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Disruptive Christian Ethics
would be viable to cut the poverty rate by more than 50 percent if, in part,
“teenagers who are unmarried didn’t have babies.”49 The enactment of
disciplinary public policies regulating poor girls and women was repeat
edly justified with arguments like these by academic consultants like
Loury and political leaders like Clinton. Denial of public assistance, par
ticularly for teenage mothers, was supported by varied rhetorical strate
gies often using (manipulating?) black churches as the public stage for
invoking the need to instill Christian family values. Yet so central in
launching the core Christian narrative ofJesus’ life and ministry—at least
in Luke’s gospel account—is the one with whom God found favor (Luke
1:30, 48): an unwed, pregnant, Jewish female who may have been just a
teenager, perhaps only twelve or thirteen years old.
In Luke’s ancient cultural context, patriarchal control usually monitored
the sexual status of teenage females. Fathers normally took control (though
mothers may have frequently played an unofficial role).50 Arrangements
for marriage were most often negotiated between the fathers, or between
the bride’s father and her future husband. Citing a marriage contract where
the dowry is related to the bride’s status as a virgin, ancient Jewish studies
scholar Ross Kraemer explains that “Jews, like their gentile neighbors,
placed a heavy cultural and economic premium on virginity at first
marriage.”51 Furthermore, though the data are minimal, we know that
“enslaved Jewish women owned by non-Jews would almost certainly have
routinely found themselves required to provide sexual services for their
owners” and bear their children.52Thus in this ancient world, female sex
ual reproduction was an important matter for the community to regulate
and control through a variety of customs. Of course, females with the least
status and power in the society seemed to have endured the most coercive
forms of this control, including overt violence.53
How does the depiction of Mary in Luke’s text reflect some of these
realities of women’s status and autonomy in the Greco-Roman world?
There is considerable scholarly discussion about how to interpret the
author’s intentions regarding gender. The Lukan author includes multi
ple references to women in Luke and Acts. Conflicting interpretations
yield differing conclusions, but they consistently show how centrally the
issues of gender and social control are at stake in this text.
Some interpreters celebrate Luke’s inclusion of so many women charac
ters as a sign of his support for broadening women’s participation in reli
gion and society.54 However, some biblical scholars have concluded that
Luke sought to limit the leadership activities of women in his early Chris
tian audience.55As Mary Rose D’Angelo notes, after the speeches of Kliza