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MacMullen uses excavation reports of hundreds of fourth-century sites to show how worship occurred in churches and their surrounding cemeteries: a religion that ordinary Christians, by far the majority, practiced in a different and largely forgotten second Church.

This collection of essays examines the urban context of early Christian churches in the first-century Roman world. A city-by-city investigation of the early churches in the New Testament clarifies the challenges, threats, and opportunities that urban living provided for early Christians. Scholars focus on the ancient urban evidence of the inscriptions, papyri, archaeological remains, coins, and iconography and discuss what is a responsible use of these differing types of evidence in reconstructing the past. The book outlines what constitutes a proper methodological use of such evidence in establishing a nuanced and informed portrait of urban life in antiquity. Readers will come away with a better understanding of how scholars assemble an accurate picture of the cities in which the first Christians flourished.