The Wider Setting of Lukan and Pauline Perspectives
The mention of gentile priests as the protagonists’ fathers-in-law thus fits a larger pattern in Genesis and Exodus, through which God’s servants become a light to other nations (cf. Gen 12:2–3). That Stephen makes some of these connections suggests that he observed this larger literary and theological picture. That Moses had two children in Midian, then, likely reflects an important point in Stephen’s message as well as in that of the narratives on which he draws. Interethnic unions underscored the point that God cared about all peoples. Indeed, two tribes of Israel (Manasseh and Ephraim) were products of an interethnic union, as were those Levites descended from Moses. God’s choice of Israel was never meant to exclude his concern for gentiles.
Such a message would have been important for both Stephen and his peers. Stephen and the other “Hellenists” (6:1–5) may have had pure Jewish lineages genetically, but culturally they were products of two cultures. Because they could bridge cultures most readily, it was they, rather than the Twelve, who spearheaded the mission to Samaritans (8:4–13) and gentiles (8:26–40; 11:19–20), a mission already commanded by Jesus (1:8). When their own people rejected the message, they could, like the rejected leaders before them, preach to the gentiles (13:46; 18:6; 28:28). They may have identified in a special way with earlier biblical characters like these sons of Moses.
A Mixed-Race Minister (Acts 16:1–3)
In addressing Acts 16:1–3, we must explore how Timothy’s contemporaries would have viewed his ethnic status. To this end I digress to discuss ancient views about circumcision and Jewish identity.
Timothy’s Situation
Those who were products of two cultures typically offered the most ready bridge between those cultures, hence were strategically placed for ministry (note discussion of the Hellenists above). But what happens when one or both cultures despises interethnic unions and demands that the person identify with one culture or another? As the son of an interethnic union, Timothy was uniquely positioned for ministry; he in fact became Paul’s closest protégé (Rom 16:21; 1 Cor 4:17; 16:10; especially Phil 2:19–22). Nevertheless, his ministry would be questioned among Jewish hearers until his status as a Jew was official.
Luke reports that Timothy’s mother was Jewish but his father was Greek (Acts 16:1), and the Jewish community in the region knew about his mixed origins (16:3). Although evidence suggests that his mother had raised him with an understanding of Scripture (2 Tim 1:5; 3:15), his father had apparently resisted allowing him to be circumcised (Acts 16:3).⁶²⁰ Many Greeks considered circumcision a cause for mockery⁶²¹ or sometimes even a form of mutilation.⁶²² Marriage to proselytes was not problematic,⁶²³ but Timothy’s lack of circumcision suggests that his father had not converted to Judaism.
Timothy was probably from the small town of Lystra (Acts 16:1–2; 2 Tim 3:11), where we know of some intermarriages among different ethnic groups (especially Roman colonists or soldiers and indigenous residents).⁶²⁴ Because Luke normally clearly identifies proselytes, we should suppose that Timothy’s mother was Jewish by birth (so also 2 Tim 1:5). If both her parents were alive when she was given to a Greek in marriage (assuming this was her first marriage), the father was probably somewhat assimilated—which would not have commended the family to some other members of the Anatolian Jewish community.
Views of Intermarriage
Probably some Jewish people overlooked intermarriage⁶²⁵ (though perhaps more often for Jewish men, since they were most apt to control the faith of their offspring).⁶²⁶ Children of mixed unions may have seemed better than complete gentiles,⁶²⁷ and even some later rabbis excused Solomon’s abundant mixed marriages as a means to secure more proselytes.⁶²⁸ Jewish communities in Asia Minor may have been less rigorous than those in Judea,⁶²⁹ certainly in places like Phrygia.⁶³⁰ Still, most Asian Jews observed the Sabbath and food laws,⁶³¹ and circumcision of children would hardly have been less crucial.
Despite some exceptions, for the most part Jewish people detested intermarriage with gentiles, simply varying in the degree of their hostility to it. It could hardly have been otherwise: Scripture normally prohibited it (Deut 7:3–4; Josh 23:12–13; Ezra 9:12, 14; 10:2, 10–11; Neh 10:30; cf. Gen 24:3, 37; 28:1; Num 25:1). (Scripture’s concern was not racial, but the danger of compromise with idolatry; cf. 1 Kgs 11:2, 4.)⁶³² Most first-century Jews thus insisted on marrying only other Jews, and Timothy’s father does not seem to have embraced Jewish belief in any case. Luke expresses no opposition to interethnic unions, as we have observed (Acts 7:29), but the interreligious marriage of Timothy’s parents could have been more problematic.
Most Jewish sources strongly condemn religious intermarriage;⁶³³ marrying pagan women was viewed as a heinous offense.⁶³⁴ So thoroughgoing was this insistence that gentiles denounced it as an element of Jewish separatism.⁶³⁵ First Esdras 9:9 urges divorce as the divine solution to intermarriage. The Book of Jubilees goes so far as to decree death for a man who marries his daughter to a gentile; the daughter should also be burned.⁶³⁶ Even members of the hellenized Herodian aristocracy would allow a Jewish princess to marry a gentile king only if the latter (despite his royalty) were circumcised.⁶³⁷
Various Jewish stories illustrate this hostility to intermarriage, especially where they seek to explain away elements of the biblical text itself. Rather than imagining that Judah actually allowed his firstborn to marry a Canaanite (as one might infer from Gen 38:6), a Jewish source claims that his wife (a Canaanite herself, Gen 38:2)⁶³⁸ arranged the marriage without his knowledge; he thus cursed her, so that she and her children died.⁶³⁹ Later rabbis denounced Esau’s marriage to gentiles and depicted judgment on Israelite women trying to seduce the Babylonian conquerors.⁶⁴⁰ One Qumran document opposes intermarriage;⁶⁴¹ more debatably, some suggest that this was a major agenda of Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities,⁶⁴² or even that Esther is omitted from among the Qumran community’s canon partly because her marriage to a gentile was so offensive.⁶⁴³
Many who opposed mixed marriages most strictly also proved hostile to the offspring. Later rabbis viewed the children as either illegitimate or at least unable to marry other Jews.⁶⁴⁴ As noted above, one Jewish story depicted Judah cursing his gentile wife so that not only she but also her offspring died.⁶⁴⁵
Most other peoples accepted interethnic marriages,⁶⁴⁶ while preferring children to be raised with the values of their own culture rather than the other’s.⁶⁴⁷ Nevertheless, some cities did not accept as citizens the offspring of unions with outsiders;⁶⁴⁸ when Greek states established treaties they sometimes specified that such offspring be treated as legitimate and as citizens.⁶⁴⁹ Roman law treated as legal Roman marriages only those contracted between Roman citizens or with special classes of people allowed to marry them.⁶⁵⁰ Some Romans worried that granting Roman citizenship too freely would lead to excessive intermarriage, degrading the Roman people.⁶⁵¹ For religious reasons, when Christians later gained political power, they sought to prevent further unions between Jews and Christians.⁶⁵²
Timothy’s Status
Scholars debate whether Timothy’s contemporaries would have viewed him as Jewish or gentile. Later rabbis portray as Jewish any son of a Jewish mother,⁶⁵³ and many scholars apply this information to Timothy.⁶⁵⁴ Others object that this Jewish tradition first appears over a century and a half after Timothy,⁶⁵⁵ and thus they argue that Timothy was viewed as a gentile.⁶⁵⁶ Those viewing Timothy as Jewish respond that the later Jewish sources simply confirm the picture of Timothy as Jewish in this passage.⁶⁵⁷ Although we do not have reason to believe that Timothy’s father was a Roman citizen,⁶⁵⁸ we may observe that Roman law assumed that children received the mother’s status in unions where both partners were not Roman citizens.⁶⁵⁹
Nevertheless, Jewish people in this period probably had no universal standard from which to form a unanimous opinion on this question. Moreover, Timothy could hardly be accepted as properly Jewish without being circumcised first. Timothy was too gentile for Jews to accept him, whereas gentiles would regard a half-Jew practicing many Jewish customs as too Jewish.⁶⁶⁰
Because Timothy’s ambiguous status could affect his ministry, Paul had him circumcised. In view of Paul’s vigorous arguments in the preceding chapter (Acts 15), Luke clearly does not envision theological reasons for this action; the point is apparently missionary strategy (cf. 1 Cor 9:19–23).⁶⁶¹ This passage suggests that while interethnic unions can form a bridge between cultures, in some cases they also must find creative ways to address the tension between those cultures. In Timothy’s case, he could minister more effectively in both communities by publicly embracing his Jewish identity than by maintaining an ambiguous status. That he joined Paul’s ministry among gentiles, however, suggests that he was able to continue to draw on both aspects of his own cultural heritage.
The Wider Setting of Lukan and Pauline Perspectives
In the Book of Acts, God’s Spirit thrusts the church beyond cultural boundaries to reach all peoples (Acts 1:8; 2:4–13; 8:29; 10:19–20; 11:12), and then empowers new believers from these other peoples as partners in the shared mission to reach the world (2:38–39; 8:15–17; 10:45–46; 19:6).⁶⁶² To prohibit table fellowship as equals is inimical to God’s work (11:3; cf. 16:34; 27:33–36; 28:7), equivalent to how Jesus’s critics acted (Luke 15:2).
Luke’s perspective here is compatible with Paul’s. For Paul, the forbidden marriage boundary for believers is not ethnic gentiles (which many of Jesus’s followers today are) but unbelievers (1 Cor 7:39). This fits his larger emphasis on Jewish and gentile unity in Christ (e.g., Rom 1:16; 3:29; 9:24; 10:12; 15:7–9, 27; Gal 2:12–14).⁶⁶³
Whereas ancient legal systems often had to address ethnically mixed marriages, the issue that concerns Paul is simply spiritually mixed marriages between believers and nonbelievers (7:12–16, 39).⁶⁶⁴ Paul’s claim that an unbeliever is “set apart” by a believing spouse, so that the children will be holy (1 Cor 7:14), probably evokes and reapplies a topic from ancient discussions of nationally, socially, and religiously mixed marriages.
Many Christian converts probably were women;⁶⁶⁵ in ancient Mediterranean divorces, however, the children normally went to the father.⁶⁶⁶ Both Roman and Jewish law had to deal with the status of children whose parents had intermarried. For example, under Roman law, only Roman citizens could contract legitimate Roman marriages; sometimes, however, Rome granted such marriages to Romans marrying “Latins” or foreigners, for the sake of the children’s status.⁶⁶⁷ In Roman marriages between persons of different social classes, a child inherited the father’s status; when parents were non-Romans, a child inherited the mother’s status.⁶⁶⁸ Free Roman men could not marry slaves without freeing them.⁶⁶⁹ In Egypt, townspeople with hereditary privileges avoided marrying those who lacked them, lest their children forfeit these privileges.⁶⁷⁰ Nevertheless, some earlier barriers had succumbed to cultural changes over time.⁶⁷¹
Jewish law addressed analogous issues. Later rabbis debated which classes of people could intermarry, say, with priests.⁶⁷² In mixed unions regarding the priesthood, the husband’s status determined the wife’s: a Jewish but non-priestly wife joined the priestly family by marrying a priest, whereas a priest’s daughter lost this status by marrying outside the priestly line.⁶⁷³ Some rabbis even discussed whether families from the two first-century Pharisaic schools could intermarry, though rabbis decided that they could.⁶⁷⁴ Many deemed illegitimate the offspring of a union between a gentile or slave and a Jewish woman.⁶⁷⁵
Rabbis particularly debated the question with regard to children of proselytes. A child conceived after the mother’s conversion was deemed an Israelite, but if conceived before her conversion, only half-Israelite.⁶⁷⁶ The Jewish element in the child’s heritage consecrated the child, or at least that element of the child, for God.⁶⁷⁷
When Paul talks about children being “holy” in 1 Cor 7:14, he is not claiming that the children are saved because they have Christian parents,⁶⁷⁸ nor that infant baptism saves.⁶⁷⁹ Their consecration involves the question of status, analogous to mixed households involving Jews (where the question was, to what extent is the child legally Jewish?). Just as the consecrating of the unbelieving partner (7:14) does not automatically save (7:16), neither does that of the children. Yet a believer who remains in the marriage retains an influence on the children, who would otherwise (in first-century marriages) normally remain only with the father, as noted above. The other party being an unbeliever is thus no excuse to withdraw from the marriage (7:12–14).⁶⁸⁰
Conclusion
New Testament writings sometimes use interethnic marriages as a model for God’s purpose for ethnic unity and mission (Matt 1:3–6; probably Acts 7:29). They also are sensitive to the practical struggles of status ambiguity sometimes faced by children in such unions (Acts 16:1–3). Whereas ancient laws addressed the status of marriages between members of different peoples or classes, the issue for early Christians was marriage between believers and nonbelievers (1 Cor 7:12–16, 39), with analogous discussions regarding the status of children (7:14). The only form of intermarriage discouraged in the New Testament is believers marrying nonbelievers.