Poverty and Charity in Early Christianity: Some Preliminary Observations
By Satoshi Toda
Mediterranean World, Vol.20 (2010)
Introduction: How did the church, or (to be more specific) the early church, care for the poor? The activities of the primitive church, on the one hand, are well known from the New Testament, especially from the Acts and some Pauline epistles. For some years, on the other, I have studied some aspects of Christian monasticism in the fourth century, and I understand that not only the idea of voluntary poverty was cherished by the monks of the period, but also that the monks cared for the poor through almsgiving etc. However, for the period between these two, i.e., the primitive church and early Christian monasticism, I am afraid that our knowledge is rather vague.
Thus in the first part of this paper, a survey will be made about how the sources say of the charity as conceived and carried out by the early church2. By the early church the period up to the rise of Constantine the Great is meant, because the period later than that is now covered, in reaction to the sketch published by the famous historian Peter Brown, by a thorough investigation of the problem of poverty made by the Australian research project team. On the other hand, the evidence of the New Testament will not be dealt with, because New Testament studies are a notorious field where too many discussions are made compared with the scarcity of the evidence.
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