Early Christian Care for the Poor

An Alternative Subsistence Strategy under Roman Imperial Rule

Richardson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781498296533
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Beginning with Jesus's ministry in the villages of Galilee and continuing over the course of the first three centuries as the movement expanded geographically and numerically throughout the Roman world, the Christians organized their house churches, at least in part, to provide subsistence insurance for their needy members. While the Pax Romana created conditions of relative peace and growing prosperity, the problem of poverty persisted in Rome's fundamentally agrarian economy. Modeling their economic values and practices on the traditional patterns of the rural village, the Christians created an alternative subsistence strategy in the cities of the Roman empire by emphasizing need, rather than virtue, as the main criterion for determining the recipients of their generous giving.

chapter 1

The Poor in the Roman World

Before turning to early Christian responses to poverty in the following chapters, I first consider here a number of preliminary issues. Who were the poor? Why were they poor? What survival strategies did they employ? I hope to answer these and related questions by briefly describing the social and economic context of poverty in the Roman world. A second goal of this chapter is to consider the economic effect of Roman imperial rule. Did the Roman Empire improve economic conditions for the poor or make them worse? This is a debated question. I hope to show that even though the economy grew during the Pax Romana, enabling some to enjoy a measure of upward mobility, Romanization disrupted traditional social relations upon which the poor had previously relied for certain kinds of subsistence strategies. For this discussion, I will draw upon the work of James C. Scott to show the way colonial rule adversely affected the poor by altering traditional economic behavior, even when the overall economy entered a period of expansion. At the conclusion of this chapter, I will then consider the Christians’ efforts to care for the poor as an “alternative subsistence strategy” in response to the detrimental effects of Roman imperial rule.

Poverty and “the Poor” in the Roman World

Modern researchers encounter a number of challenges when attempting to identify the poor in the ancient Roman world. One is the problem of terminology. In ancient Greek literature a number of terms were used to designate the “poor,” two of which, πένης and πτωχός, were most common. The word πένης stood for the working poor person, who had enough to live, but not enough for a life of leisure, a condition considered necessary for the practice of virtue. The term πτωχός, on the other hand, referred to the destitute beggar, who had little to no means of subsistence.1 Similarly, in Latin the term pauper generally refers to one who owned a little, while the term egens corresponds to the Greek πτωχός, the one who is poor and on the brink of starvation.2 To complicate matters, the New Testament uses πτωχός extensively and πένης relatively rarely. Why is this? Bolkestein concluded that the Christian use of the term must indicate that the number of πτωχοὶ increased in Roman society beginning in the first century CE.3 Alternatively, A. R. Hands pointed to the tendency toward hyperbole in the Hellenistic period.4 Another possible explanation is that the Christians had a greater awareness of the destitute than did their Greco-Roman contemporaries. Each of these explanations is plausible but impossible to verify. Perhaps the vocabulary for “the poor” was inexact and flexible, and it may be safest, therefore, to refrain from drawing hard conclusions about actual economic conditions based on the linguistic data.5

A second problem in identifying the poor in the ancient world is that many scholars envision a highly stratified society, starkly divided economically between the magnificently rich elite class and the impoverished majority. It is generally assumed that there was no “middle class” in Roman society, only a vast economic disparity between the tiny ruling class and the rest of the population which was poor and powerless.6 This view holds that the elite orders, made up of senators, equestrians, and decurions, and constituting no more than 1 to 2 percent of the population, controlled all of the surplus wealth, while everyone below the top social stratum lived in abject poverty, struggling to survive at the level of basic subsistence. While accurately representing the clear social and legal dichotomy between the elite and non-elite sectors of Roman society and correctly assessing the proportional relationship between the two groups, this view mistakenly assumes that a person’s economic level equated directly to his or her social status. Certainly it is true that members of the elite classes were very wealthy compared with their non-elite contemporaries, but it is problematic to assume that all non-elites were therefore equally impoverished. To speak meaningfully of “the poor,” it will be necessary to envision a smaller subset of the 98 percent who made up the non-elite segment of society.

An insufficient base of evidence is a third problem in trying to identify the poor. Not only do economic historians depend upon an incomplete archaeological record; they also have to contend with the fact that ancient people did not carefully record the sort of information needed for modern economic analysis. Archaeologists continue to expand the database of relevant material and documentary evidence, but the inherent limitations of this evidence hinder accurate analysis of the poor in the Roman world.

In spite of these challenges, Walter Scheidel and Steven J. Friesen have put forward a sophisticated attempt to assess the size of the economy and the distribution of income across every sector of Roman society.7 Building on their earlier individual work on the subject,8 the authors propose an alternative to viewing Roman society as composed of a “few super-wealthy surrounded by a mass of relatively undifferentiated poor.”9 Making use of available ancient data as well as comparative models from other premodern and early modern societies, Scheidel and Friesen have devised an income scale that differentiates various economic levels in the Roman world. Their argument is complex and detailed, but the results are easily summarized.10 Scheidel and Friesen conclude that 15 to 25 percent of total income was controlled by 1.5 percent of the population, (i.e. the elite classes made up of the senatorial, equestrian, and decurial orders). The bottom 90 percent (approximately) of the population controlled around 50 percent of total income. This large majority, according to the authors, hovered right around the level of basic subsistence, some just above and others below, with most living right at subsistence level. A remaining 6 to 12 percent, whom Scheidel and Friesen refer to as a “middling” section of Roman society, also controlled approximately 15 to 25 percent of total income.11 Thus, a small middle class, made up of freedmen, wealthy artisans, merchants, farmers, and soldiers, enjoyed as much spending power, collectively, as the elite classes. Put in terms of subsistence, this “middling” group had an annual income of 2.4 to 10 times the amount necessary for “bare-bone subsistence,” or 1 to 4 times the amount necessary for “respectable” levels of consumption.12

Scheidel and Friesen’s income distribution scale helpfully clarifies the identity of the “poor” in Roman society by drawing attention to subsistence as a key economic indicator. The vast majority of the population lived on the edge of subsistence, which means that they also faced chronic economic vulnerability. Any fluctuation in their economic situation—natural disaster, political instability, or personal misfortune—could immediately plunge them below the level necessary for survival. Being chronically vulnerable, however, did not necessarily mean that they were chronically poor, or that they would have considered themselves to be. In this study, I identify the “poor” as those who fell below subsistence level, either temporarily or permanently, as a result of some event that adversely affected their economic position. In other words, while close to 90 percent of the population lived under the cloud of potential poverty, a smaller segment of that number would actually be “poor” at any given time, and for many of these victims the situation would eventually be reversed.

This definition of the “poor” is consistent with the work of Roman historians who have begun to make a distinction between “structural” and “conjunctural” poverty.13 This is a difference “between those who are born poor and remain poor until they die ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Poor in the Roman World
• Chapter 2: The Historical Jesus and Care for the Poor
• Chapter 3: Care for the Poor in the Letters of Paul
• Chapter 4: Care for the Poor in Luke-Acts
• Chapter 5: Christian Care for the Poor in the Second and Third Centuries CE
• Conclusion
• Bibliography