Bible, New Testament

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Bible, New Testament

Sex in the ancient world may be regarded as a biological identity. Gender is a "social construct" indicating the ways in which men and women are taught values and behaviors appropriate to gender roles and social expectations. Practicing sophrosune, for example, is self-control for men but discretion and even silence for women. The gender ideology of the public and the private implies leadership roles in the public sphere for men, while women's domain is the household. However, this differentiation cannot be taken too far because the ancient household was also a public space regardless of its size or economy.

IDEOLOGY AND INTERPRETATION

"Let a woman learn in silence with all submission," writes the author of I Timothy 2:12, imitating Paul. "I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve." However, the injunction reveals more about the writer than about the social position of women in early Christian movements. The focus in the text is on the problem of "women," and by means of such texts one can see the ideological uses of interpretation to authorize and sustain certain relationships of domination.

The ideal of restricted women's behavior in the public space is relevant to understanding the contradiction in Paul's first letter to Corinth on the proper role of women in worship and the harshness of the prohibition on women teachers (1 Timothy 2:11-12). Although Paul expected women to take an active role in worship in terms of prophetic speech (1 Corinthians 11:5), he also demanded women's silence in the assembly (1 Corinthians 14:34-35): "The women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church."

In this context Paul can be seen as an orator adopting a role as head of household to preserve order in the Christian community through personal authority. This is best seen in the fiat in 1 Corinthians 11:16: "If any man will not be ruled in this question, this is not our way of doing things, and it is not done in the churches of God." Through the ordering and gendering of the household Paul exercised control over the community, placing special emphasis on particular hairstyles and veiling practices. This is also part of Paul's promotion of an ordered, moderate, upright community that reflected the "glory" of both Paul and God.

Thus, female conduct at Corinth or anywhere else was incidental to the main argument establishing Paul's domination and power over those constructed as being in need of control. Of course, the ecclesial body benefits from stability. However, the predominant cultural value system in which Paul was operating and that he inscribed on the Corinthian body and sought to promote as the basis for his own identity for the audience has to be seen from a Greco-Roman male perspective. Paul was trying to control women who prophesied. In the ancient world prophesying was anarchic and not gender-specific. Paul intended to counter what the early Church Fathers and he regarded as chaos with an ordered and structured Christian community in which women "know their place."

CONTROL OF BODIES AND HOUSEHOLDS

The argument begins with control of his own body (1 Corinthians 7), which is the starting point for domination of others (1 Corinthians 11). The female body in turn becomes the cultural and rhetorical battleground for the maintenance of custom in Paul. In so ordering the Corinthian "household" Paul realizes the stability of an ordered empire. Seen in this light, early Christian witnesses such as 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 become a powerful statement about Paul's status as head of household and maintainer of Corinthian order.

The household is the projection of Paul's ability to control, order, and dominate, and it becomes the model for the author of I Timothy.

Some scholars have proposed that the injunction of I Timothy is an interpolation on the basis of concerns about female modesty in the public space. I Timothy 3:5 describes an overseer (bishop) as the husband of one wife and the manager of the household, arguing: "For if a man has not the art of ruling his house, how will he take care of the church of God?" It can be suggested that the text serves as a witness to a reading of Paul's exclusion of women from the emerging leadership role of monarchical bishop and the use of a rhetoric of shame to ensure women's silence in public arenas.

Such understandings of Paul's letters to the Corinthians echo in analyses of his letter to the Romans and its condemnation of sexual relations between men and men and women and women. Bernadette Brooten concentrates on same-sex relations between women in the ancient world and shows that "throughout Western history we find the male creators of culture and of ideology wavering between assuming that sexual relations between women do not exist at all—indeed cannot exist—and imagining that if they do, then the women must be capable of penetration" (Brooten 1996, p. 190). In regard to that notion, "this focus on penetration as the principal sexual image led to a simplistic view of female erotic behavior and a complex view of the erotic choices of free men" (Brooten 1996, p. 49). In the Roman imperial era the phenomenon of female same-sex love received increased attention and then broad societal recognition. However, it is important to examine the source of that hostility.

In ancient Mediterranean concepts of sexuality "active and passive define what it means to be masculine/feminine" (Brooten 1996, p. 125; cf. p. 157, n. 43). If a female played the penetrating (i.e., active) role, she transgressed those fundamental categories, acting "contrary to nature." However, this was also the case if a woman allowed herself to be penetrated by another woman. The logic is skewed, but Brooten shows that "female homoeroticism did not fit neatly into ancient understandings of sexual relationships as essentially asymmetrical" (Brooten 1996, p. 76). Only Christians wanted homoerotic women to die and burn in hell. "Paul condemned sexual relations between women as 'unnatural' because he shared the widely held cultural view that women are passive by nature and therefore should remain passive in sexual relations" (Brooten 1996, p. 216).

It is important to realize that before the author of I Timothy wrote, women such as Phoebe were patrons in a community of Roman believers (Romans 16:1-2) and that there were female apostles before Paul, such as Junia (Romans 16:7). Lydia was a God fearer and wealthy householder who was baptized by Paul with her whole household. She was a patron to the house church and a traveling apostle (Acts 16:11-15).

REPRODUCTION AND THE COMMUNITY OF GOD

Recent study of John's gospel demonstrates how the author sought to eradicate sex by envisaging the generation of new members of the Johannine community from not of God without conception and birth (John 1:12-13). In Chapter 1 Jesus exists as God's word. In Chapter 3 Nicodemus explores what being born anew (or from above) means. To be born from above or born anew does not mean entering the mother's womb a second time (John 3:4). As Jesus explains to a mystified Nicodemus, it means being born of water and the spirit.

If John's gospel describes human generation in a nonbiological way, one can see why Jesus' parents and family of origin are absent from the gospel. Jesus has a mother, but he never addresses her as such. Except at Cana neither of them makes claims on the other as family members in a way that those in the same household might be expected to, and even at Cana the claim is not framed in terms of family obligation. Jesus' words in John 2:4, "Woman, what have I to do with you?" distance him from his earthly mother and cause more distress to interpreters than to his mother. Moreover, Jesus distances women from men: To the Samaritan woman he says, "You are right in saying, 'I have no husband,' for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true" (John 4:17-18); to the woman taken in adultery he says, "No one has condemned you, neither do I," although the law condemns both the man and the woman (Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 22:22). Similarly, in John's gospel parents separate or differentiate themselves from their children: The parents of the man born blind say, "Ask him, he is of age" (John 9:23).

At the crucifixion scene Jesus consigned the Beloved Disciple to replace him as son to his mother (John 19:25-26). Affiliation was not through birth; Jesus' mother is now mother or guardian to the prototypical disciple in whatever community exists after Jesus' death. From the cross, in a last will and testament, Jesus affiliated a new son to his mother. He created a mother-son bond through his last words. The new son takes his new mother into his realm (or house) and in so doing sustains the bond. Jesus creates through words a new family of his disciples: brothers, sisters, and friends he loves, the most prominent of whom becomes son to his mother. The Beloved Disciple is thus a (re)born child of God not by desire, by man, or by the will of the flesh.