Looking Further

A Conclusion

There is more that could be said. Each of the probes of the previous chapters could be developed beyond its introductory character, correlating the relevant material from the Vesuvian towns with (1) other material remains of the ancient world, (2) the ancient discussions of relevant topics from Greco-Roman literary texts, and (3) the full spread of texts from early Christian writers. And no doubt further probes could be added to explore additional topics and to consider additional complexities. But while expanding the coverage would add greater depth and nuance, it would also impede the nature of the introductory overviews offered in the previous chapters. So while more can be said, enough has been said, at least for the purposes of this book.

In the preceding chapters, we have at times heard apostolic voices of the early Jesus-movement articulating perspectives that highlight the innovative creativity of their theological worldview. Embedded in their discourse were certain ideological commitments that ran against the grain of perspectives and practices commonly entrenched within the Greco-Roman world. At much the same time, however, we have also seen how some forms of early Christian discourse and practice were aligned in general conformity with the first-century contexts. And we have seen apostolic voices sometimes differing in their assessment of how the novelty of their worldview was to take shape in concrete form in their first-century world.

If more can be said, some of it lies beyond the interface of the Vesuvian towns and the early Jesus-movement. For instance, although some Judeans resided in Pompeii, we know very little about them in that context, so there has been little about them in this book. Of course, the first Jesus-followers often drew on Judean traditions and devotional practices when interpreting their devotion to their risen Lord, but those dimensions are not at our interface and so have not been assembled here to the extent that they are reflected in early Christian texts. Or again, there are points of comparison between the early Christian message and the outlook of Stoic philosophers (as well as clear differences, not least in the narrative configurations that undergird their discourse), but since Stoicism has left almost no distinct impression on the material remains of the Vesuvian towns, Stoicism and early Christianity haven’t been compared in this book.

Further, the poor were everywhere in the Roman world, and the New Testament provides plenty of resources for significant engagement with the poor and the societal structures that perpetuated forms of poverty in the Roman world. Unfortunately, the Vesuvian remains give us very little hard data regarding the ubiquitous poor. We probably need to imagine the destitute populating Pompeii’s forum and congregating outside the public buildings and temples, with the hope that someone would offer them assistance in their plight. By night, they must have slept rough in the streets or in crevices around the town or beyond the town walls or farther afield in the countryside. They were neighbors of those who have served as guides in this book, and they must have been numerous, but we know almost nothing of them. Here the Vesuvian towns, destroyed by tremendously hot flows of pyroclastic ash, offer almost no specific points of entry into the fragile world of the ubiquitous destitute, now lost to us.

We might want to devise an impressionistic calculation of how many destitute people populated Pompeii. If we imagine that the destitute of Pompeii composed only 5 percent of the population (and usually estimates of the urban poor put the figure much higher than that), and if we imagine the population of Pompeii to have been approximately twelve thousand, then there would have been roughly six hundred utterly destitute people living (or more likely dying) in Pompeii at any given time. Even doubling that number would easily fall within the bounds of reasonable expectation. In any responsible estimate of the population’s demographics, the destitute would have been far more numerous than the socially prominent people whom we have met along the way—people like Eumachia, Mamia, Marcus Nonius Balbus, Marcus Holconius Rufus, Gnaeus Alleius Nigidius Maius, Gaius Munatius Faustus, Marcus Arrius Diomedes, Naevoleia Tyche, and Publius Vesonius Phileros. In contrast to those prominent residents who had resources enough to build a life of significance within the public realm, there were hundreds of others whose desperate lack of basic resources placed their life in precarious straits. While well-placed people were building tombs and statues and monuments to themselves, these people were hoping for a way to survive, usually only through the generous initiatives of others.

We know from one graffito that at least one person in Pompeii (I’ll assume it was a male) prided himself on not being generous to the destitute. Here is a short extract from a graffito he wrote: “I detest the destitute [pauperos]” (CIL 4.9839b; see also the destitute of CIL 4.9932a, as noted in chapter 10). As the full graffito illustrates, the person who wrote it thought a destitute person was a “fool” who simply wanted a free handout. If John the author of Revelation saw connections between all spheres of life, the author of this graffito was at the other end of the spectrum, failing to see that many people had been forced into situations of poverty as by-products of the social systems and economic structures of their world. Of course, giving free handouts to lazy fools is not something we find advocated within the New Testament. For instance, Paul noted that some Jesus-followers were taking advantage of the goodwill and resources of other Jesus-followers, and he gave instructions that this form of behavior should stop (see 2 Thessalonians 3:6–13; compare 1 Timothy 5:3–16; Titus 1:12; Matthew 25:26). But Paul was also able to differentiate between callous laziness on the one hand and unavoidable destitution on the other (see below)—a distinction that the author of this Pompeian graffito seems oblivious to, since he indiscriminately characterized all the destitute as lazy fools. The graffito’s author shows no cognizance of the deeply entrenched economic systems that structured so much of ancient society. Those systems often predetermined where people fell on the economic spectrum, with relative stability for the few at one end and dangerous instability for the many at the other end. The graffito, then, illustrates the author’s failure to connect the dots between lived experience and social structures (as evidenced in the charge that the destitute “should pay for it [their food]”), resulting in a graffito that can appear trite in its ignorance and oblivious in its smugness.

Figure Concl.1. A fresco variously interpreted, but probably depicting a person giving a drink to a hungry traveler, accompanied by his dog (from 6.9.6, MANN 9106)

The attitude expressed in the graffito is very different from the one attributed to Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus is remembered as saying, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the reign of God” (Luke 6:20). Conversely, he commanded a rich man, “Sell your possessions and give to the poor” (12:33); on another occasion, he exhorted an elite ruler, “Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven” (18:22). In the Wisdom of Sirach (a text widely known among Judeans of the first century), “the poor” are said to be “an abomination to the rich” (13:20), but in Jesus-traditions the rich are often “strangely moved” so that they come to recognize their responsibility toward those in need. For instance, when a wealthy man promised to give half of his goods to the poor and to ensure that the rest of his resources could be claimed by those whom he had defrauded, Jesus pronounced, “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:8–9). Jesus is remembered to have told a story about a Samaritan who cared for a struggling stranger out of his own resources, despite significant inconvenience and danger to himself (10:29–37). He told another story of a rich fool (unlike our Pompeian graffito writer, who thought the poor were fools); in this story, the rich man is judged as foolish for hoarding his possessions (rather than sharing them with those in need, as implied in 12:13–21). In another story, Jesus contrasted a rich man and a poor man, with the rich man eventually finding himself tormented in Hades as a consequence (it seems) of his failure to recognize the needy people around him (16:19–31). And in this same story, Jesus suggested that the scriptural texts written by “Moses and the prophets” are properly interpreted in contexts where the needs of the poor are not overlooked (16:29). This is the same Jesus who is remembered for summing up his ministry with the words, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor” (4:18; compare Matthew 11:2–6 and Luke 7:18–23).

New Testament texts and other texts beyond them demonstrate repeatedly that Jesus-followers of the first few centuries often sought to maintain this openness to the stories of the vulnerable (as chapters 10, 11, and 14 have gone some way to demonstrate, but there is still more that cannot be entertained here). In this way, the early followers of Jesus were aligning themselves with the one who “became poor” for their sake (2 Corinthians 8:9). Moreover, they were embracing the decision of the first ecumenical council of the fledgling Jesus-movement (probably held in the year 48), where it was agreed that the exhortation to “remember the poor” should characterize the practice of Jesus-devotees in all indigenous forms of Christian identity (see Galatians 2:10).

Evidently, then, Jesus-followers were to see past the lazy prejudices exhibited by our Pompeian graffito writer. Others within Pompeii held a view much more in tune with Jesus’s sentiments. Frescos in the country club of Julia Felix, for instance, portray scenes of ordinary life that would have been seen on any given day in Pompeii’s forum (as noted above; see figure 12.3). One of those frescos shows a woman offering financial assistance to a destitute beggar in the forum (see figure Concl.2). Since the gesture is seen only by the woman’s daughter or slave, it seems virtually devoid of the quest for status (almost contrary to what we might have expected); instead, what is on display seems to be a rarely depicted form of simple humanitarian concern for a person in need. (Perhaps the woman is training her daughter in the art of generous living.) The attitude is completely different from the blanket expression of loathing for the destitute in a nearby Pompeian graffito.

The fresco’s depiction of the poor beggar offers a rare glimpse into ancient destitution. Although we seldom see the first-century destitute in the material remains of the Vesuvian towns, the New Testament brings their world alive time after time, with their stories having some prominence within its covers. At much the same time that a fresco painter depicted a woman extending generosity to the needy in the forum of Pompeii, some of the earliest followers of Jesus were acting corporately to undertake similar initiatives (for example, Acts 4:34–35; 20:35; Ephesians 4:28; 1 Timothy 6:18; Titus 3:14; 1 John 3:17). Some of the destitute were evidently finding new resources for living in spirited communities of Jesus-devotion, where relational innovation was being enacted—often in experimental form, as they sought to find their way in the aftermath of a new day in obedience to the one whom they called their lord.

Figure Concl.2. A drawing of a Pompeian fresco (MANN 9059, from the country club of Julia Felix at 2.4) depicting a destitute man receiving aid from a “middle-class” woman and her daughter or slave (see credits); the fresco is in poor condition today.

If we could ask those Jesus-devotees to summarize their contribution to the search for human meaning in no more than a dozen words, perhaps they might have said something like this: “Rethink your deities; recalculate your status; reinvigorate your relationality with the distressed.” These three interconnected convictions helped to inject fresh resources into the ideologies of the Roman world, sometimes enabling Jesus-followers to lean into bold configurations of adventurous novelty within their corporate relationships. Perhaps these same convictions have a role to play even in the twenty-first-century tournament of narratives about healthy forms of human life, meaning, and flourishing.