In this visionary short study, Peter Brown links two themes which are rarely brought together: Christian views of the afterlife between the second and seventh centuries, and the ways in which relations between God and the faithful, living and dead, were mediated by wealth. Early Christian thinking about the afterlife, Brown argues, was dominated by two ideas: that saints and martyrs entered the presence of God at the moment of death, and that everyone would soon face God on Judgement Day. As time passed, however, and did not end, Christians became more interested in the journey all souls were making towards eternal rest, and in the variations between them. The brief, intense race run by Paul gradually became a marathon, in which all souls were running towards Heaven, but at different spee