Priests Without Penises
A friendly reader has asked my opinion on yesterday’s Salon piece about the womenpriests movement in the Catholic Church:
The hierarchy insists that the church has a constant tradition of ordaining only men. But what about Junia the apostle and Phoebe the deacon, in the Epistle of St. Paul to Romans? What about those tomb inscriptions for “Leta presbitera” and “Guilia Runa, woman priest”? What about Bishop Theodora, über-apostle Mary Magdalene…?
To which the diehards respond by putting their fingers in their ears and saying, “I can’t hear you”:
Not surprisingly, church spokespeople vigorously denounce the movement for women’s ordination. William Donahue of the Catholic League has dismissed the ordained women out of hand and declared their supporters to be “mad feminists” from “the asylum.” In an e-mail response to my specific questions, director of communications Robert Lockwood called the rich concrete evidence of women’s ordination “archaeological myth-making of the Da Vinci Code variety” and “hardly relevant.”
Aside from the fact that members of the batshit-crazy ultra-conservative Catholic League are not “church spokespeople,” this pretty well captures the controversy. So who’s right?
The pro-women’s ordination people, of course. Modern scholars recognize now that early Christianity had a remarkably radical gender-egalitarian component. (Well, as much as anything can be “recognized” about the lost past; what I’m going to say here represents the best historical reconstruction.) Probably Jesus’s core followers consisted of his brother James, Mary Magdalene, some guy named Cephas/Peter, and a few others — possibly more women than men. (The quaint notion of the Twelve Apostles is considered a late invention of the Gospel writers, created to provide a match with the Twelve Tribes of Israel.) At this remove nobody can really be sure what Jesus was about, but something that comes through pretty strongly in the earliest relics of his movement is an extreme leveling of traditional distinctions: between rich and poor, between male and female, between Jew and gentile.
For quite awhile after Jesus’s death women continued to be treated as equals — Paul refers to women as apostles, and their names are prominent in the fledgling religion. When the inevitable splintering of the movement began, different trends emerged: certain groups reverted to a more traditionally Jewish male-dominated structure, while others continued to embrace a philosophy of gender equality. There was, by the way, quite a bit of divergence in early Christianity, with many competing sects and great disagreement as to what the whole thing meant, who Jesus was, how followers should behave, and so forth.
Towards the end of the first century, the mainstreaming of the religion began in earnest. It had become clear that, pace Jesus and early Paul, the world was not actually going to end anytime soon, and so the most prominent Christian groups began shedding their radicalism and accommodating their religion to life in the Roman Empire. That’s really what spelled the downfall of women in the church, because gender equality was simply too radical for the mainstream culture. It had to go — think the Mormons jettisoning polygamy as the price of joining American society.
In the second century there continued to be a plethora of competing Christian sects, but the gender-egalitarian groups were becoming more and more marginalized. The mainstream church fathers, who strongly favored male supremacy, were positioning themselves as the voice of orthodoxy, and they did not hesitate to criticize all other forms of Christianity as “heretical.”* The war continued on paper, with the canonical gospels and the letters of Paul being re-worked to downplay women’s roles. Virtually all of the anti-woman passages in Paul are late forgeries created to justify the new policy of subordinating women. Other texts were also edited — and paintings even effaced — to remove the evidence of female apostles.
By the time Christianity was adopted as the state religion of the Roman Empire, 300 years after Jesus’s death, the evidence of the early days had been sufficiently suppressed that the few remaining egalitarian sects could be safely ridiculed as freakish heretics. Or as William Donahue says, “mad feminists” from “the asylum.”
*There was more at stake than just the role of women. The struggle to define what was “orthodox” and what was “heretical” encompassed many issues, ranging from the profound to the prosaic.
13 Responses to “Priests Without Penises”
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therealUK says:
Speaking as an atheist I would like to see a totally secular world, but failing that at least one where the religious stayed behind closed doors and communed with their imaginary friends and other consenting adults only, in private.
As soon as any of their deluded beliefs spill over into public and impact on the rest of us, then they should be flattened by a ton of bricks.
I am also slightly puzzled as to why the liberal/progressive wing of the Christian church seems to have so little to say against the more unpleasant right-wing fundies. I mean, Jesus himself (son of god or not) comes across as a bit of a tree-hugging bleeding-heart type. Don’t the lefty Christians ever challenge the facists with the whole love thy neighbour/good Samaritan/let he who is without sin ideas ?
Does the nicer version of Christianity just not get the media time, or is it that I read too many blogs where the total loony version always seems to be a big topic ?
August 1st, 2006 at 5:38 am EST -
Jimmy Ho says:
Religions are good at fabricating traditions a posteriori (more than a few Western Lamaists seem to be convinced that Buddhism is gay- and woman-friendly).
In the early 5th century, Hypatia was assassinated and her body dismembered by the Christians of Alexandria as a punishment for being an erudite gentile (εθνική) woman who refused to marry (and was apparently a virgin). Things don’t seem to have evolved that much.
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Violet says:
Does the nicer version of Christianity just not get the media time, or is it that I read too many blogs where the total loony version always seems to be a big topic ?
I just read this in Salon — it’s about Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic meltdown, but I think it speaks to your question:
“…America itself has changed — one might even say has been radicalized — since the election of George Bush. The merger of evangelical Christianity, which has long had a tinge of racism and anti-Semitism, with right-wing Republicanism has had many effects on American culture and politics, but perhaps the foremost among them is that it has legitimized attitudes that were previously considered illegitimate by the custodians of the social order. Mel Gibson has not only been the beneficiary of that change; he has courted those who effected it — those for whom extremism in the defense of their version of liberty is no vice.”
America is basically a culture of public hate now. And the loudest and most hateful of all are the evangelical Christians, who seem to regard everyone who disagrees with them as Satan incarnate.
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Invigilator says:
I would like to see some evidence of St Paul’s letters being “reworked.” I have long felt that he himself was the problem.
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Violet says:
I would like to see some evidence of St Paul’s letters being “reworked.” I have long felt that he himself was the problem.
It’s clear from the standpoint of linguistic and form analysis that the 7 authentic Pauline letters have been redacted by later editors, and the most odious passages referring to women look very much like later interpolations. The other letters, like Timothy, are late forgeries from decades after Paul’s death — the language and ideas expressed simply don’t belong to Paul or his world.
Of course this is a whole scholarly field and you need Greek if you really want to examine the evidence yourself, but for an introduction I’d recommend Bart Ehrman’s The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings.
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will says:
Oh baby! I love it when you talk biblical interpretation!
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Violet says:
Ha!
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will says:
Whisper “the King James version is bunk” to me once more in that low, low voice you use at those special times??? Plllleeeaaaseee.
or “God wrote it in English because we are his favored people.”????
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richard cherry says:
ah yes - bunk, but surely one of the greatest works of fiction from an age of great fiction. I love it.
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PamAlonia McCrary says:
I am currently working on a book in installments about how heavily invested the Bible is in the culture of drinking. You will find this here: http://www.godisajoke.com/book/
I have written several satirical essays about the Bible, which you will find here: http://www.godisajoke.com/essay-index/
I would love for you to read my work and critique it.
Thank you,
PamAlonia McCrary
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rootlesscosmo says:
There are strong parallels between official Christianity’s retrospective insistence that a thread of “true doctrine” ran straight from Jesus through the doctrinal confusions and disputes in the first few centuries CE (not to mention later), whence the redactions of Paul to align him with later Church practice, and Stalinism’s similar insistence that–even when figures like Trotsky and Bukharin et al. were trusted members of the leadership, close to Lenin, leading the Red Army and the Third International–*they were really enemies all the time,* which is why their images needed to be effaced in official iconography. (”The Vanishing Commissar” is a fascinating compilation of these images, showing how they were edited to remove “unpersons” as the years went on.)
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Pastor Al E Pistle says:
It really toasts my muffins that I cannot start my own topics and must live at the mercy of some woman who is addled by viruses and hormones.
This deserves a place of it’s own on the daily bulletin board…….which doesn’t exist.
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anna says:
The Catholic Church says that women cannot be ordained because Christ and his Apostles were not women. But Christ and his Apostles were also not Japanese (for example) and the Church ordains Japanese men. Seems unfair and inconsistent to me.
