Jesus, Paul, Luke-Acts, and 1 Clement: Studies in Class, Ethnicity, Gender, and Orientation

By David L. Balch

In this book, the author draws on two original sources, on a Greek biographer, historian, and rhetorician, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, as well as on Pompeian domestic art and architecture. Generally, NT scholars read texts, but Greeks and ancient Romans loved beauty. The walls and floors of their houses were decorated with thousands of colorful frescoes and mosaics, art that two millennia later is still on display in Pompeii. Christians lived and worshipped in those typical houses; relating the art to NT texts generates many intriguing new questions! What stories/myths did Greeks and Romans see every day? What were their sports, and how violent were they?

Many NT scholars know as much or more Latin than they do Greek, and they therefore cite the Latin historian Livy rather than the Greek Dionysius, who wrote a century before the first Christian historian, Luke. Dionysius' rhetoric expressed values shared across cultures, by Greeks, Romans, and Jews (e.g., by the historian--and rhetorician--Josephus), some values that Luke also shares. Dionysius makes clear that cities and ethnic groups had to praise how they treated emigrant foreigners, questions handled differently by Josephus and by Luke. This enables new interpretations of Jesus' inaugural speech in Luke 4 and of Peter's second Pentecost speech in Acts 10. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jun 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781532659584

David L. Balch

David L. Balch is Professor of New Testament at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary. He is the author of Roman Domestic Art and Early House Churches (2007)

Book preview

Introduction

Liminality, Acculturation, Intersectionality

I sketch three theoretical constructs by which I invite readers to understand the following essays. At the conclusion of each of the three sections, I will indicate how some of the essays in this book are clarified by the theoretical construction. Each model has resulted in entire books; I simply outline the theories and refer to further discussions and developments in the footnotes. I am introducing the following essays, not writing a theoretical textbook. First, I sketch the period of liminality between the Roman General Pompey’s conquest of Judea (63 BCE) and the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity (312 CE).

Liminality

Liminality: Theorizing Empires after Alexander: Greg Woolf, Peter Fibiger Bang, Arpad Szakolczai, Bjørn Thomassen, John A. Hall

I accept observations in a recent article by Greg Woolf, Empires, Diasporas and the Emergence of Religions.¹ The sociological model of a laboratory is one way that century has been understood. I suggest as more helpful the anthropological-sociological experience of liminality. The next sub-section presents second century CE Christian interpretations of the earliest martyrdom of Christian women, who were assigned mythological names by Nero, Danaids and Dircae (1 Clem 6.2). On the basis these observations, I propose an answer to Woolf’s question: Why did Christian innovations flourish in the second century CE? Why was there movement toward a resolution of the period of liminality? This brief discussion does not attempt to explain the origins of Christian martyrdom; it contributes rather to a realistic perception of the bloody violence in Roman arenas, to understanding choices of women and men who faced death in Roman amphitheaters, and to the politically symbolic importance of those spectacles.

Greg Woolf defines empires established by force and maintained by taxation, terror, and ideological production:

From the Atlantic to the China Sea, the second century CE stands out as an age of empires . . . The first empires—by which I mean stable systems of political domination exercised by one people over a group of others, established by force and maintained by taxation, terror, and ideological production—appeared in the last millennium BCE . . . Empires formed the background for the emergence of a series of entities that bear some resemblance to what we today call religions. Buddhism, diaspora Judaism, Christianity, Manichaeism and Islam are among these entities.²

Karl Jaspers saw an axial moment across Eurasia brought about by thinkers such as Socrates/Plato, Confucius, and Gautama Buddha. Woolf ³ refers instead to vast world empires formed after the conquests of Alexander the Great. Peter Fibiger Bang⁴ outlines processes of two such world empires, the first large Indian/Mauryan empire, whose third king was Asoka (269/8–233/2 BCE), and Seleucos/Antiochus III (r. 223–187 BCE). 1) Both utilized a world language: Sanskrit and koine Greek. 2) Institutions supported these pre-industrial empires: a network of Buddhist monasteries and the Greek polis. 3) The many, diverse ethnic groups in such empires 4) typically were governed by "a thin layer of laterally united elites presiding over a (peasant) majority of more insulated communities."⁵ 5) Elite cultures transcended ethnic regions: Buddhism and Hellenism. The first written texts from India that can be securely dated are the Sanskrit epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, epigraphic remains of Asoka, and, e.g., Ai Khanoum, a city deep in Central Asia (present-day Afghanistan) was complete with Greek theater and gymnasium, whose founder listed sayings of Apollonian lore from Delphi.⁶ 6) "[T]he most striking finding of the whole volume [Universal Empire: A Comparative Approach]: . . . every empire under consideration here [e.g., Assyrian, Indian, Roman, Ottoman, Aztecan] took the ritualistic and symbolic aspects of power utterly seriously . . . Rituals and symbols shaped power relations."⁷

Woolf rejects internalist accounts⁸ and ones that stress Christian exceptionalism as key explanations for the emergent religions. He explains further: Empires created diasporas . . . By the second century CE the extent of these empires and the diasporas they contained had grown enormously.⁹

Look back to the fourth century BCE and the contrast is clear. Many of the larger cities certainly contained temples to many gods, yet there was no sense that those who worshipped one might not worship another, nor that adherents of any particular god would have a distinctive attitude to ritual practice or moral conduct. The idea of a religious identity distinct from one’s ethnic, civic or familial identity was unthinkable. The second century CE stands between a world without religions and a world increasingly organized by them.¹⁰

Whether to call these new groupings religions is controversial. Woolf uses the term emergent religions.¹¹ North had noted the emergence of differentiated religious groups, which encouraged exclusive allegiance and invested their founders with particular mystique.¹² North and Woolf also name collegia, which had strong membership criteria, voluntary associations,’’ a term which underlines the rarity in antiquity of religious recruitment by choice rather than by birth. Woolf defines: emergent religions include a distinctive world view, an exclusive membership, some unique rituals and beliefs, a group of distinctive symbols and perhaps texts of special significance for co-religionists, a characteristic ethical stance and usually also some structure of authority not congruent with those of wider society.¹³ What needs to be explained is not the origin of various religious innovations . . . but rather why some innovations flourished while others did not."¹⁴

The stages by which ancients became aware of the existence of these differentiated groups is unclear. Early imperial texts often seem to assume that the worshippers of Egyptian gods were mostly Egyptians, and that only Jews worshipped Yahweh. By the end of the first century CE this was not true.¹⁵ North’s differentiated religious groups partly resembled each other because they responded to the same sort of pressures emanating from civic authorities.¹⁶ The largest cities—Antioch, Alexandria, Athens, Ephesos, Carthage, and Rome are the sites where this diversity developed, social locations least constrained by custom or traditional authority. Cities were change agents.¹⁷

Two Models for the Second Century CE: Laboratory and/or Liminality: Victor Turner

Greg Woolf’s and Peter Fibiger Bang’s descriptions of empires after Alexander and of religions that were emerging as diasporas describe dramatic social and political changes. Further, John A. Hall discussing these empires emphasizes Clifford Geertz’s observation that rituals and symbols shaped power relations. How do we understand and characterize these social/political changes? Below I will relate Pompeian amphitheater art to Roman power and ritual. Here I note that Judith Lieu, co-editor of the book in which Woolf published the article discussed above, wrote a theoretical conclusion to the volume that reflects on the laboratory as used in sociological analysis, e.g., by Robert E. Park and his metaphor of the city as a laboratory.¹⁸

However helpful the model of a laboratory, the anthropological-sociological experience of liminality yields greater understanding and has more explanatory power. Generally, study of how human society changes seems more relevant than how inanimate chemicals interact in a laboratory. Not only human rationality in a lab, in an academic setting, or in a city is transformative, but human experience changes individuals and societies. Further, as seen above, the second century CE was precisely such a liminal period. I do not have space fully to develop this model, but I sketch aspects that shed light on martyrdom in that century of transition, relying on Arpad Szakolczai.¹⁹

The description of liminality was first outlined by an anthropologist, Arnold van Gennep in Rites de Passage (1909), and was developed only fifty years later by Victor Turner.²⁰ In any society there are rites of separation, rites of transition [liminality], and rites of incorporation, a tripartite structure that may be universal; death to the old is followed by new birth.²¹ The middle period is one of high creativity. Thomassen (n. 20) moves beyond Turner, insisting that liminal periods are not only individual and cultural, but may also be social and political.

Szakolczai²² traces this question back to earliest Greek philosophy, to πέρας (limit, boundary) and ἀπείρων (without limit), as in Plato, Philebus 16C. An experience means the removal of forms and limits, necessary, for example, for the passage to adulthood. How do new phenomena, changed persons and societies emerge?²³ Passing through a limit, removing certainties, places one in a delicate, changeable state. "Whereas contemporary social sciences take the dichotomy between order and disorder for granted, this volume [Breaking Boundaries] problematizes the emergence and crisis of political forms as historically concrete phenomena. A key theme here is dissolutions of order, where experience shapes political consciousness, interpretive judgments, and meaning formation.²⁴ Eric Voegelin observed that many great political thinkers had endured stressful wars, civil wars, or invasions, and concluded that symbols are engendered by experiences.²⁵ A transformative event . . . whether for an individual, group, or entire civilization, suddenly questions and even cancels previously taken-for-granted certainties, forcing the people swept up in this storm to reflect on their experiences, even their entire lives, and potentially change not only their conduct in life but their identity."²⁶

The structure of such transformative human experiences has the sequential order of a rite of passage.²⁷ This means that human experiences cannot be reduced to the perception of pleasure or pain by a fixed subject, . . . for there exist formative experiences where the subject’s identity is altered.²⁸ Szkolczai’s essay emphasizes the deep-seated ambivalence of liminal situations. ‘Ambivalence’ means that whereas liminal situations and positions can contribute to creativity or renewal of institutions and structures that have become oppressive or simply tired, liminality also implies deep anxiety and suffering for those entering such a stage.²⁹

In a liminal state, one searches for models to imitate, which Plato strenuously resisted,³⁰ as do modern rationalist philosophies. Imitation poses particular problems in liminal situations, the key question being who manages to convince others to follow him or her as a model, which surfaces the contrast between charismatic leaders and tricksters.³¹ Max Weber recognized that charismatic leadership can emerge in moments of radical social or political change, but these times can also produce dangerous tricksters such as Hitler and Stalin—there are a growing number of contemporary examples—political leaders who want to perpetuate rather than to resolve conditions of confusion and ambivalence.³²

In the first centuries of Christianity, the Roman Emperor, of course, claimed symbolic legitimacy. Michael Frede evaluates a contemporary philosophical debate between the Middle Platonist Celsus (On True Doctrine, written CE 175–77) and Origen (Against Celsus, written 248 CE in Alexandria, Africa). Celsus’ theory would have "been geared to justify universal monarchy . . . by arguing that the emperor is God’s vicar on earth, and that his rule is legitimated by the fact that he, in his wisdom and goodness, maintains as well as one can, the divinely ordained order of things . . . If then the Christians refuse to swear by the daemon of the emperor . . . they are denying that the emperor represents a divine order of things."³³

Liminality: From Pompey (63 BCE) to Constantine (312 CE)

Some of the articles that I collect in this book address that question: who is the charismatic leader, Christ or the Roman Emperor, who can convince people to follow him/her as a model, and what are the means of persuasion? The liminal process began in 63 BCE when the Roman General Pompey intervened in a civil war between the Maccabeans Hyrcanus and Aristobulus. Josephus, War 1.127–186, at 155–156, gives a list of the cities that Pompey took from Judea and annexed to Syria. Pompey appointed Hyrcanus High Priest in Jerusalem, and Judea began paying tribute to Rome. After a century of self-rule, Rome shrank Judean territory and deprived it of religious and political independence.³⁴

There is a lively debate about how disruptive the beginning of Roman rule was for Judea. Was the relation between elites and the peasants such that we need to use conflict theory to understand that society?³⁵ Or as Anthony Keddie, consulting both literary and archaeological sources, argues: did institutional change in Early Roman Palestine support the empowerment of Judean elites and further entrench longstanding differences of power?³⁶ How antagonistic were socioeconomic relations in Palestine of the first century BCE? This paragraph is not the place to adjudicate such a substantial debate. Here I simply note that Pompey’s Roman intervention was a dramatic transition, the beginning of a liminal period of Judeans acculturating within the Roman empire.

The liminal period reached at least an interim resolution when Constantine converted to Christ (312 CE) and displayed the cross as a symbol of war; one might just as correctly say that the Roman Emperor converted Christianity into a colonizing religion. George Demacopoulos examines Eusebius, Vita Constantini, a watershed in the Christian reflection on war and violence.³⁷ The violence of the cross is creatively retooled in Eusebius’ text so as to connect the soteriological power of God manifest in the crucifixion of Christ to the physical power of Constantine manifest in his exercise of violence on the battlefield. The cross serves as an instrument through which God, via Constantine, inflicts violence on nonbelievers, a very significant contrast with the first Christian historian, Luke! [S]ubsequent Byzantine liturgical texts adopted Eusebius’s double vision of the cross (i.e. the pre-Constantinian emphasis on Christ(ian) suffering and the understanding of the cross as an instrument of divinely sanctioned imperial violence.)³⁸

The liminal period began when a Roman General subjugated the Jews in Judea (63 BCE). It reached a(n interim) conclusion when Jesus, whom his disciples interpreted as the Messiah/Christ of the Hebrew prophets, was adopted and promoted by a Roman emperor (312 CE); Eusebius then radically reinterpreted this Christ as a useful divine power in imperial, colonizing war, an event that stamped the coming millennium and beyond.

The Earliest Martyrdom³⁹ of Christian Women, Danaids and Dircae (1 Clement 6.2)

1 Clement already (c. 95 to 120 CE) includes every characteristic that Woolf lists for emergent religions: a distinctive world view, an exclusive membership, some unique rituals and beliefs, a group of distinctive symbols and perhaps texts of special significance for co-religionists, a characteristic ethical stance and usually also some structure of authority not congruent with those of wider society.⁴⁰ Perhaps not that final item, some structure of authority not congruent with those of wider society, since 1 Clement has an extraordinary focus on Roman hierarchical order,⁴¹ but even so, the new cult experienced two primary conflicts with Roman society: We have written, brothers, things that pertain to our [emergent] religion (threskeia, 62.1). Second, some women had chosen to join (6.2)⁴² with models of Rahab (12.3), Judith (55.4–5), and Esther (55.6):

Many women, being strengthened by the grace of God, have performed manly deeds (andreia).⁴³ The blessed Judith, when the city (polis) was under siege, asked the elders to permit her to go to the enemy’s camp. She exposed herself to peril and went out for love of her country (patris) and her besieged people (laos), and the Lord delivered Holophernes into the hand of a woman. To no less danger did Esther, who was perfect in faith, expose herself in order that she might deliver the twelve tribes of Israel (dodekaphylon Israel) when they were about to be destroyed. For through her fasting and her humiliation (ταπεινώσεως) she entreated the all-seeing Master, The God of the ages, and he, seeing the humility (ταπεινὸν) of her soul, rescued the people (laos) for whose sake she had faced the danger. (

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6

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The authors understand themselves as a distinct people.⁴⁴ "The Lord has taken for himself a nation (ethnos) out of the midst of nations" (29.3). You [God] multiply the nations (ethne) upon the earth, and from them all you have chosen those who love you through Jesus Christ . . . Let all the nations (apanta ta ethne) know that you are the only God, that Jesus Christ is your servant, that we are your people (laos), the sheep of your pasture (59.3, 4).

Jan Willem van Henten interprets the male and female martyrs in 1 Clement 5–6 as "parallels (and successors) of the pagan and Jewish exempla who sacrificed themselves for their people⁴⁵ and were a token of the glorious character of his new ‘nation.’ Already at the end of the first century, Clement of Rome emphasized the firmness of the Christians during their suffering. Probably this fact should also be understood as evidence of his pursuit of an identity for his own new group, which would measure up to the picture of the other two ‘nations,’ Greeks and Jews."⁴⁶

These early Christians were involved in a liminal experience, which implies deep anxiety and suffering for those entering such a stage.⁴⁷ In the late first or early second century CE, 1 Clem refers to repeated misfortunes and reverses (1.1), to strife and sedition (3.2). A vast multitude of the elect have suffered torments and tortures (6.1). The Roman author observes to the Corinthians: "we are in the same . . . contest (agon). (7.1) Senseless and stupid and foolish and ignorant people jeer and mock at us. (39.1) For those who walk in fear and love prefer that they themselves, rather than their neighbors, should fall into suffering (aikia [outrage, torture], 51.2). Of wild beasts you will not be afraid; wild beasts will be at peace with you (56.12): that first clause reassures, but the second is surprising given the reference to Dircae in 6.2, that is, to women who had been dragged to death by bulls in the Roman amphitheater. The author prays: We ask you, Master . . . , ransom our prisoners (desmious) . . . (59.4), and also: deliver us from those who hate us unjustly (60.3). In this Roman contest, the author worries that the ancient church of the Corinthians is rebelling against its presbyters, and this report has reached not only us but those who differ from us,⁴⁸ so that you create danger for yourselves (47.7; see 14.2).

The author reads the Biblical past in light of the present Roman contest; in this liminal period, the author offers models to imitate⁴⁹: The righteous were persecuted . . . and imprisoned, but it was by the unholy. Despite suffering these things, they endured nobly (45.4–5) Was Daniel cast in lion’s den by those who feared God (45.6)? The three, Ananias, Azarias, and Mishael,⁵⁰ were shut up in the fiery furnace. Who did these things? Abominable people . . . tortured cruelly those who served God (45.7). We too, brothers, must follow such examples (hupodeigmasin) as these (46.1; also 5.1 and 63.1), including those of some gentiles (55.1). Many among us have had themselves imprisoned, so that they might ransom others; many have sold themselves into slavery, and with the price received for themselves have fed others (55.2); these are astounding practices.

Christ is the primary model to imitate. The Corinthians are to "keep his sufferings before your eyes (2.1). Let us fix our eyes on the blood of Christ . . . poured out for our salvation (7.4). 1 Clement interprets the Suffering Servant of deutero-Isaiah as Christ: the majestic sceptre of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, did not come with the pomp of arrogance . . . but with humility (16.1). He was a man of stripes and of toil . . .; he was dishonoured . . . This is the one who bears our sins and suffers pain for our sakes . . . (16.4). He was wounded because of our sins . . . By his wounds we are healed (16.5; 36.1). Like a sheep he was led to slaughter (16.7). For the transgressions of my people he came to his death (16.9). All those who saw me mocked me (16.16). Let us be imitators (mimetai) also of those who went about in goatskins and sheepskins, preaching the coming of Christ (17.1, Elijah, Elisha, Abraham, Moses, David . . . ).⁵¹

In summary, the ecclesial author repeatedly insists on the Roman social value of obedience; this new people is to remain radically submissive within Roman hierarchies. Nevertheless, there was conflict between the heroes of this emergent religion and civic authorities. In this liminal situation, Christ is the primary model, along with many others, Biblical and apostolic, including women, whom the author suggests that the Corinthians imitate. Among those who chose to follow Christ were some women, who had joined the emergent cult and then, as Dircae, were dragged to death by bulls in Roman arenas.⁵²

Why Did Christian Innovations Flourish in the Second Century CE?

⁵³

Amphitheaters, both in Rome itself and across the empire, were perhaps Rome’s key ritual and symbolic expressions of power⁵⁴: the repeated ritual hunts, sometimes of exotic African animals, the gladiatorial duels, and the execution of deviants, criminals and social outcasts⁵⁵ demonstrated Roman imperial control over life and death.⁵⁶ The diffusion of gladiatorial combats (munus) with executions as well as venationes (animal hunts) was especially a phenomenon of the Imperial period closely connected with the celebration of the imperial cult, . . . a way for Greeks to translate the power of Rome into a local setting.⁵⁷ Greg Woolf and J. M. Hall designate this as discourse between Greek and Roman cultures, a dialogue, not a dichotomy.⁵⁸ Both Greek sport and Roman spectacle, for example, involved active spectators. Cicero (Pro Sestio 50.106; 55.116) asserts that the power of an audience in the theatre equals that of political assemblies. Virtually every aspect of Roman hierarchy was open to challenge—public executions could go awry if the crowd demanded the release of the condemned, gladiators could become heroes, charioteers could become millionaires, and actors might challenge the order of society by the way they chose to utter their lines.⁵⁹

Christian women, some we know only by the mythological names they were assigned by Nero, Danaids and Dircae, faced the choice of living in Roman society or of facing bulls. Most chose the dominant society, of course, rather than facing the performative and spectacular uses of violence authored by the Roman state.⁶⁰ An example of such violence from Seneca:

But nothing is so damaging to good character as the habit of lounging at the games . . . By chance I attended a mid-day exhibition . . . The previous combats were the essence of compassion; but now all the trifling is put aside, and it is pure murder.⁶¹ The men have no defensive armour . . . There is no helmet or shield to deflect the weapon . . . All these mean delaying death. In the morning they throw men to the lions and bears; at noon, they throw them to the spectators. The spectators demand that the slayer shall face the man who is to slay him in his turn; and they always reserve the latest conqueror for another butchering. The outcome of every fight is death, and the means are fire and sword. This sort of thing goes on while the arena is empty . . . And when the games stop for the intermission, they announce: A little throat cutting in the meantime, so that there may still be something going on! (Seneca, Ep.

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, Gummere [LCL]; compare Augustine, Confessions

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This social experience in the arena is related to Roman culture: "there is not a single tragedy in the Senecan corpus in which the mutilation and amputation of human bodies does not play a significant role."⁶² In one emergent religion, women were forced into the roles of Danaids and Dircae (1 Clem 6.2), the latter reenacting the Euripidean tragedy Antiope.

However, in the second century CE there was a new religious situation, in which the individual had to make his or her own choices, and in which as a result, the location of religious power became far more contentious, far more open to negotiation than it had been in the traditional Graeco-Roman world . . . As the monopoly situation disappeared, there must have come a critical moment in any city’s history when there was no longer a dominant group in tune with the city’s own religious traditions, but a plurality of groups in tension with one another.⁶³ Narratives of Christian martyrs in the second century CE are stories of those liminal moments, and of the faith and courage of those who, with their emergent community, could no longer believe that the Roman emperor with his symbolic amphitheaters was the representative of divine justice, who claimed absolute power over animal and over human life and death.

I again emphasize John A. Hall’s point, summarizing the essays in Universal Empire: A Comparative Approach: [T]he most striking finding of the whole volume: . . . every empire under consideration here took the ritualistic and symbolic aspects of power utterly seriously . . . Rituals and symbols shaped power relations (Clifford Geertz).⁶⁴ Rituals and symbols in Roman amphitheaters included these women forced to reenact the myths of Dirce in fatal charades.⁶⁵ From Zeus’ [Jupiter’s] and his sons’ point of view, Dirce too was a guilty woman, a transgressor, who because of her inhumanity to Antiope acts against divine laws and indirectly against the gods.⁶⁶

The author of 1 Clement and others interpreted these deaths, despite Roman civic authorities presenting them in mythological roles such as Danaids and Dircae, by different rituals and symbols, including a different myth—myth in the sense of a story of relationships between the divine and humans. The author of 1 Clement understands the emergent Roman and Corinthian communities to be imitators of Christ, the Suffering Servant of Isaiah. He was a man of stripes and of toil . . . ; he was dishonoured . . . Like a sheep he was led to slaughter (16.7). For the transgressions of my people he came to his death (16.9).

The answer I propose to Woolf’s question: 1) this ability to face and to construct meaningful deaths,⁶⁷ precisely in politically symbolic Roman amphitheaters, that is, to challenge the dominant rituals and symbols supporting Roman, terrorizing military and governing power, were key experiences that enabled Christians’ faith to flourish in the second century CE.⁶⁸ Earlier I suggesated other factors enabling Christian faith to flourish, which include 2) promoting ethnic mixing/multiethnicity, 3) the translation of sacred texts into Greek, 4) and theological and political apologetic, none of which was true, e.g., of the Isis cult, which declined (see CEI, 225–26).

This thesis about why Christian innovations flourished in the second century CE is related to that of Pedro Barceló, Why Christ: Thoughts on Constantine’s Decision for Christianity: Perhaps Constantine was particularly impressed by the God of the Christians because this One, despite the hostility of Rome, remained defiant and emerged a stronger God through persecution. Christ had won victory over his powerful opponents; might he not be present with Constantine in the hour of his greatest need?⁶⁹ Constantine was surely not the only one who was moved by these Christians’ defiant ability to face death in symbolic Roman amphitheaters.

Romans insisting on the worship of polis divinities (see n. 10 above), as also Christian martyrs, were inspired by rituals, myths, and emergent communities in conflict with each other. Christian martyrs of the second century CE, although presented, for example, in amphitheaters in the mythological roles of Danaids and Dirce, did not believe that they were being punished by the gods or goddesses of their local cities. Despite the Roman attempt to terrorize them into conformity by spectacles of death, they chose to join one of the emergent religions, where they found meaning in suffering and dying with Christ.

Liminality in This Book

The spiritual/social/political experience of liminality provides a context for understanding some of the essays collected below. Chapter 8 outlines thirty-two narrative events in Luke–Acts that mimic and therefore also contest Roman rule. Those events parallel and contrast the Founder Christ and the ekklesia with Roman Founders, Romulus and Augustus and the Roman empire. In that liminal cultural period, whom would people choose as a model to follow, Christ or the Roman emperor? Chapters 1 and 2 display two values of the Jewish charismatic leader, Jesus: an open border with others, the Samaritans (compare chap. 9 on the later church accepting all). Second, Jesus blesses the humble, hungry poor, those who have nothing (chap. 2; compare chaps. 6 and 7, also on Mary’s Magnificat, with comments on the kenosis hymn, Phil 2:6–11). In contrast, chapters 4 and 5 foreground violence in Roman amphitheaters, and the new Appendix to chap. 3 outlines the Roman imperial symbolic statues of dying Gauls; both symbols/rituals are demonstrations of Roman of power over life and death. Christian women as early as 64 CE in Nero’s Rome, labelled by Nero as Danaids and Dircae, chose to follow their Suffering Servant Christ rather than to confess the Roman emperor Nero as divine. Before Constantine, Christ’s and Roman values involved significant contrasts. Chapter 11 on the canon presents James Sanders’ emphasis on the beginning of the liminal process, the life-giving stories of the Jewish charismatic founder, Jesus Christ, not the conclusion of the process, the debate about which books belong to the institution’s canon.

Acculturation: From Jerusalem to Rome

In the liminal period between the Roman General Pompey’s conquest of Judea (63 BCE) and the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity (312 CE), some Judeans/Jews and their foreign adherents acculturated in the Roman empire.⁷⁰ I must first sketch theories of acculturation, including more recent revisions by sociologists; then I will give two examples in early Christianity, first, the acculturation by Christians to Roman multiethnicity, and second, the deutero-Pauline school mandating an Aristotelian/Roman household political ethic.

Summary of Observations on Acculturation in a Debate with John H. Elliott

Some decades ago John Elliott and I debated the question of how to understand the social situation of 1 Peter.⁷¹ I begin with examples from that discussion and then expand further. My earlier dissertation had observed that the household code in Colossians 3:18—4:1 had a form that originated in Aristotle, Politics I 1253b 1–14. Colossians addresses three pairs (wives/husbands, children/fathers, and slaves/masters), whose relationship is to be one of super/subordination, the same three pairs with the same theme of subordination that appears in Aristotle.⁷² Many texts discuss wives, for example, and slaves, but this form with its three pairs appears exclusively in Aristotle and in later discussions dependent on him. That is, the form appears nowhere in the Old Testament, or in Plato, the Stoics, or the Epicureans independently of the Peripatetic school; the ethic is a Hellenistic acculturation in Roman society by early deutero-Pauline Christianity.

In the discussion with Elliott, I gave anthropological examples of such acculturation in family relationships. B. J. Siegel had published studies among Native Americans, concluding that acculturation involves the selective adaptation of value systems.⁷³ On the dynamics of intercultural transmission, Siegel wrote:

In the most general terms we can make two statements about intercultural transmission:

1

) that the patterns and values of the receiving culture seem to function as selective screens in a manner that results in the enthusiastic acceptance of some elements, the firm rejection of other elements; and

2

) that the elements which are transmitted undergo transformation in the receiving cultural systems.⁷⁴

Further, a model of its family life may be one of the cultural values communicated from the dominant to the receiving culture, but the family configuration is certain to be refracted by the filter of traditional and idiosyncratic perception.⁷⁵

Several anthropological studies illustrate such acculturation. Among Native Americans, the Plains tribes, unlike the Woodland tribes, generally did not foster an inflation of the father image or tend to the development of submissive attitudes toward authority, so they were crushed into submission and experienced catastrophic change.⁷⁶

On the other hand, some immigrant groups did adapt American family patterns. In these cases, the family dynamic in the immigrants’ culture differs from those in the dominant culture, and the immigrants acculturate in the direction of patterns in the dominant society. I give two examples from my earlier article.

Japanese immigrants to America seek to reconstruct the family life of Japan, which involves a high degree of dominance and control of parents over children. Certain deferential attitudes are one of the most significant factors to these Japanese families But when American institutions (churches, schools, movie theaters) introduce new ideas, the status of Japanese men and women in the family changes as does the relationship between generations. Younger Japanese come into conflict with their parents over the submission and recognition of authority and prestige expected by the latter. Japanese and American families are so different that what one does and says in this situation reveals in part the extent to which one is Americanized.⁷⁷

Humphreys’s hypothesis, similarly, is that the changes in the structure of the [Detroit Mexican] family, under the impact of a new social and cultural environment, constitute a highly sensitive index of the process of acculturation.⁷⁸ The status of the Mexican father in Detroit declines. His moral protection over his wife and female children is not reinforced in Detroit in the same way as in Mexico, so that the wife may effect a reversal from subordination to superordination in family roles. In Mexico the status hierarchy in the family runs father, mother, son, daughter, in that order. But in Detroit, the son assumes a position about equal to the father, and the daughter climbs to the same level as the mother. Humphreys observes, since we regard the family as the social structure in which the self-conceptions of those who occupy roles are most intimately related to one another, we believe it will reflect most truly the changing meanings generated by the larger culture.⁷⁹

These theories, based on actual observation of changes in immigrant families, demonstrate the changes that happen in families that emigrate from one culture to another. These anthropological/sociological theories thus correspond with my exegetical/historical observation: the domestic ethics of the deutero-Pauline school emanated not from earlier Jewish tradition, but from the Greek tradition of household management (peri oikonomia), to which the Aristotelian form of the code in Colossians belongs. Living and worshipping in Greco-Roman houses, Paul’s students acculturated a foreign patriarchal household ethic.

Revised Sociological Theories of Acculturation: David G. Horrell and Rubén G. Rumbaut

More recently, David Horrell has critiqued the polarity that John Elliott and I had constructed:

Just as Elliott is right to stress the ways in which the letter as a whole aims to strengthen the distinctive identity and group cohesion of the Christians in Asia Minor, so I think Balch is right to stress that the domestic code instruction and more generally the practical instruction of the letter, represents conformity to broader social expectations as part of the attempt to lessen hostility from outside.⁸⁰

Horrell’s own valuable contribution is to note that the appeal to submit to the emperor also demands submission to every human institution or creature (κτίσει, 1 Pet 2:13; cp. Col 1:19–20; 2:9, 15; 3:1)—an implicit denial that the emperor is divine (θεῖος).⁸¹ I now agree that the suffering referred to in 1 Peter is not simply a consequence of informal public hostility, which I among others had maintained, but results from a measured but conscious resistance to imperial demands.⁸²

I also want to observe that more contemporary sociological theories of acculturation support Horrell’s assertion. In the spring of 2022 The Handbook of International Migration⁸³ was on the reserve reading list for sociology and social work students at Columbia University in New York. I cite this textbook in sociology for contemporary theories of acculturation; my quotations from these research assessments will be quite selective and brief, not comprehensive. Three of the articles reach conclusions that relate directly to the purposes of this Introduction.⁸⁴

Herbert Gans suggests that traditional terminology has polarized researchers, which he critiques: "the so-called assimilationalists have actually been emphasizing acculturation (becoming American culturally but not necessarily socially), while pluralism now has too many meanings to be useful. Gans therefore calls those who seek to avoid acculturation and to retain ethnic ties ethnic retentionists, while he retains the label acculturationists and suggests a reconciliation between the two.

The University of Chicago school of sociology constructed this polarity in the 1920s and 1940s, based on study of European emigrants who began arriving in the 1870s. More recent research focuses on emigrants from Southeastern and South Asia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean; the more recent researchers generally are insiders who belong to the ethnic group they study and speak the language, neither of which was true of the earlier Chicago researchers.⁸⁵ Basically, while the two emphases will remain, Gans advocates a reduction in polarity between researchers who are acculturationists and those who are retentionists, the kind of polarity that Elliot and I assumed and constructed in our debate.

The concept of assimilation reached its apogee in the 1950s and 1960s. However, in this sociology textbook Rubén Rumbaut now opposes the construction of straight-line progressive advance of ethnic group assimilation, which was based on a patronizing ethnocentricism.⁸⁶ Studies have shown, for example, that assimilation to American values is sometimes hazardous to infant health. I quote the results of one study in Massachusetts: compared to the U.S. born, the foreign born women had better prepregnancy nutrition; they were far less likely to use cigarettes, marijuana, alcohol, cocaine, or opiates during pregnancy; and they have birth to babies who were larger . . . and significantly less likely to be low birthweight or premature.⁸⁷ One example: Vietnamese mothers had the lowest infant death rates in San Diego county; Rumbaut suggests that they had better nutrition, lower rates of smoking and alcohol consumption, and a high regard for parental roles.⁸⁸ Another study reports that second generation immigrant youth were more likely than the first generation to engage in deviant behavior, to have learning disabilities, to be obese, to have sex at a younger age, to have engaged in violence or substance abuse.⁸⁹ Similarly, examining academic achievement, without going into detail, one conclusion is that all the non-English immigrant minorities outperformed their English only co-ethnics as well as a majority of white students.⁹⁰ The conclusion most relevant to the chapters in this book is as follows:

Unlike language, which changes in straight-line fashion, like an arrow, ethnic self-identities vary significantly over time—-yet not in linear fashion, but in a reactive, dialectical fashion, like a boomerang . . . The boomerang effect took place among both the foreign-born and the U.S. born, most notably among the youth of Mexican and Filipino descent—the two largest immigrant groups in the Unites States—an apparent backlash during a period (

1992

–

1996

) of growing anti-immigrant sentiment and at times overt immigrant bashing in the country . . . The simultaneous rapid decline of [immigrant youth self-identifying as] . . . plain American . . . and hyphenated American [e.g., Mexican-American] points to the rapid growth of a reactive ethnic consciousness. Thus change over time in this context has been not toward assimilative mainstream identities . . . , but rather toward a more proudly militant or nationalist reaffirmation of the immigrant identity . . . as these youths become aware of the ethnic and racial categories in which they are persistently classified by main-stream society. The results . . . go against the grain of a linear assimilation perspective . . . , a suggestion of the importance of applying a contextualized life-course perspective to the analysis of social change . . . Among those suffering discrimination, their own race or nationality is overwhelmingly perceived to account for what triggers unfair treatment from others . . .The difference in the historical context of immigration and incorporation themselves need to be taken far more seriously and systematically into account if we are to deepen our understanding of these processes; too often sociological analyses present structural and cultural explanations in a decontextualized historical vacuum.⁹¹

This sociological research and these conclusions observe that acculturation, e.g., adopting more American patterns in family life, in circumstances of discrimination and rejection, can have a boomerang effect leading to a more intense ethnic self-consciousness. This sociological conclusion is parallel to Elliott’s insistence that 1 Peter in a situation of persecution attempts to strengthen the distinctive identity and group cohesion of these Jewish-Christian believers, that is, 1 Peter rejects assimilation. It also corresponds with my observation that the Aristotelian family ethic in the household code simultaneously acculturates from Jewish to distinctively Greco-Roman patriarchal domestic values.

Briefly, a third article is by Nancy Foner, who observes, Members of the family, by virtue of their gender and generation, have different interests, so that women (and men) and young people (and older people) often try to fashion family patterns in ways that improve their own position.⁹² She gives several examples, although her article basically has a different agenda. Serious conflicts may develop when young people (or women), spurred on by changed expectations and expanded economic opportunities, are more assertive in challenging the authority of parents (or husbands).⁹³ Several sociologists agree that the family is crucial in understanding the acculturation process, which was also true of early Christian acculturation in the Roman empire. "[T]he family . . . may be the strategic research site for understanding the dynamics of immigration and of immigrant adaptation processes, as well as for their long term consequences."⁹⁴ Next, I discuss one understanding of the earliest deutero-Pauline statement of family/household ethics, the one in Colossians.

An Appreciation and Critique:Prof. Standhartinger on the Colossian Household Code

Angela Standhartinger published one of the most important discussions of the earliest deutero-Pauline household code, Col 3:18–4.1.⁹⁵ I stress my appreciation of her original observations, and also critique some of her criteria and conclusions. I repeat a caution from Ernst Käsemann: In 1969 I was a member of Käsemann’s seminar on Ephesians; he insisted that this kind of debate (Auseinandersetzung) is not personal, but is a search for truth (Wahrheit).

Standhartinger argues that certain phrases in the letter suggest that the household code should be read by insiders⁹⁶ against the grain, a kind of Denkschrift (a text inviting thought).⁹⁷ She observes that the author(s) of Colossians qualify the domestic ethics with three striking terms. a) Slaves are promised an inheritance (3:24, κληρονομία), despite Roman law excluding them from this.⁹⁸ b) In the section directed to slaves, Col 3:25 promises a just tribunal, without partiality (προσωπολημψία).⁹⁹ c) Masters are to treat their slaves, not just fairly, but with equality (4:1, ἰσότης).¹⁰⁰ Further, each community member is a co-slave in the lord (σύνδουλος ἐν κυρίῳ, 1:7, 4:7; see 4:12).¹⁰¹

Standhartinger keenly observes that the first known readers of Colossians, that is, the author(s) of Ephesians, transplanted the notion of partiality away from the slaves to the masters (Eph 6.9). Ephesians also deletes the term equality when instructing masters (Eph 6.9), whereas according to Col. 3.12–17, those associated with Paul and the congregation are to conduct themselves as equals.¹⁰² These original insights are very helpful in understanding the development of household ethics within the deutero-Pauline school.

Standhartinger sees Wiedersprüche (contradictions) within Colossians¹⁰³ which often lie between outsider and insider understandings of the letter: "Differently from 1 Pet the [Col] Haustafel stands in direct contradiction (Widerspruch) to Col 3.10–11.¹⁰⁴ The single explicitly named woman is Nympha in Col 4.15 . . . ; she is in no way the ideal model of the household literature (oikonomia).¹⁰⁵ Strikingly in this socially hierarchical text, the key word ἰσότης (equality, 4.1) is named and with it a politically contradictory (widersprechendes) program presented.¹⁰⁶ These contradictions lead to the conclusion that the catchword ἰσότης seems to me an interpretative key to reading the code . . . that counters the apparent prevailing subordination-ethos."¹⁰⁷

Her distinction between insiders’ and outsiders’ perceptions becomes a key to understanding. Perhaps her best example of an outsider orientation concerns an inscription from an "association meeting in Dionysius’ oikos [that] was intended for those outside the circle of members . . ."¹⁰⁸ Readers from within the Colossian congregation are to take note of the lack of continuity between the household code and its context within the epistle. Three terms [named above], when taken together, constitute a sort of interpretative guide to reading the household code against the grain.¹⁰⁹

My basic critical question concerns the category of contradiction (Widerspruch), which is appropriate when evaluating a theological or philosophical treatise (Denkschrift), but inappropriate when describing social/political acculturation. The sociologist Rumbaut recommends the Uruguan novelist Eduardo Galcano’s phrase, who writes of the endlessly astonishing synthesis of the contradictions of everyday life.¹¹⁰ As one example of contradictions involved in acculturation, I narrate my own field experience: from 1975–1980 I taught a course annually on Amish life in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I would take students on field trips, e.g., to Amish farms, where we would see their horses, not tractors, pulling motorized combines, a mixture of Amish life with animals and Western gas-powered machine