Editorial Introduction

Abstract

The study of families has been a major topic of research on the ancient world especially since the 1990s (Rawson, 2010: 8-10). According to historian of Roman families Beryl Rawson (2010: 2), this represents a major shift in the study of classical culture away from earlier tendencies to attach minor importance to aspects of family existence or to relegate them to secondary discussions of ''daily life'': ''No longer can we treat as of only antiquarian, or superficially entertaining, interest aspects such as how people dined or bathed, in what sort of housing they lived, who married whom and what happened after divorce or death, what were their religious rites, and what role family and family relationships played in all of these.'' The study of children and childhood is a subset of this larger enterprise, with new important surveys of the Roman period emerging such as that by Rawson (2003), Dasen and Späth (eds) (2010), and Laes (2011; Dutch publication in 2006). The topic of this special issue is children and childhood in early Judaism and early Christianity, but research on children and childhood in religious traditions has benefitted greatly from studies on the Greek and Roman worlds. It must also be said that there is now increasing dialogue between ancient historians and experts on early Christianity (Balch and Osiek, 2003) on the topic of families, with classical scholars themselves recognizing that it is no longer possible to conceive of early Christianity as ''a separate world'' (Rawson, 2010: 4). Roman historians have an enormous advantage, however, over scholars of early Judaism and Christianity because of the existence of extensive