Constructing Early Christian Families: Family as Social Reality and Metaphor

HALVOR MOXNES (ed.), Constructing Early Christian Families: Family as Social Reality and Metaphor (New York/ London: Routledge, 1997). Pp. xvi + 267. Paper $22.95.

The articles, with the exception of that by Guijarro, are revised papers given at the seminar on Family as a Social Reality and Metaphor in Early Christianity in Oslo, September 28-October 1, 1995.

Part 1, "The Social Context of Early Christian Families," contains four chapters. Halvor Moxnes, "What Is Family? Problems in Constructing Early Christian Families" (pp. 13-41), gives a methodological survey and discusses family and household under the forms of household structures and kinship and marriage strategies and structures. Santiago Guijarro, "The Family in First-Century Galilee" (pp. 42-65), uses archaeology (with illustrations) and Josephus to document peasant loss of land and characterizes different kinds of houses: the "simple" house of earlier rural type, the courtyard cluster of urban areas with several houses around a common courtyard, the Hellenistic-Roman mansion or domus indicative of consolidation of wealth in the hands of fewer families, the farm house, and the urban shop-house. John M. G. Barclay, "The Family as the Bearer of Religion in Judaism and Early Christianity" (pp. 66-80), discusses the role of religion in family socialization, arguing that patterns of Christian conversion undermined the family by allowing individual conversions and encouraging celibacy; in spite of some ambiguous Christian attitudes about family...