Chapter 2: Submit to One Another

My focus for this chapter will be on how ancient households functioned as workplaces. I will not say much about what this means for us today, as our primary goal will be to understand the inner workings of the first-century household and how different they were from our own. As we progress, we will see hints of how the notion of “calling” that we explored in the first chapter affected the relationships within the household, and hence in the workplace as well.

We must also keep in mind that in Aristotle’s influential book, Politics , he vehemently argues that slaves are fundamentally different from free people. In his view, their very nature was constituted differently. Clearly he had no concept of creation in the biblical sense. Aristotle, who had an enormous influence on medieval theology, flat out believed that slaves were literally of a different constitution from free people. It is astounding that a person of such intelligence could be so foolish in this regard, but one’s view on this matter is inseparable from one’s theology. Aristotle’s perspective reflected the privilege of the privileged, and he was certainly not alone in holding these beliefs. As we shall see, this was a very different world.

Most North Americans today would find this reality to be utterly distasteful. I was raised in a culture where we got ahead on the strength of our own ingenuity, and where our practical needs were met through our own everyday work. Those who got ahead by purchasing favors were scorned. Such a mindset would have been utterly alien in Paul’s time as Greco-Roman society was quite the opposite. It was predicated on a world that was “bottom-heavy,” with only a tiny minority constituting the privileged elite. Everyone else had to depend on maintaining good standing with their patron, whoever that might be.

That lower group of “clients” included the vast majority of people. If they wanted to live above the subsistence level, they needed to establish some sort of relationship with a patron. In one of his tractates, the Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote that the giving and receiving of favors was the central practice constituting the chief bond of human society. This practice is vividly illustrated in the Paul’s letter to Philemon. Philemon was evidently Paul’s patron, but he was also his friend. As his client, Paul was able to conclude his letter by asking Philemon for his hospitality. “Prepare a guest room for me, because I hope to be restored to you in answer to your prayers.” As Philemon’s friend , however, Paul is able to request an even greater act of reciprocity: he intercedes for the life of Onesimus.

The implication here is that they owed certain benefits to each another. In Paul’s eyes, Philemon owed him the benefit of his own life in Christ. The whole letter is steeped in this worldview of patronage and reciprocity. What Paul does is to raise that social reality infinitely higher by joining it to Christ. He requests a favor that no person in their culture would have dared to make, even on the basis of friendship. Paul urges Philemon to receive a runaway slave back into the household as a forgiven brother in Christ, without any repercussions. It is hard for us to grasp the shocking nature of this text—it completely upends the cultural and social boundaries of his day.

Why does he ask for this? Because of the framework of patronage and friendship. Patronage was also related to kinship; people like Onesimus needed to be in some kind of relationship with others in order to survive. This dynamic between patronage, kinship, and dependence also crops up in the “household codes” which we shall examine later in this chapter. For now, though, we will turn our attention to the actual physical structures of these households, as they offer us important clues about how the home and workplace were intertwined in Paul’s time.

These structures are still visible today. If you are ever in Italy and are interested in archaeology, I would recommend visiting Ostia, which was an ancient seaport at the mouth of the Tiber River. Paul landed in Ostia when he first traveled to Rome—it was a bustling city in his time. Archaeologically, it is equally as important as Pompeii because the ruins are so well-preserved. You can actually still see two-story insulae in Ostia’s streets. The dwellings from Paul’s time remain preserved in these ruins.

Let us consider a typical insula. Osiek and Balch write, “the most famous of these buildings at Ostia, the House of Diana, had what must have been a rather pleasant central courtyard with fountain and mosaics, shops on the ground floor facing the street, large windows on the second-floor facade, and probably a gallery across the front of the building on the third floor.” It is quite likely artisans such as Priscilla and Aquila would have lived and worked in one of these insula . On the ground floor, they would have had a shop with a street-level entrance, and upstairs they would have had larger rooms, including one where their church would meet.

This is the kind of place where Paul would have done his evangelizing. He was not walking around from house to house. Neither was he out preaching in the agora (the city’s public square). Most likely, he was making tents in Priscilla and Aquila’s shop on the ground floor of an insula . It was the kind of place where people would come and spend the day chatting about philosophy. Paul spread the gospel here in the workplace as a tentmaker. In the next chapter, we will see what this means for Paul’s understanding of his own ministry.

The other kind of residence that existed in Paul’s time was called a domus . Those who lived in insulae did not have slaves, but rather servants, or hired workers. A person of greater status such as Philemon, however, probably lived in a domus . The entrances of these homes would usually open up right into an atrium. Although there may have been a slave serving as a doorkeeper, people could usually come in and out of the atrium as they pleased. That is where visitors would do business with the household—either in the atrium, or in a side room which functioned as an office.

This is clearly the kind of household that Paul had in mind when writing to the Colossians, Ephesians, and to Philemon. Churches probably met in these sorts of residences. They were not privatized, enclosed spaces—often the entryway would not even have a door! Needless to say, this is not how we think about households today. The domus was where business happened. Women mostly resided in the back quarters, and many homes had an actual curtain to separate their space from the front of the building. Young girls would grow up in these quarters until they were brought out for marriage when they were fourteen or fifteen years old.

My point is that the home itself was, at least in part, a public place. The basic social framework behind this domus was one of patronage, which was itself founded upon the master of the household, known as the pater familias. He, of course, was its patron. Under Roman law, he possessed patria potestas —an extensive legal authority over his family, children, and entire household.

For those who lived in an insula or domus , the household was generally one’s primary place of work. Outside of these households, however, various trade guilds often had their own workplaces. Pottery was typically made in a potter’s place. Tents were often constructed in shops. Purple dye, made famous by the biblical character of Lydia, was likely produced in households. These sorts of trades were frequently carried out in shops that did not quite resemble factories, but which functioned as public, accessible spaces where people could obtain the goods they produced.

This is a crucial insight when attempting to interpret Paul’s letters: the text is addressed to all of these members—not just to the husband, wife, and children, as we might have initially imagined, but to the entire domus . It is easy for us to forget this as our culture is so centered around the modern notion of the nuclear family. Hardly anyone in the ancient world would have thought in those terms as such a concept did not exist. The gap between our respective understandings of the household is so wide that to hear these letters in their original context—let alone to infer what they might mean for us today—represents one of the toughest hermeneutical challenges in New Testament exegesis.

The central feature of these households, of course, was the pater familias , whose authority under Roman law was absolute. No one else in the household had the legal means to redress their grievances. There were no laws in Rome to protect the rights of wives, slaves, or children. In Paul’s time, as many as 10 percent of all children born in the Greco-Roman world were left in public dumps to die simply because they were unwanted. The father had full authority to do this, and there were no laws against it. Unsurprisingly, the people who made these laws were members of the highest levels of society and often engaged in these kinds of actions themselves.

In view of this authority, the pater familias would often require his entire household to serve his gods. Most households would keep their gods in a lararium , which was a corner that had been set aside as a sacred space. Each morning, the members of the household would begin their day by praying or making various offerings to these gods. They did this not because they were “religious” (in our modern sense of the word), but because they were superstitious. They saw the gods as being responsible for disrupting or maintaining order, and as a result people were expected to offer them worship. It was very uncommon for a person to be devoted to a single god; on the contrary, most people would worship any number of gods with hardly a second thought.

This was the cultural backdrop behind many New Testament letters. The book of 1 Peter, for example, addresses a situation where a slave or wife has become a Christian in a pagan household. The author encourages them in the midst of the severe punishments that they are facing, which most likely stemmed from their refusal to worship the household gods. In Colossians and Ephesians, however, Paul is addressing households in which every member has decided to follow the God of the pater familias , namely, Jesus Christ. This context will serve as an important clue to help us to interpret and apply Paul’s instructions.

Of course, this means that each of these letters would have been read publicly to the church with both Philemon and Onesimus present. You can imagine how shocking this must have been for the congregation! Paul’s “household codes,” which only appear in Colossians and Ephesians, were almost certainly written to guide their community through the extraordinary turn of events that restored Onesimus back to Philemon, and hence to their church. To get a more visceral sense of how this may have felt, try substituting the generic terms in Col 3 :18 –22 with personal names: “Apphia, submit to Philemon as is fitting in the Lord. Onesimus, obey your earthly master, Philemon, in everything.”

The moment you insert Onesimus’s name, you get a fuller sense of the dramatic nature of the text. The injunction to Philemon would have been equally startling: “Philemon, provide your slaves, including Onesimus, with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master (kyrios ) in heaven.” Remember: Philemon was the patron upon whom everyone depended. Paul was boldly speaking a new, Christian reality into this household. He reimagines the idea of the patria potestas , not to diminish the all-powerful role of the pater familias , but to incorporate it into the work of Christ by bringing the entire household into the family of God.

At this juncture, we must call attention to the multiple roles that the pater familias inhabited. On the surface, it looks like Paul is addressing six separate parties: wife and husband, children and parents, and slaves and masters. However, in each of these cases the second party is actually the same person—the pater familias. He occupies three powerful offices as the husband, father, and master. By contrast, the other parties are much more vulnerable and have no standing under Roman law. A marriage between two slaves within the household, for example, would not have been legally recognized. This meant that their master could separate them at his whim, as they were his property. Intriguingly, this also meant that the “head” of a wife in a slave marriage (see Eph 5 :23 ) was not her own husband, but the pater familias . While this stretches the metaphor to its limits, it also shows the absolute authority that the patron held over his household.

In his household, the pater familias was referred to by the title kyrios , which meant “lord” or “master.” Paul refers to him by this title when describing the master-slave relationship, yet he conspicuously avoids it when addressing him in relation to his wife. Instead, Paul first refers to him as her “husband,” and then as her “head” (kephale ). The exact meaning of this metaphor is hard to pin down, as evidenced by how it was handled by the translators of the Septuagint. They used two different Greek translations for the Hebrew word rosh , depending on whether it was referring to an actual anatomical head, or to the leader of a group. In the end, however, a clear pattern emerged: whenever rosh was used in its anatomical sense, the Septuagint rendered it as kephale in Greek. Conversely, whenever rosh referred to the leader of a clan (about one hundred and eighty times), the Septuagint translated it as arche (leader) instead.

There are only about three exceptions to this pattern throughout the entire Septuagint. Such consistency demonstrates that the translators clearly did not understand kephale to mean “leader.” Consider an illustration from Philo, a first-century Alexandrian Jew, whose first language was Greek. “The virtuous one,” he notes, “whether single man or people will be the head (kephale ) of the human race and all the others like the limbs of a body which draw their life from the forces in the kephale at the top.” Philo believed that the virtuous person would supply whatever was needed for his people to grow in virtue by drawing from the life forces of the kephale . This was how the metaphor of kephale was used in his culture.

At that time, people recognized that the body couldn’t function without the head. The head was its chief part. Still, they would never have conceived of it as the body’s “ruler” or “lord.” Instead, they believed that it provided every resource necessary for life. In fact, some ancient medical writers noticed that phlegm, which comes from the nose or throat, had a similar appearance to semen; on that basis, they concluded that semen must be produced in the head! Everything , they believed, came from the head.

This was not because the head was “lord,” but because it supplied all of the body’s needs. How does this relate to our texts? Paul, we must remember, was a man of two worlds. Frankly, his usage of kephale as a metaphor is quite mixed, but he was nevertheless consistent. At times he uses the word in its customary Hebrew sense, as “ruler” or “lord.” In Col 2 :10 , for example, he describes Christ as “head over every power and authority” to denote his rule over the demonic powers.

By contrast, in Eph 1 :22 he writes: “God appointed him head over everything for the church.” Notice that he does not say head over the church , but head over everything for the church, his body. Intriguingly, Paul never uses the metaphor in its conventional Hebrew sense (i.e., as “leader”) when speaking of Christ as the head of the church. Instead, he invariably turns to the Greek metaphor, which depicts Christ as the source for all of the body’s needs. We see this in Col 2 :19 , for example, where he describes false teachers: “They have lost connection with the head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.”

Turn to the companion text in Eph 4 :15 –16 , and you will find exactly the same imagery: “we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” Here, the head is responsible for supplying all of the body’s needs for life, health, and growth. Indeed, it would have made no sense for Paul to use the word “head” to describe Christ’s lordship over the church, as he constantly proclaims this without using any metaphors. Why rely on a metaphor when you can directly say that “Jesus is Lord”? Paul uses this word for a very specific purpose: namely, to illustrate that the church is absolutely dependent on its Head for all that it is and does.

Here is where it gets really interesting, as this is the precise imagery that Paul uses to address the pater familias in relation to his wife. Paul could have referred to him as “lord,” since he uses this exact term to discuss the master-slave relationship. But instead he uses the word “head,” as it perfectly illustrates the household’s total dependence upon its patron, the pater familias . As the “head,” he supplies the household with everything necessary for its ongoing life and sustenance, just as Christ does for his church. It is on this basis that the wife is urged to submit to her husband, just as she would to Christ.

This brings me to my final point, which is that Paul’s primary focus in this passage is not on the wife, slave, or child, but on the pater familias . This is apparent in his instructions regarding marriage, which reserve many more words for him than for his wife. Bear in mind that for a marriage in a typical Greco-Roman household, the average age of the husband would have been thirty, whereas the wife would have been about sixteen or seventeen. Such wives were completely dependent upon their husbands, and were never thought of as equals. There were a few exceptions to this, of course: patronal homes with a higher status would occasionally arrange marriages between their similarly-aged offspring. For the most part, however, marriage involved a young girl joining the household and relying upon her husband to teach her all that she needed to know. She was wholly dependent upon him and extremely vulnerable.

That social context is the backdrop for this text. Paul is primarily concerned with the pater familias , and for good reason. The instructions to him are four times longer than they are for his wife. Conversely, in the other two relationships his instructions are only half as long as they are for the others (i.e., the children and the slaves). In each case, Paul’s concern is that the pater familias —the husband, father, and master who alone possesses patria potestas— would use his power as Christ did, by giving himself up for the household and living a cruciform life for the welfare of others.

You must understand that in Paul’s mind, this was critical: without this, the church would not stand a chance. Like it or not, the pater familias was the church’s leader, simply by virtue of the fact that he was allowing it to meet in his home. The church would not survive unless he willingly submitted himself to the whole family and chose to live as one who would offer his life for the sake of others. Only in that kind of context would the members of his household truly consider accepting the faith.

If this did not happen, the members of the household might simply adopt a superficial form of the faith as a result of their subservient position. Indeed, the pater familias had to experience the grace of God for himself in order to establish a genuinely Christian household and workplace. Thankfully, this appears to be what happened to Philemon. How do we know? Because the books of Colossians and Philemon were preserved. If Philemon had punished Onesimus according to the customary laws of the time—that is, by crucifixion—there would have had little reason to keep these letters. But we are still reading them today!

Philemon did exactly what God’s grace had called him to do. He gave up his place of authority and walked in the way of Christ, accepting a slave who deserved crucifixion, and welcoming him back as a brother in the Lord. Some scholars believe that this is the same Onesimus who was addressed by one of the earliest bishops, Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius writes to a person named Onesimus, now himself a bishop in Ephesus, and calls him a “man of inexpressible love.” This is exactly what the gospel does: it takes hold of a man like Philemon and radically transforms the whole household by making a servant out of the master, such that one of its slaves eventually becomes a bishop in the great city of Ephesus.

Do you serve or lead the church in some way? Isn’t this picture striking? There is an undeniable relationship between the household, the church, and the workplace. No one in Christ’s church has patria potestas —that belongs to Christ alone. What we do have is the privilege of offering our lives for others as Christ did, so that they might know that the head is not the “master,” “lord,” or even “boss,” but the one who exists to support the whole community so that it can live, thrive, and grow.