Die Ordnung des "Hauses Gottes": Der Ort von Frauen in der Ekklesiologie und Ethik der Pastoralbriefe

Relying on form-critical distinctions between the "household management topos" and the "station code schema" worked out by David C. Verner (The Household of God and the Social World of the Pastoral Epistles [SBLDS 71; Chico: Scholars, 1983]), W argues that the Pastorals do not represent the latest instance in an unbroken line of formal or tradition-historical development of a single code of household management that runs from Colossians-Ephesians to 1 Peter before being taken up in the Pastorals. Using a combination of literary and rhetorical methods of analysis, W contends that the polemic is constructed from heterogeneous traditions: a Neo-Pythagorean adornment topos is appropriated in order to censure women's external "documentation" of their well-to-do status and the public claims they attach to it; an older Christian rule of worship (cf. Even as it is, however, W provides a new and specific epistolary occasion-though Dennis R. MacDonald's book The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983) should not be forgotten-which takes it as a given that attempts to prescribe structures of social life appeal to a prerogative, naturalized or sacralized (oikos theou!), by which more power is distributed to some and less to others, a distribution that in the Pastorals happens most hybristically along lines of gender.