Divine Accounting

This book shows how the divine was an active participant in the economic spheres of the ancient Mediterranean world. Gods and goddesses were represented as owning goods, holding accounts, and producing wealth. The book argues that early Christ-followers also used financial language to articulate and imagine their relationship to the divine. It takes seriously the overlapping of themes such as poverty, labor, social status, suffering, cosmology, and eschatology in material evidence from the ancient Mediterranean and early Christian texts. The book begins with an overview of theo-economics, which is an intertwined theological and economic logic in which divine and human beings regularly enter into transactions with one another. It then moves on to discuss some of the contexts in which the gods and humans transacted in antiquity. The book examines the theo-economics of Philippians 1, with some consideration of Philippians 4, and moves on to evaluate Philippians 2–3. The book concludes that by taking seriously the ways in which persons in antiquity understood themselves to be participating in transactions with the divine, one can begin to break down some of the scholarly categories that separate theology from economics.