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take up the challenges they pose, even if we are not able to do things
exactly as they did.'
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but says only, "Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?"
(Luke 2:49). The story concludes with the affirmation that he returned
home and was obedient to his parents. Children's Bibles often use it
to make an example of Jesus' obedience. Still, despite the young Jesus'
decision to go home with and be respectful toward his parents, what
seems really significant here is Jesus' original separation from his parents
and his affirmation that God's house, not theirs, is where he truly
belongs. This sets up the later refusal to see and submit to his family.
Clearly, according to Luke, when Jesus is older, his calling to preach
a new Gospel overrides the duty ro submit to family. Calling, then,
is ultimately separate from and more important than family for Jesus.
These two stories in Luke's Gospel give a strong indication of Jesus'
own family-denying ethic. His later ministry, in which he was known
as an itinerant, celibate preacher, simply confirms this picture. While
not denying that Jesus could have experienced sexual temptation or
even desired marriage, especially in his twenties (a period on which we
have no information), as an adult he confronts Christians with a life
of celibacy, not marriage Answers to the question "Why?" are found
in his teachings.
Jesus' Message:
Questioning the Primacy of Family Ties
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells a man who wants to follow him that
he must not stop to bury his dead father. "Let the dead bury their own
dead," Jesus says, "but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God"
(Luke 9:60, parallel in Matt 8:21-22). In this passage Luke shows Jesus
asking for devotion to the work of the kingdom of God, understanding
that his command will call into question even ordinary family affection.
Jesus knows "that the demands of the kingdom are bound to rupture
even ordinary family life."9
Once again, we have a passage that grates against our most basic
moral sensibilities. What can Jesus possibly have meant by this? It seems
that he can't have been speaking literally. But even a figurative interpretation leaves us with an extreme family-denying ethic. Perhaps, some
have argued, Jesus is speaking only to those with a special calling to
leave everything for him. Or perhaps this and other similar passages
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date from early strains of the oral traditions (usually called "Q" and
"proto-Mark" by biblical scholars) that were gathered and edited by the
wandering charismatics who made up the core of the Jesus movement. 10
However, it seems more likely that this saying of Jesus is not a literal
command addressed to a special group (there is no indication that it
is), but rather a command pregnant with symbolism that is intended to
address a general need for disciples of Jesus to place their commitment to
Jesus above their commitments to their families. New Testament scholar
Richard Horsley makes precisely this point and further claims that Jesus'
radical anti-family message was rooted in his commitment to his mission:
"the revitalization of local community life. " This mission required some
to leave their families and spread the word, while others opened and
restructured their families at home. The goal, according to Horsley, was a
society in which people treated each other with com- passion, forgave
each other's debts, shared their property, and refused' to lord power
over each other. A radical rejection of the traditional family was
necessary in order to move toward the goal of a renewed and
restructured family and community life in which discipleship had priority
for all.
One major part of this reconstruction was the dismantling of the
patriarchal family. After all, if everyone was to share property and
power, traditional hierarchical relations between men and women
would be impossible to maintain. Jesus' own preaching is the justification for the change in thinking about gender roles. Jesus evidentially
did not share the reverence for women's maternal role that was pop ular in his time. In the Gospel of Luke, for instance, we are told of
an instance in which Jesus is speaking to a group of people, and a
woman calls out, "Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts
that nursed you!" Jesus answers, "Blessed rather are those who hear
the word of God and obey it" (Luke 11:27-28). Here Jesus refuses to
uphold the cultural priority on mother-nurturing. He places the work
of the Gospel above this nurturing work, suggesting that nurturing
is not to be the primary form of God's work for women who follow
him. As Harvard biblical scholar Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza puts it,
"Faithful discipleship, not biological motherhood, is the
eschatological calling of women."2 Thus Jesus is to be understood,
according to Schssler Fiorenza and others, as someone who asked
women to do
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something more than bear and cane for children. Women who seek to
follow him, then, must be prepared to "hear the word of God and keep
it" in other ways.
Jesus also calls into question the role of fathers. For instance, Mark's
Gospel includes a story in which Jesus is talking about the coming
kingdom. He says, "There is no one who has left house or brothers
or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and
for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold
now in this age houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children,
and fields ... " (Mark 10:29-30). Fathers are the only group that is
left behind in the new kingdom. Why? Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza
has convincingly argued against the traditional reading of this passage
that fathers are not included because only men are being addressed
here. She notes that wives are only included in the list of th ose left
behind in Luke's version of this passage, not in the earlier version
in "Q." So in the original version, she believes, men and women are
asked to leave family behind, and both are promised a new family: the
community of those who are disciples of Jesus. "This new 'family' of
equal discipleship, however, has no room for 'fathers.' "13 The absence
of fathers in the lists of those who will inhabit the new kingdom is an
indication, in Schssler Fiorenza's view, that the patriarchal privilege of
fathers is rejected, that hierarchy cannot be a part of new life in Christ.
So men and women are included, but privileged and powerful fathers
are not. Similarly, Schssler Fiorenza points out, Jesus tells his followers
to "call no one your father" (Matt 23:9), indicating that no one in the new
Christian community will ha-ve this kind of power over others." These,
then, are signs that Jesus is concerned with the creation of new forms of
family and community that move beyond the problems of the traditional
patriarchal model.
Schssler Fiorenza's interpretations allow us to make some sense
of the most difficult of the anti-family passages. When Jesus asks his
followers to leave family behind, he is talking about a particular kind of
family: the patriarchal family in which men held nearly absolute power
over women." It is this family that Jesus finds objectionable. It is this
family that has no place in the Christian community.
It is tempting to believe that this concern about sexism is all there is
to the anti-family strain in the message of Jesus of Nazareth. After
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all, this would mean that our own family-focused values were not so
far off the mark. If sexism is the problem, and we no longer practice
sexism, then maybe Jesus' message cannot properly be called "anti family." However, patriarchy in the family is not Jesus' only concern.
As many of his sayings show, family itself is the problem. I lie strongest
of the anti-family sayings, for example, Luke 14:26 ("Whoever comes
tome and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and
sisters, yes, even life itself, cannot be my disciple") seen is to indicate that
separation from. is essential to discipleship.' 6 If we follow
Horsley's assumption that the anti-family demands are meant to apply
to all those who would follow Jesus, it is clear that, at some level,
Christians must confront a Jesus who is radically questioning much of
what we value most highly.
We have to wonder what could have inspired such concerns. What
was Jesus so worried about? Why did he see family as such a significant
stumbling block for believers? We have to look to the culture within
which Jesus preached in order to begin to understand his profound mistrust of strong family bonds. There were two primary cultural milieus in
first-century Palestine: the Greco-Roman culture of those who occupied Palestine, and the traditional Jewish culture of those who were
living under Roman occupation. Both are significant backdrops against
which Jesus' sayings can be measured.
In the Greco-Roman world in which the Jews lived, family was a
weighty matter. It was the primary reality, more important than individuals certainly, and significant in its relation to the state, for in it
more citizens for the Roman Empire were created. 17 For this reason, the
early Christians were derided and even persecuted for their anti-family
views." Greco-Roman ideals of marriage in Jesus' time emphasized
the ethical duty to marry. Marriages came into existence via private
compacts between two persons who intended to become husband and
wife. 19 However, children were a crucial part of marriage. In fact, "procreation was regarded as a civic duty, and all citizens of marriageable
age were expected to contribute."" Because life expectancies were so
short and the survival of the society was so crucial, through law and
social pressure "young men and women were discreetly mobilized to
use their bodies for reproduction. 121
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Those who did not fulfill their civic obligations were considered
immoral. Historian Peter Brown notes that those early Christians who
elected to remain celibate were often criticized. For example, in the fictional account of one fifth-century Christian writer, St. Paul is brought
before local authorities and taken to task because, he "denigrates
marriage yes, marriage, which you might say is the beginning, root and
fountainhead of our nature. From it springs fathers, mothers, children
and families. Cities, villages and cultivation have appeared because of
it. " 22 This is but one instance of cultural and ethical conflict between
the Romans, who believed the family to be sacred, and the early Christians, who often did not. In another example, the Acts of Pa ul and
Thecla, an early Christian text, portrays Thecla as a heroine, because
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she leaves her fianc to preach the Gospel with Paul. She and other
early Christian celibates contributed to the Christians' reputation in
Palestine as "'home wreckers,' initiators of a message not of household
order but disorder."24
The contrast with Judaism could not be starker. "In Judaism," Peter
Brown tells us, "the Law rested equally on every aspect of the human
person. It required reverent attention to those things which all human
beings were held to share food, time, and marriage. "25 Judaism, much
more than Christianity, then, can be considered a pro-family religion
in which family is a primary place where the good life can be lived.
Among the Palestinian Jews, marriage was expected as a matter of
course. 21 If one reads the Hebrew Bible, one is presented with "a religious community built upon the patriarchal family." 27 Unlike Roman
society, in which family loyalty is linked to state and cult, then, in Jewish culture the family is directly tied to the faith. The Jews as a people
have a covenant with God, and each Jew becomes a part of the covenant in and through the family. Marriage went largely unquestioned
in the lives of Palestinian Jews, until Jesus of Nazareth came onto the
scene. 28
The marriage ideals of both Jewish and Roman cultures were sweeping
in scope and demanding in expectations. It is not difficult to
understand that Jesus of Nazareth, who, like other radicals of his time,
wanted to give himself totally to God, questioned the marital ethos of
the time. The demand for so much loyalty to family seemed to him
idolatrous. He did not want family to function as an idol in his life, or
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water, it is not thicker than agape, which informs the altruis tic imagination underlying the historical Christian theology of
relinquishment and adoption. 31
How does Post come to the conclusion that for the early Christians
love is more important than kinship? He looks at Christian practice
and sees that although the first assumption is that birth parents will
rear their own children, if the best interests of the children require
that others rear them, adoption is a welcome alternative. In fact, early
Christians affirmed the morality of adoption by referring to their own
adoption as children of God in baptism. 31 Post uses his conclusions
about Christian thought and practice to challenge current Ameri can cultural mores that seem to him to question the legitimacy of
adoption by privileging biological parenthood. He suggests that 'the
Christian ideal love extends beyond biological connections is the
better one.
What Post shows is that the earl y), Christians did not limit their love
or duty to the family sphere. They did not believe that their respon sibilities to their families were their only ethical responsibilities. They did
not limit their understanding of family by thinking of it as only
biological. Rather, because they saw beyond nuclear family, they had
an enlarged sense of what life required of them. It is this ethical sense,
exemplified in the Christian practice of adoption, that is rooted in the
radical family-denying ethic of Jesus of Nazareth, who called his followers to reject nuclear family-idolatry and embrace a larger family of
all God's children.
What, then, would the new family that Jesus preaches look like?
First, Jesus called his followers to a new kind of relationship in community with others who sought to do the will of God. The first Christians can
be seen as a people who wanted to actualize Jesus' vision of the kingdom.
Horsley claims that "even if we allow for considerable exaggeration in
Luke's nostalgic and romanticizing summaries (e.g., [Acts] 2:41-47;
4:32-37; 5:42), we can still imagine a group excitedly celebrating table
fellowship, sharing resources, and energetically preaching and healing in
the Temple area. "13 This group would have heard Jesus' message about
the dangers of all-encompassing family loyalty. They would have been
attempting to live in a new kind of family-community
in which all those who were disciples of Jesus would be better able to
focus on what was really important: teaching and living the good news.
The Jesus of the Gospels used radical anti-family sayings to shake up
his family-devoted listeners, shake them loose from the ties that kept
them from being true servants of God. And they, in response, changed
the ways they thought about family and, more significantly, the way
they lived as family. In this Christian family-community, four important
changes are evident.
The De-Centering of Children
First, children are included, but they are not as central to the meaning
and mission of the family as they would have been in the Greco-Roman
context. One indication of this decentering of children and procreation
is the paucity of New Testament material on the subject of children.
The few passages we do have are often taken out of context. The
account of Jesus calling the little children to his side over the protest
of the disciples in Mark 10:14-16, for instance, is sometimes offered as
testimony to the New Testament's valuing of children." However, most
New Testament scholars view the passage as one that uses children as a
model of what a Jesus-follower should be like without commenting on
the value of children per se." Somewhat more promising is the passage
that reads, "Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking
it in his arms, he said to them, 'Whoever welcomes one such child in
my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but
the one who sent me"' (Mark 9:36-37). Schussler Fiorenza argues that
the Gospel writer is trying to say that "Jesus himself is present to the
community in those children whom the community has accepted in
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baptism ('in my name'). She claims that the passage may indicate not
only that children were seen as gifts to the community (rat her than the
family) but also that children were actually cared for by people in the
community (as well as by the family). This may be assuming too much,
but certainly, there is an affirmation of children as gifts of God or, better,
as bearers of God's spirit, which suggests that the anti-family ethos in
Jesus' sayings is not any more anti-children than it is anti-marriage. The
relationships of love and care that exist between parents and children or
husbands and wives are not the problem. Rather, the structure of the
family and its preeminence in the lives of many is problematic.
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wife must submit to her husband, as to Christ. This does not sound too
progressive to our ears because of the obvious differentiation of roles.
Despite the strong, sacrificial love required of the husband, it is still the
wife who is asked to submit to her spouse. However, it is important not
to overlook the beginning sentence in the passage, which reads, "Be
subject to one another out of reverence for Christ" (5:21) This sounds
more like the mutual sacrifice that Christians might speak of today.
What happens to the equal call to submission later in the passage?
According to some scholars, it gets muddled because the strong gender
codes of the culture are only partially overcome. Thus, while the early
Christians are striving for the egalitarian vision to which they feel Jesus
called them, they are not quite able to free themselves fiom the ideas
of patriarchal marriage that are pervasive in their culture. What we
see is a transformation in progress." From this passage, as well as from
research on the social world of the early Christians, we know that the
families in the young Jesus movement were distinct in their emerging
egalitarian ethic.
The Rejection of Hierarchy
The families of the first Christians were also unique in their rejection
of the hierarchical relations that were central to marriage in
first-century Palestine. When these Christians rejected marriage, as
they often did, they also rejected the upper-class status that came with
marriage. Unlike those who married into respectability, many Christians
called the community of faith their family and rejoiced that there they
could say to others, "If you desire a friend who supplies goods not of
this world, I am your friend. If you desire a father for those who are
rejected on earth, I am your father. If you desire a legitimate brother to
set you apart from bastard brothers, I am your brother.""' The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles is full of similar stories of young men who
leave behind possessions, of young women who sneak out of their husbands' marriage beds into other bedrooms where Christian worship is
taking place, of disciples of Christ who come together despite diverse
backgrounds,40 of women who give up their high status as wives to
embrace the life of a "slave of God. " 41 In sum, Christians who turned
away from marriage did so, at least in part, because they rejected the
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upper-class status that marriage would bring them. Instead, they identified
with a small Christian community that included people from all walks of
life, and they called this Community their family.
Eventually, most Christians would marry, and, of course, many
Christians did marry even in the beginning. It is reasonable to assume that
these marrying Christians also found ways to reform their relationships
and make them more inclusive. We know, at least, that the baptism of
adult Christians in these times included the formula found in Galatians
3:27-28, You have "clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer
Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and
female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." Many scholars have come
to believe that this formula was understood by the earliest Christians
not just spiritually, but concretely.42 To be baptized, then, was to affirm
that all socially important distinctions were no longer significant. A
Christian was brother or sister to all. Christian communities included
both the very poor and very rich, both former slaves and former
nobles. Christian families, too, crossed class lines, and in doing so,
repudiated ideas that often went unquestioned in their time.43
The Inclusion of AU
The final characteristic that set early Christian families apart from the
typical Roman and Jewish families is at the heart of all else we have
been discussing so far. It is the idea that the early Christians' families
were not limited by biology. We know that Jesus' message included
the claim that his real family was the Christian community, not his
mother and his brothers. We know that others noticed that the Chris tians sometimes left their biological families for their new Christian
families. And we know that the Christians were often seen as unpatriotic and immoral, as family-wreckers, because they sometimes refused to
give in to what was expected of them. However, we also know that
Christianity began in households where communities were led by married
couples (for example, Prisca and Aquila in Acts 18:18 and 18:25; 1 Cor
16:18; Rom 16:2)." These first Christians used family language with
reverence in speaking about their own communities, which were not
limited by biological ties. According to New Testament scholars,
they "saw themselves as extended families. This is clear from such evidence as the title of brothers and sisters commonly given to believers,
burial in common cemeteries, and conscious modeling of community
leadership on that of the household. The vision of church was that of
a community that was inclusive of all."" All of this means that family
to the first Christians was an expansive term that referenced not just
the household, but, more importantly, the community of disciples of
Christ. Within this community, some married and lived oat the call to
discipleship within marriage, while others remained celibate, devoting
their lives wholly to the work of the kingdom.
Thus it seems that relationships of love and care that character ize families were not what Jesus was trying to eliminate. Rather, the
structure of families, and their preeminence, was problematic, and this
is what the first followers of Jesus tried to do something about. They
allowed his anti-family sayings to shake them up, and they took pains
to cut themselves loose from those family ties that would keep them
from being true servants of God. Sometimes this meant leaving one
family and embracing another, and sometimes it meant rejecting biological family life all together, but either way, the point was to try to
live life focused on what really mattered: working to spread the message
of Jesus.
Why Celibacy?
What might still be distressing to contemporary Christians is that in
the early Christian literature, it often seems as though celibacy is seen
as the highest Christian calling. It seems as if the way to be really, truly
holy is to give up marriage altogether. Is this so? When Paul says that
it is better to marry than to burn (1 Cor 7:8 -10), is he remembering
Jesus' negative comments on the family and interpreting them as Jesus
would have wanted? Actually, compared with the radical Christians
in Corinth to whom he is writing, Paul is very much the preserver of
marriage. Over against the Corinthian idea that "only by dissolving
the household was it possible to achieve the priceless transparency
associated with a new creation," an idea promulgated by the more
radical of Jesus' followers who took his antifamily and anti-money
statements more literally, Paul stands with those Christians who stayed
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with their families, approving marriage for ordinary Christians.* Still, even
he is ambivalent, because he fears that those who are married will not
be able to serve God with their whole heart and mind (1 Cor 7:32-40). Why
was this ambivalence so strong?
According to Peter Brown, whose important work The Body and
Society has added a great deal to our knowledge of the early Christian
world, singleness of heart is the key moral virtue in first-century
morality.47 So marrying is problematic for early Christians like Paul because
it divides the heart between God and home. Moreover, this is most likely
what lies behind the most radical of Jesus' anti-family sayings. However, from the beginning, Jesus' followers respond to the command to
be single-hearted in discipleship in different ways. Some, like Paul,
acknowledge the reality that most people will marry. Though he (unlike
,Jesus) upholds celibacy as the superior option and recommends it, he
knows that the majority will marry and simply encourages them to be
vigilant lest they lose their lives in worrying about the wrong things.
Others of Jesus' followers, like the Corinthians, are more convinced
that celibacy is the only way to realize Jesus' vision. It is important to
remember that even the more conservative Paul is not a cheerleader for
marriage. "It is not, he insists, a sin, but neither is it, or the establishment
of a Christian family, a positive contribution to the creation or
preservation of the Christian tradition." 48 Why the pessimism?
Most of the earliest Christians have reservations about the tradi tional
family, even if they ultimately approve of it, because they see that it "is a
distraction from the preparation for the imminently expected end of
time."' This is crucial. The anti-family strains in the thinking of the early
Christians have some relation to their beliefs that the world would end
(and Jesus would return) in their lifetimes. Some theologians would
argue that these eschatological beliefs explain most if not all of the
concern about family and free contemporary Christians who do not
believe the world will end any time soon to embrace family life without
hesitation. However, this argument minimizes the importance of the
anti-family strain in early Christian thought. While the influence of
eschatology cannot be denied, I find it hard to believe that escha tology
explains everything. Often in Christian theology, eschatology has been
used to explain away or soften the radicality of the New Testament in other
areas.50 It is easy to say that Gospel injunctions
Return to Family?
And yet, in the writings of the second generation of Christians, in Paul's
followers in particular, there is something altogether newt hat calls this
interpretation into question. In Ephesians 5:21-23 (discussed above),
we have an analogy between Christ and the church and the husband
and his wile. We have codes of conduct that parallel the household
codes of the Greeks (wives are to submit to husbands, children to
parents, slaves to masters). In short, here is an assertion of the holiness of
the marital relationship that seems to fly in the face of the spirit of
Jesus' anti-family ethic. And in some ways, it does. Yet scholars tell us
that the presence of the codes in the text indicates that the practice
in the Christian communities was very different from the codes. That
is, if everyone were doing it, it would not need to be said. The writer
of the text is then seeking to modify or overturn the new structures
of family and community that have come to the fore among the early
Christians." The radicalism of the early days is being modified by the
assertion that family could be holy in itself
Still, it is interesting that even in this passage, it is primarily the spousal
relationship that is raised up as holy. Children are mentioned,
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Christians, making sure that we do not miss the truth in what they say
and do. The next step is figuring out how to respond to that truth, for
the New Testament is not the end of the story. It is only the beginning. In
the next chapter we begin to look at the different ways Christians thought
about marriage and family, and it will quickly bring us to the present
day, where our own reflections must necessarily begin.