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carolyn osiek

PIETAS IN AND OUT OF THE FRYING PAN

CAROLYN OSIEK
Catholic Theological Union

Study of the Roman family has been in full swing since 1981, involving the participation in ongoing seminars and publications by some of the best Roman social historians in the world at present. Beryl Rawson has been a key player since the beginning of this movement, contributing numerous volumes both written and edited. I first entered this world of discussion of the Roman family as a participant in an NEH seminar on the topic in the summer of 1991 in Rome, led by Richard Saller and John Bodel. Through that experience, I became even more convinced that the early Christian and Jewish family must be understood in that context. Many questions have been raised from this study that can be pursued in research on Christian inscriptions and other data. How I wish we had answers to all of them. There is of course the preliminary problem of discrepancy of chronological time. In research on Christian materials before the late third century, much has simply to be inferred from the elusive literary texts and general evidence, while at the same period the non-Christian Roman material abounds. Roman studies have the advantage of an extraordinary amount of data from the first three centuries of the empire. There is similar Christian evidence from the next centuries, which is in a way, the continuation of the material from the first three centuries, but with significant modifications as Christianity becomes the dominant religion. However, the kind of computerized data assembled by Saller from the first three centuries has not to my knowledge been continued for ICUR ,1 the major epigraphic collection of Christian inscriptions. Since there is no well-founded evidence for gender separation
1 Johannes Baptista de Rossi (ed.), Inscriptiones christianae urbis Romae septimo seculo antiquiores , 3 vols. Rome: Officina Libraria Pontificia, 1857-1915; and Angelo Silvagni et al. (eds.), Inscriptiones christianae urbis Romae septimo seculo antiquiores (new series, Vatican City: Pontificia Institutio Archaeologiae Christianae, 19221985).

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003 Also available online www.brill.nl

Biblical Interpretation 11, 2

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in the house from the Hellenistic period onwards, we can assume the same for Christian families. One wonders whether Vitruvius is going on old reports when he remarks on the difference between the Greek and Roman house, whereby the Greek house places the womens quarters in the rear part of the structure (De arch . 6.5-7). Archaeologists are hard put to delineate this gendered space distinction in the surviving houses even of the classical period. Ironically, some of the best would-be examples of this kind of separation between front (male?) spaces and rear (female?) space could be seen at Pompeii and Herculaneumif we believed that such a separation was operative there. But the literature tells us otherwise. There is a marked difference of decoration and theme between household shrines in areas for reception and family living, versus those in service quarters. The former are also more likely to depict the Penates , the household gods whose cult was controlled by the paterfamilias , while the latter are more likely to depict the Lares and the Genius, cults in which the slaves and freedmen had a larger degree of participation. This distinction suggests differences of cult activity in the household according to status. The question of Christian adaptation of household religion has long preoccupied me. How was the practice of Roman household religion adapted by Christians, along the lines of status, or at all? Was it immediately apparent that baptized slaves should participate as full members in the meeting of the house church and in whatever cult the Christian family developed for its daily life? Unfortunately, we have very little way of knowing, but we do see evidence in the texts of Christian householders with unbelieving slaves and vice versa, as well as all-Christian households. We know that there were at least some home rituals. The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus (41) calls on Christians to pray at home at various times of the day, including to rise in the middle of the night to pray, and provides that in the case where non-believers would be disturbed at night, the believers may move to another room. This midnight rising as a regular practice may be an ideal not always carried out, but it gives us a glimpse of home religious practices which were probably more highly developed. The question of romanization in the East is also an interesting question for the study of early Christianity. While it is suggested that this tendency begins in the third century, some, including Rawson, suspect that it can be found earlier. But the question of

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the romanization of the East presupposes an East-West difference that is gradually overcome. It is this earlier East-West difference that is of interest for the study of pre-Constantinian Christianity. If differences can be detected in family practice through commemorative customs, etc., then perhaps some inferences could be made about differences in social customs among Christians. This would be of central interest to the interpretation of the New Testament and other early Christian texts in their Roman context. Another viable question is whether what seems to have been a growing attention to children in the later empire also extended to Christian life. I think that would be difficult to substantiate from the remaining evidence. One other aspect, however, is worth comment. We know from Christian literary sources that the church was considered more and more to be a family, a family of families that claimed the absolute allegiance that the family of origin had previously commanded. Did this development enhance or cause a decline in the importance of actual family life among Christians? Connected to this question is an observation regarding iconography, that in art and inscriptions, Christians did not represent themselves as families as frequently as did other Romans. But was it the new religion or some other factor that reduces the numbers of such representations precisely when Christian art is in its ascendancy? This might have been a trend developing in the lower orders in the later empire, irrespective of Christianity, so the contrast is not necessarily between pagan and Christian. Clearly this is an area that could be investigated further. Two recent books will be helpful to these investigations: The Family in Late Antiquity by Geoffrey Nathan (Routledge, 2000) and The Ancient Church as Family by Joseph H. Hellerman (Fortress Press, 2001). The post-Constantinian legislation and literature has been barely touched from the point of view of family life. Ultimately, the question is, How influential was the environment of imperial Rome in early Christianity? Let us turn in earnest now into the frying pan. We are perhaps accustomed to thinking of the Pastorals as accommodating the status quo of Roman society, but less so the Maccabean literature. Both belong within the fascinating world of Roman family values. Locating the Augustan marriage legislation in the realm of propaganda is a great help toward understanding this function and strategy, and does indeed show their similarity to the household codes and the Pastorals domestic policy, all for the purpose

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of propagating an official policy kept ever before the eyes of their participants. One wonders if a similar phenomenon happened in Christian communities: a widow, for instance, who was married more than once or who was fifty-eight and one-half years old but determined to be enrolledwhatever that implied. There are later examples of Christian policy that contradict the Roman marriage legislation. Hermas in the early second century enjoined a husband to take back a repentant adulterous wife, something forbidden in the Augustan legislation (Man. 4.1.7-8). Callistus encouraged higher status women to marry lower status men, which was always severely disapproved of in Roman family ideology, even though it is known to have been done with some regularity (Hipp. 9.12). So for all the accommodation to imperial values that texts like the Pastorals show, there were always elements in Christian social rhetoric, if not practice, that encouraged resistance, or at least an alternative way of seeing things. In 2 Maccabees 7, the mother of the seven sons is in a conflictual situation. We recall what we know about the intimacy of the bond between mother and son in Mediterranean culture: the son is the mothers means of access to status, acceptance in her husbands family, and to social power. Moreover, it is the sons role to defend a widowed, defenseless mother. But here all of that is inverted or at least re-interpreted. The mothers access to glory will be through the death of her sons. She urges them on to acts of heroic courage, switching to the role of the Spartan mother who encourages her sons to die. The same behavior can be seen in some Palestinian mothers, like that of a martyr featured recently in the Western press, who says in the presence of her remaining sons: I hope they will all do the same. In 4 Maccabees, the mother is a walking cross-reference between the andreia of the Spartan mother and Augustan pietas . Her eusebeia/pietas is shown not in cooperating with or representing official family values, but in withstanding official governmental pressure, from a government that of course she does not recognize as legitimate. It only works because the Seleucids are a past tense by the time 4 Maccabees was written, and can thus be portrayed as enemies of the Roman order. If it had been Roman power persecuting the family, a very different political picture would have been painted, and we would be closer to the political dynamic of the Book of Revelation. I have long pondered the conflict or contradiction between the

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admonition in the Pastorals that younger widows should marry (1 Tim 5:14-15) and the qualification that a widow who is to be enrolled must have been an univira, married only once (1 Tim 5:9). Shes damned if she does and damned if she doesnt! And given the average life expectancy, few would make it to sixty at all. They seem penalized for having dying husbands! I have thought that the answer lies in the distinction known to the community between widows on the dole and widows enrolled as members of the official service organization of the Church. But one never knows. Much early Christian literature and such Roman period Jewish works as 4 Maccabees engage in the game of who does it better? Does eusebeia/pietas belong to the Roman government and its political propaganda, or are there some who do not identify with it but nevertheless do a better job, beating the Roman political machine at its own game, as it were? Is this a version of My Dad can beat your Dad or Nobody does it better? Or is the argument, See, were just like you! as Tertullian and other apologists like Diognetus are wont to argue? To what extent does the specifically Jewish or Christian representation of eusebeia consciously replicate the imperial ideal, even though the content may be different to some extent? Countless other examples could be cited in which the attitudes of eusebeia are propagated in Christian writing, from Ignatius ranting that those whose Christology is other than his do not practice traditional virtues like care for widows, orphans, and the needy (Smyrn . 6.2) to the Apostolic Constitutions (8.2.9) on women prophets of the Old and New Testaments, Miriam, Debborah, Huldah, Judith, Mary, Elizabeth, Anne, and the four daughters of Philip none of whom rose up against men, but kept their proper place. Or, are most of the Christian passages that exemplify pietas simply repeating mindlessly the party line? Have Christian writers so deeply imbibed the values of the official line that they are not conscious of replicating them? But this brings us to the question of alternative views, of reactions, of revolt. Are there traditions of revolt against the powers that be, and the domestic code perpetuated by the Augustan legislation and continued in subsequent official policy? Certainly we have traditions of resistance in early Christianity: they are called the Synoptic Gospels. We need not think that such resistance arose only in Christianity, however. The Acts of the Pagan Martyrs of

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Alexandria published years ago by Musurillo2 point in that direction, though it is unclear what the issues are. If we are correct about the time of writing of the Synoptic Gospels, these subversive texts that advocate abandonment of family in favor of the new grouping of disciples are more or less contemporary with the first Christian manifestations of imperial family values in Colossian and Ephesians, with the Pastorals falling not far behind. Admonitions like Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me (Matt 10:37) or Whoever leaves house and family will receive a hundredfold do not exactly fit the imperial ideology of family values. In November of 2001 I was an external examiner for a dissertation at the University of Deusto in Bilbao on the self-defined deviance of the Jesus movement. 3 Using a social-science model of deviance, the theory explains how a group can come to be labeled as deviant by the society at large, and eventually come to adopt and own that label as true to its identity, reversing the values of society and claiming its own deviant values. This is apparently what the Synoptic tradition did with imperial family values, while other writings like the Pastorals and 4 Maccabees did very different things with those family values. It is a perennial question for me, how it is that these two traditions could have developed and prospered simultaneously in the same groupsor are we talking about the same groups? There is very little trace of Synoptic traditions in the epistolary content and vice versa. Can it be that we are in the face of two parallel but distinct traditions, the one fully embracing Roman domestic values and the other reacting to it? The usual explanation that the sayings about abandonment of family are intended only for those who experience family as an obstacle to discipleship does not sit well with me, since no such distinctions are made in the texts. Research on the early Christian and Jewish family must continue in the context of the Roman family. All Mediterranean family life of the imperial period is influenced by it, whether accommodation or reaction. But we are just beginning the kind of interdisciplinary work by which we will deepen our understanding of this relationship.
2 Herbert A. Musurillo (ed.), Acts of the Pagan Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). 3 Carlos Javier Gil Arbiol, La autoestigmatizacin en el movimiento de Jess: Ensayo de Exgesis Sociocientfica (PhD diss., Universidad de Deusto).

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carolyn osiek Abstract

The importance of research in the Roman family for understanding the early Christian family in context is underlined, and some difficulties and challenges for interrelating the two areas are summarized.