Did Christianity invent charity?

Deuteronomy, in one verse: "the poor will never cease out of the land", therefore "I command you to surely open your hand to your brother, to your needy, and to your poor, in your land."

That is the tradition the first Christians were already inside. Any account of what they invented has to start by subtracting what they were handed.

Justin, in the middle of the second century, describing the weekly gathering to an emperor: "they who are well to do, and willing, give what each thinks fit; and 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, and those who are in bonds and the strangers sojourning among us."

A collection, held centrally, with a list of recipients that includes prisoners and foreigners. It is the ordinary business of the meeting rather than a special appeal.

Julian, writing in 362 to a pagan high priest about why his religious revival was not yet prospering, asks "why do we not observe that it is their benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done most to increase atheism", his word for Christianity.

His remedy is to copy it: "in every city establish frequent hostels in order that strangers may profit by our benevolence; I do not mean for our own people only", funded with 30,000 measures of corn a year for Galatia.

Then the sentence this page turns on: "it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us."

One caution about the witness. In 2002 Peter Van Nuffelen, noting that nobody had yet doubted the letter, argued that it betrays the hand of a Christian writing in the first half of the fifth century, and offered that as enough to open the question rather than to close it. If he is right, the witness is not hostile.

The half about the Jews is in the same clause as the half about the Christians, from a witness writing to shame his own priests rather than to praise either. Whatever Christian giving was, it was not without precedent and the emperor complaining about it knew that.

What he describes as distinctive is the reach: support extended to people outside the group, including his own.

Classical cities had public giving of their own, from their wealthy citizens in return for public honours, which invites comparison with Christian almsgiving. The chapter cited here is the one that sets the two beside each other, and this page has read its record rather than its text, so what it concludes is not reported here.

Care for the destitute as such, and for outsiders, does look like a different target. It is also true that the comparison is often drawn by people who want a particular answer.

The letter plainly thinks it did. Rodney Stark’s account of why the movement spread gives chapters to epidemics and to crisis in the cities, which is where such a mechanism would show. This page has read the book’s list of contents, not its argument.

It is a plausible mechanism resting on one letter’s opinion and a handful of descriptions, which is thin for a claim about a whole society.

One figure comes from a letter of Cornelius, bishop of Rome, which Eusebius preserves: his church, he says, fed "over fifteen hundred widows and persons in distress". One city, at one moment, from a bishop making a point against a rival.

The Christian descriptions come from writers presenting the church to outsiders or to itself, and both have reasons to describe the practice at its best. The hostile one was written to shame its readers into matching it, which is a reason too.

That the practice existed is well attested. Its scale is not: a figure like Cornelius’s is the kind there is, and anything wider is extrapolation.

Not a policy. The texts treat care for the poor as part of worship itself: one letter calls "doing good and sharing" a sacrifice, and Justin’s collection is taken at the Sunday meeting. The later tradition built institutions around it: hospitals, hostels, orders founded for the purpose.

The same history contains the failures anyone can list, and the two are not cancelling entries in a ledger. Both are what this actually looked like over twenty centuries.

Acts’ description of the first community goes further than the voluntary giving Justin describes: "not one of them claimed that anything of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common", with distribution "to each, according as anyone had need".

Whether that was a brief experiment in one city, a summary written to edify, or a pattern nobody managed to hold, the movement did not stay that way. It is one of the clearest cases in the collection of a practice its own scripture describes and its own history did not keep.