‘Naboth is Stoned’: A Bible Story

Bibles

Of course, by far the most important resource that both men shared, and itself the single most important source of moral and political authority throughout the millennium that divided them and beyond, was the Christian Bible. It was from a reading of the Book of Kings that both men took the story of Naboth. The history of such biblical sources is one of Byzantine complexity (see Jones 1984, 1, 2–82). If the account of Naboth's murder were history rather than simply a story, the events described would have had to have taken place around 850 bce. They were first written down not less than 200 years later, perhaps as late as 561 bce. Although the original text (or more properly texts) was written in Hebrew, the surviving sources (and the other now lost variants indicated there) are in both Greek and Hebrew (with the latter sometimes being a re-translation from the Greek). What became the ‘authorised’ text of (the two or sometimes four) Books of Kings was an intermingling of a variety of sources and redactions. Sometimes a later hand can be seen to have tried to make the text consistent but its patchwork origins are readily apparent to even the casual reader. At the end of chapter 21 of 1 Kings, for example, God relents in his decision to kill Ahab (deciding, in a judgement that is perverse even by God's cockeyed standards, to exact his punishment upon Ahab's sons) but in fact the old king is slain (and the dogs duly lick up his blood, ‘according unto the word of the LORD which he spake’) in the very next chapter (1 Kings 22:34–38).

We know that both men used (what is now) chapter 21 of the First Book of Kings as their source. But were they reading the same story (in the same language)? There is widespread agreement that Ambrose's chosen source was the Septuagint Bible (or LXX), the oldest extant Greek text which had been translated from Hebrew by Jewish scholars working at Alexandria between the third and first centuries bce (see Homes Dudden 1935, I, 456; Colish 2005, 22–23; also McGuire 1927, 173, n. 4). The further translations into Latin (the original language of De Nabuthae) were seemingly his own. We may be less certain about Ponet's sources. We know that he did not read Hebrew. The 19th-century editor of an earlier work (Ponet's translation from Latin into English of the Tragedy of Bernardino Ochino), Constance Plumptre, insists that Ponet's source of choice was the English-language Matthew's Bible (of 1537) in which the translation of Kings was the work of William Tyndale (Ochino 1899 [1549], viii). But those passages in the Short Treatise in which Ponet quotes directly from the Old Testament differ substantially from the text of Matthew's Bible. In fact, the language is in many instances closer to that of Wycliffe's much earlier (1395) partial translation of Jerome's Vulgate Bible (itself a Latin source). The use of ‘right or law’ to describe the supposed powers of kings (in citing 1 Samuel 8:11) where Matthew's Bible has just ‘law’ suggests that Ponet may have had either a Latin source or a Latin-influenced source (such as Wycliffe) in front of him (the relevant passage in the Vulgate Latin has ius at this point). Ponet also deploys a classification that treats of the two Books of Kings and the two preceding books (which come to be called the Books of Samuel) as if they were part of a single history (the four books of Kings or Reigns). This was the convention in both the Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate Bibles but had begun to change by the time of Coverdale's English translation (in 1535).

Given Ponet's proficiency as a Greek scholar (he was university lecturer in the language at Cambridge), we may well suppose that he was using the Septuagint as one of perhaps several biblical sources. He probably also had access to (at least parts of) Origen's Hexapla (Origen 1875), compiled in the first half of the third century, which provided six variants of the Bible (including a corrected Septuagint) in parallel columns. In the end, we cannot say definitively which text or texts Ambrose and Ponet had in front of them when they wrote. As both were accomplished linguists, we know that they would have been competent to read the sacred texts in both Greek and Latin. The very least that we can say is that they both read versions of the story of Naboth that were very similar, not just in their broad outlines but also in their detail. This is borne out by the textual evidence of De Nabuthae and the Short Treatise themselves.

Ambrose and De Officiis

And yet their readings of the story of Naboth differ in important ways. For Ambrose, the story of Naboth is, above all else, the (timeless) story of rich and poor: ‘daily is Naboth struck down, daily is a poor man put to death’ (Ambrose 1927 [c.387], 47). ² And the universal Naboth of De Nabuthae often appears in the guise and predicament of a property-less day-labourer, perhaps capturing Ambrose's sense that his poverty is caused (and an injustice committed) by the expropriation of the poor man from ‘his little acre’ (Ambrose 1927 [c.387], 47). No less ubiquitous is the universal Ahab:

For Ambrose, it is the rich who are the truly needy, for their covetousness knows no bounds and the more they have the more they crave: ‘for everyone in abundance judges himself all the poorer, because he thinks he lacks whatever is possessed by others’ (Ambrose 1927 [c.387], 81). The characteristic rich man is the miser, unable even to enjoy his riches for fear that he may lose what he has or that some opportunity to increase his wealth may escape him: ‘Avarice is enkindled by gain, not quenched’ (Ambrose 1927 [c.387], 49). It is the rich man (Ahab) who craves the wealth of the poor man (Naboth) and not the other way around. Indeed, Ambrose argues that the rich man craves insufficiency for everyone else as it is this which most reliably pushes up the value of his own possessions.

Nor is Ambrose's appeal to the rich to give up their wealth based upon a duty of charity to the poor. Ambrose seems to be clear that the wealth of the rich is a form of theft and based upon the exploitation of the poor.

This point is repeated throughout Ambrose's polemic: ‘for all has the world been created, which you few rich men are trying to keep for yourselves’ (Ambrose 1927 [c.387], 53); ‘rich men sorrow, if they cannot steal the things of others’ (p. 55); ‘rich men eat rather another's bread than their own, and they live on plunder and pay their expenses by acts of robbery’ (p. 55); ‘they are made sad if they are not seizing the property of others; they renounce food, they fast, not that they may lessen their sin but that they may commit crime’ (p. 75).

Patristic Views of Property

Judgements upon Ambrose's view of the legitimacy of private property vary. Arthur Lovejoy (1942) and Ambrose's first modern biographer, F. Homes Dudden (1935), are among those who take seriously the claim that Ambrose's text can be read as a sort of ‘primitivistic communism [preaching] a virtually equalitarian and communistic ideal of a Christian society’ or as the advocacy of ‘the ideal of a socialistic community’ (Homes Dudden 1935, 545–550; Lovejoy 1942, 458, 468). Certainly, there are passages in the text of De Nabuthae which seem to be open to such a reading. Close to the other extreme is Vincent Vasey who, in contesting the ‘communistic’ reading of Ambrose, finds in De Nabuthae an ‘affirmation of private property’; for Vasey's Ambrose, it just is the case that ‘private property is good’ (Vasey, 1982, 126).

This uncertainty over the nature of Ambrose's views actually belongs to a much wider debate about the character of legitimate property which we find in all of the early patristic writers (on which, see Christophe 1963; Hengel 1974; Countryman 1980). A key part of ‘the problem’ for both the fathers and later apologists was that the teachings of Jesus on property and riches were at best ambivalent and, in the eyes of their critics, quite explicitly and consistently hostile. Added to this was the ‘example’ of the common ownership reported (in Acts 4:32–34) to have existed in the earliest (and exemplary) Christian community at Jerusalem. Among the most awkward of all these stories was Jesus' command to the rich young man to ‘sell whatever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven’ (Mark 10:21). Ever since St Clement of Alexandria had penned Quis Dives salvatur? (Who is the Rich Man that Shall be Saved?) in the middle of the 2nd century ce, there had been a tradition of explaining (away) Jesus' seemingly radical message as ‘scholarly’ or ‘allegorical’ (Clement, cited in Schaff 1994, 2, 591–604). Here attention was redirected towards the man who was (improperly) ‘rich in desires’, refocusing the criticism from riches ‘in themselves’ towards the lust for riches, that is avarice. Wealth was the necessary prerequisite to doing ‘good works’ and the man who used (presumably some of) his wealth in good works was to be commended, not condemned.

But alongside this apologetic tradition, there remained a strain of writing that was much more critical of wealth and of exclusive claims to possess the earth. Thus, writing in the early third century ce, St Cyprian insists in On Work and Alms:

St John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople and a near contemporary of Ambrose, writing a commentary on Paul's First Epistle to Timothy—in which Paul rails against the pursuit of ‘filthy lucre’ and insists that ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’—mounts a sustained attack on the roots of wealth: ‘so destructive a passion is avarice, that to grow rich without injustice is impossible’ (1 Timothy 3:3, 8; 6:10; Chrysostom, quoted in Schaff 1886, 13, 447, emphasis in original). Inheritance, in particular, must always arise from a historical injustice:

Where does Ambrose fit into this larger story? Ambrose's most recent biographer, Neil McLynn (1994) has no time for ‘the completely misguided debate on whether Ambrose embraced communism’. Chrysostom may have meant what he said but Ambrose's sophisticated Milanese audience ‘would know better than to take [his condemnations of the wealthy] literally’. He concludes that ‘Ambrose's whole style and presentation ensured that any glass he held up to his society was bound to be riddling and dark’ (McLynn 1994, 245–249). It seems clear that Ambrose was not an advocate of common ownership here and now, even if he believed that to live without property might represent the ‘more perfect way’. His own property dealings with the inheritance he jointly possessed with his brother and sister are somewhat obscure but it seems that, upon taking up his post in Milan, he divested himself of most of his own personal wealth. ⁴ At the same time, he fiercely defended the corporate right of the Church to retain possession of its own buildings. In a letter to the Emperor Valentinian, Ambrose reminds him of the story of Naboth, concluding: ‘If Naboth did not hand over his vineyard, shall we hand over the Church of Christ?’ (Ambrose 2005 [385–6], 151) More than this, in De Nabuthae Ambrose clearly defends the legitimacy of Naboth's inheritance. The story of the common possession of the earth may have been a way of reminding the rich of the responsibilities that were a part of their stewardship of that which, in the end, only truly belonged to God. And it may well be that it was the expropriation of the indebted smallholder by the larger and wealthier landowner that Ambrose has uppermost in his mind in telling the story of Naboth. This chimes with the contemporary evidence that life for peasant farmers and the indentured was becoming more difficult in an economic crisis which combined ‘demographic contraction, the ravages of war, growing military expenses, tax pressure, economic decline, the coercion of workers and state interventions’ (Giardana 2007, 743–768; see also Jones 1974, 83–88, 135–136; Hopkins 1980, 121; Wickham 1994, 13; Garnsey 1998). ⁵

Ambrose and De Officiis

De Nabuthae has its origins in a set of sermons (which must have been awesomely long!). These would surely have been strongly rhetorical in style and to this extent may be an unreliable guide to Ambrose's considered opinion. We might expect something a little more measured in Ambrose's major treatise on Christian ethics, De Officiis (Ambrose 2002 [387]). In this work, Ambrose reworks Cicero's (1991 [44 bce]) famous text of the same name (itself an updating of an earlier and now lost text of the 2nd-century bce Stoic, Panaetius). His aspiration is to go beyond the ethics of the Stoic-influenced late republican Roman (who had done just about as well as a pagan lacking the revelation and teaching of Jesus Christ could have been expected to do) and to present an ethical code for a fully Christianised world. In a key passage he reworks Cicero's treatment of that in which justice consists which, according to the Roman, includes rules relating to property. We can consider the two accounts side by side (as Ambrose must have done):

OPEN IN VIEWER

Cicero, De Officiis Book One VII	Ambrose, De Officiis XXVIII
20 … The first office of justice is to keep one man from doing harm to another, unless provoked by wrong.	131. But the very first role which the philosophers think justice performs is excluded with us. They say the first expression of justice is that a person should do no harm to anyone unless provoked by some injury. This idea is dismissed by the authority of the gospel, for the will of Scripture is that we should have the spirit of the Son of Man in us, and he came to bestow grace, not to inflict injuries.
… and the next is to lead men to use common possessions for the common interests, private property for their own.	132. The next expression of justice, they have thought, is that a person who holds common, that is to say public, property should regard it as public, and a person who holds private property should regard it as private.
21. There is, however, no such thing as private ownership established by nature, but property becomes private either through long occupancy (vetere occupation) … or through conquest … or by due process of law, bargain, purchase, or by allotment … inasmuch as in each case some of those things which by nature had been common property became the property of individuals, each one should retain possession of that which has fallen to his lot; and if anyone appropriates to himself anything beyond that, he will be violating the laws of human society.	This is not even in line with nature, for nature generously supplies everything for everyone in common. God ordained everything to be produced to provide food for everyone in common; his plan was that the earth would be, as it were, the common possession of us all. Nature produced common rights, then; it is greed (usurpatio) that has established private rights.
22 … since, as the Stoics hold, everything that the earth produces is created for man's use and as men, too, are born for the sake of men, that they may be able mutually to help one another; in this direction we ought to follow Nature as our guide, to contribute to the general good by an interchange of acts of kindness, by giving and receiving, and thus by our skill, our industry, and our talents to cement human society more closely together, man to man.	… In this connection, we are told, the Stoics believed that everything the earth produces is intended for men's benefit, and that men were created for the sake of other men, in order to serve one another.

Having claimed that all these good Stoic ideas were stolen from the Holy Scriptures (from Moses and David, respectively), Ambrose concludes his discussion in the following terms:

In the secondary literature (which is extensive; see Davidson 2001, 570–1 for sources), much has been made of whether Ambrose's usurpatio here is really equivalent to Cicero's vetus occupatio. The consensus seems to be that, while usurpatio was sometimes deployed with a more neutral sense (of ‘usage’ or ‘occupation’), by this time and certainly in this context its sense is pejorative. So, initial occupation is in some sense ‘illegitimate’. At the same time, Ambrose is clearly not calling for all to be returned to common ownership. The unlawful origins of private property simply reinforce the duty upon present custodians to be generous and to share use of their resources with the poor. ⁶ It serves to remind the wealthy man that ‘you are the custodian, not the master of your wealth’ (Ambrose 1927 [c.387], 87).

It may be that Ambrose's thinking here is influenced less by Cicero than by Seneca (whether at first or second hand; see Homes Dudden 1935, I, 8). It is in the work of Seneca that we find the clearest expression of the idea that the existence of private property represents a ‘second best’, the regrettable necessity of men who have lost the innocence of their golden age, largely because they have been ensnared by avarice. The crucial source is Seneca's Epistula LXXXX. Here Seneca writes enthusiastically of:

This primitive communism was destroyed by the arrival of avarice which ‘by its eagerness to lay something away and to turn it to its own private use, made all things the property of others, and reduced itself from boundless wealth to straitened need’. Private property brings with it inequality, poverty, contestation, hatred, envy, disingenuousness, fretfulness, fear, vanity, viciousness. It creates a state of unfreedom; ‘a thatched roof covered free men; under marble and gold dwells slavery’ (Epistula 90). But, for Seneca, it is an irreversible change—and reflects the degenerate state of ‘fallen’ men.

This story could easily be Christianised by placing the golden age in the Garden of Eden and identifying its end with the Fall and the original sin of Adam and Eve. In the words of Ambrose's De Officiis: ‘Nature produced common rights, then; it is greed (usurpatio) that has established private rights’ (Ambrose 2002 [387], 1, 195). A world without property would be a better world but in our fallen condition this is not possible and it is better that fallen men should have rules about property than none, for such anarchy would simply open the way to perpetual violence and rapine.

Augustine and the City of God

This view is brought out much more explicitly in the work of St Augustine, within just a few years of Ambrose's death. Writing early in the fifth century, Augustine accepted the by now conventional view that in the beginning (and before the Fall) the earth was given by God to all mankind in common. But fallen men, in the grip of the vices of lust and avarice, need civil laws that distinguish ‘mine’ from ‘thine’, just as they need the other laws of the earthly state, to save them from falling into the anarchy of mutual self-destruction. According to the unchanging divine law, all things belong to God or maybe, by his dispensation, to those whom he deems righteous; but according to the (changeable) civil law, possessions belong to those whom the king (for now) decrees to be their owners.

Elsewhere, Augustine evokes the shadow world of divinely lawful ownership, quoting the Book of Proverbs to the effect that ‘the whole world is the wealth of the faithful man, but the unfaithful one has not a penny’ (Augustine 2001, 87). Since to possess ‘lawfully’ is to possess ‘justly’ and to possess ‘justly’ is to possess ‘rightly’, the many men who do not use their wealth well (i.e. in the service of God) are in the wrongful possession of what is properly the property of another: ‘money can be wrongly possessed by bad people, and as for the good, the less they love it, the more rightly they possess it’ (Augustine 2001, 87). But, in Augustine's view, it is best to tolerate the actual and ‘unjust’ disposition of property in the real world because this is part of the price that we pay to secure some sort of civil peace in our sojourn through this the earthly city (whose sin is incurable). Thus, the rule of the tyrant and the wealth of the wicked are also a part of God's plan, sent to test and punish the righteous. It is only in the City of God that every one ‘will truly own what he possesses’ (Augustine 2001, 87).

Ponet and the Short Treatise

For Ambrose, the story of Naboth is a story about property. It is, above all, about the duties of the wealthy and the powerful to respect the proprietary rights of the poor and the powerless. But even though Ahab is a king and although Ambrose cites the story against the Emperor Valentinian, it is really for him much more a story of rich and poor than it is one of state and citizen. Its target is the vice of avarice rather than overweening political power. The inflection of the story of Naboth as this reappears in the crucial fifth chapter of Ponet's Short Treatise of Politic Power is rather different (Ponet 1970 [1556]). ⁸

Under Edward VI, Ponet had risen into the highest echelons of the established Protestant church, succeeding Stephen Gardiner as Bishop of Winchester in 1551. With the accession of Mary to the throne in 1553 and her vigorous efforts to re-impose Catholicism, Ponet was deprived of his office and briefly imprisoned. Having been released, he was suspected of involvement in the early stage of Wyatt's rebellion (in late January and early February 1554). At this point, Ponet fled to the continent where he is next heard of in residence in Frankfurt. It was here that he wrote the Short Treatise (probably in 1555). It is widely suggested (see Hudson 1942; Skinner 1978, II) that Ponet's real purpose in this work is to establish the limits of the ruler's powers and to justify even the private subject in killing a tyrant (indeed, the latter is not really a right but rather a duty given by the law of nature, which is God's law). An important secondary theme is to establish the indefeasible right of the citizen to the ownership of private property. Indeed, (Barbara Peardon 1982, 40–41) suggests that the proximate cause of Ponet's intervention was not a general hostility to Mary's attempt to re-impose Catholic orthodoxy but rather a more specific attack upon the property of Protestant exiles which the queen was pursuing throughout 1554 and 1555.

In Ponet's account, legitimate property comes into being after the Fall but before the creation of political power (which itself is only instituted after the Flood). In the beginning, there was simply the law of nature or the rule of God (which were and are the same thing). Before the Fall, men simply knew to follow the will of God: ‘this rule is the lawe of nature, furst planted and grafted only in the mynde of man’. And, before the Fall, ‘whan ther was no sinne, all thinges were common’. After the Fall, man's ‘mynde was through synne defiled, filled with darknesse, and encombered with many doubtes’ and God set forth his law ‘in writing in the decaloge or 10 commaundmentes’. This in turn was to be reduced in Jesus' teaching to just two commands: ‘thou shalt love thy lorde God above all thinges, and thy neighbour as thy self’:

Ponet says nothing explicitly about how several property arose. But he does say that, after the Fall, ‘God ordained that man should get his living by the swette of his browes: and that he should be the more forced to labour, the distinction of thinges and propertie (mine, and thine) was (contrary to platoes opinion) ordained’. That this is God's will is said to be evident in ‘these two lawes: Thou shalt not steale: Thou shall not covet thy neighbors wife, nor his servant, nor his maide, nor his oxe, nor his asse, nor any thing that is his’.

Originally, God simply gave fallen man the law, but when he persisted in his wickedness, God brought first the Flood and then, in its wake, corporal punishment. At this point, God also ‘institut[ed] politike power and geveth authoritie to men to make more lawes’. This included ‘autoritie over goodes, landes, possessions and all suche thinges as might bried controversies and discordes’ (Ponet 1970 [1556]). The form of this magistracy (and whether monarchy, aristocracy or democracy) it was left to the people to choose. The one purpose of such government, whatever its form, was ‘the mayntenaunce of justice, to the wealthe and benefite of the hole multitude; and not of the Superiour and governours alone’ (Ponet 1970 [1556]). To secure this end, the people instituted checks upon their rulers (the Ephors at Sparta, the Decemviri at Rome and, in more recent times, parliaments). But the people always retain the right to change their form of government if the rulers breach their trust and fail to govern according to God's law. Rulers and ruled are alike subject to God's law (the law of nature) and it is our duty to defy those rulers who act against God's will.

What are the consequences of this political dispensation for the property regime? It is Ponet's intention to refute the claim of those who argue that all property within the kingdom is, in the last instance, held by the monarch. Before the Fall, all things were common (to this extent, but only to this extent, the Anabaptists are right) but in a sinful world, common ownership is impossible. (The sharing of goods in the early Christian church was supererogatory and exceptional.) But ‘in these daies … many wicked governours and rulers’ are worse than the Anabaptists—for they wish to make everyone's goods common except their own. They dress this up in various ways—as the taxation of moral evils (such as drink), by debasing the coinage, or as ‘God's will’, justified by a selective reference to the Scriptures (especially to the story of God's description of kingship in 1 Samuel 8:10–18, a favourite text of the absolutists; Ponet 1970 [1556], 83–85; see below). But rulers no less than the people are subject to God's natural law—including both the seventh and eighth commandments. No one can exercise absolute political power: ‘kinges, princes, and governours of common wealthes have not nor can justly clayme any absolute autoritie, but that the ende of their autoritie is to maintene justice, to defende the innocent, to punishe the evil’ (Ponet 1970 [1556]).

It is in this context that Ponet evokes the story of Naboth, Jezebel and Ahab. In Ponet's account, there is no mention of Naboth being a poor man: he simply refused to sell his vineyard, ‘as he might doo, for by Goddes lawe he had a propretie therin, from which without his will and consent, he could not be forced to departe’ (Ponet 1970 [1556], emphasis in original). It is not absolutely clear how Naboth has attained a right in his property ‘by Goddes lawe’. Clearly, the vineyard is ‘the inheritance of his fathers’. And the Books of Numbers and Leviticus contain a good deal of God-given law (divine positive law) which minutely prescribes paths of inheritance (of land that is originally given to the Jews by God) including rules forbidding the permanent alienation of the land. It is in this sense that Naboth's inheritance has a God-given pedigree (even if private property only exists as the result of man's sinfulness).

As we know, Jezebel schemed Naboth's murder and the king got his vineyard but God's wrath was visited upon Ahab and, in the end, his house was ‘so destroied, that ther was not lefte therof so muche as a dogge to pisse against the wall’ (Ponet 1970 [1556]). The more general lesson that Ponet draws is this:

To this Ponet adds one last and uncharacteristically pragmatic argument. If it were true ‘that all the subjects goods were the princes’, this would be a recipe for economic disaster (Ponet 1970 [1556]). Were people so uncertain about keeping the proceeds of their labour, they would abandon all their productive efforts. Indeed, they would cease to bring children into a world in which they were to be so deprived of their just rewards. This, so Ponet argues, has been the experience of the indigenous peoples of the New World where a flourishing domestic economy (and population) was crushed by the Spanish invaders' ruthless exploitation of native labour to extract gold (Ponet 1970 [1556]).

Conclusion

There is something more than a few hundred miles separating Ambrose's Milan from Ponet's Frankfurt. But despite the twelve and a half centuries that lie between De Nabuthae and the Short Treatise, there is a sense in which they belong to a shared tradition. They worked from the same source. They shared a wider epistemology (grounded in the truths of the Bible) and (in a similarly very broad sense) a world-view. They shared the view that the ultimate moral and political authority (and, in the last instance, the one truly legitimate owner) is God. They belong to a more general Christian apologetics which defends private property as a ‘second best’, as rooted in sinfulness but not itself wrong, which predates and postdates both men (and indeed continues into the present). Both men exhibit a surprisingly sophisticated ‘folk economics’—in Ambrose's case, a recognition of the effects of monopoly upon price and supply; in Ponet's case, a recognition of the impact of insecure property rights on incentives to produce and reproduce. Both men (however indirectly) see labour as a (perhaps the) legitimate source of individual property.

At the same time, there are important differences. While Ambrose cares about the economic consequences of the existing property regime, especially its consequences for the poor and the dispossessed, his is above all else a moral argument against the vice of avarice (since in the end the ‘right’ attitude to wealth is one of indifference). For Ponet, what is crucial is the integrity of the individual's property holdings over against the state. He is just not much interested in the desperate state of the poor. For Ambrose, the crucial Bible teaching is the duty to share with others; for Ponet what really matters are the eighth and tenth commandments: thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet. Both men evoke the idea of a God-given natural law but to different effects. For Ambrose, the natural law would give us a world in common; it is our fall from our original, natural condition that requires us to have laws of property (for fear of the descent into something worse). For Ponet, our claims of several property follow directly from God's natural law as set out in the Ten Commandments. We need laws and property because we are fallen but the injunction ‘Thou Shalt not Steal’ gives God's imprimatur to our having what we hold and holding what we have. The filling out of these differences would require us to trace the lineages of Christian writing on property from Ambrose to Ponet (through Augustine, Isidore, Gratian, Aquinas, John of Salisbury, William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Erasmus, More and Luther among others). But that is another story.