I apologise for not being able to refrain from making a joke out of this thread, but the topic is rather humourous.
I've just bought Peter Brown's (the illustrious historian) latest book, "The Ransom of the Soul - Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity," and am in the process of reading it. Its quite amazing how soon money entered into the early churches relationship with individual Christians,
May I recommend it for those who may still harbour illusions about Jesus and his church. (not that Brown comes across as anti-Christian. As a good historian he records his research with a straight bat).
Here's a couple of reviews (courtesy of Amazon) :
In this visionary short study, Peter Brown links two themes which are rarely brought together: Christian views of the afterlife between the second and seventh centuries,and the way in which relations between God and the faithful, living and dead, were mediated by wealth… Beginning with the teaching of Jesus that one should give away what one has, Brown traces a trajectory of almsgiving over six centuries… Brown has rarely published a book without creating a new field of study and endowing it with new research questions, and here he does it again. This beautifully written volume which is eminently accessible to non-specialists holds special interest for Catholics. As it leads reader from the ancient into the early medieval world, it speaks especially to the evolution of Catholic tradition and doctrine… This is an absorbing, thought-provoking book, which prompts reflection on the modem as well as the ancient world, and on the secular as well as the religious sphere. (Teresa Morgan The Tablet 2015-04-11)
[An] extraordinary new book… The new work, which is one of [Brown’s] shortest, is also prodigiously original―an astonishing performance for a historian who has already been so prolific and influential… [It’s] a completely fresh look at the issue of Christian wealth and giving, with special attention to changing perspectives from the mid-third century to the late seventh… [An] extraordinarily vivid panorama of money in the early church… Peter Brown’s subtle and incisive tracking of the role of money in Christian attitudes toward the afterlife not only breaks down traditional geographical and chronological boundaries across more than four centuries. It provides wholly new perspectives on Christianity itself, its evolution, and, above all, its discontinuities. It demonstrates why the Middle Ages, when they finally arrived, were so very different from late antiquity. (G. W. Bowersock New York Review of Books 2015-05-21)