For Your Sake He Became Poor

Ideology and Practice of Gift Exchange between Early Christian Groups

Georges Massinelli

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9783110723885
• eBook ISBN: 9783110724004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The Pauline collection for the poor in Jerusalem is the most famous example of financial support for geographically distant groups in early Christianity. Recent assessments of the Pauline collection have focused on patronage to explain the social relations between Jerusalem and the Pauline groups and the strategies adopted by Paul. Through a comparison with the Greco-Roman world and a close reading of the texts, this study challenges the recent approach and proposes that other factors shaped Paul's stance. Paul was interested in reassuring the Corinthians about the financial outcome of the collection and dispelling doubts that he might take advantage of them. The collection was an action modeled on divine generosity and an exchange within a reciprocal relationship between Christian groups.
This study also surveys intergroup support between Christian groups in the first three centuries CE. This practice involved churches from most of the Mediterranean Basin and was known even outside of Christian circles. Transfers of money were organized according to a consistent pattern modeled on local charitable practices. The Pauline collection had similar characteristics and can be seen as part of this widespread economic practice.

1 Introduction

1.1 Gift Exchange in Early Christianity

A gift is far more than simply an object we give to another person. A gift conveys a message. Gifts symbolize us and our feelings, are in fact pieces of ourselves that we entrust to someone who is important to us. Yet, a gift can also deceive. We all perform our roles in the drama of gift giving, pretending to give freely and with no strings attached, but on many occasions, we have no choice but to give a gift, and we expect at the very least polite acceptance and gratitude in return. We feel shame when we fail to give a gift that was expected or anger when our gift is not well received. Be it a welcome cake to a new neighbor, a bouquet of roses to a lover, a wedding ring to a spouse, or a large donation to a charity, gifts have a huge part in everyday life and a surprisingly profound impact on the economy.

A gift is also more than mere self-expression or social performance. Involving, by necessity, two or more individuals, a gift always establishes, perpetuates, or alters relationships. It is inherently social. Gift exchanges create, shape, and structure the societies in which we live. Gift exchanges generate interdependence, build and transform communities, and foster human solidarity. Gift exchange is the society.¹

Early Christians were immersed just like us in a world of gifts and, not surprisingly, used the concept of the gift to shape their understanding of the message of Jesus. Jesus was the gift of God’s love (John 3:16), and so was the Spirit (Acts 5:32; 2 Cor 5:5; 1 Thess 4:8). The cross was Jesus’s gift of self (Gal 1:4). At the Last Supper, Jesus offered the gifts of his body and blood (Matt 26:26 – 29). Yet, gift giving was not merely a theological metaphor for early Christians, but also their everyday experience and the foundation of their identity. Jesus invited his followers to sell their possessions and give to the poor (Matt 19:21). He encouraged them to lend expecting nothing in return (Luke 6:35) and give alms expecting rewards only from God (Matt 6:2 – 4). The generosity Jesus taught his disciples inspired, in the early groups of believers, an ideal ethos of communion of goods, resource sharing, and redistribution of wealth according to need (Acts 2:44; Acts 4:32 – 35).²

We do not know to what extent the idealized portrait of the early Jerusalem believers in Acts corresponded to actual practice, but we do know that Paul spent a substantial part of his missionary work raising a “collection for the saints” from the Greek-speaking communities he founded (1 Cor 16:1). This collection stands out as the largest—both in time and in space—economic project of earliest Christianity of which we have information. The Pauline collection is also striking for its unique character: a gift between religious groups united by common beliefs but geographically remote and culturally dissimilar; a gift from a plurality of donors—even separate groups of donors—to a collective recipient; a gift from poor people to poor people. Interpreters have repeatedly attempted to find adequate parallels to Paul’s collection in the economic practices of Greco-Roman or Jewish antiquity, but all attempts have failed to provide a fully satisfactory analog. This is not altogether surprising given the tight link between gift-giving practices and social structure. In some ways, the distinctiveness of Paul’s collection simply mirrors the unique features of early Christianity, a plurality and diversity of groups.

Inasmuch as it was such an unusual socioeconomic practice, the collection provides a powerful probe into some of the key questions about the social life of Pauline Christianity and its most distinctive features: their economic circumstances and activities, their leadership structures and styles, their interrelations and competitions, and the ideological basis of their social identity and interactions. The importance that Paul attached to this fundraising endeavor suggests that it was intimately connected with his views about the life of the groups and that his directions for the collection were partly aimed at establishing the kind of community and intergroup relations that he desired to see. Moreover, since a considerable portion of the texts that discuss the collection are situated in the midst of Paul’s communication with Corinth in a time when his leadership and authority were disputed, the strategies he adopted for the collection were part of and influenced by his desire to re-establish friendly relations with a troubled group.

As mentioned, Paul’s collection was an unfamiliar form of gift in the Greco-Roman world, but it was not an isolated incident in early Christianity. There is sparse but consistent evidence that during the first three centuries CE, early Christian churches gave and received financial support from other churches in times of need. The broad time frame and the widespread geographical distribution of such instances suggest that mutual help between churches was part and parcel of a common ethos among early Christians. Giving and receiving aid between communities belonged to the core of Christian identity.

1.2 Studies of Early Christian Collections

Early Christian collections have become the focus of scholarly attention only in relatively recent times, most likely as a result of an increased interest in economic realities and their significance for society and identity formation. Despite its short history, research on the Pauline collection has seen an exponential growth in the last years resulting in an intense dialogue among interpreters and showing some signs of inchoate convergence. A survey of recent studies brings into focus the direction of collection studies in the last two decades.

1.2.1 Modern Interpretations

The first monograph-length study on Paul’s collection was Wilbur M. Franklin’s Heidelberg dissertation, Die Kollekte des Paulus.³ Franklin argues that the immediate relief of the pressing need in the Jerusalem community was neither the only nor the primary purpose of Paul’s collection because Paul took several years to complete it and Jerusalem’s need did not seem urgent at all.⁴ In addition to the practical but secondary purpose of poverty relief, the collection fulfilled an obligation of the Gentile Christians toward the mother church in Jerusalem from which they had received spiritual gifts (Rom 15:27).⁵ As such, the collection was, according to Franklin, a sign of the common love and brotherhood of all Christian communities, a sign that could heal the friction between Gentile and Jewish groups in the church.⁶

In his Habilitationsschrift, Die Geschichte der Kollekte des Paulus für Jerusalem, Dieter Georgi reconstructs a “history” of the Pauline collection from its origin at the Jerusalem meeting to its eventual conveyance to Jerusalem.⁷ This, of course, means that for Georgi both Gal 2:10 and Acts 24:17 refer to Paul’s collection.⁸ According to Georgi, the economic implications of the Jerusalem agreement on remembering the poor had only secondary importance. Its main significance was that of a symbolic “confession of unity of the community of Jesus Christ.”⁹ Georgi sees the collection as a circulation of grace that encompasses the entire Christian community in all its parts:

Paul is convinced that the outpouring of God’s acts and gifts of grace, first received and passed on by the congregation in Jerusalem, is flowing back to them in the form of the collection and the thanksgiving it represents. This response will incite the Jerusalem church to gratitude and renewed giving, thus sustaining the circular movement.¹⁰

Georgi is especially inspired by Paul’s use of the category of equality (ἰσότης), which he deems connected with Philo’s cosmic interpretation of the term as a divine force. God’s original gift of grace to believers makes them righteous and equal and becomes mutual support, both material and spiritual, between Christians.¹¹

Keith F. Nickle’s The Collection interprets the collection as Paul’s attempt to preserve the unity of the church threatened by the existence of “two conflictingly oriented missionary enterprises,” one to the Gentiles and the other to the Jews.¹² This construal originates from Nickle’s reading of the collection in light of the conflicts described in Gal 2. More specifically, Nickle proposes that there were three levels of significance in Paul’s treatments of the collection, all connected to church unity: “an act of charity among fellow believers”; an expression of solidarity showing that “God was calling Gentiles to faith”; “an eschatological pilgrimage of the Gentile Christians to Jerusalem” demonstrating to the Jews “the divine gift of saving grace to the Gentiles.”¹³

In his conclusions, Nickle repeats traditional lines of interpretation.¹⁴ The real significance of his study lies in its third chapter, which adopts a comparative approach to Paul’s collection by investigating “Analogies to Paul’s Collection in Contemporary Judaism.” After analyzing the Jewish temple tax, charity for the poor, the post-70 CE patriarchal tax, and evidence from Qumran, Nickle concludes that Paul drew inspiration from the Jewish temple tax not merely for the logistics of the project but especially “because the symbolism of the Temple tax corresponded so precisely with the hopes for the unity of the Church with which Paul had invested his project.”¹⁵ Regardless of the limited significance of this interpretation, Nickle’s study marks an important turn in scholarship toward searching for possible analogies to the collection within the context of the economic practices in Paul’s world.

While Nickle focuses on the Jewish temple tax, Klaus Berger argues that the best comparative framework for Paul’s collection is Jewish almsgiving. Berger identifies Paul’s collection with the alms Paul brought to Jerusalem for his nation, Israel, in Acts 24:17.¹⁶ Berger singles out the theological motif of “almsgiving for Israel” in Jewish texts, namely, that almsgiving could have an expiatory function for Godfearers.¹⁷ However, Berger believes that the theological foundation of this motif goes together with its social function of vouching for a Godfearer’s association with Israel and his or her desire to belong to Israel.¹⁸ Berger detects this same pattern in two additional Lukan passages (Luke 7:5 and Acts 10:2) and suggests that this is the meaning of Paul’s collection: “Almsgiving to the poor (of Israel) is the phrase that describes the relationship between the Pauline communities and the Jewish-Christian community in...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abstract
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Patronage and Exploitation in the World of Paul
• 3 Multiplicity of Exchange Forms in the World of Paul
• 4 Concerns over Paul’s Collection
• 5 Paul’s Description of the Collection
• 6 Early Christian Collections in the First Three Centuries
• 7 Conclusions
• Index of Names
• Index of Ancient Sources