The household was the basic unit of first-century society. It was not what we would call a nuclear family. It was an extended economic and social unit that included a married couple, their children, their children’s spouses and children, any surviving parents, hired workers, and slaves. In a rural Galilean village, the household might be ten people under one roof and around one courtyard. In a wealthy Jerusalem family, it might be fifty.
The Structure of the Household
The head of the household was the paterfamilias — the oldest living male. In Roman law, his authority was extensive: he could arrange marriages, dispose of property, and in principle even decide whether a newborn child would be raised. In Jewish practice, the father’s authority was real but bounded. Jewish law placed limits on his power over his wife and children that Roman law did not. He could not, for example, legally kill his children, and a wife’s rights in divorce were protected in ways they were not under Roman custom.1
Marriage was arranged, not chosen. A Jewish girl was typically married in her early teens; a Jewish boy in his late teens or early twenties. The marriage was a contract between families, and the ceremony itself was relatively brief — a betrothal (which was legally binding), followed months or years later by a wedding feast and the husband’s taking the bride into his household.2
Children
Children were valued, but the infant mortality rate was brutal. Perhaps a third of children died before their fifth birthday. Boys were educated in the Torah from the age of five or six, usually by their fathers, sometimes by a local teacher. Girls were educated at home, in the domestic skills that would prepare them for marriage.
By the age of twelve or thirteen, a boy was expected to begin taking on adult responsibilities. He might work in his father’s trade, or be apprenticed to another craftsman. He was not fully adult until he married and established his own household.
Women in the Household
Women’s lives were centered on the household. They managed the domestic economy: food preparation, clothing, the care of children and the elderly. They might also work outside the home — as vendors, midwives, weavers, or in family businesses. The wife of a fisherman might sell the catch in the market. The wife of a craftsman might help in the workshop.
Jewish women had more legal protections than Roman women in some respects. They could own property, inherit from their fathers, and initiate divorce in some circumstances.3 But their public role was limited, and their testimony was not accepted in certain legal proceedings (see the Empty Tomb comparison on this point).
Slaves
Slavery was universal in the ancient world. Perhaps a third of the population of the Roman Empire were slaves. Some were war captives, some were sold into slavery by debt, some were born into it. In Jewish Palestine, slavery existed but was regulated by Torah. A Jewish slave was to be released after six years (Exodus 21:2), and the treatment of slaves was governed by law.4
The New Testament does not call for the abolition of slavery as such. It calls for slaves to be treated justly and for masters to treat slaves as brothers (Ephesians 6:9; Philemon). This has been criticized in modern times, and the criticism is legitimate. The question of what the earliest Christians could have done, given the economic and legal realities of their world, is a separate and difficult one.
The Household Church
Christians met in houses. There were no purpose-built churches for the first two hundred years. The household was not just a family unit; it was the physical location of the church community.
This is why the New Testament is so concerned with household relationships. When Paul writes about husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and slaves (Ephesians 5–6; Colossians 3), he is writing about the structure of the communities where Christians actually gathered. The household was the church.
It is late afternoon in Capernaum. The courtyard of a Galilean house — four rooms around an open space, with a flat roof for sleeping in summer and a ladder up the outside wall. Peter’s wife is grinding grain for the evening meal. His mother-in-law is in the inner room, recovering from the fever Jesus healed. Andrew is mending the nets. Two of Peter’s children are playing in the yard.
And Jesus, who came to Capernaum a stranger, is sitting in the middle of it as though he had always belonged there. This is not a formal religious gathering. This is a household. That is the point.
Why the Household Matters for the Story
When the Gospels record that Jesus stayed at Peter’s house (Mark 1:29), or that he reclined at table with a household (Mark 2:15), or that he called his disciples to leave their households for the sake of the kingdom (Mark 10:29–30), they are operating in a world where the household was the primary unit of identity. To leave your household was to leave your identity. To join a new household — the community of disciples — was to take on a new identity that superseded the old.
The early Christians did not abandon the household. They transformed it. It became the location of their worship, the base of their mission, and the pattern for their community.
