Our most important takeaway: Most of us—both egalitarians and complementarians—pull apart the household codes.
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The instructions for children and parents seem self-evidently to describe God’s ideal for all times and all places. The instructions for slaves and masters seem—equally self-evidently—to not reflect God’s ideal for all cultures. And the instructions for husbands and wives split the difference—some Christians believe that it describes a cross-cultural ideal and others very much don’t.
The Ephesians passage and the Colossians passage are each a single literary unit. We can’t pull them apart like … well, cinnamon pull-aparts. If we want to take the text seriously, we must use the same interpretive principles when interpreting and applying each pairing. If we find ourselves using different exegetical methods for wives/husbands, children/parents, and slaves/masters, we’re not interpreting the text on its own terms.
So in this series, we’re going to do our best to wrestle with the text on its own terms, treating each of the three pairings in a consistent, evenhanded way.
Today, we’re asking, “What were Roman, Jewish, and Greek households like in Paul’s day? When the first recipients of Paul’s letters heard the household codes, what were their baseline assumptions about family relationships?”
Let’s dive in.
The Roman Family
In the world of the Roman Empire, much like in our world, the family was the basic social unit. However, their families looked rather different from ours.
When we think of the family as a social unit, we usually think of the nuclear family—two parents and their biological and/or adopted minor children—alongside common variations, like single-parent households and blended families that include a stepmom or stepdad.
If your cultural background is a little different than mine, you might also think of a multigenerational family or a large extended family all living in the same household or very close together. This gets us much closer to the Roman idea of the family … but we’re not quite there yet.
(Y’all, some of this stuff is going to make your jaw drop.)
The Roman family centered around the paterfamilias, or the father of the family.1 The paterfamilias was a free Roman citizen with no living male ancestors. A man didn’t become a paterfamilias until his own father died or, less commonly, emancipated him.
The paterfamilias exercised considerable power over his family, especially his legitimate children and slaves.2 His authority over his (legitimate) children lasted until he died, regardless of the children’s age or marital status—there was no age of majority when children became independent adults. (However, Roman men tended to marry for the first time in their late twenties, and life expectancy was lower, so fathers often died when their children were still in childhood or young adulthood—fifty-year-olds weren’t typically under their father’s control.)
In this period, women usually remained under their father’s authority after they married; transfer of authority to her husband was relatively rare.3 A wife was socially expected to submit to her husband, but in a conflict between her husband and father, her obligation was clear: If she couldn’t broker peace between them, she must obey her father.
During his lifetime, the paterfamilias’s control was extensive. His children couldn’t marry without his consent, regardless of their age. In this period, marriage required the consent of the bride, groom, and the paterfamilias of both.
However, divorce only required the consent of any one of these parties! Yes, a father could force a child into a divorce(!) in order to pressure them to marry a better prospect—though this seems to have happened only rarely in happy marriages.
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Men could have only one legal wife at a time, but men didn’t have the same requirements of sexual fidelity within marriage that women had—they were free to engage in liaisons with slaves and prostitutes.
Both men and women could initiate divorces; any children born before the divorce remained with their father. A divorce only required a declaration and one party moving out of the shared home. (The house was only owned by one of the spouses—married couples didn’t usually combine their assets or own joint property.)
A paterfamilias could choose to accept a child born to his wife, daughter-in-law, or enslaved women, allowing the newborn to be reared within the household—or command the baby to be killed or abandoned.4
Now, there were some limitations on the paterfamilias’s control—his power was more limited in Paul’s day than it had been a couple hundred years earlier. By Paul’s day, a father couldn’t sell his children into slavery or kill them outright (except for newborns). He also didn’t control his wife’s assets (except her dowry), because she belonged to her father’s family. (Husbands and wives didn’t inherit money from each other, however, sons and daughters inherited equally from their parents.)
Legally, a man didn’t have control over his own children until he became a paterfamilias—if his father was still living, his children were under their paternal grandfather’s legal control. A man also didn’t have legal control of any biological children born out of wedlock, even if their mother was his long-term concubine. (Though in these cases, there was still a cultural expectation of obedience to your father and, to a lesser extent, your mother, as best as I can tell.)
Among the enslaved, the situation was (predictably) bleaker. Though the enslaved sometimes formed families, enslaved men weren’t acknowledged as the fathers of their own children. The enslaved were to obey the free members of the household, especially the paterfamilias, not their biological parents. And when slaves were freed, they usually remained a subordinate part of their former enslaver’s family until he died.
Paul wrote the household codes to churches in Asia Minor,5 where the vast majority of people weren’t Roman citizens.
Only Roman citizens were bound by Roman household law. Non-citizen residents of the Empire were subject to the laws of their city and, sometimes, to the customs of their ethnic group. Paul wrote the household codes as Roman citizen, but he wrote to an audience that would have been largely Greek and Jewish.
So, do we have any evidence that Greek and Jewish practice diverged significantly from Roman practice in this period?
It’s complicated.
In earlier periods, Greek women generally passed from their father’s authority to their husband’s when they married, and men reached an age of majority around eighteen or twenty. But the details varied from city-state to city-state; there was never a universal Greek age of majority.6
And through this period, customs were in flux—Greeks and Jews both became increasingly Romanized. In the second-century novel (and soap opera) The Ephesian Tale, Anthia and Habrocomes—who seem to be citizens of Ephesus rather than Roman citizens—appear to be under the control of their parents. Their parents agree to marry them off to each other, and both sets of parents make the fateful decision to send the newlyweds off on an ill-starred voyage. Anthia and Habrocomes seem to have relatively little say in whether or not they embark on the voyage.
However, the young couple are very young at the beginning of the book—Anthia is fourteen and Habrocomes is sixteen—and their parents are all conveniently dead when they return from their adventures. So, we have to be careful to not press this evidence too far. But it’s interesting that Anthia’s parents retain control of her after she’s married.
Second-century papyri from Judea suggest that Jewish custom mirrored Roman custom in some respects but not others. From papyri discovered in Judea, we know that some Jewish men did have multiple wives (though we don’t have records that suggest this happened often) and that Jewish women at times loaned money to their husbands—and, with the help of a male proxy, sued for repayment.7
Many scholars think that, in this period, there was not much that was particularly distinctive about Jewish marriage—the distinctives of Jewish marriage may have been largely developed in the rabbinic period.8 Ross S. Kraemer puts it rather baldly: “The dynamics of Jewish families do not appear appreciably different from those of non-Jews (of similar class and status conditions) in the early imperial Roman period.”9
But there are gaps in the literature. We can’t say with certainty that Roman marriage and family norms would have been assumed by the early Christians in Asia Minor; there may have been some variations. But we don’t really have evidence of clear, substantial divergence, either.
So we have to do the best we can with the available evidence, which I think points to Romanized family structures being common, even among noncitizens in places like Ephesus.
The Household Codes, Roman Edition
So, how might our understanding of the household codes shift if we read them through the lens of Roman family structure instead of through our 21st century family structures? I’m not going to come to any firm conclusions at this point, but I have a few questions and observations.
What do we make of the different verb used for wives (“submit to” or “subject yourself to”) vs. children and slaves (“obey”)? What exactly does that distinction mean in Greek? Does Paul use a different word for wives because first-century Romans viewed a husband’s authority differently than a father’s/enslaver’s authority? Or is Paul making an intentional distinction irrespective of his Roman cultural background, and it’s just a coincidence that first-century Romans also viewed authority in marriage differently than they viewed authority in other family relationships? (Important: In most other ancient cultures, a woman was handed over to her husband’s authority when she married, so we can’t just chalk this distinction up to something that was universal among the ancients.)
What’s the relationship between the “submit” verb in Ephesians 5:21 (“Submit yourselves to one another out of reverence for Christ”) and Ephesians 5:22 (“Wives, submit to your husbands”)? Why does Paul include this construction in one passage but not the other?
What on earth does the first part of Ephesians 6:9 mean? (“And, masters, do the same to [your slaves].”) What command from the “slaves, obey” section is Paul making reciprocal?
We might translate “Children, obey your parents” as “Offspring, obey your parents.” There’s no reason to think the obligation to obey ceased at age eighteen, or when they moved out, or even when they got married.
Why does Paul instruct offspring to obey their parents, framing the obligation to mother and father equally, rather than focusing on obeying their fathers?
Why does Paul instruct voluntary submission/obedience from the subordinate party but discourages (and in the case of slaves/masters, seems to outright forbid) the tactics of coercive control that husbands/fathers/masters used to ensure obedience?
How do the household codes conform to Roman norms and how do they differ from them (or undermine them)?
Whew! There’s a lot to consider. But we’ll take it one step at a time.
Next week, we’ll dive into the text of Ephesians and Colossians (and spend a little time comparing Paul’s household codes to other household codes from non-Christian sources).
I hope you’ll join us.
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Have a question or an insight? Agree or disagree with something I’ve said? Have another passage that you’d like to see me wrestle with in an upcoming post? Or just wanna hit “like”?
This often wasn’t true in the earlier Roman Republic, but by the first century, the vast majority of Roman marriages were sine manu, in which the wife legally remained a member of her father’s family.
I take the position that Ephesians and Colossians were written by Paul. Ephesians, in particular, may have been written for a broader audience and circulated in churches near Ephesus or throughout Asia Minor. Matt Erickson briefly summarizes the issue in “Preaching on Ephesians” at CT Pastors.
Our best records come from Athens and Sparta, which differed on age of majority and on many marriage practices, perhaps owing to Sparta’s warrior ethos.
Ross S. Kraemer, “Typical and Atypical Jewish Family Dynamics” in Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, eds. David L. Balch and Carolyn Osiek, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 154-155.
Okay yeah my mind is blown. This context is incredible. I keep thinking to myself, “How have I never known this? Do more conservative expresses of Christianity just ignore this stuff because it’s easier to be a textual literalist?”
With the paterfamilias as the primary legal authority, Paul's decision to address reciprocal pairs rather than simply the household head suggests he's already reframing the household around Genesis 1–3 rather than Roman jurisprudence.
Okay yeah my mind is blown. This context is incredible. I keep thinking to myself, “How have I never known this? Do more conservative expresses of Christianity just ignore this stuff because it’s easier to be a textual literalist?”
I love this series.
With the paterfamilias as the primary legal authority, Paul's decision to address reciprocal pairs rather than simply the household head suggests he's already reframing the household around Genesis 1–3 rather than Roman jurisprudence.