Journal of Biblical Literature - Society of Biblical Literature

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Journal of Biblical Literature
doxically also push them outside of the home. Straddling the border, these
women made conscious and courageous choices about the relationship
between beliefs and actions and identity formation. 78
V
Other scholars have argued, rightly, that suffering is a problematic, even
dangerous model for women and that suffering is positive only when it is a vehicle
for social change. 79 The ideal of submitting to suffering simply for the
promise of an eschatological vindication or even recognition within the Christian
community perpetuates a cycle of victimization that modern women have
worked hard to break. 80 But there are substantial reasons to counter that such a
critique does not apply completely to this particular text; rather, the actions of
the Petrine women have more to do with marginal resistance than with suffering
for its own sake.
First, the suffering Petrine women were contributing to a kind of familial
disobedience that many women would later follow, even though the overthrow
of the patriarchal system was never attempted. 81 This is supported by the text’s
emphasis on the “rightness” of the disobedience of the women and slaves. As
demonstrated above, it was the subversive disobedience of the women, in their
conversions and Christian activities, that prompted the persecutions by their
kuvrioi. That kind of disobedience, later celebrated in feminist heroines such as
Thecla and Perpetua, is quietly discernible, and approbated, in the Petrine
Haustafel.
Second, the suffering may have been interpreted by the Petrine women as
empowering, because they identified themselves as persecuted Christians and
they participated in a discourse that understood suffering in persecution positively.
Judith Perkins has shown convincingly that Christianity altered accepted
78 Feminist scholars sometimes make a somewhat arbitrary distinction between ancient
women who left their families for Christ’s sake as radical (Thecla is the most popular example) and
those who remained with their families as less so. The distinction is important: a woman who
rejected the traditional morality of home was significant, but the actions of a Christian woman in a
non-Christian home could be just as subversive.
79 Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 317.
80 One feminist fear is realized when a passage such as this is interpreted as a positive example
for women’s behavior. The greatest danger is that women will find strength from this passage to
continue to endure abuse. My point in this article is to argue that the circumstances surrounding
the abuse and suffering in the Petrine text differ so radically from ours that the text cannot be used
as a behavioral blueprint.
81 Sawyer, Women and Religion, 201–4. Glancy notes that slaves resisted in a number of
ways: running away, stealing, being insolent, and openly rebelling. She also acknowledges that
these options would likely result in further abuse (Slavery, 149–50).