The Judaean cultural context of community of goods in the early Jesus movement: Part IV. The Jesus movement and holy community of life and property amongst the poor of Judaea

This article explores the origins of the earliest Jerusalem believers’ communal lifestyle (Acts 1:13–14, 2:42–47; 4:32–5:11; cf. 6.1–6). Jesus’ example and authority sanctioned community of life and property. Wealthy supporters made benefactions (Luke 8:1–3) to his travelling party’s shared purse. Jesus’ group financed from their common purse support for the poor, common meals and other needs (John 6.5–7; 12:4–6; 13:29). Ideals of holiness and complete consecration dominated ancient Judaea more than Galilee. Highly dedicated service to God in common life amongst the poor had originated as a Judaean response, amongst the Essenes, to the harshness of agrarian subsistence economy. The verb nosphizomai, used of Ananias’ crime in Acts 5:2–3, means ‘embezzle, misappropriate’; Peter’s reference to Ananias’ sale of property (5:4) may reflect the Hebrew verb macar in its root sense ‘hand over’. Ananias’ property-surrender, which was only provisional, reflected both the Essene novitiate (1QS 6.13–23, cf. Josephus, Jewish War 2.8.7 §§137–142) and the nascent Church’s associations with Essenes in Jerusalem

The Judaean cultural context of community of goods in the Early Jesus Movement: Part V. Voluntary economic association and the creation of economic security through education and occupational training in the Essene fictive kinship groups of Ancient Judaea

This next part of my study: 1) depicts in greater depth the innovative, securing economic structures which Essenism had created in the region, demonstrating specifically: 2) that these cooperative economic structures secured the lives of children in the region who lacked support in local kinship structures; 3) that poor children who lacked support in local kinship structures received, instead, economic and social security through membership in new fictive kinship structures; 4) that these voluntarily created fictive kinship structures offered educational opportunities to girls and boys, and to young men and young women, the education thus bestowed constituting part of the method of securing the lives of previously unattached children and youth by offering them economically realistic occupational training and education on which to found secure future livelihoods; 5) that indigent elderly, both women and men, also otherwise unsupported in local kinship structures, received economic security through incorporation into the fictive kinship groups of the local community houses, within which they received effective charitable care; 6) that these elderly men and women gave generously, in return, of their wisdom, skill, time and effort in the education of children and youth taken in by the community houses, thereby training up a reciprocally grateful new core membership; and finally 7) that through the fictive kinship alliance created between the supported elderly, children and youth, a ‘reciprocity of the generations’ was founded and perpetuated through which rescued, able-bodied members of the community houses, having themselves attained economically secure adult lives through the largesse enabled by the cooperative economic and social structures of the community house, in turn expended economic resources, time and affection to caring for the elderly, especially when these, in the latter stages of their lives, became infirm and fully dependent upon the mutually covenanted fictive kinship city, town and town and village groups

The Judean cultural context of community of goods in the early Jesus movement: Part I

Summary of the Argument of the Whole Study Luke’s account of the community of goods of the earliest community in Jerusalem is clearly idealised with popular philosophical catchphrases. However, instances of formal community of property were a pronounced feature of Palestinian Jewish culture, and had persisted for approaching two centuries amongst the sect of the Essenes prior to the events which Luke purports to describe. By New Testament times communities of Essenes which practised complete sharing of property were to be found in most of the villages and towns of Judaea. There was also a significant community of fully property-sharing Essenes by the ‘Gate of the Essenes’ on Jerusalem’s southwest hill, close to the traditional site of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples, the Pentecost events of Acts 2, and the first recorded occasions of the sharing of property and daily corporate spiritual life amongst the early community of believers in Jesus in Jerusalem after his death and resurrection. Features of Luke’s account of property-sharing in Acts 2–6 suggest the employment in the community of believers in Jesus of linguistic usages and organisational forms employed in the legislation for Essene community of goods revealed in the Rule of the Community discovered in Qumran cave 1. Other elements of Luke’s account are illuminated by the practicalities of Essene property-sharing arrangements revealed in the accounts of the Essenes given by Philo and Josephus. These clues point to the probable Judaean origins of the tradition and suggest that a group within the earliest Jerusalem Church practised formal property-sharing. Luke’s portrayal of earliest Christian community of goods can be taken seriously as an historical account

Men of perfect holiness: Essene religious virtuosity in Jerusalem and the crowd converted at Pentecost (Acts 2)

Claus-Hunno Hunzinger made an early study [‘Beobachtungen zur Entwicklung der Disziplinarordnung der Gemeinde von Qumrān’, in Hans Bardtke (ed.), Qumran-Probleme: Vorträge des Leipziger Symposions über Qumran-Probleme vom 9. bis 14. Oktober 1961(Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1963), pp. 231–247] of the development of the Rule of the Community, commenting on the role of the group of exceptional holiness of 1QS VIII within the yachadh. I am pleased to contribute to his memorial volume this study of the gathering for celebration of the Essene Covenant renewal festival at Pentecost of the Jerusalem settlement of the intensely communal Essene religious virtuosi, Jesus’ establishment of his founding group of Twelve and others amongst their number, and the conversion of many from this influential Jerusalem community to Jesus’ post-Easter community of disciples on the occasion of Peter’s Pentecost sermon (Acts 2)

The Judaean cultural context of community of goods in the early Jesus movement: Part III. The distribution of Essene community of goods in Southern Palestine and its poverty-relieving macroeconomic significance at the time of Jesus

This is Part III of a multi-part article. This Part advances the thesis that the practice of community of goods amongst the Essenes across southern Palestine at the time of Jesus was centred in Essene 'houses of the community' located in c. 200 villages, where these houses significantly alleviated poverty amongst the rural agrarian working population. One of these houses was Bethany, which means 'House of the Poor', new Jerusalem, where Jesus was anointed by a Jerusalem patrons of the house as royal Messianic leader of the nation

Algebraic Classification of Weyl Anomalies in Arbitrary Dimensions

Conformally invariant massless field systems involving only dimensionless parameters are known to describe particle physics at very high energy. In the presence of an external gravitational field, the conformal symmetry may generalize to Weyl invariance. However, the latter symmetry no longer survives after quantization: A Weyl anomaly appears. In this Letter, a purely algebraic understanding of the universal structure of the Weyl anomalies is presented. The results hold in arbitrary dimensions and independently of any regularization scheme.Comment: 4 pages - accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter