A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Less than a century before, the heap of charges against Bishop Paul of Samosata had included the complaint that he had sat on a throne like a ‘ruler of the world’; now all bishops did this.25 The idea of a seated bishop presiding over the liturgy but also pronouncing on matters of belief and adjudicating everyday disputes, became so basic to Western Christian ideas of what a bishop represented that the Church annexed a second Latin word for ‘chair’, cathedra, previously associated with teachers in higher education, and used it for the city church in which the bishop’s principal chair could be found: his cathedral. The buildings which the Church now put up for the worship of their great congregations reflected the bishops’ role as politicians and statesmen: churches borrowed their form not from the temples of the Classical world, which were not designed for large congregations, and which in any case had inappropriate associations with sacrifice to idols, but instead from the secular world of administration.