Mark on HouseholdManagement: Excelling the Laws of Moses and of Caesar (Mark 10:2-12 within 10:2-31)

Despite the great gap between Mark’s narrative and the cultural and philosophical sophistication of Philo’s writings, this Gospel also represents a process of negotiating Jewish tradition in the Greek language that was the medium of Roman rule.^[198] While some scholars continue to support the theory that Mark was written in Rome, the evidence is no more weighty than the evidence for Syria or Galilee.

Collins delineates the topics of Mark 10:2-31 as divorce and remar­riage, children, property, and family, houses and farms. This list is a detailed and more precise version of Jeremias’s more general suggestion that the passage derives from a pre-Markan collection on “marriage, children and property.”^[201] Whether the organization is Mark’s or that of an earlier hand, these two descriptions together suggest that the material in 10:2-31 is organized on the pattern of the topos “household management.” At least from the point at which Cicero translated Xenophon’s Oikonomikos, household management was an important topic of Roman political philosophy.^[202] Interest in Aristotle’s political philosophy in the first century B.C.E.

Mark 10:2-12 is formulated in the pattern of public debate followed by private teaching for the disciples. The Roman construction of sexual morality can be seen to have some part in the formulation of both. In the public debate, the Roman contribution to a general nostalgia for a stricter marital morality plays some role, while the verbal peculiarities of the saying in the private debate seem to emerge from the discourse fostered by the Roman laws. The two parts of the passage invite separate discussion.

I. The Public Debate: Mark 10:2-9

The public debate opens with a question from the crowds, the question of whether a man is permitted to divorce his wife.^[204] Jesus responds by asking what Moses commanded. In response, they summarize Deut 24:1 LXX, characterizing this stipulation as what Moses permitted. Jesus then trumps this permission to divorce with a primordial commandment that reads Gen 1:27b and 2:24 together: “a man shall leave (καταλείψει)... and shall cleave (προσκολληθησεται) to his wife... and the two shall be (εσονται) one flesh.” Verses 8b-9 reiterate the consequences - that “they are one” - and reformulate the commandment: “what God has joined together, let a human being not separate.”^[205]

Both the debate format and the exegetical content strongly evoke the Jewish context of the passage.

Important as is the material from the Dead Sea, it does not tell the whole story. Jews of Mark’s day as well as the first audience of Mark would have shared a Roman context with the author. As Collins remarks, divorce was a common feature of both Jewish and Roman life in the first century.^{[208] [209] Questioning divorce and/or remarriage would seem to put both the Qumran sectaries and the earliest Christians (or the reign of God movement) conspicuously at odds with their cultures. While this is undoubtedly the case on the level of practice, on the level of ideology, there is more to be said about first-century Roman views.}

Suetonius refers to an attempt on the part of Augustus to limit divorces,

53 but in such vague terms that is not possible to clarify what he means. About ten years after the Julian laws were promulgated, Dionysius of Halicarnassus identified divorce as an un-Roman activity. Ascribing the stability of the Roman state to Romulus’s original legislation, “for the most part unwritten, but some laid down in writing” (Ant.

In juxtaposing Dionysius’s reconstruction of earliest Rome to Mark 10:2-9, I have no desire to claim that the historian influenced Mark; in fact, I think this highly unlikely. Rather, Dionysius’s reconstruction of Romulus’s single marriage law testifies to the political importance of nostalgia for the (supposed) mores of Roman antiquity, nostalgia that was both exploited and fostered by the Julian laws and the imperial ideology. Thus the claim of an original, indissoluble form of marriage that is made exegetically in Mark 10:2-9 is not unique or limited to “countercultural” communities like Qumran and the reign of God movement. During the early empire, Dionysius the Greek historian made this claim in Roman terms for ancient Rome.

II. The Private Teaching: Mark 10:10-12

As is the case with the other private teaching scenes, Mark 10:10-12 amplifies the public teaching and probably represents the editorial work of Mark, who seems to have joined the preceding debate about whether a man may divorce his wife to a saying equating remarriage with adultery.^[212] This equation is by no means a natural one; its oddity is obscured for later interpreters by long familiarity.

Although Mark 10:11-12 resembles some aspects of the command Paul attributes to “the Lord” in 1 Cor 7:10-11 and is frequently associated with it, there are significant formal differences, and the two sayings are applied very differently.^[213] Paul’s directive (παραγγέλλω), which he identifies as from the Lord, is first “that a woman not be separated (χωρισθηναι) from her husband” (7:10). Envisaging cases (or a specific case) in which women are separated, he adds, “but if she is separated, let her remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband.” He then pronounces the reciprocal com­mand: “and a husband should not divorce (άφιέναι) his wife” (7:11). The disparate vocabulary for the initiative of the man and the woman is more or less equivalent to different verbs generally used in Latin: for a man who divorces, repudiare or dimittere; for a woman, divertere^[214] Paul does not repeat the counsel against remarriage in the command to the husband, though the subsequent discussion may imply that he assumes it. Although Paul delivers this counsel as a command,^[215] he does not consider that it applies absolutely; in the case of an unbelieving partner who does not wish to continue the relationship, the “brother or sister is not bound” (7:15).

The Markan saying differs in significant details. It is most closely parallel to Paul’s parenthetic rejection of remarriage for a woman who divorces her husband, but it begins (as might be expected for a reciprocal ruling) with the case of the divorcing husband. As in 1 Corinthians, the saying is reciprocal; it is assumed that a woman may take the initiative in divorce, an assumption that was once seen as reflecting a Roman context for Mark. As Collins notes, it now seems probable that at least some Jewish women were able to initiate divorce in this period.^[216] Unlike 1 Cor 7:10-11, Mark 10:11-12 uses the same word, απόλυση for both husband and wife; this word may reflect common practice or may derive from Mark’s summary of Deut 24:1; the LXX uses έξαποστελει, which corresponds even more closely to dimittere.^[217]

Most importantly Mark 10:11-12 does not just recommend or rule against remarriage. Nor does this text describe remarriage as an abomina­tion (βδελυγμα) or pollution (οΰ μιανειτε) as does Deut 24.4 LXX.

Both of these features, the use verb anoXu- for divorce and the identification of remarriage as adultery (poi/-), also appear not only in the revision of the saying in Matt 19:9, but also in the versions that appear in Matt 5:32 and Luke 16:18.^[219] Small verbal correspondences between the latter two verses have contributed to a longstanding attribution of another, independent version of the saying to Q.^[220] But the strong correspondences with Mark raise questions about the claim that this prohibition should be seen as “dually attested.”^[221] The version of the saying in Matthew’s third antithesis (Matt 5:32) appears to treat Deut 24:1 as subsidiary to the sixth commandment, “you shall not commit adultery” (ou poi/euoeis).^[222]

I suggest that Mark 10:11-12 stigmatizes remarriage as adultery because, as in Philo, the sixth commandment is read in terms of the Roman adultery law. It is worthwhile recalling Treggiari’s speculation that “if a woman divorced one husband to marry another or to remain single, she might open herself to charges of adultery in the first marriage.”^[223] Presum­ably, her new husband would be liable to the same charge. The scenario Treggiari proposes differs from the one presupposed in Mark 10:11-12. In Mark it appears to be the second marriage that is understood as adulterous, and it applies equally whether the woman or the man divorces.^[224] The equation of remarriage with adultery in the Markan saying is not a product of the direct influence of the specific provisions of the Julian law on adultery. Rather it responds to the general atmosphere of insecurity that Treggiari suggests. In particular, two aspects of imperial ideology seem relevant: first, the status of adultery as a political topos throughout the first century, and second, the Julian law’s contribution to bringing all sexual topics under the heading of adultery. The Markan stipulation might be rephrased in Roman terms to say that remarriage is charged pro adulterio.

To argue that the Roman context, and particularly the Julian laws, have had an impact on this saying is not to say that they explain it. The most conspicuous innovation from a legal point of view, whether Jewish or Roman, is that the husband is found liable of adultery, not apparently because he has taken another man’s wife (the legal definition of the crime), but because he has betrayed his first wife. The double standard that bound a married woman but not a married man to sex only with her partner did not go entirely unquestioned; Musonius Rufus, a contemporary of Mark, argued that a husband should apply the same standards of chastity to himself as to his wife (Discourses 12).

But the catalysts that gave rise to Mark’s sayings (and caused them to be so frequently reformulated) should be sought in the exigencies of early Christian life. Two areas should be considered. The first is Justin’s widely- cited anecdote of the woman who divorced her pagan husband, was denounced by him, and so aroused persecution against her teacher and others in the community (2 Apol. 2). This anecdote illustrates that dangers shadowed divorce beyond those deduced by Treggiari.^[225] As soon as persecution of whatever kind became a threat to Christians, as it clearly is in Mark, men who divorced a wife to marry another Christian might equally incur accusations and denunciation. Second, Adela Yarbro Collins suggests that the prohibition of divorce may have responded to the beginnings of early Christian interest in sexual abstinence.^[226] It is certainly the case that Paul’s discussion of divorce is part of his attempt to regulate the desire for sexual self-control among the Corinthian Christians (1 Cor 7:1). In Justin’s anecdote also the pursuit of sexual asceticism plays a role. The woman’s adoption of Christianity inspires her distaste for the husband’s lack of sexual restraint, causing her to undertake the divorce, against the advice of her friends. The same collaboration of marital morality and Christian asceticism is even more prominent in Hermas Mand. 4.1, where the husband who finds his believing wife “in some adultery” (4.1.4) is counseled to divorce her, lest he become a partner in her adulterous passion (4.1.5). At the same time, he is to stay unmarried, so as to avoid adultery on his own part (4.1.7). He must take her back if she repents (4.1.7-8).^{[227] [228] This solution, like those proposed by Paul and Mark, contravenes the Julian marriage law, which did its best to coerce remarriages. But for most people, the penalties of the marriage laws were either less likely to affect them or less devastating than the penalties for adultery. More importantly, the solutions of Paul, Mark, Hermas and Justin offered a way of more rigorous virtue, a more exemplary exercise of restraint (εγκράτεια) than that of Rome.}

III. Mark 10:2-12 in the Context of Mark 10:2-31: Rethinking Household Management

As a pocket-sized treatment of household management, Mark 10:2-31 narrows its focus in striking ways. The issues of divorce and remarriage addressed in Mark 10:2-12 are a rather minimal approach to marriage. At best one might say that the treatment of marriage in the public debate supports the principle (central to the Roman legal discussions) that a stable marriage should not be disturbed, and its exegesis of Genesis excels the moral nostalgia of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s vision of an original, indissoluble Roman form of marriage. The teaching for the inner circle of the disciples revised that principle to equate remarriage after divorce with an infraction of the sixth commandment - and the Roman adultery law.

Mark 10:2-12 gives way immediately to an even narrower treatment of children. The disciples rebuke those who bring little children that Jesus might lay hands on them (14a). Jesus is angered at the disciples, command­ing them, “let the children (παιδία) come to me, do not prevent them” and affirming the place of children in God’s reign (14-15). It is noteworthy that παιδία is used throughout this passage, rather than either τέκνα or παιδα. The word παιδίον in particular stresses the age of the children; it is used especially (though not exclusively) for children under the age of 72

seven.

Thus the first two portions of Mark’s advice on “household manage­ment” can be reduced to the commands, “do not separate from spouses” and “allow the little children to come to me.” The third pericope is the oddest of all as a treatment of property: Mark 10:17-31 does not so much revise anything the manuals have to say about the management of property, as reverse it all: “do not gather, but scatter,” it says: “Sell what you have and give to the poor” and “with what difficulty will the rich enter God’s reign!” (10:21, 24).

I suggest that the sequence of anecdotes in Mark 10:2-31 is constructed specifically as a prophylactic against too radical a reading of the call to leave all and follow Jesus (10:21, 29, 30).^[229] For Mark, the call is to leave households, brothers, sisters, mother, father, and offspring (τέκνα), as well as fields (10:29-30), and to find them again a hundredfold.^[230] But disciples are not to leave wives (as the version in Luke 18:29 envisages) or husbands, nor are they to abandon young children (παιδία). At the compositional level, this sequence of anecdotes protects the radical call to God’s reign against the charge of homewrecking. It not only asserts the continued importance of some human responsibilities despite the urgency of the call, but also testifies to the ideological importance of “family values” as a touchstone of morality. This apologetic by no means exhausts the meaning of Mark 10:13-16 or, for that matter, of Mark 10:2-12. But like the exemplary function of the little children of 10:16, it helps to define the requisites for those who respond to the call of God’s reign.

As I suggested above, women tend to be elided in the interpretation of Mark 10:2-12. The narrative of Mark contributes to that elision. From the call of the first four disciples (1:16-20), the disciples who are named are all men, so that “those who were round him with the twelve” (4:10) could be construed to all be male. Only after the death of Jesus does the author name three famous women disciples and make clear that many women traveled with Jesus in Galilee and went up with him to Jerusalem (15:40­41). It is noteworthy that none of the women witnesses who are said to have followed Jesus in Galilee and traveled with him to Jerusalem is named by a husband or father; one Mary appears to be distinguished by her hometown (as is Jesus), and the other by her sons. Not only Peter, then, and his male companions, but also the women could claim to have “left household or brothers or sisters or parents or children or fields” (10:28). That the famous women disciples named in Mark appear to be single women may have made it especially important to make clear that the gospel message did not create abandoned women and children, or encourage women to abandon their responsibilities to husbands and little children.

C.