abandoned in 256, during the Persian siege, the Romans built a ramp against the wall that buried the building and preserved its walls; a French-American team uncovered it in two campaigns in 1931–32.

The baptistery paintings are now at the Yale University Art Gallery. It is a unique witness to early Christian house churches before Christianity became the Roman state religion.

Note: photos may not reflect the site's current condition.

For the visitor

Photos

Photos: Marsyas — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA) · Unknown authorUnknown author — via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain) · Wolfgang Sauber — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA) · drawn byUdimu — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA) · Heretiq — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)