Treasure in Heaven

The Holy Poor in Early Christianity

Peter Brown

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813938295
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The "holy poor" have long maintained an elite status within Christianity. Differing from the "real" poor, these clergymen, teachers, and ascetics have historically been viewed by their fellow Christians as persons who should receive material support in exchange for offering immeasurable immaterial benefits—teaching, preaching, and prayer. Supporting them—quite as much as supporting the real poor—has been a way to accumulate eventual treasure in heaven. Yet from the rise of Christian monasticism in Egypt and Syria to present day, Christians have argued fiercely about whether monks should work to support themselves.

In Treasure in Heaven, renowned historian Peter Brown shifts attention from Western to Eastern Christianity, introducing us to this smoldering debate that took place across the entire Middle East from the Euphrates to the Nile. Seen against the backdrop of Asia, Christianity might have opted for a Buddhist model by which holy monks lived by begging alone. Instead, the monks of Egypt upheld an alternative model that linked the monk to humanity and the monastery to society through acceptance of the common, human bond of work. This model of Third World Christianity—a Christianity that we all too easily associate with the West—eventually became the basis for the monasticism of western Europe, as well as for modern Western attitudes to charity and labor. In Treasure in Heaven, Brown shows how and why we are still living—at times uncomfortably—with that choice.

1

“Treasure in Heaven” and “The Poor among the Saints”: Jesus and Paul—Leadership and the Escape from Labor

Jesus and Paul

In this chapter, I will begin by going back to what the Christians whom we are studying in this book considered to be the basics. I will draw attention to two traditions of religious giving that came to lie side by side in the New Testament.

First, we have the abrupt words of Jesus to the Rich Young Man: “go and sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and then thou shalt have treasure in heaven” (Matt. 19:21). This challenge was associated with the journeys of Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples in Galilee and Judaea (in modern Israel and Palestine) around AD 30. It would echo through the centuries, among Christians, as if above place and time. As a result, it takes a considerable effort of the imagination to unravel its implications to Christians of the first centuries of the church.

But we also meet a very different tradition of giving connected with the activities of Saint Paul in the cities of the Aegean (on the coasts of modern Greece and Turkey). The letters ascribed to Saint Paul (which, we must remember, all early Christians accepted as a single block, all written by Saint Paul) reveal him at work in one of the best-documented exercises in fund-raising in the ancient world. Furthermore, Paul’s activities in organizing a collection to support the poor among the saints in Jerusalem (Rom. 15:26) went hand in hand with a debate as to the extent to which “apostles” (such as Paul)—and, by extension, other Christian religious leaders—were entitled to support from the communities to whom they ministered.

Within a little over a century, in around AD 150, these two faces of early Christianity—the sayings of Jesus and the letters of Paul—had come together in the same canon of the Christian scriptures, in the New Testament. On the one hand, we have a timeless call to renunciation, linked to the promise of treasure in heaven. On the other hand, we have a feverish correspondence concerning the movement of money in the Christian communities. In Paul’s letters, wealth was not there to be renounced. It was there to be used. Furthermore, it was to be used as much to support religious leaders as to support the poor among the saints on whose behalf Paul’s appeal had first been launched.

The two traditions are very different from each other. But it was between these two traditions that Christian thought on religious giving swung, like a great pendulum, from the days of Jesus and the first missionary journeys of Saint Paul to the age of Constantine and far beyond. A complete study of the use of wealth in the Christian churches has to take account of both traditions. So let us now deal—inevitably briefly—with each of them in turn.

“Treasures for Below . . . Treasures for Above”

First: let us go back to the sayings of Jesus. The most dramatic of these sayings was addressed to a rich young man: “Jesus said unto him: If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and then thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me” (Matt. 19:21; cf. Mark 10:21 and Luke 18:22). Jesus was also believed to have said much the same to his disciples: “Sell your possessions and give alms; provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys” (Luke 12:33).

The dramatic effect of these sayings on well-to-do Christians throughout the ages has been studied exhaustively.¹ But, in order to understand the full implications of the sayings of Jesus for the attitudes of early Christians toward wealth and the poor, we need to look more carefully at them.

What struck contemporaries in these sayings was the counterfactual assertion that treasure in heaven would be gained through the loss of treasure on earth. This idea was not unique to Christianity. Similar notions circulated in Jewish circles. In the Jerusalem Talmud (which was probably put together in the late fourth century AD), Monobazos, the Jewish king of Adiabene on the Euphrates in the early first century AD, was said to have spent his fortune on providing food for the poor in Jerusalem. His infuriated relatives accused him of living down to his name, which was derived from the word bazaz—to plunder. They accused Mono-bazos of plundering the earthly inheritance of his family. He answered them at length: “My fathers laid up treasures for below, but I have laid up treasures for above. . . . They laid up treasures in a place over which the hand of man may prevail: I in a place over which no hand can prevail. . . . My fathers laid up treasures useful in this world, I for the world to come.”²

Monobazos’s speech was accepted by the rabbis as an appropriate justification of his pious giving. Yet, in contrast to Jews and Christians, pagans of the second and third centuries reacted to the idea of “treasure in heaven” with studied incredulity. At the end of the third century AD, the great pagan philosopher Porphyry (who was born in Caesarea Maritima in Palestine and had studied with the great Neoplatonist Plotinus in Rome) wrote, in his treatise Against the Christians, that this saying could not have come from Jesus. Rather, Porphyry opined, the saying must have been invented by poor people, with the intention of persuading the rich to give all their money to them, ek toiautés kenophônias—“as a result of such airhead talk.” Porphyry added that this airhead talk had begun to affect the rich of his own times. He wrote that he had heard only recently of some well-to-do Christian ladies who had impoverished themselves, and made themselves a burden to others, by taking this passage literally.³

A century later, in AD 362, Christian ideas about placing treasure in heaven through the renunciation of wealth were the object of a jibe by the pagan emperor Julian the Apostate. Angered by the Christians of Edessa (a frontier city with a major, wellendowed church), Julian decided to confiscate the funds of the church. With the somewhat elephantine humor to which he was prone, Julian claimed that he was doing the Christians a favor by stripping the church of its possessions! “Since by their most admirable law they are bidden to sell all and give to the poor so that they may attain more easily to the kingdom of the skies, in order to help those persons in that effort, I have ordered that all their funds, namely, that belong to the church of the people of Edessa, are to be taken over.”⁴

To Join Heaven and Earth

Late antique pagans might be suspicious of the notion of “treasure in heaven.” But we are simply embarrassed. When one turns to the current scholarship on this theme, we find that the idea of “treasure in heaven” has come to be surrounded by a loud silence. Neither in the Catholic Dictionnaire de la Spiritualité nor in the Protestant Theologische Realenzyklopädie is there an entry on “trésor” or on “Schatz.” Nor can such an article be found in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church or in the recent Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion.

The few studies addressed to the Jewish and Christian notion of “treasure in heaven” approach it with ill-disguised discomfort. One such study, by Klaus Koch, insists that Jesus must have meant something very different from the meanings that came to be attached to his words in later centuries. Belief in the direct accumulation of treasure in heaven through almsgiving on earth was dismissed out of hand by Koch: it was “für den Protestanten eine abscheuliche Vorstellung”—a notion abhorrent to any Protestant.⁵

Modern Jewish scholars are no less embarrassed. Faced by the tale of King Monobazos, the great Talmudic scholar Ephraim Urbach confessed that it was difficult for him to see “traces of a more refined doctrine . . . [or, indeed, any] sublimation of the materialistic simile of collecting treasures above through squandering them below” in King Monobazos’s “prolonged and monotonous explanation.”⁶

Nowadays, indeed, the thought of transferring mere money from earth to heaven strikes us as something more than a harmless exercise of the imagination. Rather, it has the quality of an off-color joke. It joins two zones of the imagination—that of money and that of religion—which modern persons tend to keep apart.

But if we are to understand the imaginative energy that drove religious giving in Christian circles in this period and in the Middle Ages, we have to recapture something of the weight and the distinctive profile of the notion of a transfer of wealth from earth to heaven implied in the words of Jesus and of King Monobazos. Let us try to do this for a moment.

To begin with, we must defamiliarize the sayings of Jesus. As modern persons, we tend to think that we know what he meant. We assume that the notion of placing treasure in heaven was no more than a stirring metaphor. It was chosen by Jesus so as to encourage heroic indifference to wealth and the redistribution of wealth by the rich for the betterment of the poor.

But these are modern reactions. In early Christianity, a considerably wider conglomerate of notions gathered around the words of Jesus. Among these notions, the redistribution of wealth through giving to the poor was undeniably present. The great Christian theologian Origen of Alexandria (ca. 185–254) claimed to have read an alternative version of the challenge of Jesus to the Rich Young Man in an apocryphal Gospel of the Hebrews. In this version, there was no mention of “treasure in heaven.” Nor was the Rich Young Man told to “sell all.” Jesus merely told him to treat his fellow believers more generously.⁷ The message of the Gospel of the Hebrews was as banal as any modern version of the encounter between Jesus and the Rich Young Man. But what struck most early Christian readers and hearers was something rather different. In this one saying, Jesus had brought together two starkly opposed incommensurables and had declared that the one might be transformed into the other through a form of exchange that flouted all the rules of social common sense: heaven and earth, rich and poor (each group thought to be immeasurably distant one from the other) were brought together through a heroic act of giving to the poor.⁸

Not only did wealth—with all its sinister overtones of gross and weighty matter, touched by transience and death—join the unbearable lightness of a world beyond the stars. The primal joining of heaven and earth was mirrored in society itself. The starkly antithetical poles of rich and poor were brought together, through almsgiving. Through these two primal joinings, the greatest gulf of all—that between God and humankind—was healed. In the well-chosen words of Gary Anderson: “Charity was . . . an act that established a contact point between the believer and God.”⁹

The Elm and the Vine: The Joining of Rich and Poor in Early Christianity

What was it that made the notion of the joining of incommensurables so attractive to the early Christian communities? Let me suggest that these communities found, in the idea of the joining of heaven and earth and rich and poor, an expression of solidarity across real (or imagined) social cleavages.

These social cleavages were not necessarily very wide in real life. In this respect, we must be more than usually careful when reading early Christian writings on the relations between rich and poor within the Christian communities. They do not give us a realistic description of the social structure of these communities. For they wrote under the influence of a powerful conceptual polarity. Like heaven and earth, rich and poor were presented as separate. What mattered was that the one was not the other. But this did not in any way mean that, in the Christian communities, the rich were divided by an immense social gulf from the poor.

If anything, this was not the case in the Christian communities of the first and second centuries. What little we know about them suggests that they harbored a wider range of persons than we had once thought. They did not contain very many rich members. But nor were they drawn only from the very poor. Where scholars differ is in estimating the width of the social spectrum to which Christians belonged at this time. Was it wide, touching persons of different classes and of very different levels of culture, or was it narrow, confined largely to the poor?

Some scholars (such as Gerd Theissen and Wayne Meeks) have presented the first Christians as relatively well-to-do, almost as “middle class.”¹⁰ Other scholars have reacted sharply against what they regard as an overcomfortable view. Justin Megitt and Steven Friesen have argued forcefully that the first Christian communities were far from being “middle class.” For Megitt and Friesen, the early Christians lay on the wrong side of the precipice that separated the rich from the vast majority of the poor in the Roman Empire. Megitt and Friesen imagine the Roman Empire to have been a relentlessly polarized society. In their view, there was little social differentiation beneath the level of the rich. Not to be rich was to be very, very poor. In their opinion, the letters of Paul revealed the churches to be organizations of the poor. They struggled to stay afloat through ingenious schemes of mutual support. There was nothing comfortable or “middle class” about them.¹¹

This scholarly debate has remained unresolved. This is largely because the Christian writings of the time cast little light upon the real social structure of the Christian communities. Their aim was not to describe the actual relations between rich and poor in the churches. It was to present their social world as if it were structured around a dramatic polarity of “rich” and “poor,” which only the magic of Christian almsgiving could bring together.

But it was precisely this emphasis on the joining of opposites which proved most acceptable to the Christian communities of the late first and second centuries. Like their Jewish neighbors, the early Christians were a group that was socially differentiated but by no means brutally polarized. What they needed were images of solidarity that stressed the joining of distinct and potentially opposed groups: the greater the imagined distance between rich and poor, the more triumphant was the overcoming of this di...