Massinelli - For Your Sake He Became Poor: Ideology and Practice of Gift Exchange between Early Christian Groups

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.

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 Gods love (John 3:16), and so was the Spirit (Acts 5:32; 2 Cor 5:5; 1 Thess 4:8). The cross was Jesuss gift of self (Gal 1:4). At the Last Supper, Jesus offered the gifts of his body and blood (Matt 26:2629). 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 6:24). 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 4:3235).

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 largestboth in time and in spaceeconomic 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 donorseven separate groups of donorsto a collective recipient; a gift from poor people to poor people. Interpreters have repeatedly attempted to find adequate parallels to Pauls 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 Pauls 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 Pauls 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, Pauls 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.