The family in the Jesus movement

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Fall, 2004 by Santiago Guijarro

The question of Jesus' attitude toward the family has been answered in basically two ways. Some authors think that Jesus did not have an anti-family attitude and explain the imposed demand of his closest disciples to break with their families as a strategy that did not affect the family institution as such. Others, however, think that Jesus directly attacked the family in order to undermine patriarchal ideology.

Among the first group is G. Theissen. According to him, in the early Jesus movement there were two types of disciples: the wandering charismatics, from whom Jesus demanded the renunciation of family ties, and the sedentary followers who remained at home and supported the itinerants. This implies that the sayings of Jesus that require his closest disciples to break ties with their own families, and the memory of his own lifestyle without home or family, do not necessarily imply an anti-family attitude, because only a small group of disciples would have been affected. According to Theissen, breaking with the family would be a way of "self-stigmatization" that aimed at the charismatization of Jesus and his closest disciples (Theissen & Merz: 186-90).

The second answer to this question can be found in E. Schussler Fiorenza and R. Horsley. Both of them agree that the demand to break with one's own family was addressed, not to a reduced group of disciples, but to all of them. This means that the sayings about breaking away from the family contain a criticism of the patriarchal family (Schussler Fiorenza: 151-54; Horsley: 231-45).

The second question that the aforementioned traditions raise has to do with the use of kinship metaphors when referring to the group of disciples, and could be formulated like this: Did Jesus conceive of this group as a surrogate family? A "surrogate family" is a group of people that, not having an actual kinship relation, relate to each other as if they did (Pitt-Rivers: 408-13). This type of fictive kinship was and is very common in traditional Mediterranean societies because of the centrality of the family in them. Because of this the majority of significant relationships follow the model of kinship relations.

B. J. Malina, building on the assumption that the preaching of Jesus should be placed in the context of political religion and not in that of domestic religion, believes that Jesus' statements concerning his group of disciples as a surrogate kin-group reflect a post-Easter situation, when the disciples began to adopt the model of the family institution (Malina 1999: 30-32). Other authors, however, maintain that Jesus applied that model to the group of his disciples, although with an important innovation: in the new family formed by them there would be no place for the father, the patriarchal symbol of authority (Mark 3:31-35; 10:28-30; Matt 23:9). The disciples were invited to join a new family of brothers that had God as their only father (Schussler Fiorenza: 151-54; Theissen & Merz: 188-90).

The diversity of the responses to the questions that the gospel traditions raise about Jesus' attitude toward the family indicates that a consensus on this topic has not yet been reached. And this is due, in part, to the fact that some of these responses are conditioned by the ideological presuppositions of industrialized Western culture. To advance toward a clarification of this fundamental problem of the beginnings of Christianity, it is necessary to place these traditions in the context of the movement initiated by Jesus, keeping in mind that it had its origins within the framework of First-century Mediterranean society (Malina 2001a; Hanson & Oakman). The lifestyle of Jesus and that of his closest disciples, as well as the relationship that they established with other disciples who remained in their own households, should be understood in this social context.