"Christians looked after their poor– that was after all one of the main duties of one of their three orders of ministry, the deacons– and they provided a decent burial for their members, a matter of great significance in the ancient world… What is interesting about the earliest of these burials is the relative lack of social or status differentiation in them: bishops had no more distinguished graves than others, apart from a simple marble plaque to record basic details such as a name… The picture was already changing by the mid-third century… The upper classes were beginning to arrive at church."
— Diarmaid MacCulloch, from A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, 160
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