Community of Goods.—The key to the- two passages, li. 42 ff. and iv. 32 ff., is to. be found in the expression in which they both agree, occurring in ii. 45 and iv. 35, καθότι ἄν τις χρείαν εἶχεν. Such ex- pressions indicate, as we have seen, not reckless but judicious charity (see also Ramsay, St. Paul, etc., p. 373, ands
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reading in D, ii., 45); they show wise management, as in early days St. Chry- sostom noted in commenting on the words, so that the Christians did not act recklessly like many philosophers among the Greeks, of whom some gave up their lands, others cast great quantities of money into the sea, which was no con- tempt of riches, but only folly and mad- ness (Hom., vii.). Not that St. Luke’s glowing and repeated description (on St. Luke’s way of sometimes repeating him- self as here, see Harris, Four Lectures on the Western Text, p. 85) is to be confined ‘to the exercise of mere almsgiving on the part of the Church. Both those who had, and those who had not, were alike the inheritors of a kingdom which could only be entered by the poor in spirit, alike members of a family and a house- hold in which there was one Master, even Christ, in Whose Name all who believed were brethren. In this poverty of spirit, in this sense of brotherhood, ‘‘the poor man knew no shame, the rich no haughtiness” (Chrys.).
But whilst men were called upon to ' give ungrudgingly, they were not called upon to give of necessity: what each one had was still his own, τὰ ὑπάρχοντα αὐτῷ, iv. 32, although not even one (οὐδὲ eis) of them reckoned it so; the daily ministration in vi. 1 seems to show that no equal division of property amongst all was intended; the act of Barnabas was apparently one of charity rather than of communism, for nothing is said of an absolute surrender of all that he had; the act of Ananias and Sapphira was entirely voluntary, although it presented itself almost as a duty (Ramsay, u.s.); Mark’s mother still retains her home at Jerusa- lem, xii. 12, and it would seem that Mnason too had a dwelling there (see on xxi. 16). At Joppa, ix. 36, 39, and at Antioch, xi. 29, there was evidently no absolute equality of earthly possessions —Tabitha helps the poor out of her own ‘resources, and every man as he prospered sent his contributions to the Church at Jerusalem.
It is sometimes urged that this en- thusiasm of charity and of the spirit (ἐνθονσιασμός, as Blass calls it), which filled at all events the Church at Jeru- salem, was due to the expectation of Christ’s immediate return, and that in the light of that event men regarded lands and possessions as of no account, -even if ordinary daily work was not neg- lected (Ο. Holtzmann, Neutest. Zeit- geschichte, p. 233). But it is strange that if this is the true account of the