Gospel of Mary (selected passages)
Testing Gender, Testing Boundaries and Forming New Identities through Gender from After Jesus: Before Christianity (Westar Institute)
This week we’re tackling two chapters in our reading of After Jesus: Before Christianity because they are closely related. I must admit that I feel like I’m writing a book report about a book that’s over my head! We’re going to look at the understanding of gender in the first century and the communities who followed Jesus and that means laying aside layers of assumptions that we have in the 21st century about gender – because they simply don’t apply to the first century.
Let’s start with the fact that gender, like race, is a social construct. I’m learning that means that differences (or similarities) that we apply to one race or another aren’t inherent in skin color or facial features. Physically, race doesn’t make one person different from another. It has no influence on mental ability or physical strength. It doesn’t impact how a person functions in life – until culture and society assign meaning to racial differences and tell us they matter. All races have equal ability but not equal opportunity. It’s the story we tell about racial differences that creates inequality, not inherent characteristics.
In our lifetimes the stories we’ve told about gender have changed dramatically. Many of us grew up in a time when particular careers weren’t open to women. Thankfully, that is slowly changing. Of course we understand male and female anatomy as different, but ability to accomplish important things in life isn’t primarily anatomical. And so we are rethinking our understanding of gender roles and realizing they are mostly irrelevant. We’re blurring boundaries and opening opportunities for people. Interestingly, blurring boundaries is a recurring theme as we’re learning about the first century.
Oddly, in the first century the prevailing social assumption wasn’t that men and women were different genders, but that all gender was male. There were those males correctly formed (whom we call men) and those males whose genitalia failed to properly fall outside their bodies but were instead internalized (whom we call women). Women weren’t another gender from men, they were deformed men, and as such played a more private role than their more “perfect” counterparts. The word for “man” specifically means “an adult male over twenty years old, married to a woman, free-born, not enslaved, a Roman citizen, engaged in military activity, and expressing virtues such as courage and honor.” The culture didn’t separate physical characteristics from social roles. In the same way the word “woman” doesn’t apply until someone has borne a child. To be either man or woman requires participation in a traditional family, which is the framework of the Empire. So long as they keep their proper “place” the Empire is stable.
However, within the Jesus communities people kept pushing boundaries and upsetting stability. Last week we talked about those who died bravely within these communities – later called martyrs. It’s a man’s role to die with courage as a soldier. But those who were killed because of their faith included old feeble men, women and children. Their courage made them equals with the Roman men, upsetting the way things were supposed to work.
The apostle Paul is known for preferring that people in his communities remain unmarried, which also defied the stability of traditional families. Women who refused to marry the men their fathers chose for them were especially upsetting of social norms. The woman Thecla is honored as a student of Paul’s who refused marriage, was to be martyred in the arena but survived (when flesh-eating seals were struck by lightening and killed before they could eat her), and went on to be a teacher about Jesus for a long life-time.
The role women played in first-century Jesus communities is uncertain. Today’s scripture from the Gospel of Mary portrays Mary as a favorite of Jesus, receiving special teachings, and able to encourage the male disciples when their resolve fails and they want to give up. Yet they also discount her teaching because she is a woman. Paul’s letters are full of references to women who functioned as leaders in the church, yet letters under Paul’s name written in the second century tell women to be silent in the assembly and remain subservient to the men. It seems that women were leaders in some communities and other groups refused a role to women. As time passes, women’s roles became more restricted, mirroring society around them. There’s more than one way for gender to function in early gatherings and it’s not possible for us to point to one right way. It is clear that in some cases women pushed boundaries much farther than the contemporary church has been willing to acknowledge and were full participants in their communities of faith.
In the first century and the twenty-first century those who placed limitations on the role of those who weren’t men of traditional power have claimed that they were following God’s will. The diversity of roles and ambiguity about practice from the first century make that impossible to support. While we can’t say that women functioned from the beginning in the same way women do today, we can say that there’s no clear mandate that gives authority and leadership only to men.
So when the Southern Baptists prevent women as pastors in 2023 and expel churches with women leaders, they are responding out of their culture but not with a biblical mandate. The Bible reports that some early folks would agree with them, but many would not. The same is true for the Roman Catholic Church and others who exclude women.
My grandson came home from church camp this week and told me that while God loves all people, the Bible tells us that it’s wrong to be gay. After all, God made Adam and Eve male and female and that’s the way it is. While I rarely interfere with my grandchildren’s education, this one earned him a “Well grandma knows more about the Bible that anyone at your church camp and they are wrong.” This position takes isolated Bible passages out of context and uses them to reinforce a social position folks want to be right. The Bible actually says even less about gender identity than about being female and what it says is far from this position.
While we’re learning much about the first century which makes it easier to understand what people were thinking and what their writings meant to them, most of that time remains a mystery to us. We have to be careful not to read ancient texts with modern eyes. They simply aren’t coming from the same place we are. The best we can do is acknowledge diversity in many different groups which followed Jesus. We’re looking for clues from that diversity about how to follow Jesus. But we’re not trying to replicate what they did. Instead we understand the past so with God we can create our present and perhaps impact the future. In the first century people made historically appropriate beginnings at expanding the boundaries of faith and reducing the limitations placed on people. In the twenty-first century we hope to do more. We can recognize that much of what people attribute to God’s will is really our social fears prompting us to hope that God will endorse what we are comfortable with. Instead God keeps opening up new possibilities. Some early followers of Jesus believed that God’s love broke down barriers and divisions, that in Jesus there is neither “male nor female, slave nor free.” Those are the folks whose story encourages us today as we try to create a more just and loving world.