The Least of These

Paul and the Marginalized

Carla Swafford Works

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780802874467
• eBook ISBN: 9781467458825
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Jesus cared for the least, but did Paul?

The apostle Paul has a reputation for being detached from the concerns of the poor and powerless. In this book, Carla Swafford Works demonstrates that Paul's message and ministry are in harmony with the teaching of Jesus. She brings to light an apostle who preaches and models good news to the "least of these"—the poor, the marginalized, the disadvantaged, and the vulnerable. 

The Least of These begins by highlighting the presence of the marginalized in Paul's ministry by looking at poverty in Paul's churches, the involvement of slaves and freedpersons in the community, and the role of women in the Pauline mission. Works then examines the significance of the marginalized in Pauline theology by investigating how the apostle employs metaphors of the "least." 

Like Jesus, Paul cared deeply for people at the margins. Paul's ministry is consistent with that of Jesus. Both men cared for the poor. Paul served the least in his mission, modeling his apostolic ministry after the cross of Christ. Works shows that Paul, far from being an abstract thinker, was a practical theologian teaching a message and leading a life of compassion, kindness, and care.

CHAPTER ONE

Paul and Poverty

Paul does not talk about the poor as a category of people. His letters contain no blessing of the poor—even the poor in spirit. There are no parables encouraging believers to give food to the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, or to give clothes to the naked (see Matt 25:31–46). There is no definition of true religion consisting of the care of widows and orphans (Jas 1:27). Is the apostle then unconcerned with the disenfranchised, the vulnerable, the “least of these”? That is often the assumption. This assumption, though, fails to take into account that poverty was an inescapable reality of the lives of the vast majority of the Roman Empire. Paul even describes himself as being “hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked” (2 Cor 11:27; cf. 1 Cor 4:11). Paul’s mission spreads Jesus’s good news—Jesus’s blessing for the poor—to the largest cities in the Roman world, cities teeming with poverty. This chapter will situate Paul’s mission in its socioeconomic context, consider the economic status of the Pauline communities, and examine the implications of Paul’s message for the everyday life of the saints.

The Poor in the Roman World

One of the challenges facing any historian is the question of how to define poverty.¹ Poverty can take many forms. It could be a social problem that ostracizes some from resources and privileges others. It could be a problem with the structure of an economic system that keeps the poor impoverished even in times of plenty. It could be a temporary hardship that could improve in better times. Poverty in the ancient world tends to be described relative to those who have plenty.² In this book, poverty will be given the widest possible definition in an attempt to encompass all these possibilities for material poverty. The term “poverty” describes those whose basic human needs are threatened or, to put it in economic terms, those who live at or near subsistence level.³ While this definition may seem simple, determining what “subsistence” entailed in the ancient world or how many people could be labeled “poor” is quite complex.

Labeling a distinct people group as “the poor” is problematic. Historians struggle to determine what life was like for the average person in the first-century world. History is, after all, written and preserved by the elite, who comprise a sliver of the population. The wealthy are not concerned about the lives of common people, and whenever they do write about the poor—or more accurately, the non-elite—they write from their own limited perspectives, typically with an agenda that only enhances the gulf between the elite and everyone else. They portray all who do not live a leisurely existence as impoverished.⁴ They do not reveal, for instance, whether the nonwealthy could be subdivided into multiple classes. Rather, they are concerned only to demonstrate the luxuries and power of being part of the upper class. The wealthy are the ones who engage in building projects and who fund inscriptions, for instance. It is far more likely for an archaeologist to find remains of well-built mansions or public fountains than it is of shanties and lean-tos inhabited by the poor.

Based on our ancient sources, it seems that there was a stark dichotomy between the elite and everyone else. Historians agree that the wealthy elite comprised a small percentage of the Roman population. The question is how the rest—99 percent of the population—lived. Were the masses destitute? Did they struggle to survive? Was there a difference between the quality of life of urban dwellers and country farmers?

A debate among historians is whether the Roman world consisted of “middle classes”—stratification between the wealthy and the destitute. It is clear that there were elite and non-elite; it is not clear how the non-elite might be categorized. In Paul, Poverty and Survival, Justin Meggitt has argued that 99 percent of the Roman Empire lived at or near subsistence level. In other words, the Roman Empire consisted of widespread destitution. While Meggitt concedes that some would have had more than others, it is questionable how comfortably any of the non-elite lived. Meggitt argues “that the Empire’s economy was essentially pre-industrial in character and incapable of sustaining a mid-range economic group.”⁵

It may be unfair to lump all the non-elite into the category of “poor,” however. Walter Scheidel has argued that there were middling groups between the top 1 percent of the population and the truly destitute. There were, according to Scheidel, classes who would not be deemed wealthy elite, but who would have been “reasonably well cushioned against chronic want” but hardly wealthy enough to live a life of leisure.⁶ Neville Morley argues that “many of the most important arenas of social activity—dinners, collegia, private bathhouses and gymnasia—required some measure of surplus wealth to gain access.”⁷ For those with limited resources, access to such privileges might come through a patron-client relationship, which by virtue of the expectation of reciprocity, dictated the exclusion of the poorest members of society. The fact that some among the non-elite had social privileges, though, suggests that not all those hovering near the subsistence level experienced destitution. It would be fair to say that there are classes of people who lived around the subsistence level who were vulnerable, particularly to food shortage, who might have enjoyed certain social privileges, but who have likely experienced some degree of cultural shame due to their circumstances.⁸

Among those who lived around subsistence level, there were always some who were better off than others, but overall access to food was a major concern.⁹ Those with access to land had the best chance of securing food. With land, one could not only sustain oneself with food, if the conditions were favorable enough, but land also provided an acceptable security for loans. Even those who did not own land in the countryside could gather food from the land. For those in the country, hunger was episodic rather than epidemic.¹⁰ Those who dwelled in the cities, though, did not have easy access to land. Cities were, by and large, overpopulated. The city of Rome was the first Western city to reach a population of one million. Food was scarce for these urban dwellers. The Roman government provided a grain dole to about one-fifth of the citizen population of the city of Rome, but the grain distribution was only for citizen males. This left women, children, and non-citizens vulnerable.¹¹ What food source was available to them? Fish came from the Tiber, but the river was also full of the city’s untreated sewage.¹² Sickness and disease abounded. Hunger was a real threat and the impetus for some to sell themselves into slavery.

Housing and employment were also concerns in the overcrowded cities. People slept anywhere that was available—in the open air, among the tombs, under stairs, bridges, or theatre awnings, or in taverns.¹³ Some constructed lean-tos against other buildings or walls, while others lived outside town in shanties. Those who lived in these shack-like structures lived in constant fear of the officials tearing them down. The cities contained some housing, particularly insulae, apartment buildings with multiple floors. The lower floors had larger living quarters, but the upper floors were considerably more subdivided by smaller and smaller rented spaces. Even the roof was a rented space with no more coverage than a lean-to. Though the city of Rome regulated the height of these apartment buildings, the owners would hire construction workers to cram as many floors and rooms into the upper levels as possible. The workmanship was shoddy. The goal was not comfort or safety, but increasing the number of occupants and, thus, the income. The highest floors, with the least desirable living quarters, were rented on a daily basis. Others simply slept in their workshops (tabernae), small booths where artisans and their households worked. The non-elite were involved in the kinds of manufacturing jobs available in preindustrial societies. Unskilled workers lived from job to job. Skilled artisans were among the most “wealthy” of the city dwellers but, according to Meggitt, still lived only slightly above subsistence level.¹⁴ It is fair to say that for most in the Roman world, daily life lacked luxury. Most had experienced need at some point and had daily reminders of how precarious access to resources could be.

How might this information illuminate our reading of Paul’s letters? Even though historians disagree over the presence and size of middling groups, that is, those who were neither wealthy nor destitute, poverty, loosely defined, was prevalent throughout the Roman Empire. Neither Paul nor his churches would have been immune to want. We will have to be cautious in assuming that any in Paul’s churches were truly wealthy, but there seem to have been some who had more resources to protect them against deprivation. Considering, though, that Paul was carrying on the teaching of Jesus through the largest cities in the empire, it is of little surprise that Paul would have wanted to preach good news to the poor in cities known to have large quantities of impoverished people.

A Study of the Pauline Congregations

Given the limitations of our knowledge of the life of the average person in the Roman world, situating the Pauline congregations within their socioeconomic status is even more challenging.

Paul’s letters provide some insight into the recipients, but not nearly as much as we would hope. There are no accompanying church rolls listing active members and their tithes. Paul does, on occasion, mention someone by name, but he typically reveals little about that person. He would not need to do so since he is writing to people who would already know anyone named in their midst. In this one-sided conversation that is preserved in letter form, Paul does make some assumptions about the recipients. Of course, it is an open question whether his assumptions are correct. Given that he has spent time with most of the people to whom he is writing, with the exception of the Romans, we can at least glean some insight about the churches from his letters. First, though, it is important to situate this study in light of the field.

The debates among historians about whether the Roman Empire could support middling groups are also mirrored in New Testament scholarship. The past few decades have seen an upsurge in studies about the socioeconomic status of Paul’s congregations. Wayne Meeks’s classic study, The First Urban Christians, brought to light the social stratification in the Pauline churches. Using prosopographic evidence, Meeks argues that Paul’s congregations included a cross section of society, people from all walks of life. Meeks’s evidence assumes that the Roman Empire had middling classes and that 99 percent of the population did not experience abject poverty. His study was groundbreaking in raising the issue of status mobility in the context of the Pauline congregations and in considering the factors that might have attracted members of higher social classes to this early church movement. Since Meeks drew attention to Paul’s congregations, more studies have been done that attempt to place Paul’s congregations within the evidence that we have for the economy of the Roman world.

Before Meeks argued that the church contained members from the upper classes, the old consensus was that most of Paul’s congregations constituted the poor and destitute.¹⁵ This consensus still has supporters. Justin Meggitt’s work, for instance, falls into this category. As represented by Meeks’s study, a so-called new consensus has emerged, though, that considers Paul’s congregations as comprising people of higher social status and wealth. At the extreme end of this consensus are those who would even categorize the early believers as wealthy.¹⁶ Those whose work might fall into the category of the old consensus have rightly criticized the new consensus for assuming that the Pauline congregations would have contained those from the upper echelons of society.

Perhaps there are elements of truth on both sides of the debate. Bruce Longenecker has argued that the new consensus has often been misrepresented as claiming that the believers were wealthy and that there were no destitute in Paul’s churches.¹⁷ Yet those affiliated with the old consensus might be criticized for not recognizing that some in the churches had more of a surplus than others. The Pauline congregations likely consisted of economic stratifications living near subsistence level, with some who had moderately more of a surplus than others and some whose existence was more dire. In other words, contra seeing the Roman world in a bifurcation of the wealthy elite and the impoverished, there were classes of people, middling groups, in Paul’s churches who did not come from the elite in society. Longenecker builds upon the work of Steven Friesen, who classified the Roman world into poverty scales.¹⁸ Longenecker adjusts the percentages of each “economic scale” (ES) based upon his own study of the evidence of poverty in the Roman world. The adjusted chart is as follows:¹⁹

ECONOMIC SCALE	DESCRIPTION	INCLUDES	PERCENTAGES OF THE POPULATION
ES1	Imperial Elites	Imperial dynasty, Roman senatorial families, a few retainers, local royalty, a few freedpersons	0.04
ES2	Regional or provincial elites	Equestrian families, provincial officials, some retainers, some decurial families, some freedpersons, some retired military officers	1
ES3	Municipal elites	Most decurial families, wealthy men and women who did not hold office, some freedpersons, some retainers, some...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Todd D. Still
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Paul and Poverty
• 2. Paul and Slavery
• 3. Women and the Pauline Mission
• 4. The Galatian Heirs
• 5. The Church as the Least of These?
• 6. Paul as the Least of These?
• 7. Good News for the Least of These
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Citations from Scripture and Other Ancient Sources