Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (review)

Emerging out of a 2000 Brite Divinity School conference on the family and/in early Christianity, these seventeen papers (fourteen essays and three responses) provide excellent insight into the directions, methods, and materials of the burgeoning "early Christian families" industry. Balch and Osiek (whose collaborative 1997 Families in the New Testament World: Households and House Churches [Westminster/John Knox] arguably propelled the family in early Christian studies to new prominence) construe "interdisciplinarity" in a manner familiar to most students of early Christianity with a few twists: elements from classical studies (literary and epigraphic), archaeology, New Testament studies, early Judaism, ancient Christianity ("patristics") as well as critical insights drawn from sociology, anthropology, discourse analysis, comparative social history, and psychobiology.

The first section treats "Archaeology of the Domus and Insulae." Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (3-18) wants us to "think about Rome not so much as an undifferentiated sea of distinct units of housing, be they domus or insulae . . . but as a series of cellular neighborhoods" (13). Rigid notions of "household" that preserve class and ethnic division give way here to overflowing "housefuls" encouraging much more social mixing. Monika Trümper (19-43) surveys house-types from ancient Delos in order to balance out our Rome-centric sense of urban topography and give a better sense of the type of house in which Paul himself might have preached. In the only essay in this section to treat the family directly, Eric Meyers (44-69) lays out the ways in which archaeology (here, of Roman Galilee) corrects our sense of family dynamics, showing that the unhelpful "public/private" division of "gendered space" "simply cannot characterize this space [the house] where all manner of household, family, and everyday activities were carried on" (59).

The second section, "Domestic Values: Equality, Suffering," juxtaposes the two most dissimilar offerings in the collection. Peter Lampe (73-83) asks, "What does modern brain research have to do with theology?" (73) before introducing neurophilosophy into the study of Pauline house churches. He seeks to understand how Paul's communities negotiated the cognitive disconnection between "social" and "mental" constructs of equality (inside the house church) and inequality (in society at large). Lampe's is a creative but ultimately baffling and idiosyncratic attempt to preserve an early Christian erasure of hierarchy and explain away Paul's inconsistencies regarding social status. David Balch (84-108) asks, "What would Paul's word picture of Christ crucified look like, and would some Greco-Roman domestic paintings and sculptures have helped make his gospel comprehensible?" (88). The author draws on ancient art and art criticism to imagine the way in which common household images, such as Iphigeneia and Laocoon, inform the social and theological context of Paul's preaching.

Parts III and IV on "Women" and "Slaves" respectively are the strongest in the volume. Suzanne Dixon's work (111-29) on family in the Roman context is an invaluable source for students of the early Christian family. Moving fluidly between magical and philosophical texts, she pointedly asks what blinders prevent scholars from imagining affective (indeed, passionate) bonds between ancient husbands and wives. Next, Ross Kraemer (130-56) examines the unusually well-documented family lives of two Jewish women, i.e., Berenice, great-granddaughter of Herod the Great and paramour of Titus and Babatha, whose documentary archive survives among detritus of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Kraemer comes to the conclusion that "the study of Jewish families, while fascinating in itself, is not as germane to the study of early Christian families as it might initially seem" since "the dynamics of Jewish families do not appear appreciably different from those of non-Jews . . . in the early imperial Roman period" (155). It is refreshing to be reminded that ancient Jews do not always serve as "background sources" for the study of early Christianity. Margaret Y. MacDonald (157-84) rehearses familiar arguments for the centrality of women in the life and leadership of the first- and second-century church. Finally...