Corpus-Paul

["John M. Contabile II" <jcontabile AT earthlink.net>]

First, some well known resources:

Banks, R.  "Paul's Idea of Community."
Green, M.  "Evangelism in the Early Church."
Malherbe, A.  "Paul and the Thessalonians."
Meeks, W.  "The First Urban Christians."

Second, a short work that specifically addresses your questions:

Branick, V.  "The House Church in the Writings of Paul."  Gen. Ed. M. A. 
Getty.  Zaccchaeus Studies: New Testament.  Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 
1989.

Branick develops a distinction between the private "house church" meetings 
which were smaller and more intimate and the "city wide" meetings that 
would be an aggregate of the smaller house church meetings in a given 
city.

He contends that Paul is addressing these two types of meetings and this 
produces the apparent discontinuity between invited Christians and 
outsiders.  He is careful, however, to note that it cannot be proven that 
the smaller house church meetings were completely exclusive.

In my opinion, outsiders would have been invited to the meetings as they 
came into contact with Christians in their day to day life.  Much of the 
interaction most likely took place either in the work place or in the 
surrounding cummuinity.  Paul set this example, and praised the 
Thessalonian church for following it.  Since Paul often attracted the 
authorities, I highly doubt that a sign was placed outside of the home in 
which he was lecturing.  However, in safer circumstances, such as the 
lecture hall of Tyrannus (Acts 19:9) things may have been different.

Further, Paul seemed to do much of his teaching while working (1 Thess. 2 
and 2 Thess. 3)  Malherbe's work compares and contrasts Paul and the 
philosophers of his day.  There are both similarities and differences.


John Contabile
Student of the New Testament
jcontabile AT earthlink.net