Journal of Biblical Literature - Society of Biblical Literature

Bauman-Martin: Women on the Edge 255
the scholars commenting on 1 Peter and its exhortations to women interpret
those exhortations as negative in their original context and as having an overwhelmingly
negative influence on the lives of Christian (and non-Christian)
women in the centuries up to our own time. The incident in the article just
quoted is an adequate demonstration that the text of 1 Peter can wreak havoc in
the lives of modern women when wielded by modern ministers. There have
been two largely harmful results of such scholarship, however. One has been to
leave the women of the text behind—labeled as victims of the early Christian
appropriation of Aristotelian social theory; and the other has been to miss completely
the positive example of resistance and negotiation these women provide.
Indeed, the actual household code in 1 Peter and the social circumstances
visible behind it suggest that those specific Christian women were making
interpretive choices and accessing avenues of identity that have not been considered
by other exegetes, partly because those avenues no longer function in
our culture. 8
Although most of the letter focuses on the causes, meaning, and proper
response to suffering, the author’s summary of how to behave while suffering is
centered in the Haustafel, or household code, found in 1 Pet 2:18–3:11. It is
within that pericope that the exhortations to Christian women are located. Certainly
it is a significant piece of Christian parenesis, but the Petrine Haustafel
has quite often been lost in studies of the Christian Haustafeln as a group, as
such codes appear in Col 3:18–4:1 and Eph 5:21–6:9 and in extracanonical
Christian writings such as Polycarp’s Philippians. Previous studies of the
Haustafeln have focused on the origin of their form, and the earliest modern
interpretation was that the NT codes were a derivation of Stoic duty lists, which
the Christians had lightly Christianized. 9 Others have since argued for the
Christian, rabbinic, or Hellenistic Jewish origins of the Haustafel form. All of
these previous studies conclude that the meaning of the content of the
8 It is true that many conservative Christian women writers also make the point that the biblical
texts offer more positive behavioral models and choices for modern women than feminists will
allow; see, e.g., Faith Martin, Call Me Blessed: The Emerging Christian Woman (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1988); and Elizabeth Elliott, Let Me Be a Woman (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 1982). I
instead argue that 1 Peter offered interpretive choices for the original readers, but not for the readers
of today; my loyalty is less to an exalted view of the text itself than to the broadening of perspectives
with which we understand women of the past. The model that the text offers for women now
is dangerously appealing; it imparts a glimpse of strong women who chose to suffer for their faith,
but whose example should not be emulated by modern women, who have a wider variety of more
constructive options and no supportive ideological framework with which to interpret the experience
of suffering.
9 Martin Dibelius (An die Kolosser, an die Epheser, an Philemon [Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck,
1913) originated the hypothesis of Stoic origin, which was further developed by his student Carl
Weidinger (Die Haustafeln: Ein Stück urchristlicher Paraenese [Hamburg: Heinrich Bauer,
1928]).