Abstract
Four Criteria for Identifying the Socially Marginal in the Social Context of Early Christianity Reflected in the New Testament
Highlights
The social dynamics of the world of early Christianity is characterised by the limit of upward mobility and social disparity between classes in terms of access to both material resources such as lands and funds and nonmaterial resources such as honour and political power
The term “social minority group” refers to a category of people differentiated from the social majority
While social majority refers to those who hold the majority of positions of social power indebted to their monopoly in social relations and resources, social minority signifies the groups of people who hold fewer or no positions of social power, since their access to the sociopolitical, commercial, and legal centre of society is institutionally and culturally limited
Summary
The identification and categorisation of social minorities could be reasonably different from culture to culture. The core criterion for the identification of the socially marginal in the collectivistic world of early Christianity is the issue of the “quality” of social life of a given group, not the comparative “quantity” of the group It is a known fact about the imperial Roman world that those whose overall life quality was in question comprised a mass of people great in number (collective social minority) in comparison to the few privileged members in power (collective social majority) sheltered by the inviolability of social order. Humble masses who sustained hard lives of physical labour and poverty.4 While these scholars commonly suggest the absence of a genuine Roman middle class with independent economic resources, Pleket (1971:237-238), Christ (1984:216-220), Perkins (2009:5), Scheidel (2012:1-24), and Scheidel and Friesen (2009:83-85) propose the existence of a middle stratum and reject the rigid honestiores and humiliores polarity as representative of the socio-economic reality of the imperial Roman world.. From the angle of the rule-of-thumb criterion defining social minorities in terms of the quality of social experience, distinguishing between external and internal social minorities is more or less a technical matter rather than an existential one, since these peoples’ lives, regardless of their origins, must have shared the common social experience relevant to the socially marginalised
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
