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Reserve Text from Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent. New York: Random House, 1988. Chapter 1: The Kingdom of God is at Hand
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Jesus' time, these urban Jewish communities were uneasily divided between
those who accommodated pagan culture and accepted its political domination
and those who resisted both pagan culture and politics. Once allies of
the Romans, the Jews were now their subjects, and many of their lands
had become Roman provinces ruled by a puppet Jewish dynasty for their
pagan masters. [4] Even those who
resisted pagan culture had been deeply affected by it; yet they held
to the customs that distinguished and separated them from their pagan
neighbors. Many Jews, especially poorer ones, and those who lived in
the rural villages where John and Jesus preached, detested the court
of the Herods, with its luxurious entertainments and extravagant palaces,
which the Herods sometimes named for the emperors but financed with
heavy taxes, extortion, and bribes extracted from their fellow Jews.
What angered these rural people especially was the way the Herods, neglecting
Jewish tradition, courted and copied the Romans.2 Prince Herod Antipas,
son of Herod the Great, had gone to Rome to be tutored by the same philosophers
who tutored the prince Claudius, future emperor of Rome. The Jewish
historian Josephus says that not long before Jesus' birth, two thousand
Jews had been crucified in his native Galilee for rebelling against
Rome, leaving a forest of crosses littered with rotting corpses as a
warning to others.3 Jesus himself, charged with treason against Rome,
would one day suffer the same penalty. Especially among the poor, the
pious, and the rural Jews, antipagan feeling ran deep; and it was among
such people that Jesus found his following. Many Jews distrusted,
too, their own religious leaders who served at the Jerusalem Temple,
especially the powerful and wealthy men who surrounded the high priest,
for their open collusion with the Roman occupiers. Members of Jewish
communities responded to this situation in a variety of ways. The most
popular sect, the Pharisees, bitterly criticized these leaders for having
subverted the Temple,4 while some devout people went further and withdrew
in protest from ordinary Jewish life. The Essenes, for example, during
the first century B.C.E., abandoned Jerusalem, denounced the Temple
worship as polluted, and formed a "pure" community in desert
caves overlooking the Dead Sea. There they renounced private property
to live in a monastic community; they observed the rules prescribed
for holy war; and they avoided sexual contact and impure food, thoughts,
and practices as they awaited the battle of Armageddon. They warned
that on that day of judgment God himself would annihilate the hypocrites
and evildoers and vindicate the Essenes as the righteous. Jesus' predecessor
John the Baptist, a passionate reformer who may have lived for some
years with the Essenes, publicly harangued Herod Antipas, then tetrarch
of Galilee, for having married his brother's ex-wife; at the instigation of Herod's wife--she was the mother of Salome--John was imprisoned and beheaded.5 There were many people who agreed with John that the times called for radical reform. No longer was it enough merely to follow traditional Jewish patterns or to stay within the boundaries of the law. John demanded much more; he demanded, in fact, that people return not just to the letter but to the moral spirit of the law.6 Yet for all of John's claim to speak for authentic Jewish tradition, there remained a more difficult question: Which elements of the Jewish tradition were essential and true, and which were antiquated relics of an archaic past? Which should one follow, and which discard?
Jesus disregarded--and,
his accusers claimed, dismissed--strict kosher and Sabbath observance
and attacked the legal casuistry that enabled people to evade responsibility
for those in need. As biblical scholars generally acknowledge, the gospels
of the New Testament are neither histories nor biographies in our sense
of these terms; we have no independent sources with which to compare
their accounts. But as they recount his life and message, Jesus demanded
sacrifice and transformation, extraordinary measures to prepare for
the coming new age. His message could hardly have been more radical,
then or now:
Jesus attacked
Israel's religious leaders with irony and anger:
Jesus' passionate and powerful presence aroused enormous response, especially when he preached among the crowds of pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. As the Jewish and Roman authorities well knew, tensions were high during the religious holidays when Jewish worshipers found themselves face to face with the Roman soldiers. Jesus' near contemporary the Jewish historian Josephus, himself a governor of Galilee, tells of a Roman soldier on guard near the Temple who contemptuously exposed himself before just such a crowd, an outrage that incited a riot in which twenty thousand died.7 When Jesus dared enter the Temple courtyard before a certain Passover, brandishing a whip, throwing down the tables of those changing foreign money, and quoting the words of the prophet Jeremiah to attack the Temple leaders for turning God's [7] Jesus himself,
according to the New Testament, saw himself very differently, not as
a revolutionary but as a man seized by the spirit that inspired Isaiah
and Jeremiah-the spirit of God--as a prophet sent to warn humankind
of the approaching Kingdom of God and to offer purification to those
who would listen.8 Repeatedly, according to the New Testament accounts,
Jesus chose to risk death rather than allow himself to be silenced. Leaving aside,
for the moment, the religious meaning of Jesus' message, one could say
from a strictly historical perspective that Jesus foresaw events accurately:
in many ways the world in which he and his Jewish contemporaries lived
would soon come to an end, less than forty years after his death, with
the catastrophic Jewish war against Rome. In 66 C.E., the religious
and patriotic feeling that the Jewish Council feared Jesus might ignite
finally caught fire. Outbreaks of violence against the Roman occupation
exploded into a civil war that finally engulfed the whole province that
the Romans called Judea. Josephus, born
in 37 C.E., a few years after Jesus' death, participated in that war,
and described its horrifying devastation, as Titus's clanking Roman
forces marched upon Jerusalem. The streets streamed with blood; the
inner city was ground to rubble, and the Temple itself burned to a heap
of ruins. The Roman conquerors and future emperors annihilated Jerusalem
politically as well, reestablishing in its place the colony the Romans
called Aelia Capitolina, sacred to the gods of Rome. The "new age"
that followed the Roman victory challenged and split Jewish communities
from Judea to Rome and throughout the world. Some Jews simply gave up
and followed pagan customs, but the majority gradually came to adopt
the forms in which the party of the Pharisees salvaged and recast their
ancient traditions. According to Professor Jacob Neusner, the Pharisees
hoped to reunite the [8] But the radical
sectarians who called themselves followers of Jesus of Nazareth went
further. Having refused to fight in the Jewish war against Rome, they
had already alienated themselves from the Jewish communities; now they
broke with their fellow Jews and proclaimed that they themselves were
the "new Israel," even the "true Israel," of this
shattering new age. Some Jews who joined this Christian movement, especially
those influenced by Paul's teaching, abandoned, within one or two generations
of Jesus' death, the characteristic practices that had distinguished
them as Jews. Many gave up circumcision, kosher laws, and Sabbath observance,
claiming, in Paul's words, to be "Jews inwardly," circumcised
"in the heart" (Romans 2:28-29) and not in the flesh. All
converts to this new movement, whether they had once been Jews or pagans,
tended to distinguish their" new Israel" from the rest of
the world by insisting upon strict, even extreme, moral practices. The
most controversial aspect of this new moral austerity was the sexual
attitudes and practices of its adherents. 11 [9] sexual use of slaves?
These questions, too, bore wider implications: How are Christians to
understand human nature? Are slaves, for example, essentially any different
from free persons? Such questions
did not, of course, originate with Christians. Jewish teachers debated
such topics, and as the French scholar Paul Veyne, among others, has
shown, certain pagan philosophers advocated sexual restraint similar
to that adopted by Christians.12 But the Christian movement popularized
these changing attitudes with momentous consequences, especially after
the fourth century, when the Roman emperor Constantine declared his
own allegiance to Christ and granted Christianity not only legal but
privileged status within the empire It was from that time that Christian
attitudes began to transform the consciousness, to say nothing of the
moral and legal systems, that continue to form western society. This book will
explore the attitudes that Jesus and his followers took toward marriage,
family, procreation, and celibacy, and thus toward "human nature"
in general, and the controversies these attitudes sparked as they were
variously interpreted among Christians for generations--or for millennia,
depending on how one counts. It will also show how men and women who
converted to Christianity often adopted attitudes toward sexuality that
their families and friends considered bizarre! Moreover, I shall further
speculate on how we have come to take for granted the set of attitudes
about sexuality and human nature arising from "Judeo-Christian
culture," attitudes that many people today take to be normal and
obvious but that were, in the context of early Christian times, anything
but normal and, from the anthropologically informed perspective of our
own contemporaries, anything but obvious. JESUS AND HIS FOLLOWERS,
at the beginning of what came to be called the Christian Era, took up
startlingly different attitudes toward divorce, procreation, and family
from those that had prevailed for centuries among most of their fellow
Jews. So powerful were these challenges to convention that they precipitated,
or at least accompanied, the birth of a new religious movement. DespiteJesus'
radical message-or perhaps because of it-the movement quickly spread
throughout the Roman world and within three centuries came to dominate
it. As the Christian
movement emerged within the Roman Empire, it challenged pagan converts,
too, to change their attitudes and be- [10] havior. Many pagans
who had been brought up to regard marriage essentially as a social and
economic arrangement, homosexual relationships as an expected element
of male education, prostitution, both male and female, as both ordinary
and legal, and divorce, abortion, contraception, and exposure of unwanted
infants as matters of practical expedience, embraced, to the astonishment
of their families, the Christian message, which opposed these practices. Certain scholars,
prominently including Paul Veyne, as we have noted, have recently downplayed
these differences and have pointed out that philosophical moralists
such as Musonius Rufus and Plutarch advocated similar moral practices.
Veyne concludes that "we must not argue in stereotypes, and imagine
a conflict between pagan and Christian morality."13 Yet as the
philosopher and convert Athenagoras (c. 160 C.E.) points out in his
defense of the Christians, addressed to their persecutors, the emperors,
what philosophers advocate may have little or nothing to do with what
actually motivates people to change, as conversion has done to many
Christians.14 Indeed, such converts as Justin, Athenagoras, Clement,
and Tertullian all describe specific ways in which conversion changed
their own lives and those of many other, often uneducated, believers,
in matters involving sex, business, magic, money, paying taxes, and
racial hatred. 15 Justin and Tertullian both relate cases in which the
moral transformation accompanying a believer's conversion aroused pagan
relatives to outrage and even led to legal accusations and disinheritance.
Of course these Christians were writing in defense of their faith; we
need not accept all their rhetoric as fact to acknowledge that they
and many others certainly did "imagine a conflict between pagan
and Christian morality" and tried to act accordingly. Their own accounts
suggest that such converts changed their attitudes toward the self,
toward nature, and toward God, as well as their sense of social and
political obligation, in ways that often placed them in diametric opposition
to pagan culture. For the most dedicated Christians, conversion transformed
both consciousness and behavior; and such converts, gathered in the
increasingly popular Christian movement, would profoundly affect the
consciousness of all subsequent generations as well.16 Other Jewish teachers
of Jesus' time, and for generations before, had pronounced certain pagan
sexual practices abominable. Among conscientious Jews, only the worship
of pagan gods aroused more outrage than pagan sexual behavior. Generations
of Jewish teachers had warned that pagans thought nothing of pederasty,
promiscuity, [11] and incest. Yet
the clash with outside cultures challenged Jewish customs in turn. Many
pagans found such practices as circumcision to be peculiar, antiquated,
and no less barbaric than Jews found the sexual habits of pagans. Babylonians
and Romans, themselves monogamous, criticized the ancient Jewish custom
of polygamous marriage, practiced by such venerable patriarchs as Abraham,
David, and Solomon, as well as by the wealthy few who could afford it,
even in Jesus' time and later. 17 The Jewish historian Josephus, himself
apparently polygamous, tried to justify to his Roman readers the ten
wives of King Herod the Great (and possibly his own bigamy as well)18
by explaining that "among us it is the custom to have many wives
simultaneously."19 Those familiar with Roman law could also question
traditional Jewish divorce law, which granted to the husband (but not
to the wife) the often easy right of divorce. For centuries--indeed,
for over a millennium--Jews had taught that the purpose of marriage,
and therefore of sexuality, was procreation. Jewish communities had
inherited their sexual customs from nomadic ancestors whose very survival
depended upon reproduction, both among their herds of animals and among
themselves. According to the story of Abraham told in Genesis 22, the
great blessing promised through God's covenant with Israel was progeny
innumerable as the sands of the sea and the stars in the sky (verse
17). To ensure the stability and survival of the nation, Jewish teachers
apparently assumed that sexual activity should be committed to the primary
purpose of procreation. Prostitution, homosexuality, abortion, and infanticide,
practices both legal and tolerated among certain of their pagan neighbors,
contradicted Jewish custom and law. Both polygamy and
divorce, on the other hand, increased opportunities for reproduction--not
for women, but for the men who wrote the laws and benefited from them.
Jewish law even went so far as to require that a man bound for ten years
in a childless marriage should either divorce his wife and marry another,
or else keep his barren wife and take a second to produce his children.20
Jewish custom banned as "abominations" sexual acts not conducive
to procreation, and the impurity laws even prohibited marital intercourse
except at times most likely to result in conception. Generations before Jesus, Jews, like so many other peoples, had begun to invoke their creation accounts, specifically in Genesis, to prove that such tribal customs as these were not barbaric or peculiar [12] as their pagan
critics charged, but were part of the very structure of the universe
itself. In their arguments from Scripture, Jewish teachers often avoided
speaking directly about sexual practices but engaged in heated discussions
about Adam, Eve, and the serpent, and in this metaphorical way revealed
what they thought about human sexuality-and about human nature in general.
The Book of Jubilees, for example, written about 150 years before Jesus'
birth by a PalestinianJew, retells the story of Adam and Eve to prove,
among other things, that Jewish customs concerning childbirth and nakedness
were not arbitrary or trivial but actually built into human nature from
the beginning. As this author tells it, Adam entered Eden during the
first week of creation, but Eve entered the garden only during the second
week; this explains why a woman who gives birth to a male child remains
ritually impure for only one week, while she who bears a female remains
impure for two weeks.21 The author goes on to recall that God made leather
garments for Adam and Eve, and clothed them before expelling them from
Paradise (Genesis 3:21); this shows that Jews must "cover their
shame, and not go naked, as the Gentiles do," in public places
like the baths and the gymnasia.22 Throughout subsequent generations,
what Jews and Christians read into the creation accounts of Genesis
came, for better and worse, to shape what later came to be called Judeo-Christian
tradition. By the time Jesus
preached, his Jewish contemporaries had no difficulty defending their
ancestral emphasis upon procreation by showing from Genesis 1 that as
soon as God created all living creatures, culminating with the first
man and woman, he commanded them to "be fruitful and multiply,
and fill the earth" (Genesis 1:28). Whatever disagreements existed
between various groups of Jews (the Pharisees, for example, apparently
approved of sexual pleasure within the bonds of marriage, while the
Essenes practiced sexual restraint),Jewish teachers agreed that this
primary and sacred obligation to procreate took precedence even over
marital obligationsthus a barren marriage could be invalidated-and dictated
its structure. They pointed out from Genesis that God first commanded
man and woman to procreate, and only afterward, to help them do so,
he brought Eve to Adam and joined them in the first marriage:
[13]
For centuries Jewish
teachers built from this passage the basic laws of marital behavior.
Certain rabbis actually turned these lines from Genesis into a code
of sexual conduct. Rabbi Eliezer (c. 90 C.E.) took the words "Therefore
a man leaves his father and his mother" to mean not only that a
man must not marry his mother, but that he must also refuse to marry
"her who is related to his father or to his mother" within
the degrees of kinship prohibited as incest. Rabbi Akiba (c. 135 C.E.)
took the next phrase, "and cleaves to his wife," to mean,
in his words, "But not to his neighbor's wife, nor to a male, nor
to an animal"--thus disposing of adultery, homosexuality, and bestiality.
Rabbi Issi (c. 145 C.E.) among others, took the phrase "and they
become one flesh" to mean, in his words, that the man "shall
cleave to the place where both form one flesh," prohibiting through
this euphemistic phrase what the rabbis called "unnatural intercourse"-sexual
acts or positions that might inhibit conception.23 Other Jewish teachers
agreed that the purpose of marriage is to "increase and multiply";
that one must accept whatever facilitates procreation, including divorce
and polygamy; and that one must reject whatever hinders procreation-even
a marriage itself, in the case of an infertile wife. Jesus radically
challenged this consensus. Like other Jewish teachers, Jesus, when he
speaks about marriage, goes back to the Genesis account of the first
marriage; but he reads the same passage very differently than others
did. Asked by conservative teachers of the law, the so-called Pharisees,
about the legitimate grounds for divorce, Jesus answered that there
were none:24
This answer shocked his Jewish listeners and, as Matthew tells it, pleased no one. Among Jesus' Jewish contemporaries no one questioned the legitimacy of divorce. The only question was what constituted adequate grounds; and it was this question of grounds, not the legitimacy of divorce as such, that split religious schools into [14] factions. The teacher
Shammai, for one, took the conservative position: the only offense serious
enough to justify divorce was the wife's infidelity. Shammai's opponent
Hillel, famous for his liberal judgments, argued instead that a man
may divorce his wife for any reason he chooses, "even if she burn
his soup!" The well-known teacher Akiba, who agreed with Hillel,
added emphatically, "and even if he finds a younger woman more
beautiful than she." But however various teachers disputed the
grounds for divorce, no one went so far as Jesus did and prohibited
it altogether. Those among his audience familiar with Jewish law demanded
to know how he dared question divorce, a right-and, in some cases, an
obligationprovided in Mosaic law as essential to procreation. Jesus
admitted that divorce is technically legal, but he rejected the practice
nevertheless. "Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from
the beginning [i.e., from the time of creation] it was not so"
(Matthew 19:8). Moses took it upon himself, Jesus says, to change what
God had created and to permit divorce as a concession to "your
hardness of heart." When his own followers,
offended by such vehemence, complained, "If such is the case. ..it
is not expedient to marry," Jesus must have astonished them even
more by agreeing that, yes, it is better not to marry, and praising
"those who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom
of Heaven" (Matthew 19:12). Luke says that Jesus even praised barren
women: "Blessed are ...the wombs that never bore, and the breasts
that never gave suck" (Luke 23:29), implying that the time was
coming when the people who did not have children would be the lucky
ones. Luke probably saw this asJesus' prophecy of the coming war against
Rome (66-70 C.E.); but later readers often took it as referring to the
Kingdom of God. In another passage, Luke has Jesus link marriage with
death, and celibacy with eternal life: And Jesus said
to them, "The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage;
but those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the
resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage,
for they cannot die any more, because they are equal to angels and are
sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. " Such statements
must have horrified Jewish traditionalists, for barren women, whom Jesus
blessed, had traditionally been seen as accursed, and eunuchs, whom
Jesus praised, were despised by rab- [15] binic teachers
for their sexual incapacity. Unmarried himself, Jesus praised the very
persons most pitied and shunned in Jewish communities for their sexual
incompleteness-those who were single and childless; for Jesus' radical
message of the impending Kingdom of God left his followers no time to
fulfill the ordinary obligations of everyday life. First-century Christians
saw themselves participating at the birth of a revolutionary movement
that they expected would culminate in the total social transformation
that Jesus promised in the "age to come." To prepare themselves
for these events, Jesus commanded his followers to forget ordinary concerns
about food and clothing, "sell your possessions, and give alms"
(Luke 12:33), divest themselves of all property, and abandon family
obligations, whether to parents, spouses, or children, for such obligations
would interfere with their dedication to the apocalyptic hopes Jesus
announced; the disciple must become wholly free to serve God. According
to Luke, Jesus even went so far as to say, "If anyone comes to
me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children
and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my
disciple" (Luke 14:26). The coming new age demands new-and total-allegiance,
no longer to family and nation but to the kingdom itself. ThusJesus
urges his followers to break their merely natural relationships in favor
of spiritual ones. Acknowledging that such teaching divides and disrupts
family relationships, Jesus boldly declares:
Mark tells how
Jesus rejected his own mother and brothers in favor of the family of
his followers. When his mother and brothers came to speak with him and
stood outside the crowded room where he was preaching, he refused to
go to them, saying,
[16] Thus Jesus dismisses
the family obligations considered most sacred in Jewish community life,
including those to one's parents, siblings, spouse, and children. By
subordinating the obligation to procreate, rejecting divorce, and implicitly
sanction~g monogamous relationships,llesus reverses traditional prioritiesj
declaring, in effect, that other obligations, including marital ones,
are now more important than procreation. Even more startling, Jesus
endorses--and exemplifies--a new possibility and one he says is even
better: rejecting both marriage and procreation in favor of voluntary
celibacy, for the sake of following him into the new age. Twenty years later,
Jesus' zealous disciple Paul will go even further. Paul, born in the
cosmopolitan Asian city of Tarsus, brought up in the strictly observant
tradition of the Pharisees, was suddenly converted from bitter hostility
toward Christians to become one of their leaders. While we know little
of him as a person, we know from his letters, now preserved in the New
Testament, that Paul was a man of intense convictions. Paul accepts
Jesus' judgment that marriage is indissoluble and, like Jesus, not only
subordinates but actually ignores the command to procreate. But he often
speaks of marriage in negative terms, as a sop for those too weak to
do what is best: renounce sexual activity altogether. Paul admits that
marriage is "not sin" yet argues that it makes both partners
slaves to each other's sexual needs and desires, no longer free to devote
their energies "to the Lord" (I Corinthians 7:1-35).25 Paul
sees not only marriage but even the most casual sexual encounter .as
a form of bondage. Shockingly, he takes the passage from Genesis traditionally
used to describe the institution of marriage and applies it instead
to an encounter with a prostitute: "Do you not know that he who
joins himself to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it
is written, 'The two shall become one' " (Genesis 2:24). Paul then
contrasts such sexual union with the believer's spiritual union with
Christ: "But he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with
him" (I Corinthians 6:16-17). Neither Jesus nor
Paul, of course, invented religious celibacy. But those few Jews among
their contemporaries who practiced it--some of the Essenes who lived
in caves overlooking the Dead Sea, as well as Essene groups in other
places, and the Therapeutae, a monastic group of men and women in Egypt--were
widely considered extremists. Paul, however, declares, on the contrary,
that he wishes that everyone were voluntarily celibate, for the sake
of the kingdom, like himself (I Corinthians 7:7-8). Single people, spared [17] the anxieties
and obligations that plague married people, are not only freer but,
Paul says, happier. He concedes, however, that "if they cannot
contain themselves, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to
be aflame with passion " (r Corinthians 7:9). Yet Paul encourages
even those who are married to live as if they, too, were unmarried:
"Let those who have wives live as though they had none" (1
Corinthians 7:29b). George Bernard
Shaw was wrong when he accused Paul of inventing religious celibacy,
which Shaw called "this monstrous imposition upon Jesus";
and Shaw was also wrong to attribute Paul's celibacy to his "terror
of sex and terror of life."26 ForJesus and Paul, as for the Essenes,
such drastic measures were not a reflection of sexual revulsion but
a necessity to prepare for the end of the world, and to free oneself
for the "age to come." Paul, like Jesus, encouraged celibacy
not because he loathed the flesh (which in my opinion he did not) but
out of his urgent concern for the practical work of proclaiming the
gospel. Paul himself insisted that he did not want to place constraints
upon believers, but instead, in view of "the present distress,"
wanted to free them from external anxieties:
Paul had established
groups of followers among Jews and Gentiles from the Greek seaport cities
of Corinth and Thessalonica to the Asian cities of Galatia and Ephesus,
and he jealously watched over each of these groups to keep them pure
while awaiting the kingdom. He told his converts in Corinth that he
saw the Christian church as Christ's "bride," and himself
as a father or marriage broker anxious to preserve a young girl's virginity
for her future husband:
Here Paul speaks
of protecting the church's virginity as a metaphor for maintaining his
pure and original teaching; but certain Christians in following generations
took his words literally, as an injunction to celibacy.27 [18] Within about a
century of Paul's death, ascetic versions of Jesus' message were spreading
rapidly, especially in the cities of Asia Minor where Paul himself once
preached. What prompted this enthusiasm for renunciation is unclear,
but it expressed itself in such widely popular narratives as the story
of Thecla, the lovely young virgin who renounced a lucrative marriage
which her mother had arranged for her, cut off her hair and dressed
in men's clothes, and ran off to join the movement that Jesus and Paul
had initiated. According to the Acts of Paul and Thecla, she was determined,
in fact, to do what she believed the gospel required of her-to become,
like Paul himself, a celibate evangelist, and reject her wealthy fiance,
Thamyris, who would have supported not only Thecla but her aging and
impoverished mother. When Paul came to preach "the word of the
virgin life"28 in her home city of Iconium, in Asia Minor, Thecla's
mother forbade her to leave the house to hear him. So Thecla sat at
the window, straining to hear what Paul was saying to the crowds of
young people and women pressing around him:
Her mother, alarmed
when for three days Thecla refused to leave her place even to eat or
sleep, told her daughter's fiance about the
But Thecla vehemently
rejected Thamyris's loving pleas, as she had her mother's orders; and
he, grieving and furious, immediately arranged to have Paul arrested
for encouraging people to defy traditional customs and even the laws.
Hearing of Paul's arrest, Thecla stole out of the house secretly at
night to go to the prison, bribing the warden with her bracelets and
the guard with a silver mirror to let her enter Paul's cell to talk
with him privately. The next day, when
the governor, at Paul's hearing, demanded to know why Thecla refused
to marry her legal fiance, she "stood there looking steadily at
Paul" and refused to answer. Her mother, enraged that Thecla would
jeopardize her own future as well as her family's, burst into a violent
tirade:
The governor, shaken
by Thecla's defiance and her mother's rage, ordered Paul to be beaten
and driven out of town. Thecla he condemned to be burned alive for violating
the laws of the city and so threatening the social order. Brought naked
into the amphitheater for execution, Thecla was stretched out on a pile
of wood, and the kindling lighted, but suddenly a raincloud overshadowed
the amphitheater and burst. Escaping in the confusion, Thecla went searching
for Paul. But a Syrian nobleman, aroused by this young woman traveling
alone in Antioch, tried to rape her. To protect herself from such attacks,
Thecla cut off her hair and dressed herself as a man. [20] Thecla became
a famous teacher and holy woman, revered for centuries throughout the
eastern churches as a beloved saint. Although many legends
grew up around Thecla,32 and some scholars regard her story as fiction,
she may well have been an actual person,33 Whether or not she in fact
heard Paul himself preach, she--and thousands like her--welcomed such
radical versions of the gospel. Following Jesus' advice, these young
disciples broke with their families and refused to marry, declaring
themselves now members of ' 'God's family," Their vows of celibacy
served many converts as a tradition and of their families who ordInarily
arranged marriages at puberty and so determined the course of their
children's lives. As early as the second century of the Christian Era,
and for many generations thereafter, Christian celibates may have invoked
Thecla's example to justify the right of Christian women to baptize
and to preach. Even two hundred years later, Christian women who chose
the way of asceticism, whether living in solitude at home or in monastic
communities founded and often financed by wealthy women, called themselves
"new Theclas."34 The enormous popularity
of Thecla's story suggests how the Christian movement might have appealed
to young people, to Thecla's adolescent peers, Yet other popular stories--themselves
probably legends--tell how the radical message seized some of their
older, married sisters and brothers and irrevocably changed their lives
too. According to another widely told Christian story, the Acts of Thomas,
the lovely Mygdonia, wife of an aristocrat in India, having heard that
the Christian apostle Thomas was about to arrive in her city, was filled
with curiosity and immediately set out to hear him, But as her elegant
litter, carried by slaves, approached and parted the crowd
Mygdonia, shocked
and chagrined by these words, sprang from her litter and threw herself
on the ground before Thomas, acknowledg-
Such popular stories about the apostles graphically describe how some early Christian preachers, attempting to persuade men and women to "undo the sin of Adam and Eve" by choosing celibacy, disrupted the traditional order of family, village, and city, encouraging believers to reject ordinary family life for the sake of Christ.37 But many other
Christians sharply protested. Such radical asceticism was not, they
argued, the primary meaning of Jesus' gospel, and they simply ignored
the more radical implications of what Jesus and Paul taught. One anonymous
Christian living a generation after Paul wrote to a pagan friend that
far from rejecting marriage and procreation, "Christians marry,
like everyone else; they beget children; but they do not destroy fetuses."38
His contemporary, the Christian teacher Barnabas, a convert from Judaism,
assumes that Christians who follow the "way of light" act
like pious Jews, abstaining only from sexual practices that violate
marriage or frustrate its fulfillment in legitimate procreation. 39
Clement of Alexandria, a liberal, urbane, and sophisticated Christian
teacher living in Egypt more than a hundred years after Paul (c. 180
C.E.), denounced celibates and beggars who say that they are "imitating
the Lord" who never married, nor had any possessions in the world,
and who boast that they understand the gospel better than anyone else.40 For Clement, such
extremists are arrogant, foolish and wrong.41 But how could such Christians
as Barnabas or Clement, who [22] sought a more moderate
message, deal with certain well-known sayings of Jesus-for example,
his categorical rejection of divorce, or his statement that "if
anyone does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children
and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my
disciple" (Luke 14:26)? The impact of such sayings might have limited
the Christian movement to only the most zealous converts. Within two
generations of Jesus' death, however, some of his followers dared to
change the wording of such extreme sayings and insert modifying phrases.
The author of the Gospel of Matthew, for example, finding Jesus' prohibition
of divorce impossibly severe, added a phrase that apparently allowed
divorce in the case of the wife's infidelity: "for immorality,"
a crucial exception that placed Jesus on the side of teacher Shammai.
So according to Matthew, Jesus says, "Whoever divorces his wife,
except for immorality, and marries another, is guilty of adultery"
(Matthew 19:9). And Matthew softens what, according to Luke, Jesus had
said about hating one's family: Matthew rephrases the statement so that
Jesus says, "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not
worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not
worthy of me" (Matthew 10:37). The author of Matthew
not only apparently changes words and injects phrases but goes further,
deliberately juxtaposing Jesus' more radical sayings with more moderate
sayings on the same theme. According to Matthew, for example, Jesus
concludes his ringing rejection of divorce--"What God has joined
together, let no man put asunder"--with Matthew's modification
allowing for divorce "Whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality,
and marries another, is guilty of adultery" (Matthew 19:9). Only
a few verses later, Matthew juxtaposes Jesus' promise of great rewards
to "every one that has left houses or brothers or sisters or father
or mother or children or lands for my name's sake" (19:29), with
Jesus' reaffirmation of the traditional commandment "Honor your
father and mother" (19: I 9). Thus Matthew, obviously aware of
such discrepancies, and perhaps embarrassed by them, implicitly discriminates
between two types of saying-and two levels of discipleship. Matthew
gives the reader the impression that Jesus' message and the movement
he inspired need not place extreme demands upon every believer, but
only upon would-be spiritual heroes-those who want to follow Jesus'
command to "be perfect" (Matthew 5:48). But followers of Jesus
who want to stay home with their spouses and children and continue to
support their aging parents can, according to Mat- [23] thew, remain committed
to family life and still find their place within the Christian community. Certain followers
of Paul, concerned to make Paul's message equally accessible, and finding
some statements in his first letter to the Corinthians, for example,
too extreme, decided that he could not have meant what he said there,
much less what enthusiastically ascetic Christians took him to mean.
Thus some of Paul's followers proceeded to compose, in Paul's name,
letters of their own designed to correct what they believed were dangerous
misinterpretations of Paul's teaching. Several of these anonymous admirers
of Paul, a generation or two after his death, forged letters, filling
them with personal details of Paul's life and greetings to his friends,
hoping to make them appear authentic. Many people-then and now-have
assumed that these letters are genuine, and five of them were in fact
incorporated into the New Testament as "letters of Paul.')Even
today, scholars dispute which are authentic and which are not. Most
scholars, however, agree that Paul actually wrote only eight of the
thirteen "Pauline" letters now included in the New Testament
collection: Romans, I and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, I Thessalonians,
and Philemon. Virtually all scholars agree that Paul himself did not
write I or 2 Timothy or Titus-letters written in a style different from
Paul's and reflecting situations and viewpoints very different from
those in Paul's own letters. About the authorship of Ephesians, Colossians,
and 2 Thessalonians, debate continues; but the majority of scholars
include these, too, among the "deutero-Pauline"--literally,
secondarily Pauline--letters.42 Although the deutero-Pauline
letters differ from one another in many ways, on practical matters they
all agree. All reject Paul's most radically ascetic views to present
instead a "domesticated Paul"43-a version of Paul who, far
from urging celibacy upon his fellow Christians, endorses only a stricter
version of traditional Jewish attitudes toward marriage and family.
Just as Matthew juxtaposed Jesus' more radical sayings with modified
versions of them, so the New Testament collection juxtaposes Paul's
authentic letters with the deutero-Paulines, offering a version of Paul
that softens him from a radical preacher into a patron saint of domestic
life. The anonymous author
of I Timothy, for example, makes "Paul" attack as demon-inspired
those "liars. ..who forbid marriage and enjoin abstinence from
foods which God created" (I Timothy 4:1-3), taking aim, presumably,
at the preachers of asceticism, who depict Paul as one of themselves,
indeed as their model.44 [24]
> The conservative Paul of Timothy directly contradicts the advice Paul gives in 1 Corinthians, where he urges virgins and widows to remain unmarried. According to 1 Timothy, Paul, concerned that the presence of unmarried women among the Christians may arouse suspicions and scandalous gossip, declares, "I would have the younger widows marry, bear children, rule their households, and give the enemy no occasion to revile us" (I Timothy 5: 14). Dismissing ascetic discipline as mere "bodily training" (I Timothy 4:8), worth little for developing piety, this "Paul" warns his readers to "have nothing to do with godless and silly myths" (I Timothy 4:7). As Dennis MacDonald persuasively shows, the author of 1 Timothy is denouncing, in all probability, such stories as those of Thecla and Mygdonia, which circulated for generations, perhaps especially among women storytellers. (See notes 33 and 34, above.) Challenging those who, like Thecla herself, claim that women have the right to teach and baptize, the author of 1 Timothy recalls Eve's sin and commands that women
Read this way--as
it still is read by the majority of Christian churches--the story of
Eve both proves woman's natural weakness and gullibility and defines
her present role. Chastened by reminders of Eve's sin, deprived of all
authority, women must silently submit to their husbands, grateful that
they too may be saved, provided they adhere to their traditional domestic
roles.45 The "Paul" of 1 Timothy goes so far as to judge even
men's leadership abilities on the basis of their domestic roles as family
patriarchs: [25]
Thus, whereas the
authentic Paul declares in his letter to the Corinthians, "I wish
that all were as I myself am," voluntarily celibate, the "Paul"
of I Timothy urges marriage and family upon men and women alike. The Letter to the Hebrews expresses a positive reverence for marriage--and specifically for sexually active marriage: "Marriage is honorable unto all, and the marriage bed is not polluted" (Hebrews 13:4). The deutero-Pauline letter to the Ephesians calls ascetic Christians foolish, insisting that "no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it" (Ephesians 5:29). The author of Ephesians goes so far as to attribute to Paul a vision of Adam and Eve and, consequently, of marriage itself-as symbolizing the "great mystery. ..of Christ and the church" (Ephesians 5:32). "Paul's" Christian vision of marriage confirms, this author claims, the traditional patriarchal pattern of marriage,
Taking his cue
from Paul's saying that "the head of every man is Christ, the head
of a woman is her husband" (I Corinthians 11:3), the author of
Ephesians explains that since the man, like Christ, is the head, and
the woman his body, "so husbands should love their wives as their
own bodies," and wives, in turn, should submit to the higher judgment
of their husbands, as their "heads" (Ephesians 5:28-33), Within thirty to
fifty years of Paul's death, then, partisans of the ascetic Jesus-and
of the ascetic Paul-were contending against those who advocated a much
more moderate Jesus and a much more conservative Paul. Like relatives
in a large family battling over the inheritance, both ascetic and nonascetic
Christians laid claim to the legacies of Jesus and Paul, both sides
insisting that they alone were the true heirs, Many Christians--perhaps the majority--were more concerned to accommodate themselves to ordinary social and marital structures than to challenge them, By the end of the second century, as the [26]
Taking on his opponents'
arguments point for point, Clement began by saying that although Jesus
never married, he did not intend for his human followers, in this respect
at least, to follow his example:
Ascetically inclined
Christians had argued that Jesus' words prove that he advocated celibacy:
why else, they asked, would he have praised women whose "wombs
never bore," or men who "made themselves eunuchs for the sake
of the Kingdom of Heaven"? Clement admits that such sayings are
puzzling, but he avoids the issue that they raise by refusing to take
them literally. He maintains that Jesus could not have meant by "eunuch"
what most readers assume (a celibate man). Instead, "what Jesus
meant," Clement clumsily argues, "is that a married man who
has divorced his wife because of her infidelity should not remarry.
"48 What about Paul,
who remained, as he boasted, voluntarily celibate; or Peter, who, according
to Luke 18:28, left his home to follow Jesus? Paul himself tells us,
Clement could argue, that Peter, like "other apostles and the brothers
of the Lord," traveled with his wife at church expense (I Corinthians
9: 5)! Then, in a passage that surely would have surprised Paul, Clement
argues that Paul too was married: "The only reason he did not take
[his wife] with him is that it would have been an inconvenience for
his ministry."49 When Clement attacks
ascetic interpretations of Paul's message, he finds in the deutero-Pauline
letters all the ammunition he needs. For example, "to those who
slander marriage," he replies by quoting the antiascetic Paul of
1 Timothy.50 But when he confronts the authentic letters,
Clement finds his task much harder. Insisting, however, that the same
man wrote both groups of letters, Clement skillfully interweaves passages
from the authentic and the deuteroPauline letters. Thus Clement, and
the majority of Christians ever since, can claim that Paul endorses
both marriage and celibacy:
Clement rejects,
above all, the claim that Adam and Eve's sin was to engage in sexual
intercourse-a view common among such Christian teachers as Tatian the
Syrian, who taught that the fruit of the tree of knowledge conveyed
carnal knowledge. Tatian had pointed out that after Adam and Eve ate
the forbidden fruit, they became sexually aware: "Then the eyes
of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked" (Genesis
3:7). Other interpreters agreed that the accuracy of this interpretation
is proved in Genesis 4:1, where the Hebrew verb "to know"
('yada) connotes sexual intercourse: "And Adam knew his wife, and
she conceived, and bore a son." Tatian blamed Adam for inventing
marriage, believing that for this sin God expelled Adam and his partner
in crime from Paradise.52 The distinguished ascetic Julius Cassianus
instead blamed Satan, not Adam, for inventing sexual intercourse. According
to Cassianus, Satan "borrowed this practice from the irrational
animals, and persuaded Adam to have sexual union with Eve."53 But
Clement denounces all such views. Sexual intercourse, he declares, was
not sffiful, but part of God's original--and "good"--creation:
"Nature led [Adam and Eve], like the irrational animals, to procreate";54
"and," Clement might well have added, "when I say nature,
I mean God." Clement says that those who engage in procreation
are not sinning but "cooperating with God in his work ofcreation."55
Thus Clement confirms the traditional Jewish conviction, expressed in
the deutero-Pauline letters, that legitimate procreation is a good work,
blessed by God from the day of human creation. If engaging in
sexual intercourse was not the sin of Adam and Eve, what was that first
and fatal transgression? Such fathers of the church as Clement and Irenaeus
insist that the first sin was disobeying God's command. Yet even Clement
and his contemporary Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, although eager to exempt
sexual desire from [28] primary blame for
the fall, admit that, as they imagined it, "man's first disobedience"and
the fall did, in fact, take sexual form. Clement carefully explains
that the disobedience of Adam and Eve involved not what they did, but
how they did it. As Clement imagines the scene, Adam and Eve, like impatient
adolescents, rushed into sexual union before they had received their
Father's blessing. Irenaeus explains that Adam and Eve were, in fact,
underage:
Clement blames
Adam, who, he says, "desired the fruit of marriage before the proper
time, and so fell into sin. ...they were impelled to do it more quickly
than was proper because they were still young, and had been seduced
by deceit."57 Irenaeus adds that Adam's guilty response shows that
he was well aware that sexual desire had incited him to sin, for he
covered himself and Eve with scratchy fig leaves, "while there
were many other leaves which would have irritated his body much less."58
Thus Adam punished the very organs that had led them into sin. The attitudes that
Clement and Irenaeus helped to shape more than one hundred years after
Paul's death set the standard of Christian behavior for centuries-indeed,
for nearly two thousand years. What would prevail in Christian tradition
was not only the stark sayings of the gospels attributed to Jesus and
the encouragements to celibacy that Paul urges upon believers in I Corinthians,
but versions of these austere teachings modified to suit the purposes
of the churches of the first and second centuries. Clement and his colleagues
established, too, a durable double standard that endorses marriage,
but only as second best to celibacy. Clement and his fellow Christians
constructed elaborate arguments, drawn primarily from the Hebrew Bible
and the deutero-Pauline letters, to show that marriage, for Christians
as well as for Jews, is a positive act, involving "cooperation
with God's work of creation." Yet Clement can revere it as such
only by going back to the consensus Jesus challenged. Clement, influenced,
no doubt, by Stoic philosophers who agreed with him in principle, insisted
that marriage finds its sole legitimate purpose-and sexual intercourse
its only rationale-in procreation.59 Thus even Clement, certainly the
most liberal of the fathers of the church, and one who, more emphatically
than any other, [29] affirms God's blessing
upon marriage and procreation, expresses deep ambivalence toward sexuality-an
ambivalence that has resounded throughout Christian history for two
millennia. Clement believes
that Jesus meant both to confirm and to transform traditional patterns
of marriage; that he did not challenge the patriarchal structure of
marriage (which for Clement expresses the natural superiority of men,
as well as God's punishment upon Eve); but that Jesus did intend to
eradicate such pagan sexual practices as incest, adultery, "unnatural
intercourse," homosexuality, abortion, and infanticide, as well
as the Hebrew practices of polygamy and divorce. Marriage, now monogamous
and indissoluble, as God originally intended it, may become, for believers,
a "sacred image." But to experience it as such, the believer
must be purged of the sexual passion that led Adam and Eve into sin.
The married Christian must not only subordinate desire to reason but
strive to annihilate desire
To accomplish this,
as one might imagine, is not easy. "The gospel," as Clement
reads it, not only restricts sexuality to marriage but, even within
marriage, limits it to specific acts intended for procreation. To engage
in marital intercourse for any other reason is to "do injury to
nature."61 Clement excludes not only such counterproductive practices
as oral and anal intercourse but also intercourse with a menstruating,
pregnant, barren, or menopausal wife, and, for that matter, with one's
wife "in the morning," "in the daytime," or "after
dinner." Clement warns, indeed, that [30] selves to celibacy,
is better than a sexually active one. To the dedicated Christian, his
wife, after conception, is as a sister, and is judged as if of the same
father; who only recalls her husband when she looks at the children;
as one destined to become a sister in reality after putting off the
flesh, which separates and limits the knowledge of those who are spiritual
by the specific characteristics of the sexes.63 Only spouses who
are celibate and thereby recover, so to speak, their virginity transcend
the whole structure of bodily existence and recover the spiritual equality
Adam and Eve lost through the fall, Like Clement, the
majority of Christians for the past two thousand years have chosen to
maintain simultaneously Jesus' most extreme-even shocking-sayings, such
as those prohibiting divorce and encouraging renunciation, together
with others that modify their severity. By the end of the second century,
Christians, as we have seen, had also incorporated within the New Testament
a similar double image of Paul and his message. The churches that collected
Paul's letters during the second century generally included, first of
all, the authentic letters, which express Paul's own complex and often
ambivalent attitudes, ranging from his preference for celibacy to his
admission that "the weak" are better off married than promiscuouS.66
But the majority of Christians chose the domesticated Paul over the
ascetic one and tolerated contradictory statements attributed to the
apostle (just as Matthew attributes contradictory statements to Jesus
himself). In this way, Christians could attract into the movement those
who were married-and even divorced-as well as those eager for celibacy.
Clement, like most of his contemporaries, chose to subordinate Jesus'
calls for radical renunciation and to endorse instead procreation within
marriage-as Jesus and Paul did As the Christian
movement, in Clement's time and later, became more complex, gathering
hundreds of thousands of converts from Rome and Greece, from Africa
and Asia, and throughout the regions of Spain and Gaul, the message
of Jesus and Paul, intended originally for a largely Hebrew constituency,
had to be refracted through that increasingly diverse movement. Jesus'
radical call to repent and purify oneself to prepare for the Kingdom
of God remained, for many, the primary point of reference. Simultaneously,
however, Christians developed multiple images of Jesus and Paul and
multiple interpretations of their message to suit a variety of mundane
and spiritual purposes.
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[155] CHAPTER ONE I. For an excellent
discussion of the Hellenistic period, see V. Tcherikover, Hellenistic
Civilization and the Jews (Philadelphia, 1961); on the time of Jesus,
see S. Safrai and M. Stern, The JewIsh People in the First Century (Philadelphia,
1974, vol. I, and 1976, vol. 2); M. Smith, "The Zealots and the
Sicarii," Harvard Theological Review 64 (1971), 1-19;J. Gager,
Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity (New Jersey,
1975); A. Segal, "Society in the Time of Jesus," [156] [157] [158]
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