The ‘Praetorium’ and ‘Caesar’s Household’: Introduction

Abstract

Apart from the names of the cities and provinces in which he and his addressees dwelt, Paul’s letters contain very few references to specific, concrete features of his world – few data, that is, that might serve to map the small network of co-workers, rivals and Christ groups portrayed in his letters onto the broader Roman world as otherwise attested. Two of the most striking exceptions occur in Philippians, where Paul claims that his chains have become manifestly ‘in Christ’ ‘in the whole praetorium and to all the rest’ (1.13) and subsequently passes along greetings from certain ‘saints’ who belong to ‘Caesar’s household’ (4.22). However, these references have not enriched reconstructions of the social history of the earliest Christ groups so much as one might expect. As the articles in this special issue outline, their usefulness in this regard has been impaired by a number of related interpretive snares: the controlling influence of the depiction of Paul’s imprisonments in Acts and its legacy, entanglement with apologetic concerns and, finally, a narrow focus on the date and provenance of Philippians – when Paul wrote it and whether from Rome, Ephesus or Caesarea – that, for much of the past century, left exegetes mired in a tedious stalemate. The articles presented here derive from a panel of invited papers sponsored by the Historical Paul section at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. The aim of the session was to reconsider the significance of Paul’s references to the praetorium and ‘Caesar’s household’ as evidence not only for the geographical provenance of the letter, but also for the social milieu of which it is an artifact. In practice, this meant first subjecting the literary and inscriptional evidence for the two terms to fresh scrutiny. Here previous publications by Michael Flexsenhar III (2019a, 2019b) and Angela Standhartinger (2015) laid the groundwork for a decisive break with interpretations of the data that have prevailed since the work of