In his Advice to the Bride and Groom, Plutarch famously pronounces: “A married woman should therefore worship and recognize the gods whom her husband holds dear, and these alone. The door must be closed to strange cults and foreign superstitions. No god takes pleasure in cult performed furtively and in secret by a woman.”Footnote 1 These comments represent a patriarchal ideology that the wife (along with the whole household) should follow the worship practices of the husband. It also suggests the possibility that this counsel was not always followed and that wives might bring their own gods into a marriage, attempting to maintain ritual practices in their honor, perhaps secretly.
A number of early Christian sources tell us that sometimes whole households are baptized together. The typical pattern is that the head of the household, who is usually—but not always—a man, is won over by a particular teacher who is passing through town, and he and his whole household are baptized.Footnote 2 This phenomenon is in keeping with the ideology Plutarch lays out. But what if a wife converted to Christianity and her husband did not? What options does she have? Does she remain in the household? Does she leave it? If she stays, does she practice this new religion in secret, as Plutarch describes? Or does she somehow incorporate Christian practices into the traditional religious practices of the household?Footnote 3
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, we do not have information from the women themselves about this predicament. We do have evidence, however, that Christian authors — mostly men as far as we know—were concerned about this situation, our earliest being Paul.Footnote 4 In the context of a discussion of marriage and sexual practices, Paul advises men and women married to “unbelievers”Footnote 5:
(12) To the rest I say (I and not the Lord): if a brother (ἀδελφÒς) has an unbelieving wife (ἄπιστоν) and she agrees to live with him (оἰκεῖν μετ’ αὐτоῦ), let him not leave her. (13) And if a woman has an unbelieving husband (ἄπιστоν) and he agrees to live with her, let her not leave her husband. (14) For the unbelieving husband is made holy (ἡγίασται) by the wife and the unbelieving wife is made holy by the brother (ἀδελφῷ). Otherwise your children are unclean (ἀκάθαρτα); but now they are holy (ἅγια). (15) If an unbelieving man separates, let him separate; neither a brother (ἀδελφÒς) or a sister (ἀδελφὴ) is enslaved in cases such as these. God has called you in peace. (16) For how do you know, woman, if you will save your husband? Or how do you know, man, if you will save your wife? (1 Cor 7:12–16)
Paul's advice presents a striking contrast to Plutarch's. Instead of addressing wives alone, he addresses both spouses, as though this might be an issue for both men and women. And Paul is not imagining that the whole household has converted with the head of the household, as we see in other early Christian texts. Furthermore, instead of counseling adherence to the husband's gods and rejection of “foreign” gods, Paul advises both spouses to stay with their unbelieving partners as long as the latter are willing, advice which implies a certain amount of toleration for the situation. Indeed, Paul seems to imagine that this sort of “mixed marriage” could work, at least for the short term.Footnote 6
While many factors may account for these differences, one in particular stands out: in the context of the gentile audience in Corinth, Paul's teachings do not represent traditional gods and practices (which Plutarch associates with the husband), but rather a new and foreign tradition, like those Plutarch warns against. Awareness of this situation may account for his toleration of these “mixed marriages,” and may prompt his advice that believers accommodate their spouses. Indeed, much of Paul's letter is aimed at addressing this issue: his goal is to guide these gentile believers in their new lives as a people of the God of Israel while still interacting with neighbors. Thus 1 Corinthians is full of advice on various social practices, such as eating, marrying, having sex, and worshipping.
1 Cor 7:12–16 has received a good deal of attention from scholars, mostly focusing on Paul's views of marriage (specifically intermarriage), or on Paul's notions of purity and holiness. My goal is to add an additional, related question, one that perhaps would have been on the minds of Paul's readers: how would a believer and an unbeliever share a household? In the ancient world, marriage, religious practices, and children—the main topics of Paul's passage—are inextricably bound together in the structure of the household. Agreeing to live together, as Paul puts it here, encompasses the whole range of responsibilities of a husband or wife in maintaining a household, including bearing and raising children, conducting business, producing goods, farming, and—important for our discussion—tending to the household cult.Footnote 7 Ancient listeners would have undoubtedly heard Paul's advice in this context of the household and the various activities associated with it.
Furthermore, despite Paul's rhetoric of reciprocity, his comments have different implications and consequences for wives than for husbands. As the Plutarch quote above illustrates, the ideology of households, reflecting the values of patriarchy, is such that the members of the household are expected to be loyal to the gods of the head of the household, who is often, although not always, a man. Because of the power dynamics of the household, the stakes are different for a wife, or any other subordinate member of the household, who is baptized into Christ apart from the head of the household. Such individuals face the tension of dual loyalties, to their new God and to the head of the household's gods.
In the following analysis, I will read 1 Cor 7:12–16 within the context of ancient households, with special attention to the implications for the lives of women and others in subordinate positions. My primary goal is not necessarily to understand Paul better, but to use his text to think through how members of the ἐκκλησίαι, not only in Corinth but throughout the empire, might have responded to and evaluated Paul's comments (or perhaps what they did to prompt this advice in the first place). To accomplish this, it is helpful to analyze this passage in the context of ancient households, both the physical spaces and the various hierarchies and social relationships that occurred there. This becomes especially relevant when we recognize that the household was a sacred space—at least parts of it were at certain times—and religious rituals were a part of daily activities. Furthermore, these ritual practices, in which all members of the household participated, were integral to power negotiations within the household. What are the implications for a subordinate member of the household who refuses to honor the gods of her husband and honors her own in their place? By tending to these questions within the larger context of the household, I hope to expose some of the possible stakes and options for women in this situation.
To attain this perspective, I will present several snapshots of Roman-period households, based on archaeological and literary evidence. I want to call attention in particular to domestic religious practices, which would have been a part of daily life and would have involved women and slaves. I will then discuss household religious practices as a site for asserting power in the ancient world, on the part of both those higher in the household hierarchy and those in lower positions. This discussion of ancient households sets the context for an examination of 1 Cor 7:12–16, in which I will highlight some of Paul's rhetorical aims and how these interact with discourses about and practices of ancient households. We will see how Paul's advice here (to stay with unbelieving spouses) glosses over a variety of complicated issues that a mixed household might produce, especially for believing wives. Finally I will ask how “mixed marriages” and Paul's advice about them might have been understood and evaluated by women.
Snapshots of Households
If we were walking down the street in a city in the Roman empire in the year 50 c.e., we might catch an occasional glimpse of the activities inside the houses we passed, especially those of wealthier citizens.Footnote 8 We could see through the front doorway, for example, into the atrium of the house, which served as a place to meet friends and business associates.Footnote 9 The head of the household might be there, greeting guests and conducting business. We might see a slave standing guard in the doorway, or passing through the shadows on the far side of the atrium, on her or his way back and forth from the kitchen or work rooms, serving the various members of the family and the guests.Footnote 10 We might also see the householder wife occupied with her various duties as household manager, coordinating the work in the house or receiving guests.Footnote 11
Depending on the house, we might glimpse a shrine in the atrium or garden beyond, a mini-temple that mimics the architecture of the sanctuary down the street.Footnote 12 Statuettes of the gods might be perched inside this structure, or might be painted on the side, perhaps including the genius, or personification of the head of the household.Footnote 13 If it were his birthday, we would see the household members making offerings at this shrine, a rite that signals their allegiance to him and their membership in the household.
Passing another house we might witness the family gathered around a shrine, while a mother and daughter place offerings of cakes, wine and incense to Juno in a niche in the wall. It is the daughter's birthday, and the mother coaches her in her prayers to the goddess.Footnote 14 Or perhaps a new bride makes offerings to a figure of Aphrodite, asking for fertility and healthy children.Footnote 15
In rooms hidden from public view, such as kitchens or other service areas, slaves might tend their own shrines, located in a less decorated niche in the wall above the stove. In a space that free, elite members of the household would not have frequented, slave men and women may have honored the gods of their owners, or perhaps more likely, they honored their own gods, such as those from their homeland.Footnote 16
Attached to these elite houses we might notice shop fronts along the street. People working here might be dependents in the elite households, and we might glimpse an image of a god on an interior wall or a votive statue on a shelf.Footnote 17 Just down the street we might see a larger building with multiple families living in discrete living units inside, like apartments.Footnote 18 We can imagine people in these rooms, even in cramped quarters, still honoring the gods with meal time offerings and prayers.Footnote 19
As is clear from these snapshots, ancient households should not be cordoned off, as though they were private retreats from work and public life. Instead, Roman-period households accommodated domestic, commercial, political and social activities. People slept, dressed, cooked, ate, procreated and raised children in households. People worked in households, sometimes in shops attached to the physical space of the house, contributing to the economic production of the household. People conducted business in households, as exemplified by the ritual of the morning salutatio, in which clients would visit patrons in atria, often on view for passersby. People also entertained in households, inviting friends as well as business and political associates to dine in their houses. A wide range of people could populate an elite household: immediate family members, extended family and dependents, slaves, other workers, tenants, nurses, teachers, and so on. Representatives of various social strata thus occupied households together, in what Andrew Wallace-Hadrill has called “housefuls.”Footnote 20
Crucial for all of these activities and all of these people was proper devotion to the gods who saw to their prosperity. From the evidence that survives, both literary and archaeological, we can say that domestic religious practices were often connected to meal rituals, perhaps involving small food offerings to the gods before or during meals.Footnote 21 Statuettes of a variety of deities have been found in houses, as have small shrines or niches which may have held these images.Footnote 22 Rituals may have included everything from sacrifices, to prayers, to gestures made upon entering or exiting through the door.Footnote 23
The goal of this tour of an ancient street has not been to offer a comprehensive description of households or household religious practices. Indeed, our knowledge of household practices is far from complete, and our most plentiful evidence is that of the Roman elite on the Italian peninsula, even as we have some evidence from places like Corinth, Ephesus, and Egypt. If we want to consider places throughout the empire, such as Corinth or Carthage or Asia Minor, or any other places where 1 Corinthians was read, then we need to imagine multiple religious influences, including indigenous traditions, foreign imports, and those imposed by Rome.Footnote 24 We are aided in this by increasing attention to domestic archaeology and by the efforts of scholars who have begun to think about models that allow for this sort of multiplicity.Footnote 25 Furthermore, our surviving evidence underrepresents poor housing, so, as with most of our sources from the ancient world, we have to imagine the poor back into the picture, living in insulae or apartments, small shops, rented rooms, or perhaps as dependents or workers in larger households.Footnote 26
Instead, the goal of this tour of an ancient street has been to evoke images from Roman-period domestic activities in order to call attention to the household as a context for reading 1 Cor 7:12–16.Footnote 27 What are the implications of Paul's advice for believers to stay with unbelievers, maintaining households together? We can see that many religious rituals are tied to daily activities (such as eating and drinking, coming and going) and are therefore not segregated from mundane tasks.Footnote 28 Furthermore, household religious practices are local and often tied to the ancestors of the head of the household, or to those gods that are relevant to the specific needs of a given household. Therefore, even as we find broad similarities in household practices in different parts of the empire, domestic religious practices were various and adaptable, often accommodating a mix of deities.Footnote 29 Finally, religious rituals are implicated in the power relations in the household, not only those perceived between divine and human, but also those among the various people living in the household. What are the consequences for subordinate members of the household if they refuse to worship the gods of the paterfamilias?
Mapping Power through Household Cult
In recent work on Roman-period households, scholars have called attention to the household as an arena of power negotiation.Footnote 30 Kate Cooper discusses the “spatial grammar” of the domus and calls it a “stage for the performance of authority by the dominus.”Footnote 31 Kristina Sessa argues that the household was an “index of an individual's public status” and was therefore subject to public scrutiny.Footnote 32 These power dynamics might play out in a variety of ways, including the domestic cult.
The connection between the authority of the head of household and the power of the gods was widespread in the Roman world. Indeed, the very notion of belonging to a household, whether as a slave or a family member, meant precisely that you tended to the gods who protected that household, the gods of the paterfamilias. In patrilocal marriages, such as were common in the Roman world, the bride moved into the household of her husband and took up the responsibility for worship of the gods of her new household.Footnote 33 Plutarch's advice quoted at the beginning of this article illustrates this patriarchal ideology, as he admonishes wives to shun any gods but those of her husband. Not doing so amounts to a kind of “religious infidelity” not tolerated by Roman moralists.Footnote 34 Notice that Plutarch invokes a spatial image of closing the door of the household against “foreign” gods, drawing a boundary between the physical space of the household, the wife's obedience to her husband, and religious fidelity to his gods on one side, and foreign superstitions on the other.
An explicit example of this ideology put into practice is the cult of the genius of the paterfamilias, which might be described as his spirit or personification. The genius was honored by the household members on the birthday of the paterfamilias, an action that signaled allegiance to him.Footnote 35 Augustus himself recognized the potential of this tradition when he reorganized the city of Rome around wards and neighborhoods that honored the Genius Augusti and the Lares Augusti.Footnote 36 These changes transferred Augustus's household cult to the city, fitting for an emperor who was cast as the ultimate paterfamilias of the Roman empire.
As the model of the household was useful to Augustus in the political arena, so it was useful to moralists and philosophers as a moral framework for discussions on a variety of issues: economic production and wealth-getting; proper comportment of men, women and slaves; health and healing; agriculture; leadership and management skills; and politics (the household as the model for the state).Footnote 37 Authors of these discourses on “household management” are preoccupied with the proper distribution of power and status. Order, efficiency, productivity and virtue depend upon each person knowing and occupying a specific position in a larger hierarchy: some are meant to rule and some to be ruled.Footnote 38 The household thus becomes a site for mapping out various levels of superiority and subordination, and discourses about households serve as a means of deploying elite values.
There are several recurring and intersecting themes in discourses on household management: unity of the husband and wife, the subordination of the wife to the husband (often put in friendly terms by philosophers), order and stability, and reverence of the gods on the part of both husband and wife, which resulted in divine sanction of the marriage and prosperity of the household. We find this cluster of themes expressed by Xenophon, a fifth-century b.c.e. Greek philosopher whose work on this topic, Œconomicus, becomes the model for Roman-period writers such as Cicero, Philodemus and Columella.Footnote 39 The model head of household in this text is Ischomachus, who explains to Socrates that when he married his wife, she knew hardly anything about managing the household and that it was his job to teach her (she was only fourteen, after all). Before doing so, Ischomachus describes how he sacrificed to the gods and prayed for his success as a teacher and for her ability to learn (VII.6-7). When asked if his wife sacrificed with him and offered prayers, Ischomachus replies, “Oh yes, very much so, and she vowed and prayed fervently to the gods that she might become the sort of woman that she ought to be” (VII.8).Footnote 40 According to the view of this text, the husband and head of household is a teacher and the wife a student. She eagerly follows his lead in honoring the gods and submitting to his instruction. Authors of household management discourses consistently link the proper hierarchies and functioning of a unified household with devotion to the gods, a rhetorical move that claims divine sanction for their version of a proper household.Footnote 41
We find an intriguing extension of this theme in Cato's second-century-b.c.e. farming manual, De Agricultura, a treatise written for elite men who might acquire a country estate. Cato views religious practices as a way of distributing power and maintaining control of slaves in an elite household. Here Cato addresses the head male slave of the household and farm. One of his duties is to supervise the head female slave, who may be given to him (by their owner) as a wife (143). She must clean the hearth daily, and decorate it on holidays: “On the Kalends, Ides, and Nones, and whenever a holy day comes, she must hang a garland over the hearth, and on those days pray to the household gods (Lari familiari) as opportunity offers” (143.2).Footnote 42 Decorating the hearth and offering prayers to the Lares on specific holy days are thus among the duties the slave performs.Footnote 43
Cato is careful to point out, however, that the slave's role in religious rituals is limited and distinct from the roles of the dominus and domina: “She must not engage in worship (rem divinam facere) herself or get others to engage in it for her without the orders of the dominus or domina. Let her remember that the dominus attends to the worship (rem divinam facere) for the whole household” (143.1). Anxiety over unsupervised worship surfaces here as Cato outlines the limitations on the slave woman's freedom to perform religious rites.
This passage offers a glimpse of the role of both a slave woman and the free wife of the paterfamilias: the slave woman performs religious duties connected to the hearth which she tends daily, and the domina is responsible for ordering and overseeing these duties. The dominus, though, the male head of household, is in charge of the rituals of the whole household; his authority trumps that of both women. According to Cato, autonomy with respect to religious practices reflects the power structure of the household, which is shaped by gender and status. Cato's instructions echo the prevailing ideology of the power of the paterfamilias in the Roman household, as well as the intertwined gender and status hierarchies that order the subordinate members of the household.
Yet his instructions also betray a recognition of the potential for destabilizing this structure. Cato seems to recognize the possibility that the slave woman might initiate religious practices herself, or get others to do so, acts which mimic and undermine the authority of the head male slave over her or the domina and dominus over both of them. Indeed, although our archaeological evidence is not conclusive, several scholars have suggested that slaves did have access to their own shrines in kitchens and service areas and may therefore have been able to exercise at least limited autonomy in their worship practices.Footnote 44 We can thus imagine in households a tension similar to what we see in Cato's instructions to the vilicus and in Plutarch's warning to wives about foreign gods: not only was power imposed on others by the head of the household, but subordinate members could assent to and resist their place in the social hierarchy through religious rituals.Footnote 45
In a discussion of Foucault's notion of power, Elizabeth Castelli offers the following evaluation: “What is most helpful about this conceptualization of power, it seems to me, is that it creates the possibility of agency for the occupants of the subordinate position in a hierarchical relationship: that is, rather than theorizing the powerful and the powerless, it suggests that power is multiply figured in social relationships, and creates the possibility for thinking that the weight of the hierarchy might shift.”Footnote 46 Catherine Bell develops precisely this notion in her study of ritual and proposes a complex understanding of ritual, or “ritualization,” as an arena in which power is asserted, accepted and resisted.Footnote 47 Building upon Foucault's notion of bodies as sites of power, Bell argues that ritualization, as action mediated by the body, becomes a process of power negotiation: “Ritualization is a strategic play of power, of domination and resistance, within the arena of the social body.”Footnote 48
We might read the household rituals described above, ancient households in general, as well as the literature prescribing household behavior (including 1 Corinthians) in this context; power relationships are mapped out in each. We can imagine that through daily rituals, women and slaves found ways to resist or appropriate power in the household. Cato, Plutarch—and perhaps Paul—may be responding to this possibility.
Paul's Rhetorical Aims in 1 Cor 7:12–16
Although Paul is not interested in productive, procreative households, many of the themes in 1 Corinthians overlap with those of household management, including gender roles, eating practices, and relationships among members that are both harmonious and properly hierarchical. 1 Corinthians might be called “ἐκκλησία management.”Footnote 49 Instead of constructing a productive and continuing household, Paul hopes to construct a community of gentiles who belong to the God of Israel. This is an enterprise that takes some work, in his view, as he attempts to shape idolatrous, gentile bodies into gentile-bodies-in-Christ. In this process of redefining, certain themes are crucial: self-control, bodily boundaries, and proper versus improper mixing.
In 1 Cor 7:12–16, Paul's famous and famously puzzling “mixed marriage” passage, the issue of how to manage contact with those outside the ἐκκλησία is negotiated within the context of household and family. This passage has received an enormous amount of attention from scholars. My goal in the discussion that follows is not to evaluate this body of scholarship or to offer a thorough analysis of the passage. Rather, I focus on how Paul attempts to define and control household relationships. In this context, Paul's use of purity language is striking, for he uses it to explain why “mixed marriages” work. Yet as I will show, this very language also yields readings that might allow subordinate members of the household to exercise some power of their own.
Scholars have long debated how to interpret Paul's purity language in 1 Cor 7:14, where he justifies his advice to stay with unbelieving spouses: “For the unbelieving husband is made holy (ἡγίασται) by the wife and the unbelieving wife is made holy by the brother (ἀδελφῷ). Otherwise your children are unclean (ἀκάθαρτα); but now they are holy (ἅγια).” His argument seems to be that the unbelieving partner is somehow made holy by the believing partner, a process which is proven through holiness of the children.Footnote 50 This logic rests on the assumption that if one of the parents were not holy, the children would be unclean. Since the children are holy (which seems to be a given), both parents must be holy also.
I think it is probably fruitless to attempt to discern a coherent system of purity and holiness here, or in Paul as a whole, or in the Corinthian community, that would explain why the children are holy and exactly how spouses are made holy. Scholars have speculated that it has to do with the intimacies of marriage, namely intercourse, and that holiness was understood as heritable, so that children of holy parents were inherently holy. Footnote 51 As intriguing as these possibilities are, we simply do not have enough information to settle the matter. Therefore, rather than trying to “uncover” a stable system accessible to Paul and to the Corinthians, which may not in fact exist, I will consider instead how purity language is being used rhetorically in this passage. How does Paul deploy purity language in certain situations, as he does here, and what are the issues at stake for him and for his audience?
If we survey Paul's letters, we find that he repeatedly connects gentiles who are not in Christ with idolatry and πоρνεία (or sexual immorality) and then describes this state in terms of pollution and holiness.Footnote 52 Before they are in Christ, gentiles are idolatrous, prone to acts of πоρνεία, and are ἀκάθαρτα, or unclean.Footnote 53 This cluster of bad things, in Paul's thinking, is a theological condition that characterizes people who are alienated from the God of Israel.Footnote 54 In turn, Paul describes the transformation from this degraded state to becoming a people of God as being made holy. Just prior to our “mixed marriage” passage, Paul describes this change, offering a “before and after” moral assessment of the gentile believers. Some of you used to be sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers (and so on),Footnote 55 Paul tells the Corinthians, “But you were washed, you were sanctified (ἡγιάσθητε), you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” (6:9b–11).Footnote 56 Holiness marks a shift in identity for these non-Jews who have left behind their worship of the wrong gods and lack of self-mastery and have become loyal to the God of Israel.Footnote 57
These holy bodies are not without constraints, however, as Paul will argue immediately following this passage. They must answer to the “body of Christ,” of which they are all members. Using the analogy of a man with a prostitute (πόρνη),Footnote 58 Paul challenges: “Do you not know that whoever is united (κоλλώμενоζ) to a prostitute (τῇ πόρνῃ) becomes one body with her? For it is said, ‘The two shall become one flesh.’ But anyone united (κоλλώμενоζ) to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Shun πоρνεία!” (6:16–18a). With Genesis to bolster his argument, Paul asserts a contagion theory whereby impurity can pass from one to another through acts of πоρνεία, or sexual immorality.Footnote 59 This is especially egregious since it threatens the body of Christ, the community, to which the believer's body — here represented as male — is connected and subjected.Footnote 60 Paul wraps up his argument with a reiteration of the relationship of the individual body to the corporate body, and makes explicit the individual Corinthians' lack of power: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the holy spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?” (1 Cor 6:14–15).
1 Corinthians 6 illustrates how Paul uses purity language to define the status and limit the power of the Corinthians. Calling the gentiles “unclean” links them to idolatry, immoral behavior and the crisis, from Paul's perspective, of being alienated from the God of Israel. In turn, “sanctification” and “holiness” signal a transformation from that degraded state to a new life in which gentiles belong to God and must live up to this standard. Part of this arrangement, as Paul states in 1 Corinthians 6, is that they no longer own their own bodies, and must now serve the corporate body of Christ. Purity language serves Paul's aim of policing the bodies of the gentile believers, and thus the boundaries of the ἐκκλησία.
In the “mixed marriage” passage in 1 Corinthians 7, purity language once again marks the boundaries between believers and unbelievers. In contrast to 1 Corinthians 6, however, where Paul claims that a contagious impurity threatens the “body of Christ,” in this passage a contagious holiness seems to be at work.Footnote 61 Here, the status of the believer's body — a member of Christ, a holy temple — trumps the status of the unbeliever's: the holiness of the believer somehow transfers to the unbelieving spouse, at least enough to render their children not unclean but holy.Footnote 62 Instead of the body of Christ, we have the household as the corporate entity here, and the status of each member is affected positively by the holiness of the one believer. Similar assumptions about contagion and power to transform are at work here as in the previous chapter, but they are turned on their head so that the insider transforms the outsider rather than the other way around.
What is Paul up to here? It is possible that this passage is at least intended to serve his repeated admonition in 1 Corinthians 7 to “stay as you are.” Paul offers this advice to those who are married, to those who are not, to those who are widows, to those who are virgins, to the circumcised, the uncircumcised, and to slaves.Footnote 63 Just prior to our passage, for example, Paul advises spouses not to divorce each other (7:10–11). When he turns to the issue of believers married to unbelievers, he also counsels the spouses to stay together, and encourages the believers to accommodate the unbelievers: if the unbelieving spouse wants to separate, let him or her go. Paul explains why: “God has called you in peace” (7:15). Two verses later, he sums up the principle that governs each situation: “Let each of you lead the life the Lord has assigned, to which God has called you,” and further claims, “This is the rule in all the ἐκκλησίαι” (1 Cor 7:17).
The call for inertia that dominates this chapter stands in stark contrast to Paul's language of transformation in 1 Corinthians 6. He calls these gentiles to self-mastery and even upholds the celibate body as the ideal for bodies-in-Christ, yet he then tells them not to rock the boat, to stay as they are. Margaret Mitchell has demonstrated how Paul's rhetoric here, and throughout 1 Corinthians, draws upon political and philosophical discourses of harmony and unity.Footnote 64 This rhetoric—which is reminiscent of household management discourses that call for harmonious and proper familial relationships—masks difference, quells dissension and, as such, serves as an assertion of power by those for whom not rocking the boat is advantageous.Footnote 65
In our passage, the potentially unharmonious issue of mixed households has been raised, perhaps initially by the Corinthians themselves, and Paul frames the solution in terms of purity and pollution. Paul's purity language, by transforming the unbelieving spouse, attempts to dispense with conflict, and, for the sake of stability, secure the holy status of the whole family. Thus the holiness language here is intended to operate almost as a quick fix, serving the larger goal of encouraging sedation.
Yet the passage does not entirely behave itself, for it leaves open the possibility of other readings that undermine Paul's advice to “stay as you are.” As discussed above, the language of “being made holy” or “being sanctified” marks the change that occurs at baptism (1 Cor 6:11, for example). It identifies members of the ἐκκλησία over and against outsiders, or what these gentiles were before.Footnote 66 Thus the notion of one spouse sanctifying another has implications for the boundaries of the community: was baptism by an established leader necessary or could one become a member of the ἐκκλησία through marriage to a believer? Or through birth to believing parents? Does the believer serve as a kind of portal for the household to the community of believers? This individual power to influence and transform other bodies, and possibly to grant access to the ἐκκλησία, stands in tension with Paul's earlier rhetoric about subjecting individual bodies to the corporate body in 1 Corinthians 6.
This scenario is especially remarkable if the believer is a woman. Paul has granted—or perhaps acknowledged—the sanctifying power of the bodies of believing wives. This subverts traditional household ideologies, and the expectation that women and other subordinates will follow the loyalties of the male head of the household. Perhaps even more striking is that it also undermines Paul's own efforts elsewhere in the letter to rein in the practices of female bodies (e.g., 1 Cor 11:2–16; 14:34–36).Footnote 67 As many scholars have discussed, this is a chief concern of Paul's in 1 Corinthians.Footnote 68 It is intriguing to think about the possibilities of how wives might be responsible for a kind of household holiness that makes these mixed marriages acceptable.Footnote 69
Paul's “quick fix” is thus a bit slippery and yields multiple readings. Furthermore, Paul's contagious holiness solution prompts multiple questions having to do with the logistics of these mixed marriages in households. Pauline readers would have been negotiating these marriages in households where other gods were venerated, where complex social hierarchies were in place, and where subordinate members were expected to worship the gods of the household. Paul addresses none of these issues and indeed, scholars (perhaps inadvertently following Paul's lead) have also not explored this advice from the perspective of households.Footnote 70 In the final section of this essay, I will consider how ancient readers may have responded to Paul's advice. I will use some of what I have outlined about household religious practices, about purity and holiness, and about power dynamics within households to think about the possible viewpoints of wives on this topic.
Imagining Responses to Paul
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, who has long been a leader in reconstructing voices outside the written canon, suggests that when the Corinthians debated among themselves the issue of how to live out their new self-understanding in Christ, they may have written to several teachers to ask their advice, Paul being one. Discussion would have then continued once the letter had been received, evaluated, and compared to others.Footnote 71 This reconstruction frames Paul's letter not as the sole, authoritative voice among early Christ-followers, but as one of many that were subject to critique or embellishment by the Corinthians, and eventually believers from all over the empire. In what follows I will lay out a series of scenarios imagining how wives might have responded to (or perhaps prompted) Paul's comments in 1 Cor 7:12–16.
Paul's rhetoric glosses over a whole host of issues related to the power dynamics and religious practices of ancient households. For example, Paul's comments would not be terribly helpful if one were trying to maintain loyalty exclusively to the God of Israel. Given the religious life of ancient households—where offerings to multiple gods are made on a daily basis and images of the gods might populate domestic space—we can understand how difficult it would be to avoid traditional worship practices. Paul seems to imagine believers and unbelievers sharing domestic activities, but he does not comment on how to behave, for example, when offerings are made to various household gods before meals.Footnote 72 Those believers who did not wish to honor other gods would have to look elsewhere for a solution to this problem.
Furthermore, wives would hear Paul's advice differently from husbands. On the one hand, Paul's reciprocal language is striking and may appear to resist or to offer an alternative to the patriarchal household structure.Footnote 73 The conditions, which Paul lays out in two parallel sentences (vv. 12–13), appear to be the same for the believing husband and the believing wife: if your unbelieving spouse agrees to live with you, stay together. Indeed, his phrasing seems to leave open the possibility that women (either believers or unbelievers) would in fact not follow their husbands gods, but would leave the marriage instead.
On the other hand, as Elizabeth Castelli has pointed out, such reciprocal language does not necessarily translate to equal treatment in practice.Footnote 74 For a woman to leave a marriage or to stay in a marriage, for example, could have profoundly different implications than for a man to do either. Given that loyalty to her husband was tied to loyalty to his gods, a wife's avoidance of these practices may have been perceived as insubordination. She might be in the position that Plutarch imagined, accused of bringing “foreign superstition” into the household. Paul's counsel simply to stay together may not have been realistic or helpful.
It is possible that Paul's advice was prompted in the first place by believers leaving their marriages, perhaps because of some of the complications mentioned above.Footnote 75 Some of the women may have shared with Paul the association of unbelieving gentiles with idolatry, a lack of self-mastery and πоρνεία, and thought their marriage to unbelievers constituted participation in these unclean things.Footnote 76 Paul thus attempts to solve this problem with his logic of contagious holiness, reassuring them that they can stay in the marriage without compromising their new status. Believers might ask how this scenario plays out: do all these household members continue honoring the household gods, protected by holiness associated with the God of Israel? Would everyone have agreed to this?
Schüssler Fiorenza suggests that Corinthian women may have understood that their new identity in Christ disregarded the social distinctions among them and even abolished old kinship and marriage ties. Some of the women may have thought that patriarchal marriage was no longer appropriate for them, and wanted to leave their husbands.Footnote 77 Others may have agreed with Paul that a celibate body was the ideal and sought to lead lives of celibacy. Ann Wire argues that this is a possibility for the “Corinthian women prophets,” who understood themselves as channels of God's spirit and who rejected “sexual relations that involve the authority of one person over the body of another in order to devote themselves to prayer and prophecy.”Footnote 78 These women would have thought that marriage with unbelievers was no longer viable and may have been voicing these opinions and acting on them.Footnote 79 To each of these groups Paul's “stay as you are” response aims to keep these marriages intact, as long as the unbeliever is willing.
All of these reconstructions are based on the premise that a mixed household would be a problem and that women were rejecting them for various reasons. The evidence for household practices suggests another possibility: that some women actually did not find mixed households a problem and did not want to leave them. Indeed, several scholars who have reconstructed the Corinthians' positions—Wire, Martin, and Castelli among them—have argued that at least some among the Corinthians were in fact not concerned about purity and pollution, boundaries, identity, and proper gender and sexual behavior.Footnote 80 Anxiety over these issues comes from Paul, not the Corinthians, and triggers his use of purity language. If this is the case, then perhaps some women were unconcerned about their proximity to an idolatrous unbeliever and wanted to stay in these marriages. Paul's emphasis on accommodating the unbeliever's wishes—if the unbeliever wants to separate, let him separate (1 Cor 7:15)—could hint at an unwillingness on the part of the believers to break up the marriage.
Perhaps these women brought their new worship practices into the household and found this unproblematic or even advantageous. We have seen how households could include a variety of religious practices and spaces, and that people of different status participated in daily rites. Perhaps unbelieving husbands would not have minded if the God and messiah of Israel were added to the other deities honored in the household: more gods meant more protection and prosperity.Footnote 81 It seems possible that this mixing of gods would not have bothered either spouse.Footnote 82
If her husband did object to this foreign deity, perhaps the believing wife worshipped her God on her own, or in secret.Footnote 83 As discussed above, archaeological and literary evidence suggests the possibility that subordinates in the household may have had some autonomy in their religious practices, with opportunities to follow or subvert their duty to the gods of the head of the household. Plutarch and Cato seem concerned about precisely this situation in their prescriptions for subordinates to carry out the wishes of the head of the household.Footnote 84 If worshipping “foreign gods” is perceived by those in power as an act of “religious infidelity” to the marriage and household, then those in subordinate positions may view these practices as a form of resistance, an assertion of power. This sort of power could operate within the household, as one of the multiple strands of power that make up a social hierarchy.
As discussed earlier, Elizabeth Castelli and Catherine Bell, both drawing on Foucault, emphasize that power does not operate in a one-dimensional fashion, exercised upon those of lower-status by those of higher status (by the paterfamilias on subordinate members of the household, for example).Footnote 85 Instead, power is consensual, and, as Bell argues, “ritualization” allows those of the lowest status to claim some power, even as their subordination is reinscribed by the ritual itself.Footnote 86 A believing wife in a polytheistic household might be in precisely this position, especially if she understands herself as able to sanctify her children and spouse, as Paul suggests. Yet whereas Paul, and perhaps householders as well, might perceive their power as based on status and gender, wives may have perceived their own power as Castelli and Wire suggest, as fluid, available to different bodies regardless of gender and status, and uninhibited by the proximity of outsiders, and their gods and rites.Footnote 87 A sort of power similar to that which authorizes prophecy, removing veils and speaking in tongues, may also empower believing women to make their households holy. Whereas some women may have heard Paul's larger call for sedation, others may have recognized the power of their own holy bodies that Paul's text implies.
One hundred and fifty years later, as Tertullian recounts, some women were reading Paul in precisely this way. In his vigorous denouncement of mixed marriages, he mentions that he has heard of several instances of women using 1 Corinthians, especially 7:14, which claims that believing wives make their husbands holy, as a scriptural warrant for marrying non-Christians (Ad Uxorem 2.2.1–2). Tertullian, of course, is appalled by this and uses Paul's text to argue that mixed marriage is not advisable. In the process, he has left us at least a trace of his opponents' views, women who seem to have been claiming the sanctifying power Paul speaks of for themselves.
Conclusion
Much of the scholarship on 1 Cor 7:12–16 has focused on marriage and has considered Paul's ideas an early articulation of what Christian marriage would eventually become after being shaped by later church writers. I have tried to offer a different entry point of analysis by shifting the focus to households and to the women who would have heard and responded to Paul's words. Doing so helps us think about the complicated relationships among religious loyalties, gender, and social hierarchies in the ancient world, and the realities “on the ground” for early converts. Wives who had been baptized into Christ had to negotiate this new commitment in the context of the household, where they might be vulnerable to their husbands' censure. The author of 1 Peter seems to recognize this precarious position of believing wives, advising them to “accept the authority” of their husbands “without a word,” (3:1) and “never let fears harm” them (3:6).Footnote 88
Yet we have seen that domestic religion was multifarious, adaptable, and a part of daily life. Thus Christian practices may have mixed and mingled with traditional worship practices without much conflict. Or, a wife may have been able to conduct her practices in secret. Either way, she may have derived some sense of agency and power from these practices, and perhaps even understood that her presence in the household exerted some beneficial influence over the rest of the household.
This analysis prompts us to consider some larger issues relating to the beginnings of Christianity and its place in the Roman world. The boundaries between traditional religious practices and this newcomer, Christianity, may have been more porous and fluid than someone like Paul or Tertullian—or scholars of Christian origins—would typically conceive. The kind of historical situation implied by texts like 1 Corinthians, where Christian practices might exist along side many others in an ancient household, suggests that conversion to Christianity could happen in a piecemeal fashion, where individuals or groups might adopt aspects of Christianity and perhaps integrate these into their traditional religious forms. In this paradigm Christianity does not arrive fully formed, but is gradually incorporated and shaped by its adherents, influenced in part by interactions with outsiders. For a Christian wife married to an unbeliever, this piecemeal incorporation took place in the intimate and quotidian context of marriage and household.
