Celebrating scholarly achievement is always a great pleasure.

In a discipline in which women colleagues are still far too few, Adela Yarbro Collins’s extraordinary record of scholarly research and writing is deeply heartening. Her unique capacity for friendship of the intellect and affections is even more to be celebrated.

I have been enriched by our shared delight in the opera, our dissections of national, academic, and institutional politics, and our many explorations of text and history. Her contributions to the study of Mark have been particularly helpful and engaging to me. I had long used her many scholarly articles, some twenty of which, in addition to the collection The Beginning of the Gospel, appeared on one of my 2003 course bibliographies.^[157] ^{^[158] The recent appearance of her superb and comprehensive commentary has been a special boon.^[159] The pleasures of consulting the commentary have inspired me to return in this article to Mark, and specifically to the dialogues on divorce (10:2-12), a topic I have addressed before.^[160] This is a text that has been of crucial concern to women, but in which women are very nearly elided both in interpretation and in the narrative of Mark. Jewish texts, particularly passages from the Damascus Document and the Temple Scroll, have usually been used to illuminate the contexts of these sayings. Collins thoroughly explores the complexities and ambiguities of these texts, exposing the importance of the discussion of marriage in the construction of identity in the Jewish world at the turn of the common era.^[161] Her review of these materials concludes with a brief treatment of marital norms in Greek and Roman cultural contexts, including the Augustan marriage laws, but she follows the lead of most NT and Classics scholars in finding little potential in the Roman marital ideology and practice for illuminating Mark’s sayings.^[162]
My goal in this essay is to supplement her brief treatment of the Roman cultural context by asking readers of Mark to reconsider the significance of the Julian laws in the context of a larger first-century Roman political and moral discourse, and to suggest that they do have something to tell us both about the divorce dialogues in Mark 10:2-12 and about the double dialogues’ connection with the anecdote that follows (Mark 10:13-16).
Thus the focus will be the literary context of Mark rather than questions about the historical Jesus or the earliest Galilean communities.^[163] My argument is by no means that the “true” context of Mark 10:2-12 is Roman law and culture rather than Jewish law and culture. Nor do I wish to argue that the Markan text is the product of “influence,” reproducing what is to be found in either the Roman or Jewish practice or tradition. Rather Jews of the first century and the earliest Christians recast the tradition, negotiating fidelity to scripture under the exigencies of the Roman rule. The moral arena provided a venue for Roman imperial claims, and therefore a ground on which its subjects could meet them. At the emergence of the empire, Roman power was defended with claims of Roman moral superiority, particularly in the areas ruled by pietas, devotion and duties toward the deities and toward all to whom one is related - parents, children, spouse, siblings, down to clients, freedper- sons and slaves and up to the emperor.^[164] The specifics of these claims were determined in part by the culture wars of the very late republic, and played an important role in Augustus’s consolidation of power.^[165] The earliest Christians, whether they resisted the empire or sought to join it, found themselves both coerced and enabled to address their Roman overlords by a discourse of family values that conformed to, or better exceeded, the severe standards the Romans espoused. The same was true of Jews in Judea and Galilee as well as in the great cities of the diaspora.^[166]
Ancient sexual politics has received some attention as the context of Mark 10:2-12 and 13-16. In 1983, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza suggested that the prohibition of divorce voiced in Mark 10:2-10 represents the “Jesus movement’s” abolition of patriarchal marriage. On the grounds of an original equality between male and female (Gen 1:27b and 2:23) the movement revoked the unequal provisions of patriarchal marriage.
Schussler Fiorenza used the anecdote in which Jesus insists upon allowing little children into his presence and embrace (Mark 10:13-16) as part of an argument that the movement devoted itself to the communal care of children.^[167] By contrast, Richard Horsley has argued that in Mark the divorce sayings were an attempt on the part of both Jesus and Mark to reassert the covenant by strengthening the family and perhaps by providing for orphans, as a response to the destructive effect of the Roman occupation of Galilee on family relations. He rejected the possibility that the marriage relations Jesus sought to reestablish were non-patriarchal.^[168] Gerd Theis- sen’s novel, The Shadow of the Galilean, takes a different view of Rome’s impact on Judea; in it Johanna, the wife of Chuza, speaks of her preference for Roman law, which allowed a woman to divorce, in contrast to what Theissen then supposed to be first-century Jewish law.^[169] But most accounts of Mark’s Roman context ignore Mark 10:2-12.^[170] This essay will explore the sexual politics of Mark 10:2-12 on a different level. It will first review the Julian laws and their Roman political context, next briefly delineate the operation of Roman politics in the work of Philo, a Greek speaking Jew of the first century, then examine the two short dialogues on divorce in Mark 10:2-12 and their context in Mark 10:2-31. It will argue that both Philo and Mark read biblical prescriptions through their experience of the Roman moral law, and they do so to both encourage and defend the superiority of their communities’ familial mores.
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Source: Ahearne-Kroll Stephen P., Holloway Paul A., Kelhoffer James A. (eds.). Women and Gender in Ancient Religions: Interdisciplinary Approaches. JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck),2010. — 518 p.. 2010

Celebrating scholarly achievement is always a great pleasure.

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