Originally Published in the Spring/Summer 2020 issue of Jacob’s Well magazine entitled “Hierarchy and Equality,” July 4, 2020.
“Communism” is a nice idea in theory, but it can never work in practice.” So goes a refrain surely familiar to anyone who grew up this side of the Berlin Wall. Given the horrors committed by Marxist-Leninist regimes during the 20th century, one can understand such caution. However, in researching and writing my 2017 book, All Things in Common: The Economic Practices of the Early Christians, I became increasingly convinced that the first generations of Christians practiced what can properly be described as communism, and that passages to this effect in Acts 2 and 4 (e.g., “Now all who believed were together, and had all things in common…”) are not idealizations or hopeful anticipations. Rather, they describe real practices, practices which were normative for the first Christian communities, and which differentiated the Christians from the surrounding culture. This arrangement included in its reach people of different social classes and ethnicities. I also became more and more convinced that these practices were not only to be found in Jerusalem for a short time but were practiced throughout the Roman Empire well into the second century.
Of course, the term “communism” often sets off alarms, especially for those who grew up during the Cold War. But allow me to clarify what I mean. In All Things In Common, I use a general—non-political—definition, which is more or less the classical definition: any social arrangement or relationship governed by the rule, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” This is distinct from quid pro quo exchange relationships or top-down hierarchical relationships. I’ve drawn these categories from the discipline of anthropology, specifically as these categories are presented by the anthropologist David Graeber in his 2011 book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
There are two reasons I use the term “communism” as opposed to other terms such as “communalism” or “communitarianism.” First, communism is the technical term used by Graeber that applies to the economic practices of the early Christians. Second, communalism and communitarianism are accompanied by the idea of a commune, or a community, with a shared culture or background, a kind of ‘natural’ community that organizes itself accordingly. The first Christians, however, came from all different backgrounds, classes, and ethnicities. The only thing that made them a community was their dedication to Christ; they were not a commune, nor a ‘naturally’ pre-formed community. Communism is the correct technical term in that it describes only the relationship/arrangement and not its cause.
In my examination of early Christian communism, I distinguish between two types of communism: “informal communism” and “formal communism.” Informal communism refers to communism that exists spontaneously and without group enforcement. Examples might include a group of friends buying rounds at a bar, or going on a trip, where each friend is expected to pitch in and help the group and only take from the group what he needs. It could even include basic customs of hospitality.
A staple of informal communism is the family unit. In a family, people don’t ask who owns the coffee machine; perhaps the father or the mother bought it, but everyone in the household has free access. If several family members want coffee, perhaps someone will make coffee for everyone. If the machine needs to be cleaned, whoever can clean it will do so. If the coffee runs out, whoever has money (perhaps the bread winner) will pay for more. This dynamic—which is the communist “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” dynamic—works in a family on basically all levels, from food to clothes, cars, cleaning, and the home itself. In various societies, particularly tribal and other pre-modern societies, this communist dynamic applies more universally. It is this kind of dynamic that we would find among the early Christians. This should not be at all surprising, given that the language of the first Christian communities was that of a fictive kinship (brothers and sisters in Christ).
Formal communism, on the other hand, refers to communism structured by explicit rules, enforcement mechanisms, and institutions. Examples of this might be a monastery, where the duties are shared on a communist basis but regulated, up to social security programs and communes.
The communism of the early Christians involved two general arrangements. the first was a redistribution based on the collecting and distributing of goods to those in need (i.e., formal communism). We find this system described in Acts, in the Pauline epistles, in the Didache, and in the work of second-century apologists (such as Justin Martyr, who explains that “what is collected is deposited with the president, who succours the orphans and widows and those who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want”). )is system also was cross-congregational (Acts: 11:27–30; Galatians 2:10; 1 Corinthians 16:1–2; 2 Corinthians 8:13–15).
The other arrangement involved an admonition to sharing and a moral enforcement of mutual obligation (i.e., informal communism). The Greek word for this, koinonia, is used often throughout the early Christian literature (for example, in 1 Timothy 6:18, which commands the rich to take part in the koinonia). Koinonia could be literally rendered “communism,” since its root word is koinos (common), and what it refers to is a relationship of sharing and mutuality.
In the Greco-Roman world from which Christianity sprang, there were well-known concepts of communism already in place. Aristotle, like many of his contemporaries, certainly had high praise for communism. “And the proverb ‘what friends have is common property’ expresses the truth,” he wrote in book 8 of Nicomachean Ethics, “for friendship depends on community.”
Interestingly, the language used in Acts 2:42–47 and Acts 4:2–37 is the same language used by the Greek descriptions of communism among friends. It is not paralleled in earlier Jewish literature, which tells us that Luke’s audience would likely have been drawing on the Greek idea of communism when reading Acts 2 and 4. The Christians, however, did not ground their communism in the same kind of hierarchical “rationality” of the Greek philosophical schools. The koinonia, or communism, of the Christians, and the commandments that underly it, was entirely grounded in the apocalyptic eschatology of both Jesus and his disciples (which itself was grounded in Jewish apocalyptic thought). As I point out in my 2019 book, Jesus’s Manifesto: The Sermon on the Plain, many of the teachings of Jesus focused on the Kingdom of God, which stood against the kingdoms of this age.
In this sense, the communism of the first Christians was much different than any secular attempt at overcoming systems of domination to create a society of solidarity, and was much different than any supposedly “scientific” socialism grounded in enlightenment reason. The communism of the first Christians was based in faith in God and the revelation of Christ: a revelation that God’s Kingdom was at hand, and that the world was to be liberated from the powers and principalities of this world and restored to communion with the divine. It was a communism of revelation, an apocalyptic koinonia.
This apocalyptic worldview, and the eschatology that came with it, led to the admonitions to share and the moral enforcement of mutual obligations that grounded the informal communism of the early Christians. These admonitions are too numerous to mention—they are found all over early Christian literature—but let us look at two examples, the First from the Didache:
You shall not hesitate to give, nor shall you grumble when giving, for you will know who is the good paymaster of the reward. You shall not turn away from someone in need, but shall share everything with your brother or sister, and do not claim that anything is your own. For if you are sharers in what is imperishable, how much more so in perishable things! (Didache, 4:7–8)
The second is from Jesus himself, in the Sermon on the Plain, as reported by Luke:
And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is it to YOU? Sinners also lend to sinners in order that they might get back the same. Nevertheless, love your enemies, and do good and lend expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High—because He is gracious upon the ungrateful and wicked. (Luke 6:34– 35)
. . .
Give, and it will be given to you, they will give a good measure, pressed down, shaken, overflowing in your bosom—for that measure YOU measure out, it will be measured in return to you. (Luke 6:38)
When we take both commandments seriously and literally, we can understand how arrangements of informal communism would come about. Jesus’s commandments to lend draw from Deuteronomy 15, where we have the Sabbatical year release of debts. Deuteronomy 15 reminds the Israelites that even if the Sabbatical year release is approaching, they ought to lend generously to those in need, without expecting anything in return (as the debts were soon to be released). If the commandments of Jesus, and those found in the Didache and elsewhere in early Christian literature (for instance, James 1:27 and 1 John 3:16–18), were taken at face value, then what would result is a situation where members of the early Christian community had material obligations to one another and where the poor had a claim on the community and all of its members. These commandments and injunctions are commandments, not suggestions. In fact, in my book, Jesus’s Manifesto, I argue that the entire Sermon on the Plain was intended literally and normatively.
In All Things in Common, I lay out the evidence that the first generations of Christians practiced both formal and informal communism, applying these commandments to their own communities. However, one piece of evidence that stands out to me is from the second-century satirist Lucian, where he describes the doctrine of the Christians as he sees it:
Furthermore, their first lawgiver persuaded them that they are all brothers of one another after they have transgressed once for all by denying the Greek gods and by worshiping that crucified sophist himself and living under his laws. Therefore they despise all things indiscriminately and consider them common property, receiving such doctrines traditionally without any definite evidence. (Lucian, The Passing of Peregrinus, 13)
This passage shows us what the Christians looked like to the outside. What was distinctive, what defined them and their doctrine, was their koinonia—their communism—along with their serving an executed Galilean peasant. We also know that the communism of the early Christians was abused and scammed, and from the way this is recorded in various texts (Didache, 13; Lucian’s The Passing of Peregrinus; 2 Thessalonians 3:11–12), it seems as though this included scamming the informal communist arrangements of mutual aid. This must mean that the informal communism was done to such a degree that it would be worth it for someone to pretend to be a Christian to live from it. In fact, we have evidence that the informal communism was taken so seriously that Christians would even fast in order to provide for those who were poor (Aristides, Apology, 14).
What this looked like in practice is easy enough to imagine when it comes to the formal communism aspect. We have descriptions of the formal communism—collection of funds and distribution, including daily distributions of bread to the needy—laid out for us clearly in early Christian texts (Acts 6:1–6; 1 Timothy 5:3–16; Tertullian, Apology, 39; Justin Martyr, First Apology, 67). Describing what the informal communism would look like in everyday practice is somewhat more difficult, since it was largely based on social relationships. However, imagine that the Spanish phrase, “mi casa es su casa” (“my house is your house”), was taken literally in a community. Picture, in other words, a society in which people literally viewed their possessions as being at the disposal of their neighbors, as much as they were at the disposal of their family members.
I am sometimes asked what became of early Christian communism. As the scholar Peter Brown explains in his magisterial book, Through the Eye of a Needle, the decline of Christian communism was partially due to the growing idea that what mattered was the state of the heart and not necessarily actions, along with the exporting of Christian ethics to members of the clergy class, such as monastics. One also suspects that the apocalyptic eschatology of early Christianity—which grounded early Christian communism, with its vision of hierarchical society turned on its head, and its vision of, and demand for, a just society of shared prosperity—did not ‘t well with a Christianity which was increasingly the religion of the ruling class.
Today’s world is almost entirely engulfed by capitalism and market thinking. It can be difficult to imagine a society or community organized differently. As the political theorist Fredric Jameson wrote in the 1991, “It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.”
But for the Christian, “the world is passing away and so is its desire” (1 John 2:17), but there are new heavens and a new earth (2 Peter 3:13; Revelation 21:1). If that is the case, no ideology of commodifcation, including the ideology of this age that confines creation to a social-Darwinist struggle for survival, accumulation, and domination (Isaiah 5:8, Ecclesiastes 8:9), that reduces relationships to transactions and value to dollar amounts, is merely the refuse of this world, destined to be cast away. Like the brothers of the rich man at whose gate Lazarus sat and begged, we have Moses and the Prophets to admonish us (Luke 16:29); but we also have an example to imitate: the example of the early Church.
Roman A. Montero 