I

In 2 Cor 8.13–15, Paul stipulates as the criterion and goal of the collection for the poor saints in Jerusalem the ideal of ‘equality’ (ἰσότηϛ): ‘for the purpose [of the collection] is not that there [should be] relief for others and affliction for you, but rather [it should be] out of equality (ἐξ ἰσότητοϛ). In the now time, your abundance should supply their lack, in order that their abundance may supply your lack, so that there may be equality (ὅπωϛ γένηται ἰσότηϛ). As it is written: “The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little”.’Footnote ¹

It has long been recognized by Pauline scholars that the source of Paul's idea of ‘equality’ is not the Septuagint, where the term ἰσότηϛ appears only twice (Job 36.29; Zech 4.7) and without a Hebrew equivalent,Footnote ² but the Greek world, where thinking about ‘equality’ developed in three contexts: between friends, in the polis, and in the kosmos.Footnote ³ Each context is relevant to an understanding of Paul's use of the concept, a fact likewise acknowledged by interpreters of Paul, and a source of considerable discomfort, since it locates Paul's concern in proximity to secular goals and threatens to compromise the perceived primacy of theological motives such as grace and justification by faith.Footnote ⁴ The narrower purpose of this essay is to achieve sufficient immersion in the controlling logic of Greek thought in each of the areas mentioned above, so that the character of Paul's appropriation of the idea of ‘equality’ stands forth clearly. Greater clarity about Paul's notion of ‘equality’ as the ground and goal of Christian relations is a worthy aim in itself, since there is a demonstrable tendency to ignore the issue of economic inequality in the history of Pauline scholarship.Footnote ⁵ But this undertaking is also justified from a historicist perspective, since it is now increasingly clear that the danger that hangs over our present moment in late capitalism is that the Judeo-Christian sense of social obligation will be entirely swept away by a resurgence of that structured inequality which was the basis of the political system of the Roman Empire.Footnote ⁶

Yet, even if we succeed in constructing a rigorous differential comparison of Paul's concept of ‘equality’ with that of Aristotle or Philo in each of the areas mentioned above, we will not yet have grasped the novelty of Paul's application of this concept to relations between those who enjoyed ‘abundance’ in Corinth and those who experienced ‘lack’ in Jerusalem; for the category in which Paul seeks to conceptualize relations between the Corinthians and the Jerusalemites is recognizably ‘economic’, in the modern sense of the term, whereas precisely this conceptual category was lacking in pre-Christian Greek and Roman writers. As Moses Finley taught us more than a generation ago, Greeks and Romans ‘lacked the concept of an “economy”, and, a fortiori, they lacked the conceptual elements which together constitute what we call “the economy”’.Footnote ⁷ Recently, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has sought to elaborate a ‘genealogy of the economy’ by tracing the emergence of this category to the first tentative articulation of the Trinitarian doctrine in the form of an oikonomia in the early centuries of Christian theology.Footnote ⁸ We will take the measure of the novelty of Paul's thought in his organization of the collection, only when we have located Paul's project at that moment in ancient history when the unity of the cosmos was broken, when being and acting, ontology and praxis, parted ways irreversibly, making place for a new category of thought and practice—the economic.Footnote ⁹ We shall discover how fully Paul participated in this rupture by means of his belief in a deity who voluntarily ‘impoverished’ himself, thereby establishing a paradigm of economic relations under the sign of ‘equality’.

II

The first context in which we shall explore the development of Greek thought about ‘equality’ is that of friendship. Aristotle attests the antiquity of the proverb ‘Friendship is equality’ (ἰσότηϛ ἡ ϕιλότηϛ).Footnote ¹⁰ Again, according to Aristotle, the true friend is ‘equal and alike’ (ἴσοϛ καὶ ὅµοιοϛ).Footnote ¹¹ To be sure, Aristotle recognizes that few friendships qualify as the best kind, in terms of equality and likeness.Footnote ¹² Yet Aristotle insists that ‘equality’ remains the goal of unequal friendships,Footnote ¹³ and he elaborates ratios for achieving it.Footnote ¹⁴ Aristotle explains that ‘there are two sorts of equality’, corresponding to the two species of friendship.Footnote ¹⁵ In a friendship between equals, whether in wealth or virtue, equality is ‘numerical’ (κατ’ ἀριθμόν), ‘as it is measured by the same standard’.Footnote ¹⁶ But in a friendship between unequals, such as that between benefactor and beneficiary, ‘equality’ must be ‘proportional’ (κατ’ ἀναλογίαν), ‘since it is just for superior and inferior to have not the same share but proportional shares’.Footnote ¹⁷ That is, between two unequal persons, justice divides benefits in proportion to their deserts, so that the two shares are not equal to each other, but each equal to its recipient's merits.Footnote ¹⁸ In the Aristotelian calculus, this means that ‘the superior party claims by inverse proportion—the contribution of the inferior to stand in the same ratio to his own as he himself stands to the inferior, his attitude being that of ruler to subject’.Footnote ¹⁹ Thus, in order to restore balance and secure equality, the inferior party must render a larger share of affection and honor to his benefactor, ‘such as belongs by nature to a ruler or a god’.Footnote ²⁰ Without the operation of this inverse proportion, Aristotle judges, ‘it would seem that the superior comes off worse, and friendship is a charity and not a partnership’.Footnote ²¹

Roman social historians analyze unequal friendships under the category of patronage.Footnote ²² As defined by Richard Saller, patronage is an asymmetrical personal relationship involving reciprocal exchange.Footnote ²³ Andrew Wallace-Hadrill penetrates to the core of this system when he observes that patronage was a means of social control through manipulation of access to scarce resources: ‘the patron's power over the client derives not from generous and regular distribution, but from keeping him on tenterhooks with the prospect of access to resources which is never fully granted’.Footnote ²⁴ The operation of Aristotle's inverse proportion, by which the beneficiary renders a larger share of honor to the benefactor, is impressively illustrated by an inscription from Roman Corinth dated between AD 54 and 55, in which the tribesmen of the tribe Calpurnia lavishly honor their ‘patron’, Gaius Julius Spartiaticus, ‘because of his virtue and eager all-encompassing munificence toward our colony’.Footnote ²⁵

How might Paul's appeal to ‘equality’ as the principle of relations between Christians have resonated in the context of Greco-Roman thought about unequal friendships? It is the thesis of Stephan Joubert's monograph Paul as Benefactor that Paul understood the collection as a benefaction through which he and his assemblies could assist the Jerusalem saints.Footnote ²⁶ According to Joubert, the Jerusalem church had already established itself as Paul's benefactor by endorsing his work in Antioch and his mission to the Gentiles.Footnote ²⁷ Thus, Paul's organization of the collection for Jerusalem was a reciprocal gift within the framework of a benefit exchange.Footnote ²⁸ One may criticize Joubert's description of benefaction as a relationship in which the parties were benefactors to each other: this construction misses the fundamental asymmetry of such relationships, frankly acknowledged by Aristotle's comparison of the benefactor to a ruler or a god.Footnote ²⁹ Nevertheless, I suggest that it is instructive to read Paul's appeal to ‘equality’ in the context of Greco-Roman thought about unequal friendships, because this reading approximates the way in which a few Corinthian Christians with surplus resources would have approached Paul's argument in 2 Cor 8.Footnote ³⁰ Believers such as Crispus and Gaius, who had been raised in a society of ‘benefits’, and who daily encountered statues and inscriptions honoring patrons in the public spaces of Roman Corinth, would have been all too familiar with the theory and practice of unequal friendship, even if their own resources did not approach those of civic benefactors.Footnote ³¹

Moreover, the success and magnitude of Paul's collection at Corinth would have depended upon his friendships with men of substance such as Crispus and Gaius. To be sure, Paul gave instruction to the whole community for the weekly accumulation of monies: each should set aside what he or she could, in accordance with gains (1 Cor 16.1–2).Footnote ³² But for the majority of the Corinthians, who lived at the subsistence level, this could hardly have been more than the widow's two mites.Footnote ³³ In a vertically organized society like Roman Corinth, only persons with surplus resources could have ensured that the collection would be ‘considerable’ (ἄξιοϛ), as Paul says that it must be, if he is to accompany it to Jerusalem in person (1 Cor 16.4).Footnote ³⁴ In approaching men such as Crispus and Gaius, the relational category that would have been available to Paul within Greco-Roman society was that of friendship.Footnote ³⁵ The vocabulary that Paul uses in 2 Corinthians in discussing the collection and the conflict that it generated—κοινωνία, βέβαιοϛ, ἁπλότηϛ, πίστιϛ, πλɛονɛξία, ἄδικον, λύπη—are so regularly associated with friendship in ancient literature as to warrant the hypothesis that friendship is the proper category in which to conceive of Paul's appeal to certain donors in the church at Corinth.Footnote ³⁶

Several aspects of Paul's argument in 2 Cor 8 may have encouraged such readers to interpret his appeal to ‘equality’ in the context of the theory of unequal friendship. First, there is Paul's characterization of the relationship that he seeks to promote between the Corinthians and the Jerusalemites as a κοινωνία (2 Cor 8.4), a term constantly associated with friendship by Aristotle, the Pythagoreans, and Greek writers generally.Footnote ³⁷ Second, there is Paul's repeated designation of the collection as a χάριϛ or ‘gift’ (2 Cor 8.4, 6), evoking the notion of reciprocation.Footnote ³⁸ Third, Paul's sententious observation (2 Cor 8.12) that a gift is ‘acceptable according to what one possesses, not what one does not possess’ (καθò ἐὰν ἔχῃ ɛὐπρόσδɛκτοϛ, οὐ καθὸ οὐκ ἔχɛι) might be seen as an endorsement of the principle of ‘proportionality’, as indeed it often is by commentators.Footnote ³⁹ Finally, there is Paul's frank acknowledgment of the unequal status of the parties to the relationship (2 Cor 8.14): at present, the Corinthians enjoy ‘abundance’ (πɛρίσσɛυμα), while the Jerusalemites suffer ‘deficiency’ (ὑστέρημα).Footnote ⁴⁰ Why should a reader whose consciousness had been shaped by the ideology of benefaction have understood Paul's appeal for ‘equality’ as anything other than the restitution of a balance within an unequal friendship?

If these are the expectations that Paul's argument evoked in readers of a certain class, then it is likely that his appeal to the principle of ‘equality’ in encouraging participation in the collection would have appeared as a dangerous attempt to reverse the established social relations of power within Greco-Roman friendship. Let us see how this understanding of Paul's purpose might have arisen, by following the logic of his argument in 2 Cor 8.1–15, in order to draw out what is implicit. Paul begins the letter now preserved in 2 Cor 8 by calling attention to the success of the collection among the churches of Macedonia, as the occasion for requesting that the Corinthians fulfill their commitment to the project. Paul emphasizes the ‘abysmal poverty’ (ἡ κατὰ βάθουϛ πτωχɛία) of the Macedonians which has ‘overflowed into the wealth (τὸ πλοῦτοϛ) of their generosity’ and praises the Macedonians for acting ‘on their own initiative, petitioning…for the favor of partnership in the gift’ (2 Cor 8.1–5).Footnote ⁴¹ Noteworthy in this exordium is Paul's paradoxical assertion that the poverty of the Macedonians has become the source of wealth for the Jerusalem Christians. Paul develops this seemingly absurd proposition in the first of three proofs, appealing to the example of Jesus Christ (2 Cor 8.9): ‘For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that on account of you he became poor (ἐπτώχɛυσɛν), although he was rich (πλούσιοϛ), in order that by means of his poverty (πτωχɛία) you might become rich (πλουτήσητɛ) (2 Cor 8.9). Doubtless, Paul alludes here to the idea of the kenosis of the divine son, best known from the ‘Christ hymn’ of Phil 2.6–11.Footnote ⁴² But unique in 2 Cor 8 is the economic vocabulary, which evokes the image of Jesus living in circumstances of beggary (πτωχɛία) and attributes a soteriological function to Jesus' poverty.Footnote ⁴³

Paul's surprising description of material poverty as the source of spiritual wealth in the paradigmatic instances of the Macedonians and Jesus sets the parameters within which the Corinthians are encouraged to conceive of their relationship to the poor saints in Jerusalem, and so to embrace the principle of ‘equality’. Paul is arguing implicitly that the poor Jerusalem saints are in the position of the superior party, by virtue of spiritual wealth, which has alleviated the Corinthians' deficiency; so now, as the beneficiaries, the Corinthians are obliged, by the logic of inverse proportion, to make an extraordinary gift to the Jerusalem Christians, in order to restore ‘equality’. This argument, advanced somewhat elliptically in 2 Cor 8.1–15,Footnote ⁴⁴ is articulated explicitly in Rom 15.26–27, after the success of the collection was guaranteed: ‘for Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to share their resources with the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. They were pleased to do this, and indeed, they owe it to them: for if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material things.’Footnote ⁴⁵ It is not difficult to imagine how perverse this argument must have seemed to anyone shaped by the conventional notion of obligations between benefactors and beneficiaries, when Paul first advanced it in 2 Cor 8.

III

The second context in the Greek world in which Paul's use of the term ἰσότηϛ would have resonated is that of politics.Footnote ⁴⁶ As the classicist Rudolf Hirzel stated long ago, there is hardly a term which is so common in Greek discussions of law and politics as ‘equality’ (ἰσότηϛ and its cognate τὸ ἴσον).Footnote ⁴⁷ Aristotle explains that ‘because a state essentially consists of a multitude of persons,…reciprocal equality is the necessary preservative of states’.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the Greek state, the legal equality of persons before the law came to be differentiated from the social inequality of persons by nature.Footnote ⁴⁹ Equality was the basic principle of democracy: Aristotle states that equality is most fully realized in a democracy where ‘all alike share equally in the government’.Footnote ⁵⁰ But equality was also the stated goal of oligarchy, according to Aristotle, only that, in this case, ‘equality is according to worth’, which is to say, ‘by proportion’.Footnote ⁵¹ Now, we should make clear that equality in Greek politics was always a matter of rights and status, and was never extended into the economic sphere.Footnote ⁵² Indeed, the failure to extend equality into the economic domain threatened to undermine the basis of Athenian democracy, as acknowledged by Demosthenes in a bitter complaint: ‘Where the rich are concerned, Athenians, the rest of us have no share in our just and equal rights. Indeed we have not. The rich can choose their own time for facing a jury, and their crimes are stale and cold when they are dished up before you, but if any of the rest of us is in trouble, he is brought into court while all is fresh.’Footnote ⁵³

In his Hermeneia commentary on 2 Cor 8 and 9, Hans Dieter Betz argues that Paul's collection for the poor in Jerusalem should be understood in a political context: ‘A financial contribution which involves Greeks as donors and Palestinian Jews as recipients was certainly a political matter’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Betz acknowledges that in 2 Cor 8 the political idea remains largely at the presuppositional level, but ‘as the apostle explained in greater detail in 2 Cor 9.6–15, he regards the collection for the poor in Jerusalem as a means of bringing about unity within the church between Jews and Greeks’.Footnote ⁵⁵ What is known about the origin and ethnic composition of the early Christian community at Corinth supports Betz's suggestion that Paul's appeal for partnership in the collection would have had a political resonance. The majority of believers in Corinth were clearly non-Jews, as demonstrated by Paul's reference in 1 Cor 12.1–2 to a past in which ‘you were Gentiles…and were led astray to dumb idols’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet, the author of Acts attributes sensational importance to the conversion of the synagogue president Crispus in his account of the growth of the followers of Jesus to a ‘large people’ (Acts 18.10): ‘many of the Corinthians believed and had themselves baptized when they heard [of it]’—that is, of the conversion of Crispus (Acts 18.8).Footnote ⁵⁷ Greater plausibility accrues to Luke's account of the influence of Crispus from Philo's reference to a Jewish ‘colony’ at Corinth, which must have been of significant size and vitality, since it is one of only two Greek cities whose Jewish inhabitants Philo mentions by name.Footnote ⁵⁸ That Paul made an exception to his custom of not baptizing new converts and personally administered baptism to Crispus (1 Cor 1.14) is further indication of the prominence of this Jewish leader in the Christian community.Footnote ⁵⁹ In 2 Corinthians, when Jewish-Christian apostles arrive, and boast of their ethno-religious heritage as ‘Hebrews, Israelites, seed of Abraham’ (11.22), they receive a hospitable welcome among the Corinthians, even though they preach a gospel that differs from Paul's (11.4).Footnote ⁶⁰ Thus, unlike Paul's Macedonian assemblies, which seem to have been entirely non-Jewish, the church at Corinth was a mixture of Jews and Greeks, where ethnic identity was constantly negotiated.Footnote ⁶¹ In Corinth, it seems likely that Paul's appeal for partnership in the collection would have been seen as a political matter.

Precisely in this case, it must be emphasized how anomalous Paul's appeal to the principle of ‘equality’ between Jews and Greeks would have seemed. A careful examination of edicts and petitions, together with the relevant passages in Philo and Josephus, provides no grounds for thinking that Jews enjoyed equal rights identified with citizens in any of the Greek cities of the Roman east.Footnote ⁶² When Josephus speaks of the ἰσοπολιτɛία of the Jewish community in Alexandria and elsewhere, he intends to describe an equal (or similar) organizational status of the Jewish πολίτɛυμα as a parallel body, separate from the polis.Footnote ⁶³ The Jewish rights mentioned by Josephus are the right to keep ancestral laws and the right to maintain their own organizations, with a well-defined Jewish way of life.Footnote ⁶⁴ In sum, the evidence does not suggest that the Jews enjoyed citizenship in the polis by virtue of the reciprocity of civic rights. Indeed, the history of Jewish communities in the Diaspora is that of a continuous struggle to exist as separate organizations (πολιτɛύματα), while the Hellenistic πόλɛιϛ sought to destroy them and to impose their own laws and rule on the Jews.Footnote ⁶⁵

We must remind ourselves that Paul's letters to Corinth were written in the aftermath of the Caligula crisis, when Jewish efforts to defend their ἰσοπολιτɛία reached a flash-point of violence in Alexandria, Caesarea and elsewhere.Footnote ⁶⁶ Philo records the declaration of Flaccus, the governor of Egypt, that the Jews of Alexandria were ‘foreigners and aliens’ in a city where they had resided for hundreds of years.Footnote ⁶⁷ Claudius's letter to the Alexandrians advises that the Jews should ‘enjoy what is their own in a city which is not their own’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The anti-Jewish writers countered by Josephus in the Contra Apionem show us how some Greeks and Hellenized Egyptians perceived the Jewish struggle for equal rights: Manetho's revisionist history of the exodus was designed to emphasize the features of the Jewish people that marked it from its birth and ever after as a contemptible rabble of aliens, captives and slaves, who must be forcibly expelled in order to purify the city;Footnote ⁶⁹ Apion contended that the Jews represented pure barbarism, because of their misanthropic, rebellious and conspiratorial propensities, and so should not be accorded social, legal, or political equality.Footnote ⁷⁰

Paul's appeal to ‘equality’ as the principle that should govern relations between Greeks and Jews would be especially shocking, if Hans Dieter Betz is correct in his interpretation of Paul's subsequent statement in 2 Cor 9.13 about the effect of the collection as signifying the obligatory submission of the Achaians to the Jerusalemites.Footnote ⁷¹ Betz argues that the key terms of 2 Cor 9.13 are derived from the realms of law and politics: ὑποταγή is ‘submission’ to a legal agreement or a political arrangement; ὁμολογία does not mean ‘confession’ here, as it does elsewhere in the NT, ‘but is to be understood in its legal sense as a public act involving a document which codifies a transaction’.Footnote ⁷² Thus the phrase ἡ ὑποταγὴ τῆϛ ὁμολογίαϛ ὑμῶν means that ‘the donors have entered into a contractual agreement (ὁμολογία) by means of their donation, the substance of which is their submission (ὑποταγή) to Jerusalem’.Footnote ⁷³ Betz's translation of 2 Cor 9.13 successfully captures the technical quality of a legal contract: ‘Through the evidence of this charitable gift, they [that is, the believers in Jerusalem] praise God for the submission [expressed] by the contractual agreement for the [benefit of] the gospel of Christ, and [for] the generosity of the partnership benefiting them and all’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Here, again, we encounter the dangerous reversal of the logic of inverse proportion: the politically superior inhabitants of a Roman colony must demonstrate their submission to conquered provincials in Jerusalem, in order to achieve ‘equality’.

IV

The third context for understanding Paul's use of the term ἰσότηϛ is supplied by philosophical speculation on the cosmos.Footnote ⁷⁵ Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates a speech in praise of ‘equality’ as the power that orders the cosmos:

Similarly, in the pseudo-Aristotelian De Mundo, ‘equality’ is the force that preserves the cosmos: ‘In these greater matters, nature teaches us that equality is the preserver of concord, and concord is the preserver of the cosmos, which is the parent of all things and the most beautiful of all’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Appropriating this philosophical tradition, Philo attributes great importance to ἰσότηϛ, but as a Jew, he affirms that ‘equality’ is the ordering work of God the creator. In the treatise πɛρὶ ἰσότητοϛ, that makes up a significant portion of the writing ‘Who is the Heir of Divine Things’ (141–206), Philo asserts that God alone is perfectly just and able to establish right balance: thus, ‘God alone is able to attain to sublime and perfect equality’.Footnote ⁷⁸ According to Philo, the world that God has created embodies proportionate equality:

In illustration of God's equitable administration of the cosmos, Philo references the provision of manna in the wilderness, and even cites the text of Exod 16.18, the very passage adduced by Paul in 2 Cor 8.15.Footnote ⁸⁰

The great commentator Hans Windisch was so impressed by the similarity between Paul and Philo in the treatment of ἰσότηϛ that he posited that they drew upon a common tradition of Hellenistic-Jewish Torah interpretation.Footnote ⁸¹ Dieter Georgi adopted this suggestion and took it to the extreme, largely assimilating Paul to Philo.Footnote ⁸² A close reading of Georgi's monograph on Paul's collection for Jerusalem reveals that Georgi was trying to preserve the dialectical moment in Paul's thought about ‘equality’, resisting, on the one hand, the notion that Paul made a concession to secular do ut des thinking, while, on the other hand, holding at bay the mystical dimension of a Gnostic understanding of ἰσότηϛ, which Georgi identified as a tendency of the Hellenistic-Jewish Wisdom tradition, and which Georgi suggested might have been on the minds of Paul's Corinthian readers.Footnote ⁸³ Consequently, Georgi proposed that Paul, like Philo, saw ἰσότηϛ as a divine force, and that ‘Paul's expression ἐξ ἰσότητοϛ is practically interchangeable with ‘ἐκ θɛοῦ’ or ‘ἐκ χάριτοϛ’.Footnote ⁸⁴ In other words, by appealing to ‘equality’, Paul wished to refer to the divine source of giving and receiving.Footnote ⁸⁵ Georgi summarized: ‘The main point Paul clearly wishes to make is that the constant and all-encompassing movement of grace, which is and makes both righteous and equal, dwells permanently in its divine origin’.Footnote ⁸⁶

With due respect for the force of Georgi's insights, I must dissent from this interpretation and insist that Georgi missed what is distinctive in Paul's understanding of the divine origin of equality. For essential to the philosophical view, whether the divine is conceived as a creator God or a personified force of nature, is the notion of perfection and immutability: because the divine is absolutely just, changeless and immortal, the divine is capable of establishing ‘equality’ in the cosmos.Footnote ⁸⁷ It is precisely this conception of the divine that has been ruptured in Paul's thought by the Christ-event. Paul has come to believe in a deity who voluntarily ‘impoverished’ himself (2 Cor 8.9),Footnote ⁸⁸ who abandoned plentitude (Phil 2.6–8), and by his self-emptying opened a space for human beings to pursue ‘equality’.Footnote ⁸⁹ The difference between Paul and the philosophers is best illustrated by Dio Chrysostom's commentary on the speech of Jocasta in Euripides, praising personified Ἰσότηϛ, which ordained measures and weights for men, and set day and night in their yearly round.Footnote ⁹⁰ Dio offers a rather free philosophical interpretation: ‘The poet says that there is no excess among divine beings, wherefore they remain indestructible and ageless, each single one keeping its own proper position night and day through all the seasons. For, the poet adds, if they were not so ordered, none of them would be able to survive.’Footnote ⁹¹

Precisely the point where Windisch and Georgi saw the greatest similarity between Paul and Philo—namely, the citation of Exod 16.18—exposes the novelty of Paul's conception of the way in which the divine objective is realized in human action. Philo cites the Exodus passage as an example of the perfectly equitable distribution accomplished by the divine λόγοϛ: ‘Again this heavenly food of the soul, which Moses calls manna, the word of God divides in equal portions among those who are to use it, taking care of equality to an extraordinary degree. And Moses bears witness to this where he says, “He who gathered much had not too much, and he who gathered less was in no want”.’Footnote ⁹² Paul, by contrast, does not quote the verse as an illustration of providential distribution, but rather as a paradigm of the equality that human beings can achieve through redistributive action.Footnote ⁹³ Commentators generally assert that Paul quotes the Greek version of Exod 16.18 ‘almost verbatim’.Footnote ⁹⁴ But closer attention to the subtle changes that Paul makes in the Septuagint text (Exod 16.18 reads: οὐκ ἐπλɛόνασɛν ὁ τὸ τολύ, καὶ ὁ τὸ ἔλαττον οὐκ ἠλαττόνησɛν)Footnote ⁹⁵ reveals that Paul's interest in this text is not the same as Philo's, and indeed, is not entirely consistent with the point of the biblical story.Footnote ⁹⁶ Paul reverses the order of subject and verb in the first clause, and changes τὸ ἔλαττον to τὸ ὀλίγον in the second clause: ὁ τὸ πολὺ οὐκ ἐπλɛόνασɛν, καὶ ὁ τὸ ὀλίγον οὐκ ἠλαττόνησɛν.Footnote ⁹⁷ The effect of these changes is to destroy the chiastic structure of the Septuagint text, a structure which linguistically mirrors the miracle of divine equalization, and to emphasize the inequality of the parties, by the absolute contrast between ‘the one who has much’ and ‘the one who has little’ (2 Cor 8.15). Paul's linear sentence serves to advocate equality between persons of different resources through redistributive action. Yet again, we encounter the Pauline reversal of the ancient logic of inverse proportion: the divine and the human change places in respect to the realization of equality. The voluntary self-impoverishment of the divine opens a new space for human action—the economic.

V

We conclude with a few reflections upon Paul's application of the concept ‘equality’ to relations between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. I would suggest that, in this way, Paul contributes to the tentative emergence of a new category of thought—the economic. As noted above, Moses Finley argued that ‘Greeks and Romans lacked the concept of an “economy”’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Finley elaborated:

And the two treatises from antiquity which bear this title—one attributed to Xenophon and the other, wrongly, to Aristotle—are not analyses of a sub-system of society, but are manuals of household administration for the education of the gentleman farmer.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Is there a precedent in the Greco-Roman world for Paul's attempt to create an economic structure, the goal of which was to achieve an equality of possessions between persons of different classes through redistributive exchange? The parallels adduced by Windisch and other commentators are not relevant.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Thus, according to Xenophon, the great king Cyrus ‘accepted that of which the givers had abundance, and gave in return that of which he saw that they were in need’.Footnote ¹⁰² Plutarch rehearses the legend that the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus established a society in which ‘there was neither greed nor want, but equality in well-being’.Footnote ¹⁰³ But Plutarch is not ignorant of the fact that such a society was only possible because the Spartans forced the Helots to till their ground.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ There is no genuine point of comparison between the efforts of a king or a lawgiver to equalize the distribution of resources and Paul's attempt to create a structure for direct exchange between persons of different social classes.

In my view, Steven Friesen has come closest to capturing the novelty of Paul's collection through his proposal that Paul was promoting an alternative to patronage: ‘financial redistribution among poor people, Gentile and Jewish, in the assemblies of the eastern Mediterranean’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ But Friesen comes up short, because he circumscribes Paul's appeal to ‘equality’ within the ethics of a single, modestly differentiated social group—poor people.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Whereas, Paul promotes something more radical: the equalization of resources between persons of different social classes through voluntary redistribution.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Friesen minimizes the evidence of social inequality, not only within the Corinthian congregation, where a few believers, such as Crispus and Gaius, have more than ‘modest surplus resources’,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ but also between the Corinthians and the Jerusalemites.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Paul speaks explicitly of the ‘abundance’ (πɛρίσσɛυμα) of the Corinthians and the ‘lack’ (ὑστέρημα) of the saints in Jerusalem. I see no reason to believe that this is rhetorical exaggeration.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Through all stages of the Corinthian correspondence, Paul anticipates the crucial role that the Corinthians will play in the success of the collection on account of their greater wealth. At the earliest mention of the collection project in 1 Cor 16.1–4, Paul adds to the instructions for accumulating monies a promissory incentive: ‘if [the collection] is sufficiently large’ (ἐὰν δὲ ἄξιον ᾖ), he himself will convey it to Jerusalem.Footnote ¹¹¹ In 2 Cor 8.20, Paul seeks to reassure the Corinthians about ‘the large sum of money’ (ἁδρότηϛ) which they are entrusting to his administration.Footnote ¹¹²

I will concede that Friesen's understanding of Paul's purposes is modest and realistic.Footnote ¹¹³ But I would contend that Paul reflects an awareness of the audacity of his proposal, by referencing the manna miracle as paradigmatic of the action he is asking the Corinthians to take.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The moment in which such a revolutionary action is possible is ‘the now time’ (ὁ νῦν καιρόϛ), which is not a mundane present, but the Messianic time, which is charged to the bursting point with hope.Footnote ¹¹⁵