Chapter 33 · ~15 min read
What a Household Was
the social unit the New Testament keeps assuming
When the modern Christian reads a sentence like Lydia and the members of her household were baptized, or greet the church that meets at their house, or husbands, love your wives, she usually pictures something that looks like her own family. A husband, a wife, two or three children, maybe a dog. The household of the New Testament becomes, in the imagination, a 1950s nuclear family in first-century clothes. The household codes become rules for that family. The house church becomes a Bible study meeting in someone’s living room. The references to “the household of God” in the Pastoral Epistles get read as a metaphor for the Christian family.
This is, again, a projection. The Greek word the New Testament uses is oikos. It refers to something that didn’t exist in modern life and that has no clean English equivalent. The oikos was an extended multi-generational economic, social, and religious unit — kin and slaves and freedmen and clients and apprentices, with a single legal head, organized around a common production and a common identity. When the New Testament uses the word, it assumes this institution. Once the modern reader can see the institution, a substantial fraction of the New Testament’s domestic vocabulary reassembles into a different and more coherent picture.
the sentences that need a different family
There are sentences in the New Testament that only make sense if the oikos, not the modern nuclear family, is in view. They turn up in places the modern reader often glides past.
Lydia and the members of her household were baptized (Acts 16:15, paraphrase of NIV). Lydia is a businesswoman in Philippi — a dealer in purple cloth, a luxury textile that required dye-trade infrastructure. Paul meets her at a place of prayer outside the city, she becomes a Christian, and her household is baptized with her. No husband is mentioned in the passage. No children are named. The Greek word is oikos, and what it covers here is some combination of dependents, slaves, freedmen, employees, and possibly extended kin who were part of the dye business and the dwelling space. The whole unit converts together because the unit moves together.
Greet also the church that meets at their house (Romans 16:5, NIV). Paul ends Romans with greetings to many people. Some of those greetings are addressed to specific named individuals — Priscilla and Aquila, Andronicus and Junia. And tucked into the greeting to Priscilla and Aquila is the church that meets at their house. The first-century Christian community in Rome wasn’t gathering in a dedicated church building. It was gathering inside someone’s oikos. The same arrangement turns up in 1 Corinthians 16:19 (Aquila and Priscilla again, now in Ephesus), Colossians 4:15 (Nympha and the church that meets at her house), and Philemon 2 (the church that meets in your home).
If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church? (1 Timothy 3:5, NIV). The qualification for an episkopos — an overseer or bishop — in 1 Timothy includes managing one’s own household well. The Greek word for family here is oikos. The candidate is being evaluated on his ability to run an extended household economic and social unit. The skill the church needs is the skill of household management — which, in the first century, was a recognized civic capacity, taught and discussed in moral philosophy.
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ (Ephesians 6:5, NIV). The household code that runs from Ephesians 5:22 through 6:9 addresses three pairs: wives and husbands, children and fathers, slaves and masters. Modern readers who have only the first two pairs in their own lives may find the third pair jarring, or may quietly skip it. But the original audience wouldn’t have separated them. All three pairs lived inside the same oikos. The code addresses the household as a unit. To leave any pair out would have been to miss what the household actually was.
These sentences aren’t background scenery. They are the assumption underneath much of the New Testament’s social vocabulary. Without the oikos in view, they read as out-of-place fragments. With it, they read as the apostles addressing the social institution everyone in their audience actually lived inside.
the oikos and the apostolic transformation of it
The standard modern treatment of this material is Families in the New Testament World: Households and House Churches by Carolyn Osiek — Catholic New Testament scholar, the Charles Fischer Catholic Professor of New Testament (now emerita) at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University — and David L. Balch, Lutheran New Testament scholar at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley. Their joint volume, published by Westminster John Knox in 1997, integrates archaeological, literary, and inscriptional evidence to reconstruct what the first-century Greco-Roman household actually looked like, how Jewish and Greco-Roman family ideals overlapped and differed, and how the early Christian movement positioned itself inside this institution. Their central argument, much-cited in subsequent scholarship, is that the New Testament writers weren’t chiefly interested in describing the family as such; they were interested in using the household as a model for understanding the church and discipleship. To grasp what they were doing, the reader has to understand the model first.
The model has these features.
The household was extended, not nuclear. A typical first-century Mediterranean household included the male head, his wife or wives, his married and unmarried children, sometimes his elderly parents, sometimes married siblings or their families, and on top of all of that a complement of slaves, freedmen (former slaves who remained legally tied to the household by ongoing obligations), clients (free dependents who exchanged loyalty and service for the head’s protection), and sometimes apprentices, hired workers, tenants, and resident scholars or teachers. The household was a multi-generational kin and labor unit. Modern English has no word for it. Family is too narrow. Estate is too aristocratic. Household is the closest, and even household in modern usage usually means family with maybe a guest room.
The household had a legal head with substantial authority. In Roman law the male head was the paterfamilias. Under the principle of patria potestas — the father’s power — he held legal authority over everyone in the household, including his adult sons until his own death. In strict Roman law, his power historically included the right of life and death over his own children (ius vitae necisque) — a power rarely exercised by the first century but legally on the books. He controlled marriage decisions, inheritance, religion, and the major economic decisions of the household. The household was, in legal terms, an extension of his person. Greek and Jewish households worked somewhat differently — Jewish law restrained the head’s power more than Roman law did — but the basic shape was similar across the Mediterranean: a head, a structured set of subordinates, an extended unit.
The household was an economic unit. Production happened in the household. The workshop or the farm or the family trade was inside or directly connected to the household. A baker’s oikos included the bakery; a leather-worker’s oikos included the workshop; a textile merchant’s oikos — like Lydia’s — included the dye-trade infrastructure. Slaves were both household members in the technical sense and the household’s primary labor force. The slave who washed your feet in the evening might have been the same slave who kept your business accounts during the day. The line between family and workforce didn’t exist as a category in the modern sense.
The household codes were a recognized genre. When the writers of Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Peter, and the Pastoral Epistles set down their instructions on how household members should treat each other, they weren’t inventing a literary form. The form was old and familiar. Aristotle, in the Politics, had identified three foundational relationships of the household — husband-wife, father-child, master-slave — and discussed each in turn. Stoic moralists like the first-century philosopher Musonius Rufus had written extensively on the same household relationships — marriage, the raising of children, the treatment of slaves. A trained reader in the first century, picking up a letter that addressed wives, husbands, children, fathers, slaves, and masters in sequence, would have recognized the genre immediately. This is a household code. The genre was so well-established that scholars now refer to these passages by their German technical name: Haustafeln.
What the New Testament does with the genre is where things get interesting. The standard Greco-Roman Haustafel addressed the paterfamilias and told him how to manage his subordinates. The New Testament codes address the subordinates themselves — wives, children, slaves — as moral agents responsible for their own conduct. They also address the head, but not, as in Aristotle, alone. The reciprocal obligations are spelled out. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (Ephesians 5:25, NIV). Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4, NIV). And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him (Ephesians 6:9, NIV). The whole code is set inside a frame that, in the Greek, governs everything that follows: Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ (Ephesians 5:21, NIV). The recognizable Greco-Roman form has been reframed by a sentence the original form wouldn’t have included.
The house was where the church met. When Paul greets the church that meets at your house, he isn’t referring to a small-group Bible study held in a private living room. He’s referring to a congregation gathered inside someone’s oikos — which, in a wealthier home, meant gathered in the triclinium, the formal dining room, or spilling out into the atrium (the open central hall of a Roman house) or the peristyle (the colonnaded garden courtyard). The first Christian eucharists were celebrated at dining tables in actual private homes. The host of the meal was the paterfamilias of the oikos — typically also a leader of the local church, since the practical realities of hosting and the role of overseeing tended to converge. Phoebe in Romans 16:1-2, Lydia in Acts 16, Nympha in Colossians 4:15, Aquila and Priscilla in three different cities, Philemon in Colossae — these are oikos heads whose homes were the local church’s gathering space. The architecture of the Roman house shaped how the early Christians ate, prayed, and remembered Jesus together for the first two hundred years of the movement’s history.
three places the household reassembles
Lydia and the members of her household were baptized. (Acts 16:15, paraphrase). Lydia, a businesswoman in Philippi, has a household business — the dye trade — and the oikos that supported it. Slaves who handled the dyeing process. Possibly freedmen who had served their term and stayed on as paid workers. Possibly extended kin. Possibly clients. When Lydia hears Paul preach and her heart is opened — the verb Luke uses, dianoigō, is the concrete word for thoroughly opening what had been closed, the same verb used elsewhere for opening eyes and ears — she and her whole household are baptized. The household moves together not because the head decreed it but because the household was a unit. Conversion of the head was inseparable, in the first century, from a reorganization of the whole oikos’s religious life. Lydia then opens her home for Paul and Silas to stay, and the same oikos becomes the first house church in Philippi (Acts 16:40). The household has been baptized; the same household becomes the church. The two aren’t separable.
The church that meets at their house. (Romans 16:5, NIV). Priscilla and Aquila are a tentmaking couple who had been expelled from Rome by Claudius’s edict around AD 49 and ended up in Corinth, where they met Paul (Acts 18:2). When Paul writes to the Roman church around AD 57, Priscilla and Aquila are back in Rome — and they have a church meeting in their oikos. Picture what this means architecturally. Their home would have included a workshop space (they were leather workers / tentmakers), a private quarters, and a public room — probably a triclinium-style dining area capable of seating maybe twenty to forty people if pressed. The Roman house church gathered around that table. Free Christians and enslaved Christians reclined together at the same meal. The bread was broken; the cup was passed; the apostle Paul’s letter was read aloud. The host of this meal — the paterfamilias whose home it was — was Priscilla, since she is named first in four of the six New Testament references to the couple, which in Greek convention indicated her higher social standing or her primary public role. The first-century house church was an institution Greek and Roman society had a slot for. Christianity used the slot, but it didn’t use it the way Greek and Roman society would have. The slot was filled, frequently, by a woman.
Masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven. (Ephesians 6:9, NIV). Read this verse from inside a Greco-Roman Haustafel. The standard ancient code told the master how to keep order among his slaves — how to discipline them, how to extract labor, how to maintain his honor. Paul gives the slave-owning master a sentence that does something different. The master is told, first, to treat your slaves in the same way — that is, with the same respect and sincerity the slaves have been told to give their service. The reciprocity is the new move. Then he’s told do not threaten them — a direct restriction on the master’s customary tool of household discipline. Then he’s told he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven — the master and the slave have the same kyrios. Then he’s told there is no favoritism with him. Inside a single verse, the paterfamilias has been demoted from the unquestioned head of the household to a fellow servant of a higher Lord, restricted in his disciplinary methods, and told that his social rank carries no weight in the only court that finally matters. The household code keeps the institution intact in its outward form. The institution doesn’t survive the verse unchanged.
The recovery this chapter is after isn’t a recovery of Greco-Roman patriarchy. The claim isn’t that modern Christians should reconstitute paterfamilias authority or organize their churches around the oikos of a wealthy patron. The claim is that the New Testament’s domestic vocabulary assumed an institution the modern reader hasn’t been inside, and that recovering the institution makes the New Testament’s domestic vocabulary reassemble into coherent shape.
What this lets the modern Christian see is the actual move the apostles were making. They didn’t abolish the oikos. They couldn’t have done so. The institution was the basic social architecture of the entire Mediterranean world, and to attack it head-on would have been to attack the foundations of civic life itself. What they did instead was insert into the institution a series of redefinitions the institution had no category for. The paterfamilias was demoted to fellow servant. The slave was promoted to brother. The wife was addressed as a moral agent in her own right. The children were named as people the father owed something to. The mutual submission frame at the head of the household code reset the whole architecture. And then — and this is the second move — the same households that had been reorganized internally became the physical sites where the church gathered. The institution that had been the basic unit of Greco-Roman social control became the basic unit of Christian fellowship, evangelism, and worship.
The Christian recovery here isn’t nostalgic. The modern reader doesn’t need to want her own household to look like a first-century oikos in order to receive what the New Testament is doing. What she does need is to see that when the apostles wrote about households, they were writing about a real social institution, with particular features, that they were both using and rewiring. The household codes aren’t abstract ethics. They are interventions into a specific kind of room with specific kinds of people in it. The house church isn’t a metaphor. It’s a triclinium with bread on the table, slaves and free reclining at the same couches, a host who may be a woman, and a letter from the apostle being read aloud while the lamps flicker. The modern Christian, looking back across two thousand years of church buildings and Bible studies and family-values books, can stand in the doorway of that room. Inside it, the household and the church are the same thing. That is where her own congregation, however different its architecture, comes from.