Romans 15:28

When therefore I have accomplished this, and have sealed to them this fruit I will go on by you into Spain.

The commentators differ in their interpretations of the sealed fruit. To whom was the fruit sealed, the donors or the recipients? The answer lies in determining whose fruit it was; and there can be no way of making the bounty taken up from the Gentiles to be the fruit of the Jerusalem poor. It was, on the other hand, the fruit of Gentile Christianity; and through the supervision and safe conveyance of it to its intended purpose, Paul, in a sense (for the words are admittedly metaphorical), sealed it to the heavenly credit of them that gave it.

The existence of the aforementioned poor among the Christians in the city of Jerusalem in the sixth decade of the Christian era, when this letter was written, is proof that communal life was not practiced by the apostolic church. The so-called case of communal practice mentioned in Acts 4:32-35 was not really such a thing as communism at all. It was an effort of the Christian community to meet a tremendous need, upon an emergency basis, of the vast throng in Jerusalem for that first Pentecost of the Christian era, many of whom had remained in Jerusalem past the normal time of departure in order to hear the preaching of the gospel. If one should insist, to the contrary, that this incident was indeed communism, then the words of Batey are a thundering reply to it:

The poverty of Jerusalem was not solved by their communal experiment but rather led to an even more serious financial crisis.[21]

The view here, however, is that the so-called communism of Acts 4:32-35 was nothing remotely akin to communism. There were too many differences. In the New Testament situation, each one gave; in communism, the leaders take. In the church, all were free to participate or not; in communism, confiscation is enforced upon all. In the church, they were motivated by love; in communism, fear controls everything. People who draw any kind of parallel between the generous actions of the church in Acts, as compared with modern communism, are plainly mistaken.