Within popular piety in America today, it is widely believed that the Bible instructs Christians, either explicitly or implicitly, to give ten percent of their income to their local churches. Pastors teach this in the name of the biblical notion of “tithing,” a term applied to the giving of ten percent of one’s crops and flocks to the Levite. As we will see, however, the Bible nowhere even remotely suggests that Christians are supposed to give ten percent of their income to the church, or anything. Moreover, the plain facts about biblical tithing contradict the very possibility of any sort of Christian tithing, or at least of the possibility of basing such a practice upon a biblical model. Let us leave aside the question of whether Christians are bound to the Old Testament commandments for now, and look first at some of the specifics concerning tithing during the days of the Temple.
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- [1] By the way, we do have an idea when the shallow reading of these passages on tithing was first adopted by the church, that is, when the idea of Christian tithing began: it was in the sixth century. (There’s a chapter detailing the sixth-century origins of Christian tithing in R. Kottje, Studien zum Einfluss des Alten Testamentes auf Recht und Liturgie des frühen Mittelalters (6.-8. Jahrhundert) [2nd ed.; Bonner historische Forschungen 23; Bonn: Ludwig Röhrscheid, 1970].) The practice was advocated by the Council of Tours in 567 and the second Council of Macon in 585, and it became obligatory (by law) in the Carolingian empire (in 765). ↩
