History of Early Christianity Named Best Scholarly Book in Arts and Sciences

It may be easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for an 800-page, heavily footnoted scholarly book about early Christianity to enter the best-seller list.

But since its release in August, “Through the Eye of the Needle,” Peter Brown’s sweeping study of the changing attitudes towards wealth among Christians of late antiquity, has become something of a commercial hit, selling some 13,000 copies and becoming Princeton University Press’s top-selling book of 2012. Last last week it added another feather to its cap, claiming the R.R. Hawkin Award, the Association of American Publishers’ top honor for a scholarly book in the arts and sciences.

“Peter Brown is a giant, but it’s still pretty remarkable for an 800-page, $40 book on a fascinating but fairly circumscribed topic” to sell so well, Rob Tempio, r. Brown’s editor, said via email, adding: “Brown is truly a magnificent writer, but I may be biased.”

The reviewers, however, have tended to agree, praising Mr. Brown’s deep research, vivid prose and bold interpretations while offering their own nods to the book’s contemporary relevance. (“How Christianity Spread; the One Percent and the Ninety-Nine Percent in Ancient Rome,” read the headline in The New Republic.)

Garry Wills, writing in the New York Review of Books, hailed it as “a masterpiece.” Peter Leithart, writing in Christianity Today, called Mr. Brown’s account of the church’s reconciliation with wealth “deliriously complicated,” leaving the reader in a “bewildered state of ambivalence.”

The Irish-born Mr. Brown, 77, teaches at Princeton University. He established himself as a major scholar with his 1967 biography “Augustine of Hippo.” It was followed in 1972 by “The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750,” which helped establish the idea of “late antiquity” while sharply challenging the reigning view, put forth in Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” that the rise of Christianity coupled with barbarian invasions resulted in a decisive “fall” of Rome, folowed by dark ages.

In place of rupture, Mr. Brown saw “continuity,” “synthesis,” and “transformation,” a process also at work in “Through the Eye of the Needle,” whose subtitle is “Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 A.D.” There, Mr. Brown traces how the church transformed itself into something like a welfare state by abandoning the notion that wealth was inherently sinful.

“Rather than denouncing the evil origins of wealth and insisting on its total renunciation,” he writes, the church’s “outreach to the poor, which had taken the form of care only for the destitute, slowly but surely changed its function so as to embrace the care of average citizens in times of stress.”