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Motivation For The Sharing Of Material Possessions In Acts, Philo's De Vita Contemplativa And The Didache: A Comparative Study, Lena V. Toews

Dissertations

Luke, in the book of Acts, depicts the sharing of possessions as a practice in the Jerusalem community of the first century. Several pericopes, occurring primarily in the first part of the book of Acts, embody the idea of shared property and seem to have important parallels to other sources of the time, including the Jewish author Philo’s work De vita contemplativa, where he describes a group he calls, “Therapeutae,” and in the Jewish Christian document Didache. This study seeks to identify beliefs correlated with the material sharing practices in the community of Acts and compare them with De vita …