Conclusions

This essay has suggested widening the cultural and political context in which Mark 10:2-12 is read so as to locate these dialogues as responses to an imperial sexual politics that formed the horizons of both Jews and Christians in the ancient world.

• The Roman marriage laws and the moral propaganda that was their context deserve another look as part of the matrix that produced early Christian “family values” because they made marital morality an important topic of imperial dis­course.

• These laws would have had a greater impact on first century Jews and Christians than has been recognized.

• By the first century, Roman moral nostalgia had produced and propagated an ideal of an original, indissoluble marriage comparable to the vision of origins articulat­ed in Mark 10:2-9.

• The equation of remarriage with adultery in Mark 10:10-12 may have been suggested by the language and provisions of the Julian adultery law.

• The setting of Mark 10:2-12 and 13-16 in this Gospel should be seen as a defense against too radical an understanding of the call to discipleship in 10:17-31.

• The participation of women in the movement and mission may have made the need for this defense particularly acute.

This is not to say that early Christian mores should be seen as Roman rather than Jewish, or that the relationship with either context is simple and direct. Rather, I suggest that the author of Mark, and perhaps also the sources of Mark, along with other ancient Jews and the early followers of Jesus, were compelled to make clear (to themselves, as much as to the empire) that they practiced the Roman family values that Romans only talked about, as they worked out for themselves what was good, holy, and pleasing to God.

When Schussler Fiorenza proposed that the divorce sayings emerged from the Jesus movement’s attempt to restore original equality, she did so with the understanding that this was possible only within a radical reorientation of society.

This exploration of Mark 10:2-12 has been made easier and more rewarding for me by access to Adela Yarbo Collins’s research and analysis, and more pleasurable by the assurance that her lively and rigorous intellect is my first audience. For these, and for the many riches she has brought to our shared discipline, I give thanks.

Appendix: Roman Imperial Family Values and the Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Christian Origins (Based Largely on Susan Treggiari’s Roman Marriage)

1. Augustus’s Social Legislation

• lex lulia de maritandis ordinibus (18 B.C.E.) prescribed penalties for the unmarried and rewards for marriage, penalties for the childless and rewards for child-bearing between fixed ages.

• lex Pappia Poppaea (9 B.C.E.) revised its provisions, and may have included attempts to limit divorces (Suet. DA 34).

• lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis, or de adulteriis et pudicitia (18

b. c.e.) criminalized adultery, lending aid to adultery, or the tolerance of adultery by a husband, who could be charged with pimping (lenocinium), as well as stuprum, that is sex with an unmarried girl or woman, and appears also to have reasserted the lex Sca(n)tinia, a 2^nd

c. B.C.E. provision that criminalized stuprum with a boy and impu­dicitia - submission to penetration on the part of an adult male. All of these offenses, including lending assistance to adulterers, could be charged pro adulterio, and so shared in and furthered an extension of its meaning. It also established a special permanent court for adultery cases.

• A series of laws aimed at the regulation of manumission and freedpersons: leges Iunia, Aelia Sentia, and Fufia Caninia (?) limited formal manumission to slaves over thirty and masters over 20, allevi­ated this regulation for men who wished to free a slave in order to marry her, and created the category of Junian Latins: that is, infor­mally freed slaves were accorded some of the rights formerly accord­ed to Latin cities, and the potential to become citizens if they married and produced one child who lived a year. They also provided for the registration of births.

• A theater law separated the orders and the sexes in the theaters and allotted children a special place - the Julian law also excluded the unmarried from the theatre.

• Sumptuary laws aimed at limiting conspicuous consumption, especially banquets.

• The codes for Egypt acted in a similar manner, prohibiting cross­ethnos marriages.

• Codes of the Spanish cities accorded Latin rights included measures similar to the Julian laws.

2. Some Effects of the Laws

The laws brought the state into the bedroom, making the chastity and fertility of women, which had been the province of the paterfamilias and the family, a matter of state security.

• They furnished a quite startling number of billable hours for the jurists; according to Galinsky, they attracted the most (surviving?) comment of any of the body of laws.

• They furnished grounds (pretexts) on which Augustus and succeed­ing emperors could choose either to show toward favor or to punish political supporters and opponents.

• They provided strong incentives for those who wished to become citizens, and for disadvantaged citizens (freedpersons) to present lives of the strictest marital correctness.

• They encouraged women to locate their own value in the bearing and raising of children.

• They made a moral claim for Augustus, presenting him in the roles of pater patriae and censor, and constituted a kind of politics of distrac­tion, focusing both accommodation and resistance on the Augustus’s programs not on his ongoing reorganization of the Roman “constitu­tion” but on the neglect of the gods, the supposed deviance of wom­en, children and slaves of the household, and the disorder of society - the loss or blurring of distinctions among the orders.

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