In the same year (2012) that Peter Brown's magisterial study Through the eye of a needle was published with its account of how the sudden influx of wealth transformed the Western Church of late antiquity, Brown delivered the Richards lectures at the University of Virginia on the topic of the ‘holy poor’ in the Eastern Churches from the first to the fifth century ce. He explored in particular the relationship of these monks and other ascetics to the ordinary Christians who supported them by their almsgiving, and to the daily toil and grind which was the lot of so many in the pre-modern world. Now published as Treasure in heaven, the lectures form a relatively slim but valuable coda to the earlier book. As elsewhere, Brown has drawn succinctly and astutely on specialist studies to illuminate a wider picture. Scholars may find here much with which they are familiar from the work of Daniel Caner, Ewa Wipszycka, Robert Kitchen, Martin Parmentier and others, but so assembled as to escape older academic bunkers in which ‘Syria and Egypt have too long been studied in isolation from each other’ (p. xxiii), but which have also distanced one religion from another rather than relating them to the common economic and social settings which they shared.

Chapter i considers briefly the New Testament teachings of Jesus and St Paul on almsgiving, and in particular on support for the ‘poor among the saints’ (p. 10). Chapter ii examines the desire among some early Christians from the second to the fourth century to channel alms exclusively through the bishops, understood in large part as an attempt to avoid the conventional links between gifts and patronage, and illuminated through attention to pagan critics of Christianity and Jewish rabbis who ‘constructed a similar counter-cultural form of gift-giving free from the usual implications of patronage’ (p. 23). Chapter iii continues this comparative approach by examining the meaning of freedom from work for the Manichaean elect whose abstention from sex, agricultural labour and unrestrained eating enabled them to participate ‘in a form of rest that anticipated the final “cessation” that would finally still the cosmos’ (pp. 48–9). Recognition that a ‘negative view of work as the most blatant sign of all human bondage was central to the radical traditions of Syria as a whole' (p. 50) then forms the backdrop to chapter iv's study of the Syriac Christian traditions encapsulated in the Book of steps. Chapters v and vi turn to Egypt and the meaning of non-agricultural work for many fourth-century monks as a sign of their shared humanity (p. 98). Accessible though thought-provoking, Treasure from heaven may profitably be read in short order by non-specialists and specialists alike.