In his new book published in March 2024, Nijay Gupta said that many twentieth-century scholars of early Christian worship approached the topic with a “major methodological flaw” by assuming that modern categories of Christian worship were used in the first century. Gupta’s assessment aligns with the conclusions of my 2022 PhD dissertation, “Worship Service or Assembly: An Investigation of the Terminology Used to Describe Christian Meetings in the New Testament.”
The thesis of this paper is that previous studies of early Christian worship were built on the methodological flaw of anachronism, as well as presentism, pan-liturgism, and confirmation bias. These flaws drove scholars to the mistaken assumption that NT assemblies should be studied under the category of “worship.” This paper asserts that NT writers did not view their gatherings under the category of “worship,” which was a concept that didn’t emerge in Christianity until the fourth century with the institutional development of the Catholic and Orthodox churches.
The paper briefly reviews studies of early Christian worship, including works by C. F. D. Moule (1961), Ralph Martin (1964), I. Howard Marshall (1985), Robert Webber (1994), D. A. Carson (2002), and Daniel Block (2014). After identifying the methodological problems, this paper proposes key principles that provide a better foundation for understanding the assembly practices of first-century Christians.
These principles include (1) building beliefs upon Scripture, not tradition, (2) using first-century terminology to identify first-century concepts, (3) avoiding the assumption that modern practices were present in the first century (anachronism), and (4) resisting the urge to justify modern practices (confirmation bias). The paper concludes with a brief assessment of its implications for the assembly practices of global Christianity.