Abstract
Apart from the names of the cities and provinces in which he and his addressees dwelt, Paul’s letters contain very few references to specific, concrete features of his world – few data, that is, that might serve to map the small network of co-workers, rivals and Christ groups portrayed in his letters onto the broader Roman world as otherwise attested. Two of the most striking exceptions occur in Philippians, where Paul claims that his chains have become manifestly ‘in Christ’ ‘in the whole praetorium and to all the rest’ (1.13) and subsequently passes along greetings from certain ‘saints’ who belong to ‘Caesar’s household’ (4.22). However, these references have not enriched reconstructions of the social history of the earliest Christ groups so much as one might expect. As the articles in this special issue outline, their usefulness in this regard has been impaired by a number of related interpretive snares: the controlling influence of the depiction of Paul’s imprisonments in Acts and its legacy, entanglement with apologetic concerns and, finally, a narrow focus on the date and provenance of Philippians – when Paul wrote it and whether from Rome, Ephesus or Caesarea – that, for much of the past century, left exegetes mired in a tedious stalemate.
The articles presented here derive from a panel of invited papers sponsored by the Historical Paul section at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. The aim of the session was to reconsider the significance of Paul’s references to the praetorium and ‘Caesar’s household’ as evidence not only for the geographical provenance of the letter, but also for the social milieu of which it is an artifact. In practice, this meant first subjecting the literary and inscriptional evidence for the two terms to fresh scrutiny. Here previous publications by Michael Flexsenhar III (2019a, 2019b) and Angela Standhartinger (2015) laid the groundwork for a decisive break with interpretations of the data that have prevailed since the work of J.B. Lightfoot in the late nineteenth century. Consequently, although significant differences in their readings of the evidence remain, and they reach no consensus on the specific city from which Paul wrote, these articles share an emphasis on the regional Aegean context of Paul’s letter and its addressees.
Like the session itself, this issue comprises four invited papers and a response. In his opening essay, Michael Flexsenhar illustrates how, when read in light of Acts, Phil. 1.13 and 4.22 sponsor a ‘triumphalist narrative’ of the rise of Christianity, residue of which can be found in the exegetical assumptions even of interpreters who would not endorse it. Taking her cue from Flexsenhar’s suggestion (2019a: 38-44) that the ‘saints’ from ‘Caesar’s household’ and Paul’s Philippian addressees were linked through shared social networks, Heike Omerzu reflects on the mobility of Paul and his Aegean contacts through the lens of Migration Studies. Angela Standhartinger offers an extended argument for her novel reading of ‘Caesar’s household’, earlier suggested in a provocative footnote (2013: 160-61, n. 95; 2015: 129-130, n. 90) that takes the phrase as a coded reference to Paul’s fellow Christ-believing prisoners. And, drawing on his previous work on the formal and informal administration of justice in Rome’s eastern provinces, Cédric Brélaz provides a nuanced reading of the narrative rhetoric of Acts’ preoccupation with Paul’s judicial encounters and seeks to account too for the apparent suppression of the imprisonment from which Paul penned Philippians. In his response, Douglas Campbell summarizes key points of consensus, drawing on these to augment his earlier argument for the Corinthian provenance of the letter (2014: 123-25, 146-53).
Collectively, these papers thus signal a renewed interest in the praetorium and ‘Caesar’s household’ to which Paul refers in Philippians, one that presses beyond the confines of recent debates to consider what might be called the letter’s social provenance.