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Roman ‘Family Values’ and the Apologetic Concerns of Philo and Paul: Reading the Sixth Commandment*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2015

Mary R. D'Angelo
Mary R. D'Angelo*
Affiliation:
436 Malloy Hall, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA. Email: mdangelo@nd.edu
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Abstract

The Augustan laws criminalising adultery and stuprum and promoting marriage and childrearing not only intruded into the family lives of citizens (including freedpersons and their descendants) but also made marital probity central to moral and political discourse in the first century. This was true not only for imperial figures like Seneca and Musonius Rufus, but also for Jews and the earliest Christians. Considering Philo and Paul as interpreters of the sixth commandment (‘you shall not commit adultery’) illuminates the subtle but significant ways that the Roman matrix set the parameters within which they worked out their arguments. For Philo the ten commandments are heads or summaries of the legislation as whole; the sixth commandment (following the LXX) takes pride of place in the ‘second pentad’ because adultery is the greatest of injustices and is rooted in pleasure, the most fatal of passions. He reads the commandment expansively and through first-century constructions of sexuality. Comparison with Pseudo-Phocylides suggests that Philo did not originate these positions, but shares them with other first-century interpreters. Paul also is concerned with summarising the law; he cites the sixth commandment in Romans, where he grants it first place in the second pentad, and reads it as prohibiting all unions and acts that contravened good sexual mores. But for Paul, the sixth commandment is no longer a guide for the blind; it is never cited when he advises his communities on sexual morality. Instead it supports his argument for freedom from the law in Christ.

Keywords

PhiloLetter to the Romanssixth commandmentlex Iuliasexualitysummaries of the lawsPseudo-Phocylides
Type
Articles
Information
New Testament Studies , Volume 61 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 525 - 546
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

This article was prepared for the SNTS annual meeting in Szeged, Hungary in August 2014. My thanks is owed to the SNTS for the invitation to address this distinguished assembly, and to our gracious hosts at the University of Szeged for their hospitality, as well as to Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame for travel support, and to Francine Cardman and Clair Mesick who read and commented on earlier versions. The research is part of a long term project that was supported by Fellowships from the Luce Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by research leaves from the University of Notre Dame.

References

1 For an exception, see J. W. Knust, ‘Paul and the Politics of Virtue and Vice’, Paul and the Roman Imperial Order (ed. R. Horsley; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2004) 155–74; id., Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

2 See Mason, S., ‘Jews, Judeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History’, JSJ 38 (2007) 457–512Google Scholar; for a recent version of the alternative view, see Sheridan, R., ‘Issues in the Translation of οἱ Ιουδαῖοι’, JBL 132 (2013) 671–95Google Scholar.

3 All translations are my own unless otherwise identified.

4 S. Treggiari discusses scholarly responses to the laws; Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) 77, 289–92, 294–5.

5 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. iii:The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1988) 40.

6 B. Severy, Augustus and the Family at the Birth of the Roman Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003); cf. K. Milnor, Gender, Domesticity and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

7 C. Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

8 Severy, Augustus and the Family, 44–8; P. Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Jerome Lectures 16; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988) 85–100.

9 Zanker, Power of Images, 102–4; but as what Zanker terms a leitmotif of Augustus’ cultural program (102), pietas emerges throughout the study. So also in K. Galinsky, Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); for the discussion of pietas on the shield of virtues, see pp. 86–8.

10 Augustus, Res Gestae 8. My abbreviated treatment of these laws is based on the extensive discussions in Treggiari, Roman Marriage, and J. E. Grubbs, Women and the Law in the Roman Empire: A Sourcebook on Marriage, Divorce and Widowhood (London/New York: Routledge, 2002).

11 Leges Iunia, Fufia Caninia and Aelia Sentia. Discussion in Tregiarri, Roman Marriage, 44–7; see also Galinsky, Augustan Culture, 137.

12 The provisions, date and even the name of this law are debated; Treggiari places it in 149 bce (Roman Marriage, 277). C. A. Williams argues that the law criminalised stuprum with either a male or female partner, as well as submission to penetration; Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 119–24; E. Cantarella makes a case for a date in the late third century bce; Bisexuality in the Ancient World (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1992) 106–19.

13 Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 277; Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 122–4; Cantarella, Bisexuality, 141–5.

14 Severy, Augustus and the Family, 48–59. The ‘first settlement’ (27 bce) consisted of a series of honours and awards (including the cognomen Augustus) that enhanced Octavian's ‘citizen’ status; the second (24 bce) supplemented the first by granting him tribunicia potestas.

15 Severy, Augustus and the Family, 79–95, 140–57.

16 Severy, Augustus and the Family, 160–80.

17 Treggiari, Roman Marriage, Appendix 2, 510; Tacitus, Annales 11.1–2.

18 Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 292–3.

19 Galinsky, Augustan Culture, 128.

20 Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 293–4.

21 For an example of favour, see Pliny, Epistulae 10.2.1; Treggiari's list of prosecutions under the adultery law reveals their political character; Roman Marriage, Appendix 2, 509–10.

22 Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 44–5.

23 Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 45.

24 Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 76–7, 297–8.

25 T. McGinn, Prostitution, Sexuality and the Law in Ancient Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) 156; cited with approbation by Grubbs, Women and the Law, 19– 20.

26 Severy,  Augustus and the Family, 53–6, especially 55–6.

27 Severy, Augustus and the Family, 249.

28 Edwards, Politics of Immorality, 62.

29 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. Rom. 1.5.2–4; see (somewhat differently) Livy, 1 Praef.  10–12.

30 Wallace-Hadrill, A., ‘The Golden Age and Sin in Augustan Ideology’, Past and Present 95 (1982) 19–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 A. Wallace-Hadrill, Augustan Rome (CWS; London: Bristol Classical/Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, 1993) especially 5–9, 79–97.

32 D. Schwarz, ‘Philo, his Family and his Times’, Cambridge Companion to Philo (ed.  A. Kamesar; Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 9–31.

33 M. Niehoff, Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture (TSAJ 86; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001) 8.

34 J. Royse, ‘The Works of Philo’, Cambridge Companion to Philo, 32–64 ; M. Niehoff, Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

35 P. W. VanderHorst, The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides with Introduction and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1978) 81–3. VanderHorst first suggested the date 30 bce–40 ce, then moved towards an earlier date in ‘Pseudo-Phocylides Revisited’, Essays on the Jewish World of Early Christianity (NTOA 14; Freiburg/Göttingen: Universitäts Verlag/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990) 48. I would argue for his earlier preference for an Augustan or post-Augustan date. It has also been suggested that the writer was an Alexandrian, but the grounds for this localisation are weak.

36 Niehoff, Philo on Jewish Identity, 19–24.

37 Niehoff, Philo on Jewish Identity, 137–58.

38 Niehoff, Philo on Jewish Identity, 77–110.

39 Niehoff, Philo on Jewish Identity, 111–36.

40 Royse, ‘The Works of Philo’, 33; Niehoff, Jewish Exegesis, 169–70.

41 While this revelatory setting gives the ten words special weight, the rest of the commandments are not less oracular, but were delivered through Moses. Philo may identify any commandment and indeed any speech attributed to the deity as an oracle; see e.g. Opif. 8; Leg. 3.129, 142, 215. These all use the term χρησμός but Philo has a wide choice of vocabulary for oracular pronouncements.

42 See also W. Loader, Philo, Josephus and the Testaments on Sexuality: Attitudes towards Sexuality in the Writings of Philo, Josephus and in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011) 188–90.

43 Philo may have been aware of other orders of the commandments; as an exegete, he knew of text-critical studies of the scriptures, but preferred to explain the text as he found it, using philosophy and allegory to solve problems. The order of Deut 5.17–21 MT is ‘you shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal’. While I have not found the MT order in his writing, Philo twice has the order ‘to steal, to commit adultery, to kill a human being’ (Post. Cain 82; Conf. ling. 163).

44 See Seneca, Helv. 13.3; Musonius Rufus, Discourses 12, 13A, 14, 15.

45 K. Gaca, The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) 207–9.

46 See discussion in Szesnat, H., ‘Philo and Female Homoeroticism: Philo's Use of γύνανδρος and Recent Work on Tribades’, JSJ 30 (1999) 140–7Google Scholar.

47 Wilson, W., ‘Pious Soldiers, Gender Deviants and the Ideology of Actium’, SPA 17 (2005) 1–32Google Scholar; see also Zanker on the exchange of clothes between Heracles and Omphale in Antony's image; Power of Images, 57–65.

48 See also Loader, who regards all as references to female homoeroticism; Philo, 215–16. Another text that has been proposed as a reference to female homoeroticism is Spec. 3.51, which castigates the prostitute for instigating both men and women to immorality. Szesnat relates it to references to prostitutes engaging in sex among themselves; ‘Female Homoeroticism’, 142. But the context is exclusively focused on the seduction of males; Philo is likely to have understood the damage to women as resulting from the prostitute's bad example.

49 Loader also cites the law in discussing this passage, but accords it less weight than I do here; Philo 200, n. 498.

50 Loader, Philo, 200–1.

51 Acts 16.37; 22.25, 29; 23.27; discussion in R. Pervo, Acts: A Commentary (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009) 413–14, 612–13.

52 N. A. Dahl, ‘The Missionary Theology in the Epistle to the Romans’, Studies in Paul (Eugene Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2002 (Norwegian 1956)), 70–94; P. Stuhlmacher, ‘The Purpose of Romans’, The Romans Debate, ed. K. P. Donfried (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991) 231– 42; see also R. Jewett's account of the debate and his focus on both the Roman context and the Spanish mission in Romans: A Commentary (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007) 42– 91.

53 Rom 1.8–15; 15.22–4; he may have wanted an explicit invitation, including an offer of lodging and a promise of support for his mission to Spain. It is likely that the letter carrier (probably Phoebe the diakonos of Cenchreae; 16.1–2) would have been ready to communicate his requirements face to face and with tact, and perhaps to interpret other aspects of the letter. See also Jewett, 942–48.

54 On Rom 3.8 as an actual, rather than a hypothetical, objection, see U. Wilckens, Der Brief an die Römer (EKKNT vi; 3 vols.; Zürich/Neukirchen-Vluyn: Benziger/ Neukirchen, 1978) ii.8, 34, i.167; R. Jewett argues that the vocabulary is un-Pauline (Romans, 251). J. Fitzmyer also treats it as a real slander, but suggests that Paul dismisses it without rebuttal; Romans: A New Translation and Commentary (AB 33; New York/London/Toronto/Sydney/Auckland: Doubleday, 1993) 330.

55 S. Stowers’ reading connects 3.8 more tightly to 3.5–7, and rejects the idea that it is central to the argument in Romans 6–8, but he also acknowledges that it is an actual objection: ‘Paul admits that he has actually met such objections as he dismissively anticipates that argument’; A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews and Gentiles (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1994) 173.

56 U. Wilckens likewise associates these two rhetorical questions with Rom 3.8 (An die Römer, ii.8, 34), as does Fitzmyer (Romans, 432, 48). Jewett connects them with each other, but treats them as a reductio ad absurdum rather than connecting them to 3.8; Romans, 394, 415.

57 The commandment he skips is Deut 5.20 ‘you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor’. Note that Pseudo-Phocylides 3–8 places this commandment last before the summary command about God and parents (7–8); it is possible that Paul knew this order and dropped the last commandment of the pentad. Jewett explains the selection of these four as especially relevant in the urban environment of Rome. He suggests that the commandment against false witness was irrelevant because the social status of the Roman community was too low to involve them in the Roman court system (Romans, 810). This is questionable on multiple counts, not least 1 Cor 6.1–11.

58 It does occur at least twice in Philo (Post. 82; Conf. 163), so it may attest another order current in the first century.

59 Fitzmyer likewise rejects the idea that this direct address implies that the audience was primarily Jewish; Romans, 457.

60 Citing mKid. 1.1; cf. bShab 30a; see also Wilckens, An die Römer, ii.64.

61 Jewett, Romans, 431.

62 See Jewett's arguments against a reference to the Julian law; these should be seen as limitations of the analogy; Romans, 431–3.

63 The reasoning is disingenuous; the husband in question had disappeared and his wife believed that her husband was dead.

64 See also Jewett's discussion; Romans, 433.

65 Jewett offers a more explicit and somewhat idiosyncratic translation of 1.27: ‘Likewise the males, after they had abandoned the natural use with females, were inflamed with their lust for one another, males who work up their shameful member in [other] males, and receive back for their deception the recompense that is tightness in themselves’ (p. 163; see his explanation of the ancient anatomical views on p. 178–9 and nn. 154–8).

66 B. Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 42–60.

67 Jewett (Romans, 174 n. 108) notes a single possible reference to female homoeroticism in Philo, Spec. 3.51.

68 P. Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 164–83.

69 Jewett, Romans, 955–9, 961–4, 969–70; Fitzmyer, Romans, 735–42.

70 D'Angelo, M. R., ‘Women Partners in the New Testament’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 6 (1990) 65–86Google Scholar.

71 A. Bray, Homosexuality in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) 67–80; id., The Friend (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2002 ) 5–6, 35–41, 316–21.