HDS Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates how early Christ-followers used financial language to articulate and imagine their relationship to the divine. In the ancient Mediterranean, the divine was an active participant in what we call the economic sphere. Gods and goddesses were represented as owning goods, holding accounts, and producing wealth through the mediation of religious and civic officials. In this dissertation, I use a variety of epigraphic, papyrological, and literary evidence to examine the use of financial terms that are found throughout Paul’s letter to the Philippians, asking: what sorts of human-human and human-divine relationships are described? Paul describes his relationship with the Philippians using the business language of a koinonia, a shareholding venture, in the gospel. He uses language of deposit and security to represent his imprisonment as a contribution to the success of the gospel venture in which both he and the Philippians participate. In Philippians 3, he commodifies Christ and suffering. In Philippians 4, Paul refers to a divine accounting system to offer a promissory note to the Philippians for their support of him. I also explore Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians, which exemplifies one trajectory in the afterlife of this theo-economic rhetoric. There the commodification of Christ and suffering has been turned towards polemical ends.
My study adds a new framework of analysis, theo-economics, to New Testament and early Christian texts. This new framework allows a better understanding of major theological and economic logics in early Christianity, and the imbrication of themes such as poverty, labor, social status, cosmology, and eschatology. The framework of theo-economics also makes visible an emerging “economy of suffering” in early Christianity, which is present in the Letter to the Philippians and expands in multiple directions after Paul. Thus, my study has implications for New Testament and early Christian studies as well as Roman history, economics, and the study of religion.

"Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these." Based on the gospel accounts of Jesus's welcoming of little children, scholars have often presumed that early Christianity offered a new, uniform, and positive understanding of children against the backdrop of the ancient world. This dissertation challenges this exceptionalist approach to history by exploring imagery of the child used in the Gospel of Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and the Gospel of Thomas. In particular, it situates the selected texts within discourses and practices related to children in the Roman Empire and explores the cultural context in which childlikeness in each text should be understood. For Matthew, the little child in Jesus's sayings represents the lowliest of the low in the Roman Empire, functioning to urge the readers to abandon their political and economic privileges. For Paul, "infant" is a term of invective against the Corinthians, whose infantile lack of proper speech and logos marks their unpreparedness for God's kingdom. For the Gospel of Thomas, the child functions as an exemplar of the primordial being in Gen 1:27 who exists without shame, for this gospel idealizes the child's sexually undeveloped body and liminal status in society. This research demonstrates that there is no one understanding of children among these texts. The authors diversely deploy the child's marginalized status, intellectual incapability, and non-gendered state in these three focal texts while inviting the adult audience to envision an ideal believer entering the kingdom of God. These images of children concretize spiritual, moral, and social transformations to which believers must aspire-or which they should avoid, presenting the diversity of religious ideals among those who first used these texts. Their references to children cannot be used as evidence to support claims that early Christ followers were kind in their treatment of children. Exploring the developmental characteristics and social situations of children reveals that early Christ followers cast young children as theological imaginaries for expressing various conceptions of an ideal self who is worthy to enter God's kingdom.