The Passion of Perpetua is arguably one of the most
imaginative Christian texts that have come down to us from antiquity. It
tells the story of a group of Christians who were martyred at Carthage
on the occasion of emperor Getha’s birthday in 203. Particularly
prominent is the report about 22-year-old Vibia Perpetua, including some
kind of a prison diary that seems to feature her own words. In this
report, her path from a mere catechumen to a baptized Christian, who was
about to undergo the torments of martyrdom, is depicted as the
renunciation of her worldly kinship relations in favour of a new kind of
family that features Christ as the worthy replacement for the actual
father. Interestingly, this change of paradigm does not simply build on a
revision of notions of filial obligation (such as pietas) to
explain the dissociation with one and the affiliation with another
father figure but intertwines Roman moral thought with biblical motifs,
thereby producing a unique conflation of two distinct lines of
tradition. Starting from these observations, it is the aim of the paper
to elucidate Perpetua’s shift from one household model to the other
against the backdrop of these traditions. Thus, the analysis of the text
will focus on both the moral expectations that were associated with the
Roman household and the biblical imagery, which allocated a place in
the Christian family to Perpetua.
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