Familia Por Causa Del Discipulado Y De La Mision En La Tradicion Synoptica - Book Review

Salamanca, Spain: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1998. Pp. 473. Paper, n.p.

This revised doctoral dissertation is a study of the Synoptic sayings that reveal family conflicts lived by Jesus' disciples, combining the two methods of form criticism and social-science interpretation. It explicitly excludes Jesus' own relationship with his family and focuses rather on what the texts say about disciples in the first and second generation. After an introduction laying out methodological presuppositions, part one describes the ancient Mediterranean family, using structures of social models and reading scenarios. Part two, the longest, examines key Synoptic sayings on breaking with family and tensions within families because of discipleship, using traditional form and redaction criticism. Part three steps back to take in the larger picture of the first two generations yielded by these results.

Part one includes survey of the economic structures in which the family was embedded; kinds of houses; types of family groupings; and domestic religion, which is considered the strongest bond of the family. The archaeological surveys range from urban Italian Ostia to rural Palestine. They illustrate that the vast majority of people in the cities lived in small apartments and behind their shops, and that the majority of rural peasants lived not in large extended family groupings, but in smaller units of immediate family. (The archaeological evidence, however, cannot tell us to what extent kinship ties united family groupings living side by side.) Careful studies are also able to estimate the degree of homelessness in urban settings. One of the author's key arguments here that will extend into the other parts of the book is that domestic religion survived vigorously into the Christian era, and that it was the strongest bond uniting the family, thus causing the greatest trauma when that bond was threatened by conversion of family members to outside religions.

Part two takes six Synoptic sayings about break with family and subjects them to historical-critical analysis while giving a reading scenario of background in the life of Jesus and of the early church. Mark 1:16-20 and pars. on abandoning work and father to follow Jesus meant a call to reform of life, but also had the negative effect of insult to one's father. The passage was consolation and model for those renouncing family for the sake of Jesus. Mark 10:28-30 &// on the new family of disciples was meant both for the itinerants of Galilee and Syria, and for the diaspora situations of family breakup. Here different Synoptic redaction could suggest different situations, e.g., the omission of "fields" and addition of "wives" in Luke 18:29 suggests an urban setting and more fluidity in marriage customs. Mark 13:12 and pars. on betrayal by family assumes a Jewish context in Mark and Matthew, but a Greco-Roman one for Luke's version, with ties between family and religion not as right as in Jewish families. Luke 9:57-62// Matt 8:18-22 on a son's renunciation of his obligation to bury his father is a question of honor and duty, but also renunciation of the moment in which the son would assume control, and therefore it disrupts the entire family. Luke 12:51-53//Matt 10:34-36 on divisions within the family reveals the close connection between break with family and mission. Luke 24:26//Matt 10:37 argues for the radical invitation to discipleship, with "hate" meaning not to serve, or to break fidelity.

In light of the above conclusions, part three examines the effect of break with family on Jesus and his disciples, and on the first and second Christian generations. Like most students of this subject, the author concludes that Jesus did not object to the family as such, but only when it was an obstacle to discipleship. Why did he object at all? Because the break with family became not a requisite but a consequence of the lifestyle that he had adopted and saw as necessary for true discipleship. The fact that these sayings were not just repeated, but that there is evidence that they were reworked and reformulated means that they were still relevant.

Some questions must necessarily be raised. The analysis depends on a very traditional form and redaction critical method with sometimes very literal mirror reading. For example, Luke 14:26 was destined not for those already disciples but for potential ones because of its wording: "If anyone comes to me ..." (p. 303); the mention of "sons" in Luke (Q) 11:19-20 means that Jesus is speaking to parents of disciples (p. 331). The assumption could be questioned that family religion was stronger in Jewish families than Greco-Roman, and therefore a bigger family problem for Christian Jews, as can the conclusion that because the theme of family break does not seem as sharp in Luke, more whole families in his church converted together.

One of the accomplishments of the book is to call attention to the way in which the material on break with family centers on the break between father and son, the central relationship in the preservation of the patriarchal family. This is a welcome and enlightening study, even if it still preserves some of a dissertation's over-thoroughness.