Christine, I just looked up an old Atlantic article on the "historical Jesus". It impressed me at the time, there may be more recent work but this piece is pretty readable. It also cites many theologians, people I'd take a little more seriously than Neocon.
"Who Do Men Say That I Am?", The Atlantic, 11/86, theatlantic.com
A part that you might find interesting (well, it's all pretty interesting)
As a growing number of feminist New Testament scholars have recently been pointing out, Jesus seems to have displayed attitudes toward women that were highly uncharacteristic of the first- century world. That those attitudes survive at all in Gospel texts compiled by men who may not have shared such views serves only to emphasize the importance of the tradition. Jesus associated freely with women and taught some of them as disciples. Women are frequently observed among his following, and many -- for example, Martha, Mary, Susanna, and Joanna -- are mentioned by name. The subjects of Jesus's parables are as likely to be women as men, and women in the parables are held up as models for emulation (or the reverse) no more or less often than are men. Jesus repeatedly expresses his concern for the plight of widows, refuses to shun the company of prostitutes and adulteresses, and performs numerous miracles in behalf of women. As noted, Jesus also forbade divorce. In the twentieth century divorce may be liberating for some women, but in the first century it was a calamity for most women. (In Jewish law a wife could not initiate a divorce, but her husband could do so at will and had no obligation to his spouse afterward.) The historicity of the preaching by Jesus on divorce is accepted by almost all scholars, though few go so far as to assert that in these sayings we have the ipsissima verba -- the "very words themselves" -- employed by Jesus. (A modern analogy: No one disputes the historicity of Jimmy Carter's famous "malaise" speech; in that speech, however, Carter never once used the word malaise. )
The Jesus movement, like other reform and renewal movements in first-century Judaism, was highly egalitarian, and the egalitarianism appears to have survived into the early decades of Christianity. The pre-Pauline Christian baptismal formulation, preserved in Paul's epistle to the Galatians, is a radical declaration. It reads: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Elisabeth Sch[cedilla]ssler Fiorenza, the author of In Memory of Her (1983) and perhaps the most prominent feminist theologian writing today, has attempted to reconstruct -- as best one can, given the essentially androcentric nature of the sources -- the role of women in the earliest Christian communities. She argues persuasively that many women played key roles in the early Church, served as priests and missionaries, often worked with their husbands as a team, and were members of the church leadership. Eventually, however, the Church readjusted to the patriarchal patterns of the surrounding culture. There is some speculation, incidentally, that one of the hypothesized pre-Gospel sources -- L, the source thought to be unique to the Gospel according to Luke -- may have been the work of a woman. Luke contains more passages involving women (about forty) than any other Gospel; roughly half of those passages appear only in Luke, and most of them seem to come from L.
The word hermeneutics also gets bandied about a bit, but it's actually defined, too.
Cheers, Dan. |
