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The first churches may have occupied the upper-level living quarters of shops like this. Shopkeepers typically rented such vaulted rooms, which opened onto the sidewalk, and then built a wooden platform halfway up to divide the room into two levels. They used the lower level for their shop and the upper level for living quarters. These rooms were generally 8 to 14 feet wide and 12 to 24 feet deep. Statements that Prisca and Aquila, at Ephesus and Rome, hosted “a church in their house” (1 Corinthians 16:19; Romans 16:5), or more literally, “the group [of believers] which meets in their home,” suggest that the early Christians met in the living room above Prisca and Aquila’s shop. Such a room could probably accommodate 10 to 20 persons. This may explain why Paul, at Corinth, preached in the synagogue and later in the house of Titius Justus, rather than in Prisca and Aquila’s home, where he lived (Acts 18:3–7), as these locations could accommodate larger crowds than a room above a shop.