The Class Basis of Early Christianity: Inferences from a Sociological Model

Abstract

For most of this century historians and sociologists agreed that in its formative days, Christianity was a movement of the dispossessed-a haven for Rome's slaves and impoverished masses. This thesis seems to have first gained ascendancy among scholars in Germany at the turn of the century. Thus, New Testament scholars trace this view to Deissmann (1908), while sociologists look to Troeltsch (1911) who claimed that in fact all of the really creative, church-forming, religious movements are the work of the lower strata, if for no other reason than that only they have the need and the unreflective character of thought from which the intransigence of certitude can rise. Marxists also look to Germany in this same period for Kautsky's (1908) elaborate, orthodox analysis of Christianity as a proletarian movement, which, he claimed, even achieved true communism briefly. Moreover, scholars confidently attributed this conception of the social origins of early Christians to Paul on the basis of his first letter to the Corinthians in which he notes that of the wise, mighty, or noble are called to the faith. In recent decades, however, New Testament historians have begun to reject this notion of the social basis of the early Christian movement. E. A. Judge (1960) was the first to raise a vigorous dissent. He argued that perhaps the early Christian movement did include a substantial number of Roman nobles or notables, but it was abundant in the lowest strata of Roman society either. Judge showed that the New Testament gives ample evidence of privileged converts and inferred that the early church appealed primarily to the middle and upper-middle classes. Moreover, Judge perceptively noted that the proof text in I Corinthians 1. 26-8 had been over-interpreted: Paul did say his followers included none of the wise, mighty, or noble-merely that there were not such persons, which means that there were some. Of course, there were many such people in the general population either. Moreover, even if early Christianity displayed a relative shortage of elite members, this does imply a corresponding superabundance of the downtrodden. Since Judge first challenged the proletarian view of the early church, a consensus has developed among New Testament historians that Christianity was based in the middle and upper classes (Scroggs, 1980). However, the justification for this claim, or for any claim about the social basis of early Christianity, must remain