Who should be called father? Paul of Tarsus between the Jesus tradition and patria potestas

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Winter, 2003 by S. Scott Bartchy

    No Traditional Fathers Needed When
    God's Will is Done

Perhaps the most subtle and easily overlooked elimination of earthly fathers from the ideal society in which God alone is ruling is found in the Gospel according to Mark 10:28-31 (NRSV):

    Peter began to say to [Jesus], "Look, we have left everything
    and followed you." Jesus said, "Truly I tell you, there is no
    one who has left house of brothers or sisters or mother or
    father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of
    the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in
    this age--houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children,
    and fields with persecutions--and in the age to come
    eternal life."

Notice carefully that fathers are not included in the second half of this parallel-constructed saying. But might this be simply an oversight?

Gerhard Lohfink comments, "The question would have to be left unanswered if other texts did not show that the absence of any reference to fathers is anything but coincidence or forgetfulness. Fathers are deliberately not mentioned ... they are too symbolic of patriarchal domination" (45). In contrast, Kathleen Corley asserts that neither Mark nor Jesus intended to imply here what she calls an "anti-patriarchal ethic" (47). Yet when the saying is viewed in the context of the expectations of filial piety I am convinced that Lohfink, Joanna Dewey (478-79), Richard Horsley (232-44), and other scholars are correct and thus that Corley is not persuasive on this point. Part of the good news is that there are no fathers but God in Jesus' vision. And Mark emphasizes that these "fatherless" families are gifts of God which are given now, already in the present time, not some indefinite future.

Once again the context is one of anti-domination; the following sentence in Mark reads: "But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first" (10:31 NRSV). The status and authority of fathers are implicitly rejected, and the expectations to control and be served that characterized the patriarchal social system are explicitly subverted. Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza makes the compelling comment that Jesus' paradoxical exhortation to "receive the rule of God like a child (slave)" earlier in Mark (10:15) "is not an invitation to childlike innocence and naivete but a challenge to relinquish all claims of power and domination over others" (148).

Now Only God Is "Father"

Perhaps Jesus' most startling challenge to patriarchal authority is found in the material unique to the Gospel according to Matthew 23:9 (NRSV): "Call no man father on earth, for you have one Father--the one in heaven." The context for this saying is provided by Matthew, who may have especially prized it because of its reference to God as Father, a favorite theme in his Gospel; he uses the designation 44 times. But there is little question that the core of the saying came from the historical Jesus. As Lohfink observes, "Here we not only find the spirit of Jesus but hear the historical Jesus himself speaking" (47). Schussler Fiorenza suggests that the original form of the saying may have read: "Call no one father, for you have one father (and you are all siblings)" (150). By it Jesus declared that his followers both should not and need not address anyone but the God of Israel as "father." Jerome Neyrey comments that there is a stream of material in Matthew which "replaces the sense of loyalty and faithfulness owed parents with that owed God-Father." However unjust this appeared to outsiders, "Matthew portrays Jesus pursuing a different kind of justice, placing the interests of his heavenly Father over those of earthly parents" (114). Furthermore, according to Jesus, the God of Israel was a kind and caring father, with gracious characteristics traditionally associated with motherhood, whom they could trust without reservation.