Review of Regulating Sex in the Roman Empire: Ideology, the Bible, and the Early Christians

Tong, M Adryael

2018

2018-01-15

2010-2019

In Regulating Sex in the Roman Empire, David Wheeler-Reed takes on the ambitious project of mapping the various ideologies of marriage and sexuality in the Roman Empire, Judaism, the New Testament, and early Christianity, in an effort to understand the relationship these ideologies have to contemporary "Judeo-Christian" family values. His main argument is that "Christian groups that want to (re)establish so-called Judeo-Christian values in this country�have codified the imperial discourse of Augustus, with its emphasis on marriage and procreation, instead of early Christian ideology�which emphasized singleness" (xx). Relying on Foucauldian ideas about the relationship between discourse and power (e.g., xiv-xv), coupled with Deleuzian "map-making" (104), Wheeler-Reed eschews totalizing history (105) in favor of "a study of ideologies" (xi). He writes in an easy, readable, perhaps even conversational style unsual for monographs so heavily steeped in critical theory. Most impressive, however, is Wheeler-Reed�s command of an immense amount of ancient material spanning from Achilles Tatius to the Dead Sea Scrolls, Paul to John Cassian, and Philo to Jovinian.

http://readingreligion.org/books/regulating-sex-roman-empire.

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12322/itc.ir:2018_tong_m_adryael

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/