CANADIAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW | 2014 c Volume 3 • Issue 2 52 The Jerusalem Collection, Economic Inequality, and Human Flourishing: Is Paul’s Concern the Redistribution of Wealth, or a Relationship of Mutuality (or Both)? J. Brian Tucker Moody Theological Seminary Abstract Recent research into Paul and the economy has brought clarity to some longstanding debates concerning the Jerusalem Collection while raising a new series of questions. Larry Welborn contends that the Jerusalem Collection’s focus on equality (isotēs) and the redistribution of possessions highlights the idea that Paul contrib- uted to the emergence of a new category of thinking, namely the economic. Julien Ogereau, through a focus on koinōnia, further grounds historically an economic and eschatological perspective on the collection by arguing that it represents a new socio-eco- nomic order that crosses cultural and ethnic differences as part of the movement’s global identity. Both of these scholars, along with a group of other empire-critical ones, assert that the collec- tion was designed to address the rampant economic inequality in the Roman empire and, in some cases, that it represents an example of a call for the redistribution of wealth between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” This article evaluates and builds on this interpretive trajectory and, by drawing on the resources of George Akerlog and Rachel Kranton’s Identity Economics, sug- gests that the collection also brings to the fore a discourse of mutuality, revealing it as a concrete example of Paul’s vision of the Christ-movement as an alternative community with a dis- tinct ethos, one in which existing identities remain salient and integrated into local expressions of the economic structure em- bedded in the eastern Mediterranean. Thus, Paul is not seen as thoroughly subversive nor co-opted by imperial ideology; rather, he draws on Israel’s concept of the inclusive economy in order