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Women’s Contributions to Christian Origins
It is often claimed that there is not a great deal written about Mary in the New Testament, and that would certainly be true if we did not have the first two chapters of Luke. But how far can this relative silence be explained by the fact that she was a woman in a patriarchal age?
Feminist analysis of the Bible might seem to some to be a niche subject, a political take which has more to do with the social changes of the twentieth century than the circumstances of the first century in which the gospels were written. But this is a wrong impression. While feminism is a modern social movement which has initiated new ways of reading the Bible, nevertheless its central question is one that is unavoidable and should have been asked many centuries earlier. It concerns the Christian witness of around one half of the members of the early Church: the women. What was their contribution to a Church that was led by men, its founding documents supposedly written by men? Can we recover anything of their voices? Did they offer a perspective which we might have lost? The context of a person shapes their thinking and their experiences. Social demarcation between male and female in ancient Jewish culture in terms of roles, expectation, and opportunities means that the female perspective on the revolutionary events of the first Easter and its aftermath will have contrasted to a male one in some respects.
We are faced with the fact that the world in which the Church was born and has developed right up until now has been patriarchal, in that men have had priority over women in terms of controlling and shaping the world in which we live; Christian texts and beliefs reflect that world. There are two main responses: the first is to abandon the Christian faith, because it is so thoroughly and irredeemably male-dominated. Some feminists have done this, along with many other people who feel that Christianity is no longer relevant to the modern situation. The second is to find a way to reform it. Given that Christianity is based on the Bible, because its texts tell us about the centre and origin of the Christian faith, Jesus Christ the Word of God Incarnate, any reformation requires radically new interpretations of the Bible, especially the New Testament.
If male supremacy, or indeed the domination of any group of human beings over others, is regarded as a sin, something to be challenged and changed, then it is impossible for a Christian to accept that Jesus Christ promoted it. If Jesus Christ is God, then his teaching must be universal, for all times and places. The Son of God, the Word who speaks the truth of God to all generations through history, cannot be sexist and misogynist, bound to a patriarchal context. While the first-century context will reflect the way in which Jesus’ teaching was first received and will colour the way in which it was originally presented, nevertheless it must be possible to find the liberation of all people at its heart. Fortunately, there is nothing in Jesus’ own practice in the gospels to suggest that he was committed to the right of males to retain power in society, nor that he approved of any form of domination or marginalization.
Of course, the writers of the gospels and Acts, who belonged to a culture far removed from ours, have presented their material in such a way that women’s voices are not as prominent as men’s, even though we find strong females in the text. There is also the problem that instructions enforcing the silencing and subjugation of women can be found in some of the epistles traditionally ascribed to Paul (for example, 1 Cor. 14.34–35, 1 Tim. 2.12–14). Yet elsewhere, Paul states that ‘there is no longer male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal. 3.28),1 which is likely to have been an early strand of tradition, as Galatians is one of the first of Paul’s letters, one of those probably written by Paul himself. For these reasons, feminist analysis has suggested a distinction between the ethos of Jesus and his original community, and the practice of the Church at the time when the later epistles and gospels were written.
The claim in feminist biblical studies that Jesus’ original community was egalitarian cannot be proved, and it can be challenged on the grounds that it is ‘golden age’ thinking rather than genuine history of the origins of Christianity. Nevertheless, it does have support in the general observation that religious movements are often highly radical at the outset, and then gradually accept the social world in which they are forced to operate. This has been referred to as the ‘routinization of charisma’, a concept suggested by the sociologist Max Weber. It can be applied to any religion or denomination. This general phenomenon does lend some weight to the idea that Jesus was more egalitarian on the question of gender than the New Testament texts might suggest.
Susan Hylen, in her book Women in the New Testament World, shows that research on women in the ancient Greco-Roman Mediterranean reveals a picture that is far from uniform. This diversity also applies to Jewish culture. Although women were often instructed to remain passive and silent in male writing on ideal behaviours (and this includes the Pauline epistles), this was far from the reality of everyday relations between the sexes. While denied the very highest positions in the imperial hierarchy (except when deriving power from their husbands, as with the empress), women participated fully in many other areas of life, and did assume positions of responsibility and leadership. The common view that women only had a say in the ‘private sphere’ is complicated by the fact that the virtues of the domestic situation were projected into the public and civic environment, so that virtues such as modesty, industry, and loyalty were at the same time domestic and social. For this reason, women had a role to play in a range of social activities, save perhaps for the highest level of politics and the legislature. Women, it is true, were subordinate to men as a general rule, but this subordination was only to men of equal or higher rank.
Because the New Testament was formed in the Greco-Roman world in which this complicated cultural situation existed, we can therefore expect to find this complexity reflected in the New Testament and the communities from which it emerged: the ideals of female subordination as expressed in male writing versus the everyday reality of women’s participation and responsibility, even leadership. The area in which women were most obviously subjugated was in written texts, and the New Testament is a collection of texts. It may not represent fully the female voices and activities at the origins of Christianity.
It would not be right to suggest that women in ancient Jewish culture suffered more greatly from patriarchal suppression than in other nations of the time or in the Christian tradition which was to come; Jewish women did participate and had some influence in both religious and civic life. There is evidence that women had leadership roles in synagogues (which strengthens the case for women’s leadership in Christianity).2 Yet, it would appear that the higher the social class, the rarer the opportunities for women in the Jewish culture of that time to assume any position which had power or responsibility, such as in the monarchy, the main institutions of government, or the priesthood. These were the agents of power in ancient Mediterranean society, and therefore women for the most part had no say in the most important factors that determined their lives, unless they were able to influence men of power (as portrayed through stereotypes in the legend of Herodias manipulating her husband Herod Antipas to execute John the Baptist).
Hylen shows that widows in ancient Mediterranean cultures were sometimes women of means. They often lived with their sons and other male relatives, but this did not mean that they were powerless within the family; on the contrary, they had social and religious influence (for example, see Judith in the book of Judith,3 and Anna in Luke 2.36–38). Some widows remarried, while many others regarded staying single as remaining faithful to their first husbands. There is a common assumption that Mary was a widow at the time of the ministry of Jesus, which is a reasonable one given that women usually married men who were older and that Joseph plays no part in the narrative of Jesus’ adulthood.
Women and the Bible
The process of finding female voices in biblical history, where one has been used to hearing and reading male voices, is known as reclaiming. Stories are shaped by contexts and experiences. One could make a very good case for the argument that women in the early Church were involved in the storytelling and creation of the narratives, if not their written forms (and it has been suggested that women may have written some of the texts, although this is not the mainstream academic view).
In the New Testament, women’s contributions to early Christianity were given less prominence than those of men, and women are portrayed in particular ways that reflect a patriarchal culture. In some ways, the Old Testament comes off better than the New! It is true that there are extremely misogynistic texts in the Hebrew Scriptures and Old Testament apocrypha4 but there are also strong female characters. There are the foremothers of Israel: Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, Rachel, and Sarah’s slave, Hagar. Ruth has a book in her name, and her relationship with her mother-in-law Naomi is an enduring story in the Bible. To these we can add women whose major contribution is not simply mothering: the judge Deborah; Judith, and Jael, the assassins of leaders of enemies of the Israelites; Esther, the Jewess who became a Persian queen and interceded to save the Jewish people, the third woman who is the subject of an entire book. In the Song of Songs, we read about love from the perspective of the female partner. Women’s lives are reflected in the Hebrew Scriptures, even if often we encounter stereotypes rather than real women of the period (and this can be said of men too). Given that women were readers and hearers of scriptural texts as well as men, it is not surprising that the canon includes something of the female experience.
The New Testament contains strong indications that women were ministers or householders in the early Church: Chloe (‘Chloe’s people’, 1 Cor. 1.11); Phoebe the deacon of Romans 16.1; Lydia, who is baptized with her household (Acts 16.15); the ‘leading women’ of Acts 17.4. ‘Nympha and the church in her house’ is mentioned in Colossians 4.15, and Acts 12.12 describes ‘the house of Mary, the mother of John whose other name was Mark, where many had gathered and were praying’. These expressions suggest female Christian leadership at a time when worship was confined to private houses, as the head of the house led liturgy and worship.
Nevertheless, in the gospel passages that describe Jesus’ ministry, the emphasis is on male disciples as the confidants of Jesus. He sometimes takes aside the leading three disciples, Peter and the sons of Zebedee, as in the Transfiguration narrative (Matt. 17.1–13; Mark 9.2–13; Luke 9.28–36). The calls to the first of Jesus’ followers in all four gospels refer only to males, and the twelve disciples listed in three of them are all male. On other occasions, the twelve seem to be alone with him, as at the Last Supper in Matthew 26.20 and Mark 14.17 (the term ‘apostles’ at Luke 22.14 is less specific and John does not specify the total number present). There is no female disciple explicitly present at the Last Supper, which includes some of the most important passages of Jesus’ teaching and the institution of the Eucharist.
Each gospel has an average of twenty-one separate pieces of narrative5 which refer to male disciples by name or refer to ‘the twelve’, who are clearly male. There are another twenty-three on average which refer to ‘the disciples’ or ‘the apostles’, where probably males are implied (possibly one could argue that men and women might have been intended by these expressions). Contrasting with this: outside the group of named disciples, and also excluding the birth and infancy narratives and those concerning John the Baptist, each gospel has an average of nine sections where named or anonymous women encounter Jesus, and twelve with named or anonymous men.6
There are, of course, notable exceptions to the general rule that men are more prominent in the gospels: the birth and infancy narratives in Luke and the empty tomb stories in all four gospels are examples where women act as the main subjects of the text. We might expect women to be prominent in texts which involve birth and death. In the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, women were the primary agents in funerary rites and were associated with death and the supernatural in drama and literature. There are also important encounters between individual women and Jesus: with the women who anoint him in all four gospels (although only in John is the anointer named); the Syrophoenician or Canaanite woman who challenges Jesus in Mark (7.24–30) and Matthew (15.21–28); and women who ask him for healing, either for themselves or their families. Nevertheless, even healings are more likely to be of males: an average of three per gospel for females, and nine for males.
In John’s Gospel, with Mary Magdalene at the tomb, Martha at the raising of Lazarus, and the Samaritan woman at the well, women do seem to be represented more strongly than in the other gospels. Yet Adeline Fehribach, in her The Women in the Life of the Bridegroom, argues that the portrayal of women in John is necessary because, for the evangelist, Jesus is the Bridegroom, following the images of God as bridegroom in the Hebrew Scriptures. He encounters the women as the Bridegroom, and their function in the text is to convey this. She concludes that John is as male-centred as the other gospels.
It could be objected that the iterant nature of Jesus’ ministry restricted it to males on practical grounds. Yet the gospels tell us that women accompanied Jesus and supported his ministry all the way from Galilee. However, we learn relatively little about them; Luke 8.2–3 mentions them briefly and then they reappear at the crucifixion. Compared to the information that we have about male disciples, and the conversations that Jesus has with them, this is minimal. He has very brief conversations with his mother in Luke 2, John 2, and John 19. There are few examples of women learning from Jesus in the way that the male disciples do: the obvious exceptions are Martha, who declares that Jesus is the Messiah and Son of God in John 11.20–28, and Mary in Luke 10.38–42, who is an exemplar of listening and learning.
Paul’s letters give us an idea of the people who were active in the early Church. He names sixty Christian men (including James the brother of Jesus, Peter, and John) and sixteen Christian women in his letters, a ratio of 4:1 of men to women. Some of these people are also mentioned in Acts: fifteen men and one woman (Prisca). Additionally, Acts names thirty-one other Christian men not mentioned by Paul (which includes the other disciples in the list at Acts 1.13) and five women. The Acts of the Apostles, therefore, has a ratio of 8:1 of men to women. In Paul’s letters, which reflect the ministry as it was experienced by him day to day, women are twice as prominent as in the narrated story of the same period. This corroborates the point that ancient texts may not always represent the reality as far as gender participation is concerned.
What we can conclude from this is that the absence of much information in the New Testament about Mary outside the key moments of Jesus’ life – his birth and childhood (Luke), and at Cana and the cross (John) – does not imply that there was not much to be said about her. She, along with other women, suffers from a male-dominated silence which forces us to speculate to fill in the details. We know that there was more that could be said about Jesus and the male disciples; the last verse of John’s Gospel (21.25) says that, ‘But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.’ That is even more the case for the women who followed Jesus and for his mother Mary.
To sum up, it is not at all far-fetched to imagine that women will have had a major input into the earliest Christian traditions as found in the New Testament in ways that can be glimpsed in the final textual versions of the stories but is not fully articulated in them. To say otherwise is to accept that the sacred origins of Christianity from which we derive the truth of Christ and the gospel message subsists on a narrative in which women were largely silent and men spoke on their behalf. While in the final versions of the gospels and Acts, this may appear to be the case, that does not mean that it is also true of the traditions that fed into them. The folk culture of early Christianity will have had a rich female component, just as extensive and diverse as that contributed by males. In principle, Mary is likely to have made a greater contribution to the formation of the earliest Church than the texts suggest. Yet, despite this, the texts are the only place where we can find any clue as to what this contribution may have been.
Having clarified the groundwork for our investigation of Mary, we can now begin our research into specific texts. We will not be starting with the earliest documents, the epistles of Paul or Mark’s Gospel, because they do not narrate the conception and birth of Jesus, which is the obvious place to begin. Instead, we turn to those gospels which do describe these events, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
Notes
1 All biblical quotes in the book are from the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise indicated.
2 As demonstrated in the research by Bernadette J. Brooten, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue. We will discuss this further in Chapter 15.
3 In the Protestant canon, the book of Judith is placed among the apocrypha (see footnote 5).
4 Hebrew Scriptures: the collection of books that the Protestant denominations refer to as the Old Testament based on the Jewish canon or Tanakh. The Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions include other books that are usually referred to as the Old Testament apocrypha.
5 Of course, this is an approximate figure, as it depends where you decide that the pieces of narrative begin and end, and some sections are much longer than others. Nevertheless, it is illustrative for showing how the gospels describe the respective involvement of men and women in Jesus’ ministry.
6 That is, women and men who encounter Jesus in a positive way (not Herod, Caiaphas, or Pilate).