Who should be called father?

Biblical Theology Bulletin (at FindArticles.com): Who should be called father? Paul of Tarsus between the Jesus tradition and patria potestas by Dr. Scott Bartchy. This article is four years old, but I thought those reading my Household of God series might be interested. I found it online yesterday.

Who should be called "father"? What an odd question. Doesn't everyone in every culture grow up calling the male who begot them their linguistic equivalent of "father"? In the world of Jesus and Paul, everyone knew the answer to that question. For them, the term father included reference not only to their male blood progenitors, and perhaps to their fathers' fathers, but also to the emperor at Rome, the pater patriae, the "father of the fatherland." This title, as Nicholas Purcell observes, "was eloquently suggestive of the protecting but coercive authority of the paterfamilias" (1121).

In Roman culture this nearly absolute, coercive authority was called patria potestas, which in its range included the father's power of life and death over his children, beginning in infancy when a father chose to acknowledge and rear a child of "to expose" it, that is, throw the child away. The second-century Roman jurist Gaius noted that "there are virtually no other peoples who have such power over their children as we have" (INSTITUTES 1,55). From ancient Republican times, Roman fathers had been permitted by law to sell their sons into slavery–as many as three times. Yet during the Empire, paternal monopoly on the control of property probably influenced the behavior of sons and daughters more than their father's legal right to execute them. ….

I especially liked this part late in the article.

Egalitarianism Is Not the Opposite of Patriarchy

Third, scholars and their readers have largely ignored the fact that patriarchal systems in general and the ancient Mediterranean system in particular socialized men not only to dominate women but also to gain the upper hand over as many other men as possible. Along with social analysts and journalists, they have also mistakenly assumed that the terms egalitarianism and patriarchy describe opposite ends of the same social-political spectrum. Inadvertently, they have blurred the distinctions between two ancient social institutions: politics and kinship. These two missteps lead inevitably away from comprehension of Paul's implicit and explicit critique of the patriarchy of his day (see Bartchy 68-78).

In the Greco-Roman world, kinship and politics provided the key metaphors for a wide variety of human relationships. On the one hand, the term patriarchy belongs to the semantic field of kinship, the realm of the family. On the other hand, the term egalitarian belongs to the semantic field of politics and refers to such things as equal access to the vote, to positions of public leadership, and to ownership of property. Thus the opposite of patriarchal dominance is not egalitarian anarchy (or cooperation), as interpreters have commonly inferred, but something else–something for which we may not yet have a better term than non-patriarchy.

Likewise, the opposite of egalitarianism is not patriarchy as such but monarchy, oligarchy, or despotism. To be sure, part of our confusion in this area has been abetted by those Roman Emperors who sought to disguise their monarchy by selling it as a higher and public form of patriarchy. ….