Abstract
Text, Image, and Christians in the Graeco-Roman World honors the career of David L. Balch by collecting a diverse group of essays that address the central topics of Balch's research: family/households and Graeco-Roman art. The book is divided into two parts, with Part Two being further sub-divided into two sections.
Part One deals with “Text and House Churches.” Dennis Smith offers ten “working hypotheses” that focus on the “ways in which the house church can be understood as the foundational environment within which early Christian social identity developed” (p. 3). Edward Adams's chapter, though, presses back on this general statement, arguing that greater consideration needs to be given to rented non-domestic space for early Christian meetings. Margaret MacDonald's chapter discusses the complexity of family life, marriage, and children in relation to Paul's recommendations in 1 Corinthians 7, noting that “Paul's teaching on divorce … and on mixed marriage needs to be read through the eyes of families negotiating the possibilities of ongoing contact with children” (p. 47).
Continuing with the theme of marriage, Turid Karlesn Seim discusses the connection between Paul's emphasis on the church as the body of Christ and the household codes in Ephesians and the Pastoral Letters. This connection, Seim argues, reflects “the beginning of a process towards ecclesial management and the sacralization of marriage” (p. 69). Abraham Malherbe's chapter picks up on the household codes, demonstrating that the language in the lists of qualifications for overseers in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 reflect depictions of a household manager and focus attention on proper behavior, not only of the manager, but of all within the household of God. Davina Lopez and Todd Penner challenge traditional categories of “public” and “private,” arguing that these, and others, are modern constructions, and that the neat distinction between them does not fit the ancient evidence.
The blurring of the lines between so-called “public” and “private” space is illustrated in the following chapter by Ronald Hock, in which he sets forth a “literary ethnography of the day to day and crisis operations of the Graeco-Roman household” (pp. 116–17) by analyzing four novels from the mid-first to late-second centuries. Though Hock does not make specific connections with the New Testament, the data he presents does shed interesting light on both elite and non-elite households. John Fitzgerald revisits his previous argument that the household codes in 1 Peter addressed domestic violence against women and slaves by asking if such domestic violence was inspired by earlier practices of severe punishment for women who drank wine in Rome's earliest days. Peter Oaks offers three examples of how archeology could have aided Balch's commentary on Luke by helping “us gauge something of the author's and audience's experience and expectations in each of these three areas” (p. 138), namely, temple access, social reversal, and cosmic conflict.
Part Two, “Creating Images—Verbal and Visual,” is further divided into two sub-sections. The first section of Part Two deals with “Constructions of the ‘Other.’” Warren Carter argues that Matthew 20:25–27 “others” Gentile rulers as dominant and oppressive, characteristics they share with God and Jesus, while Matthew's Jesus constructs his disciple's identity in terms of slavery, an identity that depicts the disciples as both brutalized and brutalizing one another. Maintaining the focus on the Roman Empire, and assuming Balch's thesis that Graeco-Roman domestic art might have been important in Paul's message of the suffering Christ, Aloiu Niang, noting the offense of crucifixion among some, argues that Paul's depiction of Christ crucified publicly may have had both positive and negative effects. Leo Perdue argues that the author of the Wisdom of Solomon merged Greek rhetoric and ethics with traditional Jewish theology to encourage the audience to remain faithful to Jewish ethnic traditions/religious identity.
Stephen Sprinkle juxtaposes the stories of the martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas and the story of the murder of a lesbian couple in the late 1990s, asserting that both stories may be understood as accounts of martyrdom and hate-crime. Both of these stories served to establish new communities, with these four women serving as founding mothers. Frederick Brenk offers a hypothetical scenario in which a Christ-follower enters the Temple of Isis at Pompeii, reflecting on how Christianity had, perhaps, adapted some aspects of Egyptian and Roman religion. Oliver Larry Yarbrough considers the Alexamenos graffito in its Roman context, asserting that, despite the perceived attempt to shame Christians, all that can be said with certainty is that the artist was simply illustrating Alexamenos's devotion to his ass-headed, crucified god.
Section Two of Part Two deals with “Constructing the Visual World.” John Clarke examines the ways that visual representations of epiphany, whether in images, architecture, ritual, or landscape, depict a reciprocal exchange between human worshipers and the divine. Hal Taussig discusses the Aphrodisias Sebasteion within its imperial context, arguing that the Sebasteion's portrayal of the conquered nations is best understood in the context of the relief of Achilles and Penthesilea. Robin Jensen examines depictions of nudity in Graeco-Roman and early Christian art, noting that nudity in early Christianity emphasizes new life, while nudity in Graeco-Roman art was most often associated with heroic or divine figures. Yancy Smith uses Colossians 2:11 as a test case in which he demonstrates that Graeco-Roman art is helpful to translators by illustrating concepts often lost in translation (e.g., the connection between circumcision, death, and nudity in Colossians 2:11). Everett Ferguson discusses various visual representations of the Jonah story from early Christianity, noting the sequence of death, resurrection, and eternal bliss fits with Jesus’ own usage in Matthew and with the eschatological outlook of early Christianity. Richard Freund, noting the biblical assertion that God made humanity in God's image, wonders about visual representations of God, concluding that a two tiered system must have simultaneously banned the worship of artistic representations while allowing for images to be available for “popular usage” (pp. 365–66).
Space prevents a detailed engagement with each of these essays. Each essay is generally well-argued and well-documented with both primary and secondary sources. This diverse collection of essays presents fresh insights and raises new questions that will be of interest to scholars and students alike.