Well now, Jane, you are a woman, an educated one, if I am not mistaken. And you say that "history is not the record of God. The Bible is." The problem with that, Jane, is that the Bible was translated, retranslated, reviewed, and sometimes even deliberately changed to alter its meaning.
Why look at this url, Jane. Mary Magdeline was not a whore! She was a close associate of Jesus, a primary supporter. And many, many of Jesus' strongest, and most loyal, supporters were independent, capable women. Then, because men used early Christianity to set up a religion where women were dominated by men, the Bible was deliberately altered to reflect that. There are examples here, specifically citing where the actual words in the Bible were changed to create a society where the men were in charge. This has continued right into the twentieth century. I remember reading that during the Middle Ages, as Christianity came into Europe with the intent of taking over the agrarian peasant societies living there, priests ordered men to beat their women to gain control over them. Women in pagan societies, including the Celts in Europe, had many more rights than Christian women, and often owned property and ran businesses independently. In fact, it is the male domination inherent in Christianity which causes some women to leave the fold:
pbs.org
I think the early Christian women had very interesting beliefs. Here, from the url I cited, are some of them:
Jesus was understood primarily as a teacher and mediator of wisdom
rather than as ruler and judge.
Theological reflection centered on the experience of the person of the
risen Christ more than the crucified savior. Interestingly enough, this is
true even in the case of the martyr Perpetua. One might expect her to
identify with the suffering Christ, but it is the risen Christ she
encounters in her vision.
Direct access to God is possible for all through receiving the Spirit.
In Christian community, the unity, power, and perfection of the Spirit
are present now, not just in some future time.
Those who are more spiritually advanced give what they have freely
to all without claim to a fixed, hierarchical ordering of power.
An ethics of freedom and spiritual development is emphasized over an
ethics of order and control.
A woman's identity and spirituality could be developed apart from her
roles as wife and mother (or slave), whether she actually withdrew
from those roles or not. Gender is itself contested as a "natural"
category in the face of the power of God's Spirit at work in the
community and the world. This meant that potentially women (and
men) could exercise leadership on the basis of spiritual achievement
apart from gender status and without conformity to established social
gender roles.
Overcoming social injustice and human suffering are seen to be
integral to spiritual life.
Women were also actively engaged in reinterpreting the texts of their
tradition. For example, another new text, the Hypostasis of the Archons,
contains a retelling of the Genesis story ascribed to Eve's daughter Norea, in
which her mother Eve appears as the instructor of Adam and his healer.
The new texts also contain an unexpected wealth of Christian imagination of
the divine as feminine. The long version of the Apocryphon of John, for
example, concludes with a hymn about the descent of divine Wisdom, a
feminine figure here called the Pronoia of God. She enters into the lower
world and the body in order to awaken the innermost spiritual being of the
soul to the truth of its power and freedom, to awaken the spiritual power it
needs to escape the counterfeit powers that enslave the soul in ignorance,
poverty, and the drunken sleep of spiritual deadness, and to overcome
illegitimate political and sexual domination. The oracle collection Thunder
Perfect Mind also adds crucial evidence to women's prophetic
theology-making. This prophet speaks powerfully to women, emphasizing
the presence of women in her audience and insisting upon their identity with
the feminine voice of the Divine. Her speech lets the hearers transverse the
distance between political exploitation and empowerment, between the
experience of degradation and the knowledge of infinite self-worth, between
despair and peace. It overcomes the fragmentation of the self by naming it,
cherishing it, insisting upon the multiplicity of self-hood and experience.
These elements may not be unique to women's religious thought or always
result in women's leadership, but as a constellation they point toward one
type of theologizing that was meaningful to some early Christian women, that
had a place for women's legitimate exercise of leadership, and to whose
construction women contributed. If we look to these elements, we are able
to discern important contributions of women to early Christian theology and
praxis. These elements also provide an important location for discussing
some aspects of early Christian women's spiritual lives: their exercise of
leadership, their ideals, their attraction to Christianity, and what gave
meaning to their self-identity as Christians.
Women's prominence did not, however, go unchallenged. Every variety of
ancient Christianity that advocated the legitimacy of women's leadership was
eventually declared heretical, and evidence of women's early leadership roles
was erased or suppressed.
This erasure has taken many forms. Collections of prophetic oracles were
destroyed. Texts were changed. For example, at least one woman's place in
history was obscured by turning her into a man! In Romans 16:7, the
apostle Paul sends greetings to a woman named Junia. He says of her and
her male partner Andronicus that they are "my kin and my fellow prisoners,
prominent among the apostles and they were in Christ before me."
Concluding that women could not be apostles, textual editors and translators
transformed Junia into Junias, a man.
Or women's stories could be rewritten and alternative traditions could be
invented. In the case of Mary Magdalene, starting in the fourth century,
Christian theologians in the Latin West associated Mary Magdalene with the
unnamed sinner who anointed Jesus' feet in Luke 7:36-50. The confusion
began by conflating the account in John 12:1-8, in which Mary (of Bethany)
anoints Jesus, with the anointing by the unnamed woman sinner in the
accounts of Luke. Once this initial, erroneous identification was secured,
Mary Magdalene could be associated with every unnamed sinful woman in
the gospels, including the adulteress in John 8:1-11 and the Syro-phoenician
woman with her five and more "husbands" in John 4:7-30. Mary the
apostle, prophet, and teacher had become Mary the repentant whore. This
fiction was invented at least in part to undermine her influence and with it the
appeal to her apostolic authority to support women in roles of leadership.
Until recently the texts that survived have shown only the side that won. The
new texts are therefore crucial in constructing a fuller and more accurate
portrait. The Gospel of Mary, for example, argued that leadership should
be based on spiritual maturity, regardless of whether one is male or female.
This Gospel lets us hear an alternative voice to the one dominant in
canonized works like I Timothy, which tried to silence women and insist
that their salvation lies in bearing children. We can now hear the other side of
the controversy over women's leadership and see what arguments were
given in favor of it.
It needs to be emphasized that the formal elimination of women from official
roles of institutional leadership did not eliminate women's actual presence
and importance to the Christian tradition, although it certainly seriously
damaged their capacity to contribute fully. What is remarkable is how much
evidence has survived systematic attempts to erase women from history, and
with them the warrants and models for women's leadership. The evidence
presented here is but the tip of an iceberg.
So you see Jane, if the Bible is really the record of God, why did they change it so much, to portray women in a negative way? It is twentieth century archaeologists and theologians, working with newly discovered documents, and interested in the real history of women, who are putting these things together. So the study of history, and historical documents, are all very important. |
