Journal of Biblical Literature - Society of Biblical Literature

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Journal of Biblical Literature
ing for themselves polarized social situations. And because their conversions
were in opposition to familial and cultic power, Christianity posed one of the
strongest threats to the Roman family structure. 46 Corley argues that this situation
was much like the situation engendered by a Roman wife’s worship of Isis
or Dionysus. She quotes Balch: “In response to such charges, these religious
groups defended themselves by claiming that their households were indeed in
order, their wives, children and slaves properly submissive to their husbands,
parents and masters.” 47 The analogy fails, however, because what was so dramatic
about a conversion to Christianity, and not applicable to the worship of
Isis or Dionysus, was that the Christian woman would no longer participate in
the crucial familial cults. 48 In Roman texts a wife’s atheism was seen as a cause
of barrenness and/or disaster in business, household, or politics. No amount of
submission in other aspects of family life would heal that rupture. 49 So the situ-
46 John North, “The Development of Religious Pluralism,” in The Jews among Pagans and
Christians in the Roman Empire (ed. Judith Lieu, John North, and Tessa Rajak; New York: Routledge,
1992), 185–86. Ross Kraemer points out that many of the women mentioned in the NT epistles
are not specifically defined as daughters, wives, mothers, or even sisters of men, and the
absence of filiation for both men and women is significant. This is partly because “many persons
who joined the Christian movement did so over the objections of their families, both natal and marital,
leaving them effectively fatherless, if not motherless as well” (Her Share of the Blessings,
136–37). W. C. van Unnik pointed out that conversion to Christianity was viewed by Gentiles as a
shameful act of disloyalty (“The Critique of Paganism in I Peter 1:18,” in Neotestamentica et Semitica:
Studies in Honour of Matthew Black [ed. E. E. Ellis and M. Wilcox; London: T & T Clark,
1969], 129–42).
47 Corley, “1 Peter,” 351. This is also Schüssler Fiorenza’s point in In Memory of Her,
263–65.
48 David Orr summarizes the obligations entailed in the family cults: women were responsible
for the decoration of the hearth, the shrine of Vesta, during religious festivals; Vesta’s fire was
tended by the materfamilias or her daughters; the household Lares were worshiped by the entire
family on holidays; a bride was required to present a coin to the Lares of her new husband’s home;
and a wife would have been expected to participate in the worship of the household Genius on the
birthday of the paterfamilias (“Roman Domestic Religion: The Evidence of the Household
Shrines,” ANRW 2.16:1557–91, esp. 1559, 1560, 1561, 1567 n. 59, 1571). Macrinus writes that a
woman assumed her role as materfamilias and presided over the rituals of the household the day
after her wedding (Sat. 1.15.22). John M. Barclay notes that the Lares were so associated with the
Genius of the paterfamilias that they were intimately linked with his honor and prosperity and that
of the household as a whole (“The Family as the Bearer of Religion in Judaism and Early Christianity”
in Constructing Early Christian Families: Family as Social Reality and Metaphor [ed. Halvor
Moxnes; New York: Routledge, 1997], 67). So also G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, “Why Were the Early
Christians Persecuted?” in Studies in Ancient Society (ed. Moses I. Finley; New York: Routledge,
1974), 210–49. Plutarch asserted that without his wife’s assistance a flamen dialis was incapable of
discharging his religious duties (Quaest. Rom. 50). Tertullian would later write of the same problem:
What pagan husband “will willingly bear her being taken from his side by nocturnal convocations
. . . ? Who will, without some suspicion of his own, dismiss her to attend that Lord’s Supper
which they defame?” (Ux. 2.4).
49 The worship of the same gods was considered the basis of social harmony; see Plutarch,