<p>1:26 <em>Consider your calling, brothers; not many of you had worldly wisdom, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth</em>- The references to 'wise' and 'powerful / mighty' men use the words just used about the Lord Jesus as the wisdom and power of God (:24). He can only be those things to those who are not wise or powerful- or, rather, who recognize that they are not those things. So the attraction of His wisdom and power is to those who recognize they lack those things- the unwise and the powerless. And that is why it is the chain smokers and the asylum seekers and the get rich quick scheme enthusiasts... who have what it takes to believe in Christ as the power and the wisdom of God.</p><p>The Lord Himself had implied that it was to the poor that the Gospel was more successfully preached. And Paul observed that in Corinth, not many mighty had been called, but most of them were poor (1 Cor. 1:26-28). &ldquo;Christianity in its beginnings was without doubt a movement of impoverished classes&hellip; the Christian congregation originally embraced proletariat elements almost exclusively and was a proletarian organization&rdquo;. It has also been observed that the New Testament generally is written in very rough Greek, of a low cultural level when compared with other Greek literature of the period. The way he exhorts the Thessalonians to work with their own hands so that the world couldn&rsquo;t criticize them implies the readership of Thessalonians were mainly manual workers (1 Thess. 4:11). Likewise Eph. 4:28.&nbsp;Paul wrote as if the &ldquo;abysmal poverty&rdquo; of the Macedonian ecclesias was well known (2 Cor. 8:1,2); and yet he goes on to reason that they had &ldquo;abundance&rdquo; in comparison with the &ldquo;lack&rdquo; of the Jerusalem Christians (8:14). The Jewish Christians called themselves &ldquo;Ebionites&rdquo;, based on the Hebrew word for &lsquo;the poor&rsquo;- &ldquo;it was probably a conscious reminiscence of a very early term which attested by Paul&rsquo;s letters as an almost technical name for the Christians in Jerusalem and Judaea&rdquo;. Even if not all these poor converts were slaves, they were all subservient to their employers / sources of income. Craftsmen would have had to belong to a pagan trade guild, normally&nbsp; involving idol worship which a Christian had to refuse, and slaves of course had no &lsquo;right&rsquo; to their own religion if it differed from that of their household.</p>