Strangers to Family

Diaspora and 1 Peter's Invention of God's Household

Shively T. J. Smith

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781481305501
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In Strangers to Family Shively Smith reads the Letter of 1 Peter through a new model of diaspora. Smith illuminates this peculiarly Petrine understanding of diaspora by situating it among three other select perspectives from extant Hellenist Jewish writings: the Daniel court tales, the Letter of Aristeas, and Philo's works. While 1 Peter tends to be taken as representative of how diaspora was understood in Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian circles, Smith demonstrates that 1 Peter actually reverses the most fundamental meaning of diaspora as conceived by its literarypeers. Instead of connoting the scattering of a people with a common territorial origin, for 1 Peter, diaspora constitutes an "already-scattered-people" who share a common, communal, celestial destination. Smith's discovery of a distinctive instantiation of diaspora in 1 Peter capitalizes on her careful comparative historical, literary, and theological analysis of diaspora constructionsfound in Hellenistic Jewish writings. Her reading of 1 Peter thus challenges the use of the exile and wandering as master concepts to read 1 Peter, reconsiders the conceptual significance of diaspora in 1 Peter and in the entire New Testament canon, and liberates 1 Peter from being interpreted solely through the rubrics of either the stranger-homelessness model or household codes. First Peter does not recycle standard diasporic identity, but is, as Strangers to Family demonstrates, an epistle that represents the earliest Christian construction of diaspora as a way of life.

Part I

Diaspora through the Lens of 1 Peter

The first three chapters are focused strictly on the New Testament First Letter of Peter and its construction of a diaspora-Christian identity and praxis. The letter leverages diaspora to cast a unique understanding of existing as a distinct people of God living throughout the world. The contemporary reader faces the challenge of understanding the letter afresh in light of its peculiar image of diaspora, rather than simply its canonical placement or its historical misinterpretation in service to social institutions such as American slavery and patriarchy. What is diaspora in the thought-world of 1 Peter? How does it shape and inform the worldviews and practices of the people who subscribe to its proposal? Moreover, what benefit is the image of diaspora to the larger sociopolitical and theological vision the letter conveys? Diaspora creates a world of duality, even plurality, rather than singularity, and 1 Peter leverages that to empower readers with a new vision of the world and their agency within it as the people of God, or, in the vernacular of their environs, as “Christians” (1 Pet 4:16). The image of dispersion as the chosen state of God’s people infiltrates all aspects of the letter.

1

Chosen Kinship

Imagining Christian Diaspora

One benefit of narrative is its capacity to shape stories, be they fictional or actual, into new ways of knowing—into new stories. Sometimes those stories are for mere entertainment, providing readers an escape from their reality and introducing them to new worlds, new characters, unexpected events, and alternate story lines that appear odd, deviant, bewildering, and even enticing. Other times stories are educational, imparting information and knowledge previously out of the grasp of its audience as well as animating or corroding its audience’s moral center and good judgment. In addition to stimulating a reader’s imagination and offering something “other” than the world one knows and recognizes, stories can also make propositions. Narratives can bestow new frames upon readers for reconsidering old facts. Narratives can construct new trajectories and bring shape and definition to cloudy dreams and unmapped plans.

While 1 Peter is not a narrative in a formal sense, it leaves a similar indelible mark on its readers, even in its epistolary form.1 First Peter is an ancient letter written by someone called “Peter, the apostle of Jesus Christ,” to variously located and mixed Jewish Gentile audiences (although predominantly Gentiles) located elsewhere and at a distance from the author.2 Specifically, 1 Peter is a paraenetic letter, written to encourage a troubled, vulnerable, and scattered readership.3 Its aim is to embolden the group’s commitment to their confession and community and equip them with practical advice on how to endure and prepare for the inevitable attacks to come.

Like narratives, 1 Peter casts a new vision of readers’ immediate circumstances and imminent future. An important dimension of its paraenetic shape is the constructive work of its rhetoric. It is not just stating facts and addressing concerns with abstract “feel-good” language. Rather, the letter proposes an entirely new way of thinking about events and situations that is self-evident and real to its intended audience. The letter imagines a different course of action in familiar and precarious times. It is an invitation to “switch stories” and enter into a new life orientation and a new way of being “God’s own people” (1 Pet 2:9).4 It is a sort of “love offering” to its intended readers (and beyond) who dare to consider that their life story transcends their immediate situation. For those with hopes that there is something more to the Christian confession and story than just membership in a local body that convenes regularly in spite of the threat of extirpation, 1 Peter gifts them with a new image, diaspora.

It is that imaginative work or storytelling around the notion of diaspora that requires focused investigation and deep appreciation. In addition to asserting theological propositions, what the letter imagines as possible in the world and what it envisions as the core identity and makeup of the people of God is essential to appreciating 1 Peter fully and its place among other diaspora-focused writings from the Hellenistic Jewish world. The image of diaspora expresses a core belief that no body constitutes merely a group of isolated strangers striving to make it on their own in a world known for responding with great cruelty, disregard, and violence for the unrecognizable “other.” Diaspora in 1 Peter reminds readers they are members of a diverse and vast kinship requiring only acknowledgment and embrace. First Peter constructs a new reality in which readers “can see how to fit their own stories” into a larger narrative that surpasses them.5 There is value to be gained from reading 1 Peter as a kind of diaspora consciousness and narrative that imagines something so new it requires innovation in semantic definition and social construction.

Imagining Diaspora as 1 Peter Imagines

The first image of diaspora 1 Peter communicates is kinship.6 The term “diaspora” is situated strategically in 1 Peter’s opening greeting (1 Pet 1:1). Here, the letter assigns the recipients the distinct identity of “the elect-foreigners of the Diaspora.”7 The letter’s salutation illustrates its complex vision of the world and the Christian kinship that extends across it. The word “diaspora” appears in the form of a genitive of apposition and gives further definition to the preceding head noun, which is the conjoined substantive “elect-foreigner” (eklektois parepidēmois).8 As the head phrase, elect-foreigner depicts a large category that is ambiguous and unspecific. Exactly which group of elect-foreigners is the letter addressing, and where are they located?

Diaspora clarifies the identity and location of the addressees, yet alone this grammatical construct is too broad to be particularly helpful.9 Both the Greek Dispersion and Jewish Dispersion are too vast and ubiquitous in geography and chronology for the mere use of the Greek word to effectively delimit them. The letter provides additional details in the form of a catalog of provinces. This resolves the ambiguity of elect-foreigner in the opening and anchors the image of diaspora in geographic places and among particular sets of peoples, though scattered and disparate. Organized from broad to narrow, elect-foreigner, diaspora, and the catalog collectively project the literary imagination of the letter writer. Those regions and the people whom 1 Peter addresses are just segments of a larger population dispersed across the Roman world. The letter uses the proper noun form of diaspora, therefore, to heighten its readers’ awareness of their larger kinship and collective consciousness.

It is important to note that from the perspective of the epistle, decisive and volitional consent induce the diaspora condition, not divine compulsion and peremptory command. In other words, diaspora is not the creation and action of God against the people. Rather, diaspora life is the product of people’s faithful response to God’s action through Christ as they embrace their newfound identity and kinship, now called “Christian” (1 Pet 4:16). The paraenetic quality of the letter constantly encourages readers to a common future action, which implies choice. First Peter encourages readers, as diaspora Christians, to make three different social choices. It exhorts them to choose how they will relate to the outside world, to each other within the community, and to God and God’s created order.

Choosing to Relate Globally

While 1 Peter opens with a focus on the territory of Asia Minor, it portrays the scale and reach of Christian relationships surpassing those boundaries. The letter envisions other diaspora communities alongside its intended recipients and crafts a vision of a Christian relational matrix readers have yet to fully realize or leverage. From the letter’s vantage point, the addressees constitute independent local communities who have a responsibility and connection to other independent Christian communities located elsewhere. In fact, the letter itself demonstrates this connection and responsibility as it implies that the author wrote it from Rome for circulation among multiple Christian communities in Asia Minor.10 The final greeting in 5:13, in which “the sister church in Babylon . . . sends you greetings,” signals a kinship and bond. It is an acknowledgment that there are others in the world similar to the letter’s addressees (1 Pet 5:9) to whom they are accountable and attached.

Moreover, each time the designation “us” appears in the body of the letter, whether in 1 Peter 1:3, “By his great mercy God has given us a new birth into a living hope,” or in 4:17, “for the time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God; if it begins with us,” readers are reminded they are part of a larger interregional body. The “us” of Christianity includes all those who belong to the household of God locally and abroad. Consistently throughout 1 Peter, diaspora functions as a literary and conceptual mechanism for crafting a new dyadic identity. It nurtures a collective awareness around being “Christian” in which a fundamental characteristic is choosing to be part of a larger body that is not limited to the recipients’ local environs.

For the letter, the voluntary aspect of diaspora becomes a factor when people choose to operate as “Christian.” Christians are a unified but diverse body of members who are obedient to Jesus Christ (1 Pet 1:14) and hope in God (1 Pet 1:21). They can choose to be obedient to the revelation of God that is revealed through Christ’s resurrection (1 Pet 1:3; 3:21) or not (1 Pet 1:14). The repetitive use of the conditional conjunction “if” (ei) signals the volitional nature of their diasporic situation. For instance, 1 Peter 1:17 says, “If you invoke as Father the one who judges. . . .” Likewise, 1:20 says, “But if you endure being beaten for doing good and suffer for it. . . .” The conditional component in these verses arises from the possibility that the readers can choose to not call on God as Father or not endure being unduly punished and attacked. Indeed, historical sources postdating 1 Peter indicate the author’s intuition was correct. Some Christians would eventually choose to abandon the faith and community altogether.

The Pliny–Trajan correspondence of 112 CE, in which Pliny inquires about Emperor Trajan’s preferences regarding how to handle the Christian problem in his territory, confirms what the letter writer feared could happen more than twenty-five years earlier. Pliny’s letter states that he ferreted out some former Christians, who have demonstrated their “repentance” in the form of public obeisance to the emperor’s image and prayers to Greco-Roman gods. Instead of being private devotees of a monotheistic faith, they have allegedly willingly participated in public acts of emperor worship and polytheism. Former Christians’ public display of polytheistic practices is significant because, as Pliny states, committed Christians refused to perform such observances. Pliny states, “For, whatever the nature of their admission, I am convinced that their stubbornness and unshakable obstinacy ought not to go unpunished” (Ep. 10.96).11 The account of Pliny’s formal interrogation, where the threat of physical punishment and execution was real, highlights the degree to which “choice” is a factor in Christian identity and allegiance. Christianity, particularly diaspora Christianity, is a volitional social location and group identity that can thrust invisible people and classes into the spotlight of Roman governance and local suspicion.

A brief canonical survey of other instances of diaspora in the NT reveals that by the end of the first century, when 1 Peter along with the bulk of the NT writings had been written, conceptions of diaspora had evolved from a prohibitive and forced condition to notions of voluntary group departure and permanent settlement elsewhere. Across the NT literature, the word “diaspora” represents liberating and deliberate mass emigration and the formation of new social bonds, both inside and outside the immediate Jewish and Christian communities. For instance, in Acts 8:1, Jewish Christians in Jerusalem are said to disperse (diaspeirō) to Judea and Samaria out of fear of impending persecution at the hands of a fanatical Jewish Pharisee, Saul.12 Acts 8:4 details what the dispersed Jewish Christian populations did upon their arrival to their new locations—they evangelized people while simultaneously resettling among them. Again, in Acts 11:19 the Jewish Christians respond to the possibility of persecution, as exhibited in the execution of the Hellenist Stephen, by scattering (diaspeirō) to even farther-flung areas and resettling among established Greek Jewish communities in Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch.13 Although these passages define diaspora as a departure from a geographic place, rather than a departure from a normative Greco-Roman lifestyle, they nonetheless lead to an act of group preservation, which rarely results in total withdrawal and isolation from the larger surrounding environment.

In contrast, earlier Hellenistic Jewish writers characterized the origin of diaspora as God’s punishment of the Jews for their disobedience. Punishment took on the form of involuntary displacement, disenfranchisement, and marginal “othering” (LXX Jer 15:7; Jdt 5:19; Deut 28:15-25).14 In biblical Jewish writings, diaspora signals a strained relationship between God and the people in the form of forced population movement and resettlement outside Israel’s proclaimed homeland. For instance, Nehemiah summarizes God’s own words from LXX Deuteronomy 30:1-5 when he says, “Remember now the word that you commanded your servant Moses, saying, ‘You, if you are faithless, I will scatter you among the peoples, and if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, if your dispersion is to the farthest skies, from there I will gather them and lead them to the place where I have chosen my name to encamp there.’ ” (Neh 1:8-9 NETS). Likewise, in LXX Jeremiah 41:17, God says, “You have not obeyed me by calling for a release, each pertaining to his fellow. Behold, I am calling for a release for you to the dagger and to death and to the famine, and I will give you as a dispersion to all the kingdoms of the earth.” These passages represent the scriptural position that God is responsible for the Israelites’ dislocation from their “home,” while foreign rulers are merely instruments God uses to accomplish the task (LXX Jer 41:18; 28:25).15

The NT writers, however, characterize the act of dispersal as a voluntary population movement from a central location to another with the aim of avoiding social, politic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Diaspora through the Lens of 1 Peter
• Part II: Diaspora the Way Others Imagine
• Conclusion: Liberating 1 Peter’s Diaspora Vision
• Bibliography
• Index
• Notes