13.3 Scripture and Money

We in the Western world are so used to money that it is hard for us to picture the way most societies in the history of the world have primarily functioned, namely, by trading goods. For this reason, Christians may actually misread certain passages of the Bible without even realizing it. We see words like "money," "poor," or "rich," and we read them in terms of what they mean in our world, without recognizing the dynamics they had in the various cultures to which the books of the Bible were written.

In the Old Testament, Israelite families gave a tithe or tenth of their crops to the priests (). They did not give a tenth of their income, in the manner of our modern economy, our system of producing and distributing goods and services in a society. They would rarely if ever have used money. Old Testament societies were agrarian economies, in which goods were produced and consumed directly off the land. Such land was passed along in families and, according to Numbers, was returned to these families every fifty years in the Year of Jubilees, that is, if the family had somehow lost the land during that time.

[textbox: economy]

Coinage, or money, was thus mostly associated in the ancient world with kings and political powers beyond the normal daily operations of most people. It is thus no surprise that the New Testament has virtually nothing good to say about money. When someone asked Jesus whether he believed in paying taxes, he gave the well known response, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's" (Mark 12:17). He probably was not simply saying to pay your taxes. Rather, he was likely dismissing Roman coinage itself as having nothing to do with the people of God or the coming kingdom of God. It is also at least possible that the original audiences of Revelation might have understood the mark of the beast, without which they could not buy or sell, as an allusion to the coinage of Domitian, on which it was written that he was "Lord and God."

1 Timothy 6:10 has traveling teachers in mind when it says that "the love of money is the root of all evils," and the letter of James lambasts the rich throughout. "Let the lowly brother boast in his exaltation, and the rich in his humiliation, because like the flower of the grass he will pass away" (1:9-10). Similarly, "Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you" (5:1). James' assumption is that such rich individuals have treated their workers unfairly: "the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out" (5:4).

When we read passages like these, we have to remember that agrarian economies in the ancient world tended to think in terms of a limited number of resources, a "limited good." Accordingly, if one person has more, the implication is that others have less. It would be as if twenty people in a room were each given one apple, but then when they left the room some people had several apples and others had none.

It is thus no suprise to hear of the ancient Arab proverb that said that "every rich person is a thief or the son of a thief." [1] With this sort of background, it is no surprise that Jesus would tell a rich young ruler to go sell his possessions and give to the poor (Mark 10:21). If the rich were thought to have taken resources that should go to others, the poor were understood to be individuals who had lost resources that they should otherwise have had. Poverty was thus more about getting knocked out of one's inherited status than about not having money.

[textbox: limited good]

Luke and Acts seem to operate with these basic assumptions as well. One of the special emphases of Luke is Jesus' ministry to the poor and disempowered. For example, Luke uniquely has the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, where a poor beggar finds himself in a place of reward after death. Meanwhile, the rich man at whose gate he used to sit and wait for doles from the servants, finds himself in a place of torment after death.

And while the Beatitudes of Matthew have "Blessed are the poor in spirit" (Matt. 5:3), Luke bluntly has "Blessed are you poor" (Luke 6:20) and the added rejoinder, "Woe to you rich" (6:24). In Acts, the early Jerusalem church brings everyone back to their normal economic state by redistributing the excess of some to the poor in their community (Acts 2). This sharing is probably not strictly communal living, but a bringing of everyone to a similar amount of possessions.

We should point out that the New Testament writer Paul does not have as negative a view of those with significant resources as other parts of the New Testament. Indeed, he himself may have been born into a family with some status and wealth. Only a very small number of people in the ancient world were Roman citizens as Paul was. And Paul speaks of working with his hands as if it were a kind of lowering of himself (1 Cor. 4:12; 9:6).

As a trader of leather goods in the marketplace, Paul might have had some strikes against him among some of the earliest believers. James has strong words to say about the merchant who makes plans to travel and make large amounts of money (Luke James 4:13-17), and no doubt some of Paul's enemies found it easy to stereotype him in this way. Paul's thinking is rather that God sometimes blesses one part of the body of Christ and at other times other parts. Those who are blessed are to share with those who are not so that, when the circumstances are reversed, they will share in return (2 Cor. 8-9).

What we see is that it is the attitude of believers toward their possessions and toward each other that are most important for Christians today, while the specific economic structures of the Bible relate directly to the cultural forms of its days. We are thus to focus not only on our own interests, but also on the interests of others (Phil. 2:4). This shared interest certainly includes the material needs of others (e.g., 1 John 3:17; Matt. 25:31-46). And we are to see our possessions as belonging to God and as thoroughly unnecessary to who we are (e.g., Matt. 6:19-21).

[1] Malina.