2026.05.05 | Yurong Zhao. Early Christian Widows and their Social-economic Situation, Support, and Contribution to the Church. Library of New Testament Studies 687. London: T&T Clark, 2025. pp. xvii + 242. ISBN: 9780567721365.
Review by Aogu Suzuki, University of St Andrews.
Wayne Meeks, in his The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (1983), stated: “To write social history, it is necessary … to discern the texture of life in particular times and particular places. After that, the task of a social historian of early Christianity is to describe the life of the ordinary Christian within that environment.” The last four decades of New Testament scholarship have benefited from an increasing number of illuminating granular works attempting to clarify particulars of the early Christian milieu, and Yurong Zhao’s Early Christian Widows and their Social-economic Situation, Support, and Contribution to the Church is a welcome addition within this current. While the marginalized in general have garnered much discussion, Zhao argues that “the social-economic situation of widows in the early church, their means of support, and their role in the church have not been sufficiently studied” (p. 1). A published version of her doctoral dissertation completed in Durham under John Barclay, this monograph synthesizes social-economic data with the analysis of early Christian literature in order to provide a nuanced understanding of widows in the early church.
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Biblical and Early Christian Studies 