Adoption in the Historical Context of the New Testament
Like the Ancient Near Eastern cultures that surrounded the Israelites of the Old Testament, the Hellenistic [Greek] and Roman culture of the first century A.D. viewed adoption as a mainly economic institution.1 Couples who either had no children or had no sons would adopt a male, usually an adult, from their circle of friends, thus ensuring the passing of property from one generation to the next. Adoption was common among the higher levels of society as a method for securing familial alliances and sharing property. In its strictest legal form, it was limited to the upper classes: “most leading citizens seem to have chosen to adopt from members of their own class. They still had to be Roman citizens at the time of adoption.”2 Indeed, adoption was one way that families could move a step or two up the social ladder.
Adoption was one of the tools of the Roman system of patronage; adoptees were chosen based on their personal merit or the benefit that an alliance with their biological family would bring the adopter. “Romans sought to multiply their family ties because such alliances entailed obligations between relatives who could then rely on one another for mutual assistance. These bonds of kinship resulted from marriages--increasingly frequent due to divorce--and from adoptions.”3 In contrast to our modern concept of adoption, the person being adopted usually had living parents. “Neither divorce nor adoption cut children off from their original family, or the family of the wife from that of her former husband. The son of Aemilius Paullus, adopted by a Scipio and thereafter known as Scipio Aemilianus, spoke of both his fathers in equally affectionate terms.”4
In terms of its use in Roman society, adoption was in fact an institution more similar to marriage than to any kind of welfare system. It was therefore rare that very young children would be adopted.5 Adoption of adults or teens was the norm, and almost all adoptees were male. There was no adoption of women in the Republican period, and the few examples that exist in the Imperial period were made either to gain property for the adopter, or to facilitate marriages.6 “Octavia, the daughter of Claudius, is the earliest known case, adopted into another unspecified family to enable her marriage to Claudius’ adopted son Nero, and thus technically avoid the incest taboo.”7 The fact that Octavia had to leave her biological family in order to avoid an incest taboo with her adopted brother reveals how complete the assimilation into the new family was for the adoptee.
“Adoption was far more frequent and important in Roman society than it is today. The person adopted (at any age) was taken out of his previous condition, all old debts were cancelled, and he started a new life in the relation of sonship to the new paterfamilias, whose family name he took and to whose inheritance he was entitled. The new father now owned the adoptee’s property, controlled his personal relationships, and had the right of discipline, while assuming responsibility for his support and liability for his actions--all just as with natural children born into the home.”8
Adoption, despite the fact that the adoptee’s biological family was still living, entailed a radical new identity and new life. Adoption, to the Romans, meant moving (usually as an adult) from one family to another. It did not mean, nor did it really have anything to do with, providing homes for fatherless children. Tomorrow’s post will examine the Greco-Roman culture’s response to orphans.
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1. Hugh Lindsay, Adoption in the Roman World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 219.
2. Lindsay, 22.
3. Florence Dupont, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 16.
4. Dupont, 16.
5. Lindsay, 221.
6. Lindsay, 73.
7. Lindsay, 73.
8. Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity, 3rd ed., (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 65-66.
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