5 RELATIONSHIPS, RESISTANCE AND RELIGIOUS CHANGE IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN HOUSEHOLD by KATE COOPER Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law – a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household. (Matt. 10: 34–6) 1 T he household was an ideological battleground in antiquity. To ‘turn a man against his father’ was to challenge deeply held convictions about how society should be constituted. For a free man to raise children in his own image was under- stood – by Jews, Greeks, and Romans alike – as a right and even a duty. The household was the acknowledged nerve centre for the processes of social control and social reproduction. It was Edward Gibbon who irst saw the importance of the reli- gious history of the household for political history. In Book III of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he famously argued that Chris- tian asceticism had eroded the Roman social order: ‘the pusillanimous youth preferred the penance of a monastic, to the dangers of a mili- tary, life … the same cause which relieved the distress of individuals impaired the strength and fortitude of the empire’. 2 The wording is intentionally outrageous, of course, and few modern historians would sign on to Gibbon’s easily dismissive group psychology. But the connection made by Gibbon between the Christian challenge to the values of the Roman household and the roughly contempo- rary erosion of the Roman social order remains evocative. Did the 1 Unless otherwise indicated, Bible quotations in this essay are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.®. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. Quotations marked NRSV are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copy- right 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. 2 Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Book III, chs 62–4, ed. J. B. Bury (London, 1902). Religion_Household.indb 5 11/03/2014 12:20