ONE of the most memorable details about life among early Christians comes in the Acts of the Apostles: “Now the group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common” (Acts 4.32).
The striking text has been variously interpreted. An obvious suggestion, particularly since the philosophy of Karl Marx, is that the Early Church practised a form of proto-communism. Another is more theological: namely, that the unity which the first Christians found in Christ flowed naturally into sharing what they owned materially.
A further possibility draws on the ideals that the writer of Acts might have inherited from Hebrew and Greek traditions. The Hebrew Bible describes ancient Israel as a community in which “there will be no one in need among you” (Deuteronomy 15.4). And Greek philosophers had explored a notion of civic friendship in which “everything is held in common”, as Aristotle puts it. St Luke would, therefore, remember the first days of the new movement as striving, perhaps managing, to manifest that principled model.
More recently, scholars have posited another possibility, which is to do not so much with ethics or economics as with the cosmos itself. The renowned historian of late antiquity Professor Peter Brown explores these themes in his book The Ransom of the Soul. He shows that there are profound differences between the way in which needs were responded to in the first Christian centuries and how donating money and redistributing wealth is understood now, and how that casts the habits of the early Christians in a remarkable light.
In summary, the first followers of Jesus did act out of compassion and a sense of generosity, as their pagan and Jewish contemporaries did. But they also had another motivation. By sharing their goods, early Christians hoped not only to alleviate suffering, practise generosity, and demonstrate equality: they also saw giving to the poor as a sign of the bridging of earth and heaven.
The sensibility was not just material, but spiritual: giving and sharing had a purpose other than the purely altruistic. The rationale was to demonstrate the hope that lay at the heart of their faith: that the Kingdom of heaven was near. The practice was a sign of the new cosmic arrangements effected by Jesus.
How does that work? Well, consider teaching contained in other parts of the New Testament. Take Jesus’s parables. A surprising number of the 40 or so remembered by the Gospel-writers feature money, stewardship, and financial matters. There are the parables of the hidden treasure, the lost pearl, the lost coin, the faithful servant, the talents, the rich fool, the two debtors, the unforgiving servant, the wicked husbandmen, the rich man and Lazarus, and the workers in the vineyard.
Sometimes, the message is allegorical and relatively clear: forgive, and you will be forgiven, for instance. But there are also money-focused parables with an unclear or possibly jarring message.
Consider the parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16.1-9). A rich man’s administrator has charges of squandering brought against him. He realises that his time is up; so he cuts the debts owed to his master, so that the debtors owe him instead; they will welcome him into their homes when the rich man dismisses him. The steward is commended for his shrewdness, and Jesus offers an unexpected summary: “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”
To early commentators, the meaning was clear. They interpreted the parable as meaning that, by giving to the less well-off, the wealthier could make themselves worthy of the invitation to inhabit heaven.
The reading feels awkward now, Professor Brown notes, because of its seeming transactional logic: today, there exists an almost taboo-like sense that money shouldn’t stand in for the sacred.
But early Christians, from the time of the Apostles into the first Christian centuries, were sure that wealth was part of the economy of salvation. The poor were remembered by God, even if inclined to be forgotten in this world. Hence, giving to the poor was to align yourself with God and the Kingdom that was not of this world, with the implication that a giver, even if giving from misbegotten means, could hope for security in heaven. Hence, the unjust steward is commended.
The same rationale is reflected in some of the advice that Jesus offers his disciples. Do not to store up treasures on earth, he says, where they can be lost or ruined, but “store up for yourselves treasure in heaven” (Matthew 6.19-21).
The question is how to do that. The teaching that developed from the end of the first century into the post-Constantinian world was to do so by making a kind of holy transfer: giving to the needy here and now, be that directly or by donating to the Christian community. That was a way of converting worldly currency into the wealth of heaven. Charitable activities were, therefore, charged partly with a moral but also a sacred aura; the act was not only virtuous, but celestial.
All in all, Professor Brown concludes that modern readers should not assume that compassion and social justice were the governing principles in the Early Church. “Almsgiving was not only a matter of ‘horizontal’ outreach to the poor within society. It evoked a symbolically charged ‘vertical’ relationship.” Giving is receiving, not just here, but in the hereafter.
THIS reading fits with Jesus’s remark about giving to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s (Mark 12.17). In his remarkable book I Judge No One: A political life of Jesus, the historian of ideas David Lloyd Dusenbury asks why this comment “utterly amazed” the Pharisees who had tried to put Jesus to the test by asking whether taxes should be paid to Rome.
The reason for their astonishment, Dusenbury argues, is that, with this answer, Jesus uncoupled the earthly kingdom governed by potentates from a heavenly kingdom that was under an altogether different type of rule. This raised the question how to be in the world but not of it, which included how to store up treasure in heaven, and that became a key question for Christians.
There were other concerns that Christians hoped to resolve by the practice, as well. Joining the richer and the poorer into a single community was a challenge, particularly in the pre-Constantinian Church, because part of the radical character of Christianity was that it formed novel relationships between individuals.
Up to that point, people were bonded typically by belonging to households and families; obligations of care were based on kinship. Christianity, however, taught that people were united to one another because they belonged to Christ, a connection based on conviction rather than birth. The historian Larry Siedentop, in his book Inventing the Individual, goes so far as to say that the new faith “destroyed the ancient family”. Jesus’s comments about dividing father from son and mother from daughter were practical observations.
This reorganisation of attachments posed a challenge, because the new type of faith-based association required new types of social organisation.
The issue was how to maintain connections between economically diverse groups of people. Giving to the poor was a way of bridging the divides that inevitably existed within the early Christian community. By looking after Christians who needed a helping hand, ties between people could be secured. Charity complemented other practices of solidarity, such as praying for others.
That said, most Christians in the first years were not rich. The New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman notes in his book The Triumph of Christianity that, while most people coming into the Christian community were not living on the edge, they were from the lower economic classes. To be relatively poor and uneducated was simply to belong to the vast bulk of the ancient Roman population.
In other words, giving in the Early Church was not an exercise in wealth redistribution or mutualism, as if the early Christians were developing novel forms of economics. Rather, giving was a practical matter of promoting social cohesion through a love for one another.
You can sense this pragmatic motivation in St Paul’s mixed attitudes towards financial assistance. For instance, he was active in the transport of money to aid struggling Christians in Jerusalem (Romans 15.26), which was less an act of pure charity than a bridging of divisions in the Early Church. Giving eased tensions that were, in no small part, caused by him.
Similarly, in the 1 Corinthians, Paul argues that bringing spiritual benefits to the city justifies his expectation of material goods in return: “If we have sown spiritual good among you, is it too much to reap your material benefits?” (9.11).
The issue might be summarised in this way: being rich cuts you off from others and also from God, whereas offering from your means connects you to your fellows and God.
THEN there is one of Jesus’s best-known remarks on wealth: the incident in which a rich young man, who has kept all the commandments, asks Jesus what else he needs to do to have eternal life (Matthew 19.16-22). Jesus replies: “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
The young man turns away, distressed, because he owns many things, which prompts Jesus to reflect further: “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of heaven.” In short, if you regarded yourself as different from others because of material possessions — perhaps superior, perhaps not so in need of grace — than you risked being separated from God spiritually.
The same logic can be used to understand what the New Testament scholar James D. G. Dunn called “one of the most unnerving episodes in the whole of the New Testament” — the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira.
The incident, recorded in Acts 5.1-11, relates how the husband and wife sold some property, but kept back a portion of the proceeds, before handing the rest over to Peter. Peter confronts Ananias: “You did not lie to us but to God,” and Ananias falls down dead. Then, three hours later, when Sapphira, not knowing of the fate of her husband, is accused of putting “the Spirit of the Lord to the test”, she drops dead, too.
This episode has been used to justify everything from church ownership of property to capital punishment. But, read in the light of the early Christian understanding about money and the kingdom, the crime of Ananias and Sapphira is principally spiritual.
They had tried to hedge their bets, storing up some treasure in heaven by giving money to Peter, but also keeping some on earth. Their ambivalence was, in effect, a wager against their salvation; their failure was not ethical, but existential.
PROFESSOR BROWN suggests that this powerful sense of connection between the mundane and the celestial has been eclipsed today. In the ancient and medieval periods, almsgiving was routine because donating was a way of giving earthly wealth a heavenly value, and a way of manifesting the unity between the Kingdom of heaven and communities of Christians on earth.
But then came the Reformation. The religious convulsions that surged across Europe in the 16th century dramatically altered the social imagination. The shift stemmed in no small part from Luther’s abhorrence of the system of indulgences, as one of his outraged 95 theses makes clear: “They preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory.”
The important detail to note is that putting money in the chest to aid passage to heaven is deemed a “human doctrine”, which is to say, not a godly one. Luther makes a radical distinction: treasure in heaven has nothing to do with wealth on earth.
The upshot is that, nowadays, linking a commercial exchange to a religious hope, even with admirable motivations, has become questionable, if not offensive, at least in many parts of the Christian world.
The Reformation planted a seed that, in time, developed further into an abstract idea about the universal equality of humankind, as is assumed by modern notions of social justice. It is a powerful conviction, but a relatively recent one, arguably becoming widespread only after the 18th-century French Revolution.
WHY might the older understanding matter now? In part, being conscious of the way in which early Christians related to money helps us to understand otherwise obscure teachings of Jesus. But, additionally, the supernatural element contained within the ancient concern for equality can check ethical teachings dulled by familiarity, and help to make Christianity surprising again.
The early Christians can, in effect, invite us to ask again whether the gap between rich and poor might be not only a social concern, but also a cosmic one.
The oddness, even offensiveness, of such an assumption could be useful in an age that has adopted assumptions about equality, and relies on taxation as a means of wealth redistribution and caring for those in need.
It would be good for people to be reminded that the Kingdom is not of this world, and once more be intrigued by it.
Mark Vernon is a writer and psychotherapist.