Early Christian Care for the Poor: An Alternative Subsistence Strategy under Roman Imperial Rule

Beginning with Jesus's ministry in the villages of Galilee and continuing over the course of the first three centuries as the movement expanded geographically and numerically throughout the Roman world, the Christians organized their house churches, at least in part, to provide subsistence insurance for their needy members. While the Pax Romana created conditions of relative peace and growing prosperity, the problem of poverty persisted in Rome's fundamentally agrarian economy. Modeling the...