Relationships, Resistance and Religious Change in the Early Christian Household

Abstract

The household was an ideological battleground in antiquity. To ‘turn a man against his father’ was to challenge deeply held convictions about how society should be constituted. For a free man to raise children in his own image was understood – by Jews, Greeks, and Romans alike – as a right and even a duty. The household was the acknowledged nerve centre for the processes of social control and social reproduction.