John Dominic Crossan in In Search of Paul writes “Ephesians 5:22-6:9. First, on husbands and wives, the text seems much less worried about wives obeying husbands than about husbands loving wives. It is the latter that receives most space…What is most striking about those texts, is that, if you bracket their explicit Christian motivation, they emphasize general family values that would be quite acceptable across contemporary Roman social theory and practice. Augustus, where he still alive, would have been extremely pleased. It seems most likely, therefore, that their purpose was to insist that Christian families were not at all socially subversive, but were as good as, if not better than, the best of those around them. For our present argument, these texts represent a first step in collating Christian and Roman household ethics.”
John Dominic Crossan in In Search of Paul writes “Ephesians 5:22-6:9. First, on husbands and wives, the text seems much less worried about wives obeying husbands than about husbands loving wives. It is the latter that receives most space…What is most striking about those texts, is that, if you bracket their explicit Christian motivation, they emphasize general family values that would be quite acceptable across contemporary Roman social theory and practice. Augustus, where he still alive, would have been extremely pleased. It seems most likely, therefore, that their purpose was to insist that Christian families were not at all socially subversive, but were as good as, if not better than, the best of those around them. For our present argument, these texts represent a first step in collating Christian and Roman household ethics.”
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