Christian discourse regarding what it means to be “rich” or “poor” routinely fails to recognize just how elastic and contextual those concepts are. The definitions depend an awful lot on whom you ask, both now and in antiquity.
For example, you can find rhetorical rich/poor dichotomies that count reasonably well-off landowners as the poor over against a “rich.” To give just one concrete example, John Chrysostom could even suggest that the truly “poor” were greatly outnumbered in Antioch by the rich “and those who rank immediately behind them.”[1]
That’s simply not how we are accustomed to think of urban poverty, especially in the premodern world, and those examples start abounding the closer you look. That should in turn complicate some superficial readings of how wealth, property, and status function in texts like James or the Sermon on the Mount or Mary’s Magnificat.
But again, those subtleties are rarely reflected in contemporary Christian teaching, preaching, and writing, which often prefer to hitch political or social agendas to said superficial readings. That’s not at all to say that there’s no such thing as poverty or that Christians shouldn’t care about it; that would be intellectually (and spiritually) hazardous.
It is to suggest that we all should probably spend five more minutes thinking about what those categories mean in our world before assuming that our taxonomies cleanly align with the Bible’s.
Take the example of Jesus himself. Jesus was “poor,” right?
Particularly around Christmas, we are reminded that Jesus come to earth not as a member of the kalloi kagathoi. Instead, he was born in a barn and initially welcomed by shepherds. And there is something to that idea, of course (see Phil. 2:6–11, Matt. 8:20), But it is usually presented with a kind of rhetorical maximalism: we’re to imagine something more like destitution or else a severe subsistence poverty that afflicted all who weren’t rich and powerful—and there’s more than a twinge of Marxist pessimism in that picture, by the way. Christianity, we are told, uniquely appealed to this class.
But most indications are that artisans in the Roman empire were far from the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder. Kim Bowes’s recently published Surviving Rome (Princeton, 2025) argues persuasively that most non-elites didn’t get by solely on one line of work. To make ends meet, a small family might try, for example, to combine day laboring, farming some of its own land, and textile work.
Consider the familiar parable of the workers. Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to
a master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And going out about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and to them he said, “You go into the vineyard too, and whatever is right I will give you.” So they went. Going out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour, he did the same. And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing. And he said to them, “Why do you stand here idle all day?” They said to him, “Because no one has hired us.” He said to them, “You go into the vineyard too.” And when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, “Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last, up to the first.” And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius. Now when those hired first came, they thought they would receive more, but each of them also received a denarius. (ESV, Matt. 20: 1-15)
Many might assume that Jesus and his interlocutors belong to the same economic class as the day laborers in the parable: “peasants” or some such homogeneous bloc. But Egyptian evidence surviving from the era of the Principate indicates greater variety among non-elites. For example, an artisan stonemason or carpenter, such as Jesus himself, could earn between 2–4 times the wages of a day laborer.[2]
Some have further suggested that Luke’s depiction of the census implies Joseph as an urban property owner. That would be the only reason—so the argument goes—that the empire would have him register in Bethlehem.[3]
That doesn’t mean Jesus would have struck anyone as “wealthy”; there were lots of ups and downs in the demand for artisan labor too, as Bowes points out. Jesus’ family probably had some experience farming as well: a notion later tradition affirmed by claiming that the grandsons of Jude were humble farmers.
This socio-economic data adds some texture and color to an otherwise undifferentiated mass of “peasants” living at subsistence, which is too often how we picture the non-elites of the ancient world. To the extent that the antiquity had its own underclass, Jesus and his immediate family probably didn’t belong to it.
See discussion of this and similar examples in Richard Finn, “Portraying the Poor: Descriptions of Poverty in Christian Texts from the Late Roman Empire,” in Poverty in the Roman World, ed. E. Margaret Atkins and Robin Osborne (Cambridge University Press, 2006). ↑
On wages, see Kimberly Bowes, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent (Princeton University Press, 2025), 171–211. ↑
G. Anthony Keddie, “Roman Provincial Censuses as Sociopolitical Regulation: Implications for Interpreting the Synoptic Gospels and Acts,” in Taxation, Economy, and Revolt in Ancient Rome, Galilee, and Egypt, ed. Thomas R. Blanton et al., Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies (Routledge, 2022), 85. ↑