Theories of Poverty in the World of the New Testament

David J. Armitage explores interpretations of poverty in the Greco-Roman and Jewish contexts of the New Testament, and, in the light of this, considers how approaches to poverty in the New Testament texts may be regarded as distinctive. Explanations for the plight of the poor and supposed solutions to the problem of poverty are discussed, noting the importance in Greco-Roman settings of questions about poverty’s relation to virtue and vice, and the roles of fate and chance in impoverishment. Such debates were peripheral for strands of the Jewish tradition where poverty discourse was shaped by narrative frameworks incorporating transgression, curse, and the anticipated rescue of the righteous poor. These elements occur in New Testament texts, which endorse wider Jewish concern for the poor while reconfiguring hope for the end of poverty around an inaugurated eschatology centred on Jesus.