77 Family Drama: The Household Codes in Narrative-Dramatic Perspective David Starling The process of interpreting and applying the NT household codes is a notoriously contested enterprise: no approach can eliminate altogether the responsibility of the interpreter to make complex judgements about the significance of context and culture for our understanding of the text and our obedience to its message, or insulate us against the clash between the wisdom of the gospel and the values of the culture we live in. Nevertheless, some approaches serve better than others in providing us with the categories and questions that we need for fulfilling our interpretive responsibilities fittingly and faithfully. My purpose in this paper is to argue that, in the case of the Ephesian household code, a narrative-dramatic approach fits well with the shape and purpose of the letter as a whole, and allows for faithful translation of the code’s instructions into new social contexts without surrendering to the temptation to domesticate its message and conform it to the values of our own time. Within an age in which we have learnt to understand gender