Households and Discipleship

This study addresses the question of whether a coherent sequence of pericopes can be identified in Matthew chapters 19-20. Employing audience-oriented criticism, it argues that the authorial audience's knowledge of the philosophical tradition concerning household structures provides that coherent sequence. But the audience also encounters in these chapters a critique of the household tradition's patriarchal and hierarchical structure of the rule of husband over wife, father over children, master over slaves, and the accumulation of wealth as an indicator of social identity. It understands that the community of disciples is to exhibit more egalitarian patterns. this alternative structure is placed in the context of wider socio-cultural forces which were also resisting aspects of the conventional household pattern. Features of the alternative structure - opposition ot hierarchical structures, a more egalitarian pattern, a temporal framework, marginal social location, minimalization of gender differences and authority roles and relationships, opposition to wealth - can be seen as aspects of an existence which Victor Turner identifies as normative or permanent liminality. that is, the study of chapters 19-20 contributes significantly to the formulation of the larger pattern of Matthean discipleship.