It gets said at the door, kindly, to end a conversation about money. “Charity begins at home” is not in the Bible, and stranger than that, the two men usually credited with it both wrote it down in order to disown it. Each of them is quoting somebody he has no respect for.
Terence puts it in the mouth of a man dodging a debt
Around 166 BC, in a Roman comedy, a character describes how people talk when you ask them for something they owe. He calls it the most shameless speech there is, and then he performs it.
quis tu es? quis mihi es? quor meam tibi? heus, proxumus sum egomet mihi.
Terence, Andria, line 635
Who are you. What are you to me. Why should what is mine be yours. Listen, I am nearest to myself. He adds that if you then ask these people what happened to their good faith, they feel no shame at all where shame is called for. None of that is the modern proverb, and I cannot prove a line of descent from one to the other. What the two share is an instinct, and Terence wrote it down as the kind of thing a shameless man says out loud.
Into English, and into print
In English the sentiment is older than the proverb. Wycliffe has charity beginning at hem-self, at themselves, in a tract about prelates from around 1382, and at themselves is not at home.
The proverb in the form we use is first printed in Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici in 1642, inside a passage where he is praising friendship and the men who died for their friends.
That a man should lay down his life for his friend seems strange to vulgar affections and such as confine themselves within that worldly principle, “Charity begins at home.”
Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1642
He sets the proverb off as a saying and calls it worldly, and he names the sort of men who live inside it. A few lines later he says he could never keep track of what he owed himself when God and his country and his friends were in the question, and that he embraces himself after those three.
He does it twice. Charity begins at home is the voice of the world, he writes elsewhere in the same book, and adds that every man is his own greatest enemy.
Paul does write a hard sentence about family
But if anyone doesn’t provide for his own, and especially his own household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
1 Timothy 5:8 (WEB)
Paul means that as hard as it sounds. It is also the only verse in the neighborhood that a person defending the proverb ever quotes, which is the same habit that keeps God helps those who help themselves in circulation. Whether it means what the proverb wants depends entirely on what he is discussing, and he tells you, at length, on both sides of it.
The passage is a register of widows
Chapter 5 is administration. Paul is working out who the church supports, and there is an actual list with entry conditions. If a widow has children or grandchildren, those relatives take her. Paul’s wording there repays attention: let them learn first to show piety toward their own family, in verse four. First is a word about order, and a thing you do first is not a thing you do only, and Paul gives his reason for that order at the end of the section.
If any man or woman who believes has widows, let them relieve them, and don’t let the assembly be burdened, that it might relieve those who are widows indeed.
1 Timothy 5:16 (WEB)
Read that clause slowly. The families take their own so that the church’s money is free for the women who have nobody. Verse eight is not a rule about keeping what you have inside your own walls. It is a rule about not putting your mother on a fund that somebody else’s mother needs.
The conditions for getting on the list run the other way too.
Let no one be enrolled as a widow under sixty years old, having been the wife of one man, being approved by good works, if she has brought up children, if she has been hospitable to strangers, if she has washed the saints’ feet, if she has relieved the afflicted, and if she has diligently followed every good work.
1 Timothy 5:9-10 (WEB)
Hospitality to strangers is on the application form. So is relieving the afflicted, and washing the feet of people who arrived at the door. The charity the church would spend on that woman was owed to her partly because she had spent hers well outside her own house, on people who had no claim on her at all.
Six years when it nearly fitted
For about six years after my wife died I was raising two children on my own, and in that stretch the sentence would have gone down easily. There was a genuine claim on me at home and not much left over, and 5:8 would have sounded like permission instead of an instruction.
What I notice now is that the reason went away and the habit did not. The arguing I do with myself about a request at the door has the same shape it had then, and the circumstances that made it honest are years gone.
Galatians has the words in the other order
Paul gives the Galatians the same two categories and puts them in the order we have reversed.
So then, as we have opportunity, let’s do what is good toward all men, and especially toward those who are of the household of the faith.
Galatians 6:10 (WEB)
All men first. The household second, and the household there is the church, not your family. The proverb keeps the word especially and quietly loses the word all.
James, defining the religion God accepts, sends you out to the widows and the fatherless in their affliction. Not to think well of them from indoors. Out. And the first church in Jerusalem held things in common, selling property as people had need, the least domestic arrangement in the New Testament.
Browne, for what it is worth, put himself fourth. God, his country, his friends, and then his own turn. He was a working physician, which is what the title of his book says, and he had the same excuses the rest of us reach for.
Provide for your own. Paul says so and he says it sharply. He just never says to stop there, and the Roman playwright who first wrote the instinct down and the English doctor who first printed the proverb both knew exactly what sort of man says it and where he says it.