The Sins of Scripture (11 page)

I
s the male need to dominate the woman, and even to disparage her, a rational response, or is it based on some subliminal fear? One can certainly demonstrate that this need is universal, crossing all boundaries. Patriarchy’s near universality forces us to view it as a response to a human need, not a particular cultural response to a perceived cultural need or a particular religious response to a perceived religious need. Given the depth and scope of patriarchy in human history, we need to entertain the possibility that the negative attitude toward women in the Bible is symptomatic of something far deeper. That realization forces us to enter the realm of the unspoken and perhaps the unconscious, for that is where taboos are born.

A possible starting place would be to ask questions about unusual religious practices. Why was it, for example, that early religions almost universally required rites of purification for a woman after childbirth? What is unclean about having a baby? Why was it thought to be dangerous to bring a new mother back into the life of the clan, family or church until she had undergone some cleansing rite? Likewise, why was menstruation feared in primitive societies? Why were women isolated from the tribe during the days of their menstrual flow and in some times and places made to undergo cleansing rites before returning? Why were menstruating women thought to be so dangerous that it was said of them that they polluted the water, killed the fish, damaged the life of the clan and affected men adversely? Why is menstruation
still
covered with guilt or shame for many? What is the underlying source that explains this prejudice? How did this perfectly natural part of human life come to be called “the curse”?

One of the early church fathers explained menstruation by suggesting that women were really castrated males and that the menstrual cycle was the way the female body, once each month, mourned its lost organ. This seemed to him a perfectly reasonable explanation. Other equally bizarre explanations abounded in antiquity. When these practices and explanations are gathered together, a mammoth body of evidence is created that appears to point to the existence of irrational male fears that have come to be associated with menstruation. Our task is to determine the content of those fears, to raise these issues to consciousness, to confront them openly and then banish them. If we fail to do this, we must live forever under their power. I believe that the latent and still largely unconscious threat that men feel from women resides in this hidden area of life. It is out of this threat, I am convinced, that the hostility of patriarchy and acts of misogyny arise.

There has always been something mysterious and powerful about blood. Our language reflects this ancient attitude. Blood and life have been so deeply coupled in the human psyche that to “shed blood” has become a synonym for dying. In times of national crisis, the state still asks its sons and daughters to give their “blood”—that is, their lives—to protect their nation. Our breath was primarily identified in the ancient world with the spirit within, but our blood was the place where life itself resided.

Given that perspective, menstruation had to have been a profound mystery to early human beings. The woman could and did bleed from her most secretive and intimate opening on a regular basis. Yet despite that shedding of blood, the woman did not die. It was an almost incomprehensible experience. This was interpreted to mean, the taboos tell us, that every woman possessed some magical power—perhaps the power of life itself—that had to be respected and feared.

When these interpretive assumptions were combined with childbirth, the mysteries were only enhanced. Pregnancy stopped the menstrual cycle for nine months. Then, when the baby was born, the menstrual blood seemed to flow incessantly for days. Somehow, these two things were combined in the ancient mind. Prior to menopause the cessation of menstruation meant that life was being produced. The baby’s birth then inaugurated an uncontrollable flow. Perhaps the menses actually worked
against
life, since the woman was incapable of producing life until they ceased. Perhaps when the baby was expelled, the unclean anti-life substance that had been contained by this new life was finally allowed to flow freely, a sure sign that the woman’s body was once more unclean. If that was their understanding, purification rites were a necessity lest this latent death force be loosed publicly upon the clan. So myths grew about menstruation, myths that included such things as the assumption that a woman’s hair would not curl during the menstrual cycle and the fear that the male organ might actually break off or become inoperative if intercourse took place during menstruation.

The only thing certain about these mysteries was that the woman possessed a power that was a threat and a thing to be feared. Women could lose their blood and not die; they could also produce a new life and, in the process, stop the menstrual flow. Men envied this power and sought some means whereby they could capture it. Sigmund Freud, that brilliant product of an extremely patriarchal mentality, once suggested that women suffered from what he called “penis envy.” That was nothing more than a twentieth-century Freudian version of the myth that women were castrated males. They unconsciously yearned, suggested Freud, to have their penises restored, and thus to become whole again. Freud concluded that since this restoration could never happen physiologically, women reduced their anxiety by addressing this need psychologically. Though I have great admiration for Freud’s enormous intellect, this is one place, I suggest, where Freud could not overcome his German predilection for male supremacy. Far from women suffering from “penis envy,” I think a case can be made for the fact that men suffer from menstruation envy. Through the ages men have yearned to capture that female life power that enables women to bleed from their genitals and not die. That is, I believe, how circumcision entered the human and religious arena.

There is something quite irrational about circumcision. The body of the male is mutilated and religious reasons are given to support that mutilation. Circumcision was originally a male puberty rite. It was not practiced on infants until much later in history. Attempts to defend this practice on the basis of some presumed health value are so fanciful as to be amusing. These explanations suggest that because the foreskin is difficult to clean, it subjects the penis to potential infection. In other words, circumcision was designed to be a preemptive strike, a preventive measure. Does that not sound irrational? Ears are difficult to clean and become infected easily, yet no one that I know of has suggested that they be cut off to prevent those possibilities. It seems there is a better solution; namely, to wash them. Why was that procedure not applied to the foreskin?

As an alternative justification, it has been and in some places still is suggested that circumcision protects one’s wife or partner from various genital infections. Once again, a good bath (even in the river) before sex would be equally as effective and much less traumatic. Have we gotten to the place where we think surgery improves on creation? Did the foreskin, like the appendix, originally have some purpose that has now become lost? If so, and the foreskin is rendered redundant, is life actually improved when the foreskin is removed? What utter nonsense! The foreskin was designed to roll back during sexual excitement and thus to provide a ridge of flesh that enhances sexual pleasure. Both the men who have been circumcised and their partners have had their pleasure diminished by this essentially barbaric practice, perpetrated first in the name of religion and now widely practiced for its “health benefits”—and perhaps for the extra fee the doctor earns for performing this surgical procedure today, primarily on newborn baby boys. Does not this inexplicable habit cry out for deeper understanding? How did this strange and irrational mutilation practice enter the human experience so deeply as to become commonplace?

My suggestion is that circumcision began in a male attempt to capture the woman’s menstrual power. Circumcision enabled the man, just like the woman, to bleed from the genitals at puberty and not die. It became an initiation into manhood, a rite of passage. It was both feared and anticipated equally, the pain being offset by the expectation of adult sexual activity.

These thoughts were, as all irrational fear-related ideas are at their inception, quite unacceptable to the conscious mind and so they were pushed deep into the realm of the unconscious. That does not make them any less real, just more difficult to contemplate. What was not suppressed, however, was the fear of women’s power—a fear that manifested itself in unrelenting male oppression of women, pejorative male definitions imposed upon women and the long and brutal patriarchal abuse of women. When one quotes God to justify prejudices and to uphold definitions of inferiority and inadequacy in 50 percent of the human race, one should look beneath the level of rationality to search for the reason why.

The woman’s presumed inability to function fully during the days of her menstrual flow was used, in our patriarchal history, to keep her in protected domestic roles, rather than in vulnerable roles reserved for men. This, in turn, was used to enhance her servitude. This “protection” certainly played a major role in the way both the early church and the traditional, church-infused society understood and reacted to the cultural definition of a woman.

To bring this forward to our own day, we need to face the fact that a major part of the Christian church’s historical negativity to the ordination of women has been the fear that this would admit polluting—that is, menstruating—women into the sacred sanctuaries of church life.
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Behind the medieval practice of limiting church choirs to men and boys was the need to guarantee that holy places would not be corrupted by the presence of menstruating women. There was a time in church history when only prepubescent girls and postmenopausal women were allowed to enter the holy space around the altar, even to prepare that space for worship. Is it not time to force these insights into consciousness and to purge this ancient ignorance and this patriarchal fear from our lives? One place to start this process is by challenging those texts of the Bible that have presumed to define both women and menstruation as unclean. It is also time to redefine the claim made for the Bible that somehow it contains the very “Word of God.” This book must be removed from its position of power, a lofty position that has allowed irrational ignorance to flow from its religious pipelines into the corporate life of our society, where the damage it has caused is still beyond measure. How to find an answer to this evil is now my task.

Denouncing a scriptural tradition that sees women as both corrupt and corrupting must be the operative principle of a religious system that quotes Jesus as saying: “I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). If the Christian scriptures have been a primary source of negativity toward women throughout history, then those scriptures have to be either jettisoned or reinterpreted. Perhaps parts of them might even need to be
discovered
! My suggestion is that in the scriptures themselves there is an antidote to the evils of patriarchy and misogyny. To that search I now turn.

C
an the Bible, the source of so many texts that have produced unspeakable horrors, at one and the same time also be a resource to articulate the hopes for human life that have not even yet been fully embraced? I believe it can. That is why I cherish the Bible, why I fight publicly with those who misuse it and why I refuse to abandon this religious institution called the Christian church that has, more often than it is willing to admit even now, been a killing, diminishing presence in the lives of many people throughout history. So I turn now to discover again the minority voices of holy people in the past who saw beyond the boundaries of human security needs and whose words were included as nuggets of hope in a book that for many has been the sentence of death. My search begins with words that I suspect were originally a part of a baptism formula. Paul recorded them when he wrote in what was probably his second epistle to the church in Galatia, “In Christ…there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:26–28).

Paul, as an author, was a man of great ability, great passion, great energy and, let it never be forgotten, great conflict. His writings reveal his turmoil again and again. He came out of a rigid and traditional patriarchal background that he reflected over and over when giving instructions to his churches. Women were to keep quiet in church (1 Cor. 14:34). Men were not to marry unless they could not control their passion (1 Cor. 7:9). Women had to have their heads covered as a sign of respect (1 Cor. 11:5ff.). A disciple of Paul’s, writing in the name of his master, extended Paul’s patriarchy when he wrote, “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man” (1 Tim. 2:12, NRSV). As women have increasingly come into leadership roles in Christianity, they have vented their pent-up anger at Paul, who they believe was the original person to shape a misogynist church. I know women clergy today who choose to ignore Paul as the only alternative to loathing him. They dismiss Paul as an enemy who must be defeated, knowing that otherwise they will never be allowed to take their places in the life of the church as full and equal human beings.

Paul, however, was not single-minded on this subject or any other. In every area of his life this man lived in conflict. In the person Paul there was a strange combination. He is defined both by the prejudices he possessed, the rigorous training he had undergone and the binding rigidity of his pious practices; but he is also defined by the freedom and love that he discovered in his conversion experience. The two sides of this man were never to live in reconciliation. Together they created for Paul a state of perpetual turmoil. It was as if Paul’s very identity was at stake at every moment of his existence. There was a war, he said, going on in him between his mind and his body (Rom. 7:23ff.), between his past and his present, between his tradition and his eyes, from which Luke said “scales” had fallen at the time of his meeting with the figure, the memory or even the vision of Jesus (Acts 9:18). Thus we see two sides of Paul, and one of them is quite contrary to the anti-female bias that has become his major legacy. This other Paul is reflected primarily in the book of Acts in his appreciation of the women who were his co-workers and colleagues—for example, Priscilla, the wife of Aquila (Acts 18:2, 26), Lydia (Acts 16:14, 40) and Chloe (1 Cor. 1:11). One listens with wonder to the list of women to whom Paul sends his personal greeting in various epistles (Rom. 16:3, 6, 7, 13, 15; Col. 4:15).

The most overt countering text to Paul’s perceived negativity toward women, however, occurs in Galatians, which is probably Paul’s most passionate and therefore most revelatory epistle. Dated around 50–51 CE, it may reveal the real Paul because he is so angry he does not take time to think about what he is saying and edit his words. His Christ experience, he ecstatically proclaims, is so powerful that the barriers erected to keep human beings secure in their self-knowledge, their prejudices and their perennial struggle to survive their evolutionary history can be transcended. He lists those barriers as tribe, gender and economic bondage. The words “In Christ…there is neither male nor female” are the part of that text that I want to lift now into our full consciousness. As a result of the Christ experience, Paul says, the power equation between men and women—an equation presumed in the past to have been built on the will of God as expressed in the story of creation and used as the basis to impose second-class citizenship—has now been irrevocably broken.

Think about how entrenched was the view of women that Paul encountered. For long periods of history women were considered to be property, owned first by their fathers and second by their husbands. Recall, for example, that the last commandment orders men not to covet other men’s wives or their oxen (Exod. 20:17). Upon that tradition were built laws that enabled polygamy to become a way of life, for if a wife was property, a man could have as many wives as he could afford. These laws refused to allow divorce as an option for women, no matter how abusive the husband was. They fed a tradition that defined women as not educable—not intelligent enough to vote, to own property, to enter the professions or to be part of the armed forces. This is what must be set aside, Paul stated in his revolutionary language to the Galatians, for in Christ there is neither male nor female, nor is there superiority or inferiority. Paul was articulating a startling, powerful new reality that exploded into this world in the Christ experience. Paul was suggesting that this is the vision, the experience, the reality that we must recover if the power of anti-female prejudice in Christian history is to be broken.

We move on to the gospels in our quest for other evidence of the fact that this new and profound equality was present before the authority attributed to the patriarchal texts of the Bible began to be used in Christian history to suppress it. In the first of the gospels to be written, Mark tells the story of a woman who, in the last week of Jesus’ earthly life, broke in upon him at a dinner in Bethany, at the home of a man called Simon the leper. Simon was presumably a cured leper who would have a greater sensitivity toward anyone who might be an outcast. The woman’s purpose in interrupting the dinner was to perform an act of devotion. She poured upon Jesus’ head and feet a perfume known as nard, imported from India. Her act was a violation of every Jewish patriarchal custom, every defining patriarchal norm, and the men at the banquet moved to condemn her behavior. If such exceptions were allowed, the prevailing norms would no longer be norms. It was a potentially revolutionary moment. But Jesus is portrayed by Mark as rebuking her tormentors and affirming her right to be present, her actions and her motives. “She has done a beautiful thing,” Jesus is quoted as saying. “She has anointed my body beforehand for burying” (Mark 14:3–9).

That same story echoes three more times in the canonical gospels, with interesting variations. In Matthew the events are recounted almost identically: they occur at the same time, in the same place, and with the same result (Matt. 26:6–13). In Luke, however, there is a dramatic shift. The episode does not occur in the last week of Jesus’ life, and it is not a prelude to his burial; rather, it is located by Luke in the early Galilean phase of Jesus’ ministry (Luke 7:36–50). The setting is not the home of Simon the leper, but the home of Simon the Pharisee; that is, one who is known for upholding the moral norms and cultural taboos of the tradition.

The intruding woman likewise has been heightened in very negative ways in Luke. She is “a woman of the city”—quite clearly, a prostitute. She is unclean and unacceptable. Her actions are much more bizarre, highly sensual and they violate significantly the norms for a woman in her day. Only in Luke does she wash Jesus’ feet with her tears and dry them with her hair. This highly erotic act in a society where a woman would never touch a man in public is a dramatic challenge to the imposed sexual roles of the day. As in the other accounts, the value systems of the past emerge in the language employed by the male dinner guests to condemn her behavior roundly. They also condemn Jesus for allowing such provocative sexual actions to be done to him. “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what manner of woman this is.” Because he does not condemn her, his credentials as a holy man are compromised in the eyes of the upholders of the moral laws. Because this is an unclean woman who has touched him, he is now, according to the Torah, a ceremonially unclean person in need of purification. But Jesus sets aside these patriarchal rules with their doctrines of cleanliness, and in an act of startling freedom he affirms the woman, accepts her action and tears down the barrier that would cause her to be rejected. He is acting in a way consistent with the Pauline insight that in Christ there is neither male nor female. A new humanity, Paul proclaims, has come into being in Christ. This new humanity transcends every ancient definition, every ancient rule and every ancient religious barrier. Something new is being born. A new consciousness is being formed. The texts of the past, which held people inside their defining prejudices, are being set aside.

This same story, in yet another variation, is told a fourth time in the gospel of John (12:1–8). This time the anointing of Jesus’ feet takes place in the home of Mary and Martha. This means it is again in Bethany, but not in the home of one called Simon, whether he be the leper or the Pharisee. All of Jesus’ disciples are present in this episode. So are the members of the family of Mary and Martha, which includes, this gospel alone asserts, a brother named Lazarus, recently raised from the dead (John 11:1–44). In this very public setting Mary, Martha’s sister, is now said to be the one who does the anointing of his feet. She is neither a stranger, as Mark and Matthew have suggested, nor a woman of the city who was a sinner, as Luke has written. There is in this setting no sense of scandal and there is also no rebuke from anyone. The anointing is an act of which little or no notice is taken. How strange, one thinks, when these Johannine facts are absorbed. Where did the patriarchal rules, the sexual prohibitions go? Why did this act in this setting suddenly become acceptable?

The only thing I can think of that would have made such an act acceptable in the Bethany of Jesus’ day is the knowledge, on the part of everyone at this gathering of intimate family and close disciples, that this woman was Jesus’ wife. Nothing else could account for the response. Is this a new insight? Maybe. I suggest, however, that it is merely the lifting into consciousness of a repressed tradition that counters the teachings of the church, which has sought to portray Jesus as sharing in an anti-female bias that includes a commitment to celibacy. I do not draw that conclusion on this text alone, but this text is the one that first forced me to entertain this possibility.

One other story, taken again from Luke’s gospel (10:38–42), adds to this speculative conclusion about Jesus and Mary. It also, once more, illumines Jesus’ enormous power to break the negative definitions that have surrounded women in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This episode occurs, not coincidentally I believe, once again in the home of Mary and Martha in Bethany, where Jesus is now portrayed as being a guest for dinner. Martha is bearing the burden of the preparation of that meal. Mary, her sister, is sitting at Jesus’ feet listening to him teach. This is the picture of a woman cast in the role of a learner, a pupil, even a rabbinic student. Quite obviously this is a prohibited role for women in those days and in that culture. Yet Jesus affirms Mary in that role. Martha, however, rebukes her. Martha demands that Jesus order Mary to abandon the pupil role for the more acceptable domestic role of assisting with the dinner preparations. Jesus supports Mary and defends her consciousness-raising act by stating that she has elected a higher choice. Jesus is asserting a revolutionary idea: a woman is educable; she can be a learner. Nothing in the new order that he has come to establish rules out this possibility, because in Christ there is neither male nor female. The divine barriers of power and pejorative definitions are simply transcended.

I see one other repressed truth in this story that once again causes me to suggest that Mary was Jesus’ wife. Martha, according to this narrative, asks Jesus to order her sister, Mary, to help in the kitchen. Why did Martha not speak directly to her sister? Would that not be the norm in most homes? But suppose the sister was a married woman? Could it be that Martha understood that in Jewish society a woman’s husband had the power to command and the wife had the duty to obey? Is that why Martha appealed to the one who was her guest to give a directive to her sister? This passage suggests that Jesus had a wife, a fact that apparently was once acknowledged! This is a hint that did not get repressed by biblical redactors.

Moving on in this attempt to read the nuances of the gospel texts, let me postulate the possibility that Mary, the sister of Martha, was the same Mary who later came to be called Magdalene. Magdalene is portrayed in the gospels as the leader of the female disciples who followed Jesus all the way from Galilee.
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What kind of women follow an itinerant band of men? Are they not either wives or prostitutes? This was the same Mary who was the flesh-and-blood woman at his side during his life and the chief mourner at the tomb in his death. That would make her the same Mary who is portrayed in the tomb scene of the Fourth Gospel as calling him “my lord” and “rabboni,” titles appropriate in Jewish society only for a wife to use in addressing her rabbi husband. She would also be the same Mary who demanded access to his deceased body from the one she thought was the gardener, an act appropriate only for the deceased’s nearest of kin.

Finally, let me suggest that the word “Magdalene” has no reference whatsoever to a village of Magdala, as many have suggested with the translation “Mary of Magdala.” No one has ever been able to locate an ancient village of Magdala or any Jewish or Roman record that mentions such a village. A new Magdala has been built to attract modern tourist dollars, but it is not authentic.

Once we dismiss the possibility that Magdalene referred to a place, then other possibilities are allowed to surface. There is a Hebrew word,
migdal,
which has the same consonants as Magdala. Could Magdalene be a play on that word?
Midgal
originally referred to a tower (a
migdal edor
) from which shepherds could view the fields in which their flocks grazed. Such a tower—tall, large and of great significance—is mentioned twice in the Hebrew scriptures (Gen. 35:21, Mic. 4:8). A play on that word would suggest that the early church, by calling Mary “Magdalene,” was asserting that she was a tall, large or great figure—that she was “Mary the great” or “the great Mary.” If Jesus’ mother was another Mary, not “the great Mary,” could the great Mary have been anything except his wife? Jesus, I believe, had a female partner, a wife, to whom he gave a dignity and an honor that broke the barriers of the sexist definitions of the past. She was Mary—the Magdalene.