A Family Affair

Marriage, Class, and Ethics in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles

Bibliographic Data

ID5812965
AuthorsAndrew S Jacobs (0000-0003-4886-6287, corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume7
Issue1
Pages105-138
Publication date1999-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of early Christian studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1067-6341 • E-ISSN: 1086-3184
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/earl.1999.0018
OpenAlexW1984675122
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited19

A Family Affair:Marriage, Class, and Ethics in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles Andrew S. Jacobs (bio) Abstract In this essay I juxtapose a dominant culture discourse of the family, one which aims to construct an ethical center out of the marital union, with a deconstructive effort on the part of certain early Christian groups, in order to suggest that this particular Christian "antifamilial" rhetoric associated its family ethics with issues of class and social status. The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles oppose the morally inferior upper-class family, oriented around conjugal concordia, with a status-negating Christian "family" organized around apostolic potestas. "We can only guess what happened to marriage rules among early Christian groups."1 "A Maiden Taken Captive": Christians as Homewreckers A well-born young woman of a prominent house in Asia Minor is causing her family some distress. When the woman's fiancé comes to woo, her mother greets him with chagrin. It seems that a "strange man" has come to town and started preaching a disastrous message. "My daughter also, like a spider hanging at the window bound up by his words, is conquered by a new desire and a fearsome passion. She hangs [End Page 105] upon his sayings and the maiden has been taken captive."2 When it is clear that the young woman no longer wants anything to do with her fiancé or her mother, turning away from them in silence, the whole house becomes terrified: "And they wept bitterly: Thamyris for losing a wife, Theocleia a daughter, and the maidservants a mistress."3 The young lady whose defection fractures a household from top to bottom is Thecla, heroine of early Christian "romance" and a symbol of sexual renunciation.4 Her "captor" is Paul, apostle of Jesus, whose message twice leads Thecla to capital condemnation and who himself leads a life of harassed itinerant preaching. Framed on the call of Jesus in the canonical gospels, who entices his disciples away from jobs and families,5 the Acts of Paul preach radical disjunction: "Blessed are they who have renounced this world, for they shall be pleasing to God! . . . Blessed are they who through love of God have gone out of the form of the mundane for they will judge angels and be blessed at the right hand of the Father!"6 This disruption of households by some early Christians struck at the perceived building block of civilized society, the family.7 As some [End Page 106] Christian circles became more institutionalized, this radical disruption became untenable: witness the household codes in the deutero-Pauline letters to the Colossians and Ephesians, and the careful theological mapping of Christian piety onto socially conservative conduct in the Pastoral epistles. Yet in other spheres the apostles were still wielded rhetorically and socially as "homewreckers," initiators of a message not of household order but disorder. It is important to attend to the form in which this domestic demolition is framed, as a contrast between Thecla and the North African martyr Vibia Perpetua can illuminate.8 Like Thecla, Perpetua is a "woman of good family and upbringing" brought to face public punishment for her disruptive adherence to Christian belief. Also like Thecla, Perpetua renounces her family in order to embrace a new Christian identity. The family structure "overturned" by Perpetua, however, is markedly different from that of Thecla. Instead of a jilted fiancé we have a grey-haired father pleading for mercy: "Daughter," he said, "have pity on my gray head-have pity on me your father, if I am worthy to be called father by you; if I have brought you with these very hands into the bloom of life . . . do not now surrender me to the reproaches of men. Think on your brothers, think on your mother and your aunt, think of your own son who will not be able to live after you. Set aside pride lest it overturn all of us!"9 Perpetua appears as the well-born matrona who sets aside the authority of her paterfamilias, and in so doing breaks apart the entire extended family. She abandons her father's will and seeks the will of another Father to follow instead.10

Apostles · Silence · Wife · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Mormonism, Religion, and History

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