Stern and unnerving, the bronze eyes of an emperor, likely Nero, peer out from the stunning cover of Jennifer Quigley's book just as they would have once monitored economic exchanges in a first-century marketplace. This bronze bust is no common statue, but a weight standard that would have hung from a steelyard and been used to regulate sales, making the semidivine emperor present in even the most quotidian economic transactions. It is precisely objects like this that Quigley urges readers to consider together with literary texts as an archive of divine-human economic interactions, or theo-economics, in Greco-Roman antiquity. Divine Accounting, based on the author's Harvard Divinity School dissertation and focused in large part on Paul's letter to the Philippians, is a clearly written, engaging, and highly original book that makes a compelling case for why scholars in the varied fields of ancient Mediterranean studies should recognize divine and semidivine beings as actants in the ancient economy.
The book comprises four core chapters, along with an introduction, a conclusion, and a helpful appendix presenting a translation of Philippians that emphasizes “financial valences.” In the introduction, Quigley situates her project within current scholarship on Paul and the ancient economy and proposes that a new term is needed to circumvent the scholarly bifurcation of ancient religion and economics. Her neologism, “theo-economics,” refers to “an intertwined theological and economic logic in which divine and human beings regularly interact with one another” (3).
Chapter 1 provides a rich sampling of evidence for theo-economics at Greco-Roman and Jewish sacred sites and in non-cultic contexts, namely marketplaces. The inscriptions, coins, weight standards, and measures discussed were well-chosen to elucidate economic situations in which humans interacted with the divine. For instance, in Philippi, the assembly that received Paul's letter may have encountered coins embodying divinized emperors, a measuring table consecrated to the Thracian Horseman, and statues and inscriptions that made the gods present during economic exchanges.
The second and third chapters closely analyze theo-economic rhetoric in Philippians, marshalling documentary sources as comparanda. Quigley emphasizes that the language of koinōnia in the letter, often translated in terms of “fellowship,” is better understood as a “venture.” She argues that Paul framed his relationship with the Philippians as a business venture in which God and Christ are also shareholders, and all parties are subject to risks and rewards. Interestingly, she adds that Paul positions his own imprisoned body as the guarantee (bebaiōsis, 1:7) of his contract with the Philippians, who might have perceived his imprisonment as a threat to their financial investment in his gospel venture. By casting suffering as contractual and Christ as a commodity (3:7–11), “Paul sets himself up as broker in the gospel to the Philippians, offering them the Christ commodity, while also distancing their access to Christ by reminding them of his sole partnership with Christ in suffering” (91).
Chapter 4 turns to the reception of Paul's letter in Polycarp's Letter to the Philippians. Here Quigley focuses on Polycarp's description of Christ as the down payment (arrabōn) for sin (Pol. Phil. 8.1). By appealing to a labor contract, rescript, and legal texts as comparative evidence, she shows that Polycarp's theo-economic logic stipulates that financial investment is a prerequisite for accessing divine justice. Polycarp's configuration of Christ as down payment entails that the Philippians must continue to perform their righteous labor because they will eventually have to render their accounts before God. One point for further consideration here concerns whether the theo-economic language in other Pauline letters besides Philippians may also undergird Polycarp's image—for example, the down payment of the spirit (ton arrabōna tou pneumatos), presumably through baptism, in 2 Cor 5:5 and Christ as a first-fruits offering (aparchē) in 1 Cor 15:20–24.
This intriguing book, which concludes with an impassioned call for further interdisciplinary work at the intersection of theology and economics, rewards a close reading. Whereas recent scholarship has thrown around terms like “sacred economy,” “economy of the sacred,” and “spiritual economy,” this is the first book I am aware of that insists on divine beings as economic actors and seriously considers religious dispositions like piety as potential determinants of economic behavior. It should, therefore, be essential reading for anyone interested in religion and/or economics in the ancient Mediterranean. Chapter 1, in particular, would be a stimulating reading to assign in graduate and advanced undergraduate seminars.
An admirable quality of this study is that it concisely presents a broad and flexible model of theo-economics that allows for significant diversity. Future studies will do well to build on this model and interrogate its limits. A few areas of further inquiry come to mind. First, what types of emotions or affects motivate social actors to engage in financial transactions with the gods? Quigley mentions “piety, gratitude, fear, obligation, and hope” (112), but the scope of her study did not allow much depth in exploring these. Theodora Suk Fong Jim's Sharing with the Gods: Aparchai and Dekatai in Ancient Greece (Oxford, 2014) would be a complementary source for further investigation.
Second, how does the recognition of divine agency in the ancient economy reframe our understanding of human agency and intersubjectivity in the Roman Mediterranean? Quigley's work opens windows onto subjects who arguably exert agency through “being acted upon” by suprahuman beings, to borrow Amira Mittermaier's terms (“Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim Subjectivities beyond the Trope of Self-Cultivation,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 [2012]: 247–265).
Third, what are the parameters of theo-economics? Are all economic transactions theological on some level, and vice versa? If so, how might we account for ancient attempts at distinguishing economic activities deemed “sacred” from those deemed “profane”? If not, does this model then presuppose ontological domains of “religion” and “economy” in antiquity?
Finally, Divine Accounting serves as an excellent counterpart to Devin Singh's Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West (Stanford, 2018), which focuses on fourth-century patristic texts. It will be exciting to see how subsequent scholarship will fill the gaps between these two trailblazing works.
I highly recommend this thought-provoking book to scholars of Early Christianity, ancient Mediterranean religions, and economic history, and I hope to see it become a cornerstone in research on the nexus of religion and economics in antiquity.
