284 REVIWS

not necessarily (or yet) so. The important corollary is that Johns
Jews are representative of a Jewish community with whom
John the Jew remains heavily engaged, and that, although
Johns group and the Jewish community known to him were in
deadly rivalry, John also knew of Christian Jews within the
opposing camp from which John was intent on weaning them
away (p. 220). This all makes very good sense of Johns language
and purpose in writing his Gospel and throws further light on
the stresses and strains which were a feature of Johannine
Christianitys and rabbinic Judaisms emergence into the
second century.
The range and quality of the essays, not to mention their con-
troversial features, make the volume a most suitable birthday gift
for one of the most stimulating (and controversial) members of
the guild.

d0i:10.1093/jts/flri70 J. D . G . D u n n
Advance Access publication 16 January 2012 Durham University
j .d. g. dunn@b topen world, com

Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman

World. B y B r u c e W. L o n g e n e c k e r . Pp. xi + 380.
Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans,
2010. ISBN 978 o 8028 6373 7. Paper 16.g9/$25.
O n e interested in Pauline ethics will find no shortage of master-
ful, even minute, discussions of topics such as sexuality, politics,
Jew-Gentile relations, even slavery. But when it comes to the
subject of wealth, perhaps the most prominent ethical topic in
the rest of the biblical canonr the Apostle is at times said to have
ignored his Messiahs copious teachings on the proper use of
money. In future years, however, such a cavalier assertion will
be impossible, as Bruce Longeneckers monograph Remember the
Poor: Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman World has masterfully
argued that care for the needy constituted an integral part of
Pauline ethics.
Longeneckers book could well have been published in two
distinct volumes, the first being a ioo-page New Testament
scholars guide to poverty in the Greco-Roman world, and the
second, a book on poverty in the Pauline letters and commu-
nities. In Part I of his book (The Poor in their Ancient Places)
Longenecker deconstructs a number of the truisms that
T h e Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
 REVIEWS 285
oversimplify the analyses of many New Testament scholars.
Following his history of research (ch. 1), he opens with a sue-
cinct introduction to pre-industrial agrarian economics and de-
scribes the various biblical responses to the rich and powerful
people who attempted to manipulate those economies (ch. 2). He
then undertakes the ambitious task of elaborating a nuanced ac-
count of first-century socio-economic stratification. Building on
and refining his 2009 jfS N T article Exposing the Economic
M iddle, Longenecker first dismantles the commonplace lexical
distinction between and . He then sets his sights on
the frequent reduction of the ancient social economy to two
classes, an elite 1 per cent of rich honestioresy in contradistinction
to the mass of impoverished humiliores thought to comprise the
other 99 per cent of the ancient Roman society. After disman-
tling this binary model, Longenecker develops a nuanced
Economy Scale of seven tiers, according to which the ancient
population could be categorized in terms of relative wealth (ch. 3
and appendix 2). He subsequently offers a refined account of
charitable initiatives in the Greco-Roman world, decisively
rebutting the exaggerated notion that, apart from Judaeo-
Christian influence, charitable giving was essentially absent
from Hellenistic morality (ch. 4). The final chapter of Part I
examines charity in Jewish and early Christian traditions, signal-
ling the crucial features of non-Christian Jewish views, as well as
those of Jesus, the Gospels, and James; Longenecker demon-
strates the ubiquity of commitment to care for the poor in
Jewish ethics, and shows that such concern was crucial to
Jesus own preaching and, frequently, to Christian interpret-
ations of the Law (ch. 5 and appendix 2).
Part II (The Poor in Pauline Places) divides its pages be-
tween Pauls own writings and the communities to which he
wrote. Opening with a survey of Pauline letters (undisputed
and disputed) and the depiction of Paul in the Acts of the
Apostles and the Acts of Paul and Thecla, Longenecker demon-
strates that Paul expected care for the poor to be a hallmark of
the lives of his ecclesial communities (ch. 6). He then offers an
extended discussion of Gal. 2:10, rebutting the tired notion that
the poor whom Paul was instructed to remember were none
other than the Jerusalem Jesus-followers (or a subset thereof)
who called themselves the Poor as a consequence of their
self-divesting communalism. Longenecker exposes the vulner-
ability of this view in both patristic and modern interpretation
(ch. 7), and then provides an alternative reading of the passage.
He characterizes remembering the poor as an integral feature of
286 REVIEWS

Pauls message; such charity was an alternative expression of

Jewish-Christian piety over against circumcision, a compelling
missiological strategy in less-charitable pagan environs, and
indeed, an expression of cruciform, self-divesting love of neigh-
bour (chs. 8-9).
The latter half of Part II focuses on the economic profiles of
Pauls churches and the significance of their socio-economic lo-
cation for our understanding of the character and appeal of
Pauline wealth ethics. Longenecker unfolds a judicious prosopo-
graphic survey of the named individuals in Pauline letters and
locates those persons primarily between levels 6 and 4 of his
Economy Scale, that is, between those living at subsistence and
those with a stable and reasonably significant surplus beyond
their subsistence needs (ch. 10); this prosopographic profile not-
withstanding, Longenecker recognizes that people living below
the line of subsistence would also have figured prominently in
the Pauline communities, notwithstanding their general absence
from his letters. Longenecker also discusses what aspects of
Pauline ecclesial economics might have attracted people of dif-
fering levels of wealth, comparing and contrasting the appeals of
Pauline communities and pagan associations (ch. 11). Having laid
this historical groundwork, he then turns to the place of the poor
and charity in Pauline theology, rightly locating this discussion
in terms of ecclesiology and Christology and resisting the
common scholarly assumption that Christian charity did not
reach beyond the walls of the churches. He also helpfully im-
agines the economic composition of one Pauline community, as a
way of describing in more practical terms what the economic
dynamics of a typical church might have entailed (ch. 12).
Longeneckers final contribution is a prosopographic analysis of
Paul, in which he shows the reader a winsome and realistic
Apostle, a man who grew up enjoying the stability and benefits
of a family with a surplus of wealth but who voluntarily under-
took a variety of humiliations, even risking his own life, because
of his conviction that care for the poor was a central feature of
his discipleship to Jesus (ch. 13).
Remember the Poor is an invaluable resource. Longeneckers
extended engagement with both New Testament and classical
scholarship is manifest throughout the work, and has afforded
him a unique clarity regarding which of the long-standing tru-
isms of New Testament scholarship on economic ethics are over-
due for reconsideration. His prose is as engaging as his
argumentation is compelling. To say that this is the premier
work on Paul and poverty would be faint praise of
 REVIEWS 287
Longeneckers volume; although focused on Paul, Remember the
Poor is the best discussion of the economic dimensions of
first-century Christianity that this reviewer has yet seen, and
ought to become a standard point of reference for future schol-
arship on poverty and charity in the New Testament.

d0i:10.1093/jts/flr145 CHRISTOPHER M . HAYS

Advance Access publication 24 November 2011 Keble Collegey
University of Oxford
christopher.hays@theology.ox.ac.uk

Flights of the Soul: Visions, Heavenly Journeys and Peak

Experiences in the Biblical World. By J o h n J. P i l c h .
Pp. xiii + 238. Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge,
UK: Eerdmans, 2011. i s b n 978 o 8028 6540 3. Paper
$24 / 16 .9 9 .
I n this volume of essays John J. Pilch argues that reports of
several seemingly bizarre experiences in the Bible can (and prob-
ably should) be understood in terms of Altered/Alternate States
of Consciousness (ASCs). This term refers to the fact that
human awareness can range from sleep and dreams, through
normal waking consciousness, to trance states, possession states,
and out-of-body experiences such as shamanic soul-flight (or sky
journeys). Flights of the Soul contains a collection of previously
published articles in which the concept of ASCs is applied in
turn to the visions of Ezekiel and Enoch, the role of the flute
players in the Matthean account of the raising of the dead girl,
Jesus Baptism, Temptation, Walking on the Sea, Transfigura-
tion, Resurrection Appearances, and Ascension, Pauls call vision
on the road to Damascus, and the visions of the book of Revela-
tion, with an introduction presenting a kitbashed model of
Alternate States of Consciousness.
Drawing on cross-cultural anthropology and psychology, and
with occasional references to cognitive neuroscience, Pilch ob-
serves that the experience of ASCs is the norm rather than the
exception in human cultures, modern Western society being
something of an aberration in tending to suppress them. He
also emphasizes the need to approach biblical texts with cultural
sensitivity, avoiding the temptation to impose an inappropriate
Western mindset on them. W hether or not each of the biblical
incidents Pilch examines in fact derived from an ASC
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For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
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