Early Christians and Their Socioeconomic Contexts

This essay will assess scholarship from the last two decades on the socioeconomic profile and diversity of the early Christian communities. Several methodological observations about recent studies on social stratification and its implications for early Christian groups in the Greco-Roman world will also be offered, touching on poverty and the dynamics of rank and status in antiquity. 1 The transitions in scholarly consensus prior to twenty-first-century scholarship on social stratification in the early Christian communities are well known and need only be briefly summarized below.

Diversity (politics) · Early Christianity · Geography · Political science · Poverty · Scholarship · Social science · Social stratification · Socioeconomic status · Sociology · Anthropology · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Demography · Historical and Architectural Studies · History