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).