Welcome to five minutes in church history hosted by Dr Stephen Nichols, where we take a little

break from the present to go exploring the past. Travel back in time as we look at the people,

events, and even the places that have shaped the story of Christianity.

This is our story, our family history.

Let's get started.

On this episode of five minutes in church history we're going to visit the

catacombs. These are the subterranean burial grounds. We think of them as

being in the city of Rome, but actually they were in other places too.

Paris, for instance, has a significant tunnel system of catacombs.

The Romans, they simply didn't like death. They wanted to sort of push death, as it were, out

unto the margins, even out of sight. And so they buried their dead underground in these catacombs.

These catacombs play an interesting role in the history of early Christianity.

In those early centuries, as Christianity is at odds with the empire and as the early Christians are marginalized and

ostracized and persecuted, they found that they could worship freely in the catacombs.

And in those early centuries, the Christians would gather there in the catacombs and

worship.

The Romans wouldn't go down there.

They would send the slaves down there to bury the bodies and even just to dig out the

catacombs themselves.

And so the Christians were relatively free to worship there.

We know this by the way they even designed sort of seats that they would sometimes

build into the walls of these catacombs that they could have during their service and

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