Domestic sexual abuse in early Christianity: conflations of violence and desire in the Acts of John

Abstract

‘Either I’ll have you as a wife, as I had you before, or you must die!’ So Andronicus yells at Drusiana, having locked her in a tomb for refusing to have sex with him, in the second-century Acts of John. Drusiana’s domestic setting houses a nested story of violence. Her husband’s abuse parallels that of a rival assailant, Callimachus, who in turn also involves Andronicus’ steward in his violent planning. After a brief overview of the passage, and consideration of its genre alongside other Greek novels and its use of comedy, this paper analyzes the domestic setting’s violence through the portraits of these three male characters and Drusiana. The article suggests that intersectional dynamics support the text’s rehabilitation of the elite male characters and denunciation of the ‘unchangeable’ steward, with implications also for understanding broader attitudes about marriage and sexual abuse in antiquity. In keeping with other portraits of sexual desire and violence elsewhere in the Acts of John, it argues that the text conflates violence and desire in the interest of championing celibacy, which is idealized in a mixed message about the one named female character in this passage, Drusiana.