Suz’s Reviews > The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity > Status Update

1. The majority of early Christian converts were from what we would classify as urban petty-bourgeoisie.
2. Paul (writer of the epistles) was himself a skilled tradesman/small business owner as he made tents — he was not a peasant, a slave, or a former slave — the vast majority of Roman society.
3. Because Paul did not stipulate that Gentiles who converted to Christianity had to observe Mosaic Law, there was functionally little to distinguish themselves from the pagan majority
4. Therefore, the early Christians focused on sexual renunciation — a concept already present in Platonism and its related philosophies, which dominated the classical education its adherents received — almost exclusively and "took it up a notch" compared to their pagan peers.
5. The class composition of the early church also meant that there was more of a reluctance to liquidate property and wealth, though that did happen. It became inevitable though, that instead of communal living, the petty-bourgeois characters of these early converts atomized what would should have been communal practices — and honestly, an obsession about the body was the natural progression of this phenomenon.

Similarly to the current strain of urban petty-bourgeoisie thought, the early converts of the church thought the end of the world was coming, so there wasn't any point to marriage or procreation. What separates them from their contemporary petty-bourgeoisie peers is that their obsession with purity was rooted in the body, whereas modern petty-bourgeois idealists are obsessed with purity in their opinions, lifestyle, and "brand" — afforded to them by capitalism. As the Roman empire didn't have such materialist devices, and already had an attitude against sexual expression (contrary to popular belief), how else do the petty-bourgeoisie channel their desire for moral superiority?

We should also consider Socratic philosophy and its descendants, particularly Neo-Platonism, for their influences on this class. There was also a belief prevalent in medicine at the time that if a man lost too much "vital fluid", then he would lose his masculine energies. Similar beliefs persist in some Daoist and Dharmic strains of thought (conserving yang and prana respectively). Roman society was also quite prudish, which may shock the uneducated, but it was prudish in the same way the antebellum American South was prudish. Freeborn women were off limits, men had to behave with stoicism, dignitas, and it was frowned upon for them to be seen as "too open" with sexual escapades — but their slaves were completely open for casual relations.