the likelihood that the author addresses a mixed congregation of Jewish and Gentile Christians.14 One other typical concern of social-scientific inquiry involves the social level of the members of a particular group. Hebrews provides further evidence against the older, Marxian assumption that early Christianity recruited “mainly from the labouring and burdened, the members of the lowest strata of the people,” consisting of “slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights.”15