![]() ![]() "They will not cease from toil and misery by day nor from being oppressed at night, and the gods will give them grievous cares …. The descent culminates with a prediction about humanity in Hesiod’s own day, the “Iron Race”: Hesiod then portrays succeeding generations, associated with silver and bronze, as declining from this ideal state. Contented and at peace, they lived off their lands with many good things, rich in sheep, dear to the blessed gods ( Op. All good things were theirs: the wheat-giving earth bore fruit spontaneously, in abundance and without envy. They lived like gods, having a carefree heart, without toil and misery …. They lived at the time of Cronus, when he was king in heaven. "Golden was the race of articulate humans that the immortals who live on Olympus made first. The first, “golden” humans enjoyed a utopian existence: Hesiod presents an overview of human history schematized around different metals. We can observe the basic outline of the Golden Age myth in Hesiod’s Works and Days, where it first appears. Greek and Latin Accounts of the Golden Age Myth Finally, reading these summaries as Golden Age allusions helps to explain why the practice of common property does not reappear in Acts. At the same time, Luke’s use of the Golden Age motif relativizes the power and importance of the Roman emperor in comparison with Christ. By doing so, Luke characterizes the coming of the Holy Spirit as beginning a new age in which the human race will be restored and reunited. Finally, with this background in view, I will argue that Luke’s account of the lifestyle of the early Jerusalem community alludes to this myth. Next, I will review how other Jewish and Christian authors during this period used the Golden Age myth in their own writings. After briefly presenting the myth’s Greek background, I will show how Roman authors developed the Golden Age idea in new ways that made it an important context for understanding the theme of common property in the early Empire. In this essay, I will explore one of the connections that Luke’s readers would likely have made when reading his depictions of common property: the myth of the Golden Age. A further mystery involves the fate of this community of property: why does Luke never mention this conspicuous practice again? The more pertinent interpretive issue, however, is what these descriptions of common property would have brought to mind for first- and second-century audiences. Modern discussion of these verses has often been entangled with contemporary debates regarding communism. In two of these summaries, Acts 2:42-47 and 4:32-35, Luke includes the striking detail that the believers held their property in common: “All who believed were together and had all things in common” (Acts 2:42) “No one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common” (Acts 4:32). In the first few chapters of Acts, Luke gives three summaries of the day-to-day life of the Christian community in Jerusalem. See Also: Common Property, the Golden Age, and Empire in Acts 2:42-47 and 4:32-35(T&T Clark, 2020). Luke seems to have intentionally crafted his accounts to highlight these utopian associations. Given the standard features of the Golden Age and its literary ubiquity in the early Empire, Luke’s portrait of a community that marks the dawn of a new age, a “utopian restoration of the unity of the human race,” and that holds its property in common, lives in remarkable peace and harmony and enjoys God’s favor, could not help but bring this myth to the minds of many of his readers. ![]()
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