Was the Jerusalem Church in Acts Socialist?

 

Did the first church in Jerusalem practice socialism? Acts 2:44, 45 reads, "Now all who believed were together, and had all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods, and divided them among all, as anyone had need." After reading that, a good friend said, "That sounds like socialism to me!" Was it? 

That's a difficult question to answer thanks to socialists who continually redefine words so that they win any argument by definition. Today, any concern for the poor is called socialist. By that definition, the first Jerusalem church was socialist. But must we accept the socialist definition? What are socialism and capitalism really? Who has the authority to define them?

The honest thing to do is to go back to the people who launched those systems. I do that here for capitalism. I haven't done that for socialism, so let me give a brief history of it. The first depiction of socialism appeared in Plato's Republic, which was inspired by Sparta. Plato required that the state own all property and the children. The state employed nannies who raised all children so that parents couldn't know who there children were and give them advantages over others. A philosopher would be the absolute monarch.