Kristen

Ok — here is my response to the first of Mark’s points that I said I was going to respond to. His words are in bold, followed by mine.
My point is that both the Jewish (missed by Kristen when she classifies my position as a simplification) and the Roman societies had fathers in charge of children (certainly including adult dependents as she says), husbands in charge of wives, and owners (predominantly but not exclusively male) in charge of slaves. And they didn’t see one of those as patriarchy and the other two as not patriarchy. All three were fairly naturally paired together – Paul’s household codes aren’t all that revolutionary by putting those three relationships side by side.

And I’m not sure I’m slipping in ‘marriage equals patriarchal marriage’ as an unchallenged assumption. My point was, I thought, that that is what marriage was for both Paul’s Jewish and Gentile readers. They didn’t have an abstract view of marriage and then go, ‘and of the ways marriage could be structured, we opt for patriarchal’ – they had one view of marriage: patriarchal. My statement has to do with what is being understood by the society and so what the words Paul writes are going to mean to that audience.
This is precisely the point I was making. When we understand what Paul’s original audience would have been expecting to hear, what he was describing were not rules for patriarchal marriage (or slavery, or parent-child relations) as they knew them. The words would have startled them. They would have been surprised, first of all, that in a “household code” such as they were used to hearing, the wives, slaves and children were addressed directly, as if they had some choices of their own to make. The household codes common in that day (and, as I understand it, familiar throughout the Roman Empire, which would have included in Palastine) addressed the patriarch, the pater familias, only, and addressed him in terms of how to properly govern his wife, children and slaves.

They would have been surprised, secondly, by the words Paul used to the husbands/fathers/slave owners. Nothing is spoken about ruling. Nothing is spoken about authority (look at the head-body relationship as described in Ephesians itself, Chapters 1 and 4, and you will not see the word “head” as it relates to “body” spoken of in terms of authority-over, but in terms of raising up to be together, in terms of provision, and in terms of nurture and growth). The husband/father/slave owner is instead told to “give himself,” with a picture of Christ in the act of ultimate self-giving. He is told about how Christ brought His church to Himself by cleansing and making her holy. He is told not to exasperate his children, but to give them training and instruction in the Lord. And he is told to treat his slaves in the same way (!) as his slaves have just been told to treat him. The passage begins by speaking in terms of mutual submission (Eph 5:21) of all believers to “one another,“ and wraps up by explaining to the patriarch that there is no favoritism with God (Eph. 6:9).

The “one another” pronoun in the original Greek is a pronoun of “reciprocity,” as stated in both LSJ and BDAG. It is only used in the NT for “situations where there is mutuality or reciprocity,” as explained by Philip Payne in Man and Woman, One in Christ, pages 279-280. Since it is nonsensical for all Christians to have authority over one another, the word translated “submit” in Eph 5:21 (which in the earliest manuscripts is the verb governing v. 22, which itself has no verb) need not always convey the idea, “yield to authority.” “Voluntarily yield to one another” is the clearest understanding of Paul’s meaning.

Secondly, Philip Payne’s book quotes M. Barth as stating that around the same time that Paul was writing his letter to the Ephesians, a “new type of marriage” (neither “sacral” nor “patriarchal contractual”) was slowly making its way into common practice. Barth characterizes this as “marriage where mutual consensus guaranteed the rights of both parties.” (M. Barth, Ephesians, 2:656, quoted in Philip Payne, Man and Woman, One in Christ, p. 274). Non-patriarchal marriage therefore would not necessarily have been completely foreign to some of Paul’s wealthier, more educated readers– though the patriarchal system and its common household codes would still have been the most common form of marriage. Paul’s teachings would have been surprising, as I said– but the idea of mutuality in marriage was not so completely foreign that Paul’s audience could not have grasped the implications of his words.

It is when we come to the text from our 21st-century Western mentality, expecting that patriarchal marriage is just one (and certainly not the most prevalent) form of marriage, that Paul’s words look to us like they are supporting a patriarchal structure, rather than just accepting its reality in that culture as something that must be worked with. From the perspective of Paul’s original readers, I do not think that would have been the case at all.