The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul

319 Pages·2003·18.48 MB·English

by  Wayne A. Meeks

The First Urban Christians
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THE
FIRST URBAN
CHRISTIANS
The Social World of the
Apostle Paul
SECOND EDITION
WAYNE A. MEEKS
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
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Published with assistance from the foundation established in
memory of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale
College.
Preface to the second edition © 2003 by Yale University.
Copyright © 1983 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any
form (beyond that copying permitted by Section 107 and 108 of
the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public
press), without written permission from the publishers.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2002107884
ISBN 13: 978-0-300-09861-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.
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TO HANS W. FREI
colleague, mentor, friend
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CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION ix
PREFACE xiii
INTRODUCTION 1
Why a Social Description of Early Christianity? 1
Some Objections 2
Pauline Christianity 7
1. The Urban Environment of Pauline Christianity 9
Paul and the City 9
From Village to City 10
From Polis to Empire 11
The People of the City 13
City versus Country 14
Cosmopolis 15
Mobility 16
Women in the Greco-Roman City 23
Connections 25
Urban Judaism and Pauline Christianity 32
The Cities of Pauline Christianity 40
2. THE SOCIAL LEVEL OF PAULINE CHRISTIANS 51
"Proletarians" or "Middle Class"? 51
Measuring Social Stratification 53
Prosopographic Evidence 55
Indirect Evidence 63
Mixed Strata, Ambiguous Status 72
3. THE FORMATION OF THE EKKLËSIA 74
Models from the Environment 75
The Fellowship and Its Boundaries 84
A Worldwide People 107
4. GOVERNANCE 111
Dealing with Conflict 111
Inferences 131
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viii CONTENTS
5. RITUAL 140
Minor Rituals 142
Baptism: Ritual of Initiation 150
The Lord's Supper: Ritual of Solidarity 157
Unkown and Controverted Rituals 162
6. PATTERNS OF BELIEF AND PATTERNS OF LIFE 164
One God, One Lord, One Body 165
Apocalyptic and the Management of Innovation 171
The Crucified Messiah 180
Evil and Its Reversal 183
Correlations 190
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 193
NOTES 197
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SECONDARY WORKS CITED 243
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY 279
INDEX OF BIBLICAL REFERENCES 283
INDEX OF MODERN AUTHORS 291
SUBJECT INDEX 297
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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
When I wrote The First Urban Christians, the idea of a social history of the
nascent Christian movement was a novelty. Of course, there had been previ-
ous attempts to explain the origins of the Christian sect or its eventual suc-
cess on the basis of one or another social theory, but the results had not
proved very durable. What I wanted to do was simply to describe, in as much
detail as I could, the social forms, the social environment, the customary cul-
tural assumptions embedded in that environment, and the peculiar subculture
being invented by some of those groups. The idea met with considerable
skepticism. Many of my colleagues thought it impossible. Others, mainly
theologians, thought it either irrelevant or dangerous. I too saw plenty of rea-
sons to be pessimistic, and during the seven or eight years in which I was
directly engaged in research and writing for the project, I was often tempted
to give it up in favor of something easier and more conventional. There were
other people, however, especially those forerunners and colleagues mentioned
in the original Preface, who helped me maintain the excitement of the chase.
The other thing that kept me going was sheer stubbornness, born of curio-
sity, which is finally the one reliable reason for trying to be a historian.
Twenty years have passed, and those of us who started asking about the
social world of early Christianity in the 1970s are now more likely to seem
old-fashioned than innovative. Since then a fair number of books and articles
have explored several aspects of the Christian movement's early contexts and
formations—the Supplementary Bibliography below contains only a selection
of the titles. Many of those essays have ventured into terrain more difficult
than that which I explored in the first edition of this book, for the surviving
evidence for most varieties of first-century Christianity is spotty at best and
not easy to evaluate. The letters attributed to Paul and his immediate associ-
ates and disciples, supplemented by the Acts of the Apostles—the first histo-
ry of their activity, written only a generation later—provide evidence both
ix
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x PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
richer and more direct than that available for any other segment of the
Christian movement before the time of Trajan at the earliest. Studies of the
social settings of the Gospels, for example, are inevitably more speculative.
That is one reason why the results recorded in this book, which already gath-
ered insights from a host of other workers in the Pauline field, still seem solid
enough to justify reissuing it without substantial changes. The other reason a
reissue seems appropriate is that this book happily appeared at one of those
moments when the modes of inquiry in a field of study were just shifting into
new directions. Thus it has come to serve for many students as a kind of place
marker in the history of New Testament scholarship.
The images of the first Christians that come most immediately to mind
are of shepherds and peasants and simple fisherfolk in a rural landscape.
They are images from Jesus' parables in the Gospels, reinforced by the agrar-
ian slant of much American piety and by the works of art that decorated the
Sunday School rooms and lesson books that many Christians knew as chil-
dren. Whatever truth there may ever have been in that picture, the
Christianity that became the imperial religion of the Roman Empire after
Constantine's conversion looked nothing like it. If we had more evidence
from the first decade of the movement, we might find that even in those early
years the environment was not quite so bucolic as we have imagined. Some
recent research has turned up reasons to doubt whether the parts of Galilee
where Jesus was at home were exclusively rural and whether Jesus and his
first followers are appropriately labeled "peasants." The urbanization that
Alexander, his successors, and then the Romans brought to the region may
have affected the movement at an even earlier stage than we once thought. Be
that as it may, it was as an urban cult that Christianity spread through the
empire, and the earliest substantial evidence we have of its formation as an
urban cult comes from the documents associated with Paul.
Many details could now be added to the sketch of "the urban environ-
ment of Pauline Christianity" in Chapter 1. New data are continually emerg-
ing from the archaeologists' spades and from museum basements. Take
Ephesus for example, the most visually dramatic of the sites we are interest-
ed in and one of the most studied. Ongoing excavations and reconstructions
there give a more and more detailed picture of life in that metropolitan cen-
ter of Paul's activities in Province Asia (though most of the monuments seen
by the visitor today are of a later date than Paul). The systematic publication
of the inscriptions from that site provides a source of rich insights into the
cultic, economic, and social situation of various groups in the city. The clubs
of Ephesus, for example, have left an extensive record that could reinforce
and enlarge my comparison of the Pauline groups with voluntary associations
in Chapter 3. Similarly, other sites are yielding useful information, and social
historians of the Roman Empire are continually revising the larger picture. In
the process, they have to take account of new theoretical questions about the
general structure of urban society in antiquity.
It cannot be stressed enough that the ancient city is different in very many
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