Summary and Conclusions

This chapter summarizes the previous chapters and notes that Paul’s letters shift the temporal framing of the classic formulation do ut des, “I give so that you might give.” Paul’s reformulation was rather “I give because you have given”; in his view, the preeminent gifts—God’s gift of his son, and Jesus’ gift of himself on the cross—had already been given. The effect was to render members of early Christian assemblies and other potential converts in the role of recipients of divine gifts, to which they were to respond with thanksgiving, gratitude, and reciprocal gifts of labor time, money, and other material goods. In this way, religious myth served as the catalyst for an entire system of exchange in the sociopolitical realm of the early Christian assembly: it facilitated the creation of a “spiritual economy.” Today, Paul’s letters facilitate the elaboration of a number of theoretical perspectives on gift exchange developed within the fields of anthropology and sociology; the conjunction in Paul’s letters of “religion” and “gift” provides significant opportunity for interdisciplinary study.

Spiritual Gifts and Status Inversion

This chapter enlists Carole Crumley’s notion of heterarchy as a means of critiquing and refining Wayne Meeks’s notion of status inconsistency as it pertains to Pauline assemblies. The chapter shows that status is to be viewed not only as a multidimensional phenomenon but also as the subject of intense contest, negotiation, and change over time. Paul deploys a discourse of “spiritual gifts”—specifically the idea that the power by which Jesus was raised from the dead was transforming his “inner human being” into a glorious immortal being—in order to propose an inversion of the criteria utilized for the evaluation of social rank, such that he, an impoverished itinerant craftsman, might be evaluated within early Christian assemblies as having a status higher than that of wealthier patronal figures and gifted orators.

Introduction

The “free gift” posited by Christian theology indicates that “salvation” may not be bought in a market transaction. This, however, does not imply that no reciprocal donations are expected: gifts, offerings, tithes, and labor time are expended in gratitude for the “gift” of salvation. Although gifts are characterized by an irreducible complexity, they are typically described by parties to the exchange using verbs such as “give” or “donate,” they are followed by countergifts of which neither the value nor the time of their giving is determined in advance, they are regulated not by legal but by social sanctions, and they are accompanied by displays of gratitude and thanksgiving. The introduction briefly outlines the material to be presented in subsequent chapters.

The Benefactor’s Account Book: The Rhetoric of Gift Reciprocation According to Seneca and Paul

In his treatise De beneficiis, “On Benefits,” Seneca indicates that patrons ought never to call attention to the fact when they have given gifts; to do so would humiliate the donee. Paul commits what in Seneca’s terms is a faux pas when he calls attention to the fact that he had mediated the “gift of salvation” to the slaveholder Philemon. For Paul’s mediation of that heavenly gift, Paul reminds Philemon that he owes Paul his very life; Paul indicates, however, that if Philemon were to grant Paul the continued use of the slave Onesimus, that would go a long way toward repaying Philemon’s debt. The economic locations of Paul and Seneca inflect their diametrically opposed practices: the inordinately wealthy Seneca can afford to give expensive gifts in abundance—accruing honor and prestige as a lavish donor in the process—whereas the impoverished Paul attempts (in his letter to Philemon) to gain access to the labor services of a wealthier man’s slave, an evident material benefit. Seneca and Paul differently utilize discourses and practices of gift exchange to gain access to valued resources, whether prestige or labor services

Symbolic Goods as Media of Exchange in Paul’s Gift Economy

Using the concept of the “economy of symbolic goods” developed by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this chapter shows how Paul construes linguistic “goods,” in the form of promises and assurances of gifts and benefits posited as proceeding from the god of Israel, as exchangeable with currency, material goods, and labor services within an ethic of reciprocity. Seneca the Younger uses the image of the dancing Graces to illustrate reciprocity. Paul’s letters indicate that he construes a benefit (charis) from the god of Israel as eliciting a countergift, whether in the mode of “paying it forward” by donating to a collection for the early Christian assembly in Jerusalem, or by “repaying” Paul himself through granting him the use of a slave, Onesimus.

Classification and Social Relations: The Dark Side of the Gift

Although gift exchange is often vaunted for its socially integrative functions, it is also associated with negative effects: obligation, coercion, indebtedness, and the psychological and social oppression of the donee. Perhaps due to the refusal of an offer of hospitality in Corinth, Paul becomes embroiled in hostile relations that indicate the “dark side of the gift.” Paul can classify the same exchange differently at different times, and, in attempts to activate social responses of friendship or hostility, he can label his own labor a “gift” while labeling the same type of labor performed by others a “commodity.” The chapter shows that since the classification of exchange carries significant implications for social interaction, attempts to classify a given exchange cannot be disassociated from attempts to orchestrate sociopolitical relations and, in fact, always serve sociopolitical functions.

The Gift of Status

Studies of gift exchange have long recognized that lavish giving is associated with enhanced status. This chapter shows that status itself may sometimes be granted as a gift rather than being simply a corollary of gift exchange. Two types of status are distinguished: positional status, which refers to a particular position or role within a sociopolitical field, and accorded status, which is allocated on the basis of communal assessments regarding the excellence or exemplary manner in which one fulfills the duties and obligations associated with a particular social position. An examination of the letters of Pliny the Younger shows how patronage brokers functioned as middlemen mediating “gifts of (positional) status” from the emperor to lower-ranking (often equestrian) elites. Paul, too, makes use of the idea of “gifts of status,” as the positions of apostle, prophet, and teacher are viewed as “gifts from God” within the hierarchically organized early Christian assemblies.

Gift or Commodity? On the Classification of Paul’s Unremunerated Labor

The distinction between gift and commodity, recognized by Marcel Mauss and elaborated by James Carrier (among others), has been shown in previous studies to be tenuous in some respects. Based on a close examination of the rhetoric of 1 Cor 9, in which Paul classifies apostolic labor as a commodity but then insists that he offers his own labor “free of charge”—thus placing it into the register of the gift—this chapter shows that static or essentialist notions about what constitutes a “gift” or “commodity” are inadequate to grasp the complexity of the data as they pertain to many types of exchange relations. The classification of an exchange as “gift” or “commodity” is not based solely on the objective features of a given transaction; the sociopolitical interests of the transacting parties play a significant role in their choice between classificatory categories.