Alms: Charity, Reward, and Atonement in Early Christianity by David J. Downs (review)

Despite its title, this book is not about what early Christians did for the poor, but studies the texts deployed by early Christian writers from the first to the third century to articulate the meritorious or atoning power of almsgiving. In contrast to Roman Garrison’s 1993 Redemptive Almsgiving in Early Christianity, David Downs argues that avowal of the atoning power of almsgiving was not opposed to “avowal of the unique, atoning death of Jesus” (p. 6). Since Christians drew extensively on the Septuagint, the book is as much about how we read key Jewish as well as Christian texts.

An introduction distinguishes between “meritorious” and “atoning” almsgiving, sketches how wealth was unequally distributed in the empire, and identifies “two different models of almsgiving”: the “philanthropic,” which envisages gifts “along a vertical axis from those with an abundance of assets to those with minimal resources”; and the alternative model of “mutualism” with “a more horizontal exchange of resources among those of lesser means” (p. 17).

Chapters One to Three concern the reward for care of the poor in the Jewish Scriptures. Chapter One examines first Prov 16:6 (LXX Prov. 15:27), where human or divine compassion is linked to atonement, and then Deut 24:13 and Dan 4:24, where the Hebrew for “righteousness” was replaced by the Greek word for “merciful action” (eleemosyne) that may later refer specifically to almsgiving. Chapter Two examines the sense of eleemosyne in the Greek versions of Tobit (pp. 5870) and Sirach (pp. 71-81), and what is meant where they speak of merciful acts that purify or expiate sin. At several points (e.g., Tob 12:9 and Sir. 29:11-13) fresh readings are proposed against those of Gary Anderson in recent publications. Chapter Three rebuts the widely-held notion that atoning almsgiving develops out of the so-called “prophetic critique of sacrifice” (p. 84).

Chapters Four to Six consider the New Testament, and Jesus’s promise that those who assist the poor will be rewarded by treasure in heaven. Downs rejects the traditional translations of Mt 6:1-3 and Acts 10:2 as treating of “alms” rather than “merciful deeds” (p. 115). Of particular interest is his reading of Lk 11:41, where he argues for the translation “give alms with respect to the things within,” so that “Jesus offers almsgiving as a means of purifying the [Pharisees’] greed and wickedness” (pp. 126-27). Pauline texts on the care of the poor, such as Gal 2:10, are likewise re-assessed to establish the apostle’s concern for meritorious almsgiving that includes but goes beyond collections for the Jerusalem church. Chapter Six specifically concerns the assertion at 1 Pet 4:8 that “Love covers a multitude of sins” and its second-century reception.

Chapters Seven and Eight consider what is said of almsgiving more widely in Christian texts from the second and third centuries to show how “practices of and discourses about almsgiving … stood at the centre of competing conceptions of Christian identity, solidarity, and community” (p. 232). Cyprian in particular is to be credited with a concept of almsgiving as atoning for post-baptismal sins rooted in a prosopological reading of LXX Prov 15:27 and Sir 3:30 together with Lk 11:40-41.

Downs’ study forms a valuable “prequel” to Peter Brown’s The Ransom of the Soul. It offers fresh, persuasive readings of numerous texts to challenge a Protestant prejudice that the concept of atoning almsgiving must be unscriptural or at the expense of atonement by the death of Christ, while also challenging anachronistic readings of those Jewish and Christian Scriptures which have so often been heard to speak of almsgiving when they referred more widely to works of mercy.