I just started reading Nadya Williams’ Cultural Christianity in the Early Church during the past week. The introduction lays out the structure of the book, looking at the interactions between Christian faith and surrounding culture in the New Testament era, in the era of persecution between the New Testament era and Constantine, and then in the period where Christians went from being persecuted to privileged. Sounds like a very interesting read, and the podcast author interviews I have heard have been good.
Chapter 1, “More for Me, Less for Thee,” talks about Greco-Roman attitudes toward wealth and how it should be used, and how that seems to have influenced some people in the early church (Ananias and Sapphira selling some property and giving part of the proceed to the church, while claiming to have donated all the proceeds, in what seems to be an attempt to gain status as generous benefactors, rather than out of true generosity).
Williams says that Barnabas, a Levite from Cyprus, “appears to have previously been a cultural Jew. In particular, did you catch the contradiction in the idea of a Levite with property?” She goes on to mention how the tribe of Levi received no inheritance when the Promised Land was allocated to the tribes of Israel and “thus had to depend on the largesse of the other tribes in exchange for their work as teachers of the law and leaders of worship in the temple. A true Levite should have owned no property, so this anecdote shows just how far the Jewish community had drifted at this point from its roots” (p. 7).