Exposing the Economic Middle: A Revised Economy Scale for the Study of Early Urban Christianity

Abstract

In 2004 Steve Friesen proposed a 'poverty scale' for Graeco-Roman urbanism as a backdrop against which to assess features of the earliest urban Christian communities. This article offers an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Friesen's scale, not least in relation to binary taxonomies of Graeco-Roman economic stratification, rhetorical conventions of the ancient world, and the 'middling groups' of Graeco-Roman urbanism. It proposes adjustments to the scale (renamed as the 'economic scale') and gives consideration to the significance of those adjustments for the reconstruction of early Christianity relative to ancient poverty.

Scaling Gaius and Diotrephes: Socio-economic Stratification in 1 and 3 John

“…beggars, orphans, prisoners, etc.) (see Figure 1, Longenecker 2009: 44). 9 Life at this level was common for those living in the cities throughout the Roman Empire and undoubtedly played no small part in early Jesus followers’ adoption and implementation of the practice of almsgiving.…”

“…Longenecker describes these classes respectively as those persons with ‘moderate surplus’ (i.e. merchants, traders, military veterans) and those who are ‘stable near subsistence level (with reasonable hope of remaining above the minimum level to sustain life)’ (Longenecker 2009: 44). Individuals in these levels would be people who lived above subsistence with enough security that they could afford to enact such an ethic and for whom arrogance in their worldly possessions would, in fact, be a tangible temptation.…”

Early Christian Representations of the Economy: Evidence from New Testament Texts

“…1:11), small business and crafts people, like Aquila and Priscilla, who were leather workers (Acts 18:2-3), or Lydia, who was engaging in trading activities as a dealer of luxury textiles (Acts 16:14). In reconsidering Friesen's (2004) findings on first-century poverty, Longenecker (2009a) has elaborated a modified economy scale in view of developing case-sensitive taxonomies of GraecoRoman economic stratification that shed new light on the rhetorical conventions of the ancient world. This nuanced model, allowing a better interpretation of the socio-economic interests of the various urban middling groups, can help re-conceptualize the complex relationships of the early Christian movement to the societal framework around it.…”

Roman Diet and Meat Consumption: Reassessing Elite Access to Meat in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10

“…A socio-economic dichotomy on Roman diet pervades Pauline scholarship, despite recent attempts to break away from binary models to embrace more complex social stratification models (notably Friesen 2004; Scheidel and Friesen 2009; Longenecker 2009, 2010), perhaps most notably in several standard textbooks used in undergraduate teaching. I first came across this economic reading of 1 Corinthians while using Luke T. Johnson’s Writings of the New Testament (1986; revised editions 1999 and 2010).…”

“…A valuable corrective is offered by Bruce Longenecker (2009), who not only relabels the scales as economic scales (ES) (to avoid bias), but also reassesses the middling group (and Longenecker is careful to use ‘group’ rather than ‘class’ in order to avoid the anachronistic imposition of modern economic systems onto ancient Roman society; 2009: 268-69). By exploring the apparitores and the Augustales (2009: 264-67) as well as challenging Friesen’s dependency on Moses Finley’s economic model for ancient Rome (i.e., that the empire was primarily agrarian and did not generate capital; 2009: 254-59 building on Wilson 2002 and Hopkins 1978), Longenecker is able to adjust the percentages for PS4/ES4 (rising to 17% of the population), thereby arguing that the middling groups were far more prominent and played a greater role in the Roman economy than Friesen’s original poverty scale would suggest. These recent challenges to binary models have helped to establish that Roman society was not comprised of a polarity of extreme wealth (the minority) and extreme poverty (the majority).…”