Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich

Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation

Helen Rhee

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780801048241
• eBook ISBN: 9781441238641
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The issue of wealth and poverty and its relationship to Christian faith is as ancient as the New Testament and reaches even further back to the Hebrew Scriptures. From the beginnings of the Christian movement, the issue of how to deal with riches and care for the poor formed an important aspect of Christian discipleship. This careful study shows how early Christians adopted, appropriated, and transformed the Jewish and Greco-Roman moral teachings and practices of giving and patronage. As Helen Rhee illuminates the early Christian understanding of wealth and poverty, she shows how it impacted the formation of Christian identity. She also demonstrates the ongoing relevance of early Christian thought and practice for the contemporary church.

1
The Social, Economic, and Theological World of Early Christianity

The social, economic, and theological world of early Christianity belongs to that of the Greco-Roman world, and in this chapter we will broadly chart the relevant issues of wealth and poverty in that context. I will first present a fundamental analysis of the Roman economy in light of recent studies and archaeological data, and in relation to Rome’s sociopolitical structure and systems, which governed and controlled the basic social values and ways of life in the vast empire. This will lead to a discussion of the Greco-Roman understanding of and attitude toward wealth and poverty, mainly reflected in elite literary sources. Then I will switch gears to traditional Israelite and Jewish understandings of and teachings on wealth and poverty within a general historical framework. In the collection of the earliest Christian literatures, the New Testament, early Christians inherited and shared the Jewish teachings on the rich and the poor while selectively incorporating and responding to Greco-Roman social values and practices. I will lastly describe the Christian growth and expansion in the second and third centuries, giving particular attention to its social aspects, composition, and challenges vis-à-vis the dominant culture.

1.1. Economy and Social Structure in the Greco-Roman World

1.1.1. Roman Economy and Social Structure

Since Moses Finley’s monumental and influential study, The Ancient Economy, it has become a truism that the ancient economy (including the Roman economy as part of all premodern economies) was a preindustrial and underdeveloped economy, and that it was primarily based on subsistence agriculture, with the role of cities as loci of consumption rather than production.[14] According to Finley and his protégés (the so-called primitivists[15]), ancient, preindustrial economies were qualitatively different from modern industrial economies because they did not take the notions of market economy and economic growth for granted, nor were they aided by major technological advancement. In the Roman world, agriculture, the backbone of an agrarian economy, was mostly for subsistence, not for the market, and the vast majority of the population lived by agriculture in the country. Business and trade were neither market-driven nor market-oriented, but rather were based on scarcity and were mainly used for consumption and self-sufficiency. Landed aristocracy and craftsmen did not aim for maximizing profits in interregional markets nor for surplus-oriented agricultural or industrial specialization through investing capital (land) in trade or manufacturing. Technologically, neither mass production of goods nor their mass transportation was possible, with the exception of some high-value or specialized commodities such as grain, wine, oil, pottery, bricks, and textiles. Both small-scale production and the high costs of land transportation of goods limited large-scale manufacturing and transregional trade in general and therefore created a mainly local exchange economy. Cities usually functioned as centers not of production but of consumption, and urban artisans provided for the needs of the urban settlers. While most inhabitants of the Roman imperial society lived in the country and worked the land for subsistence, the elite lived in the cities as owners of landed properties and controlled both city and country with judicial underpinnings. Since the wealth of the elite was concentrated on land, the organization and management of resources tended to be acquisitive and conservative rather than productive. Though fractional in terms of actual numbers, these landed elites governed local, regional, and empire-wide politics and policies that allowed them to profit from taxation and other imperial policies.[16] In this context (to borrow Polanyi’s term) Roman economy was “embedded” in social institutions such as kinship, marriage, and age groups, and was particularly tied to the hierarchical social and political power structure.[17] Hence, in Roman society, “economic behaviour was governed more by the value systems of social groups than by economic rationality (thus precluding the use of modern economic theory for the analysis of the ancient economy).”[18]

This does not mean, however, that the Roman economy did not experience any growth or development. Recent studies, especially aided by archaeology and quantitative studies, have provided important correctives to Finley’s argument without necessarily trumping his overall thesis. They underscore a more advanced and complex nature of Roman economy (“advanced agrarian economy”), highlighting a boom in production and trade, technological development, and their combined positive impact on Roman economy.[19] For example, there was “intensive” growth and large-scale investment as well as technological advance in provincial agriculture (e.g., improved olive production through advanced olive presses, water mills, manuring, terracing, and iron tools), especially in North Africa, facilitated by rising urban demand and documented by archaeological record.[20] A wealth of papyrological and archaeological evidence in Roman Egypt reveals the sizable growth of viticulture and agriculture due to investments and technical improvements (e.g., greater use of animals in irrigation, cultivation, and transport) and a lively market-oriented economy with increased urban production and consumption not only in agriculture (wheat in particular) but also in textiles and glass.[21] Egypt also had a heyday in trade with “the development of Alexandria as the commercial center of the eastern Mediterranean, mediating the east-west flows of goods and wealth” to and from Italy, Asia Minor, Arabia, and India with an efficient transport system.[22] Roman mining (e.g., in Britain and Las Medulas in Spain) underwent great technological developments too (such as the use of hydraulic techniques), and its imperial enterprise operated “on a scale and at a level of sophistication unequalled until the industrial age”—as was also the case of stone extraction and transportation in the eastern Egyptian desert.[23] Furthermore, ample evidence of Roman coinage (throughout the empire) that was used in commercial transactions and interest-bearing loans, and of prices equilibrating grain markets in the early empire, points to extensive market exchanges typical of the market economy seen in other advanced agrarian economies.[24] This increased monetization of the economy could be witnessed in taxation and rents as well, and though it was imposed by coercive imperial policies, it increased the volume of trade in the empire in the first few centuries because producers—farmers, cultivators, artisans, etc.—were forced to produce and sell more food and products beyond subsistence and local consumption in order to pay taxes and rents in money.[25] Its cumulative impact over time suggests “a significant increase in agricultural production, an increase in the division of labour, growth in the number of artisans, . . . development of local markets and of long-distance commerce, . . . the commercialization of exchange, an elongation of the links between producers and consumers, the growth of specialist intermediaries (traders, shippers, bankers), and an unprecedented level of urbanization.”[26] This rise in interregional trade (especially in the period 200 BCE–200 CE) is confirmed by archaeological findings from the numerous shipwrecks mostly in the western Mediterranean during this time (545 dated).[27] Moreover, careful studies on the distributions of amphorae (thick ceramic containers used extensively for transporting wine, oil, and fish products) along the Mediterranean and Adriatic coasts (e.g., Gaul, Italy, Spain, North Africa, and even Britain) identify a number of regions as loci of (surplus) production (rather than consumption) for distant consumption.[28] This in turn confirms the different scales of exchange—local, regional, and empire-wide trades—though the last category was indeed rare.[29]

Nonetheless, one should be careful not to overreach by seeing the Roman economy as “proto-capitalism” as a result of these findings (the so-called modernists). Given the overwhelming importance and dominance of agriculture (75–80 percent) in Roman economy, other economic activities beyond agriculture would have had a limited scope and impact overall.[30] In Kevin Greene’s words, Finley’s “overall framework has remained intact: gross disparities in wealth, the importance of political power and social status, and the limitations of financial systems, are not in dispute.”[31] But “most commentators are more positive about the level and nature of economic activity that took place within this framework. A lack of ‘capitalist spirit’ is not a sign of aversion to growth, but one of caution.”[32] In other words, the Roman economy, with local and regional variations, experienced “significant” growth and was market-oriented from the perspective of that historical period and place; from the perspective of modern economies, however, the growth was “imperceptible” and unsustainable[33] since “under ancient social and political conditions the interests of the elite were well served without it.”[34] After all, the Roman economy was “predominantly a subsistence economy” even with contextualized economic rationalism and “economics beyond agriculture” in trade and industry,[35] which meant that the bulk of self-sufficient production “always stood outside the money economy” and that “on average levels of consumption were not dramatically above the minimum level of subsistence.”[36] Indeed, markets and economic behaviors were still embedded in and determined by society.[37]

In light of this understanding of the Roman economy, what were the dominant social values and systems in the Roman empire that influenced economic behaviors and social conditions, and how were they constructed? Roman society was formally and informally divided into hierarchical distinctions and categories, and our sources (which mainly contain the perspectives of elite men) present more or less a unified vision of a conservative and stable social order. As Richard Saller notes, this aristocratic ideology of social hierarchy and order was taken for granted and strongly justified by the elite: “if these distinctions [of ordines and dignitas] are confused,” writes Pliny the Younger, “nothing is more unequal than equality itself.”[38] Then, enormous and structural inequalities constituted the very fabric of sociopolitical stratification and the values that governed the economic behaviors of various social groups. Ekkehard and Wolfgang Stegemann single out the three criteria for stratification:

1. power through position (political office or role) and power through acquisition and transmission of property and wealth (influence);
2. privilege in legal, socioeconomic, and political realms—for example, there were two tracks in criminal law and double standards at court (differential evaluation of legal testimony) according to rank,[39] as well as reserved seats in theaters and banquets;
3. prestige, i.e., social esteem as a function and result of that power and privilege.[40]

Indeed, Roman society was obsessed with maintaining social distinctions and hierarchy.

The formal orders (ordines) consisted of senators, equestrians (knights), regional and municipal decurions, and undifferentiated plebs (freeborn citizens). These orders formed a steep social pyramid in terms of power, privilege, and prestige, and they were based upon and reinforced the traditional aristocratic criteria of birth, wealth, esteem, and (moral) excellence.[41] Augustus introduced properly defined social orders between senators and equestrians not only by prescribing minimum census requirements of one million and 400,000 sesterces respectively[42] but also by mapping out their respective careers, ranks, honors, and privileges as well as judicial boundaries of marriage and inheritance. Senators, the highest office holders, numbering in the hundreds, wore a toga with a broad purple stripe, and their sons were allowed to enter the senate as observers; they were given special seats in the theater and arena and were prohibited to marry persons of freed status (this applied to their children and grandchildren as well). The “second order,” equestrians, numbering in the thousands, were the nonsenatorial, landed aristocracy of Italy but evolved to fill important positions in the army and governmental offices in Rome and the provinces (such as prefects and procurators); they wore a toga with a thin purple stripe and a gold ring and were given separate seats at the spectacles as well. Both orders, though not legally prescribed, practically functioned hereditarily due to these aristocratic criteria. Their provincial and municipal counterparts were the decurions, civic elites who filled the important political and religious positions in the cities (especially of the East) with attendant privileges. They had a minimum census requirement of 100,000 sesterces (this requirement varied city to city). In the second and third centuries, the decurionate increa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Social, Economic, and Theological World of Early Christianity
• 2. Wealth, Poverty, and Eschatology
• 3. Wealth, Poverty, and Salvation
• 4. Wealth, Poverty, and Koinonia
• 5. Wealth, Poverty, and Ecclesiastical Control
• 6. Wealth, Poverty, and Christian Identity
• 7. Wealth, Poverty, and Christian Response in Contemporary Society
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover