"Let Him Guard Pietas ": Early Christian Exegesis and the Ascetic Family

Often those Church Fathers most concerned to press the new ascetic elitism of the fourth and fifth centuries might also produce surprisingly "profamily" interpretations of biblical texts that otherwise supported an ascetic agenda. Through analysis of patristic interpretation of Luke 14.26 (an arguably "anti-family" passage of the New Testament), this article seeks to explore the inter-section of ascetic and family values in the scriptural interpretation of ascetic late antiquity. Through exegetical strategies (intertext and context) that em-phasized at once the multiplicity and the unity of biblical meaning, the most ascetic of Church Fathers might also become the most productive proponents of particularly distinctive notions of Christian family life.