Toward the question of property ownership of the first Christian community in Jerusalem

The property ownership system of the first Christian community in Jerusalem has always been the subject of careful consideration both by ancient exegetes of the book of Acts and by Christian authors of later centuries. Ancient authors and many exegetes of the 19th - 20th centuries assume that the common ownership of property in Jerusalem is based upon the high quality of the spiritual life of its members. Some western authors challenge the uniqueness of property relations in this community. Ideologues of communism tried to present the phenomenon of common ownership as a prototype of the communist system. Christian, primarily Orthodox writers, spent a lot of effort in trying to show the differences. The principle of the community “to consider nothing to be one’s own” without negating private property in society as a whole is an example of the Christian attitude towards earthly possessions even in this age of increasingly complex property rights and economic institutions.