Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen

zum Neuen Testament

Herausgeber/Editor
Jörg Frey (Zürich)

Mitherausgeber/Associate Editors
Markus Bockmuehl (Oxford) ∙ James A. Kelhoffer (Uppsala)
Tobias Nicklas (Regensburg) ∙ Janet Spittler (Charlottesville, VA)
J. Ross Wagner (Durham, NC)

434
 Re-Making the World:
Christianity and Categories
Essays in Honor of Karen L. King

Edited by
Taylor G. Petrey

Associate Editors
Carly Daniel-Hughes, Benjamin H. Dunning,
AnneMarie Luijendijk, Laura S. Nasrallah

Mohr Siebeck
Taylor G. Petrey is an associate professor of religion at Kalamazoo College. He holds a ThD
and MTS from Harvard Divinity School.
Carly Daniel-Hughes is an associate professor of religions and cultures at Concordia Uni-
versity. She holds a ThD and MDiv from Harvard Divinity School.
Benjamin H. Dunning is a professor of theology at Fordham University. He holds a PhD
from Harvard University.
AnneMarie Luijendijk is a professor of religion at Princeton University. She holds a ThD
from Harvard Divinity School and a ThM from the Vrije Universiteit.
Laura S. Nasrallah is the Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and Inter-
pretation at Yale Divinity School and Yale University. She holds a ThD and MDiv from Harvard
Divinity School.

ISBN 978-3-16-156581-6 / eISBN 978-3-16-156582-3

DOI 10.1628/978-3-16-156582-3
ISSN 0512-1604 / eISSN 2568-7476
(Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament)
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie;
detailed bibliographic data are available at http://dnb.dnb.de.

© 2019 Mohr Siebeck Tübingen, Germany. www.mohrsiebeck.com

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by
copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to repro-
ductions, translations and storage and processing in electronic systems.
The book was typeset by epline in Böblingen using Minion typeface, printed on non-aging
paper by Gulde Druck in Tübingen, and bound by Buchbinderei Spinner in Ottersweier.
Printed in Germany.
 Preface

On behalf of the volume’s editors, the joy we had in this project was in putting all
of this together in honor of Karen L. King, who has profoundly influenced each
of those involved, and so many more. She has instructed us all in her classroom
teaching, scholarship, and mentorship. What’s more, she has taught us through
her dignity, integrity, and character as she has faced trials and triumphs. We put
this volume together to honor her contributions to the field, to celebrate her 65th
birthday, and to wish her well as she begins her retirement. She has a rich legacy.
I first met Karen L. King as a masters student at Harvard Divinity School in
2002 and later became a doctoral student in the New Testament and Early Chris-
tianity program. I took numerous classes with her and she eventually became my
adviser and directed my dissertation. I learned from her to think in new ways
and to push boundaries, and I shared in a vibrant intellectual community among
her students and colleagues. This has been a singular privilege in my life. Since
then, she has continued to mentor me, and I am so fortunate to count her as a
friend.
I want to thank my co-editors Carly, Ben, AnneMarie, and Laura for their
work bringing this to fruition. Putting this volume together with my colleagues
has been an incredible privilege. Working with such a distinguished list of con-
tributors whose essays offer significant advances in scholarship on a number of
key questions was a thrill. The friends who comprise the editorial team were dili-
gent and collegial and supportive of one another, and we all drew closer together
in our collaboration and friendship. We all worked to conceive of the scope and
subjects of the volume, shared the editorial work, and assisted one another in
making decisions. Special thanks to Carly who secured funding to help com-
plete the project. On behalf of my associates, we wish to thank Colby Gaudet
for his copy-editing. We also thank the team at Mohr Siebeck including Kathar-
ina Gutekunst, Elena Müller, and Tobias Stäbler who supported this volume and
shepherded it along the various stages toward publication.
We offer congratulations to our dear colleague and friend Karen and wish her
all the best in the next phase of her career. Many happy returns.

Kalamazoo, MI, USA, March, 2019 Taylor G. Petrey

 Table of Contents

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   V

Benjamin H. Dunning and Laura S. Nasrallah

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . �  1

I. Categories

Daniel Boyarin
Mark 7:1–23 – Finally . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . � 19

Elaine Pagels
How John of Patmos’ Readers Made Him into a Christian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . � 35

T. Christopher Hoklotubbe
What is Docetism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . � 49

Giovanni B. Bazzana
Beyond “Gnosticism”: Pneumatology and Ecclesiology in 2 Clem 14 . . . . . . � 73

Judith Hartenstein
The Designation “Gnostic” for the Gospel of Mary and Its Implications:
A Critical Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ���95

Marcie Lenk
Parted Ways Meet Again: Messianic Judaism in Israel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . �113

II. Women and Gender

Carly Daniel-Hughes
Mary Magdalene and the Fantasy Echo:
Reflections on the Feminist Historiography of Early Christianity . . . . . . . . . �135

Adele Reinhartz
Wise Women in the Gospel of John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . �159
VIII Table of Contents

Angela Standhartinger
Performing Salvation: The Therapeutrides and Job’s Daughters in Context .  173

Margaret Butterfield
The Widow, the Wife, and the Priestess:
Tertullian’s Life Plans for Widows in Ad uxorem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . �197

Silke Petersen
Marriages, Unions, and Bridal Chambers in the Gospel of Philip . . . . . . . . . �213

Taylor G. Petrey
Cosmic Gender: Valentinianism and Contested Accounts of
Sexual Difference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . �235

Ronit Irshai
Feminist Research in Jewish Studies: What’s in a Name? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . �257

III. Historiography

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

Re-Visioning “Christian” Beginnings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . �279

Stanley Stowers
Locating the Religion of Associations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . �301

Carlin Barton
A Roman Historian Looking at Early Christian religiones:
The coniuratio and the sacramentum in Second and Early Third-century
North Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . �325

Denise Kimber Buell

This Changes Everything: Spiritualists, Theosophists, and Rethinking
Early Christian Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . �345

Bernadette Brooten
Courage, Betrayal, and the Roman State: Persons Enslaved to Christians
in the Persecution at Lyons (177 CE) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . �369
 Table of Contents IX

AnneMarie Luijendijk
The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463):
Rethinking the History of Early Christianity through Literary Papyri
from Oxyrhynchus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . �391

IV. Epilogue

Sarah Sentilles
As If the Way We Think about the World is the Way the World Is . . . . . . . . . �423

List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . �435

General Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . �437

 Introduction
Benjamin H. Dunning and Laura S. Nasrallah

Telling the story of Karen King’s many contributions to the study of New Tes-
tament and early Christianity is a difficult task. One distillation of her decades
of work in the field is found in an important 2008 chapter in the Oxford Hand-
book of Early Christian Studies, “Which Early Christianity?” The very title gives
us a glimpse into King’s contributions, which provide data and analytical tools
for investigating the varieties of early Christianity. In this chapter, she offers a
succinct formulation of one of the most pressing historiographical issues in early
Christian studies:
Throughout the history of Christianity, diverse beliefs and practices would ebb and flow
on the tides of historical change and conflict, navigating and sometimes floundering with
ever-shifting geographical, social-political, and cultural contexts as Christianity expanded
from a tiny movement to a global religion. The issues, actors, and contexts would vary, but
diversity would continue to characterize Christianity, even in the face of powerful claims
to unity and uniformity. The question is how to represent this ever-shifting diversity ad-
equately.1

The drive to present (true) Christian belief and practice as singular runs deep
in the tradition, inflecting many of its earliest narratives and theological claims
and even cutting across specific positions that conflict with one another. We can
see the template for what King calls “the master narrative of Christian origins”
emerging at least as early as the conclusion to the Gospel of Luke:2 “And [Jesus]
said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the
dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be pro-
claimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses
of these things’” (24:46–48 NRSV). Here Jesus reveals a supposedly pure, original
gospel to his disciples and charges them as witnesses to carry this deposit to the
rest of the world. The book of Acts further clarifies that this initial deposit is
entrusted first and foremost to twelve male followers and that their charge entails
both pneumatic empowerment and a specific geographical mandate, which sub-
sequently shapes the text’s narrative arc: “But you will receive power when the

1 Karen L. King, “Which Early Christianity?” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian
Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2015), 66.
2 King, “Which Early Christianity,” 67.
2 Benjamin H. Dunning and Laura S. Nasrallah

Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in
all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (1:8 NRSV). Diversity of
opinion and dissension within the movement are therefore presented either as
temporary and eventually resolved (Acts 15) or as the seeds of heresy, threatening
the otherwise unbroken chain of truth – as in the case of Simon, a believing and
baptized follower of Christ (8:13) who, by virtue of his conflict with Peter, comes
to be figured by numerous sources in the later tradition as diabolically inspired
and the father of all heresies (see, e. g., Justin, 1 Apol. 26, Irenaeus, Haer. 1.23; 3,
preface).
King’s “Which Early Christianity” and her larger corpus ask that we pay
attention to nascent templates for making sense of difference in Christianized
terms, such as the one found in Eusebius of Caesarea’s enormously influential
Ecclesiastical History in the early fourth century:
It is my purpose to record: the successions from the holy apostles and the periods extend-
ing from our Savior’s time to our own; the many important events that occurred in the
history of the church; those who were distinguished in its leadership at the most famous
locations; those who in each generation proclaimed the Word of God by speech or pen; the
names, numbers, and ages of those who, driven by love of novelty to the extremity of error,
have announced themselves as sources of knowledge (falsely so-called) while ravaging
Christ’s flock mercilessly, like ferocious wolves; the fate that overtook the whole Jewish
race after their plot against our Savior; the occasions and times of the hostilities waged
by heathen against the divine Word and the heroism of those who fought to defend it,
sometimes through torture and blood; the martyrdoms of our own time and the gracious
deliverance provided by our Savior and Lord, Jesus the Christ of God, who is my starting
point. (1.1.1–2; trans. Maier)3

Here we see more fully articulated a trajectory that has served, more or less,
as the basic hegemonic narrative of Christian origins for the greater part of
two millennia. There is rhetorical power to this plot, a story of twists and turns
whereby God managed to preserve Christian truth, embodied in Jesus Christ,
through all sorts of external attacks, until finally bringing about deliverance
through the Emperor Constantine. And yet, while this may be a compelling plot,
it is also a selective one. It is an account of certain locales, communities, and
events but not others. It is an account that erases legitimate debates whose out-
comes were genuinely not known in advance, whitewashes competing visions of
Jesus’ teaching and why it matters, and positions diversity that could not be easily
assimilated or coopted as irredeemably beyond the pale.
Unsurprisingly, alternative evidence abounds, and King’s career has been
steeped in detailing and explaining such evidence. Eusebius’s rhetorical align-
ment of a fixed origin (“my starting point” – that is, Jesus Christ as singular and
singularly understood) with essence and truth works to obscure the otherwise
3Paul L. Maier, Eusebius – The Church History: A New Translation with Commentary
(Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 1999), 21.
 Introduction 3

seemingly obvious historiographical insight that whatever point we fix as the

beginning is always, historically speaking, already a point in the flow. In this
particular case, the tradition itself problematizes any notion of a singular point of
origin, insofar as the New Testament preserves four conflicting accounts of J­ esus’
life, death, and ongoing significance (the last not necessarily always aligned with
bodily resurrection in a straightforward way). Many more possibilities and
stories exist or did exist at some early point, even if now lost.
For example, the Gospel of Mary – with its theological promise of a Jesus
who dialogues with a woman, on the one hand, and whose words allow for a
questioning of the very idea of sin, on the other – is only one voice, but a key
one that King has made accessible through her translation and contextualization
of the text. Yet evidence for debate and contrary opinions at Christianity’s very
start is not limited to this one early (perhaps second-century) extracanonical
text. Diversity characterized Christ-following communities from the very begin-
ning. In his first letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul buttresses his appeal
for unity with the acknowledgment that “it has been reported to me by Chloe’s
people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters. What I mean
is that each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to
Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ’ (1:11–12 NRSV). Citing this passage, King notes,
“It would seem that the questions ‘Which Christianity? Whose Christianity?’
were posed very early, even before the gospels and most of the New Testament
literature had been composed, and at a time when the number of believers
must have been very small indeed.”4 Yet the drive to answer definitively the
question of “which early Christianity” in the singular by way of domesticating
or demonizing difference appears to be equally early – and to extend through
the tradition in ways not limited to the New Testament or other texts that later
came to be classified as “orthodox” (see, e. g., Apoc. Pet. 76–79; Testim. Truth;
Ptolemy, Flor. 33.3.2–3).5
Karen King’s work shows that Christianity was diverse from its first mo-
ments – even before the word “Christian” was coined – and insists that scholars
must engage both in deep historical work and in ethical reflection. Whatever
one’s goal in reconstructing early Christianity, she argues, “such work should be
based in an adequate comprehension of the multifarious practices of early Chris-
tians, including their constructions of identity and difference.”6 To this end, a
class that King has long taught, titled “Orthodoxy and Heresy,” deconstructs
the history of those terms. In this course, as in her publications, King dem-
onstrates how ancient Christians accused each other of heresy – a term originally
emerging from the Greek haeresis, meaning “choice” or “sect” or “school” – and
4 King, “Which Early Christianity,” 66.
5 See Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2003), 53.
6 King, “Which Early Christianity,” 81.
4 Benjamin H. Dunning and Laura S. Nasrallah

made claims of orthodoxy for themselves. In the introduction to her translation

of the Apocryphon of John, she explains that “[early Christians] developed dis-
tinct ways of contesting orthodoxy and heresy, and in so doing they created dis-
courses of identity and difference that would pervade the West for millennia to
come.”7 King has long argued that the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi in the
mid-twentieth century should not be read as “Gnostic,” but instead as part of the
diversity of early Christianity. Her expertise in the Coptic language has allowed
her to bring these texts into the orbit of mainstream scholarly conversations
within early Christian studies. One important aspect of King’s work has been to
break down the barriers that ecclesial and scholarly traditions have constructed
between various forms of Christianity in antiquity. Thus, in her work, a text from
the so-called gnostic author Valentinus can sit alongside one from Origen, and
Irenaeus can join the conversation even as the Apocryphon of John does.
King does this sort of work by precise attention to the details of ancient litera-
ture. Her first book, Revelation of the Unknowable God, is a text, translation, and
explanation of Allogenes, a challenging text within the Nag Hammadi codices.8
Her Gospel of Mary of Magdala makes that fascinating dialogue between Mary
and the Savior accessible to popular audiences. The Secret Revelation of John
provides in lucid translations the extant versions of the Apocryphon of John;
she contextualizes the text within Jewish and Christian interpretive trends in
antiquity and shows the way in which its imagination of a utopian Divine Realm
still draws from the “central values that underlie the power arrangements current
in the Mediterranean world under Roman domination.”9 Her co-publication
with Elaine Pagels of Reading Judas provides an accessible translation and dis-
cussion of the fragmentary Gospel of Judas, a text that indicates, according to
King’s interpretation, that the very idea of and meaning of a martyr was con-
tested among early Christians.
King’s careful work in translation and the production of accessible editions
needs to be situated within her larger undertaking of reconsidering the his-
toriography of early Christianity. Her What is Gnosticism? exposes the way in
which a scholarly category, once invented, was then naturalized as a historical
phenomenon. She demonstrates that what is at stake in the scholarly work of
defining Gnosticism is a theological and ideological struggle not unlike those
that we find in early Christian texts, which worked to include and to exclude
various proximate others. She also illuminates how much is at stake for scholars
as they approach the project of telling the story of Christian origins. Scholarly
interpretations of how similar Christianity was to Judaism, or how many affini-
7 Karen L. King, The Secret Revelation of John (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2006), 1.
8 Karen L. King, Revelation of the Unknowable God: With Text, Translation and Notes to
NHC XI, 3 Allogenes (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 1995).
9 King, Secret Revelation of John, 173.
 Introduction 5

ties Christianity had with so-called Hellenistic philosophy or with celebrations

of knowledge found among those then labelled “Gnostics,” reveal something
about ancient texts and communities. But they reveal just as much about the
scholars’ own times and commitments: how they define Christianity, how they
define Judaism, what assumptions they make about how a pure and sui generis
religion can emerge.
King’s work emerges from the traditions of historical criticism, which
produced such narratives of the origins of Christianity and its distinctiveness
from – and/or similarities to – “Judaism” and “Gnosticism.” But her work also
breaks from historical criticism in important ways. The advent of historical crit-
icism within modern New Testament scholarship opened up new possibilities
for interpreting ancient evidence, not only providing methodological tools to
render early Christian diversity more easily visible, but also situating it with-
in new historical narratives. Walter Bauer’s landmark thesis that the earliest
forms of Christianity were regionally specific – that is, originally characterized
by a highly localized diversity of belief and practice – is well known.10 While
critiquing many facets of Bauer’s analysis, scholars have built on and amplified
his larger thesis, integrating newly discovered textual evidence (e. g., Nag Ham-
madi, Oxyrhynchus) along with familiar sources in order to reconstruct distinct
and bounded (hypothetical) communities of early Christians. Here particular
locales, noteworthy theological positions or interpretive techniques, and the
authority of individual apostles have all functioned in various combinations to
demarcate putative social formations. As King summarizes, “Texts were read
as reflections of the historical situations of communities that produced them.
Theological differences in the texts frequently (and problematically) came to be
read as ciphers for communities in conflict.”11
These historiographical techniques rely on questionable methodological
assumptions; accordingly, more recent scholarship has done much both to
clarify the theoretical issues and to question the historical conclusions that such
assumptions yield. A rich tradition of feminist biblical interpretation has em-
phasized that early Christian texts are tendentious and rhetorical. These texts
do not reflect a preexistent social reality in a simple or straightforward way, but
rather work to persuade readers, inducting them into and/or confirming their
place within particular systems of truth and meaning.12 As Elizabeth Clark
reminds us from the standpoint of the so-called linguistic turn, the evidence

10 Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, PA:
Fortress Press, 1971).
11 King, “Which Early Christianity,” 69.
12 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Min-
neapolis: Fortress Press, 1999); see also discussion in Katherine A. Shaner, “Feminist Biblical
Interpretation,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Testament, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Benjamin
H. Dunning (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
6 Benjamin H. Dunning and Laura S. Nasrallah

we have from the ancient world does not necessarily lend itself to techniques
of analysis drawn from the social sciences: “social-scientific appropriations
obscured the fact that scholars of late ancient Christianity deal not with native
informants, nor with masses of data amenable to statistical analysis, but with
texts – and texts of a highly literary, rhetorical, and ideological nature.”13
Frederik Wisse puts a finer point on one of the key historiographical difficulties
that afflicts the project of reconstructing Christian origins: “It is as difficult to
disprove that specific communities were the real referents of early Christian
­literary texts as it is to prove it … [T]here are simply too many contingencies
that bear on the composition of literary texts to allow inferring indirect ev-
idence from them about the historical situation in which they were written.”14
But if this point is granted, what then? How might we sift, organize, and ev-
aluate the evidence differently in order to tell the history of early Christianity
otherwise?
To tell a different history of early Christianity, we must question not what
analytical categories we ought to use, but the very nature of categorization itself:
what it is, how it works, whom it serves in any given context, and to what ends.
Jonathan Z. Smith rightly notes that “‘otherness’ is not a descriptive category, an
artifact of the perception of difference or commonality … Something is ‘other’
only with respect to something ‘else.’ Whether understood politically or lin-
guistically, ‘otherness’ is a situational category. Despite its apparent taxonomic
exclusivity, ‘otherness’ is a transactional matter, an affair of the ‘in between.’”15
King has been at the forefront of thinking through the challenges and the op-
portunities that these insights pose to the task of narrating the history of early
Christianity. The formulation of a way forward that she has offered to the field
remains characteristically her own:
Given that there are many ways to map difference, and given that any categorization of early
Christian diversity will both illumine some things and distort or hide others, depending
upon its aims …, any resulting typologies would necessarily be positional and provisional;
that is, they would be understood as scholarly constructs intended to do limited kinds of
carefully specified intellectual work in order to serve some particular end.16

Elsewhere, she specifies, “I have suggested that to think hard and speak differ-
ently require revising our notions of tradition and history, reshaping discourse,

13 Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 159.
14 Frederik Wisse, “Indirect Textual Evidence for the History of Early Christianity and
Gnosticism,” in For the Children, Perfect Instruction: Studies in Honor of Hans-Martin Schenke,
ed. Hans-Gebhard Bethge, Stephen Emmel, Karen L. King, and Imke Schletterer (Leiden: Brill,
2002), 227, 229.
15 Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2004), 275.
16 King, “Which Early Christianity,” 72–3.
 Introduction 7

categories, and methods, and above all, rethinking the ethically informed goals
of historical analysis.”17
One way to revise our notions of tradition and history, King suggests, is to
move away from a static model of strictly delineated “communities in conflict”
to one that attends to the variegated and ever evolving work of ancient identity
formation. Such an approach eschews the essentializing assumption that early
Christian difference was simply there – and is thus now available to the con-
temporary historian as a kind of fully formed “found object” to be situated
uncritically within a historical narrative. Rather, this approach “aims to under-
stand the discursive strategies and processes by which early Christians developed
notions of themselves as distinct from others within the Mediterranean world
(and were recognized as such by others), including the multiple ways in which
Christians produced various constructions of what it meant to be Christian.”18 It
includes being attentive to both the ways in which Christians sought to carve up
the world into “us” and various forms of “them” (Jews, Greeks, Romans, etc.) and
also the rhetorical strategies they used to conjure internal plurality into being by
way of marking certain differences among Christ-followers as those that made a
difference (the discourse of orthodoxy and heresy).
King also analyzes what early Christians said and wrote as a mode of prac-
tice, following the insight, expressed well by Foucault, that “to speak is to do
something – something other than to express what one thinks …. [A] change
in the order of discourse does not presuppose new ideas, a little invention and
creativity, a different mentality, but transformations in a practice, perhaps also
in neighbouring practices, and in their common articulation.”19 Here King has
been one of the key scholars to introduce to the field of early Christian studies
the work of the sociologist and practice theorist Pierre Bourdieu.20 Drawing on
Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, field, and doxa, among others, she has unpacked
with clarity and precision the complex logics whereby early Christian discursive
formations impose regularity while allowing for some modicum of improvisa-
tion, spontaneity, and change. “The results of this historiographical method,” she
contends, “[is] to demonstrate where and how the ‘textual’ resources, cultural
codes, literary themes, hermeneutical strategies, and social-political interests of
various rhetorical acts of Christian literary production, theological reflection,
ritual and ethical practices, and social construction simultaneously form mul-
tiple overlapping continuities, disjunctures, contradictions, and discontinuities,
17 King, What Is Gnosticism?, 236, with reference to Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol.
3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 274.
18 King, “Which Early Christianity,” 73.
19 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New
York: Pantheon, 1972), 209.
20 King, What Is Gnosticism?, 239–47; see also Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of
Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
8 Benjamin H. Dunning and Laura S. Nasrallah

both locally and trans-locally.”21 King’s emphasis on practice works to decenter

the primacy of high literary or theological texts in the project of historical recon-
struction. Yet, as noted above, her work does not neglect close textual analysis
(and indeed, many of her signature contributions have been in the interpretation
of specific early Christian texts), but rather resituates these texts as one kind of
evidence among many, always in dynamic relation to alternative genres of textual
evidence, material culture, institutions, and other social structures.
This work of resituating, redescribing, and recategorizing entails ethics. For
as her former and current students can attest (ourselves included), in both her
research and her teaching, King not only poses questions of practice – i. e., what
work does the historical data under analysis do within a given cultural field? –
but also relentlessly asks: what is at stake for the ancient world, the contemporary
world (with an eye to the plurality of worlds and selves – scholarly, religious,
etc. – that we all inhabit), and the complex interplay between the two in how we
both formulate and answer such questions? Questions King regularly poses in
the classroom insist on historical precision. Her oft repeated question “What is
the evidence evidence of?” makes colleagues and students alike turn to situate a
piece of evidence in a broader social and political context of power; the simple
question requires the difficult two-step path of describing the evidence and con-
textualizing it adequately, not allowing oneself to be swayed by the rhetorical
context of an ancient text or the assertions of modern scholars about the nature
of the evidence. Her frequent phrase “good to think with” (bonnes à penser),
borrowed from Lévi-Strauss, pushes students and colleagues alike to notice
tropes in early Christianity and to consider the varied use of an idea – suffering,
for example, or a paradigmatic female figure such as Mary Magdalene – toward
ethical ends in antiquity and today.
For example, in her “Christianity and Torture,” King explicitly confronts the
issue of the lack of a condemnation of torture in New Testament texts, and the
ethical problems this raises:
Some might wonder why I, as a Christian who opposes torture, go to such lengths to
expose the possibilities within Christian tradition for supporting torture …. Opposition to
torture on religious grounds will not be effective without acknowledging and addressing
the fact that enculturated ways of thinking and structures of feeling cultivated in Christian
stories, images, and theological discourses are implicated in a wide variety of attitudes and
behaviors, both for and against torture …. How do religious communities, human rights
advocates, or other voices effectively engage this tradition without enabling its potential
for violence? This is a dilemma not only for believers but for all whose heritage includes
these and similar cultural “logics” of feeling and thought.22

21 King, “Which Early Christianity,” 80–81.

22 Karen L. King, “Christianity and Torture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and
Violence, ed. Michael Jerryson, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Margo Kitts (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2013), 302.
 Introduction 9

Elsewhere, King argues, “The task at hand is to enable an ethics of critical-reflex-

ive practice in historiography and theology … we must explore critically [relig-
ious traditions’] past and potential implications in violence as well as liberation,
in injustice as well as justice. Critical practice necessarily involves accountabil-
ity.”23 Such critical self-reflexivity need not lead to the disavowal or dismantling
of the tradition. Rather, King avers, “For myself and others, the ethical point that
follows from diversity is not relativism, but the need to take responsibility for
how scripture and tradition are read and appropriated.”24
Karen King’s publications and teaching upend facile uses of New Testament
texts and simple narratives of early Christian history. Her work has demonstrat-
ed, with philological, historical, and historiographical precision, the efferves-
cence of what we call early Christianity but might well call early Christianities:
the leadership of women; the complexities of theological debates over the worth
of the body, sin, and martyrdom; the possibilities for transformative modes of
thought; and, indeed, the scholarly and ideological stakes of how we define the
ancient religious formations we study. The scholars in this volume engage her
signature contributions to the field in three parts or acts. The first act treats the
topic of categories, celebrating the sort of work that King did in What is Gnos-
ticism?, which fundamentally pushed us to throw away a scholarly construction
of people called Gnostics that we had naturalized as existing in early Christianity
or even before. The second act treats the topic of women and gender. Since her
first edited volume, Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, and her contributions
to feminist projects such as Searching the Scriptures, King’s work has long helped
to open our eyes to evidence for the agency, significance, and power of women in
earliest Christianities, the variety of ways in which gender could be performed
in antiquity, and the engagement of early Christian texts in ethical debates that
demonstrate how sexual practices and theology go hand in hand.25 The third
act focuses on historiography, asking how we can write different histories of
the earliest Christianities that King has helped us to see, or different stories of
women and gender in the study of religion.

Categories

One of the major contributions of Karen King’s work has been to question what
used to look like stable categories in the history of early Christianity: Gnosticism,
orthodoxy, heresy; her work exposes the ways in which theological and scholarly
communities either have invented or have continued to trade in labels that limit
23 King, What Is Gnosticism?, 246.
24 King, “Which Early Christianity,” 81.
25 Karen L. King, ed. Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press,
1988).
10 Benjamin H. Dunning and Laura S. Nasrallah

our understanding of the diversity and choices available among earliest Chris-
tian communities. Several chapters engage the question of category criticism.
In “Mark 7:1–23, Finally,” Daniel Boyarin begins by acknowledging the
significance of King’s work and conversations with her for his own developing
sense of how the categories of “Jews” and “Christians” can obscure our under-
standing of ancient interactions in antiquity. He then offers a detailed analysis
of Mark 7, reading the words of Jesus regarding food and cleanliness within
halakhic debates of the time. He argues that Mark 7:1–12 not only presents an
attack on Pharisaic deviations from Leviticus, but also demonstrates that Jesus
kept kosher – or that the Gospel of Mark thought he did.
Elaine Pagels’s “How John of Patmos’ Readers Made Him into a Christian”
questions whether the category of “Christian” can be applied to the visions of the
Apocalypse of John. She offers a resounding no, joining those who have pointed
out John’s Jewishness. Her chapter shows that John’s engagement with Isaiah’s
prophecy fits within the logic of Jewish prophetic material and offers a vision of
the entry of Israel, and then repentant Gentiles, into a new Jerusalem.
T. Christopher Hoklotubbe’s chapter, “What is Docetism?,” suggests that
we set aside our modern category (and subcategories) of docetism. We should
instead look for “more productive classifications and more dynamic questions
about the representation of Jesus’ body in early Christian literature.” Treating a
span of literature and figures such as the epistles of John, the corpus associated
with Ignatius of Antioch, Basilides, Marcion, Valentinus, the Gospel of Peter,
Julius Cassian, Saturninus and Cerdo as we know them from Irenaeus and
(Pseudo) Tertullian, and the Acts of John, Hoklotubbe shows a variety of Chris-
tian responses to the idea of Jesus’ body. He writes, “Following the exemplary
critical insights and pedagogy of King, I strive to (re)enchant students with
the ambiguity, creativity, scriptural interpretation, the pastoral and polemical
motivations, and existential stakes involved in early Christian questions about
the nature of Jesus’ human experience that were by no means simply apparent –
Christianity was still ‘in the making!’”
Giovanni Bazzana’s “Beyond Gnosticism: Pneumatology and Ecclesiology in
2 Clem 14” focuses on the theology and conversation partners of this difficult
passage. Bazzana argues that the image of a pre-existent church makes sense in
relation to other first- and second-century literature, especially the Shepherd of
Hermas and aspects of Paul’s 1 Corinthians. Christ, understood as pneuma, as
well as an experience of spirit possession, were “foundational for membership in
the Christ movement.” Yet 2 Clement offers a surprising twist. Christ-followers
are possessed not by pneuma but by ekklesia, a pneumatic entity, in that text.
Judith Hartenstein’s “The Designation ‘Gnostic’ for the Gospel of Mary and
Its Implications: A Critical Evaluation” takes up the Book of Allogenes and the
Gospel of Mary. New fragments of the former from the Tchacos Codex allow
for clearer parallels to be drawn between Allogenes and the Gospel of Mary.
 Introduction 11

Hartenstein shows that the Gospel of Mary has access to and understands what
she terms a “mythologically founded alienation toward the world,” but that it
contains its own unique theology. Moreover, the text makes an unusual move in
that it “depicts how esoteric knowledge is made public.”
Marcie Lenk and Sarah Sentilles bring us to present-day categories. Lenk’s
“Parted Ways Meet Again: Messianic Judaism in Israel” alludes in its title to a
long debate between scholars of antiquity: when did the ways between Christian-
ity and Judaism part, if ever? She focuses on the Messianic Jewish community in
Israel and the challenges that this community poses to a stable understanding of
Judaism and Christianity and to legal status within Israel. After defining the term
“Messianic Jew” and historically contextualizing Messianic Jewish traditions
from the Hebrew Christians of the nineteenth century to the present, Lenk offers
a survey that shows a range of Jewish messianic claims over time, within which
“faith in Jesus as the Messiah has long been viewed differently.” Lenk uses a va-
riety of theoretical tools, from the postcolonial theories of Homi Bhabha to the
performance theory of Judith Butler, to make sense of the complex identity of
Messianic Jews as a possible act of resistance to claims of stability that undergird
the categories of “Jew” and “Christian.”

Women and Gender

Carly Daniel-Hughes’s contribution moves us from the “categories” subsection

of the volume to “women and gender” by working on both. Her “Mary Magda-
lene and the Fantasy Echo: Reflections on the Feminist Historiography of Early
Christianity” traces aspects of anglophone feminist historiography “to consider
how the attachment to the category ‘women’ operated in the feminist historiog-
raphy of early Christianity.” Daniel-Hughes considers the particular historical
and social-psychological forces that shaped fantasies of “women’s solidarity”
within this scholarship, as well as those that ultimately lead some feminists to
challenge these. Weaving analysis together with the personal, she ultimately
seeks to describe the affective landscape sustained by this critical feminist work
and to reflect constructively on some of its negative effects, both for feminist
historians and for those captivated by their work.
In her analysis of “Wise Women in the Gospel of John,” Adele Reinhartz
argues that the fourth evangelist is hardly proto-feminist. Yet her close analysis
of five women in the gospel – Mary the mother of Jesus, the Samaritan woman,
Martha and Mary of Bethany, and Mary Magdalene – shows ways in which “the
Gospel of John – perhaps inadvertently – does allow us to consider the behavior
and qualities of these women separate from their re-domestication.” Focusing
on the narratives of these women “allows us to consider their wisdom, as ex-
emplified by their behavior towards Jesus.” For instance, analyzing Jesus’ mother,
12 Benjamin H. Dunning and Laura S. Nasrallah

Reinhartz argues that “we may quietly appreciate the wisdom of a mother who
can see beyond her son’s rude behavior and is able to prompt him to act when
and where he does not yet understand he should.”
The women of Philo’s De vita contemplativa and the Testament of Job are the
focus of Angela Standhartinger’s “Performing Salvation: The Therapeutrides and
Job’s Daughters in Context.” Yet her contribution is nearly encyclopedic in the
evidence it provides of representations of women’s leadership in the Septuagint,
New Testament texts, and the writings of the likes of Plutarch and Pausanias.
These regular representations of women’s ritual work and competence allow
Standhartinger to argue that “While Philo’s Therapeutrides and Job’s Daughters
remain literary figures, their cultic roles are by no means exceptional or his-
torically implausible. To the contrary, female singers and dancers who act out
parts of the central myth of a given religion are broadly attested also among their
Greek, Roman, and later Christian sisters.” The work allows us to see the cultic
leadership of women in antiquity as represented in the literature of the time and
even as performed in the retelling of such literature in ritual settings.
Margaret Butterfield’s “The Widow, the Wife, and the Priestess: Tertullian’s
Life Plans for Widows in Ad uxorem” also takes up Standhartinger’s theme of
women’s participation and leadership in cult. Tertullian, she notes, details “gen-
tile” women’s involvement in religious roles, including the Vestal virgins and the
prophetesses at Delphi, and “provides chaste Christian widows with an identity
parallel to that of the gentile priesthoods – the identity not of wife, but of altar of
God.” Tertullian focuses on the widow as wife – even as God’s wife – precisely
to avoid the danger of her role as sacerdotally powerful; yet the very image of
woman as altar, as well as his detailing of the roles of religious leadership among
non-Christian women, hints at the irrepressibility of some Christian women’s
religious authority.
Silke Petersen sets aside the category of Gnosticism as unhelpful in her analy-
sis, titled “Marriages, Unions, and Bridal Chambers in the Gospel of Philip.” She
notes how “disruptions” in the text – points where the reader or hearer might be
confused – are a deliberate technique to slow down the reading process and to
note that different levels of meaning are being deployed. Images like bread and
the marriage chamber have multiple meanings. Petersen concludes that the Gos-
pel of Philip’s “bridal and marriage imagery is used to speak about community
and ritual in terms of union and separation, thus interpreting something else
rather than denoting a discrete ritual.” Such language points to the close union of
marriage in order “to speak about ritual, community, baptism, or incarnation.”
A Valentinian Exposition, Tripartite Tractate, and sections of Irenaeus’s
Against the Heresies are closely attended to in Taylor Petrey’s “Cosmic Gender:
Valentinianism and Contested Accounts of Sexual Difference.” He demonstrates
that “so-called Valentinian texts do not offer a single perspective on gender, re-
productive capacity, gender roles, bodies, hierarchy, or moral tendencies, and in
 Introduction 13

fact provide numerous models that challenge a heterogendered interpretation.”

After providing a history of scholarship on Nag Hammadi texts and gender
analysis, Petrey demonstrates that we cannot easily reconstruct a singular cos-
mological schema from these texts nor the sexual practices of the communities
that read and valued them. They instead provide “conversations … about gender
and sexual difference,” even suggesting that “disruptions to male-female com-
plementarity” are a solution as well as a problem; Valentinian texts provide
“queer alternatives to male-female complementarity.”
Ronit Irshai’s “Feminist Research in Jewish Studies: What’s in a Name?” tries
to put some order into what is called “feminist scholarship in Judaic Studies”
by proposing to distinguish four categories within it. Those categories are not
merely conceptual. They also serve as an analytical tool that can produce new
research. The chapter presents several opinions on male homosexuality in order
to consider how feminist scholarship that takes gender as an analytic category
can produce new knowledge about the ways in which male and female identities
are constituted in recent halakhah. Feminist critique, she concludes, can help in
such analysis as it lays bare the mechanisms by which “‘natural sex’ is created.”

Historiography

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s chapter, titled “Revisioning ‘Christian’ Begin-

nings,” engages with the question of Christian origins, in order to underscore
the contribution of the work of Karen King to early Christian historiography in
a feminist key. She argues for the importance of feminist historiography in the
revisioning of Christian beginnings. Karen King’s feminist work on Gnosticism
as well as on critical category formation and framework-analysis26 continues to
be pathbreaking in this work of a feminist re-description of early “Christian”
history.
In “Locating the Religion of Associations,” Stanley Stowers participates in and
nuances historians’ attempts to understand “synagogues” and Christian groups
in light of associations. He creates a clear taxonomy of four modes of religiosity,
and demonstrates that the bias of our data – which comes from literate and en-
trepreneurial experts – means that we can overlook how these groups partic-
ipated in the religion of everyday social exchange.
Carlin Barton’s contribution, titled “A Roman Historian Looking at Early
Christian religiones: the coniuratio and the sacramentum in Second and Early
26 See especially her book What is Gnosticism? and her recent articles “Which Early Chris-
tianity,” and “No Longer Marginalized: From Orthodoxy and Heresy Discourse to Category
Critique and Beyond,” in The Bible and Women: An Encyclopaedia of Exegesis and Cultural
History. Volume on “Early Christian Writings,” ed. Outi Lehtipuu and Silke Petersen (Atlanta:
Society of Biblical Literature/Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).
14 Benjamin H. Dunning and Laura S. Nasrallah

Third-century North Africa,” argues that Latin-speaking African Christians of

antiquity sought to sacralize themselves as individual persons and as groups.
Barton unravels with philological precision the terms that Latin-speaking Chris-
tians used for themselves. Focusing primarily on Tertullian, she avoids our mod-
ern conceptions of religion, our mistranslations of religio, and our inattention
to the significance of binding, framing, setting apart, which, she demonstrates,
were fundamental acts in the process of sacralizing. In this way, her work asks
questions at the intersection of historiography and philology. How do we trans-
late words from our historical distance, and how do our misperceptions or even
our desires drive such translation? By bringing attention to the details of ancient
texts and to the investments of modern readers, Barton enlivens the complexities
of late second- and early third-century Carthage and the Latin of its day.
Related historiographical questions drive Denise Kimber Buell’s “This
Changes Everything: Spiritualists, Theosophists, and Rethinking Early Christian
Historiography.” The chapter explores the nineteenth-century to mid-twentieth-
century context of spiritualism and theosophy, showing how these practitioners
and theorists were adjacent to and sometimes participants in academic conver-
sations about biblical studies, classics, and early Christian history. Their under-
standings of spirit and flesh, of the enduring nature of what they thought was
gnostic thought, of “a non-linear temporality – futures and pasts commingle in
the present,” and of ideas of mysteries and initiation were part of a larger dis-
course on early Christian origins and the nature of so-called Gnosticism. Buell
shows that tracing the impact of theosophists and spiritualists is essential to
understanding the historiography of early Christianity.
Bernadette Brooten’s chapter re-examines the depiction of enslaved persons
in the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons, which depicts a woman
named Blandina as subverting the Roman slaveholding assumption that enslaved
persons are weak in character. Blandina, who shares her mistress’s religion and
stands by it until the very end, is an owner’s best possible enslaved laborer. In
contrast to Blandina, “certain of our gentile slaves” enter the stage of the bloody
drama as “also arrested.” The Christians apparently expect these enslaved gentiles
to suffer torture silently, which aligns with what other slaveholders expected. The
Roman officials believe them, even though they speak freely and not under tor-
ture, which constitutes a breach of Roman criminal procedure. Brooten invites
us to think about how these texts project ideals for enslaved persons rather than
simply Christian heroism in the face of martyrdom.
With “The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III
463). Rethinking the History of Early Christianity Through Literary Papyri from
Oxyrhynchus,” AnneMarie Luijendijk returns to a text that Karen King has
published and made widely known. Some might argue that the Gospel of Mary
was a marginal source to the majority of Christians in antiquity, and the story
of a woman who followed Jesus and understood his teachings better than did
 Introduction 15

the male disciples was a strange tale. By looking closely at one fragment of the
Gospel of Mary from Oxyrhynchus, Luijendijk shows by the form and the hand
of this papyrus that “Such texts, like the Gospel of Mary, which disappeared in
the course of history, were not just random and aberrant sources. They were
not merely the fodder of heresiologists, examples of disregarded sources. Rather,
these sources circulated and were widely read, appearing in different forms and
hands.”
In an epilogue Sarah Sentilles draws the lens out, challenging us both to con-
sider how we see and to investigate the visual as well as structural elements of
racism. She argues, in “As If the Way We Think about the World is the Way the
World Is,” that “mis-seeing” others’ bodies has violent results. Exploring language
of eye-balling, the visible suspect, and the mug shot’s origins in eugenics, as well
as educating the “untrained eye” to see drone warfare, the deaths of Black men
and women in the U. S., and casual racism, Sentilles challenges the reader to see
differently pointing to analogous interventions made by Karen King.

Conclusions

King’s scholarship has long worked to create a welcoming and capacious new
world of possibilities for her fellow scholars, including those whom she has
taught. In a quiet voice and with an intense value for loyalty, she has changed
the face of early Christian studies, setting a large table with hospitality. She has
helped to bring her beloved Coptic texts, which used to be considered marginal
to the story of earliest Christianity, into conversation with the canonical and
authoritative texts with which the field was already familiar. She has helped us to
see how the voices and authority of women may be suppressed in a text, but the
traces of such authority nonetheless remain, opening up possibilities for writing
different kinds of history. She has consistently insisted that scholars consider
their own ethics and the ethics of the texts that we study. In doing so, she has
not only contributed to the intellectual diversity of the field, bringing in voices
from feminist studies and anthropological theory in particular, and bringing
marginalized texts into the full reconstruction of early Christian history, but
also helped to create a diverse, international community of scholarly friends,
whose words can be found in the pages ahead.
16 Benjamin H. Dunning and Laura S. Nasrallah

Bibliography

Bauer, Walter. Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. 2nd ed. Philadelphia, PA:
Fortress Press, 1971.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1977.
–. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Clark, Elizabeth A. History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. New York:
Pantheon, 1972.
King, Karen L., ed. Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press,
1988).
–. Revelation of the Unknowable God: With Text, Translation and Notes to NHC XI, 3
Allogenes. Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 1995.
–. What Is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
–. The Secret Revelation of John. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
–. “Christianity and Torture.” Pages 293–305 in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and
Violence. Edited by Michael Jerryson, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Margo Kitts. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013.
–. “Which Early Christianity?” Pages 66–84 in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian
Studies. Edited by Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2015.
–. “No Longer Marginalized: From Orthodoxy and Heresy Discourse to Category Cri-
tique and Beyond.” Pages (forthcoming) in The Bible and Women: An Encyclopaedia
of Exegesis and Cultural History. Volume on “Early Christian Writings.” Edited by Outi
Lehtipuu and Silke Petersen. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature/Leiden: Brill, forth-
coming.
Maier, Paul L. Eusebius – The Church History: A New Translation with Commentary. Grand
Rapids, MI: Kregel, 1999.
Smith, Jonathan Z. Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2004.
Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies. Minneap-
olis: Fortress Press, 1999.; see also discussion in
Shaner, Katherine A. “Feminist Biblical Interpretation.” Pages (forthcoming) in The Oxford
Handbook of New Testament, Gender, and Sexuality. Edited by Benjamin H. Dunning.
New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
Wisse, Frederik. “Indirect Textual Evidence for the History of Early Christianity and
Gnosticism.” Pages 214–230 in For the Children, Perfect Instruction: Studies in Honor
of Hans-Martin Schenke. Edited by Hans-Gebhard Bethge, Stephen Emmel, Karen
L. King, and Imke Schletterer. Leiden: Brill, 2002.
I. Categories
 Mark 7:1–23 – Finally
Daniel Boyarin

Having written about Mark 7:1–23 before,1 I come back to it once more for
a final time (no vow), because I believe that I have found further arguments
for the interpretative direction in which I took the pericope previously, and
because I am convinced that this is an absolutely key passage for understanding
critical issues in the setting of the Gospels within the first-century Jewish world,
a subject surely dear to the heart of the great scholar and dear friend whom
this volume comes to celebrate and whom, I hope, my contribution will fully
honor. This mode of honoring Karen is particularly apt, I think, as it was she
who first disabused me of the notion that Jews were Jews and Christians were
Christians and never the twain ever met, thus setting me on a long and very
productive train of thinking, of which the present communication is but one rail
car. The “bottom-line” of my reading, once again, is that this pericope, despite
its reputation, represents perhaps the most “Jewish” passage in all of the Gospels.
In this, I hope, final version of what I have to say about this chapter in Mark,
I plan to revise my earlier arguments, sharpening them, cleaning them up, and
supplementing them, taking into consideration as well objections to my reading
recently offered by Joel Marcus, and in the end arguing for why I think that the
interpretation I purvey here is not only preferable but well-nigh ineluctable. In
conclusion, I will make a more expansive statement of why I find this a critical
matter for the understanding of the earliest histories of both the Jesus movement
and of the approach to Torah that characterizes the Rabbis of the second century
on, and not – to paraphrase Meier – just a halakhic squabble.

Re-membering the Dismembered Discourse

If there may be said to be a common thread binding virtually all prior inter-
pretation of this pericope, it is that the text is divided against itself.2 Thus, for
instance, to take some very recent and highly respected examples, Adela Yarbro
Collins cites two of the major commentaries of the past generation:
1 Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospel: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: The New
Press, 2012), 102–128.
2 See Jan Lambrecht, Jesus and the Law: An Investigation of Mark 7, 1–23, Analecta Lova-
niensia Biblica et Orientalia 5 (Louvain: Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, 1977), 29.
20 Daniel Boyarin

Dibelius argued that, in 7:5–23*, originally isolated sayings have been brought together for
a particular reason. Like Bultmann, Dibelius concluded that the introductory formula in
v. 9a*, “and he said to them” (καὶ ἔλεγεν αὐτοῖς), indicates that vv. 9–13* were originally
independent. For Dibelius, this inference is reinforced by the fact that this section is about
the practice of korban, whereas the subject of vv. 1–8* is hand-washing. He also concluded
that v. 15* was originally independent, because it deals with eating and not with hand-
washing. According to Dibelius, both of the explanations of “the saying about true clean-
liness” in v. 15*, namely, vv. 18–19* and vv. 20–23*, are constructions of the early church.
He concluded that the opponents’ question about hand-washing (vv. 1–5*) was placed at
the beginning of the whole composition by the evangelist. He thought that the section of
vv. 6–15*, which begins with a citation of Isaiah, is older than vv. 1–5*.
***
Pesch argued that the evangelist combined two complexes of tradition (vv. 1–13* and
14–23*), each with its own theme and tradition history. The first concerns ritual purity;
the second, clean and unclean types of food. They were brought together because of their
thematic similarity, shown especially in the use of the terms κοινόω, κοινός (“to consider
profane” or “to defile”; “profane” or “defiled”) in both.3
Now while Yarbro Collins herself clearly understands that 15b does not, in itself,
announce the abrogation of food laws of Leviticus, she nonetheless, regards the
whole sequence from 15 on as eventually producing that effect. Thus, like other
commentators she regards the first part of the pericope, vv. 1–8, as being about a
different topic, viz handwashing, than the last part, vv. 15–23, which is allegedly
concerning forbidden foods.
Similarly, Joel Marcus in his commentary has the following to say:
Many, however, are of the opinion that the primitive core of the passage is contained in
7:1–2, 5, and 15: Jesus, when asked why his disciples ate with unwashed hands and thus
violated Pharisaic teaching, responded by saying that what comes from outside of a person
does not defile, but that what comes from inside does. This is the only real response in our
complex to the question that the Pharisees pose in 7:5, the other two replies (7:6–8 and
7:9–13) being the sort of excoriation that is easily attributable to early Christian polemic.
Subsequently (perhaps at the pre-Markan stage), this mini-controversy was expanded by
scriptural arguments against the Pharisaic tradition (7:6–8, 9–13), by an explanation that
shifted the point of the controversy to the question of eating nonkosher food (7:18b–19),
and by a list of the evils that issue from the heart (7:20–23). Finally, Mark came along and
added the editorial touches mentioned in the previous paragraph.4
That Marcus himself holds to this view is, moreover, guaranteed by his state-
ment, “Having made a pronouncement that cuts the ground out from under any
system of ritual purity and impurity (7:15), Jesus withdraws with his disciples,
who ask for enlightenment about this revolutionary ‘parable’ (7:17).”5
3 Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary, ed. Harold W. Attridge, Hermeneia – A Crit-
ical and Historical Commentary on the Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007), 343.
4 Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York:
Doubleday, 2000), 447–448.
5 Marcus, Mark 1–8, 456.
 Mark 7:1–23 – Finally 21

In a vein closer to the one explored in this paper, Morna Hooker, on the one
hand, sees the coherence of the literary structure, “the introduction (vv. 1–5)
raises two questions – why do the disciples not behave according to the tradition
of the elders, and why do they eat with unclean hands? It is these two questions
which are dealt with in vv. 6–13 and 14–25.”6 Hooker, on the right track in my
opinion, then goes off when she writes:
Yet this careful structure conceals tensions in the material. The first two sayings answer the
criticism of the authorities by means of a counter-attack: the complaint about the disciples
is based on the Pharisees’ own traditions, not on the Torah, and by concentrating on the
former they are in danger of ignoring the latter. But in the parable and its explanation
(vv. 14 ff) a different and much more radical answer is given which questions the Torah
itself by challenging its demands for Levitical purity.”7

Hooker goes on there to note the radical inconsistency in Jesus’ approach, first
criticizing the Pharisees for allegedly preferring their tradition over the Torah
and then rejecting that very Torah in the next breath and then concludes by
simply stating that this pattern is frequent in evangelistic discourse.8 Hooker
clearly understands that in vv. 1–5, “It is the tradition of the elders, not the Torah
itself, that is under attack,”9 but on arriving to vv. 14–15 and the continuation,
she insists that v. 15, “returns to the question of food and therefore seems rel-
evant to the question posed in v. 5, but is really less appropriate than at first
appears, since the hand-washing required here was not intended as a safeguard
against eating defiled food.”10 But, of course, that’s exactly what it was. The hands
become defiled, the hands then, unwashed, defile the food, and according to the
Pharisaic tradition, one must not, then, eat the food. And this Pharisaic tradition
contradicts the plain sense of Scripture, according to which impure food does
not defile the body, just as Jesus says in v. 15. Verse 15 is, then, precisely the direct
and technical answer to the objections of the Pharisees, the significance of which
Levitical law, the tropological (moral) sense of which, is laid out in the following
verses as I will show here, Deo volente. We have, at least, saved Jesus – if this
interpretation bears any weight – from the charge of inconstancy.
According to these regnant views,11 therefore, it seems that some form or
another of composite composition has to be posited for the passage, a passage

6 Morna D. Hooker, A Commentary on the Gospel According to St. Mark, Black’s New Tes-
tament Commentaries (London: Continuum, 2006), 173.
7 Hooker, Commentary Mark, 173.
8 Hooker, Commentary Mark, 175.
9 Hooker, Commentary Mark, 175.
10 Hooker, Commentary Mark, 178.
11 And it hardly needs to be said that I can agree with nary a word in C. E. Carlston, “The
Things That Defile: (Mark Vii. 14) and the Law in Matthew and Mark,” NTS 15 (1968–69): 75–
96. Nearly every assumption in that article contradicts directly the assumptions I make in my
work. I begin to suspect that interpretation of the New Testament divides Jews and Christians
in modernity even more than disagreements about the Old Testament. But see next note here.
22 Daniel Boyarin

which deals successively with three separate issues, handwashing before eating
as demanded by the Pharisees, their arrogation generally of replacing written
Scripture with their traditions, and finally rejection by Jesus of the Torah’s
dietary laws completely.12 And even if not necessarily composite, as in Hooker’s
account, nonetheless one must assume a radical break in theme and ideology
at vv. 14–15, and even the latter posits two different (contradictory) dominical
sayings on two different occasions.

The Difficulties with the Regnant Interpretation

Perhaps ironically, perhaps not, the most perspicacious catalogue of difficulties

with this reading of the passage has been offered by Marcus himself.13 In a
reading extraordinarily attentive to the ways that the Pharisees themselves might
have seen and experienced the issue, Marcus raises, as it were in their name, the
following objections which I will summarize. After suggesting that in fact “the
scriptural principles and passages adduced here support the Pharisaic position
as well as or even better than they do the Christian position,” Marcus details this
claim.14 First, he argues that handwashing, while not required by the Scripture,
can certainly be understood as praiseworthy from Scripture. Secondly, Scripture
certainly makes distinctions between the clean and the unclean, and, as Marcus
sharply puts it, “Anyone who did what Jesus, according to the Markan interpreta-
tion, does in our passage, sweeping away this dietary distinction and declaring all
food to be clean (v. 7.19), ran the risk of being identified as a seducer who led the
people’s heart astray from the true God (cf. v. 7.6) and from the holy command-
ment he had given to Moses (cf. vv. 7.8–9.13). Indeed, the antithesis that Mark’s
Jesus draws in 7.10–11 between what Moses said and what ‘you’ say could with
just as much justice be applied to the Markan Jesus himself, since he sovereignly
abrogates the Mosaic distinction between clean and unclean foods.”15 Just to
hone this point even more, Marcus reminds us that C. G. Montefiore, “charges
Jesus with inconsistency,” namely, as in Hooker’s account, first Jesus defends the
Law against Pharisaic infidelity and then almost in the same breath abrogates it

12 It is noteworthy that Shaye Cohen continues to maintain – albeit cautiously – the regnant
interpretation, incorporating as well the idea that the flow of the argument is incoherent (Shaye
J. D. Cohen, “Antipodal Texts: B. Eruvin 21b–22a and Mark 7:1–23 on the Tradition of the Elders
and the Commandment of God,” in Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on
the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Ra᾽anan S. Boustan et al. [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2013], 965–984).
13 Joel Marcus, “Scripture and Tradition in Mark 7,” in The Scriptures in the Gospels, ed.
C. M. Tuckett (Leuven: Leuven University Press; Uitgeverij Peeters, 1997), 145–163.
14 Marcus, “Scripture and Tradition,” 181.
15 Marcus, “Scripture and Tradition,” 183.
 Mark 7:1–23 – Finally 23

himself.16 I think that what can be noted without much controversy is that all of
these objections to Mark’s dominical discourse turn on one point, namely that
vv. 15–23 represent an abrogation or rejection of the so-called ceremonial laws of
food, which are, after all, not “Jewish” customs but explicitly written in the same
Scripture that Jesus cites as authoritative. None of these difficulties, I suggest,
will obtain if – as adumbrated above – we can read the passage from v. 15 on
in another way, abrogating the alleged abrogation by Mark’s Jesus of the law of
forbidden and permitted foods, and indeed for that matter rejecting as well an
alleged rejection by Markan Jesus of the purity rules of the Torah as well.

What Enters and What Exits

I continue to hold, despite the recent animadversions of Marcus17 that what is

being talked about in Mark 7:1–23 is not an attack on Leviticus but on the Phar-
isaic deviations from Leviticus, that is, on the way that the Pharisees substitute
the authority of their traditions of the elders for what is explicitly written in the
Torah. In a friendly amendment to at least the first part of Hooker’s description
of the pericope, I suggest that the alleged “two questions” are one, namely that
the washing of hands is, itself, a corrosive substitution of the precepts of men for
the doctrines of the Torah. We shall have to pay close attention to halakhic details
(as written in the Torah) to make sense of this point. It is vitally important here
to maintain a distinction that is more honored in the breach than the observance
by Markan interpreters and critics, namely between the purity/impurity systems
of Leviticus and the system of forbidden and permitted animals. To be sure, there
is some overlap in terminology in the Torah with the forbidden animals referred
to also by the term, impure, ‫טמא‬, but, nonetheless, the systems are conceptually
and in practice distinct. There are entirely different consequences. Just to take
one clear example: one who touches something impure (meaning a dead human
body or something which has touched a dead human body or a person with a
flux coming out of his or her body!) is himself or herself rendered impure and
must undergo a purification ritual before entering the Temple. A Jew who eats
bacon has committed a sin but does not contract impurity and need not purify
him or herself. With only one exception, careful study of the Torah’s regulations
reveals, as Rashi already informed us clearly in the eleventh century:
According to the Torah, no food makes a human impure when he eats it, except for bird
carrion from a pure bird, but not bovine carrion, and even less so food that has become
16 And not merely, then, with changing the subject from handwashing to kashrut. Cf.
Marcus, “Scripture and Tradition,” 192n43.
17 Joel Marcus, “Mark – Interpreter of Paul,” in Mark and Paul: Comparative Essays. Part
II, for and Against Pauline Influence on Mark, eds. Eve-Marie Becker, Troels Engberg-Pedersen,
and Mogens Müller (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 45–49.
24 Daniel Boyarin

impure by touching a primary source of impurity but they [i. e. the Pharisees/the Rabbis]
imposed this rule.
‫ חוץ מנבלת העוף הטהור אבל נבלת בהמה לא … וכל שכן אוכל‬,‫“מן התורה אין אוכל מטמא אדם האוכלו‬
”.‫ אבל הם גזרו באותו היום‬,‫ראשון שאינו אב הטומאה‬

We learn two things from this correct [empirically so] judgement, 1) the fact
that nothing forbidden for eating when ingested causes impurity with the only
exception of kosher bird carrion,18 and 2) that Rashi can unself-consciously use
the word pure in both senses without losing the distinction. It is paradoxically
only the carrion of a “pure,” i. e. kosher bird, that causes impurity but not carrion
of an “impure” bird. Clearly if something that is “pure” can convey impurity, pure
and impure are being used in two senses. Altogether, whether one eats ham or
green eggs from a non-kosher bird, one sins but one does not contract, thereby,
impurity.19 To be sure, as I’ve just said, we do find the terms “pure” and “impure
animals” both in the Torah and in the rabbinic literature and even in Rashi but
nowhere in any of these texts does the term “impure food” appear in the meaning
of non-kosher.20 “Impure food” is always and only food that has contracted im-

18 Although Leviticus 11:40: “Anyone who eats some of its carcass must wash their clothes,
and they will be unclean till evening. Anyone who picks up the carcass must wash their clothes,
and they will be unclean till evening” would seem to contradict this point, this is not the case
at least according to Jewish interpreters who note that the same level of impurity is conveyed
by pure bovine carrion upon merely picking it up and upon eating it. This is accordingly not
impurity conveyed particularly by eating but by contact and picking up. The Ramban (Gerona,
fl. 13th c.) argues, then, that the point of mentioning one who eats it is precisely to let us know
that no additional impurity is conveyed by eating it as opposed to that which is conveyed by
picking it up to carry it into one’s mouth. Even should this point be deemed too exquisite, it
remains the fact that in both of these cases, kosher bird carrion and kosher bovine carrion, it is
not the fact that they are forbidden foods that conveys impurity but the fact that their impurity
is conveyed even by touch. One can eat pig carrion all day and have no impurity conveyed to the
body. Eating pig is forbidden but does not convey impurity to the body. I am grateful to Dr. Pascal
Vander Goten for asking the good question that led to this answer and saved me from an error.
19 Even Heikke Räisänen, generally so judicious, confidently states absent any evidence that
“If nothing that enters a man from outside can defile him, then the biblical food laws are actually
set aside” (Heikke Räisänen, “Jesus and the Food Laws: Reflections on Mark 7:15,” in Jesus, Paul
and Torah: Collected Essays [Sheffield, UK: JSOT Press, 1992], 131–132). That is, unless it is the
Torah’s statement that nothing that comes from outside into the body can defile him, which just
happens to be the case. It is this confusion between the laws of defilement (tum῾ah) and the laws
of kashrut that has generated the persistent misreading of the pericope. ˙
20 Careful examination of a text such as Leviticus 11 bears this out – if not, I concede, univ-
ocally. In that chapter, famously, there is the definition of kosher and non-kosher animals: those
that chew the cud and have cloven hooves are kosher; all others are not. The term pure/impure is
utilized as well for this distinction in the chapter. It nonetheless remains the case that while the
two systems overlap with each other; they don’t blend with each other, and it remains the case
that there are forbidden foods that do not cause impurity, and, and this is vital, impure foods
that are permitted to be eaten. An excellent NT parallel for our verse is Matthew 23:25, where we
read: Οὐαὶ ὑμῖν, γραμματεῖς καὶ Φαρισαῖοι ὑποκριταί, ὅτι καθαρίζετε τὸ ἔξωθεν τοῦ ποτηρίου
καὶ τῆς παροψίδος, ἔσωθεν δὲ γέμουσιν ἐξ ἁρπαγῆς καὶ ἀκρασίας, and it is absolutely clear
what καθαρίζετε means there, to “purify” from a state of impurity and not to “permit” the con-
 Mark 7:1–23 – Finally 25

purity owing to its contact with one of the sources of impurity.21 The only seeming
exception to this rule has to do with kosher bird carrion which, if ingested, does
make the body impure (Lev 17:15). This is, indeed, the proverbial exception that
proves the rule; neither eating pork nor kosher food that has been contaminated
by contact with impurities render a body impure, and in this the Pharisaic rulings
certainly appear to depart from those of the “Written Torah,” namely “Moses.” In
any case, of course, no washing of hands would ever “defend” against the impurity
of carrion. For the absolutely clearest and definitive exposition of this distinction
between purity/impurity and permitted/forbidden (foods), see Jesper Svartvik.22
Especially relevant here are his conclusions that 1) “the Pentateuch itself upholds
a difference between food laws and purity laws”;23 2) “prohibited food as such
does not render a person unclean”;24 and 3) “contaminated food is to a much
higher extent the result of a rabbinic interpretation.”25
It is clear that these are distinct realms within the Levitical text. This is the
law of the Torah.
What does cause bodily impurity, then, according to the Torah, if not things
that are ingested into the body? Fluxes of various types, menstrual blood, the
emission of semen, gonnorheal flows as well; in short things that come out of the
body! This allows us an entirely different perspective on v. 15: “there is nothing
outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which
come out of a man are what defile him.” While there have been intimations in
this direction previously,26 it is the merit of Ya᾽ir Fürstenberg to have seen with
absolute clarity that this verse simply and clearly reproduces the exact law of the

sumption of which. See also Septuagint apud Leviticus 16:30: ἐν γὰρ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ταύτῃ ἐξιλάσεται
περὶ ὑμῶν καθαρίσαι ὑμᾶς ἀπὸ πασῶν τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ὑμῶν ἔναντι κυρίου καὶ καθαρισθήσεσθε,
where we find in both Hebrew and Greek the figurative sense of purification from sins as in Mat-
thew. I am not going to go so far as to say that the interpretation of καθαρίζειν here as “permitted
to be eaten” is impossible but it certainly seems to me improbable. As the Talmud says, one may
defend a text via an improbability but one does not attack a text with an improbability. Since the
philologically well attested meaning is to “purify” and not to “permit,” and it is this reading that
renders the text coherent and even a brilliant rhetorical showpiece, it seems counter-intuitive
to adopt an improbable lexical sense for the verb, in order to render the text incoherent! Or so it
seems to me. Once more, appeal to Paul here is question-begging of the first order.
21 Menahem Kister, “Law, Morality and Rhetoric in Some Sayings of Jesus,” in Studies in
Ancient Midrash, ed. James L. Kugel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for Jewish
Studies: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2001), 145–154.
22 Jesper Svartvik, Mark and Mission: Mk 7:1–23 in Its Narrative and Historical Contexts,
Coniectanea Biblica. New Testament Series (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International,
2000), 363–373.
23 Svartvik, Mark and Mission, 365.
24 Svartvik, Mark and Mission, 367.
25 Svartvik, Mark and Mission, 371. One of the most frustrating things about Svartvik’s
book is that 75 % of it is irrelevant; 25 % full of brilliant insight, but he never actually interprets
the pericope!
26 Kister, “Law, Morality and Rhetoric” correctly interpreting 15a but missing the point on
15b, in my humble opinion. See n. 27 below.
26 Daniel Boyarin

Written Torah as just laid out here. Impurity is conveyed by things that come out
from inside the body and not from things that enter the body.27 Any pharisaic or
rabbinic ordinances (or traditions of the Elders) that insist on impurity conveyed
via ingestion of impure foods are just that, additions to the Torah (and we will
see at what cost according to Markan Jesus) and nothing more. Jesus begins his
answer to the question about the washing of hands by citing the Torah against
it, and I will yet return to what happened between verses 6 and 14. Indeed,
“The Markan Jesus says that all foods are pure, that nothing from outside of a
person can pollute him – and prima facie that would seem to include non-kosher
foods.”28 True enough, but that is no more than the Torah itself says. Where is
there any evidence to the contrary, any evidence at all that eating non-kosher
foods was deemed in the Torah to pollute?29 Nor did even the Pharisees say so.
Well might the disciples be puzzled, since Jesus has indicated that this statement
of the Law is parabolic through his declaration in v. 14: “And he called the people
to him again, and said to them, ‘Hear me, all of you, and understand,’” which
surely indicates a deeper meaning to the law as well as a serious reason not to
change it with such practices as washing hands which imply (actually necessitate)
the idea that impurity can enter the body from without by ingestion.
The disciples then in v. 17 explicitly ask of Jesus to explain to them the parable.
Jesus is, at first, a bit annoyed at them that even they don’t see the tropological
significance of the Torah’s distinction between things that go into the body and
things that come out from the body.30 And then he explains the parable to them.
Marcus argues that in such instances we have an updating of a dominical saying
27 Ya᾽ir Fürstenberg, “Defilement Penetrating the Body: A New Understanding of Con-
tamination in Mark 7.15,” New Testament Studies 54 (2008): 176–200.
28 Marcus, “Mark – Interpreter of Paul,” 48.
29 Cf. Robert H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 2004, c1993), 166. With all due respect, I suggest that had Gundry understood
the parable here, he would have been less inclined to dismiss out of hand the view of Schmitals
and Boucher that both cola refer to ritual impurity. Schmitals was quite right to sense that the
kind of antithesis that Jesus is using here ought to refer to the same sphere in both halves, even
though he misunderstood the actual halakhic point. Gundry, on the other hand, is also quite
mistaken in his comment that according to the “OT,” eating non kosher foods renders the body
impure. Neither eating kosher food that has become impure nor non kosher food renders the
body impure. Bird carrion is the only exception but that is a form of corpse impurity, not the
eating of food that has become impure (See on this the clear statements of Kister, “Law, Morality
and Rhetoric,” 151–52). But even Kister takes 15b to be about moral defilement and not ritual
purity (Kister, “Law, Morality and Rhetoric,” 153). It is, of course, at this point that our ways part
and mine converge with Fürstenberg. See also Lambrecht’s account of Carlston: “Was (a form
of) v. 15 the original ending of vv. 1–8? For Carlston the authenticity of the ‘parable’ v. 15 is not
so obvious. If Jesus had indeed spoken this logion, Carlston thinks, friend and foe alike would
have realized his total rupture with the Law,” (Lambrecht, Jesus and the Law, 38. n. 50), only
I daresay those ignorant of the Law would have seen this logion as a rupture, total or even slight.
30 cf. William L. Lane, The Gospel According to Mark: The English Text with Introduction,
Exposition, and Notes, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), 259.
 Mark 7:1–23 – Finally 27

by the Evangelist in order to serve a present need in the Church, in this case
the question of forbidden and non-forbidden foods. That may (or may not)
be the case, however, what is not in question is that a parable is a parable and
its explanation an explanation. It is, accordingly, clear that v. 15, incorporating
v. 14 which is strongly indicative of a parable, has a literal sense, in this case the
statement of the law, which will be followed in vv. 18–19 and following by the
interpretation of the parable and not the abrogation of the law of the Torah.31
This point will, moreover, make clear what is at stake for the Markan Jesus. It is
impermissible to infiltrate the parable with its tropological sense, for then it is no
parable but a paranetic utterance all by itself and in itself.32
A parable, by definition, has a literal and a figurative side. If Jesus talks
about a vineyard but he means the Kingdom of Heaven that is a parable. Con-
sequently, if we have here a parable, it must too have a literal and figurative
side. If, when Jesus said it is not what goes in that makes one impure but only
what goes out, he was not declaring a literal fact, a fact of the Torah, but in-
stead just making the moral point directly, then there would be here no parable
at all, just a sermon. That this point has been thoroughly missed by scholarly
commentators is shown by the multiple approving citations of Westerholm’s
comment that 7:15 means that “a person is not so much defiled by that which
enters him from outside as he is by that which comes from within.”33 Others
argue against Westerholm’s suggestion and say that Jesus meant to reject purity
practices entirely, but all such discussion is actually otiose, once we understand
that Jesus is simply offering the true, literal law of Moses which is an absolute
31 Note that this interpretation works well even without v. 16, since R. T. France makes the
point that the contested v. 16 only makes explicit the parabolic nature of the discourse that is
already implicit owing to the call to hear in v. 14 – “Καὶ προσκαλεσάμενος πάλιν τὸν ὄχλον
ἔλεγεν αὐτοῖς· Ἀκούσατέ μου πάντες καὶ σύνετε; And he called to him the multitude again,
and said unto them, Hear me all of you, and understand” – the call to hear and understand
being itself a marker and signifier of a parable. R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary
on the Greek Text, The New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2002), 184.
32 cf. The Expositor’s Greek Testament: “This saying is called a parable in Mark 7:17, and
Weiss contends that it must be taken strictly as such, i. e., as meaning that it is not foods going
into the body through the mouth that defile ceremonially, but corrupt matters issuing from
the body (as in leprosy). Holtzmann, H. C., concurs. Schanz dissents on the ground that on
this view the connection with unclean hands is done away with, and a quite foreign thought
introduced …. On the whole, the most probable view is that even in Mark 7:15 the thought of
Jesus moves in the moral sphere, and that the meaning is: the only defilement worth serious
consideration is that caused by the evil which comes out of the heart (Mark 7:21).” (https://
www.studylight.org/commentaries/egt/mark-7.html).
Needless to say, I side with Karl Philip Bernhard Weiss (an important nineteenth-century
commentator on the Gospels) and Holzmann here. Paul Schanz’s argument misses the point
that the defilement of hands is what causes (allegedly) foods to become impure.
33 Robert A. Wild, “The Encounter Between Pharisaic and Christian Judaism: Some Early
Gospel Evidence,” Novum Testamentum 27.Fasc. 2 (April 1985): 119, citing Stephen Westerholm,
Jesus and Scribal Authority, Coniectanea Biblica (Lund: Liber Läromedel/Gleerup, 1978), 83.
28 Daniel Boyarin

binary opposition:34 Only that which comes out defiles a body, not that which
goes in. The celebrated anabaptist interpreter, Matthew Henry, writing in the
17th century, got this point: “As by the ceremonial law, whatsoever (almost)
comes out of a man, defiles him (Leviticus 15:2, De 23:13), so what comes out
from the mind of a man is that which defiles him before God, and calls for a
religious washing (Mark 7:21).”35 Jesus asserts the law and then offers it up for
a parabolic interpretation, as signified by “Hear me all of you, and understand”
and ratified by (when it is there) “Let him who has ears, hear!” The disciples
recognized through this phrase that a parable had been delivered, that is,
they understood that the statement was literal and that there was a figurative
second meaning, but they could not discern that meaning on their own. They
did not understand the parable. I submit that this is the only reading (in both
senses) that renders this sequence of verses intelligible. V. 15 is a statement of
the law and vv. 18–23 are its tropological or moral sense according to Markan
Jesus. The law is what it is, only that which comes out of the body rendering the
body impure, in order to teach us the moral that language and intentions that
come out from the heart cause evil and thus moral impurity. Levitical impurity
teaches us moral impurity.36

The “Hypocrisy” of the Pharisees

On the basis of this understanding, we can fill in and delineate the coherence
of the entire dominical discourse. It is all one from beginning to end, all on one
topic, all given by one shepherd. Despite what Hooker says (following Lam-
brecht), the “introduction” to the pericope does not raise “two questions – why
do the disciples not behave according to the tradition of the elders, and why
do they eat with unclean hands? It is these two questions that are dealt with
in vv. 6–13 and 14–23.”37 There is, however – at least according to my, I hope,
well-founded opinion – only one question, why do you not wash your hands
which practice is in accord with the tradition of the elders? The structure is
thus tighter than supposed by Hooker herself. Jesus begins his refutation of the
Pharisaic objection by attacking the very foundation of their complaint, namely
the authority of the tradition of the elders in two ways, via his brilliant midrash
on Isaiah and then by presenting an absolutely egregious example of violation of
the Torah itself, the word of God, via the Pharisaic tradition! Then in vv. 15 and

34See here also Kister, “Law, Morality and Rhetoric,” 154n31.

35https://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/matthew-henry-complete/ ad loc.
36 For this distinction, see Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000). There is much to be learned from this book, notwith-
standing my own view that the thesis of a literal existence of moral impurity is implausible.
37 Hooker, Commentary Mark, 173.
 Mark 7:1–23 – Finally 29

following he focuses directly on the reason why their alleged institution of hand-
washing is similarly a violation of the word of God, since, as we have seen above,
there is nothing according to the Torah that contaminates the body by entering
into it but only matters that exit from the body, and the washing of hands would
indicate, contra this simple Torah truth, that were the hands to contaminate the
food, the contaminated food would contaminate the body. Finally, the crucial
tropological interpretation of the Torah’s law is adduced.
Jesus’ midrash on Isaiah is, as I’ve just said, stunning. A bit of philology will
be necessary to entirely see it (although it is generally well-understood by com-
mentators):
6 ὁ δὲ εἶπεν αὐτοῖς· Καλῶς ἐπροφήτευσεν Ἠσαΐας περὶ ὑμῶν τῶν ὑποκριτῶν, ὡς γέγραπται

ὅτι Οὗτος ὁ λαὸς τοῖς χείλεσίν με τιμᾷ, ἡ δὲ καρδία αὐτῶν πόρρω ἀπέχει ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ·
7 μάτην δὲ σέβονταί με, διδάσκοντες διδασκαλίας ἐντάλματα ἀνθρώπων·
8 ἀφέντες τὴν ἐντολὴν τοῦ θεοῦ κρατεῖτε τὴν παράδοσιν τῶν ἀνθρώπων

As given in the Septuagint, the verses from Isaiah are:

13 
Καὶ εἶπεν κύριος ’Εγγίζει μοι ὁ λαὸς οὗτος τοῖς χείλεσιν αὐτῶν τιμῶσίν με, ἡ δὲ
καρδία αὐτῶν πόρρω ἀπέχει ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ, μάτην δὲ σέβονταί με διδάσκοντες ἐντάλματα
ἀνθρώπων καὶ διδασκαλίας
The Hebrew, as is notorious, seems not to support either the LXX or the text of
Mark – quite – reading as it does:
‫שים‬
ׁ ִ ֖ ָ‫שפָתָ י ֙ו ִ ּכ ְב ּ֔דוּנִי ְול ִ֖ב ֹּו ִר ַ ֣חק ִמ ֶמנִּי וַתְ ִ ּ֤הי י ְִרָאתָ ם֙ א ֹתִ֔ י ִמצְוַ ֥ת ֲאנ‬
ׂ ְ ‫שׁ ה ָ ָ֣עם ַה ּ֔זֶה ְב ִּפ֤יו וּ ִב‬
֙ ַּ‫וי ֹ֣אמֶר אֲד ָֹ֗ני ֚ י ַעַן ּ֤ ִכי נִג‬ ּ
:‫ְמ ֻל ָמ ָּדֽה‬
At first glance it is difficult to get from the Hebrew to either of the Greek versions;
for one thing there is no equivalent in the Hebrew to the Greek μάτην [in vain],
and for another, whence come those διδάσκοντες [teaching, a masculine plural
participle]? In his Hebrew translation of the NT, however, Franz Delitzsch has
proposed an extraordinary solution (without comment), translating:
7 :‫ויען ויאמר אליהם היטב נבא ישעיהו עליכם החנפים ככתוב העם הזה בשפתיו כבדוני ולבו רחק ממני‬
‫ותהו יראתם אתי מצות אנשים מלמדים‬
Literally translated, Delitzsch’s v. 7 reads “and emptiness is your fear of me, the
commandment of learned men.” This involves the assumption of two different
readings in the Hebrew, namely ‫[ ותהו‬emptiness] instead of ‫[ ותהי‬and it is], an
easy variant reading and ‫[ מלומדים‬learnèd, pl.] instead of ‫ מלומדה‬learned, sg.].
The verse then comes to mean, according to Delitzsch, “and he answered and
said to them, well did the Prophet Isaiah prophesy of you, hypocrites, as it says,
‘This nation honors me in its lips but its heart is far from me, and emptiness is
their fear of me, the commandment of learned men.’” Even, however, if we don’t
go quite as far as Delitzsch, nonetheless, we can see the meaning of Jesus shining
forth, “the commandment of learned men” [the Pharisees, or their elders] or
30 Daniel Boyarin

even, following the Masoretic text, “the learned commandment of men” ‫מצות‬
‫אנשים מלומדה‬, either way Jesus makes the Prophet accuse Israel of following men
and not God’s word in the Torah.38
From here, it is now an effortless step to Jesus’ example, a very severe one in-
deed, of the Pharisees setting aside a law of the Torah [“honoring one’s parents”]
in order to support their traditions of binding vows, in other words, allowing a
vow to annul a commandment of the Torah completely.39 As Moshe Benovitz
has written:
It is clear from Jesus’ criticism that he viewed this as a case in which rabbinic legislation
conflicts with Torah law. In his view, if a dedicatory vow is formulated in such a way that
the property will never actually be transferred to the Temple, it does not take effect, even
if it technically flawless. The fact that the Rabbis differed with Jesus and gave sanction to
these prohibitive vows is an example of the way in which they preferred their paradosis
over the Torah commandment to honor one’s parents.40

Jesus, himself, in this instance may have held a practice similar to that of the
Qumranites who simply declared all such vows invalid. A bit more exegesis is,
once again, in order to fully see this point. Substituting the literal “curses” for
the NRSV “speaks evil of,” I may be able to suggest a solution to a hermeneutic
problem here. Marcus writes: “But, wrong as it may be to withhold material sup-
port from one’s parents, how is it equivalent to cursing them?”41 If we, however,
think of the Hebrew this is perhaps less of a problem. In Hebrew the verb for to
honor is literally to “make heavy,” perhaps something like to treat with gravitas.
On the other hand, the word for curse it to “make light.” So in Exodus 20, the
verse reads literally “Make heavy your father and your mother,” while in 21:17,
it reads, “All who make light their father and mother shall surely die.” If to
make heavy (to honor) is to provide with material support, then to make light
(to curse) is the opposite, so not feeding one’s parents is tantamount to cursing
them. The Pharisees, then, by allowing such a vow to stand were causing the
person to violate a commandment for which the punishment was death.
38cf. Lane, The Gospel According to Mark, 248–249 who seems to interpret this as I do:
“Jesus’ sharp rebuttal sets in radical opposition the commandment of God and the halakhic
formulations of the scribal tradition.” Moreover, he entitles the section, “the conflict between
commandment and tradition,” but I cannot then understand why he quotes (approvingly?), the
anti-Jewish invective purveyed by Bornkamm, to wit that the “law has become separated from
God,” unless, by this, he means that through the alleged Pharisaic distortions of the Law, it has
become separated from God’s intended meaning. For a very different reading from mine of the
use of Isaiah here, see Moshe Benovitz, Kol Nidre: Studies in the Development of Rabbinic Votive
Institutions, Brown Judaic Studies 315 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1998), 22.
39 Note that (pace Lambrecht, Jesus and the Law, 52) this is not an ad hominem attack (my
view of the Gospels is more favorable than that); it is exactly on point, since it is another and
very egregious example where the Pharisees apparently prefer their traditions to the point of
even setting aside a true commandment of the Torah, namely to honor one’s parents.
40 Benovitz, Kol Nidre, 23.
41 Marcus, Mark 1–8, 444.
 Mark 7:1–23 – Finally 31

From beginning to end, therefore, the controversy is over the validity/author-

ity of the “tradition of the elders,” vs. sola scriptura, as it were. Following this, Jesus
returns to the question of hand-washing, explains how the Pharisaic tradition,
once more, violates the Torah as written and given by God, and finally explicates
the vital significance of this violation. Once again, the Pharisees with their “tra-
dition of the elders” are shown to have annulled a critical lesson of the Torah. In
requiring washing of hands before eating, the Pharisees are declaring that eating
foods with unwashed hands renders the food impure which seemingly renders the
body impure, which is, as Jesus says, a violation of the Torah’s own rules,42 and
thus Jesus declares, as we shall see, all foods pure, that is, not contaminated and
not contaminating the body; he does not declare all foods permitted.

“And thus he purified all foods”

Marcus writes, “But nothing in the immediate Markan context suggests such a
restrictive interpretation of ‘purifying all foods’, and the categorical nature of
Mark’s diction, especially the use of ‘nothing’ (οὐδέν) in 7:15 and the repeated
use of ‘all’ (πᾶν) in 7:18,19, and 23, tell against it.”43 The truth, I’m afraid, is
the exact opposite: Everything in the Markan context speaks only of the purity
and impurity of foods, namely the only reason for a washing of hands or for
opposing it. Nothing here says anything about non-kosher foods, and everything
in the context suggests defense of the Torah (including poor Leviticus) from the
arrogations and abrogations of the Pharisees, as the entire text indicates from
beginning to end, from the Isaiah text, through the issue of Pharisaic vows that
prevent one from feeding one’s parents as enjoined in the Torah, and thus back
to the Pharisaic innovation of washing hands which signifies against the Torah
that foods can make one impure. Furthermore, as Marcus himself has noted,
“Katharizein literally means ‘to purify or cleanse.’ In the LXX it can be used in
cultic contexts either for an act of making something pure (e. g. Exod 29:36–37)
or for the declaration that something has already been made pure (e. g. Lev
13:6, 2).”44 Nowhere, however, in the LXX do we find that it means or suggests
declaring something kosher. What would be required would be a word parallel
to Hebrew ‫התיר‬, meaning “permitted all foods.” Hebrew ‫“ טיהר‬purified,” never
means to permit a forbidden food, even in the context of a controversy regarding
a particular foodstuff. Although I am not certain of this, but it would seem to me

42 Once again, pace Lambrecht, Jesus and the Law, 56 who opines that “the fact that the
Pharisees and scribes (unlike the disciples of Jesus) observe the hand-washing cannot be shown
to render ineffectual a commandment of God.” Well that is precisely what the disciples thought
also until Jesus answered their question and showed them how it precisely does that!
43 Marcus, “Mark – Interpreter of Paul,” 48.
44 Marcus, Mark 1–8, 455.
32 Daniel Boyarin

that ἀφίημι provides the closest equivalent Greek verb. There is accordingly not
the slightest suggestion in the immediate Markan context that Jesus declared the
non-kosher kosher.45 In neither of the cited contexts nor any other in the entire
Septuagint does katharizein ever mean rendering a food kosher or declaring a
food kosher. It may sound bizarre to interpret the text just as it is, an attack on
the Pharisees, but that’s what’s there.

Parenaesis: Mark Against Paul on the Kosher Question?

While I don’t wish here to go too far into the fraught question of the relationship
of Mark to Paul, I do wish, after all that’s my point, to contend with one pillar
in that argument, namely that both Mark and Paul support an abrogation of the
laws of the Torah (or some laws of the Torah). Marcus’s latest foray into these
questions leaves this point, in his view, intact:
And both [Paul and Mark] think that the widening of God’s purposes to incorporate the
Gentiles was accomplished by an apocalyptic change in the Law that had previously sep-
arated Jews from Gentiles, a change that included an abrogation of the OT food laws; in the
new situation that pertains since Jesus’ advent, all foods are pure (Mark 7:19; Rom 14:20).46

Further on, Marcus writes explicitly, “If Boyarin is right that Mark endorses
keeping kosher, the thesis of this essay [arguing that Paul and Mark are very
close theologically] is wrong.”47 The stakes, therefore, are high.
The advantages of the current proposal, to my mind – even if only so – render
it compelling. According to the reading offered here, the pericope, whether
through-composed or bricolage, nonetheless remains rhetorically and themat-
ically consistent and consequent from beginning to end.48 The great advantage
of this interpretation, I think, from a purely exegetical point of view is that the
narrative remains coherent. It begins with a controversy over a novel “Pharisaic”
stringency, continues with Jesus’ attack on the “tradition of the Elders,” that set
of practices and ideas that the Pharisees held and which were not in the written
Torah (and which were the source of sharp controversy among Jews right through
the Middle Ages), and ends with a rejection of an entire complex of Pharisaic
45 To be sure, Paul may have done exactly that, but he can hardly be cited as a pendant in
an argument the burden of which is to demonstrate that Mark is an interpreter of Paul which
would surely beg the question.
46 Marcus, “Mark – Interpreter of Paul,” 32.
47 Marcus, “Mark – Interpreter of Paul,” 45.
48 See the extreme lengths to which even a giant like Bultmann will go: “According to
R. Bultmann the form of this controversy is not ‘stilgemass’ [pertinent, DB] since a real argu-
mentation is lacking. V. 15, which deals with unclean food, does not provide an answer to the
question of v. 5, which is concerned rather with the problem of tradition.” (Lambrecht, Jesus and
the Law, 34–35). My somewhat impertinent question to Christians would be, why would one
consider holy or even authoritative such an incoherent text?
 Mark 7:1–23 – Finally 33

stringency with regard to eating practices and purity that was the source of the
requirement for a ritual hand washing before eating. This reading does not as-
cribe to Jesus, moreover, a kind of deep (almost hypocritical) defense of the Torah
against the Pharisees followed by a rejection of that same Torah by him. It, more-
over, does not require the assumption that Leviticus prescribes rules that in fact
simply and directly are in contradiction with what Leviticus actually says. This
refers especially to an alleged bodily impurity caused by the ingestion of impure
(including non-kosher) foods. This very idea is back-formed in fact from the
assumption that when Jesus says v. 15, he is opposing Leviticus, but it is precisely
an invalid inference if Jesus is supporting Leviticus against the Pharisees, since it
is they who introduced the question of impure foods contaminating the person
and required ritual handwashing to prevent it. Further, it does not assume that
an entirely new topic (kashrut) is introduced without provocation in the middle
of the narrative about purity and the Pharisaic tradition. Finally, according to
this reading we need not reckon that the later Christian authors, the Evangelist
Matthew to Matthew Henry, at least, misread Mark, and that that’s why they
continue to discuss the question of kashrut, as quite a number of modern com-
mentaries contend.49 Better to posit, I think, that it is modern understanding
that has been flawed and that the ancients understood it well.50 I continue, there-
fore, to maintain that it is only when Pauline categories and values are imposed
on Mark – at least with respect to the Torah and its maintenance – that we find
Mark close to Paul. Jesus, I am quite certain, even Mark’s Jesus and even the Jesus
of Mark 7:19c, whether from Mark’s pen or not, kept and was kept quite kosher.
[final note: in a forthcoming paper, I intend, Deo volente, to attempt to show
that this reading of Mark 7 supports the hypothesis that Mark is close to Paul,
conjecturing that some key Pauline verses can be better understood in this light].

Works Cited

Benovitz, Moshe. Kol Nidre: Studies in the Development of Rabbinic Votive Institutions.
Brown Judaic Studies 315. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1998.

49 Räisänen brilliantly points to the difference between the Sabbath pericope in chapter 2
after which some wish to kill Jesus and the total lack of such a response in chapter 7 (Räisänen,
“Jesus and the Food Laws,” 136–137.) I would only add that the reason for the reaction in
chapter 2 is owing to the messianic claim of Jesus (“Son of Man”). Here, on the other hand, there
is no such claim but a halakhic difference of great theological moment (Räisänen, “Jesus and
the Food Laws,” 138).
50 France, The Gospel of Mark, 278–279 and see Hooker, Commentary Mark, 179. See also the
compelling argument by Räisänen (“Jesus and the Food Laws,” 139–142) that Paul, Peter, Luke
(in both the Gospel and Acts) did not know of a dominical abrogation of the laws of kashrut.
On the other hand, I find Räisänen’s own solution to this conundrum entirely uncompelling, for
reasons that will immediately be clear to readers of this essay. See above n. 15.
34 Daniel Boyarin

Boyarin, Daniel. The Jewish Gospel: The Story of the Jewish Christ. New York: The New
Press, 2012.
Carlston, C. E. “The Things That Defile: (Mark Vii. 14) and the Law in Matthew and Mark.”
New Testament Studies 15 (1968–69): 75–96.
Cohen, Shaye J. D. “Antipodal Texts: B. Eruvin 21b–22a and Mark 7:1–23 on the Tradition
of the Elders and the Commandment of God.” Pages 965–984 in Envisioning Judaism:
Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday. Edited by
Ra᾽anan S. Boustan et al. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013.
Collins, Adela Yarbro. Mark: A Commentary. Hermeneia – A Critical and Historical Com-
mentary on the Bible. Edited by Harold W. Attridge. Minneapolis, MI: Fortress, 2007.
France, R. T. The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text. The New International
Greek Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster
Press, 2002.
Fürstenberg, Ya᾽ir. “Defilement Penetrating the Body: A New Understanding of Con-
tamination in Mark 7.15.” New Testament Studies 54 (2008): 176–200.
Gundry, Robert H. Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross. Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 2004, c1993.
Hooker, Morna D. A Commentary on the Gospel According to St. Mark. Black’s New Tes-
tament Commentaries. London: Continuum, 2006.
Kister, Menahem. “Law, Morality and Rhetoric in Some Sayings of Jesus.” Pages 145–154
in Studies in Ancient Midrash. Edited by James L. Kugel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Center for Jewish Studies: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2001.
Klawans, Jonathan. Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000.
Lambrecht, Jan. Jesus and the Law: An Investigation of Mark 7, 1–23. Analecta Lovaniensia
Biblica et Orientalia. 5. Louvain: Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, 1977.
Lane, William L. The Gospel According to Mark: The English Text with Introduction, Expo-
sition, and Notes. The New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974.
Marcus, Joel. “Scripture and Tradition in Mark 7.” Pages 145–163 in The Scriptures in the
Gospels. C. M. Tuckett. Leuven: Leuven University Press; Uitgeverij Peeters, 1997.
–. Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. New York: Dou-
bleday, 2000.
–. “Mark – Interpreter of Paul.” Pages 29–49 in Mark and Paul: Comparative Essays. Part
II, For and Against Pauline Influence on Mark. Edited by Eve-Marie Becker, Troels
Engberg-Pedersen, and Mogens Müller. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013.
Räisänen, Heikke. “Jesus and the Food Laws: Reflections on Mark 7:15.” Pages 127–148 in
Jesus, Paul and Torah: Collected Essays. Sheffield, UK: JSOT Press, 1992.
Svartvik, Jesper. Mark and Mission: Mk 7:1–23 in Its Narrative and Historical Contexts.
Coniectanea Biblica. New Testament Series. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell Inter-
national, 2000.
Westerholm, Stephen. Jesus and Scribal Authority. Coniectanea Biblica. Lund: Liber
Läromedel/Gleerup, 1978.
Wild, Robert A. “The Encounter Between Pharisaic and Christian Judaism: Some Early
Gospel Evidence.” Novum Testamentum 27.Fasc. 2 (1985): 105–124.
How John of Patmos’ Readers Made Him into a Christian
Elaine Pagels

In his Book of Revelation, John of Patmos envisions the New Jerusalem, which
God’s Messiah prepares for his holy people. But who are those people? Most
Christian commentators, from David Aune and Adela Collins to Pierre Prigent
and Steven Friesen, finding John’s prophecies in their New Testament, envision
that city as one being prepared for Christians. David Aune, for example, in his
magisterial commentary, declares that John “claims that the Jews are not real
Jews, but a synagogue of Satan … [and] implies that Christians are the true
Israel.”1 Similarly, Pierre Prigent explains that although the prophet Isaiah
pictures the New Jerusalem as belonging to Israel and demonstrating Israel’s
preeminence over all “the nations,” when John of Patmos speaks of Israel, he im-
plicitly articulates “the Christian Church’s claim to be Israel, the people of God.”2
Prigent concludes with the theological conviction echoed by many others: that
while Judaism remains regrettably exclusive, Christianity not only has replaced
Judaism, but has advanced beyond it to offer a superior, and inclusive, “univer-
sal” perspective.
Yet maintaining this consensus – let’s call it the old consensus, since it’s finally
changing – has required considerable sleight of hand, so deftly performed that
the audience doesn’t notice the moves that make the magic work. Let’s take a
quick look, then, at the techniques used to make these interpretive moves. The
first trick, with which we started, is the most obvious – an exegetical version of
“bait and switch”: the assumption that since John follows Jesus, and his book is
found in the New Testament, he must be a Christian. What most commentators
have failed to notice is that John never uses the term “Christian,” and that, had
he known the term, he likely would not have applied it to himself, since for many
of his Christian contemporaries (c. 90 CE), in the region where he lived, the term
connoted Gentile converts.3
1 David E. Aune, Revelation 1–5, ed. David A. Hubbard and Glenn W. Barker, Word Biblical
Commentary 52A (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1997), 175.
2 Pierre Prigent, Commentary on the Apocalypse of St. John, trans. Wendy Pradels (Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 204 and 168n12.
3 Philippa Townsend, “Who Were the First Christians?: Jews, Gentiles and the Christianoi,”
in Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity, ed. Eduard Iricinschi and M. Zellentin (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2008), 212–230; for discussion, see Elaine Pagels, “The Social History of Satan, Part
III: John of Patmos and Ignatius of Antioch – Contrasting Visions of God’s people,” Harvard
Theological Review 99.4 (2006); 487–505.
36 Elaine Pagels

Remarkably, it’s taken nearly two millennia for a Christian exegete – in this
case, David Aune himself, writing in 1997 – to point out that John identifies as
a Jew. After noting, with apparent surprise, that John actually uses the term Jew
positively, Aune then speculates that he “moved from Judaism to Christianity at
some point in his career.”4 Thus he projects onto John’s biography a Christian
version of salvation history, which posits that “Judaism” precedes and typolog-
ically anticipates “Christianity.” Here, of course, he’s simply restating what the
majority of Christian exegetes have taken for granted: that although John of
Patmos constantly alludes to the classical prophets, he himself, being a Christian,
was not concerned, as they were, with relationships between Jews and Gentiles
(“the nations”),5 but rather with relationships between Jews and Christians.
This interpretive move, of course, radically affects all the others – most
strikingly, the exegesis of Rev 2:9 and 3:9. As the appendix to this article dem-
onstrates, nearly every Christian commentator of the past century has taken
John’s scathing criticism of the “synagogue of Satan” as referring to Jews who
persecute Christians and arouse violence against them.6
As several critics have noted, however, such exegesis requires nothing less
than reversing John’s words to claim that he means precisely the opposite of what
he writes. Commentators who take this position have to argue that “those who
say they are Jews and are not, but are lying,” actually are Jews, but, as Adela Col-
lins reiterates the older consensus, they are Jews “who don’t deserve to be called
Jews” because of their violent hostility toward Christians.7 Such commentators
find confirmation in what they read as John’s characterization of such Jews as
belonging to a synagogue, unlike the members of his seven churches (ekklesiae).

4 Aune, Revelation 1–5, 162 and cxxi.

5 For an important recent discussion, see: Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zwi, Goy: Israel’s
Others and the Birth of the Gentile, Oxford Studies in the Abrahamic Religions (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2018).
6 See, for example, any of the following commentaries, with excerpts noted in the appendix:
R. H. Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Revelation of St. John (New York:
Scribner, 1920); G. B. Caird, A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine, 2nd ed.
(London: A & C Black, 1984); Adela Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apoc-
alypse (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984); M. Eugene Boring, Revelation, Interpretation
Series (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1989); Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, Revelation: Vision
of a Just World, ed. G. Krodel, Proclamation Commentaries (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991);
Prigent, Commentary on the Apocalypse of St. John; Aune, Revelation 1–5; Craig R. Koester,
Revelation and the End of All Things (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2001); Paul
B. Duff, Who Rides the Beast? Prophetic Rivalry and the Rhetoric of Crisis in the Churches of
the Apocalypse (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Steven J. Friesen, Imperial
Cults and the Apocalypse of John: Reading Revelation in the Ruins (Oxford, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001); and Brian K. Blount, Revelation: A Commentary, ed. C. Clifton Black,
M. Eugene Boring, and John T. Carroll; The New Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westmin-
ster John Knox Press, 2009).
7 Adela Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1984).
 How John of Patmos’ Readers Made Him into a Christian 37

Thus, even scholars as sophisticated as Richard Bauckham, among others,8 have

ignored the anachronism of translating such terms as Ioudaios, synagoge, and
ekklesia, through connotations gained only in later Christian usage, as David
Frankfurter, among others, has noted,9 and as Ralph Korner has demonstrated
in his detailed and finely nuanced 2017 monograph, The Origin and Meaning of
Ekklēsia in the Early Jesus Movement.10
Those who follow the older consensus then go on to engage a second trick,
perhaps the most ingenious of all: I call it “flip the prophecies.” The lever for this
trick is irony, which enables such commentators simply to reverse what John
says even more drastically. Now they go on to claim that when he invokes the
oracles of Second Isaiah, John intends to make the classical prophet, too, say
the opposite of what he actually wrote. Consider, for example, how the author
of Isaiah 60–66, on whose oracles John relies, invites Israel to greet a new age,
prophesying her glorious future:
Arise, shine; for your light has come … darkness shall cover the earth, and great darkness
(shall cover) the nations; but the Lord shall arise upon you; and nations shall come to your
light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn (Isaiah 60:1–3).

Thus the prophet proclaims that in the coming new age, when the Lord sets right
all the wrongs of Israel’s past, “the nations,” repenting the harm they inflicted
on Israel, shall return to Jerusalem, humbly offering reparations and restitution.
Throughout Isaiah 60, he vividly pictures Israel’s oppressors returning to the holy
city, returning the Jewish exiles whom they had captured, sold, and enslaved, and
offering reparations. Arriving in ships loaded with “the wealth of the nations,”
(60:5), the foreigners shall return Israel’s lost children, along with cargoes of gold
and silver (60:9) to rebuild the city walls, so that God’s people “shall enjoy the
wealth of the nations, and rejoice in their riches” (61:6). Warming to his vision,
the prophet pictures the city gates left perpetually open, “so that the nations shall
bring you their wealth, with their kings led in procession,” as captives (60:11).
And finally, having brought splendid resources to restore the Temple which
they’d desecrated and demolished, the prophet declares, “the descendants of
those who oppressed you shall bow down at your feet” (60:14).

8 Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy: Studies on the Book of Revelation (London:
T&T Clark, 1993).
9 David Frankfurter, “Jews or Not?: Reconstruction the ‘Other’ in Rev 2:9 and 3:9,” Harvard
Theological Review 94.4 (2001): 407–409.
10 Ralph J. Korner, The Origin and Meaning of Ekklēsia in the Early Jesus Movement, Ancient
Judaism and Early Christianity 98 (Leiden: Brill, 2017); For more accurate translation of the
Greek terms, see Adele Reinhartz’s “Note on Terminology,” in her 2018 book, Cast Out of the
Covenant: Jews and Anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John (Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield,
2018), xiii–xvii.
38 Elaine Pagels

John of Patmos invokes these passages, notably Isaiah 60:14, as he pictures the
Son of Man promising his maligned people that he will reverse their humiliation
at the hands of their enemies, and exalt them instead:
I will make those of the synagogue of Satan, who say that they are Jews and are not, but
are lying – I will make them bow down at your feet, and they shall learn that I have loved
you! (Rev 3:9)

But Christian commentators, having switched the traditional contrast between

Jews and Gentiles as if it referred instead to Jews and Christians, now go on to
“flip the prophecies.” Or rather, as they see it, John of Patmos has “flipped them”
first – their Christian John now reading Jewish Isaiah ironically. So, when it comes
to the question of who will bow down to whom, David Aune follows his Christian
predecessors, declaring that
… the ironical use of this motive is clear. In all these passages, the Gentiles are expected to
grovel before Israel, while in Rev. 3:9 it is the Jews who are expected to grovel before the
feet of this (largely Gentile) Christian community … There is irony in the statement, since
in some strands of Jewish eschatology the Gentiles were expected to become ultimately
subject to Israel (Isa 45:14; 49:23; 60:14) … whereas here it is the Jews who will pros-
trate themselves before gentile Christians. This verse therefore concerns the eschatological
exaltation of the people of God, i. e., Christians.11

Recently, challenged by the work of such scholars as John Marshall and David
Frankfurter, some of our most sophisticated and nuanced colleagues have rec-
ognized the anachronisms assumed in the older consensus. Friesen, for example,
in his impressive monograph, offers a far more nuanced and accurate under-
standing of John’s language. After noting more than once that John never uses
the term “Christian,”12 Friesen acknowledges in a later article that misunder-
standing John’s use of such terms as “Jew” may easily “conjure of the ghosts of
theological anti-Semitism.”13
Friesen apparently wrote the latter in response to critics such as David Frank-
furter, who, in an important article, cites the work of Shaye Cohen,14 among
others, pointing out that the old consensus depends on “entirely anachronistic …
conceptions of ‘Jew’ and ‘Christian’ for first century Asia Minor.”15 Discussing
John’s caustic attack on the “synagogue of Satan” (Rev 2:9 and 3:9), Frankfurter
demonstrates that John’s characterization of those he attacks precisely fits the

11Aune, Revelation 1–5, 237–238.

12Friesen, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John, 183–184 and 253n24.
13 Steven J. Friesen, “Sarcasm in Revelation 2–3: Churches, Christians, True Jews, and
Satanic Synagogues,” in The Reality of Apocalypse: Rhetoric and Politics in the Book of Revelation,
ed. David Barr, Symposium Series 89 (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006), 142.
14 See, for example, Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties,
Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Frankfurter, “Jews or Not?,”
407–408.
15 Frankfurter, “Jews or Not?,” 407.
 How John of Patmos’ Readers Made Him into a Christian 39

profile of Gentile believers converted to Pauline teaching.16 Such research allows

us to drop the earlier, highly convoluted exegesis of these passages, and to rec-
ognize instead that likely John of Patmos means exactly what he says: “those who
say they are Jews and are not, but are lying” are not Jews, although, as John sees
it, they effectively claim that they are – since they see themselves as members
of the new – and better – Israel. What especially angers John, apparently, is
that although such Gentile converts, encouraged, they believe, by their “great
apostle” Paul,17 feel free to ignore even the most minimal requirements of purity
observance, yet nevertheless regard themselves, and not actual Jews, as God’s
holy people.
In an article that corroborates Marshall and Frankfurter’s conclusions, I’ve
shown that what we know of Ignatius of Antioch, himself a Syrian convert, per-
haps the most famous leader of Pauline Christians among John’s contemporaries
in Asia Minor, suggests that the seer likely would have encountered people who
share their bishops’ convictions: followers of Jesus who aggressively identified
with “Christianity, not Judaism,” and who read Paul’s letters in a starkly super-
sessionist key, priding themselves on belonging to what Paul called the “spiritual
Israel” (cf., Gal 6:16).18
While such prominent scholars as Friesen and Paul Duff seriously engage
the exegetical challenge, both reject Frankfurter’s main conclusions. Arguing
that the “synagogue of Satan” is not to be identified with the other adversaries
John mentions in chapters 2 and 3, Duff returns to his previous conclusion that
the term refers to “Jews from local synagogues,” as, he notes, “the conventional
wisdom has long recommended.”19 Friesen takes a different tack, pointing out
that John “seems completely unconcerned about Sabbath observance, food
regulations (beyond the topic of sacrificial meat), ablutions, or circumcision,”
and thus concludes that John is not a Jewish prophet primarily obsessed with
purity observance.20 Yet rather than suggest that, Frankfurter had made a far
simpler case: that John’s characterization of the believers he opposes specifically
targets Gentile converts who, although they aren’t Jews, concern themselves
with precisely the same two aspects of purity observance that Paul urges upon
his followers in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 – namely, abstinence from eidolōthytos
and from porneia. But Friesen, having rejected his version of Frankfurter’s
argument, also concludes that “it’s much easier to accept the majority opinion,”
and reiterates the argument previously made in his monograph: namely, that
John concerns himself above all with “the churches,” which he defines as “rep-

16 Frankfurter, “Jews or Not?,” 416–422.

17 See, for example, 1 Corinthians 8 and 10:23–30.
18 Pagels, “The Social History of Satan,” 487–505.
19 Paul Duff, “The ‘Synagogue of Satan’: Crisis Mongering and the Apocalypse of John,” in
The Reality of the Apocalypse, 159, 167–168.
20 Friesen, “Sarcasm in Revelation 2–3,” 135.
40 Elaine Pagels

resent(ing) God’s kingdom, chosen from among the peoples of the earth.”21 He
even adds that “in view of this perception on the world and the churches, it is
surprising how little is said overtly about Israel of things Jewish,” the “one glaring
exception” being, he says, the two passages in which John denounces “the syn-
agogue of Satan” (Rev 2:9 and 3:9).22
Yet the exegetical challenges apparently did impel Friesen to reinstate the pri-
mary point of the older consensus even more forcefully than before. In his 2006
article called “Sarcasm in Revelation 2–3: Churches, Christians, True Jews, and
Satanic Synagogues,” he first cites the work of Harry Maier, who characterizes
“the text of Revelation as a whole” as a text “permeated by ironic strategies.”23
As Friesen notes, Meier had set out to “defend” John from readers concerned
that his triumphant vision of a huge heap of enemy corpses doesn’t sound very
Christian. Maier might have considered that John was not, in fact, a Christian,
but rather a Jewish refugee from a horrifying war in which Roman troops had
ravaged, robbed, raped and slaughtered countless of his people, and reduced
their holy city, including the great Temple of God, to a heap of smoldering ruins.
Given John’s situation, it would not be surprising if he, like the prophets he
reveres – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel – were inclined to praise God
when imagining the destruction of Israel’s enemies. Yet since Meier apparently
expects a charitable response from his hypothetical Christian, he suggests that
John must have intended his vision of God’s judgement on Israel’s enemies as
nothing more than “dramatic irony.”
Friesen agrees, and proceeds to take Meier’s point much farther, performing
in effect the exegetical equivalent of a double backflip. To account for the con-
tradiction he sees between John’s words and their meaning, he introduces a
discussion of irony, satire, and sarcasm, defining the latter as “a sharp and often
satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain,” or “a mode of satirical
wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language.”24
Reading “against the grain” as he does, Friesen decides that John does nothing
less than engage all three. Thus, when John of Patmos cites Isaiah 60:14, Friesen
conjures what he actually calls “the sarcastic Christ,” who mocks Israel’s claims
to priority over “the nations,” and who ironically invokes Isaiah’s prophecy in
order to humiliate Jews, while professing his love for his new, “mostly Gentile,”
people. So, Friesen concludes, although Isaiah was prophesying that “The
gentiles who had destroyed … Jerusalem … would eventually … bow down” to
the Jews whom they’d conquered, “… The risen Christ in Revelation promises
that some Jews … would someday come and bow down to the (mostly Gentile)
21 Friesen, “Sarcasm in Revelation 2–3,” 136; Friesen, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of
John, 193.
22 Friesen, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John, 192.
23 Friesen, “Sarcasm in Revelation 2–3,” 128.
24 Friesen, “Sarcasm in Revelation 2–3,” 131, quoting Merriam-Webster Online.
 How John of Patmos’ Readers Made Him into a Christian 41

congregation. This is structural irony with a sarcastic twist …. [here] the role of
Isaiah’s gentiles is played by the Jewish community … the synagogue of Satan.”25
Having shown how to turn language upside down, Friesen feels free to reassert
the older consensus. Instead of acknowledging that he and other Christian com-
mentators have “flipped the prophecies,” Friesen declares that it’s actually John
of Patmos who flipped them. For since, as he says, John of Patmos “speaks for
the churches” who, in his words, “represent God’s kingdom, chosen from among
the peoples of the earth,”26 John of Patmos “reuses Isaiah to assert the right of the
mostly Gentile congregation to enter the new Jerusalem.”27 Seen this way, John’s
use of classical prophesy “is simply a satirical, sarcastic flourish embedded within
the ironic reuse of scripture.”28
What are we to conclude from all this, and what’s at stake? Who, finally, be-
longs in the New Jerusalem? This question often leads Christian commentators
to the third trick, a classic disappearance act: “Now you see them, now you don’t.”
Where do God’s people, the Jews, stand in the New Jerusalem? When I asked this
question, one Christian scholar responded with surprise; then replied that since
“God’s people, Israel,” now is “the church,” it’s obvious that Jews – except for
those converted to Christianity – are nowhere in sight. Prigent, among many
others, takes this for granted. When discussing the New Jerusalem, he considers
two options offered by previous commentators: either, he says “the heavenly city
is the perfected, glorified Church,” or it is “the church … that already exists.”29
In either case, he concludes, “there can be no question … that the heavenly
Jerusalem is simply the Christian Church.”30 Friesen comes to a similar con-
clusion, with more careful nuance, noting that “John did not use the term ‘Israel’
for the churches, even though,” he adds, John “considered scriptural references
to Israel to refer to the churches.” He goes on to conclude that “John understood
the churches to represent God’s kingdom, chosen from among the peoples of the
earth.”31 What apparently underlies such exegesis is their agreement that Chris-
tianity’s universalism, which potentially includes all humanity, is what surpasses
the exclusivism they see in Judaism.
John’s final vision of the New Jerusalem, compared with those of the clas-
sical prophets he invokes, is, indeed, extraordinarily inclusive. What is at stake
for me, and likely for others, is how, more often than not, Christians effectively
have “made Jews disappear” – even from their own prophecies and Scriptures.
In the case of Revelation, do we read John’s prophecies as do those commenta-

25 Friesen, “Sarcasm in Revelation 2–3,” 140–141, italics added.

26 Friesen, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John, 193.
27 Friesen, “Sarcasm in Revelation 2–3,” 141, italics added.
28 Loc. cit., italics added.
29 Prigent, Commentary on the Apocalypse of St. John, 584.
30 Prigent, Commentary on the Apocalypse of St. John, 595.
31 Friesen, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John, 183 and 193.
42 Elaine Pagels

tors who, perhaps unconsciously, have absorbed the legacy of supersessionism,

or not?
Consider, then, that when we ask who will enter the New Jerusalem, John en-
visions its population drawn from two major groups: first, the “one hundred and
forty four thousand men” (Rev 7:4) whom he sees in a vision, twelve thousand
drawn from each of Israel’s twelve tribes, who stand with the Messiah on Mount
Zion; men “who have not defiled themselves with women” (14:4), holy warriors
“redeemed from humankind, as the first fruits for God and the Lamb” (14:4).
“After that,” John says, when he looked a second time, he saw “a great multitude”
of those who, by contrast, could not be numbered; people who had come “from
every nation, from all tribes, peoples, and languages” (7:9), standing before the
throne, praising Israel’s God, and the Lamb. John distinguishes the first group
from the second not only by its greater holiness, but also in terms of spiritual
power. For while “the beast” is allowed to “make war on the saints, and conquer
them,” the prophet never says that they have capitulated, and worshipped that
evil power. But John goes on to say that “the beast was given authority” over the
rest of the human race – at least over all of those who worshipped him, excepting
only those whose names had been written in the book of life (13:7–8).
Where, then, does each group stand, as John pictures them, in the eschatolog-
ical kingdom? He declares that the names of Israel’s twelve tribes are inscribed on
its gates, and the names of “the twelve apostles of the Lamb” on its foundations
(Rev 12:12–14). Like many others, Prigent takes the twelve tribes as representing
Israel, and the twelve apostles as representing “the church” – a view that fits his
“universalist” vision of the eschatological city as entirely inclusive. For Prigent, as
for Friesen, and, indeed for many of us, what we find most inspiring about John’s
prophecy is that he envisions the prophets’ most capacious visions fulfilled,
encompassing the whole world, embracing not only his holy people, Israel, but
also people “from every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation.”
But are we to take this to mean what many Christians have assumed – namely,
that “the Jews” have now, in effect, disappeared, having been surpassed and
replaced by the “innumerable multitude” drawn from all nations (Rev 7:9)?
Exegetes like Richard Bauckham, immersed in the Hebrew Bible, who seek to
understand how John himself envisions that city, read John’s vision in a way
more consonant with the visions of the classical prophets. And those of us who
see the tradition of the “twelve” whom the Messiah has appointed to share his
reign (Luke 22:28) as firmly grounded in Jewish tradition as that of the tribes,
see the New Jerusalem as the capital of Israel’s empire, now ruled by her Messiah,
and radiant with the immanent presence of Israel’s God, now ruling the entire
world, even inviting those “of the nations” to dwell in the holy city, fulfilling a
vision long articulated by some of Israel’s classical prophets.
 How John of Patmos’ Readers Made Him into a Christian 43

Appendix: Rev 2:9 And 3:9: What Commentators Have Said

(selected, listed chronologically, with italics added)

R. H. Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Revelation of St. John

(1920)
Rev 2:9: “the bitter hostility of the Jews to the Christians at Smyrna is unmistakable from
the context (cites, among many others, Mart. Poly., Ignatius, Justin, Tertullian’s Against the
Jews).” Vol. I, 56. “The author himself is a Jewish Christian.” Vol. I, 57. “The Jews were, as
their actions showed, a Synagogue of Satan.” Vol. I, 57.
Rev 3:9: “Our author claims that Christians alone had the right to the name ‘Jew’” (here
Charles cites Rom. 2: 28–29 on “Jews inwardly.”) Vol. I, 88.
In regard to Isaiah 60:14: “The language is based on Is. 60:14, where Gentiles are de-
scribed as submitting to Jews …. However, the homage that Jews expected from Gentiles
they were themselves to render to the Christians … now (Jews) should play the role of the
heathen, and acknowledge the Christians to be the true Israel.” Vol. I, 89.

G. B. Caird, A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine (1966)

Rev 2:9; 3:9: “the Christians have been subjected to active hostility … instigated by the
Jews (cf Mart Polyc 19:1) … The Jews of Philadelphia have rejected the Messiah, thereby
forfeiting their right to be called Jews.” As for the Isaiah passages, “It is not the Gentile
oppressors of Israel who must be taught to recognize Israel’s primacy … it is Jewish perse-
cutors of the church who must come to see that the church is the true Israel.” 53.

Adela Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse (1984)
Rev 2:9; 3:9: “The name ‘Jews’ is denied to the Jewish community in Smyrna … (i. e.) to
actual Jews of the local synagogues …. Jewish hostility to the early Christian missionary
effort is well attested for both the first and second century. The name ‘Jews’ is denied them
because the followers of Jesus are held to be the true Jews.” 85. Rev 3:9: access to God is given
“to Christians” who implicitly “claim …. the name ‘Jews.’” 86.

Eugene Boring, Interpretation: Revelation (1989)

Rev 2:9; 3:9: John of Patmos, writing “to Christians” alludes to “the evident hostility that
exists between Jews and Christians in Asia, a hostility so deep from John’s side that he can
call the Jews of Smyrna and Philadelphia ‘synagogues of Satan’ … By John’s time Chris-
tianity was already predominantly a gentile religion …” 13.

Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, Revelation: Vision of a Just World (1991)

Rev 2:9; 3:9: “Jewish Christians like John were less and less able to claim their political
privileges and identity as Jews …. If Jews were excluded from the synagogue because they
were confessing Christians, such Jews could no longer claim the protection granted by
Roman law to Judaism …. The messages to Smyrna and Philadelphia seem to reflect such a
conflict. John’s identification of the synagogue as a congregation of Satan should not be mis-
read as anti-Semitism, since the author expresses great appreciation for true Judaism … as
a Jew …” 55.
44 Elaine Pagels

George Wesley Buchanan, The Book of Revelation: Its Introduction and Prophecy
(1993)
Rev 2:9. 3:9: “if this had been written against Jews by non Jews, the author would not have
said they were not really Jews. The author of this narrative … considered himself a Jew, as
did most Christians of the first and early second centuries … (His opponents) may have
been Paulinists or enthusiasts … but they were not non-Christian Jews.” 92.

Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (1993)

Rev 2:9, 3:9: While these phrases refer to “non-Christian Jews …. it is important to rec-
ognize this as an intra-Jewish dispute … like that between the temple establishment and
the Qumran community, who denounced their fellow Jews as an “assembly of deceit, and
a congregation of Belial” (I QH 2:22). 124.

David Aune, Revelation 1–5 (1997)

Rev 2:9: This passage refers to “Jewish-Christian hostility in Sardis,” in which “John calls
the Jews a ‘synagogue of Satan,’” specifically, “Jews opposed to Christianity.” (citing, among
many others, Adela Collins’ “Vilification,” article of 1986.) Vol. I, 162–65. Italics added.
Rev 2:26: Although Aune notes that John “uses the term Jews positively” (Vol. I, 164)
and that nearly all of the twenty three times he speaks of “the nations” are negative (Vol. I,
209), he says that here John refers to “the Christians sharing sovereignty with Christ”,
indeed, “to all the conquering Christians.” Vol. I, 209–212.
Rev 3:9: (in which John warns that Jesus will come and force members of the “synagogue
of Satan, who say they are Jews and are not, but are lying” to “bow down and grovel before
your feet so that they will know that I have loved you,” obviously alluding to Isaiah 43:4 and
Isaiah 60:14, Aune comments that, “the ironical use of this motif is clear: in all these pas-
sages the Gentiles are expected to grovel before Israel, while in Rev. 3:9 it is the Jews who are
expected to grovel before the (largely gentile) Christian community” … “There is irony in this
statement … (here) it is the Jews who will prostate themselves before Gentile Christians ….
This, therefore, concerns … the victorious Christians.” Vol. I, 237–238. Italics added.

Pierre Prigent, Commentary on the Apocalypse of St. John (2000; here cited in
translation from French, 2001)
Rev 2:9: “The most common interpretation … involves the relationship between Judaism
and Christianity in Smyrna” (Prigent cites the usual allusions to Mart. Polycarp and Igna-
tius’ letters); this refers to “the Jews … very violent reactions against the Christians.” 168.
Rev 3:9: “It is the Christians who form the true Israel by their intransigent faithfulness to
the one God.” 203. … “It is the faithful Christians who receive the inheritance of Israel … it
is they of whom the prophets spoke.” 204.

Craig Koester, Revelation and the End of All Things (2001)

Interprets Rev 2:9 and 3:9 as indicating hostility between Jews and Christians, the latter, he
says, “regarded as a sub-group within the Jewish community.” 64.

David Frankfurter, “Jews or not? Reconstructing the ‘Other’” (2001)

Rev 2:9 and 3:9: Frankfurter notes linguistic and historical difficulties involved in the
usual Christian identification with “Jews hostile to Christians” (407), and criticizes com-
 How John of Patmos’ Readers Made Him into a Christian 45
mentators like Aune, who, he says, “have struggled to de-Judaize” what John writes (411).
Frankfurter argues instead that John means what he says – that “those who call themselves
Jews but are not” were “Pauline and neo-Pauline proselytes to the Jesus movement” who
apparently, to John’s dismay, took Paul’s advice about eating sacrificial meat and sexual
practices (the only halakhic issues that mattered to them).

Paul Duff, Who Rides the Beast? Prophetic Rivalry and the Rhetoric of Crisis in the
Churches of the Apocalypse (2001)
Rev 2:9; 3:9: “… most likely this group represents non-Christian Jews of Smyrna and
Philadelphia” (citing Yarbro Collins, page 49). … “Judaism and Christianity (at least in
most places) would probably have separated by this time.” 53.
On the letter to Thyatira that “It is quite possible that ‘Jezebel’ was merely allowing
Christians to eat sacrificial meats in certain circumstances (much as Paul had done several
decades earlier)” 54. … “her reasoning may have been similar to Paul’s, and may even have
been directly based on his writings.” 58.

Lloyd Gaston, “Jewish Communities in Sardis and Smyrna” (2005)

Gaston reiterates his position, stated earlier, that “the only argument (as opposed to as-
sertion) I have seen (for the usual reading of Rev. 2:9 and 3:9) is based on passages from
Ignatius’ letters and the Martyrdom of Polycarp.” 21.

Paul Duff, “The ‘Synagogue of Satan’: Crisis Mongering and the Apocalypse of
John” (2006)
Noting that Helmut Koester, C. K. Barrett, John Gager, Lloyd Gaston, Stephen Wilson,
among others, take the phrase as referring to Gentiles (151), Duff again restates that it
refers to local synagogues, and concludes that “Ultimately, it is clear that John is trying to
set walls between the church and synagogue.” 163.
Rev 3:9: In regard to “the fate of the members of the “synagogue of Satan”: John’s allu-
sion to Isaiah 60:14 “points to what I read as a rather benevolent treatment at the eschaton.”
For this reason, among others, Duff reiterates that “the ‘synagogue of Satan’ is not to be
identified with John’s other adversaries.” 159.

Elaine Pagels, “The Social History of Satan, Part Three: John of Patmos and
Ignatius of Antioch: Contrasting Visions of ‘God’s People’” (2006)
Rev 2:9; 3:9: Pagels argues that those John denounces for “calling themselves” Jews when they
“are not” are primarily second-generation Gentile converts to Paul’s message. The article
shows that the letters of John’s close contemporary Ignatius, himself a Gentile Pauline
convert, far from elucidating John’s meaning (as the majority of scholars have assumed),
instead exemplifies the kind of teaching – and leader – that John detests. So far as we know,
Ignatius is the first to aggressively claim the name “Christian,” insist than anyone who
doesn’t use it “doesn’t belong to God,” and proclaim that “Christianity” has now super-
seded “Judaism.” Passim.

Steve Friesen, “Sarcasm in Revelation 2–3: Churches, Christians, True Jews, and
Satanic Synagogues” (2006)
Friesen here offers the important insight onto a basic problem that “we have not developed
an appropriate language” to understand what John writes, and that “the most glaring ex-
46 Elaine Pagels

ample … is the ubiquitous use of the term ‘Christian’ by modern scholars to describe John,
his text, and his congregations …. Our use of ‘Christian’ to describe Revelation is a powerful
and pervasive retrojection that warps our analysis of the first century by subtly redefining the
churches as opposed to, and superior to, Judaism.” 142.
Rev 2:9; 3:9: Here, however, Friesen agrees with “most scholars” who take these epithets
as aimed “at the mainstream Jewish communities of Smyrna and Philadelphia” (134),
arguing that what John actually says in not what he means – that instead he calls them
“Satan’s synagogue” ironically.
To make his interpretation consistent, he then follows David Aune, declaring that John
also reads Isaiah’s oracles ironically: “In (this) oracle, the irony of the Isaianic vision turns
into a double reverse. The risen Christ in Revelation promises that some Jews … would
someday come and bow down to the (mostly Gentile) congregation. This is structural irony
with a sarcastic twist.” 141. Italics added. In his article published in 2005, “Satan’s throne,
Imperial Cults, and the Social Settings of Revelation” (2005) Friesen implements these
insights, now using John’s terminology to designate Jesus’ followers as “saints,” and trans-
lating ekkelsiai as “assemblies”!

Brian Blount, Revelation: A Commentary (2009)

Rev 2:9: Since Smyrna’s Jews allied with Romans (in persecuting Christians) – see Ignatius,
and Martyrdom of Polycarp!) John says that God will “force the Jews to their knees to grovel
at the feet of Christians.” Vol. I, 54. Italics added.

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mentaries. Edited by G. Krodel. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991.
Townsend, Philippa. “Who Were the First Christians?: Jews, Gentiles and the Christianoi.”
Pages 213–30 in Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity. Edited by Eduard Iricinschi and
M. Zellentin. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008.
 What is Docetism?
T. Christopher Hoklotubbe

Docetism, as traditionally and narrowly defined,1 encapsulates the early Chris-

tian position that Christ the Savior only seemed (from the Greek verb, δοκέω)
to be human, although this was merely an illusion. In a fuller sense, Christ only
appeared to have a material body and to suffer and die, since, at his essence,
the Savior is a divine, impassible spirit. Docetism is commonly linked with
Gnosticism and often explained to derive from Platonic dualism, which held
corruptible matter to be inferior to the eternal spirit.2 But even this straight-for-
ward definition of docetism quickly proves problematic when applied to ancient
Christian texts because of the ambiguity surrounding what it meant for Jesus to
seem to be human.
The conventional definition of docetism simultaneously says too little and
too much. Too little because there are many ways that Jesus can seem to be
human that are not considered “heretical.” The very idea that Jesus only seems
human implies that despite misperceptions he is something else or more than
human – an implication precisely in line with the theological discourse of proto-
orthodoxy. According to Paul of Tarsus and Ignatius of Antioch, the world rulers
failed to recognize Jesus as the Lord of glory in his human form (1 Cor 2:7–8;
Ign. Eph. 19:1–2). The difficulty for early Christians would be how precisely to
describe the “humanity” of this seemingly human figure – a question that would
be met with an astonishing array of answers. For modern scholars, the difficulty
would be what minimum standard of humanity must a Christology fail to meet
for it to be classified as “docetic” – a standard that would shift according to the
1 For a helpful overview of the history of defining docetism, see Pamela E. Kinlaw, The Christ
is Jesus: Metamorphosis, Possession, and Johannine Christology (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical
Literature, 2005), 74–76; and Karen L. King, “Reconsidering Docetism,” in Nag Hammadi at
70: What Have We Learned? Colloque international, Québec, Université Laval, 29–31 mai 2015,
ed. Eric Crégheur et al., BCNHE 10 (Québec: Les Presses de l’ Université Laval, 2019). Most
notably, see Michael Slusser, “Docetism: A Historical Definition,” SecCent 1 (1981): 163–172;
Norbert Brox, “‘Doketismus’ – eine Problemanzeige,” ZKG 95 (1984): 301–314. Both Slusser
and Brox base their treatments of docetism upon the unpublished Heidelberg dissertation of
Peter Weigandt, Der Doketismus im Urchristentum und in der theologischen Entwicklung des
zweiten Jarhhunderts (1961).
2 Most recently, see David E. Wilhite, The Gospel According to Heretics: Discovering Ortho-
doxy through Early Christological Conflicts (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), 61–86.
However, Wilhite cautions against viewing either gnostics or docetists as “fixed” categories and
discusses the latter along a spectrum of docetic thinking.
50 T. Christopher Hoklotubbe

scholar defining it.3 On the other hand, the conventional definition assumes
too much in that the term docetism often carries with it questionable recon-
structions about the implicit theologies, ascetic practices, and motivations of the
“docetists,” who are then cast into texts like 1 John or the letters of Ignatius in the
role of their off-stage opponents – when in fact we have little certain knowledge
for any singular and systematically coherent group who described themselves as
the docetists. Is docetism ultimately a denial of the material physicality of Jesus
or of his capacity to suffer as a divine being? Or is it something else entirely?
Both early Christian literature and modern scholars seem to have mischar-
acterized a range of early Christian texts, figures, and views about Christ’s per-
ceived embodiment as docetic. On the one hand, the category of docetism seems
to be evidenced in texts like 2 John 4:2, which warns readers about the many
“deceivers … who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” On
the other hand, the coherency of this category becomes problematic when actual
“doketai” are identified in the anonymous Refutation of All Heresies (ca. 225),4
wherein they are distinguished for driveling on about how the higher realms
are comprised of thirty aeons, with each aeon corresponding to a different form
of human soul (Haer. 8.3–11). Surprisingly, these doketai affirm that the Savior
“robed himself with [Mary’s] offspring and did everything as recorded in the
Gospels,” including dying on the cross (Haer. 8.7).5 Furthermore, the discovery
of the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945 was a watershed moment for re-evaluating
what scholars thought they knew about docetists. In 1977 when the study of
this literature was still in its relative infancy, Karl Tröger astutely observed that
docetism, in its narrowest definition, is rarely if ever actually found within these
writings.6 Tröger’s findings continue to be validated despite the scholastic cliché
to describe gnostic Christology as docetic.7
In order to accommodate the diversity of texts that are described as docetic,
scholars have produced typologies of docetism that have preserved the overarch-
ing category and differentiate between ways Christ only seemed to be human:
1) Phantasmal docetism, in which Christ only appeared to have flesh, but only
ever existed as a spirit.
2) Possessionistic or separationist docetism, in which the spirit of Christ only pos-
sessed or inhabited a human body which the spirit left before Jesus’ death.

3See Slusser, “Docetism,” 163–165.

4On the anonymous authorship and dating of Refutation see M. David Litwa, Refutation of
all Heresies, WGRW 40 (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2016), xxxii–xlii.
5 Translation from Litwa, Refutation, 593.
6 Karl Wolfgang Tröger, “Doketische Christologie in Nag-Hammadi-Texten. Ein Beitrag
zum Doketismus in frühchristlicher Zeit,” Kairos 19 (1977): 45–52, esp. 47.
7 See Jean-Daniel Dubois, “Le Docétisme des christologies gnostiques revisté,” NTS 63
(2017): 279–304. See also Karen L. King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2003), 208–213.
 What is Docetism? 51

3) Replacement docetism, in which Simon of Cyrene was crucified in Jesus’ place.8

However, these taxonomies are problematic and obfuscate more than they
clarify the theological concerns and aims of ancient Christian writings. It has
been suggested that since docetism is not characteristic of any clearly definable
group it should be considered a “generic” and “elastic term covering degrees of
existence”9 or an “attitude”10 or tendency found among some early Christians
and their texts. If docetism has proven itself difficult to define and its adherents
challenging to locate, it is because docetism, just as Karen L. King has argued
about the term Gnosticism, is “a rhetorical term [that] has been confused with a
historical entity.”11 What new possibilities and readings might emerge if we were
to set aside our modern category of docetism for reconstructing the meaning
and stakes of ancient Christian teaching and polemics?
As an early-career professor teaching courses on the New Testament and
Early Christianity, I am concerned about the usefulness of docetism as a concept
for introducing and classifying ideas and texts to undergraduates. I worry that
when students are presented with the concept of docetism, however nuanced a
taxonomy an introductory text may present them, what they take away is that
docetism teaches that Jesus only seemed to have a body and suffer. And so, when
presented with “docetic” texts, they are often puzzled by their discovery of the
persistence of Jesus’ body and passion in some form. I argue that both scholars
and students would benefit from setting aside the classification of docetism when
introducing the subject of early Christianity, in favor of gathering texts together
around more productive classifications and more dynamic questions about the
representation of Jesus’ body in early Christian literature and the myriad of inter-
secting philosophical assumptions, interpretation of scripture, ethical-pastoral
concerns, and social dynamics possibly at play in such texts.
This essay brings together a selection of Christian texts and reconstructions
of heretical figures whose classifications as docetic or docetists should be inter-
preted for the polemical illusions they are – perpetuated by ancient heresiologists
and modern scholars alike. Even when the classification seems applicable, I aim
to demonstrate that there are other categories (e. g., possessionist Christology,
angelomorphology, polymorphy) that more precisely characterize the Chris-
tology of these texts and connect them with broader cultural conversations of
their day. I will also suggest more productive methods of reading and discussing

8 Wilhite, Gospel According to the Heretics, 78.

9 Allen Brent, “Can There Be Degrees of Docetism?” in Docetism in the Early Church: The
Quest for an Elusive Phenomenon, ed. Joseph Verheyden et al., WUNT 42 (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2018), 22.
10 Guy G. Stroumsa, “Christ’s Laughter: Docetic Origins Reconsidered,” JECS 12 (2004):
269.
11 King, What is Gnosticism?, 1.
52 T. Christopher Hoklotubbe

early Christian literature inspired by Karen L. King’s scholarship and teaching

that I hope will enrich our field’s knowledge and pedagogy alike.

The Illusory Opponents of the Epistles of John and Ignatius

The Opponents of 1 & 2 John

In introductions to the New Testament and early Christianity, it is common for

students to first encounter “docetists” in learning about the opponents of the
Johannine Epistles.12 Both 1 and 2 John seek to warn their audiences about
certain “antichrists” (1 John 2:18) and “liars” (1 John 2:22), who have separated
themselves from other Johannine Christians (1 John 2:19), deny “Jesus is the
Christ” (1 John 2:22), and do not confess Jesus “as the Christ come in the flesh”
(1 John 4:2; 2 John 7). While there seems to be no consensus among Johannine
scholars as to the precise identity of these secessionists, there are reasonable
reconstructions of these opponents that do not rely on the problematic clas-
sification of docetism.13 For example, it is possible that the opponents had con-
cluded from their reading of the Gospel of John that the humanity of Jesus had
no significant relevance to either Jesus’ mission as “the Christ” or the salvation
he offers.14 1 John’s insistent link of the death of Jesus with the atonement, taking
away, and cleansing of sins (1 John 1:7, 9; 2:2; 3:5; 4:10) can be interpreted to
indicate that the secessionists denied the relevancy of Jesus’ death for salvation.
While these secessionists may have emphasized the divinity of Jesus exclusively,
they make no claim that Jesus only “appeared” to be human. Another possibility
includes reading the central issue at stake in the theology of the opponents as
the denial that Jesus “is the Christ” not that Jesus has “come in the flesh.” The
confessional statement “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” (1 John 4:2), which
is not present in the second iteration of this confession in 1 John 4:3, is not nec-
essarily polemical but rather reflects an early, relatively well-known summary
of the faith and mirrors numerous early Christian confessions that described
the advent of the Messiah (e. g., Rom 1:3–4).15 Another take on the opponents

12 For example, see Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the
Early Christian Writings, 6th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 201–204.
13 Some exemplary studies include, Kinlaw, Christ is Jesus; Urban C. von Wahlde, Gnos-
ticism, Docetism, and the Judaisms of the First Century, LNTS 157 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015);
Maarten J. J. Menken, “The Secessionists of the Johannine Epistles and Docetism,” in Docetism
in the Early Church, 125–141.
14 Menken, “The Secessionists,” 125–141.
15 So Daniel R. Streett, They Went Out from Us: The Identity of the Opponents in First John,
BZNW 177 (Göttingen: de Gruyter, 2011), 173–255. According to Streett, “come in the flesh”
in 1 John 4:2 is roughly equivalent to confessional statements like John 6:14: “This is indeed the
prophet who is come into the world” (p. 250).
 What is Docetism? 53

agrees with the last approach that the controversy of the Johannine epistles con-
cerns less the “flesh” (σάρξ) of Christ, but whether or not the Savior is com-
pletely identifiable with the human Jesus. In this reading, the opponents held a
possessionistic Christology that understood the divine savior to have possessed
the human Jesus at his baptism and departed from him during the crucifixion,
a view analogous to other ancient Mediterranean concepts of gods temporarily
possessing humans.16 Each of these three positions still maintain that Jesus had
flesh and suffered, aspects often lost or misinterpreted under a docetic label.

The Opponents of Ignatius of Antioch

Docetists are further introduced to students through references to the letters of

Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch. Of his “docetic” opponents, Ignatius writes:
… not, as certain unbelievers say, that he suffered in appearance (τὸ δοκεῖν) only. Indeed,
their fate will be determined by what they think: they will become disembodied and
demonic. (Ign. Smyrn. 2)
But if, as some people atheists (that is unbelievers) say, he suffered in appearance only (τὸ
δοκεῖν πεπονθέναι αὐτόν) (while they exist in appearance only [τὸ δοκεῖν]!), why am I in
chains? (Ign. Trall. 10)17

While it is clear that Ignatius’ opponents believe that Christ only suffered in
appearance, it remains unclear what this entailed.18 Although Ignatius calls his
opponents “disembodied” and accuses them of not confessing that Christ bore
flesh (σαρκοφόρος) in his resurrected state (Ign. Smyrn. 5), to classify the oppo-
nents as “phantasmal docetists” assumes too much about what these opponents
held about Jesus’ body during his earthly ministry. Given that in the passages
quoted above Ignatius’ opponents question the reality of Christ’s suffering and
death, not his incarnation (see also Ign. Magn. 9), and that Ignatius emphasizes
his own suffering (see also Ign. Smyrn. 4), the critical issue at hand for Ignatius
is not that Jesus was truly incarnated so much as that he truly suffered.19 Did
the opponents hold a possessionist Christology, which confessed that the Spirit
only temporarily possessed the human Christ at his baptism and left before
the Passion?20 Or did they believe that the divine element of Christ did not
suffer because it was inherently impassible, only his fleshly nature suffered?21

16 So Kinlaw, Christ is Jesus, 69–108.

17 Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic,
2007), 221, 251.
18 For a detailed overview of options, see Alistair C. Stewart, “Ignatius’ ‘Docetists’: A Survey
of Opinions and Some Modest Suggestions,” in Docetism in the Early Church, 143–173.
19 Michael Goulder, “Ignatius’ ‘Docetists,’” VC 53 (1999): 16–30, esp. 27–28.
20 Goulder, “Ignatius’ ‘Docetists,’” 25.
21 Georg Strecker, The Johannine Letters, trans. Linda M. Mahoney, Hermeneia (Minneap-
olis: Fortress, 1996), 72.
54 T. Christopher Hoklotubbe

Or perhaps they believed that Christ possessed a body like an angel that was
incapable of suffering?22 All of these options can be intelligibly conceptualized
and discussed without resorting to conventional notions of docetism. While
Ignatius’ opponents likely deployed τὸ δοκεῖν to rhetorically reconcile their dis-
tinct Christological theory with traditional accounts of Jesus’ suffering on the
cross,23 however, its mere presence is not a reliable predictor of any particular
systematic doctrine or identifiable sociological group. The suspect nature of the
classification of “docetists” to characterize the opponents of Ignatius becomes all
the more apparent when one recognizes how many early Christian teachers and
texts have been mischaracterized as docetic.

The Putative Docetists

Beyond the shadowy opponents of the epistles of John and Ignatius, many of the
heretics of the second century have been accused of peddling docetism. Teachers
and texts including Basilides, Marcion, Valentinus, the Gospel of Peter, and Julius
Cassian are commonly identified as perpetrators of various types of docetism.
Indeed, it is in reference to the Gospel of Peter and Julius Cassian that our earliest
occurrences of the terms “docetists” and “docetism” appear. However, a close
investigation of the ancient sources and a healthy suspicion of the heresiologists
will demonstrate that it is not clear what these ancient terms signified and that
the modern application of these terms are ill-suited to signal the complexity and
variety of these ancient Christian Christologies.

Basilides’ Replacement Docetism

The Christology of Basilides has become the locus classicus for “replacement
docetism,” which holds that Christ did not really die on the cross but someone
else. Basilides was a prolific exegete of Scripture who taught in Alexandria in
the first half of the second century CE and is primarily known to us through the
contrasting descriptions of Irenaeus of Lyons, the anonymous Refutation of all
Heresies, and fragments preserved by Clement of Alexandria. Irenaeus states that
Basilides taught that Christ was the first begotten Mind of the ungenerated and
unnamable Father who:

22 John W. Marshall, “The Objects of Ignatius’ Wrath and Jewish Angelic Mediators,” JEH
56 (2005): 1–23; Ulrich B. Müller, “Zwischen Johannes und Ignatius: Theologischer Widerstreit
in den Gemeinden der Asia,” ZNW 98 (2007): 49–67.
23 Perhaps analogous to way in which Euripides deploys the word-groups δόκησις, δοκέω
to describe how others misperceived Helen’s image (εἴδωλον) for her real self; so argued by
Ronnie Goldstein and Guy G. Stroumsa, “The Greek and Jewish Origins of Docetism: A New
Proposal,” ZAC 10 (2007): 435–436.
 What is Docetism? 55
… appeared on earth as a man to the peoples of the archons and worked miracles. Con-
sequently he did not suffer, but a certain Simon of Cyrene was impressed into service and
carried his cross for him, and he was crucified by ignorance and error, transfigured by
him so that he was supposed to be Jesus. As for Jesus himself, he assumed the appearance
of Simon and stood by to deride the archons. Since he was an incorporeal power and the
Mind of the ungenerated Father, he transfigured himself as he wished, and it was thus that
he ascended to him who sent him, deriding them because he could not be held and was
invisible to all. (Haer. 1.24.4)24

The Refutation 7.27.8–11 contradicts Irenaeus’s portrayal, noting after a long

survey of Basilides’ Aristotelian-influenced cosmology that:
After [Jesus] was born … all the events of the Savior’s life occurred, in their view, wholly
as is written in the Gospels. These things occurred, he says, so that Jesus might become
the first fruits of the differentiation from the confused mixture of elements … Thus his
bodily (σωματικὸν) part, which belonged to chaos, suffered and was restored to chaos.
He resurrected his animate (ψυχικὸν) part, which belonged to the Hebdomad, and it was
restored to the Hebdomad. He resurrected what belonged to the height, which was akin
to the great Ruler; and it remained by the great Ruler. He brought to the highest reaches
what belonged to the boundary of the Spirit (πνεύματος), and it remained in the boundary
Spirit. Through Jesus, the third Sonship, who was left behind to give and receive benefits,
was purified and rose to the blessed Sonship, traversing all these regions.25

According to the Refutation, Jesus’ suffering was necessary for differentiating the
blended mixture of the higher and lower elements within him like a centrifuge.
It is unclear whether either of these contrasting portraits actually describes
Basilides’ Christology or rather reflects the Christology of those identifying
with his exegetical legacy.26 However, since Clement of Alexandria affirms that
Basilides taught that Jesus, at least the human aspect of him, suffered (see Strom.
4. 12. 82–83),27 more credence should be given to the latter Refutation’s ac-
count.28 The discrepancy between Irenaeus and both Refutation and Clement

24 Robert M. Grant, trans., Irenaeus of Lyons (London: Routledge, 1997), 69.

25 Litwa, Refutation, 535.
26 See esp. Winrich Löhr, Basilides und seine Schule: Eine Studie zur Theologie- und Kirchen-
geschichte des zweiten Jahrhunderts, WUNT 83 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), 255–323, who
argues that these traditions reflect Basilides’ students and not the theologian himself.
27 According to Clement, when pressed about whether Jesus suffered because he was
human and inherently sinful due to his flesh, Basilides responds: “the man you name is a man,
but God is righteous” (ἄνθρωπον ὅντιν' ἂν ὀνομάσῃς ἄνθρωπον εἶναι, δίκαιον δὲ τὸν θεόν;
Strom. 4. 12. 83). This passage implies that Basilides thought that Jesus, in so far as he was divine
or possessed a divine element within, did not suffer, but whatever was human did. Furthermore,
Basilides argues that Jesus “suffered like a child” (ὅμοιος δὲ ἦν τῷ πάσχοντι νηπίῳ) (Strom.
4. 12. 82), who though has yet to commit a sin, suffers because s/he possesses sinful flesh and so
that s/he might benefit from these difficulties. See Birger A. Pearson, “Basilides the Gnostic” in
A Companion to Second-Century Christian ‘Heretics,’ ed. Antti Marjanen and Petri Luomanen
(Leiden: Brill, 2008), 26.
28 Cf. Bentley Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1987), 418,
who argues that Irenaeus’ account accurately reflects Basilides himself and does not contra-
56 T. Christopher Hoklotubbe

may be explained, in part, by the suggestion that Irenaeus has misread his Basil-
idean source. Accounts similar to Irenaeus’ putative Basilidean account include
the Second Discourse of the Great Seth and the Coptic Revelation of Peter, both
of which may be roughly contemporary to Irenaeus and shed light on Irenaeus’
error.
The Second Discourse of the Great Seth sets out to correct misconceptions
about the human embodiment of the divine Savior. The Savior is described as
having descended upon a “bodily dwelling” and as casting out either the soul or
mind that previously occupied the earthly body of Jesus of Nazareth (Disc. Seth
51.20–24). In no uncertain terms the spiritual Christ “from above the heavens”
is distinguished from “the regions below,” to which it is a “stranger” (Dis. Seth
52:1–10). The Savior narrating the revelation explains the event of the crucifixion
in the following way:
Those who were there punished me. And I did not die in reality but in appearance, lest I be
put to shame by them because these are my kinsfolk. I removed the shame from me and
I did not become fainthearted in the face of what happened to me at their hands … For
my death which they think happened, (happened) to them in their error and blindness,
since they nailed their man unto their death. For their Ennoias did not see me for they
were deaf and blind. But in doing these things they condemn themselves. Yes, they saw
me; they punished me. It was another (ⲛⲉⲕⲉⲟⲩⲁ), their father, who drank the gall and
the vinegar; it was not I. They struck me with the reed; it was another (ⲛⲉⲕⲉⲟⲩⲁ), Simon,
who bore the cross on his shoulder. It was another (ⲛⲉⲕⲉⲟⲩⲁ) upon whom they placed the
crown of thorns. But I was rejoicing in the height over all the wealth of the archons and the
offspring of their error, of their empty glory. And I was laughing at their ignorance. (Disc.
Seth 55.16–24; 55.30–56.19)29

The Second Discourse of the Great Seth plays with the Savior’s identity both
associating himself with the brutalized human body (i. e., “they punished me,”
“they struck me”) and disassociating himself (i. e., “I did not die in reality,” “it
was another”). The Savior variously identifies the one who undergoes the Pas-
sion as “me” and then three others described as “another one” (ⲕⲉⲟⲩⲁ), including
“their father,” “Simon,” and a third unidentified “another.” This text has often
been read as describing Simon as replacing Jesus as the one who was crucified
and so conflates the final two “another one’s.”30 However, it is preferable to dis-
tinguish the ambiguous and final “another one” from Simon and even to inter-
pret it as the “bodily dwelling” of Jesus who bore the crown of thorns. Nowhere
does this text explicitly state that Simon was crucified in Jesus’ place. Rather it

dict the authentic fragments of Basilides preserved in Clement of Alexandria. See also Pearson,
“Basilides,” 1–31, notably 2–8 on sources.
29 “The Second Treatise of the Great Seth (VII, 2),” trans. Joseph A. Gibbons and Roger
A. Bullard (NHL, 362).
30 See Joseph A. Gibbons in his introduction to the Second Treatise of the Great Seth in
Robinson (NHL, 362).
 What is Docetism? 57

repurposes the Synoptic account of Simon of Cyrene being compelled to carry

Jesus’ cross (Mark 15:21; Matt 27:32; Luke 23:26) in its overall playful discourse
of the multiple and mistaken identities on stage during the Passion.31 I suspect
that had we not possessed Irenaeus’ account of Basilides’ Christology, the Second
Discourse of the Great Seth would be interpreted quite differently.
The Coptic Revelation of Peter, which follows after the Second Discourse of
the Great Seth in Nag Hammadi codex VII, also distinguishes the spiritual Savior
from the body that is crucified on the cross. In the Revelation of Peter, Peter is
confused and distressed by a vision of the coming capture and crucifixion of
Jesus. Peter simultaneously perceives three Jesus’: a crucified Jesus, a Jesus “glad
and laughing upon the tree,” and then a luminous one resembling the Living
Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit. The Savior explains:
Be strong, because you are the one to whom these mysteries are given to know them
openly, that the one who was nailed is the firstborn and the house of the demons; and the
vessel of stone in which they live – of Elohim, of the cross, which is under the law. But he
who stands near him is the living Savior, he who was in him before, (in) the one who was
seized and he was released, while he is standing gladly because he sees that those who
have treated him violently, are divided among themselves. Therefore, he laughs about their
inability to see. For he knows that they are born blind. So, the one who suffers shall stay
(behind) because the body is the substitute. The one who is released is my incorporeal
body. I <am> the intellectual Spirit which is filled with radiant light. The one you saw
coming towards me is our intellectual Pleroma who unites the perfect light with my holy
Spirit. (Apoc. Peter 82:18–83:15)32

The Revelation of Peter presents a threefold representation of Jesus Christ: 1) a

body susceptible to suffering and described as the “substitute”; 2) an incorporeal
body that is the laughing and living Jesus who is released through the crucifixion;
and 3) the intellectual Spirit filled with radiant light. This depiction reflects the
tripartite division of reality between matter, soul, and spirit/mind.33 Similar to
Irenaeus’ account of Basilides’ teaching, Christ is simultaneously an “incorporeal
body” and intellect/mind. However, it is important to note how this passage can
describe the body as a “substitute,”34 but has no “replacement” theory in view.
The punished and crucified body remains the body of Jesus of Nazareth and the

31 See also Marvin Meyer, ed., The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (New York: HarperOne, 2007),
474–475.
32 Henriette W. Havelaar, The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter (Nag-Hammadi-Codex VII,3),
TUGAL 144 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag GmbH, 1999), 49–51, with modifications.
33 See Gerard P. Pluttikhuizen, Gnostic Revisions of Genesis Stories and Early Jesus Traditions
(Leiden: Brill, 2006), 135; Winrich Löhr, “A Variety of Docetisms: Valentinus, Basilides, and
Their Disciples,” in Docetism in the Early Church, 250.
34 On the likely Greek and Jewish intellectual background that influenced this concept
“substitute,” in particular the Greek poetic device of εἴδωλον (“the image” or “phantom” of
a deceased or ethereal “double” of a living person), see Goldstein and Stroumsa, “Greek and
Jewish Origins of Docetism,” 423–441.
58 T. Christopher Hoklotubbe

crucifixion remains significant as it brings about the condemnation of the foolish

archons and those under their dominion.35
It is impossible to know for certain whether the Second Discourse of the
Great Seth or the Revelation of Peter accurately reflect the treatise that ultimately
underlies Irenaeus’ own unidentified source for Basilides’ Christology. Insofar as
they distinguish the human element from the divine with regard to explaining
Jesus’ suffering, they may in fact be in line with Basilides’ position that the
human part of Jesus suffered (Clement, Strom. 4. 18. 83). In typical presentations
of Basilides’ docetic Christology, scholars begin with Irenaeus and then move
along to the Second Discourse of the Great Seth and the Revelation of Peter to
discuss the development or variants of Basilidean Christology. But if we take
seriously the combined testimonies of the Second Discourse of the Great Seth
and the Revelation of Peter it seems quite likely that Irenaeus or his source has
misinterpreted Basilides’ Christology. I suspect that Irenaeus, who sought to un-
cover the ridiculousness of heretical claims, was more than delighted to (mis)
read and criticize the absurdity of the belief that Jesus had been substituted with
Simon on the cross. If this is so, then the very category of “replacement” docetism
is problematic. Moreover, it should be noted how unhelpful it is to describe any
of these Basilidean-like Christologies as docetic in so far as each affirms that
Jesus possessed a physical body capable of suffering.

Marcion’s Phantasmal Docetism

Marcion’s Christology has often been labeled “docetic” because he excised the
birth narratives from his Gospel and taught that Jesus had a psychic, not fleshly
body. However, classifying Marcion as docetic risks misreading Marcion’s Jesus
as merely an intangible phantom incapable of suffering. One could be forgiven
for interpreting Marcion as a textbook example of “phantasmal docetism” since
Tertullian describes Marcion as promoting a “phantom” (phantasma) Jesus with
“putative flesh” (putativa caro) in Against Marcion 3.8–9. The Refutation of All
Heresies 10.19.3 also simplifies Marcion’s Christology: “He calls him ‘the inner
human,’ claiming that he appeared as a human but was not human, that he
appeared as enfleshed (ἔνσαρκον) but was not enfleshed – that he manifested
himself in appearance (δοκήσει), enduring both birth and his suffering only in
appearance (δοκεῖν).”36 However, Marcion held that “Christ did truly suffer” – a
position that certainly confounded Tertullian (Tertullian, Marc. 3.11.8) and con-
ventional notions of docetism.
Marcion’s proposal that Jesus possessed a “psychic” and not “fleshy” body
likely follows from his conclusion that Jesus’ body comprised an angelic body.

35 See King, “Reconsidering Docetism.”

36 Litwa, Refutation, 729.
 What is Docetism? 59

For Marcion and his followers, particularly Apelles (Tertullian, Carn. Chr.
6.9–11), the appearance of the Lord as “three men” (Gen 18:2) who ate with
Abraham was paradigmatic for understanding how Jesus like the angels could
partake in meals, even in his post-resurrection state (Luke 24:42–43),37 and per-
form other tangible signs of enfleshment while maintaining the integrity of his
psychic corporeality (Tertullian, Against Marcion, 3.9). Furthermore, like the
angels, Jesus could appear in a tangible state and disappear at will as evidenced
in Luke’s post-resurrection accounts (Luke 24:13–53). Marcion’s conclusion that
Jesus possessed a “psychic” angelic body is made more intelligible within the
scope of broader Platonic speculations of the angelic bodies within both ancient
Jewish and Christian writings.38 For example, Philo of Alexandria writes that
when God and two heavenly powers visited and ate with Abraham and Sarah, the
Lord produced the φαντασία or “appearance” of their figures to Abraham and
Sarah (Sacr. 59). For Marcion then, Jesus possessed a tangible body that could
suffer, though comprised of a different kind of substance. This nuance can be lost
or left unexplained under the label “docetic.”39

Psychic Flesh and Valentinian Docetism

The Christologies of Valentinus and disciples of his teaching have also been con-
sidered to exhibit traits of docetism. However, here too such classifications seem
inappropriate and contribute little to understanding these texts. Not much can
be said with certainty about Valentinus, who taught in Alexandria and Rome in
the first half of the second century, given that what we know about him is frag-
mentary, coming to us in theological texts that may be more representative of
his followers than his own and from the polemics of heresiologists. Referencing
Valentinus’ Letter to Agathopus, Clement of Alexandria records Valentinus as
teaching that “[t]he power of [Jesus’] self-control was so great, that the nourish-
ment in him was not corrupted because he did not have the corrupting” – in this
way Jesus “practiced his divinity” (Strom. 3.59.3). The fact that neither Clement of
Alexandria nor (Pseudo-) Basilius who quote this fragment criticize Valentinus’

37 Cf. Antonio Orbe, “El Hijo del hombre come y bebe (Mt 11,19, Lc7,34),” Greg 58 (1977):
523–555, esp. 524–533, who argues that Marcion’s Gospel may not have included Luke 24:42–43.
38 See esp. M. David Litwa, We are Being Transformed: Deification in Paul’s Soteriology,
BZNW 187 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), 139–51; Kinlaw, Christ is Jesus, 29–39; Matthew Thiessen,
Paul and the Gentile Problem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 129–169; David
A. Burnett, “‘So Shall Your Seed Be’: Paul’s Use of Genesis 15:5 in Romans 4:18 in Light of Early
Jewish Deification Traditions,” JSPL 5 (2015): 211–236.
39 So also Judith M. Lieu, Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the
Second Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 378: “To describe Marcion’s
views as ‘docetic’ on [the basis of Refutation] is unhelpful, especially if it suggests his allegiance
to an existing coherent doctrine about the nature of Christ’s body or about his mode of presence
in the human sphere.”
60 T. Christopher Hoklotubbe

position is perhaps telling that the idea that Jesus could eat without excreting
his food did not imply he was any less human than others or possessed anything
but a fleshly body.40 In resonance with this position, Clement himself will argue
that Jesus was “sustained by a holy energy” (δυνάμει συνεχόμενον ἁγίᾳ) and
so did not need to eat, but only did so that others might not suppose that he
had appeared in an illusory state (δοκήσει) (Strom. 6.71.2). It may even be that
Valentinus conceptualized Jesus as possessing a level of self-mastery that was on
par with legendary ancient philosophers, including Pythagoras and Epimenides,
who too were able to regulate their bodies such that they needed only enough
food to live.41 However, such a reading contrasts against Tertullian’s remark that
Valentinus taught that Christ was of a “psychic” (animalis; Carn. Chr. 10.1) or
“spiritual” (spiritalis; Carn. Chr. 15.1) substance since the Lord could not have
a flesh of lesser quality than the angels or one that experiences corruption. It is
unclear whether Tertullian’s remarks reflect that of his encounter with “one of
Valentinus’ faction” or Valentinus’ own teaching (Carn. Chr. 15).42
Turning to Valentinus’ followers, we find a diversity of positions concerning
the nature of Jesus’ body, such that it may be possible to speak about two tradi-
tions of thoughts distinct to the Eastern and Western followers of Valentinus.43
Irenaeus presents one such position that has been associated with the Western
tradition:
For, they say, he assumed the first fruits of what he was going to save: from Achamoth,
the spiritual; from the Demiurge he was clothed with the psychic Christ; finally, from
the divine plan he was surrounded by a body possessing psychic substance but prepared
with ineffable skill to be visible, tangible, and capable of suffering. He received nothing
material, for the material is not capable of being saved. (Haer. 1.6.1)44

Here we clearly see the “spiritual” Christ that Tertullian attributes to Valentinus.
What is surprising about this depiction is that even though Christ’s body is com-
prised of “psychic substance,” it remains capable of suffering. A similar sentiment
is found in Irenaeus’ description of another faction of Valentinians who held that
while the spirit of Christ and the spiritual seed of the Mother inherently cannot
suffer, the psychic Christ clothed with the body from the oikonomia suffered as a
symbolic reference to direct people’s attention to the Christ above (Haer. 1.7.2).
Irenaeus will later denounce Valentinians for being vain for alleging that Christ
40Löhr, “Variety of Docetisms,” 234.
41See Löhr, “Variety of Docetisms,” 234.
42 See Einar Thomassen, The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the Valentinians (Leiden: Brill,
2006), 41.
43 According to Thomassen, both “schools” (or churches) believed that Jesus’ body was
composed of both psychic and spiritual parts, but they differed as to “when the psychic and the
spiritual were joined: according to the [eastern] theory the spiritual joined with the psychic only
at Jesus’ baptism, whereas the second lets the spiritual and the psychic come together already in
Mary’s womb” (Spiritual Seed, 45).
44 Grant, Irenaeus, 48.
 What is Docetism? 61

only appeared in a purely illusory (putative) manner (Haer 5.1.2). Here Irenaeus
gets as close as he does anywhere else to describing Valentinians as docetists;
however, he never uses the term and may not have known it. We would be wise
to recognize here the polemical edge of Irenaeus’ charge of illusion against
Valentinian Christologies, as it is more incendiary than illuminating for under-
standing their varied and nuanced positions. This variance is exemplified in
such Valentinian texts like the Tripartite Tractate, which describes the Savior as
being equipped with the instruments necessary for revealing salvation, namely
a body and soul (Tri. Trac. 114:16–115:11),45 and the Treatise on Resurrection
and the Interpretation of Knowledge which both affirm that the Savior became
flesh (Treat. Res. 44:14–15; Interp. Know. 10:27–34) and suffered (Treat. Res.
45:25–28; Interp. Know. 5:30–38).46 Again, no docetists here.

The Gospel of Peter and “the Docetists”

The earliest known occurrence of the term “docetists” (δοκεταί) may not in
fact aptly describe the theological tendencies of the text the group is associated
with – at least within the scope of our conventional understanding of the term.
The docetists are first explicitly recognized by Serapion, the bishop of Anti-
och (190–210 CE), who sought to dissuade the church of Rhossus, Syria from
reading the Gospel of Peter, as it contained doctrine associated with the docetist
school of thought (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.12.6). What we know about Serapion
comes down to us in Eusebius’ Church History and it is unfortunate that Eusebius
did not preserve Serapion’s explanation of the docetic elements of the Gospel
of Peter. If we assume that our present extant fragments are relatively identical
to that encountered by Serapion,47 then we have reason to doubt whether the
Gospel of Peter is properly associated with docetism.
The clearest docetic element within what is still preserved of the Gospel of
Peter is its description of Jesus remaining silent while being crucified between the
two thieves, “as if he felt no pain” (ὡς μηδένα πόνον ἔχων; Gos. Pet. 10). While
the ὡς could be translated as signifying a causal relationship (i. e., “Jesus was
silent, since he felt no pain”), the phrase is best rendered “as if he felt no pain.”48
This reading not only coheres with the text’s broader portrayal of Jesus’ death
and implied suffering (Gos. Pet. 13),49 but also the widespread second-century
trope of depicting martyrs as facing their deaths in courageous and stoic silence,
as if they were not even experiencing any pain at all. For example, Polycarp is

45See Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 46–58.

46See Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 83–89.
47 Cf. Brent, “Degrees of Docetism,” 19.
48 So also Paul Foster, The Gospel of Peter: Introduction, Critical Edition and Commentary,
TENT 4 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 161.
49 Jerry W. McCant, “The Gospel of Peter: Docetism Reconsidered,” NTS 30 (1984): 261.
62 T. Christopher Hoklotubbe

described as bruising his shin, but making his way to trial “as if nothing had
happened to him” (ὡς οὐδεν πεπονθώς; Mart. Pol. 8) and Blandina, when tossed
by a bull, had “no more feeling for what had happened to her” (μηδὲ αἴσθησιν ἔτι
τῶν συμβαινόντων ἔχουσα; Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5. 1. 56).50 The Gospel of Peter
has also been classified as “docetic” for its unique account of Jesus’ final words
on the cross, “My power (δύναμις), my power, you have forsaken me” (Gos. Pet.
19), which seems to signify the divine power departing from the crucified Jesus.
However, the text here may simply be offering a common Jewish circumlocution
for God (“Power”), which can be observed in Mark 14:62/Matt 24:26, Pseudo-
Philo, the Prayer of Manasseh, Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, and Irenaeus’
Against Heresies.51 And finally, the Gospel of Peter’s resurrection scene which
depicts Jesus’ head transcending the heaven as he ascends from the tomb with his
angelic escort (Gos. Pet. 40) does not depreciate the reality of his physical body
any more than the miraculous and sudden appearances and disappearances of
the supra-human resurrected body depicted in the canonical gospels. It also may
symbolize his status as superior to that of the angels whose heads only reach
the heavens (Gos. Pet. 40) and emphasize his transcendent glory.52 While some
doketai read the Gospel of Peter, it is not clear what exactly about this text qual-
ified it as “docetic” according our understanding of the term, let alone what
Serapion ultimately imagined to constitute the teaching of the doketai. The clas-
sification of the Gospel of Peter as docetic is not entirely useful for us either as a
descriptor of the Gospel of Peter’s Christology or as a sociological designation of
a group that can be clearly understood beyond the polemical rhetoric.

Julius Cassian and “Docetism”

Julius Cassian, an Encratite who flourished in Egypt around 160–180 CE, was
singled out by Clement of Alexandria for his “docetic” views that marriage is
fornication and birth is evil. Clement writes in Miscellanies 3. 17. 102:
If birth is an evil, then the blasphemers must place the Lord who went through birth and
the virgin who gave him birth in the category of evil. Abominable people! In attacking
birth they are maligning the will of God and the mystery of creation. This is the basis of
Cassian’s docetism (δόκησις), and Marcion’s too, yes, and Valentinus’ psychic body (τὸ
σῶμα τὸ ψυχικόν).53

Cassian is a strange case because Clement also describes him as “ὁ τῆς δοκήσεως
ἐξάρχων” (Strom. 3. 13. 91) which can be translated as “the originator” or

50
Peter M. Head, “On the Christology of the Gospel of Peter,” VC 46 (1992): 212–213.
51
For a detailed list of references, see Head, “Christology of the Gospel of Peter,” 222n36–39.
52 Head, “Christology of the Gospel of Peter,” 217.
53 Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis Books One to Three, trans. John Ferguson, vol. 85 FC
(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1991), with slight modifications.
 What is Docetism? 63

“chief leader” of “docetism” or “deceit.” Clement never discusses what Cassian

taught about the nature of Jesus’ body or whether Jesus suffered, but critiques
his encratitic positions on continence and celibacy. Translating δόκησις as
“docetism” assumes that this term held some technical meaning rather than its
more natural renderings of “opinion, deceit, appearance” (e. g., Strom. 6. 17. 150
for “opinion”). Is it possible that translators have wrongly translated δόκησις
as “docetism” rather than “opinion” or “deceit”? If ἐξάρχων is to be understood
as “originator” (cp. Strom. 7. 16. 99) then it would be intelligible for Cassian to
be the author of his own deceit of encratitism, but certainly not the founder
of “docetism” since he is preceded by Marcion and Valentinus. Rather than
teaching us about docetism then, Clement would be simply saying that Cassian’s
erroneous views about “the will of God and the mystery of creation” stands as the
foundational error of the fanciful opinions of Cassian and Marcion and what led
Valentinus to imagine Christ’s “psychic body.” This reading however must make
sense of Jerome’s description of Cassian in his commentary on Galatians 6:8
(ca. 386 CE), which is the only other extant account of this teacher: “Cassianus,
the most astute heresiarch among the Encratites, maintained that Christ’s flesh
was imaginary (putativam Christi carnem) and considered that every [sexual]
union between man and woman is foul.”54 Did Jerome know something about
Cassian’s view of Christ’s flesh that Clement either did not know or share or
has Jerome introduced the idea that Cassian thought that Christ’s flesh was
imaginary as an inference of what would seem to underlie someone’s denial of
the goodness of the flesh? Whatever we make of this case,55 it would be prudent
not to overdetermine Cassian’s Christology based on his views on marriage and
creation.56 While Clement certainly knew about the dogma of the “docetists” (ἡ
τῶν Δοκητῶν; Strom. 7. 17. 108), he does not describe their specific beliefs and so
we cannot be certain of the doctrine it entailed.

Summary

It has been the aim of this brief survey of teachers and texts to demonstrate the
illusory nature of “docetism” and “docetists” to adequately characterize these
54 Jerome, Commentary on Galatians, trans. Andrew Cain, vol. 121 FC (Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 256.
55 The objection could be made that Clement indeed had something like “Docetism” in
mind when he discusses the δόκησις of Cassian, otherwise, why else would he specifically
reference Valentinus’ teaching of Jesus’ psychic body had he not had in mind also the docetic
teachings of Cassian and Marcion regarding Jesus’ phantasmal body? However, Clement never
explicitly critiques Cassian for denying that Jesus possessed flesh or only appeared to have flesh.
56 According to Clement (Strom. 3. 14. 95), Cassian interpreted the “tunics of skin” given to
Adam and Eve in Gen 3:21 as their fleshly bodies. As Ferguson notes (Stromateis, 315–16n386),
this was a common interpretation found in Philo, Alleg. Interp. 3.69; Post. 137; Origen, Cels. 4.40;
Porphyry, Abst. 1.31. Cassian may have thought that Jesus possessed a body like Adam’s pre-
lapsarian body.
64 T. Christopher Hoklotubbe

second-century Christian accounts. In summation: “replacement docetism” is

probably not a real position; the concept of Jesus’ suffering remained significant
to Marcion, Valentinus, and many “Valentinians” (many of whom also affirmed
that Jesus came in the flesh!); although some early Christians denied that Jesus
possessed typical human “flesh,” they still believed that Jesus was embodied in
a tangible, even angelic state; and that the earliest explicit occurrences of “doce-
tism” and “docetists” do not necessarily align with scholastic reconstructions of
this classification.

The Apparent Docetists

While this essay holds no pretense of being exhaustive in its treatment of

docetists in the first three centuries of the early church, there remain three
more teachers and texts that embody the conventional definition of docetism
as a denial of Jesus’ material body and suffering, namely: Saturninus, Cerdo,
and the Acts of John. Unfortunately we have little in the way of direct evidence
of the teachings of Saturninus and Cerdo. Irenaeus states that Saturninus
taught that Jesus was without birth, body, and figure and only in appearance
(putative) seemed human (Haer. 1.24.2; cf. Refutation of All Heresies 7.28), but
associates no such belief with Cerdo (Haer. 1.27.1). The early third century
text erroneously attributed to Tertullian, Against All Heresies, describes both
Saturninus and Cerdo as teaching that Christ had not existed in a bodily sub-
stance (substantia corporis), but as a phantasm (phantasmate), and to have only
suffered a quasi-passion (quasi passum) (Ps.‑Tertullian, Haer. 1.4, 6.1). Given
the lateness of this text, one can wonder to what extent Ps.‑Tertullian may have
conflated the Christological teachings of Saturninus and Cerdo with their more
well-known associates, Basilides and Marcion. Further skepticism is warranted
regarding the accuracy and precision of both of these descriptions given the
discrepancies we have seen thus far between second-hand caricatures of “he-
retical” Christologies and the more nuanced positions that result from direct
quotes or texts of such teachers – especially in the case of Marcion. If Marcion
was inaccurately flagged as a docetist, is it appropriate to dismiss his teacher
Cerdo’s guilt by association?
In the Acts of John (ca. late second century CE), Jesus metamorphizes his
body in all manner of shapes and sizes. At the resurrection he appears to Dru-
siana “in the form of John and of a youth” (Acts John 87); to John and James as
simultaneously a bald and bearded fellow and a youth beginning to grow his
beard (89); as a small, unattractive man (89); and at the transfiguration as naked,
luminously white, with a head reaching to the heavens (90). John observes that
Jesus never shuts his eyes (89), as having a chest that was sometimes smooth
and soft and other times tough as rocks (89), and as leaving no footprints (93).
 What is Docetism? 65

Furthermore, John states: “sometimes when I meant to touch him, I met with a
material and solid body; but at other times when I felt him, his substance was im-
material and incorporeal, as if it did not exist at all” (93).57 As if this text did not
exemplify docetism enough, Jesus explains to John that he “suffered none of the
things which they will say of (him)” (101). And yet, even this text’s docetic clas-
sification has been challenged on the grounds that it does not argue that Jesus ex-
isted in a body only in appearance, but that he could metamorphize and dissolve
his supra-human body at will – claims not so dissimilar to those made about the
canonical transfigured and resurrected Christ, who is both misrecognized (Luke
24:13–35; John 20:14–15) and can suddenly appear and disappear (e. g., John
20:19, 26).58 Indeed, the classification of this text as promoting a polymorphic
Christology places it within a more expansive orbit of early Christian texts that
describe Christ as changing forms including the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of
Judas, the Gospel of Philip, the Acts of Peter, the Ascension of Isaiah, and the
Epistle to the Apostles.59

Teaching Docetism without Docetism

To be clear, it is not my argument that docetists did not exist nor that no text or
teacher can be classified “docetic.” It may be that Saturninus and the Acts of John
are justifiably described as docetic. And some ancient Christians, in response to
arguments that Jesus was witnessed as having normal human flesh and suffer-
ing, replied: “it only seemed so” (e. g., Ign. Smyr. 2; Trall. 10; Disc. Seth 55.16).
However, docetism in its broadest sense as a modern category is too vague to
give a precise account of the complexity of the known phenomena and in many
of its narrower forms (i. e., phantasmal, replacement) the application of such
classifications more often than not mischaracterizes early Christian teachers and
texts. Given the complexity and diversity of ideas about the nature of Christ’s
body, heresiological accounts of the “illusory” character of rival Christologies
should be noted more for the rhetorical functions of such descriptions to define
boundaries between tolerable and intolerable differences and (de)legitimating
sources of authority, rather than for their doctrinal precision. Neither the cat-
egories of docetism and docetists are necessary to analyze or teach these texts –
indeed, the categories are often ineffective in both pursuits.

57 J. K. Elliot, trans., The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian

Literature in an English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 318.
58 Brox, “Doketismus,” 309–11.
59 See Paul Foster, “Polymorphic Christology: Its Origins and Development in Early Chris-
tianity,” JTS 58 (2007): 66–99; Jörg Frey, “‘Docetic-like’ Christologies and the Polymorphy of
Christ,” in Docetism in the Early Church, 27–49.
66 T. Christopher Hoklotubbe

When I teach students about the history of early Christianity, I worry about
providing classifications that invite students to interpret ancient Christian ideas
as categorically foreign to the concerns of the New Testament writings and
proto-orthodoxy broadly. I suggest that by classifying the above surveyed texts
as promoting a two-nature Christology, a category which can subsume posses-
sionistic or separationist Christologies as types, we can bring together a broader
array of teachers and texts into conversation that are conventionally deemed
proto-orthodox and heretical.60 Two-nature (or pneumatic) Christology seeks
to describe the union of a pre-existing divine spirit with Jesus’ human nature,
imagining the Christ-Spirit-Logos as indwelling the human Jesus as a garment or
vessel (e. g., Barnabas, Shepherd of Hermas, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Cyprian
of Carthage) or even becoming flesh (e. g., Ignatius of Antioch, 2 Clement, and
Irenaeus).61 Tertullian, a proponent of the indwelling type of two-nature Chris-
tologies, can be seen to share a common concern with Basilides, the Revelation
of Peter, and perhaps the Second Discourse of the Great Seth, of preserving the
impassibility of the divine spirit and passion of Jesus’ humanity. In Against Prax-
eas 27, Tertullian describes the Word as “not compounded but conjoined” (non
confusum sed coniunctum) with the “flesh” or human body of Jesus – each sub-
stance preserved in its integrity carrying out its own characteristic actions (i. e.,
the Spirit performs miracles and the flesh hungers, thirsts, dies). The Gospel of
Judas, often considered docetic, can be productively read as promoting a two-
nature Christology and even a Christus Victor soteriology alongside of Melito,
bishop of Sardis, who distinguished Christ’s body, which “was able to suffer,”
from his Spirit, which “could not die” and conquered death (On Pascha 66–67).62
Such an approach helps students not only to notice better how these seemingly
disparate Christian texts actually share many similar concerns, assumptions, and
interpretative and rhetorical strategies, but also to isolate and interrogate what
differences seem to be tolerated and not among early Christians and why.
Following the exemplary critical insights and pedagogy of King, I strive to
(re)enchant students with the ambiguity, creativity, scriptural interpretation,
the pastoral and polemical motivations, and existential stakes involved in early
Christian questions about the nature of Jesus’ human experience that were by no
means simply apparent – Christianity was still “in the making!” Judith Lieu states
it well: “Both the problem and available solutions were far more complex than a
simple opposition between ‘flesh’ and ‘not flesh’, or ‘truly’ and ‘not truly’, could
60 So argued by Adolph von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 4th ed. (Tübingen:
Mohr, 1910) 286; and reiterated after the publication of Nag Hammadi codices by Kurt Rudolph,
Die Gnosis: Wesen und Geschichte einer spätantiker Religion (Leipzig: Koehler & Ameland,
1977), 158–162.
61 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper, 1978), 142–158,
esp. 142–145.
62 So Lance Jenott, The Gospel of Judas: Coptic Text, Translation, and Historical Interpretation
of the ‘Betrayer’s Gospel’ (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 7–36, esp. 17–22.
 What is Docetism? 67

articulate.”63 King’s model of thinking and teaching more in terms of problems

than tidy early Christian groups has led me to challenge students to read ancient
texts with an eye toward the possible issues and questions that mark the distinct
theological formulations set before them. Such questions include, if Paul states
that “flesh (σὰρξ) and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God” (1 Cor 15:50)
and describes the resurrected body as “spiritual” (πνευματικόν, 1 Cor 15:44),
then how should we imagine the nature and substance of the resurrected body?64
In contrast to Irenaeus (Haer. 5.9–14) and Tertullian (Res. 48–50) who argued
that Paul did not intend to deny the resurrection of the flesh, the Treatise on the
Resurrection (or Letter to Rheginus) argued that Christ “draws us to heaven like
beams of the sun, and nothing holds us back. This is the spiritual resurrection,
which swallows up the physical as well as the fleshly” (45:14–46:2).65 In my
classrooms, students are assigned specific texts to embody in debate with other
students in class role-play.
It is also important to demonstrate to students that the discursive rules for
how Christians should answer such questions and what terms mean are being
worked out throughout the period of the early Church. Even what it meant for
Jesus to be “incarnate” and have “flesh” are not stable categories. For example,
Clement of Alexandria describes the Logos, the pre-existent Christ, as having
become “flesh through becoming active through the prophets” (σὰρξ ἐγένετο διά
προφητῶν ἐνεργὴσας) (Exc. 1.19.1–2) – that is, to have become “incarnate” in
the word of the prophets prior the birth of Jesus!66 “Flesh” in early Christian dis-
course becomes a malleable and contested concept signaling at times the sinful
quality of humanity, the world order, or its material substance, the evaluation of
which is variously esteemed as something sacred to be redeemed, inferior to the
spiritual yet productive of salvation, or simply corrupting, corruptible, and so
unredeemable.67 Theological discourse is sometimes strained to contradictory
and paradoxical ends eschewing theological precision to express devotional or
confessional convictions and evoke the wonder of mystery. Melito declares “God
has been murdered” (On Pascha 96) and Jesus in the Second Discourse of the
Great Seth reveals, “they struck me with a reed. It was another …” Even Tertulli-
63 Lieu, Marcion and the Making of a Heretic, 378.
64 Paul never uses “flesh” to describe the resurrected body; see esp. Dale B. Martin, The
Corinthian Body (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 123–129. See also, Daniel
A. Smith, “Seeing a Pneuma(tic Body): The Apologetic Interests of Luke 24:36–43,” CBQ 72
(2010): 752–772.
65 See Outi Lehtipuu, “‘Flesh and Blood Cannot Inherit the Kingdom of God:’ The Trans-
formation of the Flesh in Early Christian Debates Concerning Resurrection,” in Metamorphoses:
Resurrection, Body, and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity, ed. Turid Karisen Seim
and Jorunn Økland (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 159–180; Francis Watson, “Pauline Reception
and the Problem of Docetism,” in Docetism in the Early Church, 57–60.
66 Brent, “Degrees of Docetism,” 21.
67 See esp. Taylor G. Petrey, Resurrecting Parts: Early Christians on Desire, Reproduction,
and Sexual Difference (New York: Routledge, 2015), 74–77; King, “Reconsidering Docetism.”
68 T. Christopher Hoklotubbe

an, who strenuously argues for the need to distinguish in no uncertain terms the
suffering of the Son from the impassibility of the Father (see Prax. 29), will write
“God died” (Marc. 2.16.3) and “God was crucified” (Marc. 2.27.7; Carn. Chr. 5).
Seeing that theological discourse functions not just to detail, systematize, and
police dogma, but to inculcate devotional attitudes and spiritual dispositions,
I invite students to imagine what affect early Christian teachers sought to achieve
in denying Christ’s incarnation or suffering, which may not precisely reflect the
pastor’s more nuanced theology.
In light of the fascinating research being conducted around Hellenistic and
Jewish conceptions of angelomorphology, metamorphosis, polymorphy, and the
Greek literary device of εἴδωλον “image,” it has become pertinent to reconsider
not only whether, how, and why some early Christians denied Jesus’ flesh and
suffering, but also how they imagined the kind of body Jesus’ possessed, the intel-
lectual milieu in which such concepts were intelligible, the rhetorical work Jesus’
body was deployed to do, and why it mattered. Recently within Pauline studies,
it has been argued that when Paul conceptualizes the resurrected body of Jesus
and of believers, he has in mind the kind of celestial-astral bodies comprised of
pneumatic substance that can only loosely be considered “flesh” and is at home
within angelomorphic or deification traditions within Second Temple Judaism.68
If Marcion interpreted Jesus’ body as comparable to that of the angels, then his
so-called phantom Christ is much more grounded within Paul’s theological-cos-
mological vision than we have been led to believe by Irenaeus and Tertullian.
With respect to the intellectual milieu of these Christological disputes, studies
on how ancient Greek and Roman predecessors and contemporaries of early
Christians could conceptualize how gods could change into and temporarily
possess human bodies69 and tell stories about gods and heroes being momen-
tarily replaced by “images” that functioned as the double responsible for or
receptive of unbecoming events70 provide important models and analogues for
reimagining both the origins and reception among ancient audiences of stories
of Jesus’ own polymorphic and “seeming” appearances. Regarding the rhetorical
function of Jesus’ body, in the Second Discourse of the Great Seth, the bodily
dwelling of Christ is distinguished from his divine nature precisely to critique a
Pauline theology that understood the individual’s salvation to be accomplished
through identifying with the redemptive work of Christ’s death on the cross and
resurrection through the ritual of baptism.71 As King makes clear in the con-
clusion of her own essay on docetism, words about Jesus’ flesh matter because

68
See n. 38.
69
Kinlaw argues that in place of taxonomies of docetism, the ancient phenomenon can
be more precisely understood in terms of the following ancient Mediterranean models: 1) the
metamorphosis model; 2) the possession model; 3) blends of (1) and (2). Christ is Jesus, 79.
70 See esp. Goldstein and Stroumsa, “Origins of Docetism.”
71 See Dubois, “Docétisme,” 298.
 What is Docetism? 69

they are more than simple claims about his body, but entail the very nature of the
church – Jesus’ other body: “the question of docetism at its heart is a question
about what social arraignments are enabled, what abjections justified, about who
flourishes and who pays the costs of ‘the unequal distribution of glory.’”72 Impli-
cated in conceptualizations of Jesus’ body are questions about the nature of our
own bodies, suffering, and hope for salvation – no wonder early Christians were
so enticed and incensed by this topic!
In the end I ask, do we need “docetism”? I suggest that we would lose very little
in terms of clarity or organization when it comes to presenting and making sense
of early Christian literature. In place of “docetism” a number of other categories
and questions have and can further show themselves to be more productive of
comparative readings of early Christian literature that more precisely treat their
ambiguity, complexity, and diversity. Our students will thank us, just as those
who count themselves among King’s students retain the utmost gratitude for her
exemplary practices of critically reading and teaching early Christian texts.

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Church: The Quest for an Elusive Phenomenon. Edited by Joseph Verheyden, Reimund
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(1984): 301–314.
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 Beyond “Gnosticism”
Pneumatology and Ecclesiology in 2 Clem. 14

Giovanni B. Bazzana

The present contribution aims at offering a better appreciation of chapter 14 in

the so-called Second Letter of Clement (from now on 2 Clem.). This is one of the
most discussed and obscure passages in the entire document. Earlier scholarship
devoted to this text has often dismissed the chapter as an intractable jumble of
disorganized theological ideas produced by an author lacking the gift of literary
ability or logical thought.1 In more recent years the tides seem to have slightly
turned on this specific point: both the extensive commentaries on 2 Clem. by
Wilhelm Pratscher and Christopher Tuckett engage chapter 14 in its own right
trying to understand what might have been the theology hidden behind the
clumsy and at times too dense formulations. Pratscher in particular analyzed in
detail the literary structure of chapter 14 and placed its theological ideas within
the broader context of the religious history of the early Christ movement.2
As noted above, Pratscher’s inquiries have demonstrated that taking the
chapter’s pneumatology and ecclesiology seriously is a worthwhile endeavor,
even though one must still concede that at this juncture the argument devel-
oped in the text is still not perfectly clear.3 However, there are good reasons to
doubt Pratscher’s main suggestion (echoing proposals advanced earlier in the
modern critical study of 2 Clem.) that the theological thrust of the chapter can be
adequately understood within the context of anti-Gnostic (or, better, anti-Valen-
tinian) polemics.4 With Pratscher himself one must recognize that the defining
1 See the collection of critical opinions assembled by Wilhelm Pratscher, “Das Kirchenver-
ständnis des 2. Klemensbriefes,” in Die Kirche als historische und eschatologische Größe: Fest-
schrift für Kurt Niederwimmer zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Wilhelm Pratscher and Georg Sauer
(Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1994), 101–113, here p. 101n3.
2 Wilhelm Pratscher, “Das Geistverständnis des 2. Klemensbriefes im Verhältnis zu dem
Neuen Testament,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Theologie 3 (2000): 37–50.
3 Note also the textual uncertainty that plagues the final chapters of 2 Clem., for which the
main and best witness to the text (the Alexandrinus codex of the 5th century) is lacking. On the
textual transmission of 2 Clem., see Christopher M. Tuckett, 2 Clement: Introduction, Text, and
Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–6.
4 Almost no scholar has done more than Karen King to overcome the old-fashioned and
theologically biased definition of “Gnosticism” that has been often applied to 2 Clem. as well. In
so doing, King has also reworked from their roots our approach to the history of the early Christ
groups. For these reasons, and as an expression of gratitude for the many years in which she has
74 Giovanni B. Bazzana

rhetorical posture of this text is paraenetic and hortatory, so that polemical tones
can be inferred at best. Thus, the present contribution will propose an alternative
religio-historical placement for the theological peculiarities of chapter 14 by re-
tracing a trajectory leading back to the Shepherd of Hermas and to the epistles of
Paul in light of the central role that the phenomenon of spirit possession played
in the religious experience of the early Christ groups.5

1. 2 Clem. 14

A first step in the present treatment might consist in taking a look at the full text
of 2 Clem. 14, because it presents a few basic textual critical and interpretive
issues that must be dealt with at the outset:6
Ὥστε ἀδελφοί, ποιοῦντες τὸ θέλημα τοῦ πατρὸς ἡμῶν θεοῦ ἐσόμεθα ἐκ τῆς ἐκκλησίας τῆς
πρώτης, τῆς πνευματικῆς, τῆς πρὸ ἡλίου καὶ σελήνης ἐκτισμένης. Ἐὰν δὲ μὴ ποιήσωμεν
τὸ θέλημα κυρίου, ἐσόμεθα ἐκ τῆς γραφῆς τῆς λεγούσης· ἐγενήθη ὁ οἶκός μου σπήλαιον
λῃστῶν. ῞Ωστε οὖν αἱρετισώμεθα ἀπὸ τῆς ἐκκλησίας τῆς ζωῆς εἶναι, ἵνα σωθῶμεν. (2) Οὐκ
οἴομαι δὲ ὑμᾶς ἀγνοεῖν, ὅτι ἐκκλησία ζῶσα σῶμά ἐστιν Χριστοῦ· λέγει γὰρ ἡ γραφή [ ]
ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ· τὸ ἄρσεν ἐστὶν ὁ Χριστός, τὸ θῆλυ ἡ
ἐκκλησία· καὶ ἔτι7 τὰ βιβλία [τῶν προφητῶν8] καὶ οἱ ἀπόστολοι τὴν ἐκκλησίαν οὐ νῦν εἶναι
λέγουσιν ἀλλὰ ἄνωθεν [ ] Ἦν γὰρ πνευματική, ὡς καὶ ὁ Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς ὁ κύριος ἡμῶν,
ἐφανερώθη δὲ ἐπ᾽ ἐσχάτων τῶν ἡμερῶν, ἵνα ἡμᾶς σώσῃ. (3) Ἡ ἐκκλησία δὲ πνευματικὴ
οὖσα ἐφανερώθη ἐν τῇ σαρκὶ Χριστοῦ, δηλοῦσα ἡμῖν, ὅτι ἐάν τις ἡμῶν τηρήσῃ αὐτὴν ἐν
τῇ σαρκὶ αὐτοῦ9 καὶ μὴ φθείρῃ ἀπολήψεται αὐτὴν ἐν τῷ πνεύματι τῷ ἁγίῳ· ἡ γὰρ σάρξ

been a gracious colleague and trusted mentor, I am honored to offer this essay in celebration of
professor King’s outstanding career.
5 An initial exploration in this direction in John Muddiman, “The Church in Ephesians, 2
Clement, and the Shepherd of Hermas,” in Trajectories through the New Testament and the Apos-
tolic Fathers, ed. Andrew F. Gregory and Christopher M. Tuckett (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 107–121. Muddiman’s exclusive focus on the potential dependency of the two
other texts on Ephesians and his lack of consideration of spirit possession limit the cogency of
his results.
6 The Greek text of 2 Clem., unless otherwise noted, is taken from Tuckett, 2 Clement.
7 Constantinopolitanus reads ὅτι at this juncture (and it is the reading favored by Tuckett, 2
Clement, 252, n. 30), but the Syriac makes more sense as a way to strengthen through additional
authorities the initial statement about the ekklesia being the “body of Christ”; so, Wilhelm Prat-
scher, Der zweite Clemensbrief, KAV 3 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 182, with
the majority of commentators.
8 The reading “of the prophets” is attested only in the Syriac translation and there are good
arguments both to reject it as secondary (2 Clem. 14 would then oppose the “Scriptures” of
Israel to the oral testimony of the apostles) or to accept it (thus, the opposition would be roughly
the one between Old and New Testament). A choice on this matter is not necessary, so the words
are left between brackets (see the equally non-committal positions of Tuckett, 2 Clement, 253,
n. 31, and Pratscher, Clemensbrief, 182).
9 The pronoun αὐτοῦ is missing in Constantinopolitanus (well-known for its erroneous
omissions), but is attested by the Syriac translation. Pratscher (Clemensbrief, 184) prefers
the reading of the Greek manuscript because he thinks that the “flesh” has an ecclesiological
 Beyond “Gnosticism” 75
αὕτη ἀντίτυπός ἐστιν τοῦ πνεύματος· οὐδεὶς οὖν τὸ ἀντίτυπος φθείρας τὸ αὐθεντικὸν
μεταλήψεται. Ἄρα οὖν τοῦτο λέγει, ἀδελφοί· τηρήσατε τὴν σάρκα, ἵνα τοῦ πνεύματος
μεταλάβητε. (4) Εἰ δὲ λέγομεν εἶναι τὴν σάρκα τὴν ἐκκλησίαν καὶ τὸ πνεῦμα Χριστόν,
ἄρα ὁ ὑβρίσας τὴν σάρκα ὕβρισεν τὴν ἐκκλησίαν. Ὁ τοιοῦτος οὖν οὐ μεταλήψεται τοῦ
πνεύματος, ὅ ἐστιν ὁ Χριστός. (5) Τοσαύτην δύναται ἡ σάρξ αὕτη μεταλαβεῖν ζωὴν καὶ
ἀφθαρσίαν κολληθέντος αὐτῇ τοῦ πνεύματος τοῦ ἁγίου, οὔτε ἐξειπεῖν τις δύναται οὔτε
λαλῆσαι ἃ ἡτοίμασεν ὁ κύριος τοῖς ἐκλεκτοῖς αὐτοῦ.
Therefore, brothers, by doing the will of our father, God, we will be part of the ekklesia,10
the first one, the spiritual one, which has been created before the sun and the moon. But
if we do not do the will of the Lord, we will belong to the scripture that says: “My house
became a den of thieves”. Therefore, let us choose to belong to the ekklesia of life, so that
we may be saved. (2) I do not think that you ignore that the living ekklesia is the body of
Christ; for the scripture says: “God made the human being male and female”. The male is
Christ, the female the ekklesia. And also the books [of the prophets] and the apostles say
that the ekklesia is not something of the present, but came from above. For it was spiritual,
as also Jesus Christ our Lord, but it11 was revealed in the last days, so that it may save us.
(3) The ekklesia, being spiritual, was revealed in the flesh of Christ, demonstrating to us
that, if one of us watches over the ekklesia in his own flesh and does not corrupt it, he will
obtain it in the holy spirit. For the flesh itself is an antitype of the spirit. Therefore, no one
who corrupted the antitype will partake of the authentic. Thus, he says, brothers: “Watch
over the flesh, so that you may partake of the spirit”. (4) If we state that the ekklesia is the
flesh and the spirit is Christ, then one who abused the flesh abused the ekklesia. Therefore,
such a person will not partake of the spirit, which is Christ. (5) This flesh can partake of
such a life and incorruptibility when the holy spirit has been glued to it, and no one can
either express or speak of the things that the Lord prepared for his elects.

meaning up to the end of paragraph 3. However, Pratscher’s understanding of the text raises
theological difficulties that will be discussed more in detail in the final section of the present
paper. Tuckett (2 Clement, 256) is arguably right in including αὐτοῦ and in connecting it to τις
so that it takes on an anthropological meaning.
10 The translation of ἐκκλησία with “church” is traditional for early Christ texts, but its ap-
propriateness has been challenged on good grounds in recent years: see Anna C. Miller, Corin-
thian Democracy: Democratic Discourse in 1 Corinthian, Princeton Theological Monograph
Series 220 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2015). The translation of the term in 2 Clem. offers an
interesting challenge, because – at the very least in chapter 14 – the writing never employs
ἐκκλησία to indicate an actual group of Christ believers (a fact that disqualifies alternative trans-
lations such as “community” or “assembly.”) Similarly to a text such as Ephesians (as noted by
Muddiman, “Church,” 110–111) the ἐκκλησία of 2 Clem. is always a cosmic and supernatural
entity. However, these are not nuances that are evoked by the use of a modern term such as
“church.” Thus, in order to alert readers of the unfamiliar nature of what 2 Clem. labels ἐκκλησία
I will employ the transliteration ekklesia throughout.
11 The subject of the verb ἐφανερώθη is the theme of a considerable debate, since it could be
either the ekklesia or Jesus Christ. The first option is the more natural from a syntactical point of
view, but it creates a few theological problems, because it would ascribe a soteriological role to
the “church” itself, possibly independently from or on a par with Christ (see Pratscher, Clemens-
brief, 183, who however entertains the possibility of conceiving the ekklesia as a “collaborator”
in the salvific function performed by Christ). Tuckett, 2 Clement, 255, rightly observes that it
is better to preserve the most natural reading of the Greek and that a soteriological role of the
ekklesia is not entirely absent from 2 Clem., as we will see more clearly below.
76 Giovanni B. Bazzana

As observed above, this is a rather complex passage, both because of its text-
critical uncertainties and of the dearth of explicit parallels in the contemporary
literature of the early Christ movement. A central object of discussion in 2 Clem.
scholarship is obviously the rather unusual representation of the ekklesia as a
pre-existent entity.12 In truth, scholars routinely indicate that the ekklesia as a
supernatural entity occurs in a very prominent and narratively effective role in
the Shepherd of Hermas as well. In the Visions in particular, Hermas has several
encounters of an apocalyptic nature, in which revelations are mediated to him by
supernatural agents. Prominent among these revealers is a woman, who appears
to Hermas first as old (πρεσβύτερα) and later becomes younger, while maintain-
ing white hair, in all likelihood to indicate that she exists outside human time in
a supernatural condition.13 Already in Vision 2 the identity of the elderly woman
is manifested to Hermas as that of the ekklesia, whose old age is explicitly indi-
cated as a sign of her coming to being earlier than all the rest of creation.14 Again
throughout the Shepherd – in Vision 3 and once more at even greater length in
Similitude 9 – the ekklesia figures prominently in long allegories as a tower that
is gradually built through the history of salvation with stones of different shapes
representing the faith and ethical dispositions of Christ believers. It goes with-
out saying that, since Hermas is explicit in expressing the idea of a pre-existing
ekklesia, the Shepherd provides under several accounts a very close parallel to
some of the ecclesiological notions expounded in chapter 14. That being said, it is
all the more puzzling that interpreters of 2 Clem. seldom pay consistent attention
to the general theological similarities between these two works.
The present contribution intends to work against such trend of relative
disregard for the connection between 2 Clem. and Hermas, which is in all
likelihood built on a more general lack of consideration for the Shepherd as an
important theological writing in its own right. The following considerations will
start correcting such an undesirable state of affairs first by attending to a pair of
major theological elements that are shared between Hermas and 2 Clem.:15 the

12In the literature on 2 Clem., it is common to encounter the assertion that a similar notion
of a pre-existent ekklesia might have been already attested in a fragment of Papias’s Inter-
pretation of the Oracles of the Lord preserved by Anastasius Sinaites. However, these fragments
contain little more than a mention of ekklesia and they seem to indicate that Papias expounded
an allegorical exegesis (πνευματικῶς) of the creation narrative of Genesis (see Enrico Norelli,
Papia di Hierapolis: Esposizione degli oracoli del Signore [Paoline: Milano, 2005], 422–433).
13 The transformation is described and allegorized in detail in Herm. Vision 3.10–13. On
Hermas’s ecclesiology, see the handy summary and treatment in Norbert Brox, Der Hirt des
Hermas, KAV 7 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 524–533.
14 In Vision 2.2.4: Διατί οὖν πρεσβύτερα; Ὅτι, φησίν, πάντων πρώτη ἐκτίσθη⋅ διὰ τοῦτο
πρεσβύτερα, καὶ διὰ ταύτην ὁ κόσμος κατηρτίσθη (“Why then does she appear elderly? Because,
he replies, she has been created first among all; therefore, she is elderly and through her the
universe was pieced together”).
15 A fuller discussion of the relationship between these two writings should attend to the
issue of their respective datings. While there seems to be a consensus around 2 Clem.’s location
 Beyond “Gnosticism” 77

understanding of Christ as πνεῦμα (with attending christological consequences)

and the experience of spirit possession as foundational for membership in the
Christ movement.

2. “Pneumatic christology”

2 Clem. seems to presuppose a christology that is labeled as “pneumatic” in

traditional systematizations.16 Such label is construed on the basis of the later
trinitarian systematizations of the fourth and fifth century CE and, as such, it
cannot be but anachronistic and of limited help for the study of the documents
examined here. I will retain it for the time being only in order to reframe it later on.
2 Clem. 14 contains a sentence that expresses “pneumatic Christology” most
clearly at the end of paragraph 4, when the author writes that someone who
abuses the flesh and the ekklesia, will not partake of “the spirit, which is Christ”.
An even more clear statement occurs earlier in the homily at 9.5:
εἷς Χριστός, ὁ κύριος ὁ σώσας ἡμᾶς, ὢν μὲν τὸ πρῶτον πνεῦμα, ἐγέντο σὰρξ καὶ οὕτως
ἡμᾶς ἐκάλεσεν· οὕτως καὶ ἡμεῖς ἐν ταύτῃ τῇ σαρκὶ ἀποληψόμεθα τὸν μισθόν.
The one Christ, the lord who saved us, who was a spirit first, became flesh and thus called
us; thus we as well in this flesh will obtain the reward.

In many ways, what is stated in 9.5 appears as an alternative modulation of what

is said in chapter 14, in particular with regard to the incarnate nature of the test
through which the Christ believers are expect to obtain the “reward” (μισθός),
which seems to be understood as the participation in the πνεῦμα, which is in
turn Christ. In christological terms, however, 9.5 adds something more with
respect to 14. Combining the two passages, one could even say that the author
of 2 Clem. envisages a christology articulated in chronological phases, in which
a first stage presupposes the pre-existing Christ as a πνεῦμα that then becomes
“flesh” and finally returns to the original condition after the end of the “earthly”
phase.17

somewhere in the first half of the second century, the conversation involving Hermas is more
complex. The traditional dating based on the testimony of the Muratorian fragment should now
be called into question: see Andrew Gregory, “Disturbing Trajectories: 1 Clement, the Shepherd
of Hermas, and the Development of Early Roman Christianity,” in Rome in the Bible and the
Early Church, ed. Peter S. Oakes (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2002), 142–166, and most importantly
now Claire K. Rothschild, “The Muratorian Fragment as a Roman Fake,” NT 60 (2018): 55–82.
A significant element should be considered the paleographical reassessment of some papyri of
the Shepherd: on the case of P. Iand I 4, see Antonio Carlini, “Testimone e testo: il problema della
datazione di PIand I 4 del Pastore di Erma,” SCO 42 (1992): 17–30.
16 See the classic Manlio Simonetti, “Note di cristologia pneumatica,” Aug 12 (1972):
201–232.
17 Pratscher, Clemensbrief, 138, speaks already of two phases with respect to christology and
soteriology on the basis of 2 Clem. 9.5.
78 Giovanni B. Bazzana

Leaving aside for a moment the issue of these christological phases, it is worth
stressing again that πνεῦμα is the main conceptualization through which the
author of 2 Clem. seems to understand the nature of Christ.18 Even though in its
well-known opening paragraphs 2 Clem. advocates strongly for a consideration
of Christ on an equal footing with God, one must agree with Tuckett in con-
cluding that even there what the author is calling for is more a functional than an
ontological equation between the two beings.19
It goes without saying that Hermas’s Shepherd provides what is perhaps
the closest comparandum for the “pneumatic” christology of 2 Clem. Recently,
Bogdan Bucur has re-examined the entire complex issue by locating it under the
heading of “angelomorphic christology”.20 Bucur correctly observes that Her-
mas treats the “son of God” as a “spirit” in keeping with a use that is widespread
in all early Christian circles when one needs to describe “heavenly entities”.21
Furthermore, Bucur points out that the Shepherd continues the Second Temple
Jewish tradition of representing these “spirits” as “angels”.22 Bucur takes such
“angelomorphic” representation to mean not that “spirits” have the outward
appearance of angels (whatever that may be), but more appropriately that these
“spiritual beings” have all the features of personhood that are usually ascribed
to human beings.23 Thus, Bucur’s analysis proves that it may still be legitimate
to retain the term πνεῦμα, which is indeed used with preference with respect
to “angel” both in 2 Clem. and by Hermas. It goes without saying, though, that
πνεῦμα ought to be understood not anachronistically in light of later trinitari-
an systematizations, but as the designation for intermediary beings, located
between the divine and the human realms and provided of their own specific
personality.
The benchmark to assess the effectiveness of Bucur’s or anyone else’s reading
of Hermas’s christology is obviously the infamously complex Similitude 5. With-

18Tuckett, 2 Clement, 72: “spirit language is thus entirely reserved for the person of Jesus.”
19Tuckett, 2 Clement, 68.
20 Bogdan G. Bucur, Angelomorphic Pneumatology: Clement of Alexandria and Other Early
Christian Witnesses, SupplVChr 95 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), and more specifically Idem, “The Son
of God and the Angelomorphic Holy Spirit: A Rereading of the Shepherd’s Christology,” ZNW
98 (2007): 121–143.
21 Bucur, Pneumatology, 137.
22 This is obviously the core of Bucur’s argument and it continues the trend established in
a few seminal contributions by John R. Levison, “The Angelic Spirit in Early Judaism,” SBLSP
34 (1995): 464–493, and “The Prophetic Spirit as an Angel According to Philo,” HTR 88 (1995):
189–207.
23 Bucur works out the implications of an understanding of what “angel” meant that had
been already identified by Jean Daniélou (The Theology of Jewish Christianity [London: Darton,
Longman & Todd, 1964], 118): “The word angel connotes a supernatural being manifesting
himself. The nature of this supernatural being is not determined by the expression, but by the
context. ‘Angel’ is the old fashioned equivalent of ‘person.’” (see also Bucur, Pneumatology,
XXV–XXVII).
 Beyond “Gnosticism” 79

out getting into too many details with respect to this notoriously entangled pas-
sage, it will suffice here to make two points that might prove helpful to achieve
a better understanding of 2 Clem. 14 as well. First, the allegorical interpretation
of the parable of the slave working in the vineyard (given in Herm. Sim. 5.6.4–7)
provides the closest analogy to the christology organized in chronological phases
that one has encountered already in 2 Clem. The pneuma is presented by Hermas
too as pre-existing and placed by God in a “flesh” of his choice (τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ
ἅγιον τὸ προόν, τὸ κτίσαν πᾶσαν τὴν κτίσιν, κατῴκισεν ὁ θεὸς εἰς σάρκα ἣν
ἠβούλετο in 5.6.5). Within the economy of this allegorical interpretation the
“flesh” is a transparent allusion to Jesus Christ, whose enslavement to the pneuma
is so pure and perfect to earn him a “reward” that should be clearly understood
as the return to the divine and pneumatic realm. Thus, the christology of the
Shepherd presents (most clearly in Similitude 5 and with due consideration for
the fact that Hermas studiously avoids the use of the term “Christ”) a three-stages
chronological development that is quite close to the model sketched above with
reference to 2 Clem.24 Just to dispel the impression that the christological model
observed in 2 Clem. and Hermas might be judged a secondary and heterodox
“corruption” featured in two texts that were excluded from the New Testament, it
is worth remarking in passing that the same model lurks in all likelihood behind
the famous christological formula employed by Paul in Rom 1:3–4.25 There is no
space here to tackle such a complex text, but, if it really preserves the remains
of pre-Pauline materials, then it would enable one to retroject the “pneumatic”
christology of 2 Clem. and Hermas towards a very early stage in the history of
the Christ movement.26

24 For this reading of Hermas’s Similitude 5, see Alistair Stewart-Sykes, “The Christology of
Hermas and the Interpretation of the Fifth Similitude,” Aug 37 (1997): 273–284, and Giovanni
B. Bazzana, “Il corpo della carne di Gesù Cristo (POxy I 5): conflitti ecclesiologici nel cris-
tianesimo del II secolo,” Adamantius 10 (2004): 100–122.
25 For a more detailed analysis of these well-known two verses, see Andries B. du Toit, “Ro-
mans 1,3–4 and the Gospel Tradition: a Reassessment of the Phrase κατὰ Πνεῦμα Ἁγιωσύνης,”
in The Four Gospels 1992: Festschrift Frans Neirynck, ed. F. Van Segbroeck et al.; BETL 100
(Leuven: Peeters, 1992), 1.249–256, with the further developments in Giovanni B. Bazzana,
Having the Spirit of Christ, forthcoming.
26 Theologically, there remains a significant difference between the christological model
deployed by Paul and that of Hermas, inasmuch as the latter does not seem to connect the
movement from the second to the third stage with the resurrection of Jesus, as it happens
instead for Paul in Rom 1:3–4. On the theological absence of death and resurrection in the
Shepherd, see Mark R. C. Grundeken, “Resurrection of the Dead in the Shepherd of Hermas:
A Matter of Dispute,” in Resurrection of the Dead: Biblical Traditions in Dialogue, ed. G. Van
Oyen and T. Shepherd; BETL 249 (Leuven: Peeters, 2012), 403–415. This constitutes an impor-
tant additional element of similarity with 2 Clem, as observed by Tuckett, 2 Clement, 69.
80 Giovanni B. Bazzana

3. Possession by the pneuma

The preceding remarks on Hermas’s fifth Similitude lead to highlight another

interesting similarity between the Shepherd and 2 Clem. Indeed, scholars have
often observed with puzzlement that section 6 in Similitude 5 seems to transition
in a rather awkward fashion from talking about what – using the terminology
of later theological systematizations – can be labeled divine “Spirit” to talking
about anthropological “spirit”. The crucial paragraph is here 6.7, in which the
transition happens without Hermas’s acknowledgement either through a change
in the formulae employed for the pneuma or through the employment of any
other literary device:
Since it [the flesh] lived in a good and pure way, cooperating with the spirit and working
with it in everything it did, behaving in a strong and manly way, God chose it to be a
partner with the holy spirit (μετὰ τοῦ πνεύματος τοῦ ἁγίου εἵλατο κοινωνόν). For the
conduct of this flesh was pleasing, because it was not defiled on earth while bearing the
holy spirit. 7. Thus he took his Son and the glorious angels as counselors, so that this flesh,
which served blamelessly as the spirit’s slave, might have a place of residence and not
appear to have lost the reward for serving as a slave. For all flesh in which the holy spirit
has dwelled – and which has been found undefiled and spotless – will receive a reward.

Halfway through paragraph 7 Hermas switches gears from talking about the
human existence of Christ incarnated in the “flesh” (σάρξ) of Jesus to talking
about the condition of all humans (πᾶσα σάρξ), which is not radically different
inasmuch as the central concern is with “hosting” the pneuma.27 The final para-
graphs of 5.6 continue the development of a thematic concern that is crucial for
the overall rhetorical goals of the Shepherd. Indeed, the question that Hermas
poses to his supernatural interlocutor in 5.5.5 is extraordinary in the context of
the literary production of the early Christ groups. Not only does the parable of
Similitudo 5 cast the “son of God” as a slave (while, for instance, in the Gospel
parables slaves have merely instrumental functions in keeping with their social
status in the ancient world), but Hermas makes explicit the dismay that might
have been the most likely reaction of ancient readers and hearers confronted with
such a statement.28 The answer of the Shepherd extends to 5.6 and articulates
why it makes sense to speak of the “son of God” as a slave. As Osiek notes, the
first part of the answer (5.6.1–3) shows that the subjection inherent to the slave’s
status in the parable hints at a deeper truth, because “the slave has had complete
charge of the vineyard, but only in obedience”.29 But it is the second part of the
27 See the reading of Carolyn Osiek, Shepherd of Hermas: A Commentary (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress, 1999), 180.
28 The issue is analyzed quite well by Martin Leutzsch, Die Wahrnehmung sozialer Wirk-
lichkeit im “Hirten des Hermas,” FRLANT 150 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989),
151–153. The other rather exceptional instance is obviously Phil 2:7, for which it is interesting
to look at the coyness of the Patristic reception.
29 Osiek, Shepherd, 178.
 Beyond “Gnosticism” 81

answer (paragraphs 5.6.5–7 quoted above) that truly grounds this ambiguity in
the lived experience of being a Christ believer as that is understood by Hermas.
These paragraphs show that the ambivalent relationship between submission
and power depends on the fact that being “Christian” in the Shepherd means
essentially being possessed by the “holy spirit,” as it has been the case for Jesus
himself. Anthropological research shows that the subjectivity of possessed in-
dividuals is often formed cross-culturally in the ambiguous and continuously
(re)negotiated space that stretches between the total submission of “hosts” and
the mediums’ fleeting control over their “spirits.” Unequal social relationships,
such as the master/slave one, have been often employed historically as convenient
idioms to speak and think of the frightening and powerful experience of posses-
sion.30 The same happens in Hermas too as the Shepherd tries to express the
ambiguity of this crucial phenomenon.31 Possession is so decisive for Hermas
because (as the text illustrates in 5.6.5–7) it constituted the subjectivity of Jesus
as a model for the behavior of all his future followers.
To affirm that pneuma possession32 is a foundational religious experience in
the theological universe of the Shepherd cannot be a surprising move by any
means. In particular, the central section of the writing (the so-called Mandata)
contains several passages that are quite explicit in building on this experience and
in theorizing in a relatively elaborate manner on the nature of “good” and “bad”
possession. Famously, Mandates 5.1.3 intimates that “the holy spirit” cannot be
“cramped” within the same “vessel” (indicating a human “host”) with other “evil
spirits” (singling out, in this passage, the spirit of ὀξυχολία). If the “good spirit”
finds itself in an “impure vessel” is bound to abandon it and to leave the human
being under the control of the evil forces.33 Likewise, in Mandates 11.9, when
30 For all this, see a more detailed discussion in Bazzana, Having the Spirit of Christ, forth-
coming.
31 A very important element with respect to Hermas’s use of slavery language to speak
of spirit possession is the way in which 5.6.6 describes how God chooses the “flesh” who has
successfully “served as a slave” for the “holy spirit” to be its κοινωνός (“companion”). The
terminology cannot fail to recall how Paul asks Philemon to take back his slave Onesimos as a
κοινωνός, which Paul already is, in Phlm 17.
32 The employment of the term “possession” in this context needs justification, since the
texts belonging to the early Christ movement as well as most other ancient writings do not
use consistently (when they use it at all) this language to indicate the experience of a human
self-controlled by an external and supernatural personal agency. The choice of retaining the
terminology of “possession” is motivated by the attempt to bring these ancient texts in conver-
sation with the contemporary anthropological study of “possession” (for which, see Bazzana,
Having the Spirit of Christ, forthcoming) in order to better illuminate the broader experiential,
ritual, and social context presupposed by the ancient authors. It goes without saying that the
terminology of “spirit possession,” being a modern Western creation, does carry its own ideo-
logical baggage, for which one can see a lucid analysis in Paul C. Johnson, “Toward an Atlantic
Genealogy of ‘Spirit Possession,’” in Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic
Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 23–45.
33 Ἐὰν δὲ ὀξυχολία τις προσέλθῃ, εὐθὺς τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον, τρυφερὸν ὄν, στενοχωρεῖται,
μὴ ἔχον τὸν τόπον καθαρόν, καὶ ζητεῖ ἀποστῆναι ἐκ τοῦ τόπου.
82 Giovanni B. Bazzana

Hermas describes the onset of a “true” prophetic inspiration, the process re-
volves around the agency of the “true” prophet being completely taken over by an
entity that is alternatively designated as “angel of the prophetic spirit” or as “holy
spirit”.34 Hermas’s hesitancy between “angel” and “spirit” in speaking about pos-
session should not surprise in light of what has been observed above – following
Bucur’s suggestion – with respect to the significance of “angelic” language in
texts belonging to the early Christ movement.35 The anthropological and ethical
dimensions of the experience of possession are summed up neatly by Hermas
through the terminological pair of ἁπλότης (“singleness”) and διψυχία, which
occur often in texts belonging to the Christ movement and datable to the second
or third centuries CE. The valence of the latter term, in particular, is considerably
obfuscated by modern translations that tend to privilege its cognitive aspects
(as, for instance, in “double-mindedness”, which is quite common in English
versions of the Shepherd).36 Whatever one makes of the etymological origins of
διψυχία,37 clearly both terms must be attributed a meaning that is not restricted
only to doubt in faith or lack thereof. Such a cognicentric reductionism is typical
of Western modernity, but for Hermas “singleness” and “double-soulness” have
to do with the mechanisms of possession. In the positive case, the agencies of
the two entities (the two ψυχαί, with the latter term to be taken as meaning
“persons”) coexisting within the same body are totally aligned and integrated,
while in the negative case they are misaligned and the end result is catastrophic
for the human being.
When one comes back from the Shepherd to the analysis of 2 Clem. 14, it is
easy to see that the chapter presents several features recalling those observed
above in Hermas’s Similitudes 5. First of all, one can mention the strong em-
phasis put on the goal of keeping “pure” a spiritual entity while the latter inhabits
the “flesh”. 2 Clem. 14 expresses this through the use of verbs such as τηρέω
(“watching over”) in a positive sense and φθείρω (“corrupting”) in the negative.
Hermas employs different phrases in Similitudes 5 to indicate that “the flesh”
performed its role as a slave in a satisfactory manner by maintaining itself “pure”
34 Τότε ὁ ἄγγελος τοῦ προφητικοῦ πνεύματος ὁ κείμενος πρὸς αὐτὸν πληροῖ τὸν ἄνθρωπον,
καὶ πληρωθεὶς ὁ ἄνθρωπος τῷ πνεύματι τῷ ἁγίῳ λαλεῖ εἰς τὸ πλῆθος.
35 Tellingly, in Mandates 6.2 Hermas describes the activities of two “angels”, one of right-
eousness and one of wickedness, which are “with the human being” (μετὰ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου),
and operate in ways that cannot but recall the description of the “spirits” in the immediately
preceding Mandates 5.
36 A good criticism of such cognicentrism occurs in Brox, Hirt, 551–552, who also em-
phasizes the need to keep the pairing with ἁπλότης.
37 See the series of articles authored by O. J. F. Seitz, “Relationship of the Shepherd of
Hermas to the Epistle of James,” JBL 63 (1944): 131–140; “Antecedents and Signification of
the Term ΔΙΨΥΧΟΣ,” JBL 66 (1947): 211–219; “Afterthoughts on the Term Dipsychos,” NTS 4
(1957–1958): 327–334; and “Two Spirits in a Man: Essay in Biblical Exegesis,” NTS 6 (1959–
1960): 92–95. Seitz’s proposal of a Jewish source that would have been behind all the various
uses of διψυχία in texts belonging to the Christ movement is ultimately unconvincing.
 Beyond “Gnosticism” 83

and “undefiled”. Likewise, but in an opposite way, in Mandatum 5 the arrival of

the “spirit of anger” causes the “vessel” to cease being “a pure place” with the
consequence that the holy spirit will leave. The fundamental dynamics is patently
the same between the two texts. Secondly, the final reward that is presented
to the audience of 2 Clem. 14 is immortality or incorruptibility by means of
“partaking” (μεταλαμβάνω) in the pneuma, which is Christ, and of being “glued”
(κολληθέντος, more on this controversial aorist participle in the next section) to
the holy spirit, which in all likelihood has to be considered the same. Similarly,
the “reward” set for the “flesh” Jesus Christ as well as for all the other human
beings who will follow his example is – at the end of the allegorical interpretation
of Similitudes 5 – that of becoming “partner” (κοινωνός) of the holy spirit.
Strikingly enough, the two passages examined here seem to share also a textual
and interpretive issue that has been already mentioned above while reviewing
in brief Hermas’s Similitude 5.6.7. As noted previously in the translation and
comment of 2 Clem. 14.3, there exists a variant between the two extant witnesses
concerning the problematic presence or absence of the pronoun αὐτοῦ. Scholarly
opinions are divided on a complex problem that is rendered even trickier by the
scant manuscript basis on which one is forced to rely with respect to the final
chapters of 2 Clem. Without delving too much in the text-critical side of the
issue, it is interesting to note that, as in Hermas’s Similitude 5 the theological
discourse slides almost seamlessly (and puzzlingly in light of later Christian doc-
trinal developments) from a christological to an ecclesiological plan, likewise in
2 Clem. 14 there appears to be a striking “confusion” between the ecclesiological
and the anthropological dimension. Obviously, as it has been observed above
with respect to Hermas’s case, the sense of confusion is magnified (or, one
could say, even generated) because the text is approached employing anachro-
nistic theological categories and distinctions. For the case of 2 Clem. 14.3 the
interpretation of the entire passage (and of its Greek grammar) becomes much
more streamlined if one accepts – following the position taken by Christopher
Tuckett – that the idea conveyed is that human beings must preserve the ekklesia
uncorrupted in their own flesh.
In sum, it is possible to envisage 2 Clem. 14 as operating with a notion of pos-
session similar to the one present in Hermas’s Shepherd. However, there remains
an important stumbling block for such a hypothesis. As noted again by Tuckett, 2
Clem. never puts human beings in direct relationship with the pneuma, which –
even in its identification with Christ – seems to be always presented as an es-
chatological “reward” to be obtained after they will have undergone a period of
“test” in the flesh.38 This is a fundamental objection and a key observation that
will be taken up more in detail in the final section of the paper.

38 Tuckett, 2 Clement, 72.

84 Giovanni B. Bazzana

In concluding this section, however, it is worth mentioning that traces of pos-

session, similar to those encountered in Hermas, can be found also elsewhere in
2 Clem. beyond chapter 14. That is the case chiefly for the language of διψυχία
which counts a substantial number of occurrences (11.2,5; 19.2), particularly in
a text as short as 2 Clem. It is true that 2 Clem. seems to emphasize the cognicen-
tric nuance of διψυχία much more than Hermas does,39 but the overall context
of the writing (in particular, when one factors in also the previous analysis of
chapter 14) enables one to read such a terminological preference in a more
enriching perspective.40
Moreover, it is worth adding – as done at the end of the previous section –
some very brief reflections on the presence of the idea of pneuma possession
in early Christ-movement texts that have been included in the New Testament.
Once more, the Pauline epistles seem to offer the best comparandum. As Paul
seems to envisage the current ontological state of Christ as that of a πνεῦμα,41
likewise his beloved formula “in Christ” should be understood as indicating the
“hosting” of Christ on the part of Christ believers.42 Some Pauline concepts that
depend on the central religious experience of pneuma (or Christ) possession in
Paul’s groups can prove themselves important also to achieve a more adequate
understanding of 2 Clem. 14. That is the case, for instance, for the apostle’s
notions of human beings as the temple of God43 or of the group as the “body of
Christ.”

39 2 Clem. 11.2: Ταλαίπωροί εἰσιν οἱ δίψυχοι, οἱ διστάζοντες τῇ καρδίᾳ (“Miserable are the
double-souled, those who doubt in their heart”).
40 The portion of 2 Clem. 11.2 quoted in the previous footnote is part of the explicit
quotation of a “prophetic word” (possibly coming from 1 Clem. 23, which in turn attributes
it to a “scripture”), but exactly this context seems to move the meaning of being δίψυχοι in a
non-cognitive direction and towards “the heart,” as expected by Seitz. See also the hypothesis of
Brox (Hirt, 551–552) that the common use of the διψυχία language in Hermas, 1 Clem., and 2
Clem. might indicate a shared Roman theological milieu for the three writings.
41 Representative texts that presuppose such a notion are the already mentioned Rom
1:3–4, but also Rom 8:9–11; 1 Cor 15:45, and possibly 2 Cor 3:17. The point had been already
established more than 100 years ago by Adolf Deissmann, Die neutestamentliche Formel “in
Christo Jesu” (Marburg: Elwert, 1892).
42 The formula has its most direct parallels in the Gospels (in particular, Mark’s) phrases
used to indicate possession by the “holy spirit” (Mk 1:8) or by “impure spirits” (Mk 1:23). This
point too had been established earlier by Albert Schweitzer, Die Mystik des Apostels Paulus
(Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1930), even though the German scholar employed the unhelpful
category of “mysticism.” This line of analysis has been revived fruitfully in recent years in the
work of authors such as Colleen Shantz, Paul in Ecstasy: the Neurobiology of the Apostle’s Life and
Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), and John Ashton, The Religion of Paul
the Apostle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
43 This imagery occurs also in 2 Clem. 9.3 (δεῖ οὖν ἡμᾶς ὡς ναὸν θεοῦ φυλάσσειν τὴν
σάρκα), but the context does not enable one to establish whether this is a mere metaphoric
redeployment of an admittedly very common expression or if this is more organically con-
nected with the experience of possession as it is in Paul.
 Beyond “Gnosticism” 85

Paul’s well-known development of the latter motif in 1 Cor 6:12–20, for in-
stance, can be a very convenient locus in which to highlight the role of posses-
sion and the ethical concerns that surround it in the apostle’s writing as well as
in 2 Clem. 14:
All things are lawful for me, but not all things are beneficial. All things are lawful for me,
but I will not be dominated by anything. 13. Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach
for food, and God will render inoperative both one and the other. The body is meant not
for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14. And God raised the Lord
and will also raise us by his power. 15. Do you not know that your bodies are members
of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a
prostitute? Never! 16. Do you not know that whoever is united to a prostitute becomes one
body with her? For it is said: ‘The two shall be one flesh’. 17. But whoever is united to the
Lord becomes one spirit with him. 18. Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits
is outside the body, but the fornicator sins against the body itself. 19. Or do you not know
that your body is a temple of the holy spirit within you, which you have from God, and
that you are not your own? 20. For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in
your body.

Halvor Moxnes has provided a particularly insightful Foucauldian reading of

this important passage.44 Among his many significant observations Moxnes
acknowledges that while Paul is here making a moral point that most ancient
thinkers would have shared, the reasoning behind it is quite distinctive. Indeed,
the apostle does not undergird his opposition to sexual relationships with pros-
titutes through a divine commandment (as other Jewish authors would have
done) or by appealing to the need to exercise one’s emotional control (as other
Greco-Roman philosophers would have done). In fact, Paul states twice that
his moral instruction is grounded in the fact that his addressees’ “bodies are
members of Christ” (τὰ σώματα ὑμῶν μέλη Χριστοῦ ἐστιν) in 6:15 and that
their “body is a temple of the holy spirit” (τὸ σῶμα ὑμῶν ναὸς τοῦ ἐν ὑμῖν ἁγίου
πνεύματός ἐστιν). As we have seen already before with respect to the notions
of the “body of Christ” and of the indwelling of the spirit in believers, both
these ideas are clearly linked to πνεῦμα possession and to the incorporation “in
Christ” that is produced by it. As in other important Pauline passages, such a
union between Christ believers and the πνεῦμα is conceived in radically bodily
terms. As a consequence, it is also exposed to very material threats coming from
the outside, since these could “corrupt” such a relationship and compromise
the presence of the “spirit” within the believers.45 In this perspective, posses-
44 Halvor Moxnes, “Asceticism and Christian Identity in Antiquity: A Dialogue with
Foucault and Paul,” JSNT 26 (2003): 3–29.
45 A similar subtext runs behind the long discussion on the meats sacrificed to idols in
1 Cor 8–10 and the pericope of 2 Cor 6:14–7:1, whose Pauline authenticity is discussed, but
with unconvincing arguments, since the cluster contains both the themes of the Christ group
as temple of the πνεῦμα and that of discernment of the “spirits;” for a good analysis of the
latter pericope, see John R. Levison, Filled With the Spirit (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009),
253–315.
86 Giovanni B. Bazzana

sion itself, far from being an impulse to amoral behavior fostered by the mis-
interpretation of the Pauline message on the part of his “opponents,” becomes a
privileged foundation for ethical reasoning and action in the very teaching of the
apostle. That this feature cannot be taken as a trait unique to πνεῦμα possession
in Paul’s Christ groups is confirmed by even a very cursory examination of the
ethnographic literature. Thus, almost all the studies of possession cults report
about constraints that are imposed by the “spirits” on their mediums and that
have very concrete bodily and social implications. For the tromba possession of
Madagascar, Michael Lambek describes in detail the requirements that mediums
must observe in choosing their dress or in avoiding eating the specific foods
that their respective royal “spirits” ate on the day of their death.46 Indeed, these
are the means through which possession is made present in the life of mediums
well beyond the actual moments of manifestation of the “spirits,” so that one can
legitimately speak with Lambek of possession as a source of ordinary ethics and
of the formation of specific subjectivities for possessed individuals.47 Likewise,
Adeline Masquelier gives a very compelling account of the West African bori
“spirits” and of their heavy impositions on their mediums.48 If such requests,
which can be interpreted as expressions of resistance to Islam as well as to
modernity (for instance, through the prohibition of riding in cars), are not met,
the “spirits” can retaliate by causing illnesses in their chosen mediums49 or even
by abandoning them altogether.
Furthermore, Moxnes notes that one of the main subtexts of the pericope is
that the Corinthians are not in complete possession of their bodies and that the
latter cannot convey their identities immediately or unquestionably.50 Moxnes
46 For the present purposes, an interesting parallel case is that of Mayotte mediums living
in France and observing traditional food taboos there in their grocery shopping habits (for
instance, concerning chicken) as described by Michael Lambek, “Rheumatic Irony: Questions
of Agency and Self-deception as Refracted through the Art of Living with Spirits,” in Illness and
Irony: On the Ambiguity of Suffering in Culture, ed. Michael Lambek and Paul Antze (New York:
Berghahn, 2004), 40–59.
47 In this light, it is appropriate to follow Denise K. Buell’s lead and correct Dale Martin’s
assessment of this theme in 1 Corinthians to the effect that Paul’s crucial message for the Corin-
thians “is not about protecting one’s closed boundaries, but negotiating one’s inevitable porous-
ness ‘correctly’:” see “The Microbes and Pneuma That Therefore I Am,” in Divinanimality:
Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology, ed. Stephen D. Moore (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2014), 63–87, here p. 301, n. 41.
48 Adeline Masquelier, “Narratives of Power, Images of Wealth: The Ritual Economy of Bori
in the Market,” in Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa, ed.
Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3–33.
49 One might interpret in this perspective the otherwise puzzling aside of Paul in 1 Cor
11:27–30 (“Whoever, therefore, eats the bread and drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy
manner will be answerable for the blood and body of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only
then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the
body, eat and drink judgment against themselves. For this reason many of you are weak and ill,
and some have died”.)
50 “It is not so that a man is the master of his body, so that he can shape it according to his
 Beyond “Gnosticism” 87

concludes that the entire moral instruction and the ascetic project enshrined in
1 Cor 6:12–20 depend on the original experience of incorporation: “the bodies
of Christian men in Corinth were determined by being ‘members of Christ’. […]
First came their inclusion into the body of Christ, so that their bodies became
part of Christ’s body. Then, as a consequence, came asceticism in the form of
their renunciation of other bodily unions.”51 But the experience of incorporation
depended originally on the experience of πνεῦμα possession. Anthropological
studies show that it is indeed in possession that a new subjectivity is negotiated
and constructed through the traumatic experience of limited agency accompa-
nied by the empowering presence of the “spirits.”52

4. Ekklesia possession in 2 Clem. 14?

The preceding pages have left open a fundamental question concerning the text
discussed and the interpretive hypothesis submitted here. An analysis of the the-
ological profile of 2 Clem. 14 shows significant similarities with Hermas’s Shep-
herd (and less closely with some Pauline documents) in particular with respect
to the central role of the religious experience of pneuma possession. However,
as noted already above, it appears that 2 Clem. systematically avoids connecting
the experience of the pneuma with the present fleshy state of human life.53 On
the contrary, the partaking in the pneuma is presented in the entire text as con-
stitutive of the eschatological “reward” that expects those Christ believers whose
behavior will prove itself adequate. To counter such a position, scholars have
sometimes invoked the aorist participle κολληθέντος, which occurs in a genitive
absolute construction in 2 Clem. 14.5. In these interpretations, the tense of the
Greek verb could indicate that the pneuma was “glued” to the human “flesh” in
a period chronologically preceding the eschatological time in which the same
“flesh” receives the “reward” of life and incorruptibility. This is an important
observation and one that would reconnect 2 Clem. to Hermas and Paul from a
theological point of view. However, it is dubious that a single participle should
be taken as sufficient evidence to reverse the interpretation of entire paragraphs,

wishes. To speak in modern terms, a body does not have an ‘essence’ in itself; it does not possess
an ontological identity. […] And the primary determination of the male body is that it is a
member of Christ’s body. This is not understood intellectually, in terms of world-view, but in
terms of an inclusion into another corporeal existence” (Moxnes, “Asceticism,” 23).
51 Moxnes, “Asceticism,” 25.
52 See a hint in this direction in Guy Williams, The Spirit World in the Letters of Paul the
Apostle: A Critical Examination of the Role of Spiritual Beings in the Authentic Pauline Epistles,
FRLANT 231 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), 216–217.
53 The point is made in a convincing way in Pratscher, “Geistverständnis,” 45–46.
88 Giovanni B. Bazzana

without even considering the fact that aorist tenses do not necessarily always
convey a temporal meaning.54
Very widespread, in particular within German-speaking literature, is the hy-
pothesis that the specific pneumatological configuration of 2 Clem. 14 might de-
rive from a – rather covert – anti-Gnostic polemics that the author of the writing
pursued also in other passages. More recently, Wilhelm Pratscher suggested that
the syzygy of Christ and the ekklesia introduced in 2 Clem. 14.2 is dependent on
Valentinian speculations about the primordial ogdoad of which one would find
traces indirectly in Irenaeus’s Against the Heresies 1.11.1 and more directly in Nag
Hammadi’s Tractatus Tripartitus. Pratscher, with many others, concludes that
the author of 2 Clem. is adopting the language of Valentinian opponents in order
to polemicize more effectively against their enthusiasm and their conviction that
having the pneuma already on earth would result in realized eschatology.55
The entire issue of potential anti-Gnostic polemics in 2 Clem. is sorely in
need of a significant re-examination in light of the most recent scholarship on
“Gnosticism” and on the unacknowledged biases imported when such a label is
employed in much of contemporary research. James Kelhoffer offers a completely
convincing way forward in the methodological premise to his recent study of 2
Clem. 12.56 In this perspective, the evidentiary basis connecting 2 Clem. 14 and
Valentinian speculations on primordial syzygies appears quite fragile. Thus, it
is worth highlighting that the passage from Irenaeus invoked by Pratscher does
not present (as Pratscher himself acknowledges) the pair Christ-ekklesia, but
only anthropos-ekklesia and, in order to try to make it fit, one has to include the
mention of ζωή, which is in fact only extant in a contiguous syzygy. More impor-
tantly, as done by Kelhoffer with respect to the idea that the “Gnostics” upheld
either ascetic or libertine ethics, it must be stressed that the supposed “gnostic”
proclivity for enthusiasm and thus individualism or moral deregulation in com-
munal life, is more the product of contemporary scholarly imagination (heavily
influenced by the ancient heresiological discourse) than of an adequate analysis
of the evidence. In fact, both the analysis of Hermas (and Paul) and the ethno-
graphic study of contemporary cases of spirit possession attest that such “charis-
matic” experiences are highly productive in cultural terms to generate a stronger
sense of community and to provide means for ethical reasoning and action. In
sum, it seems that the genealogy sketched in the preceding pages constitutes a
more suitable context in which to inscribe the pneumatology and ecclesiology
of 2 Clem. 14 (while some of the “gnostic” parallels might be retained at best as

54 It appears that Pratscher, Clemensbrief, 188, is convincing on this point in siding with
Klaus Wengst against Andreas Lindemann.
55 Pratscher, “Kirchenverständnis,” 108–112.
56 James A. Kelhoffer, “Eschatology, Androgynous Thinking, and the Question of Anti-
gnosticism in 2 Clement 12,” VChr 72 (2018): 142–164.
 Beyond “Gnosticism” 89

significant witnesses to the same trajectory within the early history of the Christ
movement).
The last observation shows that there is an alternative (even if admittedly
more convoluted) route to solve the interpretive conundrum with which the
present section has started. In 2 Clem. 14 the possession of Christ believers is
not performed by the pneuma (which is identical with Christ) as in Hermas and
Paul, but by the ekklesia, while all the other elements remain identical among
our texts. In this perspective, it is crucial to understand that the ekklesia itself
is presented from the very beginning of chapter 14 – in 2 Clem. 14.1 – as a
pneumatic entity, certainly not equal to the Christ-pneuma, but at least ennobled
by its creation before the entire cosmos. Moreover, the ekklesia is treated – in
its relationship with the fleshy human beings – in the same way in which the
Christ-pneuma is treated in Hermas and Paul. The ekklesia is present in the flesh
of the Christ believers and as such enables them to form the “body of Christ”.
In turn, each Christ believer is tasked with the responsibility of keeping the
pneumatic ekklesia unblemished through a strict observance of ethical demands
with the final goal of retaining the pneumatic entity within the flesh. Finally,
the ekklesia goes through a trajectory (briefly sketched in the entire chapter 14),
which is almost identical with the three-stages “pneumatic christology” that has
been illustrated above with respect to Hermas and Paul. As the Christ-pneuma
pre-existed in a pneumatic state and later became flesh in order eventually to be
restored to his initial place, likewise the ekklesia pre-existed in a pneumatic form
and then was manifested within human flesh (or even “was incarnated”) in order
ultimately to return to its original spiritual condition and to give human flesh an
effective means to achieve salvation.57
There is little doubt that, on this basis, it is possible to give an account of
the theological profile of 2 Clem. 14, which rescues the chapter from being a
jumble of uncoordinated and less-than-well-formed thoughts. The combination
between possession and ekklesia remains a unique feature of 2 Clem., but at the
very least now it can be inscribed within a coherent historical trajectory. Indeed,
the period between the end of the first and the first half of the second century sees
several texts belonging to the Christ movement in which the ekklesia moves from
being the simple designation of a group to become a cosmic concept as, for in-
stance, in Ephesians. The analogies between the latter text and 2 Clem. have been
well highlighted by Muddiman, even though his argument for a dependency of
2 Clem. on Ephesians is ultimately unconvincing.58 Hermas’s Shepherd seems
to go even a step further by personalizing and making a narrative character out
of the ekklesia in a way that does not happen in other ancient texts. There is
even a paragraph at the very beginning of Hermas’s Similitudes 9 (a passage that

57 Such a trajectory is envisaged also by Pratscher, “Geistverständnis,” 43–44.

58 Muddiman, “Church,” 114–116.
90 Giovanni B. Bazzana

could be a later addition to the final form of the writing), in which some scholars
have proposed to see the ekklesia taking over even the role of “son of God.”59
Whatever one makes of this instance, the Shepherd seems to have generated a
significant number of similar developments straddling the boundary between
pneumatology and ecclesiology. For example, a very small scrap of papyrus – dis-
covered among the first ones in the fortunate findings of Oxyrhynchos (P. Oxy
I 5) – carries the text of Hermas’s Mand. 11.9 (for which see footnote 33 above)
with the addition of a very interesting glossa designed to explain the meaning of
the unusual phrase “the prophetic spirit:”60
Τὸ γὰρ προφητικὸν πνεῦμα τὸ σωματεῖόν ἐστιν τῆς προφητικῆς τάξεως, ὅ ἐστιν τὸ σῶμα
τῆς σαρκὸς Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τὸ μιγὲν τῇ ἀνθρωπότητι διὰ Μαρίας.
For the prophetic spirit is the body of the prophetic order, which is the body of the flesh of
Jesus Christ, mixed with humanity through Mary.

In P. Oxy 5 the role of the ekklesia is taken up by the “prophetic order” (προφητικὴ
τάξις), which seems to indicate a group of prophets perhaps to be imagined in
the way in which Hermas describes the “assembly of just men who have the loy-
alty of the divine spirit” (συναγωγὴ ἀνδρῶν δικαίων τῶν ἐχόντων πίστιν θείου
πνεύματος) in Herm. Mand. 11. What matters for the present purposes is the
fact that such a “prophetic order” is equated with “the body of the flesh of Jesus
Christ.” This appears at first sight a very clumsy and redundant phrasing, but
maybe it is like that because it strives to combine the idea that the τάξις is both
and at the same time the “body of Christ” through possession by his pneuma
as well as the “flesh of Christ” in an incarnational scheme similar to the one
encountered in 2 Clem. 14 and in Hermas’s Sim. 5. Likewise, in 2 Clem. 14.3 the
pneumatic ekklesia is manifested “in the flesh of Christ,” which is constituted by
the combined “flesh” of all the Christ believers who are possessed by it.

5. Conclusion

The present contribution has tried to contextualize historically and theologically

the pneumatological and ecclesiological reasoning in 2 Clem. 14. It appears that
the entire 2 Clem. and this chapter in particular show interesting analogies with
Hermas’s Shepherd (and the authentic Paul) with respect to two main features: the
understanding of Christ as pneuma and the centrality of the religious experience

59 Herm. Sim. 9.1,1: θέλω σοι δεῖξαι, ὅσα σοὶ ἔδειξε τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον τὸ λαλῆσαν μετὰ
σοῦ ἐν μορφῇ τῆς ἐκκλησίας⋅ ἐκεῖνο γὰρ τὸ πνεῦμα ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστιν. However, Brox, Hirt,
532–533, concludes that the effect might be a mere product of Hermas’s literary clumsiness.
60 This very interesting text would deserve a more thorough discussion, for which one
can see Bazzana, “Corpo”, passim, and Henning Paulsen, “Papyrus Oxyrhynchus I. 5 und die
ΔΙΑΔΟΧΗ ΤΩΝ ΠΡΟΦΗΤΩΝ,” NTS 25 (1978–1979): 443–453.
 Beyond “Gnosticism” 91

of pneuma possession for the religious life of the members of the Christ group.
In this perspective, the development of 2 Clem. 14 can be inscribed within an
early trajectory, in which the pneumatic and cosmic entity designed as ekklesia
becomes more and more personalized and endowed with autonomous agency.
In the case of 2 Clem. the participation in this movement might have been
favored – at a moment of incipient christological elaboration, as attested by 2
Clem. 1 – by the goal of differentiating the christological and the anthropological
plans, which might otherwise overlap in Christ-pneuma possession as in the case
of Hermas’s Similitudes 5.61

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 The Designation “Gnostic” for the Gospel of Mary
and its Implications
A Critical Evaluation

Judith Hartenstein

The purpose of my essay is to explore the implications of the label “gnostic” for
the interpretation of an early Christian gospel using the Gospel of Mary as a test
case. The recent debate on the term “Gnosticism,” which includes the major con-
tribution of Karen L. King, challenged many views formerly held.1 The picture of
early Christianity has changed; it is no longer possible to speak with confidence
about “Gnosticism” as a fixed set of ideas or a clearly marked social movement.
Moreover, the term itself is tainted with its long use in contexts that emphasize or
even construct boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy. From the perspective
of this debate, I will look back on former research on the Gospel of Mary, which
discusses its “gnostic” character. In retrospect, it might be easier to evaluate
the reasons for calling the Gospel of Mary “gnostic” and to examine the con-
sequences of this designation. In addition, the new reconstruction of the Book
of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos (CT) provides a parallel to Gospel of Mary
p. 15–17 whose impact on this question needs to be analyzed.2 In my opinion, it
leads to a further differentiation of the problem by displaying new aspects of the
possible “gnostic” involvements of the Gospel of Mary.
Writing about the designation “gnostic” for the Gospel of Mary following
the debate about “Gnosticism” poses terminological difficulties. In this essay,
I use the terms in quotation marks when referring to research on the Gospel
of Mary (including former publications of my own) that applies it. Different
authors might use the terms in different ways and in most cases, they are not
clearly defined, but I will discuss the problems connected to them and mark the
terms as a kind of citation. However, I have doubts whether the terms are still
helpful as an analytical tool. I see related theological ideas in a number of texts
1 Cf. Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2003); Michael A. Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious
Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
2 Gregor Wurst published the Coptic text (with German translation), cf. Gregor Wurst,
“Weitere neue Fragmente aus Codex Tchacos: Zum ‘Buch des Allogenes’ und zu Corpus Her-
menticum XIII,” in Judasevangelium und Codex Tchacos, ed. Enno Edzard Popkes and Gregor
Wurst, WUNT 297 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 1–12.
96 Judith Hartenstein

from antiquity (for example among the writings from Nag Hammadi) that need
a label, and I usually still call these ideas gnostic, mostly because I do not have
a better term. Yet, speaking of Gnosticism tends to imply a concept I do not
have in mind; it is impossible to separate the term from its history. Moreover,
the word itself is not particularly fitting for the phenomenon I want to name. In
my view, an important characteristic of several texts is the idea that the highest
deity is not the creator of this world. The texts elaborate this idea mythologi-
cally, which involves a number of heavenly beings with similar names and/or
functions. As a consequence of this view of creation, the texts portray human
beings as strangers to the created world they are living in and as really belong-
ing to a heavenly realm they are trying to regain. A number of texts describe
or clearly presuppose such ideas, for example the Apocryphon of John, the
Hypostasis of the Archons, the Wisdom of Jesus Christ, the First Apocalypse
of James or Allogenes. Despite these parallels concerning the formation of the
world, the texts disagree in many other questions such as the possible role of a
savior and the process of salvation (knowledge is not necessarily a central cat-
egory) or aspects of anthropology. Besides, the relevance of the creation myth
for the theology of the writing might differ. It is my perspective to group the
texts primarily according to this feature – the first readers might have regarded
other aspects as more important. Although a literary relationship among
these ideas can be detected, it is not at all clear in which way their authors or
readers are socially connected. Many of them might be part of “normal” Chris-
tian communities, not separate groups with for example rituals of their own.
I would like to call the concept common to these writings “mythologically
founded alienation towards the world” and I hope it is more helpful to use such
a rather complex description than to try to redefine the term gnostic. In my
opinion, it is possible to pose the question whether a writing like the Gospel
of Mary promotes or presupposes such a mythologically founded alienation
towards the world, even if it does not describe the creation. I will develop my
answer to this question in the second part of my essay after taking a closer look
at the discussion of its “gnostic” character.

Is the Gospel of Mary a “Gnostic” Text? A Review of the Discussion

Unlike the Apocryphon of John or the Wisdom of Jesus Christ, which follow the
Gospel of Mary in the Berlin Codex (BG), the Gospel of Mary is not an obviously
“gnostic” text. It does not narrate a creation story, which stresses the difference
between the highest deity and the inferior creator of the material world. No
typical heavenly individuals such as the demiurge Yaldabaoth or certain angels
are mentioned. There are no other specific “gnostic” theological traits – if such
a thing can be ascertained at all – or any outward testimonies connecting the
 The Designation “Gnostic” for the Gospel of Mary and its Implications  97

Gospel of Mary to such groups.3 The other tractates of the Berlin Codex are the
most solid link to “Gnosticism,” although the Act of Peter, the fourth writing of
the codex, is not regarded as such.
Nevertheless, when the Gospel of Mary was published, in his edition of the
Berlin Codex Walter Till simply presumes a “gnostic” background without fur-
ther explanation.4 He regards the Gospel of Mary as closely related to writings
like the Apocryphon of John5 and uses this connection to explain the content of
the Gospel of Mary. In the ascent of the soul, for example, Till sees the hostile
powers as powers of the material creation.6 From today’s perspective, the lack
of explanation is astonishing and it seems rather optimistic (and perhaps a bit
too simplistic) to assume that the same general theological concept underlies
the different texts. However, for several decades and up until now, most research
follows Till’s view on the text. Its “gnostic” character is taken for granted and
sometimes just stated, sometimes elaborated on.
The reasons given for the “gnostic” character of the Gospel of Mary vary. Most
often mentioned are the genre, the general character of esoteric teachings, typical
“gnostic” language and topics (if specified, the ascent of the soul is most promi-
nent), connections to clearly “gnostic” writings like the Apocryphon of John, and
the relationship of the disciples with the greater importance of Mary and Levi
over Peter and Andrew. This list looks impressive, but on closer examination, the
items tend to become more problematic and less convincing. It is not so easy to
find persuasive arguments for a general statement about, for example, the typical
“gnostic” topics and language. Moreover, opinion differs about many aspects of
the text, thus the so-called “gnostic” character often presupposes a certain inter-
pretation.
Just a few examples show how difficult it is to substantiate a general state-
ment about the “gnostic” character of the Gospel of Mary: In his first overview
of “gnostic” gospels for the third edition of Hennecke-Schneemelder, Henri-
Charles Puech simply writes about the Gospel of Mary: “Die Sprache und die
verschiedenen Themen der Schrift lassen keinen Zweifel an ihrem gnostischen
Charakter und gnostischen Ursprung.”7 Years later, I tried to substantiate this

3 The Gospel of Mary is not mentioned or cited by any church father as far as we know the
texts, cf. Christopher Tuckett, The Gospel of Mary, Oxford Early Christian Gospel Texts (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.
4 Cf. Walter C. Till, ed., Die gnostischen Schriften des koptischen Papyrus Berolinensis 8502,
TU 60 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1955) – his view is already displayed in the title of his edition,
which only included the first three writings of the codex.
5 Nonetheless, Till differentiates among the writings when he states that unlike the Apocry-
phon of John the Gospel of Mary does not present esoteric teaching, cf. Till, Schriften, 31.
6 Cf. Till, Schriften, 27–28.
7 Henri-Charles Puech, “Gnostische Evangelien und verwandte Dokumente,” in Neu­
testamentliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung: Band I/3: Evangelien, völlig neubearbeitete
Auflage, ed. Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm Schneemelcher (Tübingen: Mohr 1959), 255.
98 Judith Hartenstein

statement and listed instances of typically “gnostic” formulations from the

Gospel of Mary.8 However, my argument was not conclusive, as critics have con-
vincingly pointed out.9 None of the examples really proves the case because they
can be interpreted in different ways. I still think that the language of the Gospel
of Mary leaves a kind of “gnostic” impression, that it would fit in well with ideas
about a mythologically founded alienation towards the world; however there is
nothing specific to prove Puech’s statement.
There are similar problems with themes addressed in the Gospel of Mary.
Silke Petersen mentions the dissolution of matter and the ascent of the soul as
typically “gnostic.”10 But surely, a negative attitude towards matter is widespread
in antiquity. The idea that the soul separates from the body after death and goes
up to heaven is common, too – if the Gospel of Mary is narrating a post-mortal
ascent. It is a further complication that the text is fragmentary and needs inter-
pretation. It is possible to understand the text in the context of a “gnostic” view of
the world ruled by archontic powers, but is such a background really necessary?
More promising to assess the question of “gnostic” themes are parallel texts
like the directions Jesus gives to James concerning his ascent in the First Apoca-
lypse of James (NHC V p. 33,2–35,25).11 However, prior to the discovery of the
parallel from the Book of Allogenes (CT p. 63–66) – I will come back to that –
none of them was close enough to prove the connection. The argument of Antti
Marjanen demonstrates the difficulties: He involves Gospel of Thomas 50, which
is in itself not at all clear, as well as other texts and has to fight with fundamental
differences to the Gospel of Mary although trying to show the similarities.12 On
one hand, the Gospel of Mary seems to have links to ascent-texts from writings
that might be called “gnostic”,13 although it does not simply concur with them.
On the other hand, Esther de Boer criticised the “gnostic” parallels as insufficient
and suggested other texts that might be helpful; although none of them is really
close to the Gospel of Mary either.14 Christopher Tuckett matches the names of
the powers in the Gospel of Mary to a list of archontic powers in the Apocryphon

8Judith Hartenstein, Die zweite Lehre: Erscheinungen des Auferstandenen als Rahmenerzäh-
lungen frühchristlicher Dialoge, TU 146 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2000), 132–133.
9 Cf. the general critique by Karen L. King, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the
First Woman Apostle (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2003), 170–174; specifically addressed
to my list of “gnostic” language in personal conversation.
10 Cf. Silke Petersen, ‘Zerstört die Werke der Weiblichkeit!’: Maria Magdalena, Salome und
andere Jüngerinnen Jesu in christlich-gnostischen Schriften, NHMS 48 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 60.
11 Irenaeus, Haer. 1.21.5 describes a ritual for a dying person including verbal parallels to
the instructions to James. Similar ascent-texts are found in Origen (Cels. VI 31), 2 Jeû 52, Pistis
Sophia 112, and Gos. Thom. 50. Only in Pistis Sophia does a soul ascend.
12 Cf. Antti Marjanen, The Woman Jesus Loved: Mary Magdalene in the Nag Hammadi
Library and Related Documents, NHMS 40 (Brill: Leiden, 1996), 94.
13 I do not think the Gospel of Thomas should be included here.
14 Cf. Esther de Boer, The Gospel of Mary: Beyond a Gnostic and a Biblical Mary Magdalene,
JSNT.S 260 (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 81–83.
 The Designation “Gnostic” for the Gospel of Mary and its Implications  99

of John, which might support their “gnostic” background even if they are not
part of an ascent-story.15 This is a point of overlap; although only three or four
out of seven names are equal.
Another important argument for calling the Gospel of Mary “gnostic” lies in
its genre as a post-resurrection dialogue useful in the transmission of esoteric
teaching. Especially Anne Pasquier regards the Gospel of Mary as an example of
esoteric teaching through visions and thereby as typically “gnostic.”16 Yet, both
parts of the argument can be challenged: The link between “gnostic” and esoteric
is not at all clear – texts with a typical view of creation are not necessarily esoteric
(see for example the Wisdom of Jesus Christ or the Letter of Peter to Philip) and
vice versa (for example the Gospel of Thomas). Moreover, the esoteric character
of the Gospel of Mary is open to interpretation.17
Decisions about genre are difficult because more than half of the pages of
the Gospel of Mary, including the beginning, are missing. Thus, the argument
moves in a kind of circle: The genre shows the “gnostic” context – and because
the Gospel of Mary is considered as “gnostic,” the genre of dialogue gospel (or
“gnostic” dialogue) is appropriate to fill the lacuna. As far as I am aware, nobody
challenged the reconstruction of the missing first pages with an appearance of
the risen Jesus and the similarities of genre to the Apocryphon of John and the
Wisdom of Jesus Christ. However, it should be noted that this view is at least
intertwined with, and to some degree depends on the assumption of a “gnostic”
origin. Moreover, even if the Gospel of Mary uses the same literary form as some
texts which include a mythologically founded alienation towards the world, this
does not prove that its content is the same. The Gospel of Mary could take the
form to display its own theology or the genre might have a completely different
origin. I have argued for a rather narrow definition of the genre: In my opinion,
most dialogue gospels and the origin of the genre should be considered as “gnos-
tic.”18 However, at least one of the extant writings, the Epistula Apostolorum, has
a different, rather anti-“gnostic” than “gnostic”, attitude.19 This is not the only
possible view of the genre, though. Recently Sarah Parkhouse presented a much
broader definition and included writings without any “gnostic” connections like
the Apocalypse of Peter (not the one from Nag Hammadi).20

15 Cf. Tuckett, Gospel, 175–180; see also Marjanen, Woman, 94 for a similar observation.
16 Cf. Anne Pasquier, L’Évangile selon Marie (BG 1), BCNH Section Textes 10 (Québec:
Presses de l’Université Laval, 1983), 5–6.
17 Cf. Till, Schriften, 31 for a different opinion. Although Mary has secret knowledge, she
shares her knowledge.
18 Cf. Hartenstein, Lehre, 253–254 and 313–314.
19 Cf. Hartenstein, Lehre, 102–106 and 322.
20 Cf. Sarah Parkhouse, “Eschatology and the Risen Lord: Mary and the Dialogue Gospel
Genre” (Ph.D. diss., Durham University, 2017), 32–33. In consequence, she does not use the
designation “gnostic” for the Gospel of Mary.
100 Judith Hartenstein

Another argument about the “gnostic” character derives from the character-
ization and interactions of the disciples in the Gospel of Mary that might reflect
the social context of its author and/or readers. The conflict between Peter and
Mary might mirror a conflict between orthodoxy and heresy with Mary as a
“gnostic” heroine.21 However, because the Gospel of Mary is a literary text
narrating events from the past, it is difficult to draw direct conclusions for its
social setting. It might show some affinity to a minority position, but that is
not a certain interpretation. Moreover, a “gnostic” interpretation of the social
setting presupposes a certain picture of early Christianity with separate groups
associated with certain disciples.22 Yet, this picture might be false – and Mary is
not an exclusively “gnostic” disciple, she is present in all kinds of early Christian
gospels. Besides, there is again the problem of the interpretation of the text: How
hostile is the relationship of the disciples depicted in the Gospel of Mary?23
In contrast to the majority of scholars, some – most prominent Esther de
Boer and Karen King – rejected the idea that the Gospel of Mary should be
considered as “gnostic.” They saw the reasons offered for its “gnostic” character
as insufficient and suggested alternative or additional contexts that should be
taken into account.24 In many cases, this critique is justified, although it seems
more difficult to establish a comprehensive alternative context.25 This view of the
Gospel of Mary does not only give a different answer to the question whether the
text is “gnostic” or not, but sometimes leads to or is joined by a general rejection
of the concept of “Gnosticism.” If something like “Gnosticism” does not actually
exist and cannot be meaningfully applied to a phenomenon of antiquity,26 there
is no need to discuss the designation “gnostic” for the Gospel of Mary.27
Looking back on six decades of research on the Gospel of Mary, its “gnostic”
character was the dominant position for most of the time. The efforts to explain
this view increased during this time while similarly the view was challenged. In
my opinion, this interaction worked in both directions: If the consensus is con-
tested, the need arises to defend it by reasoning. Yet, the elaborate explanations
displayed the weaknesses of the argument as well and offered opportunities for
criticism. In general, later scholarship tends to give reasons for a designation as

21 Cf. Andrea Taschl-Erber, Maria von Magdala – erste Apostolin? Joh 20,1–18: Tradition
und Relecture, Herders biblische Studien 51 (Freiburg: Herder, 2007), 524, 562.
22 Cf. Taschl-Erber, Maria, 524 passim.
23 Cf. Tuckett, Gospel, 201–203; Judith Hartenstein, “Wie ‘apokryph’ ist das Evangelium
nach Maria? Über die Schwierigkeiten einer Verortung,” in The Other Side: Apocryphal Per-
spectives on Ancient Christian “Orthodoxies,” ed. Tobias Nicklas et al., NTOA/StUNT 117 (Göt-
tingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2017), 120.
24 Cf. King, Gospel, 170–174; de Boer, Gospel, 32–34, 58–59.
25 Most convincing are the stoic parallels to the dialogue between Jesus and the disciples,
cf. de Boer, Gospel, 35–59.
26 Cf. King, Gnosticism, 226–227.
27 Cf. Parkhouse, “Eschatology,” 2–3.
 The Designation “Gnostic” for the Gospel of Mary and its Implications  101

“gnostic,” but rather weakens the case by doing so. I do not see any conclusive
evidence that the Gospel of Mary is linked to “Gnosticism” or rather to writings
expressing a mythologically founded alienation towards the world – prior to
the reconstruction of the text of the Book of Allogenes, as I will argue below.
Furthermore, the general discussion of the concept of “Gnosticism” calls many
elements formerly described as typically “gnostic” into question.28 In addition,
the text itself enhances the problems. In many instances, it is open to interpreta-
tion and its fragmentary condition poses additional difficulties. Nevertheless, the
number of possible links, even if every single one is weak, results in a stronger
argument.29

The Purpose and Consequences of the Designation “Gnostic”

The designation “gnostic” for the Gospel of Mary is not just a label, but has an
important impact on the interpretation of the text. First, the characterization
serves to provide additional information for the often very short statements of
the text. The powers the soul has to fight against can be understood as archontic
powers in the context of a “gnostic” myth of creation.30 In consequence, their
hostility and the strategy of the soul, for example the reference to its origin from
above, make sense. Such outside supplements are necessary for any interpreta-
tion as the Gospel of Mary does not provide an exhaustive argument but rather
collects short statements that presuppose further knowledge of the reader. Yet,
the understanding of the text differs depending on the background used and the
exegete might read something into the text that is not there and might overlook
the points that do not fit.31 For the position about matter at the beginning of the
Gospel of Mary, Stoic philosophy might offer a better and less fixed context than
“gnostic” ideas. Moreover, the discussion about “Gnosticism” showed that no
such unified concept exists that might help to understand the incomplete picture
the Gospel of Mary offers. Differentiation is necessary among “gnostic” texts;
they provide different combinations of theological ideas that makes it impossible
to supplement the Gospel of Mary with just one.
In addition, the “gnostic” context can be used to fill the lacuna of the manu-
script. The Gospel of Mary is not only a text that requires interpretation; it is
moreover a fragmentary text. If we want to imagine the content of the missing
pages, we need parallels and a more complete overall concept. Scholars agree
that the Gospel of Mary probably began with an appearance of the risen Jesus
28 Cf. King, Gnosticism, 191–217.
29 Cf. Tuckett, Gospel, 53–54.
30 Cf. Till, Schriften, 27–28 and many others.
31 In the ascent of the soul, the dialogue with ignorance about judging does not fit in so well
with a “gnostic” context.
102 Judith Hartenstein

as in other (mostly “gnostic”) writings. Other notions have met with less ap-
proval such as the suggestion of Michel Tardieu that the first pages must have
contained a creation myth like other “gnostic” treatises.32 The necessity as well as
the dangers of such speculation about what we do not have are obvious.
As another possible use, the designation “gnostic” for the Gospel of Mary
might provide a social context for the text and its first readers. Again, an accepted
concept of “Gnosticism” as a social phenomenon offers additional information
to understand the text. This is an important point for Erika Mohri, although
she rather stresses the differences in content among the “gnostic” writings and
is reluctant to see the conflict between Peter and Mary as a direct reflection of a
conflict between the main church and “gnostic” groups.33
On the other hand, if the Gospel of Mary is considered as “gnostic,” the text
can provide information to clarify our picture of early Christianity. It might be
seen as the product of a specific “gnostic” school.34 Alternatively, the text might
support a certain view of “gnostic” groups. The interactions of the disciples, if
they are seen as representatives of early Christian groups, might point to a still
intact community.35
Even if the designation “gnostic” for the Gospel of Mary is rejected, this
serves a purpose. It opens up the possibility to find different contexts in order
to fully understand the views displayed and the need to explicate the reasons for
using certain texts as parallels. Furthermore, the Gospel of Mary is included in
general early Christian discourse, it is not just part of a separate branch viewed as
heretical (whether social or theological). This does not only affect the placement
of the Gospel of Mary, but also changes the picture of early Christianity if a text
with such a strong position of a woman is part of it.36
In my view, the debate over whether the Gospel of Mary is “gnostic” or not
did not really come to a close, but somehow dissolved together with the fixed
concept of “Gnosticism.” Even if the term is still used to describe a cluster of
ideas in certain texts, it does not denote a unified theology. A specific view of
creation (including Yaldabaoth and other archontic powers) does not necessarily
lead to the same view of salvation or the same role of Christ or the same attitude
towards the body.37 It is therefore necessary to explain why a specific idea or

32 Cf. Michel Tardieu, Écrits gnostiques: Codex de Berlin (Paris: Cerf, 1984), 22.
33 Cf. Erika Mohri, Maria Magdalena: Frauenbilder in Evangelientexten des 1. bis 3. Jahr-
hunderts, Marburger Theologische Studien 63 (Marburg: Elwert, 2000), 280.
34 Cf. Tardieu, Écrits, 25, who links the Gospel of Mary to the school of Bardesanes.
35 Cf. Hartenstein, Lehre, 133–135 and 331. Since then, my doubts increased about the
validity of the picture the Gospel of Mary draws, cf. Hartenstein, “Evangelium”, 129–132.
36 Cf. King, Gospel, 174–177.
37 Cf. King, Gnosticism, 191–217, on differences among the Nag Hammadi writings regard-
ing dualism, ethics/asceticism, and doceticism; Judith Hartenstein, “Erscheinungsevangelien
(Gespräche mit dem Auferstandenen) im Kontext frühchristlicher Theologie: Anknüpfungs-
punkte und Besonderheiten der christologischen Vorstellungen,” in The Apocryphal Gospels
 The Designation “Gnostic” for the Gospel of Mary and its Implications  103

parallel writing can help to provide additional information for the fragmentary
and enigmatic text of the Gospel of Mary. Moreover, the boundaries between
“gnostic” and non-“gnostic” dissolve as well. Early Christian discourse was prob-
ably an open mixture of different ideas and “gnostic” texts take part in it; they
are not confined to their own group (in theology as well as in social practice).
For a convincing interpretation, all kinds of possible parallels must be taken into
account.38 In consequence, it does not really matter whether the Gospel of Mary
is “gnostic” or not because the impact for its interpretation is minimal. The label
“gnostic” does not any longer offer a shortcut towards understanding the text.
Although the critique against the “gnostic” character of the Gospel of Mary
is largely justified, the opposing view also did not prevail. It might be difficult to
connect the text with “gnostic” ideas, but it is even more difficult to deny any such
connection. The most important achievement of this discussion is, however, that
it is necessary to look for parallel texts helpful for the interpretation of the Gospel
of Mary in all kinds of contexts and to explicate their respective relevance. The
Gospel of Mary should be read as part of general early Christian discourse.

The Book of Allogenes

At this point of the discussion, the work of Gregor Wurst on the reconstruction
of the badly damaged Codex Tchacos allowed us to read some more pages of
the Book of Allogenes, the fourth tractate of the codex.39 It contains a dialogue
between Allogenes and a voice from heaven that instructs him about his ascent
after death and the powers he has to overcome on his way up. The names of
the powers are strikingly similar to the seven names of the fourth power in the
ascent of the soul in the Gospel of Mary.40 The literary conformity proves a close
relationship; probably both texts depend on the same source.41 This is the first
direct link to a text expressing a mythologically founded alienation towards the
world, the most solid evidence that the Gospel of Mary might belong to such

Within the Context of Early Christian Theology, ed. Jens Schröter; BETL 260 (Leuven: Peeters,
2013), 305–332 on differences in Christology among post-resurrection dialogues; and Judith
Hartenstein, “Encratism, Asceticism and the Construction of Gender and Sexual Identity in
Apocryphal Gospels,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Apocrypha, ed. Andrew Greg-
ory and Christopher Tuckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 389–406 on asceticism.
38 Parkhouse, “Eschatology,” 115.
39 Cf. Wurst, “Fragmente,” 3–9. Former editions had virtually no text on CT p. 63–66, but
the placement of some additional fragments enhanced the text.
40 The Book of Allogenes offers parallels to the first six names (with minor variants and
lacuna) before the fragment breaks off.
41 The Book of Allogenes is dated later than the Gospel of Mary, cf. Gregor Wurst, “[Buch
des Allogenes] (CT 4),” in Nag Hammadi Deutsch: Studienausgabe, ed. Hans-Martin Schenke
et al., 3rd ed. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 590–593; 591. On the other hand, it is unlikely that the
Gospel of Mary is its source because in the Gospel of Mary the text seems to be revised.
104 Judith Hartenstein

a context. However, the discussion about the “gnostic” categorization of the

Gospel of Mary has already changed and lost most of its relevance. Nevertheless,
the fragment is very useful for the interpretation of the Gospel of Mary in the
post-“gnostic” era.
Yet, before I turn to that, some remarks on the Book of Allogenes are nec-
essary. Allogenes (“another race”) is a well-known figure in writings displaying
a mythologically founded alienation towards the world.42 He is an alternative
name for Seth and adequately describes the self-designation of possible readers
as strangers in this world. Although the few pages now extant do not show much
of the content (for example a creation myth), the instruction for the ascent
seem to presuppose it (like in the Gospel of Mary, this is not solid evidence)
and the “father above the aeons” seems to refer to a deity unconnected to the
material world (and therefore not the creator).43 Moreover, the dialogue between
Allogenes and the heavenly voice is much more closely related to similar texts
from sources presenting a mythologically founded alienation towards the world
than the dialogue in the Gospel of Mary is. The Book of Allogenes describes an
instruction to a recipient who learns about his own future ascent similar to what
Jesus tells James in the First Apocalypse of James. It would fit well into a context
like the one described by Irenaeus (Haer. 1.21.5).
The comparison shows that the text of the Gospel of Mary, despite the verbal
parallels with the Book of Allogenes, has a number of specific traits. In my
opinion, the main importance of the parallel from the Book of Allogenes lies in
its ability to draw attention to the specific profile of the Gospel of Mary. Some
points that had already been noted in connection to other ascent stories (and
had weakened the argument for a “gnostic” context) are more clearly visible in
comparison to the much closer parallel of the Book of Allogenes.
Thus, the structure of the ascent or rather of the powers is rather complicated
in the Gospel of Mary. The soul encounters four powers with different names, the
last of which, wrath, moreover has seven forms, which are presented in a list of
seven more names. With each of the four powers, the soul engages in a dialogue
different in content.44 The Book of Allogenes displays six powers, whose names
are parallel to the first six of the seven forms of the fourth power in the Gospel
of Mary.45 The question posed and the answer of Allogenes are always the same

42 Cf. Wurst, “Buch,” 590–591. The tractate Allogenes from NHC XI is part of the variety of
“gnostic” thought, cf. King, Gnosticism, 193–194.
43 Both points, i. e. the name Allogenes and its implications and the father above the aeons,
are mentioned in the preceding scene of the Book of Allogenes where Allogenes has an en-
counter with Satan similar to the temptation of Jesus in the New Testament.
44 Due to the missing pages, we only have the last three dialogues, but I think it is safe to
assume that there was a dialogue with the first power as well.
45 After the dialogue with the sixth power, several lines of the text of the Book of Allogenes
are missing, it is therefore possible that a seventh name is now lost. A list of seven powers seems
more likely than one of six, even without the parallel in the Gospel of Mary, cf. the parallel in
 The Designation “Gnostic” for the Gospel of Mary and its Implications  105

in substance: The power asks Allogenes where he is going or wants to go and he

replies that what bound him has been killed, that he is set free and going to his
father above the aeons.

Book of Allogenes (CT p. 63,9–21)46 Gospel of Mary (BG p. 16,1–5; 16,12–17,7)47

(Dialogue with the first power) (Dialogue with the last power)
But when you go, you come to the first When the soul had overcome the third power,
power, which is the strength of desire. it went upwards and saw the fourth power:
it had seven forms. … These are the seven
powers of Wrath
And it will bind you and ask you: They ask the soul: ‘Where do you come
‘Where will you go to, Allogenes?’ from, killer of men, or where are you going,
conqueror of space?’
But you shall say: ‘What binds me has The soul answered and said: ‘What binds
been killed and I have been released. me has been killed, and what surrounds me
has been overcome, and my desire has been
ended, and ignorance died. In a world I have
been released from a world, and in a type
from a heavenly type, and (from?) the fetter of
oblivion which is (only) for a time.
I will go up to my father who is above From this time on, I will attain the rest of the
all these great aeons.’ time of the season of the aeon in silence.’
And it will release you.

The question and part of the answer are similar to the dialogue of the soul with
the fourth power in the Gospel of Mary. The text of the Gospel of Mary is more
elaborate, though: The power asks two questions and addresses the soul rather
critically (as a killer of men and a conqueror of space) in contrast to the use of
the name Allogenes in the Book of Allogenes. The soul uses several repetitive as
well as detailed sentences to express the first two statements of Allogenes, but
their main substance, the killing of what has bound and the release from this
bondage is present in both texts.48 However, in the Gospel of Mary the soul does
not refer to the father above the aeons or any equivalent, but just expects rest in
silence. This last point is remarkable as there is no other mentioning of God in
the extant text. If the Gospel of Mary used a source describing an ascent against
hostile powers similar to the Book of Allogenes that included a reference to the
highest deity as the father of the instructed person,49 the absence of God seems

Origen (Cels. VI 31). However, the last dialogue must have been shorter than the previous ones
to fit the lacuna.
46 Translation mine.
47 Translation Tuckett, Gospel, 97–99.
48 The wording of the Coptic texts does not agree exactly as the texts we have were both at
some point translated from Greek to Coptic.
49 The parallels from the First Apocalypse of James and other sources contain comparable
references to God as the father of the recipient.
106 Judith Hartenstein

intentional. While the Book of Allogenes indicates that it sees God as uncon-
nected to the lower world, the Gospel of Mary avoids expressing its view on this
central theological point. In my opinion, the Gospel of Mary, whatever back-
ground it may have, does not want to commit itself concerning the relationship
of God and the world.
Two other details are different in the Gospel of Mary: The powers do not try
to seize or bind the soul, and do not release it at the end;50 they just ask questions.
Therefore, the situation seems less violent and the powers less dangerous than in
the Book of Allogenes. Nevertheless, the questions they pose are more difficult,
because they imply that the soul is not worthy of its ascent, the problems might
come from within the soul. The clear line of conflict between the powers and
Allogenes is more diffuse in the Gospel of Mary.
Moreover, the whole character of the dialogue is different in the Gospel of
Mary. It looks more like a real dialogue in which the soul gives answers to specific
questions, while the stereotype answers of Allogenes seem to be formula that
should be learnt by the readers to prepare for their own death. Again, the Book
of Allogenes coincides with other texts about the ascent whereas the Gospel of
Mary is different.
Apart from these differences in the parallel parts of the text, the Book of
Allogenes draws attention to what is completely different in the Gospel of Mary.
First, in the Gospel of Mary a soul ascends and this ascent is narrated as an event
from the past and from an outside perspective. Due to the missing pages, it is
unclear whose soul it is and who is watching the ascent. In the Book of Allogenes
as well as in most other ascent-stories, the focus is on the future ascent of the re-
cipient – his true self – of the revelation.51 He is told what to do after his physical
death.
Then, the Gospel of Mary combines two lists of names, a basic structure of
four powers and the seven names of the last powers that are parallel to the Book
of Allogenes. The Gospel of Mary obviously combines two sources52 and uses
the names and the dialogue we know from the Book of Allogenes for the last
scene of the ascent, the encounter with wrath. The passage about the first power
must have been on the now lost pages, but the names of the second and the third,
desire and ignorance, are preserved. The soul engages in dialogue with both and
in contrast to the parallel in the Book of Allogenes and most other ascent-texts,
each of them displays a different topic. In dialogue with desire, the soul explains
its origin from above and why its descent was not observed. With ignorance,
the discussion focuses on binding, wickedness, and judging. The question of the
soul’s origin, whether it belongs to the power or comes from above, fits in well
50 Only the first powers do that in the Book of Allogenes.
51 An exception is Pistis Sophia.
52 This has already been suggested before the parallel from the Book of Allogenes was
known, cf. Tuckett, Gospel, 175.
 The Designation “Gnostic” for the Gospel of Mary and its Implications  107

with the last dialogue and a background of mythologically founded alienation

towards the world. However, the topics of wickedness and judging do not suggest
such a background, the Gospel of Mary seems to be drawing on material from a
different context.
Moreover, the names of the powers – desire, ignorance and wrath – rather
sound like conventional vices from a philosophical or ethical context. They
need not be originally part of a list of hostile powers trying to prevent the as-
cent of a soul. In my opinion, it is quite possible that the Gospel of Mary took
this structure from a source parallel to the Book of Allogenes and created the
other dialogues in analogy from other material. In any case, it is necessary to
look for other corresponding texts besides the Book of Allogenes to provide a
background for the ideas expressed in the Gospel of Mary. Although the Book of
Allogenes is the best parallel we have and the only one with considerable verbal
agreements to the Gospel of Mary, it does not explain everything. I will offer
two other parallels that might throw some light on the specific features of the
ascent-story of the Gospel of Mary.
King and de Boer already considered texts from the Corpus Hermeticum as
a possible background for the ascent of the soul.53 In Corp. Herm. I 24–26 Poi-
mandres informs about the post-mortal ascent of the inner self of the human.
The true self has to leave the body, growing and decay, and several vices including
desire behind and in the end reaches the goal in praising the father. In this text,
there are no hostile powers; the ascent rather looks like an inner struggle. In the
Gospel of Mary, such an inner struggle seems to be present in the lively dialogues
in which the soul’s morals are questioned.54 In the end, the soul overcomes out-
side forces that bound and surrounded it, but leaves its desire and ignorance
behind as well (Gospel of Mary BG p. 16,17–21).55
A parallel to the names of the powers – desire, ignorance, and wrath – can be
found in Corp. Herm. XIII 7–9. In this text, the inner human is affected by twelve
vices that are overcome by ten virtues called powers of God to attain rebirth.
Against such a background, the focus turns to the inner alteration the soul has
to achieve during its ascent. The soul might have to fight against itself and the
ethical aspect of the text becomes more pronounced. Several elements of the text
support this reading of the Gospel of Mary, which might supplement or even
substitute the cosmic-“gnostic” interpretation. It might depend on the context of
the reader which interpretation is more plausible.
Another text might explain the specific perspective of the Gospel of Mary,
which narrates the ascent of the soul from an outside perspective. A similar de-
scription can be found for example in the Apocalypse of Paul, which depicts
53 Cf. de Boer, Gospel, 83–84; King, Gospel, 174–175.
54 Cf. King, Gospel, 175.
55 In contrast, the problems of Allogenes are from outside, there is no inner struggle in-
volved.
108 Judith Hartenstein

the fate of the righteous and sinners in different heavenly landscapes.56 At the
beginning of the text, the general sinfulness of humankind is stressed and Paul
watches the post-mortal ascent of two souls, one righteous and one a sinner
(Apoc. Paul 14 and 16). An angel and a spirit accompany each of the souls while
speaking and acting for them. On their way up, the souls encounter hostile
powers, whose names resemble vices that question their ascent. However, they
are unable to find anything of their own in the soul of the righteous. Because the
soul has done the will of God, it can escape them. They succeed better with the
soul of the sinner, but still they cannot keep it since the soul is brought to God
to be judged.57
There are several parallels to the Gospel of Mary besides the narrative per-
spective.58 Like the Gospel of Mary but unlike most texts about an ascent against
hostile powers and the hermetic texts, the Apocalypse of Paul speaks about a
soul. The dialogue is not a stereotype but accuses the soul of concrete sins and
the soul has to defend its moral character (if possible). Moreover, the topics
of wickedness and judging discussed with ignorance, which had no parallel in
the texts showing a mythologically founded alienation towards the world, play
a central role in the Apocalypse of Paul.59 Even the question whether the soul
belongs to desire in the dialogue with the second power has an equivalent in
the Apocalypse of Paul where the powers search for something of their own –
probably vices like themselves – in the soul. This part of the dialogue, as well
as the naming of the powers with vices and the topic of binding, is linked to
different sources.

56 This widely known Apocalypse of Paul was probably composed at the end of the fourth
century and transmitted in several versions and languages. It has no “gnostic” background and
no relationship to the Apocalypse of Paul from NHC V apart from the title.
57 The powers have no real function in the narrative as all the souls are brought to God who
then decides on their fate. It is therefore possible that the scene stems from an older tradition in
which the powers actually prevent the ascent of some souls. It might have been adjusted to the
concept of the Apocalypse of Paul where the hell-like regions for the sinners are part of heaven,
on the same level though on different sides than the heavenly realm of the righteous.
58 It is difficult to imagine how the ascent of the soul was introduced into the dialogue of
Jesus and Mary somewhere on the missing pages of the Gospel of Mary. Jesus does not instruct
Mary about her own future ascent like in most parallels. The Apocalypse of Paul opens up the
possibility that he grants her a vision in which she, like Paul, is able to watch the ascent. Before
the missing pages, they talk about how visions can be seen, but the end of Mary’s speech seems
to imply that Jesus talked up to this moment. Perhaps Jesus narrates an ascent he has somehow
witnessed himself. These problems are connected to the question of whose soul is ascending
and probably cannot be solved. Nevertheless, the Apocalypse of Paul is closer to the narrative
structure of the Gospel of Mary than all the other parallels.
59 In the Apocalypse of Paul, God is the judge, the souls are judged by him. In the Gospel of
Mary, the soul rejects being judged by the power and denies that it has judged itself. This might
be a hint that God alone has the right to judge, but no reference to God is made. But it might
also imply that the soul could judge.
 The Designation “Gnostic” for the Gospel of Mary and its Implications  109

Results

How does the Book of Allogenes help us reach a conclusion as to the “gnostic”
character of the Gospel of Mary, respectively on its position concerning myth-
ologically founded alienation towards the world? In my view, the answer is not
a simple yes or no but much more complex. The parallels between the two texts
prove that the Gospel of Mary had access to sources displaying a mythologically
founded alienation towards the world and used at least one of them. Neverthe-
less, the source is not simply repeated, but redacted and combined with material
of different origins thereby expressing a position of its own. The close corre-
spondence of the Book of Allogenes to some parts of the ascent of the soul in the
Gospel of Mary shows clearly that the possible common source does not explain
all the text. For the remaining parts, a philosophical or general Christian back-
ground seems much more likely. Even the ascent of the soul – usually considered
the most “gnostic” part of the Gospel of Mary – is probably a mixture of ideas
from different backgrounds. In other parts of the text, such other backgrounds –
for example philosophical ideas in the dialogue of Jesus with his disciples or the
New Testament in his farewell speech – dominate. Concerning the sources and
traditions used, the Gospel of Mary is linked to ideas about a mythologically
founded alienation towards the world as one of several backgrounds.
Moreover, the Gospel of Mary does not just repeat the traditions it uses, but
seems to change them at significant points. The mention of the “father above the
aeons” as the aim of the ascent of Allogenes is missing in the Gospel of Mary, and
thereby an important element of the theology is changed. The Gospel of Mary
does not indicate any discontinuity between the highest deity and the creation
of the world – and neither does it indicate the opposite. There is no reference to
God at all in the extant text. Thus, even if the Gospel of Mary uses texts with a
specific position, it does not openly advocate such a theology itself. Although the
text can be read in the context of a mythologically founded alienation towards
the world, it does not actively reproduce this view.60
This last idea gains weight because a similar observation concerns the genre
of the Gospel of Mary. The post-resurrection dialogue might have its origin in
the context of mythologically founded alienation towards the world and was
certainly popular for writings with such theology. The esoteric teaching, which
might be transmitted by it, is often considered as a typical part of “gnostic”
thought.61 The Gospel of Mary is acquainted with this concept and depicts
Mary as knowing words of Jesus nobody else has heard. However, the narrative
60 It is possible that the Gospel of Mary tries to hide its theology to avoid difficulties and
expects some of its readers to supplement the missing points, cf. Hartenstein, “Evangelium,”
129. Alternatively, the texts might want to attract readers with different backgrounds. Or it really
displays its own theology that combines elements we would consider incompatible.
61 This statement does not agree with all the texts of the genre, though. In the Wisdom of
110 Judith Hartenstein

structure contradicts the esoteric character of the writing. The Gospel of Mary
does not describe the revelation of secret knowledge to Mary but narrates how
she shares her knowledge.62 The text depicts how esoteric knowledge is made
public – a significant change of the concept.
Is the Gospel of Mary “gnostic”? The designation “gnostic” is in itself certainly
not helpful. However, even a more precise terminological expression such as
“mythologically founded alienation towards the world” does not solve all the
problems. Does it imply that the Gospel of Mary was acquainted with such ideas,
that it expects its readers to know them, or that it advocates such a theology? The
parallel to the Book of Allogenes shows that the Gospel of Mary had access to
and used at least one source with such a position. The genre points to a similar
context. Yet, the Gospel of Mary contains a number of other ideas as well and
revised all the traditions used. In consequence, it does not display any clear ele-
ment of mythologically founded alienation towards the world, although there is
no rejection either. At least some of its readers (the ones using the Berlin codex)
read it in connection with such ideas. We can only speculate about the position
of the author – he or she might not show all of his or her theological ideas in the
text. It is hard to decide whether the text intends its readers to be acquainted
with or agreeing to these positions. All we have is a fragmentary text from early
Christianity. However, this text expresses most interesting and remarkable, in
some places even singular, theological ideas.

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JSNT.S 260. London: T&T Clark, 2004.
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erzählungen frühchristlicher Dialoge. TU 146. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2000.
–. “Wie ‘apokryph’ ist das Evangelium nach Maria? Über die Schwierigkeiten einer
Verortung.” Pages 117–133 in The Other Side: Apocryphal Perspectives on Ancient
Christian “Orthodoxies.” Edited by Tobias Nicklas et al. NTOA/StUNT 117. Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017.
–. “Erscheinungsevangelien (Gespräche mit dem Auferstandenen) im Kontext früh-
christlicher Theologie: Anknüpfungspunkte und Besonderheiten der christologischen
Vorstellungen.” Pages 305–332 in The Apocryphal Gospels within the Context of Early
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Jesus Christ, Jesus reveals his teachings to the whole group of disciples (twelve male and seven
female) and they openly preach this gospel after he has left them.
62 Moreover, the retelling of Mary’s dialogue with Jesus is combined with a dialogue be-
tween Jesus and the group of disciples, which also counteracts esoteric tendencies. In addition,
general traditions about Jesus such as the canonical gospels are used, another point against the
dominance of esoteric traditions, cf. Hartenstein, “Evangelium,” 125–126.
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–. “Encratism, Asceticism and the Construction of Gender and Sexual Identity in Apoc-
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–. What Is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
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de l’Université Laval, 1983).
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Jüngerinnen Jesu in christlich-gnostischen Schriften. NHMS 48. Leiden: Brill, 1999.
Puech, Henri-Charles. “Gnostische Evangelien und verwandte Dokumente.” Pages
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60. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1955.
Tuckett, Christopher. The Gospel of Mary. Oxford Early Christian Gospel Texts. Oxford:
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 Parted Ways Meet Again
Messianic Jewish Identity in Israel

Marcie Lenk

In this essay I analyze a contemporary “heresy”: Messianic Judaism, exploring

the rhetoric used by members and by opponents. As Mary Douglas has noted,
“Ambiguous things can seem very threatening”;1 and indeed, people who pray
to Yeshua while insisting that they are Jews are perceived as deeply threatening
to many Jews. This is not an anthropological study, nor is it an attempt to de-
termine whether Messianic Jews are right or wrong in their claim to be Jews.
Instead, I look at the identity claims of Messianic Jews, as well as the claims
of those who reject those claims, considering what is at stake for each. I focus
on the Messianic Jewish community in Israel specifically – and the theoretical
challenges that that community poses to common understandings of Judaism
and Christianity – because in Israel it is clear that “Jewish” is an identity marker
that expands beyond faith and religious practice, to include ethnicity, language,
education, and politics.2
One methodological tool useful for understanding the rhetoric about Mes-
sianic Jews may be found in queer theory. Judith Butler has considered the
“specific codes of cultural coherence” in Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger.
Butler questions the coherence of culture when she writes of Douglas’s work,
“Her analysis suggests that what constitutes the limit of the body is never merely
material, but that the surface, the skin, is systemically signified by taboos and
anticipated transgressions; indeed, the boundaries of the body become, within
her analysis, the limits of the social per se. A poststructuralist appropriation of
her view might well understand the boundaries of the body as the limits of the
socially hegemonic.”3 For Butler, it is essential that gender categories and sexual
practices, even minority ones, be seriously examined and not easily rejected.
Analogically, I consider claims of religious belonging to two ostensibly clearly

1 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), xi.
2 Pew Research Center, March 8, 2016, “Israel’s Religiously Divided Society”; Erik H. Cohen,
“Jewish Identity Research: A State of the Art,” International Journal of Jewish Education Research
1 (2010): 7–48.
3 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2011), 179. Emphasis in the original.
114 Marcie Lenk

distinguished religions and the controversial practices of Messianic Jews in the

light of Butler’s challenge to a binary gender system.
The most imortant methodological lesson that I learned from Karen L. King
was to identify and investigate assumptions made by both ancient and contem-
porary writers. Why are particular questions being asked? Who gains and who
loses from the assumptions and conclusions? Among the many books and ar-
ticles that Karen has authored, in 2008 she contributed a chapter entitled “Which
Early Christianity?” to The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies. Here the
questions she poses about ancient texts and modern studies are familiar to any
of her students: “What was at stake, and for whom?”4 Asking the right questions
allows readers to recognize that writers, ancient and modern, often present as
universally accepted identity markers that are actually under debate. In her work
on Nag Hammadi texts such as the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Mary,
and The Gospel of Truth, among others, King has shown that the “Gnostics” who
have been presented by both ancient Church leaders and modern church his-
torians as unified in their heretical ways actually participated in the great Chris-
tian debates of their time, arguing with each other and with other Christians
about the value of scripture, martyrdom, and resurrection.5 The challenges to
modern scholars of ancient Christianity posed by Karen King’s work are useful
in consideration of the discourse around the identity of Messianic Jews.
While Messianic Jews claim to live out a “fulfilled” Judaism, are they actually
Jews at all? Isn’t faith in Jesus the dividing point between Jews and Christians?
Aren’t they really Christians, as Israeli courts have declared?6 At best, perhaps
they should be categorized as Jews who have gone astray; but at worst, might
they be traitors? Perhaps the claim of these Jesus believers that they should be
called Jews is deliberately misleading, a means to seduce unsuspecting Jews into
converting to Christianity?7 Messianic Jews have been identified in each of these
ways. My work here is not to provide a decisive answer to these questions, as
I am not a gatekeeper with the authority or power to define and enforce identity
claims. I am, however, interested in questions of Jewish and Christian identity,
and in what those questions mean. For whom is it important to include or ex-

4 Karen L. King, “Which Early Christianity?,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian
Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), 66–84.
5 Karen L. King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
6 Jeremy Sharon, “Rabbinic Court Rules Against Jewish Marriage Rites for Messianic Jews,”
Jerusalem Post, Aug. 30, 2017 https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/
Rabbinical-court-rules-against-Jewish-marriage-rites-for-Messianic-Jews-503839. Accessed
August 26, 2018.
7 In Israel, there are a number of organizations devoted to “rescuing” Jews from Christian
missionaries, and they often focus on Messianic Jews. Three of the most active organizations are:
Yad L’achim (“Hand for the Brothers”), www.yadlachim.org; Shomrei Emet (“Guards of Truth”),
http://shomreiemet.com/; and Jewish Israel, https://jewishisrael.com/.
 Parted Ways Meet Again 115

clude Messianic Jews as members of Jewish communities, and why? What is at

stake in these claims?

Jews or Christians?

Messianic Jews describe their faith in Jesus (most would say “Yeshua”) as making
them fulfilled Jews, not Christians. Most do not identify with Christian denomi-
nations. They see themselves as Jewish disciples of a Jewish Jesus, like the earliest
apostles.8 That Jesus came to be venerated mostly by a non-Jewish Church, that
the Church was intensely anti-Jewish, and that Rabbinic Judaism rejected the
messianism and divinity of Jesus are all seen by Messianic Jews as deviations
in God’s plan. Messianic believers see their faith as part of or a fulfillment of
Jewish identity – not a rejection of it. For Messianic Jews, Christians are heirs to
Greco-Roman rejection of the Jewish roots of their faith; by contrast, they see
themselves as following and returning to the original faith of the Jewish Jesus
and his Jewish disciples.9
In considering discourse about orthodoxy and heresy among ancient Chris-
tians, King writes, “Constructing the impression of unity out of all this multi-
formity required emphasizing or even manufacturing similarities (often through
harmonization) while ignoring differences. In contrast, excluding heretics
meant emphasizing or even manufacturing differences while overlooking sim-
ilarities.”10 We will see that a parallel process is at play among contemporary
Jews. To exclude Messianic Jews, “Jewishness” is defined in ways that overlooks
the ways that Messianics share certain Jewish markers and practices. Differences
between faith claims and practices of non-Messianic Jews that might otherwise
be quite significant are often overlooked when the goal is to exclude those who
believe that Yeshua is the Moshiah (Messiah).
Whether we describe the “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Chris-
tianity as taking place in the first two centuries, or in the fourth, or as a longer
process, most scholars are comfortable relegating that particular identity strug-
gle to late antiquity. Yet the existence of Messianic Jews and Messianic Jewish
communities in the modern world suggests that the categories of “Jew” and
“Christian” continue to be unstable, an instability that plays out in striking ways
in the State of Israel, where the designation “Jewish” signifies culture, religion,

8 Reidar Hvalvik, ed., Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries (Peabody, MA: Hen-
drickson, 2007).
9 Richard Harvey, Mapping Messianic Jewish Theology: A Constructive Approach (Carlisle,
PA: Paternoster, 2009); Dan Cohn-Sherbok, ed., Voices of Messianic Judaism (Baltimore, MD:
Lederer, 2001); Mark S. Kinzer, Post-Missionary Messianic Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos,
2005).
10 King, “Which Early Christianity?,” 79.
116 Marcie Lenk

ethnicity, and nationality.11 If we take Daniel Boyarin’s charge regarding Late

Antique identity and “refuse the option of seeing Christian and Jew, Christianity
and Judaism, as fully formed, bounded and separate entities and identities”12
even today, we can then situate Jewish definitions of Messianic Jews and Mes-
sianic Jewish identity claims in broader view. Questions of insider and outsider
status persist not only among Jews in considering whether to accept or reject the
claims of Messianic Jews to be Jews, but also among Christians who wonder why
these Jesus believers call themselves Jews.
Within Messianic communities, one can find a similar discourse regarding
what is acceptable, and what is considered too Jewish or too Christian. In their
refusal to choose sides of the Christian-Jewish binary, Messianic thinkers are
aided by the work of Walter Bauer, who influenced so many scholars of early
Christianity to reject simplistic models of orthodoxy and heresy.13 Yet the deep
organizational, spiritual, educational and financial connections between most
Messianic congregations and Evangelical Christian seminaries and organizations
lead Messianic Jewish leaders to reinscribe discourses of orthodoxy and heresy
for their own purposes, often insisting on fundamentalist Evangelical models of
faith and practice.14

History of Messianic Jews generally and in Israel

Messianic Judaism grew out of a nineteenth-century movement known then as

Hebrew Christianity. Emancipation offered Jews the concept of distinguishing
between religion and nationality, which opened the possibility, at least theo-
retically, that a Jew who believed that Jesus was the messiah might still retain
connections to the Jewish people, in contrast to centuries of Jewish converts to
Christianity who understood that proclamation of faith in Jesus meant breaking
with the Jewish people.15 Around the same time, the eschatological ideas of dis-
pensationalism were spreading in Christian pietistic and evangelical circles – and
11 Avi Sagi, Reflections on Identity: The Jewish Case (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016);
Anita Shapira, Jews, Zionists and In Between (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 2007); Laurence
J. Silberstein, ed., Mapping Jewish Identities (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
12 Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 7.
13 Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1971); German original, Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzeri im ältesten Christentum (Tübingen: Mohr
& Siebeck 1934); James Carleton Paget, “The Definition of the Terms Jewish Christian and Jew-
ish Christianity in the History of Research,” in Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries, ed.
Oskar Skarsaun and Reidar Hvalvik (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007), 22–52.
14 Harvey, Mapping Messianic Jewish Theology, 4–5; Warshawsky, “Returning to Their Own
Borders,” 137–200.
15 Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish
Thought (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011).
 Parted Ways Meet Again 117

especially the idea that the Jewish people’s return to their land is central to God’s
plan for the end of time.16 In the effort to encourage more Jews to join their faith,
some evangelical missions adopted Jewish symbols and argued that Christian
faith did not contradict Jewish identity. Messianic Judaism has been described
by Patricia Power as “a Gentile Protestant missionary project to convert the Jews
to Christianity [which] has become an ethnically Jewish movement that aims,
at most, to form a new type of Judaism, or at the least, to reform Protestant
theology to accept the presence and expression of a distinctive Jewish identity
within its churches.”17 In other words, the roots of Messianic Judaism can be
found in both the desire of some converts to Christianity to retain their Jewish
connection, as well as a desire of some Christians to claim as Christian certain
Jewish symbols, practices and bodies.
Hebrew Christians in the early twentieth century reclaimed their own sense
of Jewish identity by taking on the name “Messianic Jews” and the movement
grew, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, within the zeitgeist of individual identity,
spiritual searching, and Jewish pride, in particular after the victory of the State of
Israel in the 1967 war. As the variety of Christian denominations has expanded
and as Jews have become socially accepted in western societies, Messianic Jewish
congregations have grown around the world.
Messianic Jewish communities in Israel include members from varying back-
grounds. At one end, there are those who grew up in Jewish families and came
to faith in Jesus later in life. They might choose to be in a Messianic community
rather than a Christian one because they don’t see their faith as opposing their
Israeli / Jewish identity, or because they are looking for a church that prays in
Hebrew.18 At the other end are members who were never Jews. Such a person
might join a Messianic Jewish community because she married a Jew, because
she wants to incorporate Jewish language and symbols into her worship, or for
any other reason that people choose a worship community. The rest are children
raised within Messianic communities. Exact numbers of Messianic Jews in Israel
are hard to come by, though best estimates put the number at around 15–20,000
people in approximately one hundred communities.19 Messianic services in Is-
rael can be found in English, Hebrew, Russian, and Amharic.

16 Yaakov Ariel, An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews (New York: New
York University Press, 2013), 215.
17 Patricia A. Power, “Blurring the Boundaries: American Messianic Jews and Gentiles,”
Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 15 (2011): 69–91.
18 Most Arab/Palestinian Christians who are Israeli citizens are either Orthodox or Cath-
olic. Most pray in their native Arabic. There is a community of Hebrew-speaking Catholics
(St. James Vicarate for Hebrew Speaking Catholics in Israel) that serves Catholics from the FSU,
as well as foreign workers and asylum seekers in Israel.
19 Ariel, An Unusual Relationship, 230. In the United States there are approximately 350
Messianic communities led by Jewish and non-Jewish messianic rabbis. For more on the history
and practices of Messianic Jews: David A. Rausch, Messianic Judaism, Its History, Theology, and
118 Marcie Lenk

While one might expect the Messianic Jews in the Jewish State of Israel to
practice traditional forms of Judaism, in fact, most Messianic Jews in Israel see
their Jewish selves in ethnic, secular terms, while their faith is connected to
Yeshua.20 Most believe that traditional Jewish practices that are derived from
the teachings of the Rabbis are not part of authentic Judaism, just as patristic
traditions and later Christian practices are irrelevant accretions to true faith in
Yeshua. They look to Jesus and his (Jewish) disciples as models of the best ways
to be a Jewish believer. The conservative faith life of Messianic Jews tends to be
similar to Evangelical Christian faith life, with the addition of celebrating most
Jewish festivals, often interpreted christologically.
In many ways, Messianic Jews in Israel are virtually indistinguishable from
non-Messianic Jews in Israel. Messianic Jews send their children to Israeli
state schools, they work and pay taxes, and their children serve in the Israeli
Defense Forces. They celebrate Jewish holidays as national holidays (sometimes
with christological interpretations). Though most identify with secular Jews in
their rejection of halakhic obligations, Messianic Jewish families tend to be quite
pious, committed to praying and celebrating together, with conservative social
values. This juxtaposition of conservatism and secularism can produce unique
challenges. Dating, for example, tends to be challenging for Messianic young
people. Their secular school friends might be sexually permissive, expressing
very different values from those that Messianic Jewish young people learn at
home. Israeli Messianic communities tend to employ only male religious leaders;
feminism is not highly valued. In other words, children are raised as secular Jews
and religious Messianics.
The boundaries of Jewish identity in Israel are broad, and for most Israeli Jews,
deviations from traditional Jewish beliefs practices do not indicate that someone
is no longer a Jew. While some Haredi21 Jews reject the identity of liberal Jews
as Jews, either rhetorically or actually, there is a well-known Rabbinic principle
that “A Jew, despite his/her sin, remains a Jew.”22 Judaism is not an identity that
can be shed.23 There are two markers to Jewish identity: religion (acceptance of
Jewish faith and practices) and membership in the Jewish people. Judith Butler’s

Polity (New York: Mellen Press, 1982), 29; Louis Goldberg and John Fischer, How Jewish Is
Christianity?: Two Views on the Messianic Movement, 1st ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan,
2003), 25.
20 Warshawsky, “Returning to Their Own Borders.”
21 Haredi means “[God] fearful.” It is the category that most ultra-Orthodox Jews use to
describe their own Jewish identity.
22 b. Sanh. 44a.
23 Of course, there have always been Jews who have left the Jewish community and as-
sumed other identities, whether by converting to other religions or by becoming assimilated
into secular cultures. The Talmudic principle implies that were that person to desire to return to
the Jewish people, there would be no need to convert “back” since in fact, s/he never legally left.
See Tzitz Eliezer Responsa 13:93.
 Parted Ways Meet Again 119

theory is useful here if one compares Jewish peoplehood to “sex” and Jewish
religion to “gender”:
When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender
itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might
just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as
easily as a female one.24

For most Messianic Jews in Israel, Jewish faith and practices have been radically
separated from the concept of Jewish peoplehood. What does it mean for a Jew-
ish body (son or daughter of a Jewish mother) engaging in expressions of faith
most commonly associated with Christianity? The test-case for Israeli law came
in the 1962 “Brother Daniel” case. Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew who converted
to Catholicism and become a Carmelite friar during World War II, later applied
for Israeli citizenship under Israel’s “Law of Return,” claiming that he was a Jew
returning to the Jewish homeland.25 The Israeli (secular) court rejected Daniel’s
claim that he remained a Jew even while being Catholic friar,26 although Jew-
ish law was quoted in the case in support of Brother Daniel’s claim. The ruling
reflected a sense that a Jew who embraces Christianity is a traitor and thereby
should no longer be eligible to benefit as a member of the people of Israel. Israel’s
Law of Return guarantees citizenship to a Jew or anyone with a Jewish parent,
grandparent, or spouse (among other first-degree relations), but since 1970, this
law explicitly excludes “a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed
his religion.” Messianic Jews would say that they never changed their religion
and therefore retain the right to immigrate based on the Law of Return, and the
right to call themselves Jew, while for most Jews (including Jews who identify as
secular) consider the acceptance of Jesus as the messiah is essentially conversion
to Christian faith, whether or not Messianic Jews call themselves Christians.

Messianic Faith and Judaism

Israeli politicians and Rabbis representing different Jewish denominations agree

on very little, but they all seem to agree that “Messianic Jews” are not Jews due to
expressions of faith in Jesus (Yeshua) as Christ (Messiah).27 This consensus has

24 Butler, Gender Trouble, 9.

25 The Law of Return (1950) legislated that “Every Jew has a right to come to this country
as an oleh [immigrant]”. For the law and amendments to the original law: https://knesset.gov.il/
laws/special/eng/return.htm. Accessed August 27, 2018.
26 For analysis of this case, Shalom Goldman, Jewish-Christian Difference and Modern
Jewish Identity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 129–48; Tiffany Pransky, “Boundaries
of Belonging: Conversion in Israel’s Law of Return,” (MA thesis, Central European University,
2012), 15–22.
27 Jeremy Sharon “Rabbinic Court Rules Against Jewish Marriage Rites for Messianic Jews,”
120 Marcie Lenk

led, as we have seen, to the Orthodox Rabbinate in Israel refusing to authorize a

Jewish marriage for Messianic Jews and rejecting their eligibility to participate
in the Taglit-Birthright program in Israel.28 Suspicion that Messianic Jews are
imposters seeking to lure away unsuspecting Jews in order to convert them to
Christianity has led to public protests of Messianic Jewish activities29 and to the
violent attack on a Messianic Jew by a Jewish terrorist.30 While some Orthodox
Jews in Israel have expressed discomfort and even aggression towards Chris-
tians,31 negative responses to Messianic Jews are even more common.
Many Jews would consider the self-designation “Messianic Jew” to be mis-
taken, delusional, or even deceitful. If belief that Jesus was the Messiah / Son of
God is the definition of Christian, then anyone with that belief who calls herself
a Jew is either uninformed and living with an alternate set of identity categories,
or, perhaps more nefariously, identifying as a Jew in order to deceive Jews and
turn them into Christians. Jewish rejection, discomfort, and fear of Christians
becomes even more potent with respect to Messianic Jews due to a distrust of
motives.
The rejection of Messianic Jews as Jews is based on the assumption that there
is an unbridgeable gap between Christian and Jewish faith, as expressed in the
following quotation:
Insofar as Jews wish to remain Jewish, they cannot accept many of the basic tenets of
the Christian faith: they must reject incarnation, because they believe there is an infinite,
unbridgeable, and ontological gap between the Creator and his creation; they must reject
the Trinity, because it contradicts the Jewish belief in God’s unity; they cannot recognize
Jesus as the Messiah, because Jewish tradition holds that the redeemer will not be a divine
and suffering victim, but an earthly champion who will lead his people to victory; they

Jerusalem Post, Aug. 30, 2017 https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/

Rabbinical-court-rules-against-Jewish-marriage-rites-for-Messianic-Jews-503839. Accessed
August 26, 2018. Rabbis Kassel Abelson, Reuven Hammer, “The Status of ‘Messianic Jews’” YD
268:12.2012a [Rabbinical Assembly]: https://www.quora.com/If-a-Reform-or-Conservative-
or-Orthodox-Jew-accepts-Jesus-as-the-messiah-could-they-continue-to-attend-synagogue.
Accessed August 21 2018; Benzion Kravitz, The Jewish Response to Missionaries: A Counter-Mis-
sionary Handbook. 4th ed. (LA: Jews for Judaism, 2001), 26.
28 Alan Feiler, “Messianic Jew Turned Down for Birthright Israel Trip,” JWeekly.com
(February 11, 2000). https://www.jweekly.com/2000/02/11/messianic-jew-turned-down-for-
birthright-israel-trip/. Accessed August 28, 2018.
29 Sara Leibovich-Dar, “Do Unto Your Neighbor,” Haaretz (April 28, 2004). https://www.
haaretz.com/1.4827515. Accessed August 28, 2018.
30 Yuval Azoulay, “Suspected Jewish Terrorist Admits to Anti-missionary Activities,” Haa-
retz (February 10, 2010). https://www.haaretz.com/1.5027779. Accessed August 28, 2018.
31 For Cases of graffiti on Churches and young Haredi Jews spitting on members of Catholic
and Orthodox clergy; see Larry Derfner, “Mouths Filled with Hatred” Jpost.com (November 26,
2009): https://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Mouths-filled-with-hatred. Accessed August 28, 2018.
For Arson and graffiti in the Church of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes in Tabha; see
“Sea of Galilee church where ‘Jesus fed 5,000,’ torched in suspected hate attack,” Times of Israel
(June 18, 2015) http://www.timesofisrael.com/arson-suspected-in-fire-at-church-on-sea-of-
galilee/. Accessed August 28, 2018.
 Parted Ways Meet Again 121
cannot believe that God superseded his covenant with the Jews through a new covenant
with all of the world’s nations; and finally, they cannot consent to the Apostle Paul’s claim
that Jewish law has been rendered obsolete by the Grace of Christ.32

Yet there have always been strands and voices within Judaism that have rep-
resented the views that this writer rejects. Additionally, Christian scholars and
theologians would reject this portrayal of Christian beliefs as reductionist and
overly simplistic – or just plain wrong. This is not the place to debate each of
Sagiv’s claims; most relevant for my purposes is to consider the question of the
Messiah in Jewish tradition.
The idea of a messianic figure or a messianic time of redemption can be found
throughout Jewish tradition. Deuteronomy 28–31 promises that after a time of
sin and punishment, the people of Israel will return to the Land and to God.
The prophets spoke of end times, some as a time of tribulation (Mal 3:23–24;
Zech 1:8–10) and others as a time of Israel’s victories over her enemies and a
time of peace (Is 2:4, 9:6–7; 11:6–9). They spoke of a mysterious figure who
would lead the way (Dan 7:13–14). In the centuries just before and after the
common era, there is evidence that many Jews believed that a redeemer would
soon appear, and that this redeemer might or might not be human.33 While most
of the Rabbis continued to consider the conditions that might bring the Messiah
and the End of Days,34 others warned that too much messianic speculation is not
conducive to a productive Jewish life.35
In the first century of the common era, some Jews believed that Jesus (among
several messianic hopefuls36) was the Messiah, though most did not. Within two
short decades after Jesus’ death, Paul recognized that this movement would not
grow if limited only to Jews, since “we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stum-
bling block” (1 Cor 1:23). Most Jews, it seems, did not recognize Jesus as the
Messiah, and this was troubling to those Jews who were part of the movement
formed around Jesus and the apostles.
Despite Paul’s concerns, was faith in Jesus as the Messiah the dividing line be-
tween Jews and Christians from the perspective of the Rabbis? In a recent article,
Annette Yoshiko Reed proves that it is entirely incorrect to posit that ancient

32 Assaf Sagiv, “Coming to Terms with Christianity,” Azure 38 (2009): 30.

33 Dan 7:13–14; 1 En. 37–71; 4 Ezra 13:26. David B. Levenson, “Messianic Movements,” in
The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 2nd ed., ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Z. Brettler (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 622–28; Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of
the Jewish Christ (New York: The New Press, 2012); Israel Knohl, The Messiah Before Jesus: The
Suffering Servant in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
34 The exception is Rabbi Hillel who declared, “There shall be no Messiah for Israel because
they have already enjoyed him in the days of Hezekiah.” (b. Sanh. 99a).
35 b. Sanh. 97b; Avot de R. Natan B 11.
36 On first century would-be messiahs: Theudas: Acts 5:33–39; Josephus, Ant. 20.5.1 97–99.
The Egyptian: Acts 21:37–38; Josephus, Ant. 20.8.5 169–172; War 2.13.5 261.
122 Marcie Lenk

Jews and Christians shared everything except faith in Jesus.37 Jewish sources
from late antiquity indicate that the behaviors and rejection of obligations to
observe Biblical and Rabbinic commandments is what most bothered Rabbis
vis-à-vis Christians. But if the distinction between Jew and Christian is based
primarily on ritual behavior, where does that leave a person who acts like a Jew
and believes that Jesus is the Messiah?
Messianic Jews are criticized by both Jews and Christians for being heterodox
and therefore, as Jerome would have put it regarding Nazoreans of his day,
“neither Christian nor Jew.” Still, why would Jews assert that belief in the messiah
is the boundary marker between in or out? Indeed, historically is was Christians
who insisted on belief statements to construct their boundaries between or-
thodoxy and heresy; and now Jews are using Christian definitions of what makes
a legitimate Christian in order to create a boundary around Judaism. On this
point, we might turn the tables on which group is embracing hybridity. In the
words of Homi Bhabha, “In the very practice of domination the language of the
master becomes hybrid – neither the one thing nor the other.”38
There have been many would-be messiahs in the Jewish history. Most were
rejected by Jews of their time or later, but Jewish tradition has judged their
followers in a variety of ways – and not primarily by rejecting them as Jews.
Rabbi Akiba, who believed that Bar Kochba was the Messiah,39 is remembered as
a hero and martyr. Some suspected followers of Sabbatai Zevi were marginalized
and perceived as sectarian or heretical, though others were respected rabbis.40
For centuries after Sabbatai Zvi’s conversion to Islam and subsequent death, the
rhetoric of polemical attacks on Jewish movements as widely disparate as Has-
sidism and the Reform movement was shaped by the Sabbatean controversy.41
Many Habad Hassidim today retain a belief that Rabbi Menachem Mendel
Schneerson, their leader who died in 1994, was in fact the Messiah and that he
will return to usher in the End of Days. While David Berger has attempted to
prove that Habad messianists are comparable to Christians and are therefore
heretics and idolators,42 the Jewish world (including most Orthodox Jews) has
rejected his argument and continues to view Habad Hassidim as acceptable and
even admirable Jews.

37 Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Messianism Between Judaism and Christianity,” in Rethinking

the Messianic Idea in Judaism, ed. Michael L. Morgan and Steven Weitzman (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 2015), 23–62.
38 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 33.
39 y. Ta᾽anit 4:6, 68d–69a.
40 Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah 1626–1676 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1973, reprinted 2016).
41 Pawel Maciejko, ed. Sabbatian Heresy: Writings on Mysticism, Messianism, and the Origins
of Jewish Modernity (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017), xii.
42 David Berger, The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference (London:
The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008).
 Parted Ways Meet Again 123

This brief survey shows that there has been a variety of intra-Jewish responses
to Jewish followers of other messianic claimants, faith in Jesus as the Messiah
has long been viewed differently. Still, there are exceptions. Scholars of Judaism
and Christianity in Late Antiquity have demonstrated that there were Christian
communities that included many Jewish practices in their Christian lives,43 and
that it took a sustained effort on the part of the rabbis to reject Jewish belief
in an incarnate Logos existing with God.44 As Christian and Jewish authorities
developed orthodoxies, the line between Christianity and Judaism was drawn.
Additionally, as Christendom grew more powerful and Jewish communities
suffered at the hands of Christian authorities, Jewish resentment of Christians
grew to such an extent that Jewish converts to Christianity were perceived as
not only as sinners who had moved outside the Jewish community, but even as
traitors to the Jewish people.45 Contemporary Messianic Jews, therefore, make
identity claims that not only challenge Jewish assumptions about theology, but
also raise questions of loyalty.

Christology and Incarnation

Some Jews would consider incarnational theology idolatrous46 or at least shittuf

(lit. “association” – associating other powers with God), a concept that medieval
rabbis believed to be forbidden to Jews, though permissible to Gentiles.47 Since
the Middle Ages, there have been rabbis who have disagreed about the status of
Christian faith, from a Jewish perspective. While agreeing to reject any belief
that Jesus was the messiah, some rabbis maintain that Christian faith is not to
be considered idolatry.48 Still, even if not forbidden, can belief in an incarnate
43 Judith Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christian in the Second
Century (London: T&T Clark, 1997); Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric
and Reality in the Late 4th Century (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004); Adam H Becker, An-
nette Yoshiko Reed, The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christian in Late Antiquity and the
Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007); Marcie Lenk, “The Apostolic Con-
stitutions: Judaism and Anti-Judaism in the Construction of Christianity,” (PhD diss., Harvard
University, 2010).
44 Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnos-
ticism (Leiden: Brill, 1977); Boyarin, Border Lines; Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed,
eds., The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007).
45 F. E. Talmage, Disputation and Dialogue: Readings in the Jewish-Christian Encounter
(New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1975).
46 Maimonides, Commentary on the Mishnah, Laws of Idolatry 1:3; Berger, The Rebbe, xxi.
47 Tosafot, b. Sanh. 63b s. v. asur; Tosafot b. Bek. 2b, s. v. shema; Rabbi Yehuda Ashkenazi,
Beer Heitev, Yoreh Deah 151:2.
48 The most prominent medieval rabbi who declared that Christians are not idolaters is
Rabbi Menahem he-Meiri (1249–1310 Provence). See Moshe Halbertal, Between Torah and Wis-
dom: Rabbi Menahem ha-Meiri and the Maimonidean Halakhists of Provence (Heb.) (Jerusalem:
124 Marcie Lenk

deity ever be considered Jewish? While much Rabbinic tradition insisted that
such belief was heresy and outside of the bounds of Judaism, Michael Fishbane
has shown that some traditions of a suffering Messiah with the power to bring
redemption for God’s people can still be found in Rabbinic texts.49 Daniel
Boyarin writes of the “Crucifixion of the Memra”, suggesting that the Rabbis
relegated certain traditions that were known by Jews to the borders of what was
acceptable, in order to produce Jewish orthodoxy. For example: the belief that,
while God is transcendent, the idea that God’s memra (Word / Logos) can be
experienced within certain people and events was declared to be the heretical
belief in two powers.50 Scholars of Kabbalah have shown that the Jewish mystical
tradition retained the concept of a “semi-divine, created power.”51 In his analysis
of the writings of the early twentieth-century Christian Jew who himself trans-
lated parts of the Zohar into English for the five-volume Soncino edition, Elliot
Wolfson writes, “For Levertoff, the Word made flesh is the truest execution of
the Hasidic directive to materialize the spiritual by spiritualizing the material, to
render the invisible visible by rendering the visible invisible.”52 In other words,
Levertoff, a scholar of Jewish and Christian mysticism, saw no contradiction
between Judaism and Christianity with respect to the deepest ideas about God’s
presence in the world. Still, this belief remained within mystical and Hassidic
Jewish teachings and was virtually unknown to most other Jews.

Evangelism

Matthew’s Gospel ends with a resurrected Jesus calling the apostles, “Go there-
fore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (28:19–20, NRSV), making the call to
proselytize difficult to ignore. For Jews, evangelizing evokes historical memory
of supersessionism, violence, forced conversions, and disrespect for Jews and

Magnes Press: 2000), 80–108; Eugene Korn, “Rethinking Christianity: Rabbinic Positions and
Possibilities,” in Jewish Theology and World Religions, ed. Alon Goshen-Gottsten and Eugene
Korn (Oxford and Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012), 191–217.
49 Michael Fishbane, “Midrashic Theologies of Messianic Suffering,” in The Exegetical
Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1998), 73–85.
50 Boyarin, Border Lines, 128–147.
51 Daniel Abrams, “The Boundaries of Divine Ontology: The Inclusion and Exclusion of
Metatron in the Godhead,” HTR 87 (1994): 291; Elliot Wolfson, “The Image of Jacob Engraved
Upon the Throne: Further Reflection on the Esoteric Doctrine of the German Pietists,” in Along
the Path: Studies in Kabbalistic Myth, Symbolism, and Hermeneutics (Albany, NY: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1995), 4–7; Moshe Idel, “Enoch is Metatron,” Immanuel 24/25 (1990):
220–40.
52 Elliot R. Wolfson, “Paul Philip Levertoff and the Popularization of Kabbalah as a Mis-
sionizing Tactic,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 27 (2012): 320.
 Parted Ways Meet Again 125

Judaism. Evangelism is often a sticking point for contemporary Jews and Chris-
tians who are deeply involved in interfaith work and study. In 1949, as many
American churches attempted to increase ecumenical and interfaith relations,
the Anti-Defamation League prepared a report about attempts of the churches
to proselytize among Jews. They concluded, “Many Jews consider any attempt to
proselytize a kind of ‘higher antisemitism’ which, wittingly or otherwise, tends
to disrupt harmonious relations between Jews and Christians.”53 Evangelizing
may be perceived as disrespectful since the idea that one can only be saved
through faith in Jesus implies that there is little or no ultimate value in other
religions. As interfaith dialogue developed and deepened among Catholics and
Mainline Protestants and as theologians in those denominations grew to under-
stand this issue, many spoke out against Christian mission to the Jews.54 The
Catholic Church recently published a statement insisting that God’s covenant
with the Jews has never ended and that Jews do not need Jesus to be saved.55
Paradoxically, evangelical Christians who asserted a special love for Jews have
participated less in interfaith dialogue, but they also have generally not been
welcomed by Jews or other Christians. Christians who saw evangelization of
Jews as a shameful part of Christian history and worked hard to establish trust
with Jewish colleagues were not eager to welcome those who hope to bring Jews
into their own Christian faith.
By contrast, to most Evangelical Christians and Messianic Jews, it makes no
sense to leave Jews out of the salvation that will come only through Jesus. There
is a strong sense among Evangelicals that Jewish believers have a central role to
play in God’s plans. Messianic Jews tend to identify with the 1989 Manila man-
ifesto, which states,
It is sometimes held that in virtue of God’s covenant with Abraham, Jewish people do
not need to acknowledge Jesus as their Messiah. We affirm that they need him as much
as anyone else, that it would be a form of anti-Semitism … to depart from the New Tes-
tament pattern of taking the gospel ‘to the Jew first’ …56

The best-known Messianic organization is Jews for Jesus, an organization found-

ed in Berkeley in the early 1970s to build on Jews’ sense of ethnic pride to bring
53 “Proselytizing and the Jews,” The Facts 4 (January 1949): 6.
54 World Council of Churches, The Theology of the Churches and the Jewish People (Geneva:
WCC Publications, 1988); ICCJ: A Time for Recommitment: Jewish Christian Dialogue 70 Years
After War and Shoah (Berlin: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2009); The Gifts and the Calling of
God are Irrevocable (Rom 11:29): A Reflection on Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic-
Jewish Relations on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of ‘Nostra Aetate’ (No. 4) (Rome: Vatican
Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, 2015), par. 40–43.
55 The Gifts and the Calling.
56 Manila Manifesto, A. 3, 1989. More recently, in 2010, the Lausanne Cape Town Commit-
ment proclaimed: “We affirm that, whereas the Jewish people were not strangers to the covenants
and promises of God, … they still stand in need of reconciliation to God through the Messiah
Jesus.” (II. B)
126 Marcie Lenk

them to faith in Yeshua. Jews for Jesus employs Jewish terminology, but, accord-
ing to Yaakov Ariel, “Jews for Jesus was an agent of evangelical Protestantism
acting to Christianize Jews and bring them into the evangelical community.”57
Jews for Jesus has an almost negligible presence in Israel, but the evangelical
ideal is strong in Israel’s Messianic Jewish communities. Many Jews are uncom-
fortable around Messianic Jews primarily because so many Messianic Jews see
their calling in the mission to the Jews. This Jewish sensitivity is so strong that
the Knesset passed the “anti-missionary law” in 1977, prohibiting “the buying of
converts” through financial or material incentives. Messianic believers in Israel
are careful to offer only spiritual incentives to those who choose to accept faith in
Yeshua, and the law has not prevented them from sharing their faith with others,
though there are no reliable figures as to how successful they have been.
There are Evangelical Christians who are determined not to evangelize to
Jews, as can be found in a 2011 statement of the Hebraic Heritage Christian
Center:
Though we understand that our own self-definition as Evangelicals rests on our response
to and engagement in the call to bear witness both to Israel’s God and to Jesus, our Lord
and Savior, and though we honor the divine imperative to make disciples of all nations,
we engage the Jewish people in conversation not as heathens or unbelievers but as fellow
believers in the God of Scripture; therefore, we share our understanding and our beliefs
with the Jewish people as dialogue within a monotheistic Abrahamic family and as com-
munication with fellow citizens in the commonwealth of God’s community of faith.58

Mark Kinzer of the Hashivenu movement within the Messianic Jewish com-
munity, has gone further to argue for “Postmissionary Messianic Judaism,”
which “affirms Israel’s covenant, Torah, and religious tradition.”59 But Hashive-
nu, which espouses that Messianic Jews are “fully part of the Jewish world in
both religious and national terms … to represent the Jewish community in
relation to the Church, and not vice versa,”60 does not have a very influential
presence among Messianic Jews in Israel. While a small percentage of Messianic
Jews have accepted this limitation, more common in Israel are Messianic Jews
who theoretically believe that the mission to Jews is central, though practically
most are busy with other aspects of their lives. Messianic Jews live and raise

57 Yaakov Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jews in America, 1880–2000
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 211.
58 Reflections of Evangelical Christians in Conversation with Orthodox Jews, Hebraic Her-
itage Christian Center, May 24, 2011. On Evangelicals with growing concerns about Jewish
sensibilities, see also Alan Mittleman, Byron Johnson, Nancy Isserman, eds. Uneasy Allies?
Evangelical and Jewish Relations (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007).
59 Mark Kinzer, Postmissionary Messianic Judaism: Redefining Christian Engagement with
the Jewish People (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005), 263–302.
60 Mark Kinzer, “Messianic Jews and the Jewish World,” in Introduction to Messianic Juda-
ism: Its Ecclesial Context and Biblical Foundations, ed. Daniel Rudolph and Joel Willitts (Grand
Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), 126–35.
 Parted Ways Meet Again 127

families in every city in Israel, most existing under the “anti-missionary” radar
of Jews. They serve in the army and live as Israeli Jews, occasionally speaking to
Jewish friends and colleagues about their faith without imposing their beliefs on
others.
Messianic Jews look to the Jewishness of Jesus, the apostles, and the earliest
disciples of Jesus as models. The current discourse in Early Christian Studies
(including the New Perspectives on Paul, which considers what it means to
understand Jesus and Paul as Jews) allows for more positive attitudes towards
Jews and Judaism than were known in earlier scholarship on the New Testament
and Church History. Using this scholarship, both the Catholic Church and many
mainline Protestant denominations have moved away from replacement theol-
ogy (supersessionism) and opened up paths to respect as covenantal a Judaism
which does not see Jesus as the Messiah; accordingly, these denominations have
even argued against proselytizing to Jews. This historical and theological work
indicates respect for Jews and Judaism, and the growth and visibility of Messianic
Jews testifies to the fact that Jewish identity is no longer a shameful thing in the
Church. Still, many Messianics have reinscribed the theology of Jews as rejected
in their belief that the only theologically positive/correct form of Judaism is to
be found in Jews who have rejected a sense of obligation to Jewish law and who
have embraced Jesus as the Messiah.61

Conclusions: History, Categories, and Labels

Messianic Judaism is a modern movement, an outgrowth of developments

among Christians and Jews in the last two centuries, though Messianic Jews
identify themselves as true disciples of Yeshua, returning to a simpler time in late
antiquity when followers of Jesus were known as Jews. While it is not uncommon
for modern movements to claim ancient roots in the name of authenticity, Mes-
sianic Judaism in Israel plays out this identity with multiple ironies.
According to Homi Bhabha, “Resistance is not necessarily an oppositional act
of political intention, nor is it the simple negation or exclusion of the ‘content’ of
another culture, as difference once perceived. It is the effect of an ambivalence
produced within the rules of recognition of dominating discourses as they artic-
ulate the signs of cultural difference and reimplicate them within the deferential
relations of colonial power – hierarchy, normalization, marginalization and so
forth.”62 In Israel, Judaism is the dominant culture, and Messianic Jews exist
within a commonly accepted definition of Judaism that is based on ethnicity,
61 In my own anecdotal experience, I have spoken to Messianic Jews who argue that the
2015 Vatican statement regarding Jewish Christian relations (see note 53) is heretical since it
argues that Jews do not need Jesus to be in covenantal relationship with God.
62 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 110–111.
128 Marcie Lenk

culture, and nationality, apart from Jewish faith. Messianic Jews’ combination of
that identity with their own belief system might well be seen as a kind of resist-
ance, a resistance that they might identify with the resistance of the historical
Jesus and his followers.
In her analysis of the term “Jewish Christianity,” Karen King concludes,
“Attempts to imagine Jewish Christianity as an essential, homogenous type of
Christianity with a fixed set of characteristics result in imprecision, because the
phenomena are diverse and complex in this period … Those mappings did a
variety of different kinds of work: setting boundaries, marking the limits of inter-
nal difference, and supplying intellectual materials for constructive theology and
ethics. In each case we have to ask: what difference makes a difference? What
work does it do? What is at stake?”63 If, for Paul, it was baptism that made the
difference, what are the significant differences at play for Messianic Jews today?
For example, is support of the State of Israel a perceived difference between Mes-
sianic Jews and Christians? Service in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) is a point
of Jewish/Israeli identity and pride among Messianic Jews in Israel, while Chris-
tian Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel usually do not serve in the IDF. Where
might that leave Messianic Jews (and non-Messianic Jews) who advocate for
Palestinians and challenge policies of the Israeli government?64 King points to
the ways that Paul’s letters were used by Christians to distinguish between a dead
letter Judaism and a living Christianity of faith; but more recently those same
letters have been used in a post-Holocaust world to show how Paul remained
Jewish throughout his life. In the centuries that Jews lived as persecuted minor-
ities in Christian lands, faith in Jesus necessarily meant a break with the Jewish
community. As King writes, “What is at stake in the ways that Christians define
Judaism is the very nature of Christianity itself.”65 The growth of Messianic Jew-
ish communities in Israel is certainly a result of contemporary Christian consid-
eration of the meaning of Scripture and the Jewishness of Jesus and his disciples.
Jews have embraced the Jewishness of Jesus for the last century. What would it
mean for Jews to embrace the Jewishness of contemporary followers of Jesus?
What does it mean for Messianic Jews who embrace faith as central to their
identity that for many, particularly in Israel, their Jewishness is secular? Finally,
what would it mean to use queer theory as advocated by Judith Butler to un-
derstand Messianic Jewish identity to be an expression of resistance of the di-
chotomy between Judaism and Christianity? What would it mean for socially
conservative Messianic Jews to advocate such a theory?

63 King, “Which Early Christianity?,” 76–77.

64 Salim Munayer and Lisa Loden, Through My Enemy’s Eyes: Envisioning Reconciliation in
Israel-Palestine (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2014).
65 King, “Which Early Christianity” 77.
 Parted Ways Meet Again 129

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II. Women and Gender
 Mary Magdalene in the Fantasy Echo
Reflections on the Feminist Historiography of Early Christianity

Carly Daniel-Hughes

“A story always starts before it can be told. When did fem-

inism become a word that not only spoke to you, but spoke
you, spoke of your existence, spoke you into existence? …
What did it mean, what does it do, to hold on to feminism,
to fight under its name; to feel in its ups and downs, in its
comings and goings, your ups and downs, your comings
and goings?”
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life1

The Braun room sits at one end of Andover Hall, the building that now houses
part of Harvard Divinity School. Remodeled in the 1950s, this room always sug-
gested to me elite intellectual pedigree with its wood-paneling, imposing fire-
place, large framed portraits of Deans, shields of prestigious colleges, and the
antiquarian, formalized prose on a plaque that reads: “Braun Common Room –
In the Year of Our Lord 1956 this room was refinished to the Glory of God and
in loving memory of Reverend Samuel John Braun, 1856–1938, Leader of Men,
Preacher of Christ, by his grandson, William J. Braun, student of HDS for the
enhancing of the community life of the School.”2 When the room was not in use,
I liked to study there. It was also one of the first places that I remember hearing
Karen King give a talk. I do not recall the precise details. I know it entailed dis-
cussion of Nag Hammadi materials, perhaps the Apocryphon of John, a text that
I had read as an undergraduate and found utterly disorienting. Karen stood at
a podium, red-patterned scarf looped causally around her neck, and made this
text seem lucid, even prescient, highlighting how it spoke to the corruptions of
power and violence. What attracted me to her work was more than the content
of her speech; rather, it was the way that content was expressed, her composure
in this particular space, one visually marked for the “Leaders of Men.” It was a
feminist posture with which I began to identify, and I was not alone in this.
In The Fantasy of Feminist History, Joan Wallach Scott uses the psychoanalytic
notion of fantasy to consider how feminists (including historians) constituted
1 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 4.
2 See https://hds.harvard.edu/news/2012/05/09/saluting-andover-hall-100-years.
136 Carly Daniel-Hughes

and appealed to the category of women in ways that secured their identification
with it.3 Here I take up Scott’s concept, the “fantasy of feminist history,” to con-
sider how the attachment to the category “women” operated in the feminist his-
toriography of early Christianity in which I was trained. What I offer is a portrait
of a little more than a decade, the 1990s and early 2000s – a time of remarkable
production in the feminist historiography of early Christianity. While Karen
features prominently, because her work made an indelible impact on my own
scholarship and teaching, she is but one figure circulating in a larger intellectual
orbit described here.
In what follows, I rely variously on personal reflections to highlight how the
fantasies of the feminist historiography of early Christianity got traction and
what effects (often unintended) they could have on those in thrall to them. My
approach is informed by feminist scholars working with affect theory, notably
Ann Cvetkovich, Sara Ahmed, and, nearer to early Christian studies, Maia Ko-
trosits.4 Together these scholars have theorized and demonstrated how the per-
sonal articulates the affective registers of academic pursuits and gives needed
texture and depth to our histories. The personal is a mode of writing well suited
to archiving an intellectual landscape within feminism because as an academic
orientation, it has concerned itself with lived realities (even if those connections
have been the subject of contestations in feminist circles).5 This essay asks then:
what did it feel like to be taken up with the feminist historiographic task of early
Christianity in these decades? What pleasures, and what disappointments, did
such intellectual pursuits facilitate?

Falling Hard for Feminist Historiography

There was no better moment to begin your graduate work at Harvard Divinity
School (HDS) then in 1998, if what drew you there was a passion for feminism
and the historical study of ancient Christianity. Though at the time of my arrival,
I could not explain what animated my desire to attend Harvard in order to study
(as I reported to my proud, but concerned parents) the Bible and “early Chris-
tian women.” That I could name my intellectual pursuit and be emboldened
to undertake it was in part the disciplinary success of feminist thought – “a

3 Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2011).
4 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 18; Maia Kotrosits,
“How Things Feel: Biblical Studies, Affect, and the (Im)personal,” Brill Research Perspectives in
Biblical Interpretation 1.1 (2016): 1–53.
5 See Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2012), 74–76.
 Mary Magdalene in the Fantasy Echo 137

story always starts before it is told,” Ahmed explains.6 That I should seek an
intellectual home in feminism and early Christian studies was enabled by my
biography.7 Early on in life I cultivated a sensibility that it was my job to account
for the lives of women who had raised, loved, and supported me. Two of these
women, my maternal grandmother and mother, were devout Christian women.
Both were deeply constrained by social, historical, and no doubt psychological
forces that limited their life choices and pursuits beyond raising a family. My
mother asserted that Christianity served her as solace for a life of economic
insecurity, career disappointments, and loneliness, all of which exacerbated by
long stretches of solo parenting. I often wondered (privately sometimes, openly
and irreverently at others), whether in fact her piety might also have been Marx’s
proverbial flowers decorating the chains that set her limits? That I wanted to read
early Christian woman as complex agents and actors, as subjects of history and
not “victims of patriarchy,” I think now, was a suggestion to my mother that there
were other possibilities for her life too, if she wanted them. I was also motivated
by a sense of guilt that my relative freedom (she helped me get to Harvard after
all) actually came at the expense of her own.8
When I arrived at HDS, feminist work in biblical and religious studies as
well as theology had moved from the margins of these related subfields, though
certainly not to their centers, to an established place within the academy. There
was at this point a sizable, and expanding, body of feminist work in these areas,
and critical resources to undertake it: feminist commentaries on scripture, fem-
inist histories of early Christianity, feminist theologies, feminist approaches to
the study of religion9 – not to mention all of the feminist work taking place in
allied fields. At HDS in particular, the “Women’s Studies in Religion Program”
had been supporting feminist scholars for two decades. The Journal of Feminist
Studies in Religion was in its eighteenth year. In the United States there were
two graduate programs focused especially on women and religion, and Harvard
was one of them.10 And then there were the established and path-breaking
professors working at the intersections of feminism, gender theory and early

6 Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 4.

7 Home has played a signature symbolic role in feminist circles, see Scott, The Fantasy of
Feminist History, 37–40.
8 I use the word “guilt” in relation to how my career may have damaged my mother’s own,
anticipating the work of Melanie Klein, which I address the close of the essay. Klein had a rich
commentary on guilt and anxiety in relation to the mother.
9 The bibliography is immense. For a treatment of feminist biblical studies, see Shelly Mat-
thews, “Feminist Biblical Historiography,” in Feminist Biblical Studies in the Twentieth Century:
Scholarship and Movement, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical
Literature, 2014), 233–248. For a survey of feminist theologies in this period, see Rosemary
Radford Ruether, Women and Redemption: A Theological History (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress,
1998), 179–272.
10 The other was Claremont Graduate University.
138 Carly Daniel-Hughes

Judaism and Christianity; a sizable number of whom happened to be circulating

in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts, namely: Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,
Bernadette Brooten,11 Joanna Dewey,12 Gail Yee,13 Ross Shepard Kraemer,14 and
of course, Karen King.15 Exactly one year before I arrived on Harvard’s campus,
Karen was hired as Harvard Professor of New Testament. She would eventually
hold the oldest chair at the University, the Hollis Professorship of Divinity, es-
tablished in 1721. She is the first women to do so.16
The late 1990s was not the breathless and revolutionary time of the 1970s,
where the lines between scholarship and activism seemed less opaque. Instead,
it represented the maturation of feminist scholarship as an academic pursuit.
It was a time when a keen student could cultivate her ardor for the feminist
historiography of early Christianity, even at a conservative institution such as
Harvard. I was caught up and buoyed along by a heady combination that this
moment promised, rigorous intellectual work (that would earn me an academic
position – I’d hoped) and something like a moral imperative that operated, more
or less explicitly, in feminist approaches to early Christianity then: history is an
ethical and political act meant to bring social transformation in the present.17
What an intoxicating promise this mix seemed to offer. Here I could have the
benefits of elitism – resulting from the specialized training demanded of a
budding historian of late antique Christianity at Harvard University – without
foregoing a connection to the “real world.” I imagined that my work, like that of
the feminist scholars surrounding me, could address the needs of a collective of
which I was part and to whom I felt responsible: “women.” I was only beginning
to understand then that the production of this identity was, and continues to be,
heavily scrutinized in feminist theory.18 As I will go on to explain, I have only
lately understood that my hopeful attachment to it amplified my disillusion with
the academy and raised the existential stakes of academic pursuit for me and,
I hazard, others as well.

11 She is Kraft-Hiatt Professor of Christian Studies at Brandeis University (Waltham).

12 She taught at Episcopal Divinity School (Cambridge) for thirty years, and served as its
Dean as well.
13 She joined the faculty of Episcopal Divinity School in 1998.
14 She taught at Brown University (Providence) where she was hired as Professor of Relig-
ious Studies in 2000.
15 Outside of biblical studies, there was a rich repository of feminist scholars working in
theology and the history of Christianity, for instance, Sara Coakley, Clarissa Atkinson, Ann
Braude, and Amy Hollywood. In Boston, students also had access to scholars working in other
institutions, such as Carter Heyward, Kwok Pui-Lan, and Mary Daly.
16 See https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/05/the-oldest-endowed-professorship/.
17 Perhaps the clearest expression of this ideal can be found in Elisabeth Schüssler Fioren-
za’s, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1999). This
orientation also informed Karen L. King’s historiography, see What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 245–46.
18 See Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History, 8–11.
 Mary Magdalene in the Fantasy Echo 139

With my peers, I poured over Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s books, especially

In Memory of Her, and eagerly took her “Feminist Biblical Interpretation” course
(we affectionately abbreviated it as “FBI”).19 But it was Karen King’s work that
ultimately opened my imaginative horizons to what early Christian studies could
entail; to what kinds of histories its rich and variegated sources might tell; and
to what they could unsettle. More than this, I was drawn to the way that Karen
commanded her material all the while overturning traditional narratives about
ancient Christianity. Her courses showed orthodoxy to be a product of ancient
polemics, moreover, ones that twentieth-century scholars had reproduced. (She
was in the midst of completing the manuscript for What is Gnosticism? in those
years). Her students learned that heresy was not an historical fact, but a dis-
course, and a pernicious one that often used anti-Judaism as part of its rhetorical
arsenal.20 This discourse had shaped the history of religions so much so that
scholars of ancient Christianity for the most part had either continued to treat
Nag Hammadi and related literature as “Gnostic,” or to ignore these texts entirely
in their historical accounts.21 Karen’s work gave new impetus to the study of
these Coptic sources. They were no longer esoteric “Gnostic scriptures,” but
rather, evidence of early Christian diversity and internal struggle, and those
included contestations of women’s authority and gender roles.

No Longer on the Margins: The Case of Mary Magdalene

For feminist historians of early Christianity, Karen held out an expanded corpora
of sources that could be used to illuminate the complexity of debates about wom-
en’s leadership. As she explained in her chapter on the Gospel of Mary in Search
the Scriptures:
The rediscovery of the Gospel of Mary (Magdalene) provides new materials with which to
reconstruct the past. The Gospel of Mary now provides direct evidence of early Christian
arguments in favor of the leadership of women and allows us to see that views excluding
women were but one side of a hotly debated issue.22

Her analysis of the Gospel of Mary in particular rehabilitated Mary Magdalene

from repentant harlot to a prophet and apostle. In Karen’s assessment, the iden-
tification of Mary as a harlot was a fabrication produced by the artful exegesis of
figures, like Pope Gregory the Great, and designed to undermine theologies as-
sociated with Mary of Magdala and traditions that presented her “as a visionary
19 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of
Christian Origins. Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York: Crossroad, 1998).
20 See King, What is Gnosticism?, especially 40–48.
21 King, What is Gnosticism?, 57–109.
22 Karen L. King, “The Gospel of Mary Magdalene,” in Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist
Commentary. Volume Two, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 601.
140 Carly Daniel-Hughes

prophet, exemplary disciple and apostolic leader.”23 Karen argued that the Gospel
of Mary, a text likely initially composed in the second century CE, provides the
most detailed witness to this early Christian representation of Mary.24 Redis-
covered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Gospel of Mary
has been preserved in the Berlin codex and two papyrus fragments.25 The text
begins amidst a post-resurrection dialogue in which Jesus informs his disciples
about the nature of sin, salvation and the end of the world. The key to eternal
life is uncovering the “Child of Humanity” within oneself, and not falling prey
to the deceptions and allures of bodily passions and desires which lead to sin
and death.26 When Jesus departs, Mary alone is undisturbed, while the disciples
weep. Standing in their midst, Mary relates to them a vision she received from
the savior. Here the manuscripts break off, but with what remains, it seems that
the vision related details about the ascent of the soul and the nature of prophecy.
At the close of her speech, two male disciples, Andrew and Peter, challenge her.
Peter’s rebuke is the harshest: “Did he, then, speak with a woman in private
without our knowing about it? Are we to turn around and listen to her?”27 Levi
defends her, and cajoles the group to cease arguing in order to deliver Jesus’ mes-
sage of salvation. An unresolved ending to be sure. Karen suggested, however,
that the disciples quarreling and disquiet exemplified Mary as the model disciple,
whose composure solidifies her spiritual maturity as compared to the bickering
and jealously of disciples like Peter.28
Karen showed that the Gospel of Mary makes a clear case for women’s leader-
ship and teaching – even as it witnesses that such a case was a source of debate
in early Christian circles. Here she avoided any simple equation that made Mary
Magdalene a proto-feminist, or an easy icon for women’s liberation. Indeed, in
this text Mary’s spiritual authority points to the elimination of sexual difference,
an indication that in the end, it is illusory, fleeting. Thus, while the text makes a
case for women’s leadership, it does so by undermining Mary’s identification as a
woman as well as undermining the value of her material body.29 As such the text
is not a ready ally for contemporary feminism. It is not interested in the project of
women’s emancipation, Karen explained, but rather, the emancipation of the soul
23 See especially, King, “Canonization and Marginalization: Mary of Magdala,” in Women’s
Sacred Scriptures, ed. Kwok Pui-Lan and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (London: SCM Press,
1998), 31.
24 King, “Canonization and Marginalization,” 31–32.
25 See Karen L. King, Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle (Santa
Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 2003), 7–11.
26 King, Gospel of Mary Magdala, 51.
27 Translation from the Berlin codex, King, Gospel of Mary Magdala, 17.
28 King, Gospel of Mary Magdala, 56.
29 King, “The Gospel of Mary Magdalene,” 624–25; see also, “Prophetic Power and Women’s
Authority: The Case of the Gospel of Mary (Magdalene),” in Women Preachers and Prophets:
Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millenia of Christianity, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle
and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 32.
 Mary Magdalene in the Fantasy Echo 141

from matter, sin, and death. Yet, in a turn befitting the nuance of Karen’s work, she
pointed out that the Gospel of Mary does have something to offer contemporary
feminists. It provides an unrelenting critique of injustice and suffering, and more
than this, it indicates “one type of theologizing that was meaningful to some early
Christian women, that had a place for women’s legitimate exercise of prophetic
leadership, and to whose construction women contributed.”30
Karen’s research on Mary Magdalene earned broad interest, both inside and
outside of the academy. Her work on the Gospel of Mary, which I have been
discussing here, was written to be accessible to a broader public. One can feel
this particularly in the 2003 Polebridge Press, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala:
Jesus and the First Woman Apostle, a slim book that provides a translation of the
text and generously guides its readers through it. Popular attention to Karen’s
work on Mary Magdalene was also a response to the publication of Dan Brown’s
The Da Vinci Code, which came out the same year. As is well known, Brown’s
thriller imagined a conspiracy in which the Catholic church sought to hide ev-
idence that Mary was Christ’s wife and lover, and that the pair were ancestors
of the Merovingian dynastic line.31 Adapted into a movie in 2006, The Da Vinci
Code kept Karen’s work about Mary in the public eye. Brown’s mystical reading
of Mary Magdalene drew part of its inspiration from feminist scholarship like
Karen’s, but it also took license by literalizing the metaphoric sexual language of
texts like the Gospel of Philip.
At the time of the Dan Brown sensation, feminist biblical studies had already
penetrated pockets of the larger, non-academic world, a result of feminist re-
sources designed for use in churches and reading groups, like Searching the
Scriptures: A Feminist Commentary (1994),32 and journalistic coverage like
Cullen Murphy’s readable title, The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible
in Ancient Times and Our Own (1998)33 as well as glossy magazine features in
places like Newsweek, Time, and Ms. Magazine (some penned by feminist schol-
ars).34 In 2003, Newsweek interviewed Karen and some other biblical scholars for
a story that opened with the following gripping lead: “Fueling Faith and Igniting
30 King, “Prophetic Power,” 33.
31 Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2003). The references to
the Gospel of Mary Magdalene (and Nag Hammadi materials) appear on pages 245–250.
32 See note 22. Other titles include Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, eds. Women’s
Bible Commentary with Apocrypha (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1992); Carol
Meyers, Toni Craven, and Ross S. Kramer, eds., Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and
Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, The Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New
Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000).
33 Cullen Murphy, The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and
Our Own (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
34 David van Biera, “Mary Magdalene: Saint or Sinner?” Time Magazine (August 2003),
available at: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,472868,00.html. Jane
Schaberg and Melanie Johnson-Debraufre, “There’s Something about Mary,” Ms. Magazine
(Spring 2006), available at: http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2006/mary.asp; see also Elaine
142 Carly Daniel-Hughes

Debate: A New Generation of Scholars is Altering Our Belief about the Role
of Women in the Bible.”35 In these popular venues, Karen corrected not only
the idea that Mary was a repentant prostitute, she also dismissed Brown’s rep-
resentation of Mary as Christ’s wife. For Christian women, who also appear in
the 2003 Newsweek story, the result was an image of Mary Magdalene who “was
not a weakling … but a person of strength and character.”36
The recuperation of Mary Magdalene by feminist scholars like Karen con-
firmed for these contemporary women their desire to be leaders within their
respective Christian communities.37 Certainly feminist work in biblical studies
was at earlier points explicitly caught up in the question of women’s ordination
because this topic was at issue in many Christian denominations in the 1970s.
When, as a Master’s student, I read the Newsweek story (and promptly purchased
a copy to send to my mother), it felt obvious to me the link that these Christian
women were making: What could be said about Mary, or other heroines of the
Bible, could be said of women in Christian churches more generally. Karen had
shown that controversy over Mary Magdalene’s teaching pointed to the possibil-
ity that women held spiritual authority in the early Jesus movement, or at least,
that some argued that they could possess leadership positions. Karen’s attention
to writings like the Gospel of Mary provided “new direct evidence” for this his-
torical argument. We cannot underestimate the affective force of this feminist
work for some Christian women. Precisely because Christianity has appeared
as the figure of women’s exclusion from teaching and speaking (although for
differing reasons at different times), how thrilling was it to watch Karen, and
other feminist scholars, expose the lie: the prohibition was contestable, and from
the earliest moments of the Jesus movement. Yet I was drawn to something else
in Karen’s work, namely, the way it seemed to secure my uncertain position in
the academy. A feminist historian, Karen King, had advanced an argument that
confirmed ancient women’s authority to speak about matters critical to Chris-
tian teaching. Moreover, she did it by performing those very things herself, with
seriousness and erudition. She implied that I could as well.

Pagels, “The Truth at the Heart of the Da Vinci Code,” May 22, 2006 National Public Radio
online, available at: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5422879.
35 Barbara Kantrowitz and Anne Underwood, “The Bible’s Lost Stories,” Newsweek Maga-
zine (December 8, 2003): 49–59.
36 Kantrowitz and Underwood, “The Bible’s Lost Stories,” 50.
37 Other important titles here are Jane Schaberg, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene:
Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament (New York: Continuum, 2006); Ann Graham
Brock, Mary Magdalene: The First Apostle. The Struggle for Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Divinity School Press, 2003).
 Mary Magdalene in the Fantasy Echo 143

Mary Magdalene & the Fantasy Echo

With the critical remove of almost two decades – and from the subject position
of a feminist professor with students of her own – my identification with my
feminist mentors seems less natural, less evident, and even ambivalent. Yet I am
confident that this identification, and its eventual fracture, remains absolutely
germane to my formation as a scholar and teacher. It also prompts me to ask,
rather than accept as given: How did Christian women, in twenty-first century
North America, kindle an affiliation with Mary of Magdala, a Judean woman,
from the first-century Roman province of Palestine? In part, this identification
was primed by a longer history of Christian scriptural practices. Personalized
engagement with the Bible emerged in evangelical circles in the Victorian period
and extended to Protestants and Catholics alike in the twentieth century. Bible
study, alone or in groups, is a marker of Christian belonging in North America, a
social practice that cuts across racial and denominational lines.38 As such, Bible
study readies Christians to see themselves and their various personal struggles in
the stories and figures that populate the scriptures. (Certain modes of feminist,
womanist, liberationist, mujerista and queer biblical interpretation build on and
sustain such forms of reading, and in some cases, they have also interrogated
them).39 Attachments and identifications, whether to ancient biblical figures or
feminist mentors, are sustained by particular historical conditions and social-
psychological forces at work in subtle ways.
Scott’s The Fantasy of Feminist History turns to psychoanalytic theory to think
critically about those conditions and forces. “Women,” according to Scott, is not
a natural category, but rather a production whose “means and effects” ought to
be the topic of feminist inquiry.40 “As long as ‘women’ continue to ‘form a pas-
sive backdrop to changing conceptions of gender,’” she writes, “our history rests
on a biological foundation that feminists, at least in theory, want to contest.”41
Scott continues: “We have to ask how, under what conditions, and with what
fantasies the identities of men and women – which so many historians take to

38 See for instance, Hillary Kaell, “A Bible People: Post-Conciliar U. S. Catholics, Scripture,
and Holy Land Pilgrimage,” US Catholic Historian 31.4 (2013), especially 88–92; James S. Bielo,
Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study (New York: New York
University Press, 2009); Allen Dwight Callahan, The Talking Book: African Americans and the
Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
39 On Feminist Biblical studies, Matthews, “Feminist Biblical Historiography”; also Susanne
Scholz and Shelly A. and Matthews, “Feminist Biblical Interpretation,” in The Oxford Encyclope-
dia of Biblical Interpretation, ed. Steven L. McKenzie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013),
303–313. Critiques have come from queer theory in particular, which has challenged identity
categories, see essays in Teresa J. Hornsby and Ken Stone, eds. Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at
the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011).
40 Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 40.
41 Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 10.
144 Carly Daniel-Hughes

be self-evident – are articulated and recognized.”42 Fantasy is a movement of the

psyche representing the outside and itself to itself.43 According to Scott, fantasy
allows us to analyze how such collectivities are sustained out of the desires and
fears that attend the formation of the self. In this, fantasy grants a promise of
“wholeness and completion, adequate representation,” and masks contradictions
and antagonisms that attend that uncertain processes of identity formation.
In one essay, Scott develops the concept of “fantasy echo” as an analytic to
explore how the identity “women” coalesced in feminist movements since the
eighteenth century. Echo serves as “a gloss” on fantasy, “a reminder” that “iden-
tity (in the sense of both sameness and selfness) is constructed in complex and
diffracted relation to others.”44 Fantasy echo describes the mechanism by which
these feminists could “transcend history and difference” and see themselves,
and their audiences, as part of “a vast, undifferentiated collective” of women
stretching back in time. By means of a fantasy echo, feminists in these centuries
imagined themselves in “similarly structured scenarios” with women who had
come before them.45
Two dominant scenarios that played themselves out for these feminists were
the female orator and the feminist maternal fantasy. In the orator fantasy, a woman
seemingly transgresses the bounds of her gender, occupying speaking positions
that are the domain of men; in the maternal, a woman derives pleasure from the
bonds of a shared sisterhood. These fantasies were not mutually exclusive. They
could be elicited by the very same figures, at different moments. Moreover, these
fantasies can be mutually informing, the orator scene confirming something of
the pressure and anxiety that is released in the maternal one.
Both fantasies, the orator and the maternal, have dominated the feminist his-
toriography of early Christianity as well. They could be said to neatly capture the
dominant affective impulses of much of that historical work; they likewise help
account for what solicited excitement in it. Mary Magdalene restored to the po-
sition of a teacher and apostle nicely aligns with what Scott defines as the orator
fantasy. She is a woman taking up a position of speech and authority in what
appears to be male public space.46 In the Gospel of Mary, Mary imparts special
knowledge to a group of male disciples. That two of these disciples, Andrew and
Peter, openly question her right to be among them, to claim such knowledge,
confirms her act as a potential transgression. Feminist historiographical work
that shows up such moments in early Christian literature garners public interest
because, in psychoanalytic terms, it solicits a libidinal charge that comes with
trespassing “social and sexual boundaries.” It can and does draw animosity
42 Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 21.
43 Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 14.
44 Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 53.
45 Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 57.
46 Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 53.
 Mary Magdalene in the Fantasy Echo 145

for the very same reason.47 Naming early Christian women as prophets, office
holders, teachers, and even priests, has been a regular preoccupation of feminist
historiography of ancient Judaism and Christianity.48 A charge of shared trans-
gression likewise provided the groundwork for contemporary Christian women
to identify with the image of Mary, the apostle, which Karen’s work highlight-
ed. “I aspire to be a Mary of Magdala … a woman unafraid to speak up,” states
Maggie Alpo in the 2003 Newsweek article mentioned above.49 Maggie refers to
her fight with the Catholic diocese to allow the burial of unidentified remains in
Catholic cemeteries. In her statement, Mary Magdalene has been refracted back,
an echo, a selective remembering. She is not a witness to the resurrection, or a
visionary outlining the soul’s release from matter, that we find in the Gospel of
Mary, but a woman unafraid to speak for what is right. So too my conflation of
Mary’s erudite speaking and teaching with Karen’s – and what I hoped would
one day be my own – was caught up in the pleasurable notion that “women”
could be masters of an intellectual domain.
It’s important to clarify Scott’s argument about fantasy echo unless it be mis-
read as uncharitable, or inattentive to real conditions of disenfranchisement,
in the case of Maggie (and so many Catholic women), or the precariousness of
an academic future, in my own (and in the lives of many doctoral candidates).
Scott explains: “Women is an unstable category, this doesn’t mean it has no his-
torical existence. It may be transitory, coming in and out of view, but it exists in
its temporal context, with important effects. It serves to organize women in its
image …”50 Women have experienced exclusion and prejudice in the church and
the academy as a result of gender. Such exclusions are compounded by the force
of race, class, sexuality, and disability.51 The orator fantasy consolidates feelings,
experiences, encounters of discrimination into a coherent narrative, one that
created the conditions for agency and self-determination. Maggie spoke up. In
2000, I entered the doctoral program. Karen King became my supervisor.

47 Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 20. A well-known example from the field of feminist
biblical studies would be the work of Jane Schaberg on the gospel infancy narratives. In her 1987
monograph, Schaberg argued that behind Matthew and Luke’s birth stories lay not a tradition of
virgin birth, but rather of Mary’s illegitimate conception of Jesus as the result of rape. Schaberg
endured intense animosity, including verbal attacks, threats of harm and tenuous status within
her university in response to its publication; see The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological
Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives. Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield
University Press, 2006), 3–10.
48 Two prominent examples include Karen Jo Torjesen’s When Women Were Priests:
Women’s Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of
Christianity (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1995); Bernadette Brooten, Women Leaders in the
Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press,
1982).
49 Kantrowitz and Underwood, “The Bible’s Lost Stories,” 53.
50 Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 11.
51 Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 65.
146 Carly Daniel-Hughes

The maternal fantasy, on the other hand, is on display in feminist calls for
“solidarity” and “sisterhood,” which Scott traces in various moments of feminist
activism and scholarship. This collective identification is not driven by the affec-
tive power of entering into masculine territory together as in the orator fantasy;
rather, it evokes a scene, in Luce Irigaray’s terms, of the joys of a maternal love that
have been repressed. This fantasy is premised on the recovery of a pre-Oedipal
love of mother and daughter,52 recovery of “a desire distinct from and potentially
prior to that which is associated with heterosexuality, with phallic economies,
with men.”53 Such love need not be predicated on literal maternity (though in
some feminist discourse it has been). But it can also be seen as a psychic-social
orientation. Irigaray writes: “… we are always mothers once we are women. We
bring something other than children into the world, we engender something
other than children: love, desire, language, art, the social, the political, the relig-
ious, for example. But this creation has been forbidden us for centuries, and we
must reappropriate this maternal dimension that belongs to us as women.”54 The
world of women conjured by feminist calls for solidarity and action, notes Scott,
“is one in which women find pleasure among themselves, or ‘jouissance d’elles-
mêmes,’ in Irigaray’s words.” What is it that women share “among themselves”?
A deep and abiding love for one another that overflows to all of humanity. “The
historian’s pleasure, it might be added is in finding herself party to this scene of
feminine jouissance,” Scott writes.55
The feminist historiography of early Christianity has long invoked this fantas-
tic scene. The movement of fantasy is not unidirectional – that is, it is not simply
the result of projection from Christian women, or keen graduate students.
Rather fantastic affinities with biblical women and the scholars promoting those
images were encouraged (sometimes quite explicitly and other times perhaps
less intentionally) by the ambience of this feminist historiography itself “the
women’s bible,” “the discipleship of equals,” “wo/men church,” “love between
women,” or “the lost world of early Christian women.”56 What is being imagined

52 Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 63.

53 Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 65.
54 Luce Irigaray, “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother,” in The Irigaray Reader, ed.
Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 43.
55 Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 65.
56 The Women’s Bible refers to the commentary and translation project undertaken by Elis-
abeth Cady Stanton and a committee of women. This effort is evoked in the work of Elisabeth
Schüssler Fiorenza, and the terms “discipleship of equals” and “wo/men church” are also hers
(taken up by other feminist scholars as well), see, In Memory of Her, 7–14, 140–155, and in
the “New Introduction,” xxx–xxxv. The other expressions here appear in book titles, namely
Bernadette Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Nicola Denzey, The Bone Gatherers: The Lost
Worlds of Early Christian Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007); more recently, Kate Cooper,
Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women (New York: Overlook Press,
 Mary Magdalene in the Fantasy Echo 147

here if not a homosocial space of women’s pleasure? What a thrill as a graduate

student, and one so deeply attached to my own mother, to contribute to finding
and reconstructing such scenes in my own work? In early Christian studies, the
Acts of Thecla has been the text that has most readily aligned with feminine
jouissance. It is the extra-canonical story of an elite women, named Thecla, who
abandons marriage and family to follow the apostle Paul’s message of celibacy.
Saved, remarkably, from death on multiple occasions, she ultimately finds sup-
port among the women of Antioch. (Paul, a poor excuse for a mentor, has long
left her behind). In the end, she baptizes herself, dons a male cloak, and spends
her final days as an iterant missionary.
Thecla could nicely support the orator fantasy too, a reminder that the orator
and maternal fantasies are often connected, one sustaining the other. Feminist
scholars have repeatedly emphasized Thecla’s gender inversions, her cross-dress-
ing, and her brazen acts of public speech and transgressive self-baptism. It is
interesting that they have variously allied the text with the early-third century
Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas. Is what solicits this connection that they
can both be read in either of these fantasy scenarios, orator and maternal?
Perpetua too is a leader, unafraid to challenge men in courts or arenas. Yet she
has an intense bond with her female slave, Felicitas. She is a mother who at once
nurtures and resists her maternal role. Perpetua, like Thecla, is a figure with com-
plex and shifting relationships to femininity and masculinity.57
Feminist work on the Acts of Thecla in the 1980s popularized the view that
this apocryphal Act provided access to “women’s world.” Here was a narrative
that contained the memory of widows’ oral storytelling; one that spoke to
women’s motivations and intentions to what drew them to the Jesus movement;
one that is filled with a range of female characters (including, household slaves,
and improbably, a lioness) who come to Thecla’s aid.58 More than this, the text
seems to ground those connections in the bond of mother-daughter love. As
Ross Kraemer points out, “Mother-daughter relations bookend Thecla’s story.”59
Forsaken by her own mother, Theocleia, Thecla earns the love and esteem of
the noble women, Queen Tryphaena, who elects to adopt her as a second child,
having lost her own dear girl, Falconilla. “[Tryphaena] loved her deeply just as

2013). It is particularly interesting to read Cooper’s foreword in this monograph in light of the
maternal fantasy (it details the story-telling of her mother and grandmother); her reading is
somewhat of a surprise given that her earlier work challenged the notion that the Acts of Thecla
was a gynocentric text, see Ross Kraemer, Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in
the Greco-Roman Mediterranean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 127–133.
57 For example, Gail P. Streete, Redeemed Bodies: Women Martyrs in Early Christianity
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009).
58 For feminist scholarship on this text, see Kraemer, Unreliable, 120–136. For a discussion
of early work on it, Shelly Matthews, “Thinking of Thecla: Issues in Feminist Historiography,”
JFRS 17.2 (2001): 39–55.
59 Kraemer, Unreliable Witnesses, 133.
148 Carly Daniel-Hughes

her daughter Falconilla,”60 we read in the twenty-ninth chapter. In the end, the
once angry mother, Theocleia reunites with her child, Thecla. At this point in
the story, the male characters either fall out of the narrative entirely, or they are
unnecessary. Her fiancé, Thamyris, we learn has since died. Paul, who has for
most of the narrative abandoned Thecla, now suddenly wishes her well with a
commission: “Go and Teach the word of God.” This reads as a lame and late-
coming blessing for a woman who has just finished an inspired speech that
spared her life, prompting women in attendance to cry out “praise to God.” There
is much in this short narrative to evoke the jouissance of the feminist historian.

Suspending the Fantasy: The Linguistic Turn

By the time that I entered my doctorate, however, feminist historians were

largely denying themselves such pleasurable encounters with texts like the Acts
of Thecla. They were informed by the linguistic turn, and the work of scholars
like Elizabeth Clark who pushed feminist historians of early Christianity to take
seriously the theoretical insights of post-structuralist theory. Attentiveness to
the rhetorical and textual nature of our ancient sources complicated the notion
that they might be used to reconstruct women’s history.61 That work certainly
defined my mature graduate thinking about feminist historiography. I was now
under the provocative suggestion that I could examine early Christian sources to
demonstrate how some early Christian male authors wrote women’s bodies into
their texts, and in so doing, I could reveal the theological and political agendas
motivating their discourse.
Tertullian of Carthage made for an especially good target. His ire proved hard
to resist. I wanted to cut off his misogynistic rhetoric at the knees, catch him in
the act, expose the flaws in his logic. (The fantasy of the orator persisted for me).
By the time I revised the thesis into monograph form, I was reading Tertullian’s
work on women’s dress with his more speculative writings on the soul and the
resurrection. In this, I surfaced a deep and abiding connection between female
flesh and sin that manifest itself across his writings.62

60 Translations of the Acts of Thecla from Bart Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not
Make It into the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
61 Two important articles appeared in the same year: Elizabeth A. Clark, “Holy Women,
Holy Words: Early Christian Women, Social History and the Linguistic Turn,” JECS 6.3 (1998):
413–430 and “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the Linguistic Turn,”
CH 67:1 (1998): 1–31. Feminist scholars, of course, are now grabbling with the implications of
the material turn, a corrective to post-structuralist approaches that seemed to grant language
too much epistemological priority and eschewed attention to materiality.
62 See Carly Daniel-Hughes, The Salvation of the Flesh in Tertullian of Carthage: Dressing for
the Resurrection (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
 Mary Magdalene in the Fantasy Echo 149

My damning conclusion reflected the most “suspicious” elements of the fem-

inist hermeneutics in which I had been trained. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
described the “hermeneutics of suspicion” as one that “does not presuppose the
feminist authority and truth of the Bible, but takes as its starting point the as-
sumption that biblical texts and their interpretations are androcentric and serve
patriarchal functions.”63 What ranks among one of the most memorable images,
at least in my reading of her work, is this: we, feminist exegetes, are detectives
and health-inspectors. We find androcentric presumptions and patriarchal logic.
We ask: do these writings, and our interpretations of them, sustain an ethical
vision of emancipation, or do they sustain patriarchal oppression?64 And we
should look everywhere, for there may be unseen consequences: Paul’s seemingly
innocuous claim that “love bears all things” can become a proclamation that
allows, and conceals, domestic violence.65 This suspicious posture was a good
instance of what Eve Sedgwick called “paranoid reading.”66 Robyn Wiegman ex-
plains: “… paranoid reading is understood in current literary critical debates as
a practice bent toward diagnosis, demystification, and revelation, ready at every
moment to alert readers to worlds of meaning they are unable to discern on their
own.”67 Such reading practices are anticipatory and capacious in their reach.
They are premised on the notion that “there can be no bad surprises.” Paranoid
reading is motivated by a desire to blunt pain, to forestall humiliation.
It strikes me that part of what animated feminist turns to post-structuralist
theory was an attempt to stave off such conditions of humiliation. One thing that
these approaches did was place feminist historians at a greater distance from
their subjects: women.68 It was harder to address questions of agency and auto-
nomy that had so dominated earlier feminist theorizing, or to use these writings
to advance feminist political aspirations. The route was more circuitous when
we did; the results more tepid.69 To argue for an aspiration lays bare a subjective
want, exposes the fact that we go to ancient texts propelled by our own “fervent
desires.” One of those desires was the thrill of the homosocial space that defined
feminist historiography particularly in the 1970s and early 80s. “All that libidinal
energy,” writes Scott, “devoted to women as objects of inquiry, subjects of rights,
63 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Inter-
pretation, Tenth Anniversary Edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 15.
64 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation
(Boston, Beacon Press, 1992), 54.
65 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “The Justice of Wisdom-Sophia: Love Endures Every-
thing – Or Does It?,” in Sharing Her Word: Feminist Biblical Interpretation in Context (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1998), 137–159.
66 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So
Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy,
Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–151.
67 Wiegmen, “Eve’s Triangles, Or Queer Studies Beside Itself,” Differences 26.1 (2015): 50.
68 Clark, “The Lady Vanishes,” 5.
69 See Kraemer, Unreliable, especially 1–11.
150 Carly Daniel-Hughes

students, colleagues, and friends …”70 In the mature period of feminist historiog-
raphy, operating out of some erotic charge that homosociality once provided, but
no longer seemed possible, this homosocial desire read as naïve, and not entirely
ethical. “Our world,” Scott notes, “is no longer exclusively female.”66 Moreover,
such fantasies of solidarity ignored feminists of color who pointed out, and early
on, that white feminists were masking critical differences in their emphasis on
women as a singular collective, thereby obscuring and appropriating others’
lives and histories.71 By the time I was in graduate school, feminist scholars had
mostly appreciated this lesson. We did not stand on sure ground to found “wom-
en’s history”: subjectivity, the body, agency, and identity had come under the
force of challenge and critique, as Scott’s work demonstrates. Yet I would suggest
that this fantasy of solidarity still operated, perhaps more subtly, less directly,
in scholarship that nonetheless remained attentive to “early Christian women.”
Some feminist historians relish the opportunity to lay out their agenda and
to write in a subjective mode.72 They have interpreted critiques of the category
“woman” as necessitating this kind of reveal. For others, what is required is self-
awareness of our subjective needs and desires in order to prevent these from
overwhelming our historical investigations. I would place Karen’s scholarship
here. At least this is what I took away from her mentoring. She did not imply that
we can retreat from the subjective – that would be another kind of naivety – but
rather, that in being aware of our assumptions and values we do not make ancient
sources too readily in our own image. As she shows in What is Gnosticism?, for
instance, historians in the twentieth century constructed “Gnosticism” from
ancient polemics of heresy, and in so doing, normalized Orientalist narratives
that secured the primacy of Christian orthodoxy and (Protestant) conceptions
of proper religion. Karen did not to fall back on pre-determined categories, or
the notion that we already knew the theologies and worldviews espoused by
these Coptic texts. She earned her intellectual reputation because she was, and is,
attentive to and careful with her sources.
Yet a career populated with a body of robust, critical historical work cannot
entirely protect the feminist scholar from the threat of humiliation. Or, this was
one lesson that I took from the episode surrounding Karen’s publication of the
Gospel of Jesus’ Wife in 2012. There seemed an unrecognized aggression at play
in the online commentaries that circulated about her work on the fragment, so
that those who came to her defense did so, maddeningly, by reminding us what
Karen was actually arguing.73 Karen’s initial conclusions offered a more con-
servative notion (compared to her earlier work on Mary Magdalene) that some
70 Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 31.
71 For instance, see Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 85–89.
72 For instance, Matthews “Thinking of Thecla,” 54–55.
73 For critical assessments, see Mark Goodacre, http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/
jesus-wife-fragment-round-up.html. For a friendlier interpretation, see Michael Peppard’s
 Mary Magdalene in the Fantasy Echo 151

early Christians might have thought Jesus was married.74 It raised the question:
were scholars keen to criticize her conclusions because she was connectable to
feminist scholarship on early Christian women? While this feminist scholarship
has excited some, as I have been demonstrating, it has also upset others, out
of disdain for “the world of women” it conjures. Set before Karen seemed an
impossible standard to which other academics are not held: You must always be
right; you must have handled everything perfectly. The incident also indicated
that scholars cannot be shielded from the fantastic machinations of a disturbed
pseudo-Egyptologist bent on materializing the plot of The Da Vinci Code. (The
operations of fantasy are not precisely under anyone’s control after all). If you are
a feminist scholar whose research garners a public audience and media attention,
you are a target for assaults and fixations of various kinds.

The Failure of Fantasy

The fantasy of feminist solidarity can fall apart in subtle ways too. The setting
for this failure, for surfacing the discomforts of identification on which that
fantasy is based, need not be grand. It need not involve large-scale critiques
of identity categories or of theories of language, agency and subjectivity. It can
also entail the fine-grained encounters between people. Feminism analyzes
power and its effects, attending to how gender serves in those operations. But
do its critical tools register the nitty-gritty power dynamics, like those at work
in academic contexts, between faculty, between mentors and students, between
students, especially between those occupying the same race and gender? As
feminists, we might be aware that assertions of a shared identity as women
masked differences and renders invisible the conditions of women of color and
queer women. Yet some feminists have been less willing to critically consider
the power dynamics at play in claiming to do justice on behalf of these margin-
alized groups, or the ways that such claims lend to our speech and actions a
kind moral authority that can render invisible the more proximate structures of
power circulating within our academic institutions, and our role within these.
“There is no guarantee that in struggling for justice we ourselves will be just,”
Sara Ahmed notes.75
The hyper-intellectual environment of my Harvard graduate program facil-
itated meaningful encounters and intense affiliations across groups of students
and faculty, but it enabled certain devastations too. Ellen Aitken, a mentor and

blogs for Commonweal, for example: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/jesus-said-them-

my-wife.
74 See Karen L. King, “Jesus Said to Them: ‘My Wife …’: A New Coptic Papyrus Fragment,”
HTR 107.2 (2014): 131–159.
75 Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 6.
152 Carly Daniel-Hughes

one of the loveliest people I met at Harvard, told me once: “Always get more out
of Harvard than it gets out of you.” (I believe Bernadette Brooten told her this
when Bernadette left Harvard for Brandeis University). Ellen said this in order
to normalize a depression that came over me at the successful completion of my
doctoral exams: “You think you’ll feel like celebrating, but really it’s like being
hit by a bus.” I was not alone in feelings of despair, as long lunches or late night
conversations with my peers revealed. But now I wonder: why were ­encounters
with faculty and other students so vulnerable making? Why did they feel so
consequential? Was it the pressure under which graduate students labor, a pres-
sure to be legitimated as a scholar in an unsure market? And our knowledge
that such recognition absolutely depends on patronage from ­faculty? We knew
that such patronage works best when it is visible to others. I recall waging
and being party to subtle manipulations to produce evidence and denial of
mine or others’ legitimacy. I am not saying that my experiences were more
wounding than others. I know this not to be the case. I am not claiming that
such micro-politics captures all of my graduate experience either (again, there
were also meaningful and intellectually stimulating relationships forged there,
with students and faculty, and these persist); instead, I am highlighting how the
academy can enable conditions in which dissolution and self-doubt thrive.
With some of my peers, I was also vulnerable to moments of existential doubt
because of feminist affiliations and deep (but carefully managed) investments.
“Auto-identification,” notes Eve Sedgwick is “strange and recalcitrant.”76 It is not
easily shaken off. My historical training had disciplined me to feel embarrass-
ment about any longing for feminine jouissance – that accountability to my
mother that motivated my interest in feminist historiography at the start. It also
cautioned me against vocally claiming identification with the feminist mentors
with whom I worked in graduate school. Yet there remained in me a stubborn
desire for homosociality, and a sensibility that I owed my allegiance to these
female scholars, that there was some common ground we occupied that should
make our relationship operate smoothly. So often the opposite was the case.
These relationships appeared more vexing, harder to understand. Identification
can be destabilizing. Sedgwick recognized this possibility early in her career.
Reflecting on the tensions that circulated in and amongst women in one of her
seminars, including herself as the instructor, she wrote: “Afterall, to identify as
must always include multiple processes of identification with. It also involves
identification as against; but even did it not, the relations implicit in identifying
with are, as psychoanalysis suggests, in themselves quite sufficiently fraught with

76 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1990), 59.
 Mary Magdalene in the Fantasy Echo 153

intensities of incorporation, diminishment, inflation, threat, loss, reparation,

and disavowal.”77
It did not occur to me that my identification with feminist professors might
work in the other direction, their identification with (and against) me. This
movement of auto-identification necessarily rendered us uncertain figures for
one another. Of course, the relationship of student and teacher is already com-
plex, a delicate interaction, which demands a studied pedagogical sensitivity.
Tensions, disappointments, abuses of power, these do not only describe inter-
actions in feminist academic circles, of course. But in the affective landscape
cultivated by feminist historiography in which I was caught up (with colleagues
and professors, whether by our choice or not), there was a risk often unremarked
upon, a byproduct of the idealization of feminist solidarity. Utopic visions of
solidarity gave the impression that there should be loyalties and affections, and
thus, no difficulties, no tensions. When inevitably these surfaced, what could
we make of them? What did we do with them? This fantasy left me without the
critical tools to understand what was happening when things were difficult, or
unsure in my encounters with my mentors. Now, as a professor, I can see that it
left them without those tools as well.

“Comings and Goings”: Withstanding the Loss of Fantasy

Even as I write this essay the fantasy of solidarity holds sway. There is a nagging
thought that I have engaged in a form of betrayal by suggesting that its utopic
tenor persisted, often unnamed in the orbit of the feminist historiography I con-
sumed, and that as unnamed, it did harm to the very feminist allegiances it was
meant to cull and sustain. Maybe I worry that talking about the fracture of a
fantasy implies something of a longing for that failure (and with it gives cred-
ibility to those openly hostile to feminist politics)? What if, alternatively, such a
critique is not so withering? Addressing how the fantasy fractured might actually
create the conditions for gratitude (both intellectual and more) for the feminist
historiography that formed me, and many others, even as it attends to the limits
of that work. Moreover, it is not only the fantasy of solidarity, which I have been
discussing, that can undermine the work of gratitude, it is also that of the orator.
That idealization is grounded in shared transgression, as Scott notes, but in
my own experience, it was also connected to grand ideas of mastery (an ideal
held out for academics more generally). This fantasy implies that to be seen as
knowledgeable, as an expert who can speak, one must perform a kind of intellec-
tual omniscience.78 What this allows is for us to either ignore, mask, or downplay

77 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 61.

78 My reflections on mastery complement recent work by Maia Kotrosits in a chapter called,
154 Carly Daniel-Hughes

our indebtedness to others, to the intellectual contexts that sustain and make
possible our writing and thought, and to feel slightly or greatly paranoid that our
lack of originality or lack of total mastery might be exposed. Yet doesn’t inquiry
emerge from and in intellectual encounters, and perhaps most powerfully prox-
imate ones, like friends, lovers, students, and advisors? To acknowledge this fact
seems terribly risky, potentially undermining. I am asking why this might appear
to be the case? Such acknowledgements, conversely, might cut through some of
the more harmful effects of the orator fantasy, to what that fantasy, unchecked,
can do to relationships. Ultimately, in light of psychoanalytic theory that sup-
ports my discussion here, I am indicating that fantasy is integral to intersub-
jective lives and to the projects that animate our intellectual endeavors. It is not
enough, indeed impossible on this account, to simply be rid of fantasy and its
projections.79 It is possible, however, to be attentive to them.
In the psychoanalytic discourse associated with Melanie Klein, what she
calls “phantasy” is likened to imagination. It is a process that carries on, and
must, throughout our lives. Fantasy/phantasy begins in infancy, enabling the
infant and eventually adult to reconcile the tensions between the oppositional
forces of hate and love. These oppositional sensations are imagined to derive
from objects (initially the mother’s breast) outside the infant. Over time, objects
come to entail more fully images and inter-subjective others over whom the
infant’s initial notions of omniscience must come under threat in healthy devel-
opment. The infant does not exercise full control over these objects/others. She
can neither demand that they constantly fulfill her desires, nor concomitantly,
discover that her aggression is enough to annihilate them. There is at once a
move to restore, psychically, what one feels she has destroyed, and a comfort
derived from pleasure received by the return of good objects. This process is the
work of reparation, which allows her to see objects more holistically, as good
and bad, as whole and damaged.80 It is a move of empathetic identification, and
not of idealization.81 The reparative process allows her to seek out pleasure,
safely, looking for new objects, displacing onto them that “primary goodness”
associated first with the breast, and later with any number of objects/others. It
is one in which “helpful figures,” those that sustain life, are always represented
psychically – that is are “installed,” while “bad objects” are repelled. In this way,
identification is always a selective and partial process, but also deeply connected

“Darkening the Discipline / Fantasies of Efficacy and the Art of Redescription,” in The Lives of
Objects: Material Culture, Experience and the Real in the History of Early Christianity (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
79 See also Kostrosits, The Lives of Objects.
80 Melanie Klein, “Love, Guilt and Reparation,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other
Works 1921–1945, Volume One (New York: The Free Press, 1975), 306–343.
81 For a summary of Klein’s work, see Sarah Richmond, “Feminism and Psychoanalysis:
Using Melanie Klein,” in The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, ed. Miranda
Fricker and Jennifer Hornsy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 68–86.
 Mary Magdalene in the Fantasy Echo 155

with the capacity for gratitude, and ultimately, for love. “Through the processes
of projection and introjection … an enrichment and deepening of the ego comes
about. In this way the possession of the helpful inner object is again and again
re-established,” Klein writes.82
What is compelling about Klein’s model of phantasy/fantasy is that it poten-
tially interrupts the idealized modes of identification, and the utopic scenes of
fantasy that they can sustain. The costs of not examining the work of fantasy may
be too great for feminist inquiry because in that case the affective environments
it produces are insufficiently self-reflective, potentially allowing for damaging
power dynamics to go unmarked. What if, instead, we identify our fantasies,
the orator, the maternal, the ones that propelled feminist history of early Chris-
tianity for a time, sustained some important affiliations, came together, but
then fell apart, and necessarily so? Here I have tried to read the emergence of
these fantasies not as naiveté of passé feminist scholarship – I want to resist the
teleological move that this would imply. I am also arguing that the avoidance of
fantasy is not an attainable goal; relatedly, working from a more protective stance
cannot spare us from error, embarrassment, or humiliation that the exposure
of our “desires,” our fantasies might open us up to. Naming how the fantasy of
solidarity collapsed can allow recognizing that the jouissance that emerged in the
feminist scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, and institutionalized in the 1990s,
did change the social and political landscape (if unevenly, as Scott says, in favor
of “white, middle-class, professional women”).83 We need not pine for its loss,
or unwittingly replicate its negative effects. Feminism, writes Ahmed, has “its
comings and goings.” What if, in the end, we are not so fragile? What if we have
acquired resilience to face fantasy’s enigmatic movements?
The controversy surrounding the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife came to an end in
2016 when an article in the Atlantic printed evidence that the fragment was
likely a forgery.84 As I watched Karen navigate the revelation about the fragment
once more she appeared as a figure in my imagination, another vision of Mary
Magdalene from her Gospel. It was not so much that Karen occupied a position
of public speaker (though she did), but rather it was her quiet poise that resonat-
ed for me. Here, at this moment, defensiveness was not the posture she struck.
Here Karen listened to the mounting evidence that the fragment was a fake, and
simply accepted the conclusion. Amidst the squabbling din of academics striving
to undermine this papyrus fragment, and Walter Fritz (presumed forger), manic

82 Melanie Klein, “Envy and Gratitude,” in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963
(London: Hogarth Press, 1975), 189. My reading of reparation is perhaps a bit sanguine, but it is
informed by Sedgwick’s presentation of it in her chapter “Paranoid Reading.”
83 Scott, Fantasy of Feminist History, 37.
84 Ariel Sabar, “The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’ Wife,” The Atlantic July/August 2016. Avail-
able at: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/karen-king-responds-to-the-un
believable-tale-of-jesus-wife/487484/.
156 Carly Daniel-Hughes

to secure its reputation and so his Da Vinci Code fanfiction, Karen was unmoved.
She appeared unharmed: “I’m finding myself not even angry at him [Walter
Fritz] … I’m mostly just relieved. I think the truth always makes me feel calm,”
she told the reporter.85

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 Wise Women in the Gospel of John
Adele Reinhartz

Contemporary New Testament scholarship seems to be rather ambivalent

towards the Gospel of John.1 On the one hand, scholars praise the Gospel for its
literary qualities, including its sophisticated use of symbolism, biblical allusion,
characterization, among other aspects.2 On the other hand, scholars criticize
John for its inconsistencies, and, most acutely, for its overt anti-Judaism.3 There
is one point, however, on which most agree: the Fourth Gospel presents a highly
favorable and relatively detailed picture of women in Jesus’ ministry. Margaret
Beirne asserts that John presents women and men together in a discipleship of
equals.4 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza uses John’s narrative as a basis for arguing
that women were considered equal to men in the earliest stages of the Jesus
movement.5 Raymond Brown suggests that the positive roles of women in the
Gospel of John may reflect historical fact: Martha and Mary of Bethany as well
as Mary Magdalene were disciples alongside Jesus’ male followers, and Jesus’
mother was “involved with that Disciple on an equal plane as part of Jesus’ true
family.”6 Others suggest that John’s treatment of women characters mirrors the
prominence of women in leadership positions in a real, historical, “Johannine
community.”7

1 This essay is dedicated with respect and affection to Karen King, wise woman and friend.
2 See, for example, Craig R. Koester, Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel: Meaning, Mystery,
Community (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) and the excellent essays in Douglas Estes and
Ruth Sheridan, eds., How John Works: Storytelling in the Fourth Gospel (Atlanta, GA: Society of
Biblical Literature, 2016).
3 Donald A. Carson, “Syntactical and Text-Critical Observations on John 20:30–31: One
More Round on the Purpose of the Fourth Gospel,” JBL 124.4 (Winter 2005): 693–714; Adele
Reinhartz, Cast out of the Covenant: Jews and Anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2018).
4 Margaret M. Beirne, Women and Men in the Fourth Gospel: A Genuine Discipleship of
Equals (London; New York: T&T Clark International, 2004).
5 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of
Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 2002), 223–234.
6 Raymond Edward Brown, “Roles of Women in the Fourth Gospel,” in The Community of
the Beloved Disciple (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 198.
7 Brown, “Roles of Women in the Fourth Gospel,” 198. See also Sandra M. Schneiders,
“Women in the Fourth Gospel and the Role of Women in the Contemporary Church,” BTB 12.2
(May 1, 1982): 35–45. For counterarguments, see Judith Plaskow, “Feminist Anti-Judaism and
the Christian God,” JSFR 7.2 (1991): 99–108.
160 Adele Reinhartz

Most of John’s female characters do indeed have significant roles in the

narrative and they exercise agency with respect to the story or with respect to
its central motifs and rhetorical goals. Jesus’ mother is the catalyst for the Cana
miracle, in which Jesus turns water into wine (2:1–8). The Samaritan woman
engages Jesus in an extended conversation and evangelizes her fellow Samaritans
(4:1–42). Mary and Martha send word to Jesus about their brother Lazarus’s
illness, and in this way set in motion the events that lead Jesus to raise Lazarus
from the grave (11:1–44). They then host a dinner at which Mary anoints Jesus’
feet (12:1–8). Mary Magdalene is the first person to engage with the Risen Jesus
and is tasked with giving the disciples the good news that Jesus is ascending to
the Father (20:1–18).8
Yet, as Adeline Fehribach has noted, each of these figures serves patriarchal
purposes, and each is marginalized once she has fulfilled her literary role in the
Gospel narrative.9 To put it differently, each woman enters center stage as an
autonomous actor, and is then brought back in under the aegis of a man or is
dismissed completely, before disappearing behind the curtain. In 2:1–8, for ex-
ample, Jesus’ mother exercises her maternal authority when she prods Jesus into
providing wine for a wedding that had run dry; in 19:27 she is given into the care
of the Beloved Disciple, who is instructed by Jesus to take her to his home. While
we may applaud Jesus’ concern for his mother, this short scene implies that she
cannot, or, at least, should not, live independently of a male caregiver.
A similar narrative pattern can be seen in the other stories that feature women.
The Samaritan woman has a long tête-à-tête with Jesus, after which she preaches
to her fellow Samaritans. But once they meet Jesus for themselves, they dismiss
her: “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard
for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world” (4:42). Mary
and Martha presume upon their friendship with Jesus when they send word
that Lazarus was ill. But then Martha apparently needs her theology corrected
(11:23–27) and Mary anoints Jesus’ feet, bending in subservience to him (12:3).
Perhaps the most striking literary role is given to Mary Magdalene. She is the
one who is privileged with the first encounter with the Risen Lord, who gives her
a special task of testifying to the male disciples. Yet her testimony to the disciples
has no apparent impact (20:18). Not only does she disappear from the narrative

8 The Gospel’s sole silent woman is Mary wife of Clopas, who joins Jesus’ mother and Mary
Magdalene at the foot of the cross in 20:25. The Greek indicates that the following women were
at the foot of the cross: ἡ μήτηρ αὐτοῦ καὶ ἡ ἀδελφὴ τῆς μητρὸς αὐτοῦ, Μαρία ἡ τοῦ Κλωπᾶ καὶ
Μαρία ἡ Μαγδαληνή. It is unclear whether this phrase refers to four women – Jesus’ mother,
Jesus’ aunt, Mary wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene – or whether Jesus’ aunt is Mary wife of
Clopas. I tend towards the latter reading, but scholarly opinion is divided on this question. See
discussion in Craig S Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson,
2003), 2.1142.
9 Adeline Fehribach, The Women in the Life of the Bridegroom: A Feminist Historical-Literary
Analysis of the Female Characters in the Fourth Gospel (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998).
 Wise Women in the Gospel of John 161

but the disciples are granted their own revelation; they receive the holy spirit and
the ability to forgive sins (20:22–23).
This brief survey supports Fehribach’s main argument about the women’s
narrative roles. Although women emerge from the shadows to positions of
prominence in John’s narrative, their roles invariably have a Christological
focus – to testify to Jesus’ identity as the messiah and Son of God or to provide
occasion for signs that would point the reader in that direction. Once that task
is complete, they return to the shadows. Only one of the women – Jesus’ moth-
er – appears in two non-adjacent stories; her second appearance, however, is
a silent one as she is merely transferred from the jurisdiction of her son to the
protection of the beloved disciple. It seems, then, that we should not be too hasty
to pronounce the Fourth Evangelist a proto-feminist, nor the Johannine women
community leaders.10
And yet, the Gospel of John – perhaps inadvertently – does allow us to consider
the behavior and qualities of these women separate from their redomestication.
I refer to this feature as inadvertent because it does not seem to be the Gospel’s
goal to highlight the qualities of these women, but rather to draw attention to
their roles in its Christological project. Yet in depicting them as Christological
witnesses, the Gospel must necessarily portray them in ways that go beyond its
Christological aims.
In what follows, I will undertake an imaginative exercise that resists the mar-
ginalizing moves of the narrator.11 I propose to look at these women as individ-
uals. To the extent possible, I will bracket Christology and decenter the figure
of Jesus, in order to allow these women to shine. In doing so, I make no claim
whatsoever to be recovering these women as historical figures. This is not to deny
that they, or women like them, may have existed. It is reasonable to imagine that
Jesus’ mother attended a wedding with her son and his friends, that a woman
met Jesus at a well in Samaria, that Mary and Martha, along with their brother
Lazarus, were Jesus’ friends, and that Mary Magdalene mourned Jesus at his
tomb. It is also possible that women held leadership positions among the groups
of Christ-confessors for whom the Fourth Gospel was a central document. We
10 To be sure, I have not come across anyone that makes these claims. Those, however,
who make such claims about Jesus, rely heavily on the Gospel of John as supposed evidence.
See Leonard J. Swidler, Jesus Was a Feminist: What the Gospels Reveal about His Revolutionary
Perspective (Lanham, MD: Sheed & Ward, 2007). Swidler, and others who wish to claim Jesus as
a feminist, tend to do so by claiming that Jesus was opposed to and stood out from a misogynist
Jewish context, a claim that cannot be substantiated from the sources. See Judith Plaskow,
“Feminist Anti-Judaism and the Christian God,” 99–108; Amy-Jill Levine, “The Disease of
Postcolonial New Testament Studies and the Hermeneutics of Healing,” JSFR 20.1 (2004):
91–99; Amy-Jill Levine, “Response,” JSFR 20.1 (2004): 125–132.
11 Here my approach is very much in line with Karen King’s own, in using the imagination
to think about ancient people and their texts. See, for example, Karen L. King, “Factions, Variety,
Diversity, Multiplicity: Representing Early Christian Differences for the 21st Century,” Method
& Theory In The Study of Religion 23 (2011): 216–237.
162 Adele Reinhartz

can be certain that Jesus had a mother, but none of these specific points can be
demonstrated historically. But my purpose here is not to argue about history,
but simply to imagine these women in their own right, apart from the Gospel’s
Christological agenda.12 As will soon become clear, each one appears to me as a
wise woman, though the wisdom that comes through in this Gospel varies from
woman to woman.13

The Wise Mother at the Cana Wedding

John chapter 2 situates Jesus, his mother, and his disciples, at a wedding in Cana.
When the wine runs out, Jesus’ mother says to him, “They have no wine.” Jesus
responds abruptly: “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour
has not yet come.” His mother then turns to the servants and tells them: “Do
whatever he tells you” (John 2:1–5).
For John, and subsequent Christian tradition, the focal point of this scene is
Jesus’ transformation of water into wine. But in the first few verses of the story,

12 There are dozens of books and articles that explore the roles of women in the Gospel
of John. For a sampling, in addition to the works already cited, see Sandra M. Schneiders,
“‘Because of the Woman’s Testimony …’: Reexamining the Issue of Authorship in the Fourth
Gospel,” NTS 44 (1998): 513–535; Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her; Amy-Jill Levine and
Marianne Blickenstaff, A Feminist Companion to John, vol. 1 (London; New York: Sheffield
Academic Press, 2003); Amy-Jill Levine and Marianne Blickenstaff, A Feminist Companion to
John, vol. 2 (London, New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003); Fehribach, The Women in the
Life of the Bridegroom; John Wilkinson, “Incident of the Blood and Water in John 19:34,” SJT
28.2 (January 1, 1975): 149–172; Colleen M Conway, Men and Women in the Fourth Gospel:
Gender and Johannine Characterization (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 1999); Mary
Rose D’Angelo, “(Re)Presentations of Women in the Gospels: John and Mark,” in Women &
Christian Origins, ed. Ross Shepard Kraemer and Mary Rose D’Angelo (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 129–149; Christine E. Joynes, Women of the New Testament and Their
Afterlives (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009); Turid Karlsen Seim, “Roles of Women in
the Gospel of John,” in Aspects on the Johannine Literature: Papers Presented at a Conference of
Scandinavian NT Exegetes at Uppsala, June 1986, ed. Lars Hartman and Birger Olsson (Uppsala:
Almqvist & Wiksell, 1987), 56–73; Adele Reinhartz, “Women in the Johannine Community: An
Exercise in Historical Imagination,” in A Feminist Companion to John, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and
Marianne Blickenstaff, 2 vols. (London, New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003), 2:14–33;
Ingrid R. Kitzberger, Transformative Encounters: Jesus and Women Re-Viewed (Leiden; Boston:
Brill, 2000).
13 Claudia Camp has argued that “wise woman” was a formal political role available to
women in ancient Israel in the period before the establishment of the monarchy. See Claudia
V. Camp, “The Wise Women of 2 Samuel: A Role Model for Women in Early Israel?,” The Cath-
olic Biblical Quarterly 43 (1981): 15; see also Adele Reinhartz, Why Ask My Name?: Anonymity
and Identity in Biblical Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 63–74. In this
essay, however, I am using “wise woman” in the nontechnical, modern sense, as a confident and
intelligent woman who is able to carefully way her options in any given situation, to stand up
for her convictions, and speak truth to power. It is in this sense that I see an affinity between the
women of John’s Gospel and Karen King.
 Wise Women in the Gospel of John 163

Jesus’ mother emerges as a wise mother who knows her adult son well. In re-
marking to her son that “they have no wine,” she may simply be gossiping: Isn’t
it odd that the wine has run out so soon? Or, aware of her son’s abilities, she
may be indirectly suggesting that he can do something about this unexpected
situation: Won’t you fix this? You know you can! This is how Jesus takes her
comment, as his rude reply – Woman! – suggests.14 She wisely ignores his re-
buke. Perhaps, like most mothers of adult children, she is used to the occasional
outburst. By refusing to respond, however, she can maneuver him into doing
exactly what was needed: providing excellent wine and thereby enabling the
wedding celebrations to continue in style. After all, once she has instructed the
servants, Jesus could not very well have walked away, or told them to ignore
her, without losing face and, potentially, embarrassing the bride and groom as
well.
While the Gospel’s narrator, the wine steward, and Jesus’ disciples, may have
focused on the spectacular transformation of water into wine, we may quietly
appreciate the wisdom of a mother who can see beyond her son’s rude behavior
and is able to prompt him to act when and where he does not yet understand
that he should.

The Wise Stranger: The Samaritan Woman

On a long and dusty walk from Judea to the Galilee, Jesus stops to rest at Jacob’s
well in Samaria while his disciples go into town to buy food. A Samaritan woman
comes along to draw water, and Jesus asks her for a drink (4:7). She is taken
aback: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (4:9).
As the narrator explains, “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans”
(4:9). This woman is aware of the social boundaries that exist between Jews and
Samaritans. Perhaps – depending on the tone of voice we ascribe to her words –
she is mocking these boundaries, as a member of the group that, according to
this passage, is shunned or looked down upon by the Jews.15 The fact that she
nevertheless engages with him indicates at the very least that she herself, like
Jesus, does not hold by these social boundaries.
Later we learn that she – and Jesus – have transgressed a second social
boundary. When the disciples return from shopping in the city, they are sur-
prised that Jesus was speaking with a woman, though they keep their surprise

14 On the history of interpretation of this verse, and Jesus’ discourtesy, see Adele Reinhartz,
“A Rebellious Son? Jesus and His Mother in John 2:4,” in The Opening of John’s Narrative (John
1:19–2:22) Historical, Literary, and Theological Readings from the Colloquium Ioanneum 2015 in
Ephesus, ed. R. Alan Culpepper and Jörg Frey (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 235–249.
15 Alan David Crown, Reinhard Pummer, and Abraham Tal, eds., A Companion to Samari-
tan Studies (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993).
164 Adele Reinhartz

to themselves (4:27). The fact that the woman apparently lives with a man who
is not her husband, and that she has had multiple relationships with men, also
speaks to her refusal to observe the social boundaries, at least as construed by
the narrator (5:17–18).
She then engages Jesus in conversation about matters of historical and spiritu-
al importance: the locus of proper worship, and the belief in a coming messiah.
Here she shows herself to be both well-versed in Samaritan beliefs and also
forthright. She challenges his statements – “Are you greater than our ancestor
Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?”
(4:12) – and provokes him into a demonstration of his prophetic powers (4:16).
Only at that point does she acknowledge that “you are a prophet” (4:19). Even
after he proclaims his identity as the messiah (4:26) she is not entirely convinced,
for when she returns to the city to tell the others, she still hesitates: “He cannot
be the Messiah, can he?” 4:29). The very fact that she announces his presence to
the people, and that they leave the city to come to him (4:30), suggests that she is
in some position of authority, whether formal or informal. While she may need
quite a bit of convincing by the stranger at the well, her fellow Samaritans need
few words to assure them that she is telling them something that they need to
check out for herself.
In this Gospel, the Samaritan woman represents the wise stranger with whom
one can have a meaningful conversation. Although she is intrigued and, by the
end, open to his message, she faces Jesus as an equal, able and willing to engage
him in theological discourse.

The Wise Friend: Martha of Bethany

Mary and Martha of Bethany appear together in the Gospel of John (11:1–12:8),
as they do also in Luke’s Gospel (10:38–42).16 Although they sometimes act
together, as they do in sending a message to Jesus about the dire illness of their
brother Lazarus (11:3), they do not constitute a corporate character. Unlike
“the Jews” or “the Pharisees,” Mary and Martha speak and act in distinct ways
in each of the passages in which they appear. Although Mary may seem more
prominent in the Gospel of Luke, John does not play favorites.17 John 11:1, for
example, refers to “the village of Mary and her sister Martha” and reminds the
reader/listener of an event that will not be narrated until the next chapter: Mary’s

16 See Adele Reinhartz, “From Narrative to History: The Resurrection of Mary and Mar-
tha,” in “Women like This”: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World, ed.
Amy-Jill Levine (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1991), 161–184.
17 For one view on the relative importance of Mary and Martha, see Elisabeth Schüssler
Fiorenza, “A Feminist Critical Interpretation for Liberation: Martha and Mary: Lk 10:38–42,”
Religion and Intellectual Life 3.2 (1986): 21–36.
 Wise Women in the Gospel of John 165

anointing of Jesus. In 11:5, however, the narrator describes Jesus as loving “Mar-
tha and her sister and Lazarus.” These variable references imply the importance
and perhaps also the individuality of these sisters. For this reason, I will look at
them separately.18
After hearing from the Bethany sisters of Lazarus’s dire illness, Jesus arrives in
Bethany during the period of mourning after the man’s death.19 Martha comes
out of the house to meet him. Without any preliminaries, she expresses her deep
disappointment that it took Jesus so long to come: “Lord, if you had been here,
my brother would not have died” (11:21). Without waiting for his response,
however, she softens her rebuke by adding: “But even now I know that God will
give you whatever you ask of him.” (11:22). Jesus tries to reassure her: “Your
brother will rise again.” (11:23). Martha acknowledges this point – “I know that
he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day (11:24) – but in the context
of her earlier reproach one might imagine her thinking that this is not quite
enough. Jesus then takes control of the conversation, by asking for a confession
of faith, to which she responds, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the
Son of God, the one coming into the world.” (11:27).
This brief exchange tells us several things about Martha. First, she believed
Jesus to have the power to heal, and she also believed that Jesus cared enough
about Lazarus and their family to make the effort to come to Bethany imme-
diately upon hearing of his illness. Jesus’ delay not only jeopardized Lazarus’s
life but also challenged Martha’s confidence in his affections, and undermined
his loyalty as a friend. Second, Martha did not hesitate to reprove him for his
behavior, indirectly expressing her disappointment in him. Third, however,
she showed tact by softening her rebuke immediately. We might read this is a
statement of deference, but it could also simply be that, having expressed her
negative feelings, she had no need or desire to hold a grudge. Finally, her con-
fession, which Jesus extracts from her through his questions, suggests that Jesus’
behavior has not caused her to question her faith in him as Messiah and Son
of God. On the other hand, perhaps we should not take her comments at face
value. This situation of mourning would be neither the time nor the place to call
it quits, no matter her thoughts and feelings about Jesus at this juncture.
Martha calls her sister Mary to Jesus. The narrative returns to her in 11:40
when, in response to Jesus’ command to take away the stone covering the
opening to Lazarus’s tomb, Martha comments, “Lord, already there is a stench

18 For textual considerations, see Elizabeth Schrader, “Was Martha of Bethany Added to the
Fourth Gospel in the Second Century?,” HTR 110 (2017): 360–392; Elizabeth Schrader, “Was
Martha of Bethany Added to the Fourth Gospel in the Second Century? – CORRIGENDUM,”
HTR 110 (2017): 473–474.
19 On Jesus’ violation of the ancient norms of friendship, see Adele Reinhartz, “Reproach
and Revelation: Ethics in John 11:1–44,” in Torah Ethics and Early Christian Identity, ed. Susan
J. Wendel and David Miller (Grand Rapids, MI.: Eerdmans, 2016), 92–106.
166 Adele Reinhartz

because he has been dead four days.” This comment is striking, for it implies
that she may not really have bought Jesus’ implied promise that Lazarus will rise
imminently rather than at the generally expected resurrection of the dead in
the messianic age. Of course, her comment also magnifies the splendor of Jesus’
miraculous act, by emphasizing the finality of Lazarus’s death. At the very least,
her warning suggests that Martha, like many of us during the days after a major
loss, has begun to accept the reality of her brother’s death.
Martha’s final appearance is in 12:2, in which she is described briefly as the
one serving dinner to Jesus and others after her brother’s resurrection. This com-
ment can be seen as part of the narrative domestication that she undergoes; her
service is for and about Jesus and her personality is eclipsed by her sister’s act
and the responses of Jesus and Judas to that act.20

The Wise Believer: Mary of Bethany

After Martha’s conversation with Jesus, she calls Mary to tell her privately that
“the Teacher is here and is calling for you” (11:28). Mary quickly rises – perhaps
from the low seat where she was sitting shiva for her brother – and went to him.
She was followed by the Jews who had come to mourn with her; according to
the narrator, the Jews thought that she was going to the tomb (11:30–31). Like
Martha, Mary reproaches Jesus for taking so long to arrive: “Lord, if you had
been here, my brother would not have died.” Unlike Martha, however, she kneels
at his feet, in a gesture of subservience that goes even further towards softening
her rebuke than do Martha’s words a few verses earlier (11:32). Jesus does not
respond directly but he seems to be moved by her grief (11:33). At this point the
action shifts back to Martha briefly, and then, spectacularly, to Jesus.
Mary next appears at the dinner at which Martha served, when she “took
a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped
them with her hair” (12:3), but she says no more and disappears from the nar-
rative, as does her sister. In contrast to Martha, Mary of Bethany seems willing
to put Jesus’ delay behind her, and simply to reaffirm her faith both before and
after their brother’s revivification. Perhaps she understands that Jesus, however
exalted he may be, was also a fallible human being whose errors must be forgiven
even though his feet may be anointed.

20 Yet if we see Martha’s service at table as including presiding over the meal, we can
imagine for her an ongoing important role in her household as well as in the larger community
that is breaking bread in her home. Schüssler Fiorenza, “A Feminist Critical Interpretation for
Liberation: Martha and Mary,” 31.
 Wise Women in the Gospel of John 167

The Wise Lover: Mary Magdalene

The most intriguing woman in John’s Gospel is Mary Magdalene. Mary Mag-
dalene first appears in 19:25 as one of the women standing near the cross. But
she comes into her own after Jesus’ burial. She arrives at the tomb early on the
Sunday morning after Jesus’ death, only to find that the stone has been removed
(20:1). She runs to tell Simon Peter and “the other disciple.” They come running
to see for themselves but then return to their homes (20:10), leaving Mary to
weep on her own. Looking again inside the tomb, she sees “two angels in white,
sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at
the feet” (20:12). To their question, “Woman, why are you weeping?” she answers
“They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him”
(20:13). She then turns around and sees a man, who asks her the same question.
According to the narrator, she assumes he is the gardener, and she says: “Sir, if
you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him
away” (20:14–15). He then calls her by name, and she recognizes him as Jesus,
exclaiming “Rabbouni!” (20:16). He gives her an instruction (“Do not hold on to
me”), some information (“because I have not yet ascended to the Father”) and a
message: Go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and
your Father, to my God and your God.’” (20:17). The passage concludes: “Mary
Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she
told them that he had said these things to her” (20:18).
Elsewhere I have pointed out the linguistic and narrative allusions in this pas-
sage to the biblical Song of Songs, and argued that these parallels describe Mary
as Jesus’ spiritual lover, who exemplifies the intimacy and love of the believer and
the risen Lord.21 This possibility is suggested by two sets of biblical echoes: to the
second creation story in Genesis, and to the Song of Songs.
The garden location itself draws attention to the Eden locale of the creation
stories. Jesus calls Mary “woman,” just as the first man called his mate in Gen
2:23, and then calls her by name, as Adam did the first woman (Gen 3:20). Jesus’
directive that Mary not cleave to him (John 20:17) challenges the physical basis
of the male-female relationship as described in Gen 2:24, according to which a
man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife and they become one
flesh. This echo suggests a contrast between the sexual relationship which devel-
oped between the first man and woman and the relationship of devotion between
Jesus and Mary. In doing so, it also draws attention to the sexual potential of an
encounter between man and woman in a garden.22
21 For detailed analysis of this motif, see Adele Reinhartz, “To Love the Lord: An Inter-
textual Reading of John 20,” in The Labour of Reading: Essays in Honour of Robert C. Culley, ed.
Fiona Black et al., Semeia Studies (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1999), 56–69.
22 Whereas Mary is told not to touch, Thomas is invited to “put your finger here and see my
hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side” (20:27). In contrast to Brown, who argues that
168 Adele Reinhartz

The sexual undertones of the passage emerge even more clearly against the
backdrop of another biblical garden. The garden of the Song of Songs is identified
with the body and person of the female lover. Mary’s search for the body of Jesus
echoes the search of the lover for the beloved in Canticles 3:1–4.23 This passage
depicts the woman as seeking him whom her soul loves, but not finding him;
calling him but receiving no answer. She asks the sentinels of the city, “Have
you seen him whom my soul loves?” She then finds him, holds him and declares
that she will not let him go until she brings him into her mother’s house. The
verb “to seek” (ζητέω) appears four times in these verses. Other parallels between
Song of Songs and our chapter include the use of the verb παρακύπτω to mean
“peering in” (John 20:5, Song 2:9), and the emphasis on spices associated with
both gardens (John 19:39 and Cant 1:12; 3:6; 4:6,10; 5:1, 13).24 These parallels
suggest that Mary Magdalene is symbolically presented as the beloved of the
Lover in the Song, the spouse of the New Covenant mediated by Jesus in his
glorification, the representative figure of the New Israel which emerges from the
new creation.25
Mary’s symbolic portrayal as the lover of the Song of Songs casts a different
light on Jesus’ demand that she not touch him. Mary’s search for the body of her
beloved is fuelled by love as expressed through her desire to hold him and touch
him. Had she found the body in the tomb as she had expected, she would have
touched it and cared for it, perhaps anointing it with spices as in Mark 16:1. But
imagine the joy of the lover in finding that her beloved is not dead after all. How
else could the joy be expressed other than to touch and to hold, and to vow never
to let go (Song 3:1–14)?
Of course, in the absence of narrative clues as to her mood or the tone of
voice, we may only guess at Mary’s state of mind as she does Jesus’ bidding. But
the joyful and awestruck tenor of the resurrection narrative allows us to imagine

these two episodes should not be brought into comparison with each other (Raymond Edward
Brown, The Gospel According to John [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966], 2:1011), Dorothy
Lee suggests that Mary Magdalene and Thomas are in a narrative partnership that encircles the
giving of the spirit. Hence Jesus’ prohibition of Mary’s touch and invitation of Thomas’s touch
draw attention to the giving of the spirit as the essential act of the risen Lord. Dorothy A. Lee,
“Partnership in Easter Faith: The Role of Mary Magdalene and Thomas in John 20,” JSNT 17.58
(1995): 37–38.
23 That the Fourth Gospel as a whole contains numerous allusions to the Song of Songs is
argued in detail by Ann Robert Winsor, A King is Bound in the Tresses: Allusions to the Song of
Songs in the Fourth Gospel, Studies in Biblical Literature 5 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). See also
Schneiders, who argues that the encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene is intended to
evoke both the garden of Genesis 2:15–17, 3:8 and the garden of Canticles understood as “the
hymn of the covenant between Israel and Yahweh.” Sandra M. Schneiders, “John 20:11–18: The
Encounter of the Easter Jesus with Mary Magdalene – A Transformative Feminist Reading,” in
What Is John? Readers and Readings of the Fourth Gospel, ed. Fernando Segovia (Atlanta, GA:
Scholars Press, 1998), 161.
24 Schneiders, “John 20:11–18,” 161.
25 Schneiders, “John 20:11–18,” 168.
 Wise Women in the Gospel of John 169

that Mary’s tears are now dry, and that she hastens eagerly to do her teacher/
lover’s bidding.
The Gospel is silent on the prior relationship between Jesus and Mary Mag-
dalene.26 Even if we posit a prior sexual relationship, as is suggested in The Last
Temptation of Christ (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1988), for example, John 20 clearly
rules out the possibility of such after the empty tomb. Instead, the words of Mary
suggest that her relationship to her beloved is expressed not through touch but
through speech and vision. Its consummation is not an embrace but Mary’s tes-
timony to the disciples of what she has seen and what she has heard. Although
the beloved is not accessible in the flesh, she has his image in her mind’s eye, and
his words upon her lips.27
Lifting the Gospel of John’s women out of their narrative contexts allows us
to consider their wisdom, as exemplified by their behavior towards Jesus. Of
course, it is precisely because of these qualities that they are useful for the Chris-
tological aims of this Gospel, even if, after testifying to Jesus as the Messiah and
Son of God, these women fade into the background. To be sure, their treatment
is not unique. Within the Fourth Gospel, male characters such as Nicodemus
and some of the male disciples are also treated in this way; only the Beloved
Disciple and Peter maintain a degree of independence. Further, it is not only the
Fourth Evangelist who redomesticates his female characters; the same is true of
the authors of the Jewish Hellenistic novels such as Judith, Susanna, and Greek
Esther.28 Yet there is value both in taking note of, and drawing attention to, both
the strength of these female figures, and the tendency to marginalize them once
their narrative roles are fulfilled.

26 There was, however, considerable ancient speculation on the topic. See Karen L. King,
The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge
Press, 2003); Antti Marjanen, The Woman Jesus Loved: Mary Magdalene in the Nag Hammadi
Library and Related Documents (Leiden: Brill, 1996). See also Marvin W. Meyer, The Gospels of
the Marginalized: The Redemption of Doubting Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and Judas Iscariot in
Early Christian Literature (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012); Jacob Needleman, The Gospel of Philip:
Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Gnosis of Sacred Union, trans. Jean-Yves Leloup (Rochester, VT:
Inner Traditions; Bear & Co, 2004); Antti Marjanen, “Mary Magdalene, a Beloved Disciple,” in
Mariam, the Magdalen, and the Mother, ed. Deidre J. Good (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2005), 49–61.
27 According to Craig Koester, Mary’s story confirms that seeing alone does not guarantee
faith. Only when she heard Jesus speak her name did she recognize him. What she heard
enabled her to make sense of what she saw, although the command to stop touching Jesus
(20:17) indicates that she did not fully comprehend the significance of the resurrection. Craig
R. Koester, “Jesus the Way, the Cross, and the World According to the Gospel of John,” WW 21.4
(September 1, 2001): 345.
28 Adele Reinhartz, “Better Homes and Gardens: Women and Domestic Space in the Books
of Judith and Susanna,” in Text and Artifact in the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity: Essays
in Honour of Peter Richardson, ed. Stephen G. Wilson and Michel Desjardins (Waterloo, ON:
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000), 325–339.
170 Adele Reinhartz

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Marjanen, Antti. “Mary Magdalene, a Beloved Disciple.” Pages 49–61 in Mariam, the
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 Performing Salvation
The Therapeutrides and Job’s Daughters in Context

Angela Standhartinger

“Images of gender both reflect the social practices of men and women and play
a role in shaping the gendered character of social reality.”1 As Karen King’s im-
pressive scholarship over more than forty years has shown, however, writings
from the manifold Christianities as well as from other parts of the pluriform
religious world in antiquity hardly only mirror a given reality. Rather, “because
of the use of sex/gender to articulate and authorize norms and their accom-
panying structures of power, … theological imagination was actively engaged
in social formation, sometimes reinscribing and sometimes challenging and
transforming ancient norms, whether intentionally or not.”2 In honor of Karen
King’s groundbreaking feminist work, this paper tries to sharpen our percep-
tion of gender roles and norms in antiquity by focusing on women’s religious
practice. It will be argued that early Jewish as well as later Christian writings re-
flect women’s cultic agency that was common among their sisters in Greek and
Roman religions. In Greek and Roman religions, at least some women acted
as priestesses, founded sanctuaries, presided in festivals, performed hymns,
danced for their God or Goddess, and fulfilled other religious duties. After a
short presentation of recent feminist scholarship on women in Greek and
Roman religion and a glance at Christian female singers and songwriters, I will
turn to two groups of Jewish religious actresses, the Therapeutrides, described
by Philo in De vita contemplativa, and Job’s daughters from the Testament of
Job. While these female cultic agents remain fictive literary characters, the
performance of these and similar writings raises the question how these texts
might have challenged the notion of sex/gender roles and the norms held by
their respective readers.

1 Karen L. King, “Editor’s Foreword,” in Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism: Papers from
a Conference Held Nov. 19–25, 1985, in Claremont, California, ed. Karen L. King (Harrisburg:
Trinity Press International, 1988), xi.
2 Karen L. King, “Gender Contestation as Political Critique: Four Cases from Ancient Chris-
tianity,” in Doing Gender – Doing Religion: Fallstudien zur Intersektionalität im frühen Judentum,
Christentum und Islam, ed. Ute E. Eisen, Christine Gerber, and Angela Standhartinger, WUNT
302 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2013), 94.
174 Angela Standhartinger

1. Women’s Cultic Competence in Greek and Roman Religions

Women’s religious activities in Greek and Roman antiquity have been almost
ignored for many decades. With philosophers from Plato and Xenophon to the
church fathers, many interpreters took for granted that women in antiquity had
been confined to their homes under the guardianship of their fathers, husbands,
and masters. In silence they remained invisible to outsiders. Only recently have
some scholars noticed that this is only half of the story. The other half is religion.
Euripides has Melanippe say:
And in divine affairs – I think this of the first importance –
we have the greatest part. For at oracles of Phoebus
women expound Apollo’s will. And the holy seat of Dodona
by the sacred oak the female race conveys
the thoughts of Zeus to all Greeks who desire it.
As for the holy rituals performed for the Fates
and the nameless goddesses, these are not holy
in men’s hands, but among women they flourish,
every one of them. Thus in holy service woman
plays the righteous role ….3

Material evidence, such as artifacts, images, inscriptions, and the like doc-
ument women serving their gods in manifold ways.4 They act as priestesses,
lead processions, offer prayers, preside in sacrifices, pour out libations, decorate
statues, preside over cultic meals, and perform many other religious activities. As
Melanippe states in Euripides’s play, to approach a given God successfully – not
only a female deity but also male ones – women are indispensable. In fact, it is in
the area of religion that at least some Greek and Roman women exercised agency
in public life.
This obvious tension between moral discourse and religion allows us to
rethink the binary models private-public, male and female, that has guided

3 Euripides, The Captive Melanippe Fragment 494 (P. Berlin 2772). Translation: Helen
Foley. See Joan B. Connelly, “Priestesses – Women in Cult. In Divine Affairs – the Greatest
Part: Women and Priesthoods in Classical Athens,” in Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in
Classical Athens, ed. Nikolaos Kaltsas and Alan Shapiro (New York: Alexander S. Onassis Public
Benefit Foundation, 2008), 186.
4 For Greece: Eva M. Stehle, “Women and Religion in Greece,” in A Companion to Women
in the Ancient World, ed. Sharon L. James and Sheila Dillon (Chichester: Blackwell, 2012),
191–203. Joan Breton Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Barbara Goff, Citizen Bacchae: Women’s Ritual
Practice in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Matthew Dillon, Girls
and Women in Classical Greek Religion (London: Routledge, 2002). For Rome: Lora L. Holland,
“Women and Roman Religion,” in A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, ed. Sharon
L. James and Sheila Dillon (Chichester: Blackwell, 2012), 204–14. Sarolta A. Takács, Vestal
Virgins, Sibyls and Matrons (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 25–59. Daria Šterbenc
Erker, Religiöse Rollen römischer Frauen in “griechischen” Ritualen (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2013).
 Performing Salvation 175

scholarship for long. Cult practices not only effect women’s agency in their own
lives but also require them to act for the salvation of their whole communities.
This the famous first-century Jewish author Philo of Alexandra also noticed. In
his explanations of the Jewish laws, Philo claims: “The women are best suited to
the indoor life which never strays from the house.”5 Yet religion is the exception
to this rule: “A woman, then, should not be a busybody, meddling with matters
outside her household concerns, but should seek a life of seclusion … except
when she has to go to the temple, … (to) make her oblations and offer her prayers
to avert the evil and gain the good.”6 The reference to a (Jewish?) temple (ἱερόν)
at Alexandria and an offering of sacrifices (θυσίας ἐπιτελεῖν) is striking. Either
Philo uses cultic language metaphorically or he adopts “the language of Gentile
communal worship.”7 In any case, he has to accept that women’s religious agency
effects the wellbeing of the given community and thereby public life.
Not only do single women act as priestesses. Groups of women also contribute
in sacred rites. One example comes from the geographer Pausanias (115–80 CE)
in his description of the cult of Eileithyias in Elis:
At the foot of Mount Cronius, … is a sanctuary of Eileithyia, and in it Sosipolis, a native
Elean deity, is worshipped. Now they surname Eileithyia Olympian, and choose a priestess
for the goddess every year. The old woman who tends Sosipolis herself too by an Elean
custom lives in chastity, bringing water for the god’s bath and setting before him barley
cakes kneaded with honey. In the front part of the temple, for it is built in two parts, is an
altar of Eileithyia and an entrance for the public; in the inner part Sosipolis is worshipped,
and no one may enter it except the woman who tends the god, and she must wrap her head
and face in a white veil. Maidens (παρθένοι) and matrons (γυναῖκες) wait in the sanctuary
of Eileithyia chanting a hymn; they burn all manner of incense to the god, but it is not the
custom to pour libations of wine. An oath is taken by Sosipolis on the most important
occasions.8

At the sanctuary of the Olympian Eileithyia serves a professional priestess who

alone is allowed to enter the inner cell with the cult statue of Sosipolis, “savior
of the city.” Pausanias has heard (λέγεται) the cult-legend telling about a woman
who was sent by a dream to save her city with her baby.9 When the professional

5 Philo, Spec. 3.169. Translation: F. H. Colson, LCL.

6 Philo, Spec. 3.171.
7 Shelly Matthews, First Converts: Rich Pagan Women and the Rhetoric of Mission in Early
Judaism and Christianity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 85. Cf. F. H. Colson, Philo
in Ten Volumes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 7:640. Philo might refer to a
popular handbook of common morality as it is documented by the tractate of the Phintys, who
likewise states: “Women of importance leave the house to sacrifice (θυηπολεῖν) to the leading
divinity of the community on behalf of themselves and their husbands and their households.”
Holger Thesleff, The Pythagorean Texts of the Hellenistic Period AAA. Ser A 30.1 (Åbo: Akad,
1965), 154,1–2; Translation: Mary Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant, Women’s Life in Greece &
Rome (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 164.
8 Pausanias, Descr. 6.20.3. Translation: W. H. S. Jones, LCL.
9 Pausanias reports also an etiology for the cult. Informed by a dream, a woman placed her
176 Angela Standhartinger

priest enters the inner cell, other women attract the gods by singing and burning
incense. Pausanias does not give the texts of the hymns to Eileithyia and Sosip-
olis, perhaps because he was not allowed to listen to them. In his Roman Ques-
tions, Plutarch cites a women’s cultic song from the same region: “Come, O hero
Dionysus, To thy Elean holy Temple, with the Graces, To thy Temple With thy
bull’s foot hasting.” As a refrain, the women chant twice “O worthy bull.”10 This
hymn seems to represent a feature from the Dionysus myth. Yet when Plutarch
tries to place this into his own knowledge of the myth, he puzzles about the
song’s meaning. Some divinities had ceremonies for women alone. This makes
them more mysterious to men.11 While exclusion sometimes led to suspicion
and scandal, Plutarch and Pausanias respect women’s essential ritual work.12 As
Deborah Lyons puts it, “the recurring silence at the heart of these texts highlights
the ritual knowledge and competence of women.”13
The majority of priestesses in Greece, professionals as well as temporarily
elected, came from the cities’ elites.14 In Rome, all “women were vital partici­
pants in the religious lives of their families and of their communities.” Whether
a woman was married or not, whether she was freeborn, freed, or a slave, what
family she came from and how she behaved privately “determined what religious
offices were open to her … and what rites or cults she might attend.”15 One might
therefore argue that the religious sphere reinforces societies’ social distinctions.
Yet this does not fully determine its meaning for its participants. In both Greek

baby in front of the army that tried to defend her hometown. When the enemies approached,
the baby turned into a snake and put them to flight (Descr. 6.20.4–5).
10 Plutarch, Quest. Rom. 36 (Mor. 299a–b).
11 Rules of participation and gender politics differ from cult to cult. Cf. Susan G. Cole,
Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: The Ancient Greek Experience (Berkeley: California Uni-
versity Press, 2004), 92–104.
12 Others look for scandals. See, e. g., Deborah J. Lyons, “The Scandal of Women’s Ritual,”
in Finding Persephone: Women’s Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Maryline Parca and
Angeliki Tzanetou (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 28–51.
13 Lyons, “What the Women Know,” in Women’s Ritual Competence in the Greco-Roman
Mediterranean, ed. Matthew Dillon, Esther Eidinow, and Lisa Maurizio (London: Routledge,
2016), 236.
14 In Greece, some priesthoods were held by inheritance, while others were sold among the
elite families. Cf. Connelly, “Priestesses,” 189–190; Portrait, 44–55. Connelly compares Greek
and Hellenistic priestesses with women leaders of ancient synagogues, as well as with Christian
female officeholders, two groups that are mostly documented through inscriptions (cf. Portrait,
258–273). For female priesthood in Rome, cf. Emily A. Hemelrijk, “Women and Sacrifice in
the Roman Empire,” in Ritual Dynamics and Religious Change in the Roman Empire, ed. Olivier
Hekster, Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner, and Christian Witschel (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 253–268.
15 Celia E. Schultz, Women’s Religious Activity in the Roman Republic (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 2006), 149. Cf. Celia E. Schultz, “Sanctissima Femina: Social
Categorization and Women’s Religious Experience in the Roman Republic,” in Finding Perse-
phone: Women’s Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Maryline Parca and Angeliki Tzanetou
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 92–113. Meghan J. DiLuzio, A Place at the Altar:
Priestesses in Republican Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
 Performing Salvation 177

and Roman religious rituals, choral singing is sometimes acted out by virgins or
younger girls (παρθένοι), by married women (γυναῖκες), or both.16 Some inter-
preters explain the segmentation of women into age- and marriage-status groups
as age and class imitation for girls.17 Others find the initiation paradigm imposed.
For them, ritual practice is “the primary arena” in which women stage “various
negotiations between ‘ideology’ and agency.’”18 And while groups of female
singers might sometimes reinforce gender roles and ideology through the script
and laws of the ritual, the performers have to stage their own identity through
performance. First and foremost, singing and dancing in contexts of religious
festivals aim to honor and delight a deity. Or to say it with the words of Eva Stele:
So far as the evidence goes, it indicates that women performing communal poetry
combined the function of providing reflection and model with a staging of their own sub-
ordinate status in the community. Yet they did perform. Their self-presentation could not
be wholly discredited without jeopardizing the communal function they filled, and they
themselves could undermine their words by irony or mocking exaggeration. Dancing is a
sensuous activity. Performers cannot in the nature of the event be inhibited from projecting
their subjectivity through inflection and body language. The demand that women affirm in
their own persons the dominant culture’s self-contradictory meaning of the sign “female”
gave women a psychological power that they could always try to reclaim.19

In the following, I will trace some Jewish religious practitioners, namely two
female groups of hymn singers. But first, I turn briefly to the evidence from the
early Christian movement.

2. Female Singers and Songwriters in Early Christianity

New Testament writings do not postulate gender segregation during worship

services. Paul might argue for veiled and unveiled heads or gender specific hair-
16 Cf. Livy 27.37.11–14; Macrobius, Saturnalia 1. 6. 14. Female choirs, sent by cities in Asia
Minor, are also attested by inscription for the Apollo-temple at Claros. See Angela Standharting-
er, “Der Kolosserhymnus im Lichte epigraphischer Zeugnisse,” in Epigraphical Evidence Illus-
trating Colossians, ed. Jos Verheyden, Markus Öhler, and Thomas Corsten, WUNT (Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 69–92, 87–88. For music in Greek and Roman cults, see Jade Brooklyn
Weimer, “Musical Assemblies: How Early Christian Music Functioned as a Rhetorical Topos,
a Mechanism of Recruitment, and a Fundamental Marker of an Emerging Christian Identity”
(PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2016), 35–47.
17 Claude Calame, Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece: Their Morphology, Religious
Role, and Social Function ([French original 1977] Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).
18 Goff, Citizen Bacchae, 14. Some point also to rituals of inversion and mocking espe-
cially in the cult of Demeter and Persephone. Cf. Bonnie MacLachlan, “Inhabiting / Subverting
the Norms: Women’s Ritual Agency in the Greek West,” in Women’s Ritual Competence in the
Greco-Roman Mediterranean, ed. Matthew Dillon, Esther Eidinow, and Lisa Maurizio (London:
Routledge, 2016), 182–195.
19 Eva Stehle, Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece: Nondramatic Poetry in its Setting
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 113.
178 Angela Standhartinger

styles, yet there is no doubt that each gender prays and prophesies in Corinth,
according to 1 Cor 11:2–16. Therefore, most interpreters argue today that women
and men contribute equally to the worship’s liturgy by “a hymn, a lesson, a rev-
elation, a tongue, or an interpretation” (1 Cor 14:26).20 Likewise, Nympha and
the community at her house at Laodicea will “teach and admonish” one another
“with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.”21
Separate groups of female hymnodists and musicians appear in the writings
of Clement of Alexandria, when he compares the worship of his group to the
festivals of the god Dionysus:
The righteous form this company, and their song is a hymn in praise of the King of all.
The maidens (αἱ κόραι) play the harp (ψάλλω), angels give glory, prophets speak, a noise
of music rises; swiftly they pursue the sacred band (θίασος), those who have been called
hasting with eager longing to receive the Father.22

This sacred thiasos is a gender-mixed group accompanied by angels, with spe-

cial roles for unmarried girls and prophets. Similarly, Methodius of Olympus
has one of the participants of his literary symposium, the virgin Agathe, say:
“I have become the torch-bearer of the unapproachable lights, and I join with
their company in the new song of the archangels showing forth the new grace
of the Church.”23 From third-century Antioch, we hear of female psalm-singers
(ψαλμῳδεῖν γυναῖκα) “in the middle of the church on the great day of the Pas-
cha.”24 This notice, however, is part of the indictment of Paul of Samosata. He
might be rebuked for public female singing or for training women to sing hymns

20 1 Cor 14:33b–35(6) is a later gloss. The text copies conservative gender morals. Cf.
Plutarch, Coniugalia Praecepta (Mor.142c–d); 1 Tim 2:11–12. Cf. Marlene Crüsemann, “Un-
rettbar frauenfeindlich. Der Kampf um das Wort von Frauen in 1 Kor 14, (33b) 34–35 im
Spiegel antijudaistischer Elemente der Auslegung,” in Von der Wurzel getragen. Christlich-fem-
inistische Exegese in Auseinandersetzung mit Antijudaismus, ed. Luise Schottroff and Marie-
Theres Wacker, BibInt 17 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 198–223. Specific religious competence might
stand behind the advice for widows in 1 Tim 5:3–16. Cf. Standhartinger, “‘Wie die verehrteste
Judith und die besonnenste Hanna.’ Traditionsgeschichtliche Beobachtungen zur Herkunft der
Witwengruppen im entstehenden Christentum,” in Dem Tod nicht glauben. Sozialgeschichte der
Bibel. Festschrift für Luise Schottroff zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Frank Crüsemann et al. (Gütersloh:
Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2004), 103–126.
21 For more singing in the New Testament and early Christian literature, see Mark 14:26/
Matt 26:30; Acts 2:47; 16:25; Ign. Eph. 4:1–2; Ign. Rom. 2:2. Cf. James W. McKinnon, Music in
Early Christian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The dancing song in
Acts of John 95–96 is led by the female personification of Charis.
22 Clement of Alexandria, Protr. 12.119.2–3. Translation: George Butterworth, LCL,
(adapted).
23 Methodius of Olympus, Symp. 6.5. Translation: William A. Clark, ANF.
24 Cf. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 7.30.10: “And as to psalms, he put a stop to those addressed to our
Lord Jesus Christ, on the ground that they are modern and the compositions of modern men,
but he trains women to sing hymns (ψαλμῳδεῖν) to himself in the middle of the church on the
great day of the Pascha, which would make one shudder to hear.” Translation: John E. L. Oulton.
 Performing Salvation 179

to himself or both. Indeed, women’s public singing was banned in later centuries
in some quarters of the emerging church.
In Syria, however, women’s liturgical choirs became prominent from the
fourth century onward. Their task was to perform metrical hymns called ma-
drashe publicly during services in the churches.25 The anonymous Vita Ephraemi
describes this as follow:
[Blessed Ephrem] established and arranged the Daughters of the covenant in opposition
to the diversions and popular movements of the deceivers [the Bardaisanites]. He taught
them metrical hymns (madrashe) and songs (sblatha) and antiphons (῾onitha) […]. Every
day the Daughters of the Covenant gathered in the churches on feasts of the Lord and on
Sundays and for the celebration of the martyrs.26

With madrashe, female voices present doctrinal instruction to the larger Chris-
tian community.27 Their songs perform biblical stories in a lively, dramatic way.
For instance, they expand them with imagined speeches and dialogues between
Sarah and Abraham, Mary and the archangel Gabriel, or the so-called Sinful
Woman with Satan.28 According to Jacob of Serugh, Ephrem introduced these
women’s choirs to counter seductive hymns of the heretics.29 This thesis sounds
apologetic.30 As Susan Ashbrook Harvey has shown, it is a reaction to the emerg-
ing criticism of public female singing elsewhere.31

25 Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Singing Women’s Stories in Syriac Tradition,” IKZ 100 (2010):
171–89; Harvey, Song and Memory: Biblical Women in Syriac Tradition (Milwaukee: Marquette
University Press, 2010); Harvey, “Performance as Exegesis: Women’s Liturgical Choirs in Syriac
Tradition,” in Inquiries into Eastern Christian Worship: Acts of the Second International Congress
of the Society of Oriental Liturgy, ed. Bert J. Groen, Stefanos Alexopoulos, and Steven Hawk-
es-Teeples; Eastern Christian Studies 12 (Leuven: Peeters, 2012), 47–64. The choirs are called
“Daughters of the covenant.”
26 Quoted from Harvey, “Performance,” 49. Ephrem himself refers to these women’s choirs
in his Hymnos on Easter 2.8.9.
27 Cf. from the same vita: “[Blessed Ephrem] put in the metrical hymns (madrashe) words
with subtle connotation and spiritual understanding concerning the birth and baptism and fas-
ting and the entire plan of Christ: the passion and resurrection and ascension, and concerning
the martyrs” (Harvey, “Performance,” 54).
28 Cf. Harvey, “Singing,” 157–88; Song, 39–92. Cf. Harvey, “Bearing Witness: New Tes-
tament Women in Early Byzantine Hymnography,” in The New Testament in Byzantium, ed.
Derek Krueger and Robert Nelson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 205–19.
29 Harvey, “Singing,” 175; Song, 35, 45–46. For conflicts around music and women’s singing
among early Christian groups, see Weimar, “Musical Assemblies,” 167–218.
30 Harvey, “Performance,” 58–60; Kathleen McVey, “Ephrem the Kitharode and Proponent
of Women: Jacob of Serug’s Portrait of a Fourth-Century Churchman for the Sixth-Century
Viewer and its Significance for the Twenty-First Century Ecumenist,” in Orthodox and Wes-
leyan Ecclesiology, ed. S. T. Kimbrough (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary, 2007), 229–253.
31 Criticism of hymn singing by women is raised by Cyril of Jerusalem, Procatechesis 14, and
Isidore of Pelusium (third-fourth century CE), Ep. 90 (PG 78.224–25). Johannes Quasten, Musik
und Gesang in den Kulten der heidnischen Antike und christlichen Frühzeit, LQF 25 (Münster:
Aschendorff 1930), 121, argues that women’s singing was generally repressed by the so-called
mainline church. However, the evidence is more ambivalent, as Harvey proves (“Perform-
180 Angela Standhartinger

3. Temple Singers and Other Cultic Actresses in Jewish Texts

The Bible does not exclude women from the temple. In 1 Samuel, Hannah prays
at the temple at Shiloh, and her New Testament counterpart, the widowed
prophetess Hannah, stays at the temple in Jerusalem.32 First Chronicles mentions
among the temple singers three daughters of Heman who play “cymbals, harps,
and lyres for the service of the house of God.”33 Twice mentioned are women
who serve at the entrance to the tent of meeting.34 A special women’s court at the
Jerusalem temple is mentioned for the first time by Josephus and therefore might
belong to Herod’s rebuilding of the Second Temple in the first century CE.35
The Bible also alludes to women dancing choral dances outside the city wall.36
From the Greek perspective, one is reminded of the maenads in the thiasos of
Dionysus. And indeed, women perform choral dances with olive crowns on their
head and the thyros in their hands in the book of Judith.37 Another group of
female cultic dancers are the Therapeutrides, to whom I will turn now.

3.1 The Therapeutrides

In De vita contemplativa, Philo of Alexandria portrays a community of male and

female philosophers, called Therapeutae and Therapeutrides.38 In the first part
of this writing, he describes their settlement, their ascetic life with allegorical
studies, and their noticeable gender-segregated community that meets on the
seventh day.39 The second part presents a detailed description of their festal meal

ance,” 51–52). Some think 1 Cor 14:33b–35 is an argument against women’s cultic singing (cf.
Pseudo-Athanasius, Didascalia CCCXVIII Patrum Nicaenorum 18. Cf, R. Riedinger / H. Thurn,
Die Didaskalia CCCXVIII Patrum Nicaenorum und das Syntagma ad monachos im Codex
Parisinus gr. 1115 (a. 1276), JÖB 35 (1985), 75–92.
32 1 Sam 2; Luke 2:26–38.
33 1 Chr 25:6. The ‫צלְּתַ י ִם‬
ִ ‫ ְמ‬/ κύμβαλον, cymbal, is a metal percussion instrument; the
‫ כִּנֹור‬/ κινύρα is a stringed instrument; and the ‫ נֵבֶל‬/ νάβλα is a musical instrument of ten or
twelve strings. All three instruments are mentioned several times in the context of the Jerusalem
temple cult in Persian and Hellenistic times. See 1 Chr 13:8; 15:18–21, 28; 16:5; 25:1; 2 Chr 5:12;
29:25; Neh 12:27 (inauguration of the city wall); and 1 Macc 4:45.
34 Exod 38:8; 1 Sam 2:22. Irmtraud Fischer, Gotteskünderinnen. Zu einer geschlechterfairen
Deutung des Phänomens der Prophetie und der Prophetinnen in der Hebräischen Bibel (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 2002), 95–108, identifies these women as prophets.
35 Josephus, B. J. 5. 198–200; C. Ap. 2.102–4. Cf. Susan Grossman, “Women and the Jerusa-
lem Temple,” in Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue, ed. Rivka Haut (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 1992), 15–37, 18–20.
36 Judg 21:21: ‫ מְחֹלָה‬or χορεύειν ἐν τοῖς χοροῖς; see also Judg 11:34.
37 Jdt 15:12–13.
38 Philo, Contempl. 1–2. Philo explains their name θεραπευταὶ καὶ θεραπευτρίδες by
the double meaning of the word “healer of the soul” and “worshipers of God.” The feminine
θεραπευτρίς seems to be Philo’s own invention, used also in Somn. 1.332; 2.273; and Post. 184.
39 At the worship meeting on the seventh day in a κοινὸν σεμνεῖον, common sanctuary
women are seated within hearing distance behind a wall, so that “the modesty becoming to
 Performing Salvation 181

and subsequent all-night vigil on every fiftieth day. When the celebration reaches
its climax, the gender segregation is completely reversed.
At the outset, the festival starts as a typical Greco-Roman symposium. Yet the
Therapeutae’s and Therapeutrides’s banquet surpasses all other symposia ever
held among Greeks and Romans, particularly by its modesty and the cultivation
of its participants.40 The followers of “the truly sacred instruction of the prophet
Moses” gather in white robes to recline, after their initial praying, on plank beds
without any luxury.41 Women recline beside men, yet among themselves on the
left side of the room.42 The ascetic meal consists of water, bread, salt, and, at least
for some, hyssop.43 The banqueters are entertained by the president’s lecture
on questions arising from the Holy Scriptures and allegorical interpretation, to
which they listen silently.
With the libation between eating and drinking, all formal banquets contain
some religious rites. And many religious festivals also include festive meals.44
The symposium of the Therapeutae and Therapeutrides reveals its religious char-
acter gradually. The president’s talk resembles Philo’s own accounts of Jewish
synagogue worship, from elsewhere in his writings. Here, as there, people come
together to listen “quietly”45 to the lecture by one of special experience, who
instructs them in the philosophy of their fathers.46 Moreover, food and partic-
ipants are compared to cultic practice elsewhere. The female participants “have
kept their chastity not under compulsion, like some of the Greek priestesses, but
of their own free will in their ardent yearning for wisdom.”47 “Abstinence from
wine is enjoined by right reason as for the priest when sacrificing.”48 And the
table is filled with “the truly purified meal of leavened bread seasoned with salt
mixed with hyssop, out of reverence for the holy table enshrined in the sacred

the female sex is preserved” (Contempl. 33). The lecture room thus described, similar to a
synagogue, is the sole example in antiquity of a segregation of the sexes in a synagogue. See
Bernadette Brooten, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Back-
ground Issues, BJS 36 (Chico: Scholars Press, 1982), 133–34.
40 Contempl. 40–63 contains a satirical description of all kinds of deviant meals, including
the symposium of Xenophon and Plato. See Standhartinger, “The School of Moses at Table:
Sympotic Teaching in Philo’s De vita contemplativa,” LTQy 47 (2017): 67–84.
41 Contempl. 63.
42 Lucian shows a similar seating arrangement for a wedding feast (Symp. 8).
43 The food is mentioned twice with some difference in Contempl. 73, 82. In the first pas-
sage, hyssop is called a luxury, taken only by some. For Contempl. 82, see below.
44 Cf. Dennis E. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian
World (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003).
45 Spec. 2.62: ἐν κόσμῳ καθέζονται σὺν ἡσυχίᾳ.
46 Mos. 2.215–16; Spec. 2.62. Cf. also Martin Ebner, “Mahl und Gruppenidentität. Philos
Schrift De Vita Contemplativa als Paradigma,” in Herrenmahl und Gruppenidentität, ed. Martin
Ebner, Quaestiones disputatae 221 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2007), 64–90, at 75–76.
47 Contempl. 68. The notion of only virgin Therapeutrides contradicts Contempl. 18, where
the Therapeutae and Therapeutrides have left their former families.
48 Contempl. 74.
182 Angela Standhartinger

vestibule of the temple.”49 On the table in the Jerusalem temple, of course, lie
unleavened loaves and salt, without condiments.50 The Therapeutrides and their
male companions surpass other priesthoods and, at the same time, remodel them
and finally respect a certain distance to an alluded cult in the Jerusalem temple.
As in many ancient symposia, the banqueters chant and listen to hymns.51
Philo highlights the religious character of the Therapeutae’s singing.
Then the President rises and sings a hymn composed as an address to God, either a new
one of his own composition or an old one by poets of an earlier day who have left behind
them hymns in many measures and melodies, hexameters (ἔπος) and iambics (τρίμετρος),
lyrics suitable for processions (προσόδιον ὕμνος) or in libations (παρασπόνδειος) and
at the altars (παραβώμιος), or for the chorus whilst standing (στάσιμος) or dancing
(χορικός), with careful metrical arrangements to fit the various evolutions (στροφαῖς
πολυστρόφοις εὖ διαμεμετρημένος). After him all the others take their turn as they are
arranged and in the proper order while all the rest listen in complete silence except when
they have to chant the closing lines or refrains (ἀκροτελεύτια καὶ ἐφύμνια), for then they
all lift up their voices, men and women alike.52

As Peter Jeffery has shown, three of the terms are suggestive of pagan rituals.
A προσόδιον ὕμνος is a processional hymn sung while approaching an altar for
sacrifice.53 A παρασπόνδειος is a song at or for a libation. And a παραβώμιος
is a hymn sung at the altar. The genres of poetry mentioned are reminiscent of
the Greek drama. Iambic lines or τρίμετρος are “often used in Greek drama for
the dialogue or recitative between the solo and choral songs.”54 The στάσιμος
was sung by the chorus in Greek performances while dancing. Dancing is also
implied by the terms χορικός, choral dance, and στροφή, the turning of a chorus.
Yet, at least in the classical period, Greek dramas were themselves cult occasions,
and, as recent interpreters have shown, there is “a specific intersection of drama
with women’s rituals.”55 Philo, who proves himself competent in the theoretical
and cultural aspects of music elsewhere, would not have chosen the various
musical genres without intention.56 Here, however, women and men alike par-
49 Contempl. 81.
50 Philo does not name the temple in Jerusalem here. One is reminded, however, of the table
with the Bread of the Presence, according to Exod 25:30. Lev 24:7 LXX mentions also salt on
this table. Cf. Mos. 2.104.
51 Cf. Plato, Symp. 176a; 181a; 214b; Xenophon, Symp. 3.1; 7.1. Plutarch, Sept. sap. conv.
157e; quaest. conv. 704c–706e etc.; Athenaeus, Deipn. 14.8–43 (617f–639a).
52 Contempl. 80. All Translations are taken from F. H. Colson, LCL.
53 Peter Jeffery, “Philo’s Impact on Christian Psalmody,” in Psalms in Community: Jewish
and Christian Textual, Liturgical, and Artistic Traditions, SBLSS 25, ed. Harold W. Attridge and
Margot E. Fassler (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 147–87. Cf. Ian Coleman,
“Antiphony: Another Look at Philo’s On the Contemplative Life,” Studia Liturgica 36 (2006):
212–30.
54 Jeffery, “Philo’s Impact on Christian Psalmody,” 166.
55 Goff, Citizen Bacchae, 289–370, quotation at 290.
56 Everett Ferguson, “The Art of Praise: Philo and Philodemus on Music,” in Early Chris-
tianity and Classical Culture: Comparative Studies in Honor of Abraham J. Malherbe, ed. John
 Performing Salvation 183

ticipate in active roles by chanting one after the other their hymns and closing
line refrains.
Finally, the symposium of the Therapeutae and Therapeutrides culminates
in “honorable drunkenness” and bacchantic enthusiasm57 – and indeed, in the
“sacred vigil,” which, as the word παννυχίς suggests, has orgiastic features.58
They rise up all together and standing in the middle of the refectory form themselves
first into two choirs, one of men and one of women, the leader and precentor chosen for
each being the most honored amongst them and also the most musical. Then they sing
hymns to God composed of many measures and set to many melodies, sometimes chanting
together, sometimes taking up the harmony antiphonally, hands and feet keeping time in
accompaniment, and rapt with enthusiasm reproduce sometimes the lyrics of the proces-
sion (προσόδια) sometimes of the halt (στάσιμα) and of the wheeling and counter-wheeling
of a choric dance (στροφάς τε τὰς ἐν χορείᾳ καὶ ἀντιστροφὰς ποιούμενοι). Then when each
choir has separately done its own part in the feast, having drunk as in the Bacchic rites of
the strong wine of God’s love they mix and both together become a single choir, a copy of
the choir set up of old beside the Red Sea in honor of the wonders there wrought.59

In a musical dimension, this “rapt enthusiasm” is reflected by the reversed order

of strophe, anastrophe, and stasimon of the classical Greek drama.60 Yet the myth
staged at the Therapeutae’s or Therapeutrides’s all-night-vigil is Israel’s exodus
from Egypt. As a cultic drama, the festival becomes an imitation (μίμημα) of this
decisive moment in Israel’s history with God. With their singing and dancing,
the Therapeutae and Therapeutrides “represent” (ἀπεικονίζειν) the choir with
Moses and Miriam at the Red Sea.61 A women’s chorus led by Miriam is already
included in the Exodus account (Exod 15:20–21). The mixing of the two choirs
at the Red Sea is an exegetical tradition that Philo mentions several times.62 The
Dead Sea Scrolls preserved an extended version of Miriam’s song.63 This raises
T. Fitzgerald et al., NovTSup 110 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 391–426. Philo calls the composer of bib-
lical psalms ὑμνογράφος (Gig. 17; Agr. 50) and ὑμνῳδός (Philo, Det. 74; Plant. 39; Conf. 59), but
only here he states that the psalms are acutely composed “in all sorts of meters and melodies,”
hexameter and trimeter (Contempl. 29; 80).
57 Contempl. 89; cf. 11. In Contempl. 87, Philo explicitly states that both women and men
are equally possessed by God (ἐνθουσιῶντές τε ἄνδρες ὁμοῦ καὶ γυναῖκες). Cf. Matthews, First
Converts, 83–85.
58 Cf. Euripides, Bacch. 882; Athenaeus, Deipn. 6.55 (250a); 14.6 (647c); 15.7 (668d).
59 Contempl. 84–85.
60 Siegmund Levarie, “Philo on Music,” The Journal of Musicology 9 (1991): 124–230 (129).
61 Contempl. 88.
62 Philo, Agr. 82: “The same hymn is sung by both choirs, and it has a most noteworthy
refrain, the recurrence of which is strikingly beautiful. It is this: ‘Let us sing unto the Lord, for
gloriously hath He been glorified; horse and rider He threw into the sea.’” Cf. Mos. 2.256. That
the men’s and the women’s choir sing together is already stated in Wis 10:20. See Peter Enns, “A
Retelling of the Song at the Sea in Wis 10,10–21,” Bib 76 (1995): 1–24.
63 Cf. 4Q365 6aII 1–7. Cf. Sidnie White Crawford, “Traditions about Miriam in the Qumran
Scrolls,” Studies in Jewish Civilization 14 (2003): 33–44, 36–37; and H. Tervanotko, “‘The Hope
of the Enemy Has Perished’: The Figure of Miriam in the Qumran Library,” in From Qumran to
Aleppo: A Discussion with Emanuel Tov about the Textual History of Jewish Scriptures in Honor
184 Angela Standhartinger

the question of how far Philo’s depiction of the Therapeutrides reflects an actual
cultic practice among Jewish women in the first century.64
Philo places the most important settlement of the group at Lake Mareotis,
not far away from Alexandria.65 However, the imaginative description of the
group’s ascetic practice sounds throughout idealized and strikingly similar to
a group of Egyptian priests represented by the contemporary Stoic philosopher
Chaeremon.66 Therefore, some scholars doubt the existence of the group, while
others reconstruct a sect of Jewish philosophers.67 In my view, De vita contem-
plativa is an ethnography of Judaism in the guise of an Egyptian sect.68 Indeed,
this “race” (γένος) that “exists in many places in the inhabited world” reveals
itself only progressively as Jewish.69 Yet, while its members remain as citizens of
heaven beyond this world, they nonetheless reflect some actual Jewish religious
practice. Therefore, the Therapeutrides’s religious practice of dramatic reenact-

of his 65th Birthday, ed. A. Lange and M. Weigold, FRLANT 230 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek &
Ruprecht, 2009), 156–175. Cf. Tervanotko, Denying Her Voice: The Figure of Miriam in Ancient
Jewish Literature (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), 147–162. For an exodus drama,
cf. Ezek. Trag. Cf. Tervanotko, Denying Her Voice, 217–24.
64 For Judith Newman, Philo “provides a picture of what ritual life might be like at some
distance from the Temple” (“The Composition of Prayers and Songs in Philo’s De Vita Contem-
plativa,” in Empsychoi Logoi – Religious Innovations in Antiquity: Studies in Honour of Pieter
Willem van der Horst, ed. Alberdina Houtman, Albert de Jong, and Magda Misset-van de Weg,
AJEC 73 [Leiden: Brill, 2008], 468).
65 Contempl. 22.
66 The link was first noted by Paul Wendland, “Geschichte des hellenistischen Judentums,”
Jahrbücher für klassische Philologie, Supplement 22 (1896): 755.
67 See Troels Engberg-Pedersen, “Philo’s De Vita Contemplativa as a Philosopher’s Dream,”
JSJ 30 (1999): 40–64, and Ross S. Kraemer, Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in
the Greco-Roman Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 57–115, versus Joan
E. Taylor, Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria: Philo’s “Therapeutae” Recon-
sidered (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Cf. Joan E. Taylor, “Real Women and Literary
Airbrushing: The Women ‘Therapeutae’ of Philo’s De vita contemplativa and the Identity of the
Group,” in The Bible and the Women: Early Jewish Writings, ed. Eileen Schuller and Marie-Theres
Wacker, vol. 3.1 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2017), 205–224.
68 Angela Standhartinger, “Philo im ethnografischen Diskurs. Beobachtungen zum lit-
erarischen Kontext von De Vita Contemplativa,” JSJ 46 (2015): 314–44; and Angela Stand-
hartinger, “Best practice. Religious reformation in Philo’s representation of the Therapeutae and
Therapeutrides,” in Beyond Priesthood: Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman
Empire, ed. Richard L. Gordon, Georgia Petridou, and Jörg Rüpke, RVV 66 (Berlin: de Gruyter,
2017), 128–156.
69 Contempl. 21. Philo presents us with a group of people who live in temple-like houses by a
lakeside just south of Alexandria in Egypt, abstain from wine like sacrificing priests (Contempl.
84), share food in reverence to a holy table enshrined in the vestibule of an unnamed temple
(Contempl. 81), and have ecstatic experiences like bacchanals or corybants (Contempl. 12; 85).
Only in the last third of the text does Philo mention that the members of the group “have
dedicated their own life and themselves to knowledge and the contemplation of the verities of
nature, following the truly sacred instructions of the prophet Moses” (Contempl. 64). The only
other undoubted reference to Jewish identity is the identification of Moses and Miriam, the
choral leaders at the performance of the exodus (Contempl. 87).
 Performing Salvation 185

ment of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt as well as women’s choirs chanting with
Miriam at the Red Sea are in my view hardly only fictively imagined.

3.2 Job’s Daughters

My second example comes from the Testament of Job, Job’s farewell to his sons
and daughters at the end of his life. T. Job is preserved in four Greek, one Coptic,
and at least nine Slavonic manuscripts.70 The dating ranges between the first
century BCE and second century CE.71 As is typical in the genre of a testament,
Job recapitulates his life and gives some advice to his children.72 In addition to
the biblical Vorlage, Job is informed by an inaugural vision that, after destroying
the temple of the idols, he will fight against Satan, but if he manages to resist,
all he loses will be restored. The voice from the light says: “[Y]ou will be like a
sparring athlete, both enduring pains and winning the crown.”73 One theme of
the book is endurance and patience in the attacks of Satan, who appears through-
out the story as a quick-change artist.74 In the role of a beggar, he fools Job’s
door maid (T. Job 6 f.); in the guise of a bread seller, he disguises Job’s wife Sitis/
Sidotis (24 f.) until he finally unmasks himself as Job’s last friend Elihu (41 f.).75

70 The Greek text of P, preserved in two manuscripts from the eleventh and sixteenth centu-
ries, is edited by Sebastian P. Brock, Testamentum Jobi, PVTG 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1967). A second
edition on the basis of manuscript S (1307 CE) and V (thirteenth century) is edited by Robert
A. Kraft, The Testament of Job according to the SV Text, SBLTT 4 (Missoula: SBL Press, 1974).
The Coptic papyrus is edited by Gesa Schenke, Der koptische Kölner Papyruskodex 3221, Teil I:
Das Testament des Iob (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009) and Schenke, “Neue Fragmente des Kölner
Kodex 3221. Textzuwachs am koptischen Testament des Iob,” ZPE 188 (2014): 87–105. The
Coptic papyrus proves that the text must have existed in the fourth century CE. It elaborates on
some hymns in T. Job 32–33, 43. Cf. Schenke, Kölner Papyruscodex, 21–31. One can speculate
how these hymns might have been performed when the text was read aloud. For the Slavonic
tradition, see Maria Haralambakis, The Testament of Job: Text, Narrative and Reception History
(London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 185–212.
71 Bernd Schaller, Das Testament Hiob, JSHRZ III/3 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus,
1979), 311–312.
72 For the genre, see John J. Collins, “Structure and Meaning in the Testament of Job,”
SBLSP 1 (1974): 37–39. More recently, Robin Waugh (“The Testament of Job as an Example
of Profeminine Patience Literature,” JBL 133 [2014]: 777–792) identifies T. Job as patience lit-
erature in the context of ancient discourse on martyrdom, which includes also feminization and
admiration of women’s patience and endurance.
73 T. Job 4:11. Translation, if not indicated otherwise, R. P. Spittler, OTP. In T. Job 27:1–6,
Job challenges Satan to fight openly against him.
74 ὑπομονή κτλ.: T. Job 1:5; 4:6; 5:1. μακροθυμία κτλ.: T. Job 11:10; 21:4; 26:5; 27:7; 28:5;
34:4. Cf. Cees Haas, “Job’s Perseverance in the Testament of Job,” in Studies on the Testament
of Job, ed. Michael A. Knibb and Pieter W. van der Horst, SNTSMS 66 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 117–154.
75 The name is given as Sitis or Sitidos. The former does not exist elsewhere, and the latter
would be “giver of bread,” a role Job’s wife takes. Cf. Job 2:9 LXX and T. Job 21–25. For the
evidence, see van der Horst, “The Role of Women in the Testament of Job,” NedTT 40 (1986):
275–76.
186 Angela Standhartinger

These may be humorous features of the story, yet they are not merely humorous
features.76 Job’s philanthropic benefactions to strangers, widows, orphans, and
slaves are extraordinary.77 After the daily feeding of the widows, he reminds
them to glorify God and accompanies their chanting by playing the lyre.78 Many
passages of T. Job are given in exalted prose and, like the chorus in the classical
drama, summarize information or add comments.79 Exactly at these passages,
manuscripts and translations differ. Presumably T. Job was actually performed
by some of its readers.80
The most important part for our question follows at the end. In contradiction
to the biblical Vorlage, Job distributes his recovered estate among his sons
alone.81 His daughters – named just as in the Septuagint, Hemera (Day), Kasia
(Cinnamon), and Amaltheias-Keras (Horn of Plenty)82 – complain: “(A)re we
not also your children?” (T. Job 46:2). Job, however, promises to them a better
inheritance, hidden in three golden boxes.
“And he (Job) opened them and brought out three multicolored cords (χορδή) whose
appearance was such as no one could describe, since they were not from earth but from
heaven, shimmering with fiery sparks like the rays of the sun. 9And he gave each one (of
his daughters) a cord, saying: ‘Place these about your breast, so it may go well with you all
the days of your life.’” (T. Job 46:7–9)

The daughters’ inheritance consists of three cords that are obviously of heavenly
origin, which they are going to wrap around their breasts. Similar girdles or belts
are worn by angels and heavenly messengers elsewhere.83 However, the Greek
word for this cord or belt, χορδή, is unique. Its normal meaning would be “that
which is made from guts” – used, for instance, for the strings of a harp or a lyre.
This detail might be a first hint at the cord’s function as a musical instrument.
But the cords are multifunctional, fulfilling at least five tasks.84 Job explains:

76 For humor in T. Job, see Haralambakis, Testament, 174.

77 Cf. T. Job 8–15; 53:1–6.
78 T. Job 14:1–2.
79 See, e. g., the lament for Sitidos in T. Job 25.
80 Schenke and Schenke Robinson, Papyruskodex, 21–31. Cf. Schaller, “Testament,” 313.
81 P. Machinist (“Job’s Daughters and Their Inheritance in the Testament of Job and Its Bib-
lical Congeners,” in The Echoes of Many Texts: Reflections on Jewish and Christian Traditions:
Essays in Honor of Lou H. Silberman, ed. William G. Dever and J. Edward Wright, BJS 313
[Atlanta: Scholars Press,1997], 67–80) reads T. Job as a midrash on biblical inheritance law in
the light of Job 42:15.
82 In Greek mythology, Amaltheias is the name of the goat that suckled Zeus. In Roman, the
cornucopia stands for nourishment and abundance.
83 Dan 10:5; Ezek 9:2, 10; Rev 1:13; 15:6; Apoc. Zeph. 6:12; Acts Pet. 12 Apos. (NHC VI 1)
2. Cf. Heike Omerzu, “Das bessere Erbe. Die privilegierte Stellung der Töchter Hiobs im Tes-
tament Hiobs,” in Körper und Kommunikation. Beiträge aus der theologischen Genderforschung,
ed. Katharina Greschat and Heike Omerzu (Leipzig: Eva, 2003), 80–85.
84 Cf. Rebecca Lesses, “Amulets and Angels: Visionary Experience in the Testament of
Job and the Hekhalot Literature,” in Heavenly Tablets: Interpretation, Identity and Tradition
 Performing Salvation 187

“Not only shall you gain a living from these, but these cords will lead you into
a better world, to live in the heavens” (T. Job 47:3). Additionally, the cords – or
bands (σπάρτη), as they are sometimes called – are an efficacious remedy to
cure equally body and soul. Job recalls that they had been given to him, as God
said, “gird your loins like a man” (Job 38:3; 40:2). Suddenly, worms and plagues
disappeared from Job’s body, and he forgot the pains in his heart (T. Job 47:6).
Furthermore, the cords are a protective amulet or phylacterion (φυλακτήριον).85
With these cords, Hemera, Kasia, and Amaltheias-Keras will no longer face the
enemy or have to worry about him (47:10–11). Finally, the cords mediate visions
of the heavenly reality (47:11; cf. 52:1–10).
Actually, the cords have transformative power. When the first daughter girds
herself:
She took another heart – no longer minded toward earthly things – but she spoke ec-
statically in the angelic dialect, sending up a hymn to God in accord with the hymnic
style of the angels (κατὰ τὴν τῶν ἀγγέλων ὑμνολογίαν). And as she spoke ecstatically, she
allowed “the Spirit” to be inscribed on her garment.86

Similarly, when Kasia girded herself, she

had her heart changed so that she no longer regarded worldly things. And her mouth took
on the dialect of the archons, and she praises God for the creation of the heights. So, if
anyone wishes to know “the Creation of the Heavens,” she or he will be able to find it in
“The Hymns of Kasia.”87

At last, Amaltheias-Keras’s
mouth spoke ecstatically in the dialect of those on high, since her heart also was changed,
keeping aloof from worldly things. For she spoke in the dialect of the cherubim, glorifying
the Master of virtues by exhibiting their splendor. And finally whoever wishes to grasp a
trace of “The Paternal Splendor” will find it written down in the “Prayers of Amaltheias’s
Horn.”88

in ­Ancient Judaism, ed. Lynn LiDonnici and Andrea Lieber, JSJSup 119 (Leiden: Brill, 2007),
49–74.
85 T. Job 47:11. Matt 23:5 uses φυλακτήριον with another meaning.
86 T. Job 48:2–4. The Coptic papyrus reads στήλη (monument) instead of στολή (garment).
The Slavonic version reads: “When she completed the angelic song, she rejoiced and stopped.”
87 T. Job 49:1–3. Again the Slavonic tradition skips the last verse. 49:3 reads: “She sang
praise to the highest, as no single human can say, songs sang Kasia.”
88 In this verse, every single manuscript seems to read its own text. Brock (P): καὶ ὁ βουλόμενος
λοιπὸν ἴχνος ἡμέρας καταλαβεῖν τῆς πατρικῆς δόξης εὑρήσει ἀναγεγραμμέναἐνταῖς εὐχαῖς τῆς
Ἀμαλθείας κέρας. Kraft (S,V): “And the one who further wishes to grasp the poetic rhythm of
the paternal splendor will find it recorded in the Prayers of Amaltheias-Keras.” Coptic version:
“Wer also von einem Bruchstück (μέρος) der Herrlichkeit des Vaters [erfahren möchte], seht,
es steht in den Gebeten (προσευχή) der Unveränderlichkeit geschrieben.” Slavonic tradition:
“Nobody can follow to praise the glory of the father, as we find in the songs of Amalthias
praising God with a horn.”
188 Angela Standhartinger

The three girded daughters guide us through classes of angels, and their languages
transmit heavenly knowledge.89 It remains open whether the narrator envisions
the daughters in the middle of the angelic worship in heaven or as mediators
between earthly and heavenly devotees or whether the daughter’s hymns mirror
the heavenly worship on earth.90 Either way, in the Greek and Coptic versions,
there is also an interest in keeping their songs in writing in order to transmit
them to posterity. Indeed, the daughters act as theologians, are guided by the
spirit, praise the creation, and glorify the master of the virtues. The transmission
of the songs by writing is, however, eradicated from the Slavonic version of the
T. Job. But in some quarters of the later church, mysterious hymns authored or
transmitted by women became increasingly suspect and provocative.
In the last scene of the book, the three daughters escort Job’s soul into heaven
with their music. This time, Hemera plays the lyre (κιθάρα), Kasia holds the
censer (θυμιατήριον), and Amaltheias-Keras beats the kettle drum (τύμπανον).91
Unseen by bystanders, they welcome the heavenly chariot that came down to
carry Job’s soul back home into heaven. Lyre and censer belong to the temple
cult.92 The kettle drum is an instrument played by women in the Bible.93 Later
the daughters also lead the funeral procession for Job’s body.
Equipped with their cords, the three daughters Herma, Kasia, and Amal-
theias-Keras are transformed into liturgical officiants. Just as in many other
ancient religions, their cultic practice leads to ecstatic transformation. As relig-
ious professionals, they enact knowledge of the heavenly hosts and their dialects,
theological expertise, hymns and cultic music that help welcome heavenly beings
among their worshipers, and they lead processions into heaven and on earth
alike.
Caused by the strikingly different images of the five women represented,
feminist evaluation of T. Job has led to diverging conclusions.94 Most scholars
89 It is not obvious whether T. Job thinks of one or many angelic languages by referring
to ἀγγελική διάλεκτος (48:3), διάλεκτος τῶν ἀρχῶν (49:2), διάλεκτος τῶν ἐν ὕψει (50:1), and
διάλεκτος τῶν Χερουβιμ. Zephania and Abraham are also taught angelic languages (Apoc.
Zeph. 8:4; Apoc. Ab. 17).
90 For similar options regarding acts of worship, as documented by some of the Dead Sea
Scrolls see Esther G. Chazon, “Human and Angelic Prayer in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls,”
in Liturgical Perspectives: Prayer and Poetry in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Proceedings of the
Fifth International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and
Associated Literature, 19–23 January, 2000, StTDJ 48 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 35–47.
91 T. Job 52:1–10. A similar chariot picks up Adam’s soul in Apoc. Mos. 33.
92 2 Chr 9:11; ψ 42:4; 80:3 (LXX). As an instrument of the heavenly worship service, see
Rev 5:8; 14:2; 15:2. In non-Jewish cultic practice, Dan 3:5. Cf. Thomas J. Mathiesen, Apollo’s
Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1999), 258–270.
93 Exod 15:20; Judg 11:34; 1 Sam 18:6; Jer 38:4 (LXX); Jdt 16:1.
94 For an overview, see Maria Haralambakis, “‘I Am Not Afraid of Anybody, I Am the Ruler
of This Land’: Job as Man in Charge in the Testament of Job,” in Men and Masculinity in the
Hebrew Bible and Beyond, ed. Ovodopi Creangă (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2010), 127–128;
 Performing Salvation 189

detect two negative characters, the disobedient door maid and the betrayed
wife Sitidos, and the positive group of the three daughters. Some ascribe this
opposing characterization to two authors.95 Others argue that, while the writing
uses enslaved and married female characters only as foils to enhance through
negative contrast Job’s virtue and spiritual knowledge, it values virginity in high
esteem because it transforms women into non-sexual transgendered men.96
However, nowhere in T. Job does the marital status of Hemera, Kasia, and Amal-
theias-Keras become explicit. Moreover, Nancy Klancher has argued that all five
female characters reflect Job’s challenges and conflicts on his spiritual path.97
The kind-hearted door maid who offers bread to the beggar accords perfectly
with Job’s action in other passages. Likewise, Sitidos’s selling of her hair to feed
Job is an act of remarkable generosity. Both characters “mirror the former Job,
Job before his enlightenment by the angel” in his initial vision.98 Yet, Sitidos’s
character develops, and she is finally rewarded by an eternal memorial with the
Lord (T. Job 40:3–4).99 The daughters represent the healed and transformed Job.
Yet, as John-Patrick O’Connor remarks, “ the state into which they are ushered
is not manhood as opposed to womanhood, but monotheistic inheritance, pro-
tection from Satan, prophetic ecstasy, and praise and glorification of the creator
God, and ‘Master of Virtues.’”100
The literary turn denies any possibility to draw conclusions about realities
behind a given text – and rightly so, since direct mirror readings from texts
to groups in which texts might have originated and been transmitted tend to
become circular.101 Texts exist, however, not beyond a social reality experienced

and Nancy Klancher, “Female Soul in Drag: Women-as-Job in the ‘Testament of Job,’” JSP 19
(2010): 228–231.
95 van der Horst, “Role,” 281–89.
96 Susan R. Garrett, “The ‘Weaker Sex’ in the Testament of Job,” JBL 112 (1993): 55–70;
Robert A. Kugler and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, “On Women and Honor in the Testament of Job,”
JSP 14 (2004): 43–62. Cf. Robert A. Kugler, “On Anthropology and Honor in the Testament of
Job,” in Dust of the Ground and Breath of Life (Gen 2:7): The Problem of a Dualistic Anthropology
in Early Judaism and Christianity, ed. Jacques van Ruiten and George H. van Kooten, TBN 20
(Leiden: Brill, 2016), 117–26.
97 Klancher, “Female Soul,” 225–45. Cf. Emily O. Gravett, “Biblical Responses: Past and
Present Retellings of the Enigmatic Mrs. Job,” BibInt 20 (2012): 97–125.
98 Klancher, “Male,” 236.
99 Sitis/Sitios is also vindicated by Eliphas, who finally clothes her in a purple garment upon
her death (T. Job 37:8; 40:1–14). Cf. John-Patrick O’Connor, “Satan and Sitis: The Significance
of Clothing Changes in the Testament of Job,” JSP 26 (2017): 314–315.
100 O’Connor, “Satan and Sitis,” 237.
101 Already Kaufman Kohler (“The Testament of Job: An Essene Midrasch on the Book
of Job Reedited and Translated with Introductory and Exegetical Notes,” in Semitic Studies in
Memory of Rev. Dr. Alexander Kohut, ed. Georg A. Kohut [Berlin: Calvery 1897], 264–338)
placed the writing among the writings of Philo’s Therapeutae. Cf. Marc Philonenco, “Le Tes-
tament de Job et les Thérapeutes,” Semitica (1958): 41–53; and van der Horst, “Role,” 288. Others
look for mystic groups in Hekhalot literature. See, e. g., Rebecca Lesses, “The Daughters of Job,”
in Searching the Scriptures II: A Feminist Commentary, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (New
190 Angela Standhartinger

by their authors and readers. As I have shown above, in all ancient religions,
women act as spiritual leaders in manifold ways. Therefore, it is not coincidental
when Hemera, Kasia, and Amaltheias-Keras likewise lead processions, welcome
heavenly guests, and channel prayers between this world and another. It’s not
extraordinary when they act vicariously on behalf of men and women, or that
parts of their ritual acts remain unseen and unheard by outsiders. They just act,
as many of their Greek and Roman sisters do, in a cultic setting that demands
women’s religious performance. Job’s daughters should therefore no longer be
seen as extraordinary or merely as pure fiction. We should consider them within
the context of women’s religious leadership in antiquity.102

4. Performing Salvation

While Philo’s Therapeutrides and Job’s Daughters remain literary figures, their
cultic roles are by no means exceptional or historically implausible. To the con-
trary, female singers and dancers who act out parts of the central myth of a given
religion are broadly attested also among their Greek, Roman, and later Christian
sisters. Likewise, women who participated in the synagogue lectures and who
performed the exodus story, who participated in the heavenly worship, who
mediated the songs of the angels, and who led processions into heaven and on
earth most likely existed also in ancient Judaism. But even if Philo’s Therapeu-
trides and Job’s daughter would have existed nowhere beyond these two texts,
their cultic acting would have become re-dramatized whenever the two texts
were read aloud in one group or another. Manuscripts as well as the history
of reception prove that there were contested interpretations of both writings.
The Coptic version of T. Job from the fourth century CE expands some of the
hymnic passages, proving thereby the dramatic performance by its readers.
The Slavonic version, to the contrary, deletes the notion that the songs of Job’s
daughters ever existed.103 The Decretum Gelasium (sixth c. CE) names T. Job
among “writings which have been compiled or been recognized by heretics or

York: Crossroad, 1994), 144–145. More nuanced is Lesses, “Amulets.” More recently, parallels
have been drawn to specific passages in writings found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Cecilia
Wassen (Women in the Damascus Document, AcBib 21 [Leiden: Brill, 2005], 194–196) detects
an analogy between the heavenly cords and the enigmatic ‫( רוקמה‬authority?) in 4Q270 7 i 14.
Jennifer Zilm (“Multi-Coloured like Woven Works: Gender, Ritual Clothing and Praying with
the Angels in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Testament of Job,” in Prayer and Poetry in the Dead
Sea Scrolls and Related Literature: Essays in Honor of Eileen Schuller on the Occasion of Her 65th
Birthday, ed. Jeremy Penner and Cecilia Wassen, STDJ 98 [Leiden: Brill, 2012], 437–451) points
to a parallel between the multicolored cords and a multicolored garment in 11QSir (11Q17
21–22).
102 Cf. Lesses, “Daughters,” 144, who thinks of women who held synagogue offices.
103 See above nn. 70, 86–88. Cf. Schenke and Schenke Robinson, Papyruskodex, 21–31.
 Performing Salvation 191

schismatics.”104 By reading De vita contemplativa, Eusebius claims that Philo,

the Jew, testifies to the existence of early Christian hearers of the Gospel of Mark
in Egypt.105 One of Eusebius’s main arguments is women’s membership in this
particular group.106 Yet, while declaring the festival of the fiftieth day the “feast
of the Passion of the Savior,” Eusebius emphasizes separation between men and
women and skips over the intermingling choirs and all other ecstatic features
of the all-night event.107 No female singing of the “new psalms” composed by
these alleged Christians is mentioned by him.108 As Eusebius and the Decretum
Gelasium prove, obviously not all readers appreciate women’s religious dancing,
singing, and songwriting. Nonetheless, the dances of the Therapeutrides, the
angelic songs of Hemera, Kasia, and Amaltheias-Keras, their music, and their
leading of the most important processions in religious life all became re-
dramatized, when De vita contemplativa and the Testament of Job were read and
performed among Jews and Christians alike. “Performers cannot in the nature
of the event be inhibited from projecting their subjectivity through inflection
and body language.”109 That is, some Jewish and Christian women throughout
history acted in cultic settings in some ways or others, publicly claiming their
agency in the worship of their God.

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 The Widow, the Wife, and the Priestess
Tertullian’s Life Plans for Widows in Ad uxorem1

Margaret Butterfield

For a text ostensibly devoted to convincing Christian women to remain widows

after their husbands die, Tertullian’s Ad uxorem (Ux.) has surprisingly little to
say about widowhood.2 Instead, Tertullian devotes the bulk of the treatise to dis-
cussions of marriage. For Tertullian in Ux. (likely written c. 200 CE in Carthage),
even remaining in widowhood is figured as a kind of marriage. He lays out three
paths forward for a Christian widow: she could become the wife of God, the wife
of a Christian man, or the wife of a gentilis. The first is his preferred path, but one
which he devotes little space to fleshing out; the second is an acceptable compro-
mise; the third is to be avoided at all costs. The image of widow as wife pervades
Ux. and provides the rhetorical framework for both books of the treatise. While
she may have some choice in husband, the Christian widow in Ux. has no choice
but to become again a wife.
Why, in a text (seemingly) about widowhood, does Tertullian exhibit such
a focus on wives? One possible answer may be found when one looks at the
particular sort of Christian women Tertullian addresses in this text – namely,
wealthy women – alongside his portrayal of widows allied with Satan – namely,
gentile3 priestesses. In what follows I will examine the three wifely paths Ter-
1 This article developed out of a chapter of my doctoral dissertation (Margaret Butterfield,
“Widows as Altar in Christian Texts of the Second and Third Centuries” [PhD diss., Harvard
University, 2017]), completed under the direction of Professor Karen L. King. I was honored to
have Professor King as my advisor throughout my time at Harvard. I have been inspired con-
tinually by her keen eye and skill in attending to texts and their contexts from the most granular
level of detail to the most broad scope of potential interactions and implications. Her abilities
to be open to the unexpected, to wade into complexity, and to bring new ways of thinking to
old texts and old problems were a privilege to witness in the field, in her scholarship, and in the
classroom. She is gifted, both in her writing and in person, with the capability to communicate
often formidably challenging ideas both with clarity and without oversimplification – a capabil-
ity for which I and no doubt all of her students are extremely grateful. Beyond her abilities as a
scholar and teacher, Professor King brought a level of generosity and kindness to her advising
that is in short supply across academia. I feel privileged to count her as a mentor and friend.
2 I would like to express my thanks for the generous and thoughtful feedback on an earlier
draft of this article provided by one of this volume’s editors.
3 I use the term ‘gentile’ throughout this article to reflect Tertullian’s frequent use of gentiles
in Ux. to designate non-Christians (Jews as a group existing contemporaneously with Tertullian
do not seem to figure at all in Ux.). Throughout Ux. Tertullian is at pains to establish a clear
198 Margaret Butterfield

tullian presents for Christian widows, as well as his portrayal of gentile widow
priestesses. While the framework of widow as wife always places the Christian
widow within the bounds of a kyriarchal household, the gentile widow priestess,
as Tertullian portrays her, actively throws off such bounds. Here lies the danger
Tertullian seeks to avoid by his focus on Christian widows as wives. I suggest that
Tertullian feels a sort of unease about encouraging wealthy Christian women to
remain widows without also ensuring that they are, no matter what path they
choose, properly subordinated in some form of marital relationship.4 Should
wealthy Christian widows be understood as a priesthood in service to God, they
would be powerful figures indeed, perhaps subject to little oversight by men.5

God as Second Husband: The Persuasive Aim of Ad uxorem

The main thrust of Tertullian’s two-book treatise as he sets it forth is to convince

his wife that should he die before her, she should not remarry – or, if she must re-
marry as he discusses in book two, it should be to another Christian man. While
division between Christians and the idolatrous rest, a rhetorical move that likely did not reflect
the context of a 3rd century CE Carthage in which identities and affiliations were more fluid
and shifting than Tertullian might wish. See Éric Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities
in Late Antiquity: North Africa, 200–450CE (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), and Carly
Daniel-Hughes, “The Perils of Idolatrous Garb: Tertullian and Christian Belonging in Roman
Carthage,” in Religious Competition in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Nathaniel P. DesRosiers and
Lily C. Vuong (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2016), 15–26. Thank you to one
of this volume’s editors for his or her useful feedback on Tertullian’s use of gentiles and sugges-
tion of these bibliographic resources.
4 In her consideration of the relationship between Tertullian’s attitudes toward marriage
and virginity and his belief in a fleshly resurrection, Carly Daniel-Hughes comes to a related
and relevant conclusion when she describes Tertullian as presenting virginity as a “species” of
monogamy. “When it comes to envisioning a sexual ethics for his community in his writings on
marriage the concept of monogamy serves him more readily [than virginity]. Unlike virginity,
monogamy easily retains the gendered language of husband and wife, of marital union, of a
binary in which one side takes the lead. In this way, monogamy leaves intact the link between
femininity and flesh, and concomitantly between masculinity and spirit, upon which Tertulli-
an’s vision of salvation relies.” Carly Daniel-Hughes, “‘We Are Called to Monogamy’: Marriage,
Virginity, and the Resurrection of the Fleshly Body in Tertullian of Carthage,” in Coming Back
to Life: The Permeability of Past and Present, Mortality and Immortality, Death and Life in the
Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Frederick S. Tappenden and Carly Daniel-Hughes (Montreal:
McGill University Library, 2017), 261.
5 Elsewhere in his corpus we do see evidence that Tertullian had an understanding of
widows as a group of liturgical importance in the Christian community: see Exhortatione cas-
titatis 11, De monogamia 11, De virginibus velandis 9, and De pudicitia 13. The politics of sex and
gender in Tertullian’s writings, and his attitudes toward women in general, are complicated to
say the least, and his relation to and rhetorical construction of widows is no different. While the
preponderance of the evidence from Tertullian’s corpus suggests that he held widows in esteem
as a group of some importance in the church, and his respect for widows comes through in Ux.
as well, his focus in the text is on ensuring that widows re-enter into a properly subordinate
kyriarchal marriage (ideally to God).
 The Widow, the Wife, and the Priestess 199

his primary inscribed audience is his wife, the treatise is clearly geared toward
a broader audience of women as Tertullian says his topic is also worthy of con-
sideration by “any other woman who belongs to God” (1.1.6).6 In so broadening
the pool of women for whom his argument is relevant Tertullian makes clear
that he considers widowhood to be the state in which all once-married Christian
women should remain. Widowhood – in this case envisioned as occurring upon
the death of Tertullian himself – is held up as a dignified and praiseworthy state,
one in which the widow enters into the “angelic family” (1.4.4, my translation).

Book One: No Remarriage!

Although Tertullian describes the topic of book one as what his wife’s life should
be like after his own death (1.1.1), most of the book is focused not on setting forth
the proper life of the widow but rather on setting up and refuting arguments for
remarriage. Tertullian presents three principal motivations for why a woman
might want to remarry: fleshly desires, worldly desires, and the desire for pos-
terity. Fleshly desires include not only the desire for sex (which is what Tertullian
presumably means by “the functions of maturity,” 1.4.3) but also desires for other
sorts of security and companionship that a husband might provide for a wife
(“on account of power and solace, or to guard her from wicked rumors,” 1.4.3,
my translation). Worldly desires are principally desires for money and status that
might be gained in remarriage. Desire for posterity reflects a desire to live on
through one’s children, and to experience the joys and sorrows of parenthood
(Tertullian calls this “the bitter sweet which comes of having children,” 1.5.1).7
All three of these categories of desires reflect advantages that are gained
through membership as a wife in an earthly household; perduring advantages
that could aid a woman in maintaining socioeconomic security and even comfort.
Tertullian’s presentation of desires of the world in particular makes clear that the
women at whom he is aiming his rhetoric are of relatively high status – women to
whom it would make sense to speak of “spending extravagantly,” having a “mass
of jeweled pendants,” and “lending luster” to one’s wedding with “mules from
6 Unless otherwise noted, translations from Ux. are taken from the translation of William
P. Le Saint, Tertullian: Treatises on Marriage and Remarriage, ACW 13 (New York: Newman,
1951). Where I have provided my own translation, I have used the Latin edition of Charles
Munier, Tertullian: A son épouse, SC 273 (Paris: Cerf, 1980). Munier’s edition is slightly different
in some places from the CSEL Latin edition, which is the edition on which Le Saint’s English
translation was based. CSEL: Emil Kroymann, Quinti Septimi Florentis Tertulliani Opera, vol.
2.2, CSEL 70 (Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky; Leipzig: Becker & Erler, 1942).
7 This particular desire Tertullian will dismiss as “sheer nonsense” – in vivid language he
describes how widows will not be hampered by children at the resurrection; rather “at the first
sound of the angel’s trumpet they will leap forth lightly, easily able to endure any distress or
persecution, with none of the heaving baggage of marriage in their wombs or at their breasts”
(1. 5. 32).
200 Margaret Butterfield

Gaul” or “porters from Germany” (1.4.7). Being the wife in a wealthy household,
as Tertullian presents it at least, has real advantages.
What draw could choosing to remain a widow have, in comparison? Drawing
on 1 Cor 7, Tertullian makes very clear that celibacy – whether from birth or from
the end of a marriage – is the spiritually desirable state, the state truly blessed by
God. He dismisses all of the arguments for remarriage that stem from desires,
saying that “the servant of God is above all such supposed necessities” (1.5.3).
Referencing Matt 6:25–34 / Luke 12:22–31, Tertullian reminds his audience that
with regard to worldly desires a true Christian has the confidence that God will
provide for any needs. “The widow whose life is stamped with the seal of God’s
approval has need of nothing – except perseverance” (1.4.8)! A widow does
not need an earthly household to take care of her material needs because God
himself will provide.8

The Newlywed

When he moves on to refute fleshly desires, Tertullian makes explicit what he

had begun to imply in his refutation of worldly desires when he spoke of God
as provider. A true Christian widow is in fact not choosing to remain a widow,
but choosing to become a wife in the ultimate household – God’s household.
What need could a woman have for an earthly spouse when she has God as
her husband? In expanding on this notion, Tertullian paints a portrait of a very
particular sort of matrimonial relationship in vivid language:
In fact, they choose rather to be married to God. They are God’s beautiful ones, God’s
girls. With him they live, with him they converse, with him they spend day and night.
Just as their prayers are dowries they confer to the Lord, so they obtain from him dignity
as conjugal duties, however often they desire. Thus they have taken possession of their
eternal good, a gift of the Lord, and now on earth, not marrying, they are considered as
belonging to the angelic family. (1.4.4)9

Tertullian describes the relationship between God and the widows with strongly
marital, almost romantic language. The widows are God’s puellae – his girls, his
sweethearts, his young wives. This is most certainly not a portrait of dominae in

8 It is worth asking how such rhetoric might have been received by the vast majority of poor
widows for whom “porters from Germany” would be so remote as to be laughable. How might
such a widow respond to the notion that all she needs is perseverance, and the rest of her needs
will be met? Carried to its extreme, Tertullian’s logic would seem to state that a widow who has
to devote time and effort to the struggle for her own survival neither serves God properly, nor
has true faith in him.
9 Malunt enim Deo nubere. Deo speciosae, Deo sunt puellae. Cum illo uiuunt, cum illo
sermocinantur, illum diebus et noctibus tractant. Orationes suas uelut dotes Domino assignant,
ab eodem dignationem uelut munera maritalia, quotienscumque desiderant, consequuntur.
Sic aeternum sibi bonum, donum Domini, occupauerunt, ac iam in terries, non nubendo, de
familia angelica deputantur. My translation.
 The Widow, the Wife, and the Priestess 201

charge of the members and activities of a household. Rather God and the wid-
ows are newlyweds, exchanging nuptial gifts and obligations, talking together,
spending all of their time together. The prayers referenced here seem to be not
so much the supplications or intercessions of a widow as they are the intimate
conversations of lovers.
Tertullian presents an explicit comparison between the two sides of the ex-
change between widows and God: just as (uelut) the widows give over to God
their prayers as a marriage portion, so they receive from him honor as munera
maritalia. Given that Tertullian presents munera maritalia as parallel to dotes
(dowries), its likely meaning would seem to be something akin to bride-prices.
However, since Tertullian says that these widow-wives obtain munera maritalia
from God quotienscumque desiderant – however often they desire, or ask – this
suggests not so much a one-time handing over as with a bride-price but rather
ongoing marital obligations. These could be understood as ongoing gifts, or the
maintenance of the wife in material comfort. I suggest that we might also see
in this phrase a reference to the conjugal obligations of 1 Cor 7:3.10 Tertullian
designates what the widows receive from God as dignationem – dignity, esteem,
reputation. The widows give prayers to God, and God gives them honor. The
husband esteems the wives, with whom he converses continually.
This passage represents one of the only moments in the treatise where
Tertullian describes what activities a widow might engage in after choosing to
remain a widow – that is, after choosing to become God’s wife. Notably absent
is any place or role for the Christian community. In contrast, the Christian com-
munity and the former widow’s ability (or lack thereof) to actively participate
in it form a large part of Tertullian’s portrayals of the options of marriage to a
Christian or a gentile man, as we will see. The effect of Tertullian’s zeroing in
here on the marital dyad of God and the widows to the exclusion of anyone else
is that the audience of Ux. is given no sense that the activities of the widows
who have chosen to marry God are of significance for the community in any
way. In fact, the audience is given almost no sense of what her activities might
be, beyond her nuptial conversations with God. In theory, the position of wife
of God could be a powerful one indeed. God’s domina could be in a position
of leadership over many members of the household, with the ability to oversee
and direct many household activities. The portrayal Tertullian paints, however,

10 Obligations often understood in 1 Cor 7:3 to include sexual intercourse. I do not suggest
that here Tertullian is presenting the widows as engaging in sexual intercourse with God. Rather,
I suggest that the language Tertullian uses can evoke a broad range of obligations that spouses
are understood to have to one another and that the language serves to flesh out the portrayal
of God and the widows as husband and wives. On Tertullian’s use of the Pauline epistles in his
writings regarding women, see Elizabeth A. Clark, “Status Feminae: Tertullian and the Uses of
Paul,” in Tertullian and Paul, ed. Todd D. Still and David E. Wilhite, Paul and Patristic Scholars
in Debate 1 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 127–155.
202 Margaret Butterfield

shows a young newlywed with eyes only for her husband; power, leadership, even
simply activity in the household community are nowhere to be seen.
Having presented and refuted various arguments for (earthly) remarriage, and
painted a portrait of the delights of marriage to God, Tertullian has one principal
remaining argument in book one in support of choosing celibate widowhood.
The gentiles engage in celibacy to make mockery of a practice beloved by God,
and their chastity is a challenge to God’s servants. (1.6–7). Gentile women main-
tain widowhood in honor of a dead husband; gentile women maintain celibacy,
as virgins or widows, in priesthoods for several deities. We will examine this
portrayal of widow priestesses later in the article, but for now we will turn to
Tertullian’s presentation in book two of the two other marital paths forward a
Christian widow might take besides marriage to God: marriage to a Christian
man, or marriage to a gentile.

Book Two: But If You Must, Marry a Christian

Book two of the treatise has little to say directly about widowhood11 (much like
book one) as in it Tertullian focuses on why, if a woman really must remarry,
she should marry a Christian. The other alternative, marriage to a gentile, is
presented as guaranteeing a woman a dismal future and should be avoided at all
costs. In his descriptions of both options Tertullian focuses on whether or not
the Christian woman would be able to participate actively in the Christian com-
munity, and what that participation would look like. This is in notable contrast to
his portrayal of the Christian widow married to God, as described above.
Another issue repeatedly crops up in Tertullian’s portrayals of these two
marital options in book two that did not surface in his description of marriage
to God: that of money. More specifically, Tertullian is concerned about what
happens to a widow’s money when she remarries. As David Wilhite has ably
demonstrated, the rhetoric of Ux. makes clear that Tertullian’s implied audience
is wealthy widows, not the majority of widows who would have survived in
poverty and near-poverty.12 This is the audience for whom it would make sense
to reference “jeweled pendants” (1.4.7) and “elaborate coiffures” (2.3.4), about

11 The opening of book two does give us some interesting insight into Tertullian’s ideas
about widowhood, although it comes in an offhand remark he makes. Speaking of women who
choose to remarry, he describes them as “certain women who, when given an opportunity of
practicing continence by reason of a divorce or the death of a husband …” (2.1.1). This may be
an indication that Tertullian includes divorcées in his understanding of ‘widows.’ This more
­expansive understanding of ‘widowhood’ than is held in contemporary Western culture would
be in line with that generally held in the Greco-Roman world; see Butterfield, “Widows as
Altar,” 5.
12 David Wilhite, “Tertullian on Widows: A North African Appropriation of Pauline
Household Economics,” in Engaging Economics: New Testament Scenarios and Early Christian
 The Widow, the Wife, and the Priestess 203

whom to ask “where but from the devil will they get husbands able to maintain
their sedans, their mules, the outlandishly tall slaves they need to dress their
hair” (2.8.3)? Tertullian clearly states at the opening of the treatise that his aim
is to convince his wife and other women not to remarry, but rather to remain in
the more spiritually desirable and admirable state of being without a (human)
spouse. However, this concern for the maintenance of widows’ chastity is not
all that is at stake. As Wilhite has shown, Tertullian is motivated at least in part
by a desire to keep widows’ wealth accessible to the church, for “if the widows
remarry, their ‘dowries’ will be paid to new husbands and not to God via the
church.”13 Far be it from Tertullian to state it so baldly, so in book one he merely
observes that a true servant of God would be above a need for the trappings of
wealth, and describes the wife of God as offering him her dowry – in the form
of prayers. Tertullian’s concern with the destination of a widow’s material dowry
emerges more clearly in book two with his presentation of a widow’s two human
marriage options.

The Oppressed

Tertullian compares the obstacles faced to participation in the Christian com-

munity by a woman married to a non-Christian, to the free participation that
would be experienced by a woman in a Christian marriage. Would a non-Chris-
tian husband, Tertullian asks, permit his wife to “go about the streets to the
houses of strangers, calling at every hovel in town in order to visit the brethren”
(2.4.2)? Or worse, spend the entire night away from the house during Easter
rituals, or participate in the Lord’s Supper “when such vile rumors are spread
about it,” or slip into prison to kiss a martyr’s chains, or share the ritual kiss
with any “brethren,” for that matter (2.4.3)? Certainly not – in fact, a Christian
woman married to a gentile cannot fulfill “her duties to the Lord … according
to the demands of ecclesiastical discipline, since she has by her side a servant of
Satan who will act as an agent of his master in obstructing the performance of
Christian duties and devotions” (2.4.1). The demands of her husband will take
her away from her Christian duties; mere participation in everyday life with him
puts her in danger of damnation (2.6).
Even if a non-Christian husband is seemingly tolerant of his wife’s Christian
activities, according to Tertullian this must mean that the husband knows what
those activities are, and so his wife has violated a scriptural command to serve
in secrecy (2.5). In reality this ‘tolerant’ husband is probably just after his wife’s
money: “they practice tolerance because they intend to make the dowries of their

Reception, ed. Bruce W. Longenecker & Kelly D. Liebengood (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2009), 222–242.
13 Wilhite, “Tertullian on Widows,” 234.
204 Margaret Butterfield

wives the price of their silence, that is, by threatening to expose them to the
scrutiny of a judge. This is a thing a great many women failed to think about,
but came to understand only after their property had been extorted from them
or their faith had been destroyed” (2.5.4). This sort of marriage, according to
Tertullian, would be actively dangerous for the wives’ faith – and their property.
Far from being able to enjoy the benefits of her wealth, a Christian woman
married to a gentile would likely find it all taken from her and would receive no
spiritual benefit in recompense.

The Partner

Spiritual recompense would, of course, come from a marriage to a Christian

man, and particularly a less well off one. This marriage would benefit the wealthy
widow spiritually if not financially – “for if the kingdom of heaven belongs to
the poor, it does not belong to the rich; and thus a woman who is wealthy will
be better off with a man who is not. She will receive a dowry ampler than her
own from the goodness of one who is rich in God” (2.8.5). Handing off one’s
dowry to a poor Christian man might not be quite as wonderful as presenting it
directly to God, but at least it would benefit another Christian. This marriage is
mutually beneficial, and while it does not provide the same sort of relationship
and rewards in this life as a marriage to God would, seemingly it will aid the
widow-wife’s standing in the kingdom of heaven.
Marriage to a Christian man is better than marriage to a gentile not only in
financial terms, but also in relation to the wife’s participation in the Christian
community. Where a gentile husband would only be an obstacle to such partic-
ipation as we saw above, a Christian husband would not only support his wife,
he would also participate alongside her (2.8). Wives and husbands in Christian
marriages may act freely in performance of Christian duties: “Unembarrassed
they visit the sick and assist the needy. They give almost without anxiety; they
attend the Sacrifice without difficulty; they perform their daily exercises of piety
without hindrance” (2.8.8).14 They pray, worship, and fast together, and provide
each other with instruction, encouragement, and strength. They have no secrets
from one another and are truly both one flesh and one spirit. The happiness of
this blessed Christian marriage is something that Tertullian, never at a loss for
words, professes himself unable to adequately describe.
In the course of Ux., Tertullian presents the Christian widow with three pos-
sible paths forward, all involving remarriage: marriage to God (definitely the
best choice), to a Christian man (if she must marry a human), or to a gentilis (a
14 On Ux.’s treatment of household religious practices, see Caroline Johnson Hodge, “Daily
Devotions: Stowers’s Modes of Religion Meet Tertullian’s ad Uxorem,” in “The One Who Sows
Bountifully”: Essays in Honor of Stanley K. Stowers, ed. Caroline Johnson Hodge et al., BJS 356
(Providence: Brown University Press, 2013), 43–54.
 The Widow, the Wife, and the Priestess 205

terrible choice that will inevitably produce awful consequences for her). While
marriage to God is clearly Tertullian’s favored option, it is also the only one of
the three for which Tertullian does not present some portrait of the widow-wife
engaged in activities with someone beyond her husband. As we have just seen,
when discussing the perils of taking a gentile for a husband, Tertullian stresses
how this husband will prevent her from engaging in her Christian activities
while forcing her to participate in all sorts of blasphemous undertakings (2.4–6).
When painting a portrait of a Christian marriage, Tertullian idyllically presents
the couple engaged in their Christian activities together – praying together, wor-
shipping together, visiting the sick together (2.8.7–8). Aside from her prayer-as-
pillow-talk, the widow as God’s puella is not portrayed as doing anything, and
certainly nothing active involving the community.
Why not? Tertullian’s portrayal of a Christian marriage shows a wife active in
the community. Given that God is in some sense the ultimate Christian husband,
Tertullian’s rhetoric at least allows for the space to imagine the Christian widow
as wife of God engaging in the same activities as Tertullian allows the wife of the
human Christian. We might see God as functioning as the spouse who freely
allows widows’ travel and activities. Perhaps this is the sort of argument that we
can imagine widows themselves having made in support of their activities: my
true spouse is God, and he encourages me in my work. Yet, while Tertullian’s
rhetoric allows for the space to imagine he would condone widows behaving
thusly, his direct portrayal of the wife of God offers no hint of her engaging in
such conduct. Perhaps Tertullian is silent about the activities of the wife of God
out of a sense of caution – for to present widows as God’s dominae active and
engaged in the world could be to present powerful women indeed, women with
no obvious human oversight.
Does Tertullian present portraits of active, engaged widows anywhere in
Ux.? Yes – but only of non-Christian widows. In particular, in several instances
Tertullian presents portraits of gentile widows as priestesses. In a text abounding
in the language of household and family, these portraits contain some of the only
sacerdotal15 imagery in Ux. I suggest that in the portraits of these priestesses we
can see the full flowering of the danger Tertullian seeks to avoid by focusing on
the widow as wife – the danger of an active, sacerdotally powerful woman.

15 In this article I use the term ‘sacerdotal’ to mean being of ritual and/or spiritual signifi-
cance for others due to one’s role as some sort of mediating communicator between humanity
and the divine. The term ‘sacerdotal’ derives from the Latin sacerdos, which is typically trans-
lated in English as ‘priest,’ and which is etymologically rooted in a notion of giving something
sacred, viz. making offerings in a sacrificial system of worship (sacer + dare). Here in Ux.,
Tertullian uses the related word sacerdotia – priesthoods – to denote particular groups of gentile
widows and virgins.
206 Margaret Butterfield

The Priestess and the Altar

Book one of Tertullian’s Ux., as we have seen, is devoted principally to refuting

arguments for second marriages, in support of the treatise’s stated goal of en-
couraging Christian women to choose to remain chaste widows after their hus-
bands have died. Toward the conclusion of this book, Tertullian takes a different
tack and discusses instead gentile women who practice celibacy in service to
Satan (1.6–7). Tertullian’s tone here is not so much chastising or goading toward
Christian women (as in, ‘even the gentiles can manage to practice celibacy’) as
it is decrying the severe practices that look so much like Christian practices but
that come from the devil himself. One gets the impression that Tertullian is at
pains to explain why it is that Christians and gentiles have such similar practices,
and what it is that distinguishes them.
While Tertullian generally does not have much to say about Christian widows
in this passage, he opens with a comparison between Christians and gentiles. It
is a very difficult thing, says Tertullian, that (Christian) holy women (sanctae
feminae) bear chastity after their husbands’ departure for the sake of God, while
gentile women, “the priesthoods of both widows and virgins” (gentiles … et
uirginitatis et uiduitatis sacerdotia), do so for Satan.16 Chaste Christian widows
are described as ‘holy women,’ while their comparanda are denoted as ‘priest-
hoods.’17
Tertullian moves on to note several examples of gentile virgin priesthoods
(including the Vestals and the Delphic oracles), and then describes in greater
detail an example of a priesthood of widows:
Further, we know that widows minister to the African Ceres, indeed having been with-
drawn through a most unyielding oblivion from wedlock. For while their husbands are still
living, they not only depart from marriage, but even thrust other women in their place,
no doubt while their husbands smile cheerfully; having been deprived of all contact, even
with the kiss of their sons and yet, with enduring practice, they continue steadfastly in
such a discipline of widowhood, which excludes even the holy comforts of pious affection.
(1.6.4)18

16 Durum plane et arduum satis continentia sanctae feminae post uiri excessum Dei causa,
cum gentiles satanae suo et uirginitatis et uiduitatis sacerdotia perferant (1.6.3, my translation).
17 Tertullian does employ sacerdotium elsewhere in his corpus to designate a Christian
priesthood, so the fact that he does not describe the Christian widows with that terminology
here cannot be explained entirely by a reluctance on his part to employ specifically sacerdotal
vocabulary for Christian officials. See David Rankin, Tertullian and the Church (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 165–168.
18 Ceterum uiduas Africanae Cereri adsistere scimus, durissima quidem obliuione a matri-
monio allectas. Nam manentibus in uita uiris non modo toro decedunt, sed et alias eis, utique
ridentibus, loco suo insinuant; adempto omni contactu, usque ad osculum filiorum et tamen,
durante usu, perseuerant in tali uiduitatis disciplina, quae pietatis etiam sancta solatia excludit
(1.6.4). My translation. Tertullian invokes this same imagery in Exhortatione castitatis 13.
 The Widow, the Wife, and the Priestess 207

Tertullian’s tone, while exhibiting disparagement of the overly extreme prac-

tices of these priestesses, seems also reluctantly admiring of their commitment.19
These widow priestesses are directive of their own situation. They withdraw
(decedunt) from their husbands, and thrust (insinuant) others in their place.20
They persevere (perseuerant) in a discipline of widowhood which shuts out (ex-
cludit) even the holy comforts of usual familial affection. In contrast to Christian
widows, whom Tertullian portrays as enmeshed in marriage and household even
while remaining chaste, these widows actively reject all such bonds. In doing so,
says Tertullian, they are following the commands of the devil (haec diabolus suis
praecipit et auditur).
After a brief foray into arguing that God must have willed widows to remain
widows since he willed the death of their husbands, Tertullian returns to the
imagery of gentile widow priesthoods. This time, though, he does it with a twist.
He provides chaste Christian widows with an identity parallel to that of the
gentile priesthoods – the identity not of wife, but of altar of God. This reference
is unusual in Ux., which employs terminology relating to sacrifice or sacrificial
ritual almost nowhere else. However, the image of the Christian widow as altar
appears in several other early Christian texts, notably Polycarp’s letter To the
Philippians (Phil.), Methodius’s Symposium (Symp.), and the Didascalia apos-
tolorum (DA) and several other related church orders.21 Tertullian invokes the
image of the widow as altar only briefly, and does not explain it, expand on it, or
return to it again. The passage is worth quoting in full:

19 Elsewhere in Ux. we see additional evidence that Tertullian regarded widows’ commit-
ment to maintaining chastity with respect. Comparing widows’ chastity to that of virgins, he
states that virgins’ chastity may be perfectly intact and so they will “look upon the face of God
more closely,” but nevertheless the condition of widowhood is more difficult to sustain because
the widow knows what she is giving up. “Chastity is most praiseworthy when it is sensible of
the right it has sacrificed and knows what it has experienced” (1.8.2). Virgins may have chastity
through happy grace, but widows work personally to achieve it through their own virtue. This
characterization of widows is interesting on a number of fronts. Tertullian evaluates the worth
of chastity as present in virgins and widows on two different scales: that of length and perfection
of chastity, which result in grace and a particular closeness to God; and that of difficulty of in-
dividual sacrifice and endeavor, which result in personal virtue (1.8.3). The reward of virginity
(being closer to God) may be, strictly speaking, more desirable and prestigious, but one gets
the impression that Tertullian has more respect for the work of widows (or at least his rhetoric
works effectively to portray them as worthier of respect). This presentation of widows in com-
parison to virgins is also noteworthy for the way in which Tertullian emphasizes the importance
of widows’ own individual efforts in achieving their chastity. See also Daniel-Hughes, “We Are
Called,” esp. 257–259.
20 We see here an indication that Tertullian’s conception of widowhood goes beyond simply
that state occasioned by the death of a husband, to encompass states occasioned by other sorts
of marital separation.
21 For explorations of the widow-altar imagery in all of these texts, see Butterfield, “Widows
as Altar.”
208 Margaret Butterfield

How depleting to faith, how great an obstacle for holiness second marriages are, the
teaching of the church and the rule of the apostle make evident, since they do not permit
the twice-married one to preside, nor do they allow a widow to be selected for the order22
unless (she is) an uniuira. For the altar23 of God must be displayed clean. All that is pure of
the church is a reflection of holiness. A priesthood of widowhood and the single life exists
among the nations, obviously (because) of the rivalry of Satan. For the king of the age, the
pontifex maximus, to marry again is a crime. How greatly does holiness please God, that
even now the enemy strives after that, certainly not as someone partaking of what is good,
but striving after the abuse of what is pleasing to God the Lord. (1.7.4–5)24

As in 1.6.3 above, here too Tertullian presents Christian widows in parallel to

gentile widow priestesses, both engaged in practices of chastity. He expands
upon how it is that their practices are so similar: these priests and priestesses
adhere to principles of chastity and single marriage because they are pleasing to
God, but not in order to please God. According to Tertullian, as agents of ‘the
enemy’ (Satan) they strive after what is pleasing to God in order to abuse it. The
pure Christian widow-altar, married once and now chaste, is presented as a true
reflection of holiness. In contrast, the gentile widow priestesses are presented as
participating in a sort of imitative distortion of holiness masterminded by Satan.
Not too far before Tertullian’s turn to the widow priestesses, he presented
his rather romantic portrait of the Christian widow as the young wife of God
22 Adlegi in ordinem. William P. Le Saint, S. J., in his 1951 translation of the text, regards
this as a reference to the enrollment of widows in 1 Tim 5:9 and nothing more. He is at pains to
argue against a more sacerdotal understanding: “Tertullian appears to speak of the ‘ordination’
of widows … but their selection was never by the rite of ordination properly so called.” Le
Saint, Tertullian, 122n66. In contrast, Bonnie Bowman Thurston, while also regarding this as
a reference to 1 Tim 5:9, reads it as providing evidence that Tertullian regarded ‘enrollment’ as
referring to widows belonging to an “ecclesiastical order” that was parallel to the orders of male
clergy (The Widows: A Women’s Ministry in the Early Church [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989], 84,
88); she also sees evidence for this in other texts of Tertullian. I am more inclined to agree with a
toned-down version of Thurston on Tertullian’s general understanding of widows (although not
that presented in Ux.). Scholars have often in the past attended to the use of specific vocabulary
words such as ordo in debating whether or not widows counted as ‘clergy.’ I am not certain that
this is the right debate to have, given the fluidity of ideas of ‘clergy’ and ‘ordination’ at this point
in early Christian history. See Karen Jo Torjesen, “Clergy and Laity,” in The Oxford Handbook
of Early Christian Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 389–404 for a superb overview of scholarship, especially 394–395 on
women and gender, 397–398 on widows in particular, and 398–399 on Tertullian’s use of the
term ordo and its origin in Roman class rankings.
23 Tertullian uses ara here rather than altaria, which is intriguing. See Butterfield, “Widows
as Altar,” 78n2 for a consideration of his vocabulary.
24 Quantum detrahant fidei, quantum obstrepant sanctitati nuptiae secundae, disciplina ec-
clesiae et praescriptio apostoli declarant, cum digamos non sinit praesidere, cum uiduam adlegi
in ordinem nisi uniuiram non concedit. Aram enim Dei mundam proponi oportet. Tota illa
ecclesiae candida de sanctitate describitur. Sacerdotium uiduitatis et caelibat<u>um est apud
nationes, pro diaboli scilicet aemulatione. Regem saeculi, pontificem maximum, rursus nubere
nefas est. Quantum Deo sanctitas placet, cum illam etiam inimicus affectat, non utique ut
alicuius boni affinis, sed ut Dei Domini placita cum contumelia affectans. My own translation,
which follows the Latin quite closely (hence its somewhat wooden feel.)
 The Widow, the Wife, and the Priestess 209

discussed above. If that portrait presented the right way to engage in celibate
widowhood, then the portrait of the gentile widow priestesses presents its
opposite. Agents of Satan, actively throwing away the bonds of household and
family, persevering in strict disciplines that make a mockery of true holiness –
any similarities between gentile widow priestesses and chaste Christian widows,
Tertullian assures his readers, are purely superficial. If Tertullian has already
presented the best (Christian widow as wife of God) and worst (widow as gentile
priestess) ways to go about celibate widowhood, then why does he drop in this
image of the Christian widow as altar of God? One possible answer might be
that he was in a sacerdotal frame of mind, as it were, and wanted to present a
parallel to priestesses for Christian widows from that same ritual framework.
The need for an altar to be kept pure fits well with Tertullian’s broader message
that Christian widows remain pure, and it is on this connection of purity that
Tertullian trades when he invokes the image of widow as altar. It could also be
that Tertullian wishes to trade on the object status of an altar, something that
must “be kept clean” presumably through the supervision of others, as a contrast
to the aggressively active nature of the gentile priestesses as he presents them.25
That the image of widow as altar was employed in other early Christian texts
suggests that Tertullian may have been able to assume some familiarity with it on
the part of his audience.
Having invoked the image of widow as altar, why does Tertullian not develop
it further? Perhaps it was a stylistic choice to drop in a brief, striking and unusual
(for Ux.) image as a sort of punctuation, an image which might carry weight with
his audience. It also remains the case that this image of the Christian widow as
altar is a departure from the primary imagery Tertullian is working with in this
text, that of the widow as wife, so perhaps he did not want to muddy the waters
with further development of the altar image. It could also be the case, though,
that the image of the widow as altar contained potential implications that would
make it more of an ill fit for Tertullian’s rhetorical framework and goals than it
appears to be at first glance. When the image appears in other early Christian
texts, it is always in the context of widows actively engaged with the community,
whether they be acting as privileged intercessors with God, receiving the offer-

25 However, I would inject a note of caution here. It is very easy to assume that the image
of widows as an altar is at least in part an attempt to construct widows as passive, as thing-
like, as an implement that is controlled by the activity of others. To do so uncritically, however,
would be to assume that understandings of altars of antiquity necessarily conform to modern
assumptions regarding their nature as objects. It is in fact extremely rare that the object nature
of the altar is explicitly invoked in the texts that employ the imagery, despite the fact that these
texts are generally engaged in projects of controlling widows and their behavior. So while it may
be that here Tertullian does implicitly trade on the object nature of altars to construct Chris-
tian widows as passive, it would be wrong to take this rhetorical move as a given. Butterfield,
“Widows as Altar,” 3–4. For more on the idea of objects as actants, see Jane Bennet, Vibrant
Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
210 Margaret Butterfield

ings of the community, or both – in other words, engaging in activities that look
rather sacerdotal.26 Perhaps Tertullian was aware that the image contained these
sacerdotal implications, and so touches on it only briefly in Ux. because those
implications carried the potential to undermine a persuasive goal of the text,
namely to present widows only with life paths that kept them securely within the
bounds of a kyriarchal household.

Tertullian’s Widows

Throughout Ad uxorem Tertullian treads a fine line when it comes to questions

of power and control of widows. A plausible historical reconstruction sees him as
concerned with maintaining control of wealthy widows’ funds for the church and
in order to maintain that control he sets out to convince women to choose to re-
main widows.27 In order to do so he must paint a positive portrait of widowhood
when compared to its alternatives. He is not likely, then, to present widowhood
as a desolate and unimportant state in which one is dependent on the largesse of
others and one’s behavior is monitored and regulated by one’s local bishop. But
his presentation of widowhood also does not trend to the opposite end; he does
not present widows as figures of power and authority, whose work (spiritual and
otherwise) is of great importance to the community and who do not fall under
the control of other humans.
Instead, Tertullian presents the widows with three options for what their
future might look like: as wife of God, as wife of a gentilis, and as wife of a Chris-
tian man. All of these options place the widow within the structure of kyriarchal
marriage. By utilizing the image of the widow as wife of God, Tertullian is able
to present a positive picture of widowhood while still keeping widows within
the bounds of well-understood frameworks of kyriarchal authority. The wife of
a wealthy household may be an important figure, but she is definitively subordi-
nated to her husband. And when portraying the widow as wife of God, Tertullian
does not portray her as the domina of a household, someone with responsibility
and authority over others. She is rather a puella, a young newlywed beloved of her
husband, while other members of the household – the Christian community –
are not in sight, even in relation to her prayers. In contrast, the Christian wife of
the gentile husband is overly controlled, in a manner detrimental to her spiritual
and financial health, and she is prevented from participating in the Christian
community. The wife of the Christian man participates in the community – with
26 The texts themselves (here I refer to Polycarp’s Phil., Methodius’s Symp., and the DA) do
not identify widows as priests, and while the altar imagery seems to designate a level of respect
for the widows in all of these texts, they are also all at pains to try to use it to control widows and
their behavior. See Butterfield, “Widows as Altar.”
27 Wilhite, “Tertullian on Widows.”
 The Widow, the Wife, and the Priestess 211

her husband. None of these portraits show a Christian woman who is active in
the community independent of a human husband. That option, it seems, does
not exist in the rhetorical world which Tertullian has constructed in this treatise.
In contrast to these Christian widow-wives, ensconced in marriage and
household, gentile widow priestesses as Tertullian portrays them actively throw
away the traditional bonds of marriage and family even while that family is very
much in existence. This, according to Tertullian, is emphatically the wrong way
to go about engaging in chaste widowhood – these priestesses are agents of Satan
who strive to make a mockery of holiness. While Tertullian works to present
the priestesses and their practice of chastity as Satanically inspired and false to
their very core, his descriptions of them nevertheless open to view an alternative
sort of relationship between widows and a divine entity than the young wife
imagery he employs elsewhere. These are not newlyweds who have given over
their dowry and are whispering with their divine spouse. These are members
of a priesthood, in service to a god, who have chosen to separate themselves
from family structures and persevere in an unyielding way of life. Tertullian
presents the image of the Christian widow as altar in parallel to the widow pries-
tesses, perhaps as a more acceptable identity drawn from within a sacerdotal
framework. But the brevity of its reference may suggest that even the altar image
carried with it sacerdotal implications that left Tertullian uneasy.
I suggest that Tertullian’s portrayal of gentile widow priestesses in Ux. shows
us precisely the sort of woman he sought to steer Christian widows away from
becoming: women who were directive of their own situation, who purposefully
removed themselves from bonds of household and family, women who served
the divine as sacerdotally significant persons. Tertullian does not explore the pos-
sibility of such a path for Christian widows in Ux., even as the wrong path – no
matter what, in the rhetorical world Tertullian has constructed here, Christian
widows would remarry and so re-place themselves in a kyriarchal household,
ideally as God’s young bride. That Tertullian was concerned that wealthy Chris-
tian widows remain somehow ‘controlled’ (even if that control was the velvet
bonds of a blissful new marriage) suggests that the opposite may have been
occurring, and the widows were not always submitting themselves to such con-
trol (or at least not in a manner to Tertullian’s liking). Tertullian’s presentation of
gentile priestesses – and perhaps also his parallel image of the Christian widow
as altar – may give us a glimpse of another way of understanding widows and
their work already present in the Christian community, an understanding of
widows as active, sacerdotally significant figures.
212 Margaret Butterfield

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Daniel-Hughes, Carly. “‘We Are Called to Monogamy’: Marriage, Virginity, and the Res-
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Back to Life: The Permeability of Past and Present, Mortality and Immortality, Death
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Daniel-Hughes, Carly. “The Perils of Idolatrous Garb: Tertullian and Christian Belonging
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Hodge, Caroline Johnson. “Daily Devotions: Stowers’s Modes of Religion Meet Tertul-
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Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky; Leipzig: Becker & Erler, 1942.
Le Saint, William P. Tertullian: Treatises on Marriage and Remarriage. ACW 13. New York:
Newman, 1951.
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Rankin, David. Tertullian and the Church. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
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neapolis, MN: Fortress, 1989.
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 Marriages, Unions, and Bridal Chambers
in the Gospel of Philip
Silke Petersen

In an article published in 2013, Karen King argues that the stance of the Gospel
of Philip (Gos. Phil.) on marriage is basically a positive one. King places the
Gos. Phil. inside of Christian “pro-marriage ethics” and interprets “marriage as a
symbolic paradigm for the reunification of believers with their angelic (spiritual)
doubles in Christian initiation ritual.”1 Thus, King avoids the alternative often
found in scholarship between those who reclaim ascetic tendencies as the back-
ground of the Gos. Phil. and others who are finding some kind of “libertinism”
in this text. Such an alternative is characteristic for the scholarship on the subject
of so called Gnosticism, as Williams has shown.2 From the church fathers to
Hans Jonas and beyond,3 “one of the most frequently repeated characterizations
of ancient ‘Gnosticism’ is that it was a religious ideology that tended to inspire
two divergent ethical programs, asceticism and libertinism. This character-
ization has been around in one form or another for a very long time and has been
repeated so often that its essential validity has often been simply presupposed.”4
This alternative is also applied in interpretations of the Gos. Phil. and – in line
of the general criticism of King on the concept of “Gnosticism” and its short-
comings5 – I do not believe that it enhances the understanding of this Gospel
which I am reading fundamentally as a Christian text. Below, I will therefore try
to understand the statements that can be discovered in the Gos. Phil. concerning
marriage, couples and their unions and separations and finally concerning the

1 Karen L. King, “The Place of the Gospel of Philip in the Context of Early Christian Claims
about Jesus’ Marital Status,” NTS 59 (2013): 587, 565.
2 Michael A. Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious
Category (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 139–188; on the history of research
see also Philip L. Tite, Valentinian Ethics and Paraenetic Discourse: Determining the Social
Function of Moral Exhortation in Valentinian Christianity, NHMS 67 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 1–7.
3 See e. g. Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. Erster Teil. Die mythologische Gnosis. Mit
einer Ein­leitung zur Geschichte und Methodologie der Forschung, 4th ed. (Göttingen: Vanden-
hoeck & Ruprecht, 1964; repr. 1988), 233–238 (with emphasis on libertinism); Kurt Rudolph,
Die Gnosis. Wesen und Geschichte einer spätantiken Religion, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1980), 262–283.
4 Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism,” 139.
5 See Karen L. King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003)
for the overall problem of the construction and usage of “Gnosticism.”
214 Silke Petersen

“bridal chamber” (which are basically several “bridal chambers”) while avoiding
the said alternative and following King’s ideas on the subject, although arriving
in some points at different conclusions. The reason for the differences results
from the problems in decoding the complex metaphorical language world of the
Gos. Phil. which makes it difficult to figure out on which level a given state-
ment may be understood. Therefore, I shall, as a first step, try to explain how
the different levels in the Gos. Phil. are related to each other – undertaking an
excursus into agriculture first in order to use a starting point that is a less dis-
puted subject than marriage.6

1. Irritations and Disruptions in the Gospel of Philip

Throughout the Gos. Phil. we can find certain disruptions or irritations in the
text. In the process of reading there are time and again sentences which do not fit
into their context or seem to be plainly wrong. By encountering such disruption,
the reading process has to slow down as it becomes unavoidable to think about
the problems created by the apparently wrong statements and to decode what
they might contribute to establishing sense in this complicated text. I start with
one of the Adam-Christ passages in the Gos. Phil. which offers an interesting
example for such an irritation just at the beginning:
Before Christ came, there was no bread in the world, just as Paradise, the place, where
Adam was, had many trees as food for the animals, but no grain as food for the human
beings. Humans were nourished like animals. But when Christ came, the perfect human
being (ⲡⲧⲉⲗⲓⲟⲥ ⲣ︦ⲣⲱⲙⲉ), he brought bread from heaven, so that human beings could be
nourished with human food (ϩⲛ̅ ⲧⲧⲣⲟⲫⲏ ⲙ̅ⲡⲣⲱⲙⲉ).7

The statement that there was no bread in the world before the time of Christ
seems to be simply wrong: Agriculture had already been established in neolithic
times. And since there are many Old Testament narratives in which people are
producing or eating bread, one can also not postulate that the ancient readers
and writers of the Gos. Phil. were not aware bread existed even before the time

6 For methodical reasons I will not engage in the following with the church father accounts
about Valentinians. I do not want to presuppose that the whole Gos. Phil. is Valentinian (even
if it may be partly based on Valentinian ideas) – and Irenaeus and other church fathers are
“hostile sources” anyway as for instance Ismo O. Dunderberg, Beyond Gnosticism: Myth, Life-
style, and Society in the School of Valentinus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 8,
states, which means that there is always the danger of reading one-sided when following their
perspective. See also Tite, Valentinian Ethics, 11–19, 309–313, for the methodological challenge
of establishing “Valentinianism”, and Hugo Lundhaug, Images of Rebirth: Cognitive Poetics and
Transformational Soteriology in the Gospel of Philip and Exegesis on the Soul, NHMS 73 (Leiden:
Brill, 2010), 349–356, for problematic readings of the Gos. Phil. from the perspective of the
church fathers.
7 Gos. Phil. 15, p. 55,6–14.
 Marriages, Unions, and Bridal Chambers in the Gospel of Philip 215

of Christ. If we go on reading – still somehow wondering – we find ourselves

in Paradise where the described situation without bread really took place: Only
after they were thrown out of Paradise, human beings started to cultivate the
earth (Gen 3:17–19) and only then the time of simple nourishment by fruits
from the trees (Gen 1:29–30) came to an end. The story of Genesis is correctly
narrated or at least alluded to.8
The text then contrasts this era of “animalistic” nourishment with the period
after Christ came. As a perfect human being, Christ established human nour-
ishment by bringing bread from heaven. This “bread from heaven” is clearly a
reference to John 6, where the bread is not only given by Christ but also rep-
resents Christ himself as heavenly food, necessary to eat in the Eucharist to re-
ceive eternal live.9 Since Christ gave this bread not immediately after Adam and
Eve were thrown out of Paradise, the long time span between Gen 3 and John 6
(several thousand years of human civilization) is absent in the Gos. Phil. Normal
bread seems to be utterly unimportant. The only real bread is the one that Christ
brought, the heavenly, eucharistic one – which really did not exist in the era
before Christ. Eucharist is thus proved to be the essential human nourishment.
Taking a step back one can define different levels of the text in the following
way:

↑ level 3: ritual / community Eucharist

↑ level 2: exegesis Genesis + Gospel of John
↑ level 1: everyday life agriculture

On the everyday level, the text deals with agriculture. On the exegetical level, it
is connected with references to the story of Adam in Genesis and Christ in the
Gospel of John. The combination of these two levels generates a third one in
which the community ritual of the Eucharist enters the picture – without ever
being mentioned directly.
One can detect those different levels also in many other passages of the
Gospel of Philip.10 The so called “disruptions” or “irritations” slow down the

8 For the (particularly Jewish) parallels see Jan Dochhorn, “Warum gab es kein Getreide im
Paradies? Eine jüdische Ätiologie des Ackerbaus in EvPhil 15,” Zeitschrift für die neutestament-
liche Wissenschaft 89 (1998): 125–133.
9 For Christ as bread and the interpretation of John 6 see Silke Petersen, Brot, Licht und
Weinstock. Intertextuelle Analysen johanneischer Ich-bin-Worte, NT.S 127 (Leiden: Brill, 2008),
201–234; Silke Petersen, “Jesus zum ‘Kauen’. Das Johannesevangelium, das Abendmahl und die
Mysterienkulte,” in “Eine gewöhnliche und harmlose Speise”? Von den Entwicklungen frühchrist-
licher Abendmahlstraditionen, ed. Judith Hartenstein, Silke Petersen, and Angela Standhartinger
(Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2008), 105–130.
10 See Silke Petersen, “Esel, Glasgefäße und pneumatische Schwangerschaften. Erkundungen
bildlicher Sprache im Philippusevangelium,” in Gleichnisse und Parabeln in der frühchristlichen
216 Silke Petersen

reading process and are, therefore, able to function as transfer signals pointing
to the changing levels in the text.

2. Adam and Eve as Exemplary Couple

On the base of these insights and ideas, I will now switch from agriculture to the
subject of marriages and couples. First of all, it might be helpful to consider some
other passages – as a link between those two themes of everyday life – where the
Gos. Phil. is also engaged with the course of events in Paradise, now explicitly
including Eve. Since Adam and Eve are the exemplary exegetical couple, we may
be able to learn something from them about the way the Gos. Phil. understands
couples and their unions or separations. The fate of Adam and Eve can thus be
used as a building block for understanding those concepts in principal, even
though the fate of those two is not a happy one. Whenever Adam and Eve are
mentioned, the central focus is on their separation and its consequences:
When Eve was still in Adam, death did not exist. When she separated (ⲡⲱ̣ⲣϫ) from him,
death came into being. If he enters again and he takes him up into himself, death will be
no more.11

Here, death is not the result of eating the forbidden fruit, but rather originates
earlier, namely in the separation of Eve from Adam. This is likely to refer to Gen
2:21–23, where Eve comes into being from Adam’s side (πλευρά).12 Irritating
here, however, is the continuation. The use of several masculine personal pro-
nouns without clear referents causes confusion: Who goes into whom, and who
takes up whom? I see different possibilities for understanding this passage: One
may assume that Adam enters again into Eve and, therefore, annuls the separa-
tion of the two beings, which were formerly united. Surprising in this case is the
fact that it was Eve who separated herself previously. Thus, it should be she who
must enter again into him.13 The reversal could indicate a positive assessment
of sexuality, if one reads the text as saying: If he, the man, goes into the woman
once again. Such a reading would place sexuality in a position where it is able
to annul the original separation, thereby indicating a positive assent of (hetero)
sexual unions. The next statement (“when he takes him up into himself ”) would
then be interpreted in such a way that the original two-sex primordial human
being is repaired through the act of taking up Adam again, which would imply
an interesting reversal of the Genesis narration.

Literatur, ed. Jens Schröter, Konrad Schwarz and Soham Al-Suadi, WUNT (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, forthcoming 2019).
11 Gos. Phil. 71, p. 68,22–26.
12 Cf. King, “The Place of the Gospel of Philip,” 574; Lundhaug, Images, 215.
13 Lundhaug, Images, 216, discusses the possibility of such an emendation but rejects it.
 Marriages, Unions, and Bridal Chambers in the Gospel of Philip 217

Another reading possibility perceives Paradise as the location of “entering

into” once again; the last part of the sentence then would mean: If Adam once
again would enter into Paradise (or into a Paradisiac state) and would take up
Christ in himself, then there will be no more death.14 In the complex, multi-lev-
elled world of language and understanding in Gos. Phil., both interpretations are
possible. It becomes clear, however, that it is actually Christ who is the agent of
annihilating death when we consider another passage in Gos. Phil. which in its
beginning closely resembles the one just quoted:
If the woman had not separated (ⲡⲱⲣϫ) from the man, she would not die with the man.
His separation (ⲡⲉϥⲡⲱⲣϫ) became the beginning of death. Because of this Christ came to
repair the separation (ⲡⲡⲱⲣϫ) which was from the beginning and again unite the two, and
to give life to those who died as a result of the separation and unite them.15

Here it is irritating that the text reads “his separation” (ⲡⲉϥⲡⲱⲣϫ) instead of “her
separation” (ⲡⲉⲥⲡⲱⲣϫ), which would be the logical continuation of the preceding
sentence. In this case, we can still understand the text as it is when we assume
that the separation is reciprocal – and so also the union, matching the first inter-
pretation of the Adam and Eve passage above. More complicated is the under-
standing of the following sentence, in which it is stated that Christ came to repair
the separation through unification of the genders, but we learn nothing about
how and in which manner Christ does this. Since it is nowhere mentioned in the
canonical Gospels that Christ initializes a marriage or a union between Adam
and Eve (or anybody else), how shall one understand the statement that Christ
unites the two again? A possible answer may be found in the continuation, where
the levels are changing again, this time from the paradigmatic exegetical couple
to the level of everyday life – and back:
But the woman unites with her husband in the bridal chamber (ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ). But those who
have united in the bridal chamber will no longer be separated (ⲡⲱⲣϫ). Thus Eve separated
from Adam because it was not in the bridal chamber (ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ) that she united with him.16

The first sentence functions easily on an everyday level, talking about the hetero-
sexual union in the “bridal chamber” (in this case: ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ). The second sentence
is also still understandable on the same level: The union in the “bridal chamber”

14 This reading gains in plausibility when one incorporates the text appearing directly be-
fore it (Gos. Phil. 70, p. 68,17–22): “Before Christ some went out from a place where they are
no longer able to enter (i. e., the Paradise), and they went in to where they were no longer able
to leave (i. e., in the body / the world). Then Chris­t came. Those who went in he brought out,
and those who went out he brought in (i. e., into Paradise).” My suggestions for a possible inter-
pretation of the riddles are found in the parentheses. Traditions of Adams return to Paradise
are also found in rabbinical sources, cf. Emmanouela Grypeou and Helen Spurling, The Book
of Genesis in Late Antiquity. Encounters between Jewish and Christian Exegesis (Leiden: Brill,
2013), 57–58.
15 Gos. Phil. 78, p. 70,9–17.
16 Gos. Phil. 79, p. 70,17–22.
218 Silke Petersen

implies the consummation of the marriage which is now valid and will ideally
not be separated again. But if there is no union in the “bridal chamber” – as in
the case of Adam and Eve – the relationship will not endure. Naturally, there was
no union in a “bridal chamber” because Adam and Eve did not have a house with
a bedroom in Paradise (as well as there was no bread in Paradise). However, as
in the case of the missing bread, this is true on an exegetical level but seems not
to be the complete story. If we assume that the separation of Adam and Eve was
the bodily separation of the primordial human being in Gen 2:21–23 (referred
to directly before in Gos. Phil.), we cannot assume that the text deals with a
usual kind of marriage and an everyday “bridal chamber,” i. e. bedroom, for the
consummation of marriage. We know from the Genesis story that “Adam knew
Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain” (Gen 4:1). But this happens only
after they were thrown out of Paradise, so this union cannot be meant in the text.
And the story of Cain has a problematic continuation, which is stated explicitly
in another passage of the Gos. Phil.
First adultery (ⲙ̅ⲛ̅ⲧ̅ⲛⲟⲉⲓⲕ) happened, and afterwards murder. And he was begotten in
adultery, for he was the child of the serpent. Therefore, he became a murderer, just like his
father, and he killed his brother. But every union which has occurred between those who
do not resemble each other is adultery.17

The “he,” who was begotten in adultery, is Cain, who then becomes the murderer
of his brother Abel. A surprising turn in this Genesis interpretation is the ser-
pent, who is imagined here as a male (according to Coptic and Greek grammar),
as father of Cain.18 Something went terribly wrong with the fabrication of Cain.
If one connects this story with the next sentence, one can assume that a human-
animal relationship is not an ideal one because the two “do not resemble each
other.” Therefore, this relationship belongs to the category of adultery (ⲙ̅ⲛ̅ⲧ̅ⲛⲟⲉⲓⲕ)
in the sense of mixing different categories which should be kept separated.19

17 Gos. Phil. 42, p. 61,5–12.

18 The link between the devil and Cain is more common in rabbinic as well as Christian
sources, cf. Grypeou and Spurling, Book of Genesis, 132–136.
19 For those who are wondering about the practical aspect: Considering another passage in
Gos. Phil. it would have been enough for Eve to fantasize about the serpent while having inter-
course with Adam: “The children a woman generates resemble the man whom she loves. If it is
her husband, then they resemble the husband. If it is an adulterer, they resemble the adulterer.
Often, if it happens that a woman sleeps with her husband out of necessity, but her mind is with
the adulterer, with whom she usually unites, the child she will bear she bears resembling the
adulterer.” (Gos. Phil. 112, p. 78,12–20). The necessity of unions between equals is stated shortly
after this (Gos. Phil. 113, p. 78,25–79,13, considering animals again), making the connection
to the above quoted text more obvious. – The idea that the children of a woman will resemble
the man she has thought about during intercourse (or even the picture she has looked at) is
an common one in ancient texts, in pagan as well as Jewish/Christian ones, see the collection
of source texts in Max Küchler, Schweigen, Schmuck und Schleier. Drei neutestamentliche Vor-
schriften zur Verdrängung der Frauen auf dem Hintergrund einer frauenfeindlichen Exegese des
 Marriages, Unions, and Bridal Chambers in the Gospel of Philip 219

The story shows the consequence of a union which did not happen in the
right way, i. e. it did not happen in the “bridal chamber” and Christ took no part
in it. But the text does not tell how one has to imagine the ideal union of the
“bridal chamber” and how Christ should be involved in this union. What we
know so far is that the story of Adam and Eve can be used to show how it should
not be. But where is the positive mirror image that could tell us something about
the kind of necessary union in the “bridal chamber”? Are there any positively
evaluated unions except the one in the “bridal chamber” about which we know
nearly nothing so far? Or is the image of earthly marriages only used in contrast
to the better heavenly union as well as the union of Eve and the serpent, which
had a fatal result, and the union of Eve and Adam which has never been a perfect
one? To put it differently: If one starts with Hugo Lundhaug’s statement – “For
what Gos. Phil. seems to be doing is to use the metaphorical input of human
marriage, intercourse, and procreation in order to conceptualize central relig-
ious mysteries, mysteries that call for metaphorical modes of discourse in order
to be understandable to the human mind”20 – where are the good marriages or
unions in the Gos. Phil. that can be used as a starting point to understand the
metaphorical input for the level of religious rituals?

3. Searching for Good Marriages

If we look at the everyday level of human marriages, i. e. at the metaphorical

input from the level of “usual” human marriages for the discussion, it is evident
that the positive perspective is more difficult to find than negative examples.
Some passages in the Gos. Phil. sound at the beginning as if there might be a
good marriage involved but then the text takes an unexpected turn and leads the
reader into doubt about the quality of earthly marriages:
No [one will be able to] know, when [the male] and the female unite with each other except
they alone. For the marriage of the world (ⲡⲅⲁⲙⲟⲥ ⲙ̅ⲡⲕⲟⲥⲙⲟⲥ) is a mystery (ⲙⲩⲥⲧⲏⲣⲓⲟⲛ) for
those who have taken a wife. If the marriage of defilement (ⲡⲅⲁⲙⲟⲥ ⲙ̅ⲡϫⲱϩⲙ) is secret, how
much more (ⲡⲟⲥⲱ ⲙⲁⲗⲗⲟⲛ) is the undefiled marriage (ⲡⲅⲁⲙⲟⲥ ⲛ̅ⲁⲧϫⲱϩⲙ) a true mystery! It
is not fleshly (ⲥⲁⲣⲕⲓⲕⲟⲛ), but pure and something which belongs not to desire but to will,
something which belongs not to darkness or night but belongs to day and light.21

Alten Testaments im antiken Judentum, NTOA 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986),
444–456.
20 Lundhaug, Images, 277.
21 Gos. Phil. 122a, p. 81,34–82,10. – King, “The Place of the Gospel of Philip,” 582–583,
also quotes this passage, interprets the defiled intercourse as non-Christian and concludes that
(according to the Gos. Phil.) “only Christian marriage can be pure.” My own conclusion is sim-
ilar but slightly different because of the different role I assume for the marriage imagery in
connection with the “bridal chamber,” see below section 4.
220 Silke Petersen

This passage has been interpreted as a prove that the Gos. Phil. sees all “usual”
earthly marriages as defiled and should be read entirely as an ascetic text. Thus
Williams states after citing this text: “The simplest reading of this passage is to
understand the ‘undefiled marriage’ to be a marriage lacking sexual intercourse,
and it is possible to read the entire text of Gos. Phil. assuming this encratic per-
spective. In all of the places of the work where sexual intercourse is mentioned,
it is either referred to as something defiling, or introduced to be contrasted
unfavorably with something more sublime, or mentioned for analogical or met-
aphorical purposes.”22 Interesting is the alternative at the end of the quotation:
“analogical or metaphorical” means that there is maybe something else going
on than what “the simplest reading” might lead to: If the above quoted passage
of the Gos. Phil. has an analogical or metaphorical meaning, we cannot simply
assume that it propagates ascetic “undefiled” marriages. Instead a metaphorical
reading would imply that one aspect of the marriage input is taken to another
level of understanding whereas another part of the marriage image is rejected
and not built upon. According to metaphor theories, not all aspects from the
source domain are highlighted in the metaphorical process: “It is the salient
features of the source domain that are in interaction with the target and mapped
onto the target.”23 In an article on Jesus as “celibate bridegroom,” Elizabeth
Clark states: “In case of the ‘celibate Bridegroom,’ the adjective ‘celibate’ puts a
restrictive brake on the sexual associations of ‘bridegroom’: as Derrida suggests,
metaphor withdraws as well as supplements. ‘Like a bridegroom in certain – but
not in all – respects,’ the addition warns.”24 Thus there has to be something both
marriages have in common and something where they differ from each other.
Since the interpretation of this passage is central for every scholar who is
writing about marriage and related topics in the Gos. Phil., I will spend some
more time in trying to understand the argument.
One central feature is the expression “how much more” (ⲡⲟⲥⲱ ⲙⲁⲗⲗⲟⲛ / πόσῳ
μᾶλλον), which points to one of the rabbinical exegetical rules: qal wahomer
(“the light and the heavy”), in the Latin version argumentum a fortiori or argu-
mentum a minore ad maius (from the lesser to the greater), a kind of argument
which is also used in the New Testament in several instances.25 The movement of

22 Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”, 148.

23 Hanne Løland, Silent or Salient Gender? The Interpretation of Gendered God-Language
in the Hebrew Bible, Exemplified in Isaiah 42, 46 and 49. FAT 2.32 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2008), 46.
24 Elizabeth Clark, “The Celibate Bridegroom and his Virginal Brides: Metaphor and
the Marriage of Jesus in Early Christian Ascetic Exegesis,” Church History 77 (2008): 7. The
metaphor can be found several times in the New Testament (2 Cor 11:2; Matt 25:1–13; Matt
22:1–14; John 3:29–30; Rev 19:6–9; cf. Clark, 10). Clark remarks: “Yet the metaphor does not
escape its original habitat: the return of the repressed ensures that the ‘celibate Bridegroom’ still
emerges as erotically desirable” (11).
25 See Matt 7:11; 10:25; Luke 11:13; 12:24–28; Rom 5:9; 11:12–24; Heb 9:14, all using πόσῳ
 Marriages, Unions, and Bridal Chambers in the Gospel of Philip 221

the argument goes from “what is true” to “what is even more certainly true.” The
principle states that if something applies in a lesser case it will apply in a greater
case as well. If the Torah says that you should take care for your neighbor’s cattle
or donkey in case of problems (Deut 22:1–4), it concludes that you should also
rescue their child.26 This conclusion is not dependent on the quality of the cattle
or donkey; they do not have to be devaluated to make the conclusion work.
Therefore, one might conclude that the Gos. Phil. does not disqualify earthly
marriages to establish its argument. The above quoted text is not an ethical ad-
vice regarding earthly marriages.
On the other hand, the text seems to equate “the marriage of the world”
(ⲡⲅⲁⲙⲟⲥ ⲙ̅ⲡⲕⲟⲥⲙⲟⲥ) with the “marriage of defilement” (ⲡⲅⲁⲙⲟⲥ ⲙ̅ⲡϫⲱϩⲙ), which
does certainly not sound like a positive description of earthly marriage. Even if
defiled and undefiled marriages are both qualified as mysteries and, therefore,
seem to have the mysterious character of the particular union in common, the
uncommon (not salient) element is stated in the opposition between “defiled”
(ϫⲱϩⲙ) and “undefiled” (ⲁⲧϫⲱϩⲙ). According to this, the question remains what
exactly is meant by “defiled” in the Gos. Phil.27 Looking at other instances where
ϫⲱϩⲙ and its derivates are used, we unfortunately do not find something which
resembles a definition, but have to work out the meaning of some obscure and/
or damaged passages. Particularly annoying for our subject are the gaps on the
changeover from page 64 to page 65:
Great is the mystery of marriage! For [without] it the world would [not exist]. Now the
existence of [the world depends on human beings], and the existence [of human beings on
marriage]. Think of the [undefiled relationship], for it possesses [great] power. Its image
(ⲧⲉⲥϩⲓⲕⲱⲛ) exists in [defilement].28

Even if not all of the reconstructions are equally reliable, the structure of the text
implies in any case that it speaks about different marriages or unions on different

μᾶλλον. See also Matt 12:12 (only πόσῳ); Rom 5:17.19; 2 Cor 3:9.11 (πολλῷ μᾶλλον). For the
Roman/Hellenistic background of this kind of exegetical rules see David Daube, “Rabbinic
Methods of Interpretation and Hellenistic Rhetoric,” HUCA 22 (1949): 239–264.
26 David A. deSilva, Perseverance in Gratitude. A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on the
Epistle “to the Hebrews” (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 34.
27 According to Walter E. Crum, A Coptic Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939), 797b,
ϫⲱϩⲙ can stand for quite different kinds of impurity or pollution, the references to biblical texts
where Coptic bible translations use ϫⲱϩⲙ include e. g. Lev 10:10; 21:14; Amos 7:17; 1 Cor 7:14;
Mark 7:5; Heb 10:29; 13:4.
28 Gos. Phil. 60, p. 64,30–65,1, the reconstructions follow Hans-Martin Schenke, Das
Philippus-Evangelium (Nag-Hammadi-Codex II,3). Neu herausgegeben, übersetzt und erklärt,
TU 143 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), 38. Conf. Schenke, Philippus-Evangelium, 345–349,
for a discussion of the reconstruction of the gaps and the grammar of the last sentence. Schenke
translates at the end: “Ihr Abbild hat eine von Besud[elung] (bestimmte).” (39). Isenberg, 171,
has: “Its image consists of a [defilement]”; Bentley Layton, Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation
with Annotations and Introductions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1987), 339, translates: “It is
in pollution that its image resides,” which implies a different understanding of the sentence.
222 Silke Petersen

levels, whereas the lower level is in a Platonic image relationship with the higher
level. This implies that we can only gain access to the higher level through the
lower level, even if the latter has not the same quality.29
Whether the text really says something specific about “defilement” is not
equally certain since both instances of ϫⲱϩⲙ are (partially) reconstructed and
the grammatical structure of the last sentence is not entirely clear.
Similarly complicated is another passage, which builds upon a Syriac etymol-
ogy:
Some said: “Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit.” They are in error. They do not know what
they are saying. When did a female ever conceive by a female? Mary is the virgin whom
no power defiled (ⲙⲁⲣⲓⲁ ⲧⲉ ⲧⲡⲁⲣⲑⲉⲛⲟⲥ ⲉⲧⲉ ⲙ̅ⲡⲉ ⲇⲩⲛⲁⲙⲓⲥ ϫⲁϩⲙⲉⲥ). (…)30 This virgin whom
no power defiled […] The powers defile themselves. And the Lord [would] not have said:
“My [father who is in] heaven”, unless he had another father, but he would have simply
said: “[My father].”31

Erroneous is the idea that the Holy Spirit is the father of Jesus, since the Spirit is
conceptualized according to Syriac (and Hebrew) grammar as female. Neverthe-
less, Christ has two fathers, one in heaven (which is stated via using a quotation
of Matt 16:17, cf. also Matt 6:9) and another one, not in heaven. Considering
another passage of the Gos. Phil. (91, p. 73,8–15) one has to assume that this
other father is simply Joseph,32 thus making it strange that Mary is, nevertheless,
called a “virgin” (ⲡⲁⲣⲑⲉⲛⲟⲥ). Qualifying her as a virgin is thus not necessarily
a biological category – as well as fatherhood is not primarily a biological but
a social category in antiquity, where there was no facility to prove biological
fatherhood. Mary is called a virgin since “no power defiled” her, not because she
did not have sex with Joseph, one of the two “fathers” of Jesus.33 We can conclude
that such a defilement would have destroyed her virginity, but it is, again, not
stated what “defile” exactly might imply. What is clear is that defiling does not
refer to intercourse between Mary and Joseph.
Another text points in a similar way to the opposition between virginity and
defilement:
29 This Platonic structure of reality is explained in other texts of the Gos. Phil., see esp. 67a,
p. 67,9–12 and 11–12, p. 53,23–54,18, cf. on this the last paragraph in my article “Esel, Glas-
gefäße und pneumatische Schwangerschaften”; cf. also King, “Place,” 572–573.
30 I skip one sentence here because it does not further my argument and adds other com-
plications. For a discussion of the problems this sentence has to offer see Schenke, Philippus-
Evangelium, 214–215; Lundhaug, Images, 390–391.
31 Gos. Phil. 17, p. 55,23–36.
32 See Schenke, Philippus-Evangelium, 211.
33 Exact the same terminology is used for Norea in Hyp. Arch. (NHC II,4, p. 92,2–3), which
according to Schenke qualifies both her and Mary in the Gos. Phil. as positive counter-images
of Eve, who was defiled; for an interpretation of the entire passage cf. Schenke, Philippus-Evan-
gelium, 209–216; Petersen, “Zerstört die Werke der Weiblichkeit!” Maria Magdalena, Salome
und andere Jüngerinnen Jesu in christlich-gnostischen Schriften, NHMS 48 (Leiden: Brill, 1999),
281–286.
 Marriages, Unions, and Bridal Chambers in the Gospel of Philip 223
There is no bridal chamber (ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ) for the animals, nor is it for the slaves, nor for defiled
females (ⲥϩⲓⲙⲉ ⲉϥϫⲟϩⲙ); but it is for free men and virgins (ⲡⲁⲣⲑⲉⲛⲟⲥ).34

Based on the given oppositions and equations, one can conclude that virgins are
free females, because they are not “defiled,” which one can understand – when
read together with the passage about the virgin Mary – as being free from the
defilement of evil powers. This leads to the last and longest text where defilement
plays an important role for the argument. Again, it starts with an everyday ex-
ample about problematic relationships:
When the ignorant females see a male sitting alone, they leap down on him and play with
him and defile him (ϫⲟϩⲙⲉϥ). So also the ignorant men, when they see a beautiful female
sitting alone, they persuade her and compel her, wishing to defile her (ϫⲟϩⲙⲉⲥ). But if
they see the man and his wife sitting together, the females are not able to go into (ⲃⲱⲕ⸌
ⲉϩⲟⲩⲛ⸌ ϣⲁ) the male, nor are the males able to go into (ⲃⲱⲕ⸌ ⲉϩⲟⲩⲛ⸌ ϣⲁ) the woman. So if
the image (ⲑⲓⲕⲱⲛ) and the angel are united with one another, nobody will dare to go into
(ⲃⲱⲕ⸌ ⲉϩⲟⲩⲛ⸌ ϣⲁ) the male or the female.35

The first two sentences describe attempts by females and males to seduce members
of the other gender and can easily be read as a description of an everyday situation.
The only surprising feature is the priority of the female action in the texts. This
runs against the usually androcentric language of ancient (and many modern)
texts as well as against everyday experience which shows that the second case is
much more common in (patriarchal) societies. This slight imbalance continues
in the next sentence. Again, females are mentioned first and it is told about them
in exact the same wording as for the male, that they go into (ⲃⲱⲕ⸌ ⲉϩⲟⲩⲛ⸌ ϣⲁ) the
males – which seems not to be a suitable description of usual sexual practices.
One can conclude that this is told in preparation for the last sentence where the
level changes to the union of image and angel, indicating the everyday level of
sexual advances has been left. The union of those two protects from defilement,
but it is far from evident how the relation of “image” and “angel” to the involved
and protected fe/male person has to be imagined.
The last sentence casts serious doubts on an everyday understanding of the
previous two sentences. Are the fe/male persons mentioned in the last sentence
to be understood on a different level – or on the same level and also on a different
level? Did the text change the level from an everyday setting to a different setting
after a kind of initiation ritual has taken place thus changing the quality of the
persons involved? If one looks back from this passage to the directly preceding,
the doubt deepens, as there a parallel story unfolds, but now it starts on a “spiri-
tual” level where the same problem arises, but concerning souls and spirits:
The forms of unclean (ⲁⲕⲁⲑⲁⲣⲧⲟⲛ) spirits include among them male ones and female
ones. The males are those that unite with the souls (ⲯⲩⲭⲏ) which inhabit a female form,
34 Gos. Phil. 73, p. 69,1–4.
35 Gos. Phil. 61b, p. 65,12–26.
224 Silke Petersen

but the females are they which mingle with those in a male form through one who is
not equal.36 And no one will be able to escape them since they detain him/her if s/he
does not receive a male power and a female one, which is the bridegroom (ⲡⲛⲩⲙⲫⲓⲟⲥ) and
the bride (ⲧⲛⲩⲙⲫⲏ). And one receives them in the iconic bridal chamber (ϩⲙ̅ ⲡⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ
ⲛ̅ϩⲓⲕⲟⲛⲓⲕⲟⲥ).37

Whereas in the afore quoted passage the problematic mingling is described as

simply one between male and female, we have here unclean spirits of the two
genders who mix with souls that inhabit the respectively opposite gender. Again,
a kind of union between male and female can prohibit this. A common trans-
lation error shows where the main irritation in this text is to be located: “receive
a male power or a female power” is to be found in several translations,38 implying
that one has to receive a power of the opposite gender to be protected – whereas
the ⲙⲛ̅ of the Coptic text points to the notion that one has to receive two powers,
one of each gender, which are in the next phrase referred to as bridegroom
and bride – now in the normal androcentric sequence of mentioning the male
element first. One can conclude from this sentence that what happens in the
“iconic bridal chamber” is not a union of two but of three.39 This is, indeed,
not what one expects in a usual “bridal chamber.” In addition, the existence of
an “iconic bridal chamber” implies that there has to be a prototypical “bridal
chamber” above, whose icon the one named in the text must be. I will get back to
this surprising feature in the next paragraph.
So far we have collected several negative examples of problematic or dysfunc-
tional relationships. The chart below provides an overview, which also organizes

36 The final phrase of this sentence (ⲉⲃⲟⲗ ϩⲓⲧⲛ̅ ⲟⲩⲁⲧ⸌ⲧⲱⲧ⸌) is rendered quite differently in
the translations (e. g. Wesley W. Isenberg, trans., “The Gospel of Philip,” in Nag Hammadi Codex
II,2–7. Volume I, ed. Bentley Layton, NHS 20 (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 171: “through one who was
disobedient”; Lundhaug, Images, 497: “as a result of a lack of mingling”; Schenke, Philippus-
Evangelium, 41: “wider die Natur”). In my translation I follow Schenke’s commentary (351) but
not his translation which involves a lot of interpretation. I understand this clause along the lines
of the warning against mingling and mixing of entities from different categories which one can
find in Gos. Phil. 42, p. 61,5–12 and 113, p. 78,25–79,13.
37 Gos. Phil. 61a; p. 65,1–12.
38 See e. g. Isenberg, “The Gospel of Philip,” 171. Robert McLachlan Wilson, The Gospel
of Philip: Translated from the Coptic Text with an Introduction and Commentary (New York
and Evanston: Harper & Row/London: Mowbray, 1962), 41, translates even the second ⲙⲛ̅ as
“or”: “receive a male power or a female, which is the bridegroom or the bride.” Walter C. Till,
Das Evangelium nach Philippos, Patristische Texte und Studien 2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1963),
33, translates “und” but interprets as “or” by inserting “= beziehungsweise” in brackets, which
implies the same understanding as the one shown by Wilson and Isenberg. Divergent trans-
lations offer Lundhaug, Images, 497 (“and” – “and”), as well as Schenke, Philippus-Evangelium,
41 (“und” – “und”). Schenke already had this rendering in his first translation of the Gos. Phil.,
which was published in ThLZ in 1959, see page 13.
39 Looking back at the parallel passage about the fe/male advances in p. 65,12–26 one might
conclude that the union between the “image and the angel” is not a union in which one of those
two is identical with the person involved in the union, but a union between two powers which
includes additionally the then protected person.
 Marriages, Unions, and Bridal Chambers in the Gospel of Philip 225

the examples into the different levels, adding a heavenly realm as level 4 above
the others:

↑ level 4: heavenly realm Mary and the Holy Spirit are not a productive couple
since being both female
↑ level 3: ritual/community unclean spirits unite with and detain souls of the
opposite sex
↑ level 2: exegesis Eve and the serpent produce Cain in adultery
↑ level 1: everyday life ignorant fe/males make (hetero)sexual advances and
defile the others

The different levels illuminate each other: So is the “defilement” which happens
on level 1 not precisely explicated, but a case of defilement surely happens on
level 2 when Eve produces Cain in adultery. Mary, as a counter-image of Eve, is
free from defilement through the evil powers of whom we might think along the
lines of the “unclean spirits” from level 3. The cases on level 1 and 3 are described
in parallel passages following each other and thus showing that defilement can
be at work in different kinds of unions. “Defilement” (ⲡϫⲱϩⲙ) thus seems to be a
relatively open category in the Gos. Phil., being connected to adultery (and as we
will see also to porneia). It is clearly a negative category and implies that entities
or persons, which should not do so, are mixing. The counter-image of these
“wrong” unions is, according to the last quoted text, the union in the “bridal
chamber.” This union protects against the wrong mingling, and it is also this
union in the “bridal chamber” which was missing in the case of Adam and Eve
and, therefore, they separated from each other.
The reason that we have not yet found any positive examples of marriage
language is due to the fact that the positive side is hidden in the “bridal chamber”
imagery. In the next section, I will try to figure out the place of the “bridal
chamber” in the conception of marriages and unions. The “bridal chamber”
seems be located on different levels of the text as a counter-image of the negative
stories mentioned so far: It is something like a medicine against the negative
unions we have encountered.

4. The Bridal Chamber(s)

In previous scholarship the “bridal chamber” has been described and explained
in rather different ways. Some consider it to be a ritual or sacrament on its
own, for instance a dying sacrament (“Sterbesakrament”).40 Others equate it
with one or several of the other mentioned sacraments. As we have seen, some
40 So Hans-Georg Gaffron, Studien zum koptischen Philippusevangelium unter besonderer
226 Silke Petersen

scholars view the image of the “bridal chamber” primarily in contrast to the
earthly “defiled marriage”41 which would imply that the Gos. Phil. is critical of
all “usual” marriages and has to be understood as an ascetic text. The opposite
position is taken by some scholars who speculate about sexual activities in-
cluded in the practical side of a “bridal chamber” ritual,42 thus placing the Gos.
Phil. among those texts that include acts which, at least according to the church
fathers, have to be considered as “libertinism” (which primarily means that they
oppose it).
Lundhaug has argued that there is “no single referent” for the terms “that are
usually translated as ‘bridal chamber.’”43 Among other aspects, he points to the
fact that there is no uniform terminology in the Coptic text. Instead three differ-
ent Greek words are used: ⲕⲟⲓⲧⲱⲛ, ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ, and ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ, whereas the possible
Coptic equivalent ⲙⲁ ⲛ̅ϣⲉⲗⲉⲉⲧ (which is used in other texts44) is absent in the
Gos. Phil. The three Greek terms all occur several times in the Gos. Phil. even if

Berücksichtigung der Sakramente (Diss. Evangelisch-Theologische Fakultät der Rheinischen

Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn, 1969). – For other attempts to establish a sacramental
system of the Gos. Phil. see Eric Segelberg, “The Coptic-Gnostic Gospel According to Philip
and its Sacramental System,” Numen 7 (1960); 189–200; Herbert Schmid, Die Eucharistie ist
Jesus: Anfänge einer Theorie des Sakraments im koptischen Philippusevangelium (NHC II 3), VCS
88 (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Bas Van Os, Baptism in the Bridal Chamber. The Gospel of Philip as
a Valentinian Baptismal Instruction (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2007) (http://irs.ub.rug.nl/
ppn/303088044, last viewed 25. 8. 2018). I am skeptical about using the terminology of “sac-
rament” etc. for the Gos. Phil., which (not being written in Latin) does not use such terminology
but only ⲙⲩⲥⲧⲏⲣⲓⲟⲛ which has a completely different meaning, and thus I use “ritual” as a more
open term. For the terminological and other problems see Elaine Pagels, “Ritual in the Gospel of
Philip,” in The Nag Hammadi Library after Fifty Years. Proceedings of the 1995 Society of Biblical
Literature Commemoration, ed. John D. Turner and Anne McGuire, NHMS 44 (Leiden: Brill,
1997), esp. 280–283.
41 For this contrast see e. g. Tite, Valentinian Ethics, 2; Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”,
144.148–150. Cf. also Kurt Rudolph, “A Response to ‘The Holy Spirit Is a Double Name. Holy
Spirit, Mary and Sophia in the Gospel of Philip’ by Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley,” in Images of the
Feminine in Gnosticism (SAC 4), ed. Karen L. King (Harris­burg: Trinity Press, 2000), 236, who
finds a “devaluation of the earthly marriage.” One point of reference for the ascetical inter-
pretation is found in Clement of Alexandria, who reports that Valentinian groups did not reject
marriage but rather practiced “spiritual communities” (πνευματικὰς κοινωνίας, cf. Strom. 3.1.1
and 3. 4. 29), which might be interpreted as sexless marriages.
42 For such speculations see e. g. April D. DeConick, “The True Mysteries: Sacramentalism
in The Gospel of Philip,” Vigiliae Christianae 55 (2001): 225–261; April DeConick, “The Great
Mystery of Marriage: Sex and Conception in Ancient Valentinian Traditions,” Vigiliae Chris-
tianae 57 (2003): 307–342; Jorunn J. Buckley, “A Cult Mystery in the Gospel of Philip,” Journal
of Biblical Literature 99 (1980), 569–581. Jorunn J. Buckley, “‘The Holy Spirit is a Double Name’:
Holy Spirit, Mary and Sophia in the Gospel of Philip,” in Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism,
213, argues also that “the earthly marriage should be seen as a symbol and a prerequisite for the
bridal chamber sacrament. In this regard, the earthly marriage warrants a positive evaluation.”
For an overview on the research see also Lundhaug, Images, 331–334.
43 Lundhaug, Images, 408, cf. also 334.
44 For instance in Tri. Trac. (NHC I,5), Gos. Thom. (NHC II,2), Ex. Soul (NHC II,6) and
Auth. Teach. (NHC VI,3).
 Marriages, Unions, and Bridal Chambers in the Gospel of Philip 227

ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ is used mostly.45 Several modern translations do not show an awareness

of the possible differences, referring to all Greek words as “bridal chamber”46 or
switch sometimes between different renderings without being consistent with the
source terminology.47 In what follows, I will take the different terms into consid-
eration, because even if the Gos. Phil. and many other Coptic texts do quite often
use Greek words and their respective Coptic equivalents interchangeably, this is
not equally common for parallel or similar Greek words. Therefore, one should
conclude that there has to be a certain difference of meaning between ⲕⲟⲓⲧⲱⲛ,
ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ, and ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ. Looking into the most comprehensive Greek dictionary
for the time span and context of the Gos. Phil., Lampe’s Patristic Greek Lexicon,
there are, indeed, three different translations offered: “bed-chamber” for κοιτών,
“bridechamber” for νυμφών and “bridal chamber” for παστός,48 which can be
perceived as an indication that the first term is used primarily for earthly matters
but does not give a clear distinction between the other two.
Taking into consideration the possible differences in the terminology, I will
now turn back to the text of the Gos. Phil. The passage about the defiled and
undefiled marriages quoted above (at the beginning of section 3), has a con-
tinuation which uses two different terms for the “bridal chamber.” At first, the
movements of the bride are seriously restricted:
If a marriage is exposed, it has become porneia,49 and the bride not only has committed
porneia if she takes the seed of another man, but also if she leaves the bridal chamber
(ⲕⲟⲓⲧⲱⲛ) and they see her. She shall only show herself to her father and her mother and
the friend of the bridegroom and the children of the bridegroom.50

At the beginning, we seem to hear one of those patriarchal voices which put
restrictions on women and disparage them if they move around freely, but while

45 ⲕⲟⲓⲧⲱⲛ: p. 82,13s; p. 84,21s; p. 85,21.33; ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ: p. 69,1.37; p. 70,18.19.[22]; p. 70,[33];

p. 71,7.9f; ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ: p. 65,11s; p. 67,5; p. 67,16.30; p. 69,25.27.[27].[37]; p. 72, [21].22; p. 74,22;
p. 76,5s; p. 82,18.24; p. 86,5. While writing about Valentinians the church fathers mostly use
νυμφών, see e. g. Irenaeus, Haer. I,7,1; I,21,3; Clement, Exc. 64; 68.
46 Isenberg, “Gospel,” translates the three Greek terms uniformly as “bridal chamber”.
47 See e. g. Schenke, Philippus-Evangelium, 14–79, who translates ⲕⲟⲓⲧⲱⲛ consistently
as “Schlafgemach” (p. 82,13s; p. 84,21s; p. 85,21.33), but ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ in the same context first as
“Hochzeitssaal” and afterwards as “Brautgemach” (122b–d; p. 82,18 and p. 82,24), and ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ
also as “Brautgemach” (e. g. p. 70,18. 19. 22).
48 Geoffrey W. H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), 764, 930
and 1046.
49 I do not translate porneia in this case because it is not clear which behaviors are rejected
here, for the problem of understanding the meaning of porneia cf. David Wheeler-Reed, Jen-
nifer W. Knust, and Dale B. Martin, “Can a Man Commit πορνεία with His Wife?” JBL 137
(2018): 383–398. Porneia at first denoted prostitution but can refer to sex outside of marriage,
sex with animals, homosexuality, sex not intending procreation also inside of marriage, in short:
It is a term open for projection of any kind and can denote whatever a person or community
does consider not acceptable behavior.
50 Gos. Phil. 122b, p. 82,10–17.
228 Silke Petersen

reading on, this setting becomes more and more unreal. It might be understand-
able that a bride shows herself only to her parents, but already the “friend of
the bridegroom” seems a little bit strange in a bridal context, and, finally, the
“children of the bridegroom” are surprising. Why should a bridegroom of an
undefiled marriage (i. e., one without porneia, which we might interpret along
the lines of defilement and adultery) already have children – and why would the
bride, after being seriously restricted in her movements, tolerate being exposed
to the friend and the children of the bridegroom? Obviously, we have left the
usual bridal setting at the conclusion of this text. The change of the level is con-
firmed in the next sentence where the term used for the “bridal chamber” also
changes:
They are allowed to enter into the bridal chamber (ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ) every day. But the others may
desire at least to hear her voice and to enjoy her ointment (ⲥⲟϭⲛ̅). And they may nourish
themselves from the crumbs falling from the table – like the dogs. Bridegrooms and brides
belong to the bridal chamber (ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ). Nobody will be able to see (ⲛⲁⲩ) the bridegroom
and the bride if [s/he does] not become this (i. e. the bridal chamber).51

This passage is especially rich in biblical references: the desire to “hear the voice”
of the bride (Cant 2:14; cf. 8:13), the voice of Jesus which his friend is delight-
ed to hear (John 3:29, where Jesus is a metaphorical “bridegroom” [νυμφίος]);
the anointing through a woman (Matt 26:7; Mark 14:3; Luke 7:38; John 11:2)
and the bread crumbs falling from the table for the Syro-Phoenician woman
(Matt 15:27; Mark 7:28). A reader with a knowledge of biblical stories could note
all these allusions, and might additionally think of the parable of the virgins who
wait to see the bridegroom, although only some are able to go inside with him
(Matt 25:1–13). We have obviously left the setting of the enclosed bride and have
moved on to a level of meaning where the subject is now the membership in the
Christian community. Those outside, “the others,” are equated with those non
Christians who only get the crumbs and stay outside in their desire to hear the
voice and receive the ointment. The exegetical input (level 2) leads to the level
of ritual and community. Looking back at the passage quoted before, the “chil-
dren of the bridegroom,” i. e. the children of Jesus, are obviously the insiders,
the Christians who belong to the bridegroom and enter the “bridal chamber.” In
the last quoted text, the “bridal chamber” (ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ) therefore belongs to level 3
in my system, the level of community and ritual, whereas the “bridal chamber”
from the text quoted before (ⲕⲟⲓⲧⲱⲛ) should be assigned to level 1. The transition
point is to be found in the “children of the bridegroom,” who disrupt the picture
painted before and indicate the change of levels.
The idea that one has to become the “bridal chamber” in order to see the
bridegroom and the bride is interesting.52 Again, as already in 61a, p. 65,1–12,
51 Gos. Phil. 122c–d, p. 82,17–26.
52 The “bridal chamber” is not explicitly named here, but this interpretation is the only
 Marriages, Unions, and Bridal Chambers in the Gospel of Philip 229

there are three entities involved in the process, not two. One does not have to
become a bride to receive the bridegroom – or vice versa – as we tend to assume
at first sight, knowing a multitude of (mostly later) Christian texts, where e. g. the
soul is metaphorized as bride who desires to receive Christ as her bridegroom.
The idea is not that one has to become part of a couple which unifies but the
union has to take place inside of the person who will then be protected and a
member of the community. This conception is a strong argument against the
notion that some kind of sexual activities might have been part of a “bridal
chamber ritual.” Instead, I conclude that the bridal and marriage imagery is used
to speak about community and ritual in terms of union and separation, thus
interpreting something else rather than denoting a discrete ritual.
Looking at the other instances of ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ in the Gos. Phil., one can ob-
serve that most of them are connected with level 3: The “children of the bridal
chamber” (ⲛ̅ϣⲏⲣⲉ ⲙ̅ⲡⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ, p. 72, [21].22; 76,5s; 86,5) are the Coptic equiv-
alent for the Greek οἱ υἱοὶ τοῦ νυμφῶνος (Matt 9:15, Mark 2:19, cf. Luke 5:34),
and also a reference to the followers of Christ. Several other instances of ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ
appear in settings where connections to rituals are obvious,53 especially to the
combined ritual of baptism-chrism, which was widespread in early Christianity
from the late second century onwards.54 Additionally the connection between
“bridal chamber” and baptism is not a singular feature of the Gos. Phil., but
appears in several other early Christian texts from quite different contexts.55 We
can conclude that the “children of the bridal chamber” are insiders because they

plausible one, cf. Schenke, Philippus-Evangelium, 500. According to Lundhaug, Images, 264s,
“this” refers to the bridal chamber where the Christian becomes like Christ in receiving the
Logos (bridegroom) and the Holy Spirit (bride).
53 Cf. p. 67,5; p. 67,30; p. 69,25.27.[27].[37]; p. 74,22.
54 The probably oldest reference to baptism-chrism appears in Theophilus of Antioch, Ad
Autolycum, 12 (who died 183 CE). More evidence for such a ritual is found in the first half of
the third century especially in Syriac sources. For the reference to Theophilus I have to thank
Predrag Bukovec, Vienna, who works on a research project concerning baptism-chrism which
he reported about at a meeting of the “Berliner Arbeitskreis für koptisch-gnostische Schriften”
in February 2018.
55 Links between “bridal chamber” and baptism appear e. g. in Tri. Trac. (NHC I,5),
p. 128,33s: the baptism is called bridal chamber (ⲙⲁ ⲛ̅ϣⲉⲗⲉⲉⲧ); Ex. Soul (NHC II,6) p. 132,13:
the soul cleans herself in the “bridal chamber” (ⲙⲁ ⲛ̅ϣⲉⲗⲉⲉⲧ) after having received baptism; the
Flavia Sophe inscription (text in: Paul McKechnie, “Flavia Sophe in Context,” Zeitschrift für
Papyrologie und Epigraphik 135 [2001]: 117–124) with a connection between baptism, chrism
and “bridal chamber” (νυμφῶν); Ammonios Alexandrinus (3th century), frag. in John 3:29
(Migne 85.1413D), where it is stated that Christ is the bridegroom, the church the bride and the
bridal chamber (νυμφῶν) the place of baptism (ὁ τόπος τοῦ βαπτίσματος). The connection is
also to be found in Irenaeus, Haer. 1.21.3. Irenaeus writes about a Valentinian bridal chamber
ritual where the bridal chamber replaces baptism, but this seems to be his misinterpretation,
cf. Einar Thomassen, The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the “Valentinians” (Leiden: Brill, 2006),
376, who argues that Irenaeus’ bridal chamber rite “which he portraits not only as a separate
rite, but also as one carried out instead of baptismal initiation, most probably is a product of his
own imagination.”
230 Silke Petersen

have received the baptism-chrism which is metaphorized as “bridal chamber”

(ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ).56 Being a combined ritual in which water and ointment are used,
baptism-chrism is suitable for speculation about other pairs of two, as the
following text shows:
Through the Holy Spirit we are in fact (ⲙⲉⲛ) generated again, but (ⲇⲉ) we are generated
through Christ in the two (ϩⲙ̅ ⲡⲥⲛⲁⲩ). We are anointed through the Spirit. When we
were generated we were united. None can see (ⲛⲁⲩ) himself either in water or in a mirror
without light. Nor again can you (sg.) see in light without water or mirror. Therefore it is
necessary to baptize in the two (ϩⲙ̅ ⲡⲥⲛⲁⲩ), in the light and the water. But the light is the
chrism (ⲡⲭⲣⲓⲥⲙⲁ).57

This passage is connected to the one quoted before also through the idea that to
see (ⲛⲁⲩ) is desirable: In the text above one was able to see (ⲛⲁⲩ) the bridegroom
and the bride, here one has to have water and light to see (ⲛⲁⲩ). The water is
associated with baptism and Christ, whereas the light can be connected with
chrism/anointment and the Spirit.58 The “two” in the first instance can thus be
interpreted not only as water and light, standing for baptism and chrism, but also
as Christ and Spirit. Therefore, one can conclude that baptism includes chrism
and implies some kind of union with Christ and the Holy Spirit. They can be
interpreted as bridegroom and bride (the Spirit is female, as we have already
seen, and it is even called a virgin in Gos. Phil. 83a, p. 71,16–18). The human
being is thus the “bridal chamber,” in which both Christ and the Spirit are united
when s/he receives the baptism-chrism. The union is not a real union between
human beings, but rather an image of the union of Christ and the (female) Spirit
inside of the baptized person.
One of the remaining instances where ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ is used had already been
quoted. It states that one receives the bridegroom and the bride “in the iconic
bridal chamber” (ϩⲙ̅ ⲡⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ ⲛ̅ϩⲓⲕⲟⲛⲓⲕⲟⲥ, 61a, p. 65,11s.) Another passage also
connects ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ closely with the image or icon (ⲑⲓⲕⲱⲛ for the Greek εἰκών,
67c, p. 67,16–18). Thus, both instances put the whole subject in a Platonic con-
text. Consequently, we have to find the heavenly “bridal chamber” of which the
earthly one, called ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ, is only the icon. This heavenly “bridal chamber” is,

56 This strong link between “bridal chamber” and baptism does not rule out connections
with other rituals. Cf. Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 100: “The fact that the notion of the bridal
chamber may be associated with baptism and anointing as well as with the eucharist suggests
that it does not represent a separate ritual event, but that it is rather an implied aspect in the
process of initiation.” See also Auth. Teach. (NHC VI,3) p. 35,11, for the use of “bridal chamber”
(ⲙⲁ ⲛ̅ϣⲉⲗⲉⲉⲧ) in an eucharistic context.
57 Gos. Phil. 73–75, p. 69,1–14. Cf. also Gos. Phil. 66, p. 67,2–9.
58 This thinking might be inspired from some New Testament texts where baptism is con-
nected with different elements, cf. Matt 3:11; Luke 3:16: baptism first with water (ἐν ὕδατι), then
with Holy Spirit and fire (ἐν πνεύματι ἁγίῳ καὶ πυρί); cf. also John 3:5 about the (re)birth from
water and Spirit (ἐξ ὕδατος καὶ πνεύματος). Additionally, it is based on ancient practice since oil
is used not only for ointment but also to produce light.
 Marriages, Unions, and Bridal Chambers in the Gospel of Philip 231

indeed, present in Gos. Phil. 82 (p. 71,3–13), where we encounter a “great bridal
chamber” (ⲡⲛⲟϭ ⲙ̅ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ), in which Christ comes into being through a union
of the father and the virgin (again, presumably the female Holy Spirit).59 This
passage is also connected to the baptism of Christ in the Jordan, spoken about
directly before.60 This can be linked to Gos. Phil. 96 (p. 74,21–24) where Christ
receives the Holy Spirit in the “bridal chamber” (ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ) and connects with the
father. Thus, one can conclude that the “heavenly bridal chamber” is the original
one which involved Christ, blending his baptism and incarnation, whereas the
community ritual of the “bridal chamber” (ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ) is to be perceived as the
icon of this original heavenly great “bridal chamber”, which is called ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ.61
Using another table, I will sum up the different “bridal chambers” in the Gos.
Phil. we have encountered so far:

↑ level 4: heavenly realm Christ / heavenly bridal chamber (ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ)

↑ level 3: ritual / community baptism / iconic bridal chamber (ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ)
↑ level 2: exegesis Adam and Eve / no bridal chamber (ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ)
↑ level 1: everyday life marriage / material or earthly bridal chamber (ⲕⲟⲓⲧⲱⲛ)

In the table, we can observe that the “bridal chamber” – which was missing in
the case of Adam and Eve – is also supposed to be the heavenly one (ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ),
thus linking level 2 to level 4. In my point of view the different usage of the terms
affirms the productivity of distinguishing different levels in the Gos. Phil., even
though here I cannot include a detailed interpretation of all remaining passages
where some kind of “bridal chamber” is mentioned.62
To summarize: The “bridal chamber” can be located on different levels of the
text, in the same way as the notion of marriages and unions is not restricted to
only one level. The “bridal chamber” image does not denote a discrete ritual,
but can be perceived as a counter-image to the negative examples which I listed
in the table before.63 Both sides are linked. Therefore, Adam and Eve were not
59 See Elaine Pagels, “Pursuing the Spiritual Eve: Imagery and Hermeneutics in the Hypo-
stasis of the Archons and the Gospel of Philip,” in Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, 201;
Lundhaug, Images, 184.
60 For this connection see Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 94; Lundhaug, Images, 182–184, 264.
61 The rendering of a heavenly bridal chamber as ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ is not restricted to the Gos. Phil.,
cf. e. g. Treat. Seth (NHC VII,2) p. 57,17s: ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ is “of heavens and perfect”; Hippolytus, frag. 4
in Prov. (Migne 10.617A): παστός as heaven which is the bridal chamber of Christ.
62 In the case of the probable ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ in p. 70,[33] there seems to be a connection with the
baptism of Jesus again. The other instance of ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ not dealt with in this article is p. 69,37,
again with many gaps (and I doubt Schenkes reconstruction in this case), but ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ seems
to be linked with the “Holy of Holies” in the Jerusalem temple, which does not contradict an
interpretation on the heavenly and/or exegetical level. I must admit not to be sure how the two
instances where ⲕⲟⲓⲧⲱⲛ seems also to appear in the context of the Jerusalem temple (p. 84,21s;
85,21) can be understood.
63 Unlike Karen King, I do not think that we have enough information to make a connec-
232 Silke Petersen

united in the heavenly “bridal chamber” (ⲡⲁⲥⲧⲟⲥ) and thus separated from each
other. And the ritual “bridal chamber” (ⲛⲩⲙⲫⲱⲛ) protects from the “unclean
spirits” that try to detain the souls of members of the opposite gender. The bridal
chamber language is part of the marriage imagery as well as the negative ex-
amples participate in those imagery.
This kind of language does not imply an evaluation of marriage per se, but uses
the idea of a maximally close union inherent in the marriage imagery to speak
about ritual, community, baptism, or incarnation. Thus, the Gos. Phil. neither
argues for earthly marriages nor condemns them. They are simply a given factor
in its everyday environment – just as agriculture is. And as agriculture enables
speaking about bread and therefore also about the Eucharist, the Gos. Phil. uses
the marriage imagery – including the “bridal chamber” language – to speak
about other purposes without establishing an ethical doctrine of marriage. This
also explains why the attempts to connect the Gos. Phil. with either asceticism or
libertinism cannot achieve a satisfactory result.

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 Cosmic Gender
Valentinianism and Contested Accounts of Sexual Difference

Taylor G. Petrey

Many of the texts that scholars believe represent Valentinian thought discuss the
relationship between male and female in cosmological terms. These Valentinian
writings contain an account of the divine realm, a protological story about the
appearance of the aeons of the Fullness (Pleroma) and the events that led to
the creation of the material world.1 They discuss the biblical creation and fall
narratives as an allegory for a deeper philosophical argument about the relation-
ship between the one and the many, including the relationship between male and
female. None of the existing accounts is identical to any of the others, however,
creating questions about how they all relate to one another. My analysis relies
on three documentary records of Valentinian cosmology: Irenaeus’s description
in Against Heresies 1.1–8 and two texts from Nag Hammadi: A Valentinian Ex-
position and the Tripartite Tractate.2
Gender plays a key role in these accounts and is also a site of disagreement
among the them. In this way, these Valentinian texts reveal an early Christian
debate over the ontology of sexual difference itself. Was the universe always
divided between male and female pairs in a complementarian hierarchy, or was
there only one essence of being that was subsequently divided between male
and female? The competing accounts of pleromatic unity answer this question
differently; in so doing, they reveal ways in which questions about the nature
of sexual difference cut across emerging schools of thought about the fabric of
existence. This essay examines these questions: 1) What are the gendered images

1 Einar Thomassen, The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the “Valentinians” (Leiden: Brill,
2006), 269–314.
2 In addition to the original languages, I consulted several translations for each of the cita-
tions from these texts in selecting my rendering, including: Dominic J. Unger, trans. St. Irenaeus
of Lyon Against the Heresies (New York: Newman Press, 1992); John D. Turner, “NHC XI,2:
A Valentinian Exposition,” in The Coptic Gnostic Library, Nag Hammadi Codices IX, XII, XIII,
ed. Charles W. Hedrick (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 106–153; Einar Thomassen and Marvin Meyer,
“Valentinian Exposition with Valentinian Liturgical Readings,” in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures,
ed. Marvin Meyer (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), 663–678; Einar Thomassen,
“The Tripartite Tractate,” in Nag Hammadi Scriptures, 57–102; Harold Attridge and Elaine
Pagels, “Tripartite Tractate,” in Nag Hammadi Codex I, ed. Harold W. Attridge (Leiden: Brill,
1985), 192–338.
236 Taylor G. Petrey

in the Valentinian pleromatic realm? 2) How do we make sense of the significant

differences in the representation of gender in the Valentinian school?

The One and the Many Valentinians

Scholarly analysis of these texts has long focused on their treatment of gender
and sexual difference. The publication of the Nag Hammadi documents led to
new feminist analyses relatively early on. In 1979, Elaine Pagels’ blockbuster The
Gnostic Gospels contributed to this undertaking by offering ancient Christian
“gnosticism” as an alternative to the patriarchal tradition of orthodoxy.3 Others,
however, noted that these texts often disparaged “femaleness,” concluding that
this heterodox movement was another manifestation of patriarchy.4 The ques-
tion hinged on whether or not these texts where good to and for women.
Two ideas soon emerged that challenged both conclusions. The first suggest-
ed that the relationship between gendered imagery and social practice is more
complex than had been previously assumed. Caroline Walker Bynum authored
an influential piece demonstrating that one could not deduce that a positive
or negative religious representation of a female deity or femaleness translated
into any particular mode of living that benefited or harmed women.5 Michael
Williams built on this idea in his analysis of female and feminine imagery in the
Nag Hammadi texts. He concluded that there was neither a monolithic positive
nor monolithic negative representation of femaleness in these texts, but rather a
“variety in Gnostic perspectives on gender.” Williams had worked with Bynum
in a seminar as he was developing his own ideas, and references her essay in his
analysis.6
The second new idea argued that “gnosticism” was neither a unified move-
ment nor group and that the ideas found in one text did not apply to all others
everywhere and at all times.7 Anne McGuire’s overview of gender in the Nag
Hammadi corpus takes this perspective into consideration in her description of

3 Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), especially chapter 3.
4 Frederik Wisse, “Flee Femininity: Antifemininity in Gnostic Texts and the Question of
Social Milieu,” in Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, ed. Karen L. King (Harrisburg, PA:
Trinity Press International, 2000), 305–306; Daniel L. Hoffman, The Status of Women and Gnos-
ticism in Irenaeus and Tertullian (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1995).
5 Caroline Walker Bynum, “Introduction: The Complexity of Symbols,” in Gender and
Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Steven Harrell, Caroline Bynum, and Paula Richman
(Boston: Beacon, 1986), 1–20.
6 Michael Williams, “Variety in Gnostic Perspectives on Gender,” in Images of the Feminine
in Gnosticism, 2–22.
7 Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, Female Fault and Fulfillment (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1986); King, “Editor’s Foreword,” in Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, xi–
xviii.
 Cosmic Gender 237

the varied evidence.8 She argues that “gender imagery was used to represent a
variety of more abstract issues in religious speculation, including the relation of
duality or multiplicity to unity and of the many to the one.”9 McGuire challenges
the idea that there is an easy route to understanding actual social practices that
benefited or harmed women behind the abstract theorizing in these materials.
She also notes that these texts do not present a unified use of gender imagery.
The lack of a unified perspective among these texts presents a problem for the
categories that scholars use to group these texts together. Many now reject earlier
attempts to categorize the Valentinian school as “gnostics” at all, quite apart from
whether or not “gnosticism” is a useful category.10 Today, many scholars consider
a Valentinian school to be a subtype of early Christians.11 At the same time, the
so-called Valentinian texts do not present a unified perspective. For instance,
the Tripartite Tractate and Irenaeus’s Against Heresies diverge in a number of
significant ways.
Scholars have opted for two explanations for the variations in the Valentinian
system. The first is a temporal explanation: one version is a development of the
other coming from a later period with different interests. For example, Harry
Attridge and Elaine Pagels characterize the Tripartite Tractate as a revision and
demythologization of the earlier myth found in Irenaeus.12 Some have found
the temporal theory of different kinds of Valentinianisms useful to explain the
differences in treatments of gender and sexuality. In this vein, April DeConick
traces out some of the erotic and reproductive metaphors that remain in the
Tripartite Tractate as remnants of the earlier version of the myth reported by
Irenaeus.13 On this reading, the Tripartite Tractate undertakes a subsequent
“softening” of the erotic elements found in Irenaeus “to bring the myth more in
line with developing ‘orthodoxy.’”14 Despite these differences, she finds an over-
all consistency between the earlier and later myths. Emphasizing dyadic syzygies
as the essence of a unified Valentinianism, DeConick examines the story of the

8 Anne McGuire, “Women, Gender, and Gnosis in Gnostic Texts and Traditions,” in Women
and Christian Origins, ed. Ross Shepard Kraemer and Mary Rose D’Angelo (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 257–99.
9 McGuire, “Women, Gender, and Gnosis,” 288.
10 Christoph Markschies, Valentinus Gnosticus? Untersuchungen zur valentinianischen
Gnosis mit einen Kommentar zu den Fragmenten Valentins, WUNT 65 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr,
1992); Ismo Dunderberg, Beyond Gnosticism: Myth, Lifestyle, and Society in the School of
Valentinus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 14–15.
11 Nicola Denzey Lewis employs the “family resemblance model” with respect to Valentini-
an texts in Introduction to “Gnosticism”: Ancient Voices, Christian Worlds (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 63–88; Karen L. King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2005), 164.
12 Attridge and Pagels, “Introduction to Tripartite Tractate,” 180–181.
13 April DeConick, “The Great Mystery of Marriage: Sex and Conception in Ancient
Valentinian Traditions,” VC 57 (2003): 319.
14 DeConick, “The Great Mystery,” 323.
238 Taylor G. Petrey

fall of Wisdom, whose problem is that she creates on her own without her com-
panion. In this interpretation, “the ideal procreative act in Valentinian thought
is one that occurs between spousal partners.”15 This idea, namely that Wisdom’s
transgression of this norm is the cause of her fall, is an essential piece of evidence
across the Valentinian corpus of the centrality of male-female pairing for this
school of thought.
The second explanatory strategy for Valentinian diversity is geographical.
Einar Thomassen suggests that the Tripartite Tractate is different from Irenaeus
because they “are merely local variants” of a broadly shared Valentinian myth.16
In Thomassen’s view, the Tripartite Tractate represents the “Eastern” version,
while Irenaeus’s account represents the “Western” version of Valentinianism.17
The primary different between the two is their account of the characters in the
Fullness. The Eastern version of the Tripartite Tractate, Type A, does not name all
of the aeons and does not specify their fixed number.18 The second version, Type
B, found in Irenaeus (and the heresiologists who follow him), holds that there are
thirty aeons that are subdivided into a primal Ogdoad, a Decad and Duodecad,
and that these are further subdivided into a syzygic pairs.19 But here also, there
is a fundamental commonality that binds both types together. For instance, “the
ontological problem the two protologies seek to express is fundamentally one
and the same.”20
Thomassen’s geographical explanation also has a temporal dimension, but it
flips the explanation of Attridge and Pagels. He argues that Type A is prior to
Type B, making the core story of Tripartite Tractate earlier than what is recount-
ed in Irenaeus.21 Oriented by this contention, Thomassen sees Valentinus as the
source for Type A and Ptolemy as the source for Type B. His dating of these two
versions, then, also maps onto the geographical division, with the earlier Type
A characterized as “Eastern” and the later Type B as “Western.” Yet these are not
pure divisions. For instance, A Valentinian Exposition contains elements of both
types, which leads Thomassen to argue that it represents an intermediate stage of
Type B that has still retained elements of Type A. This also makes A Valentinian
Exposition temporally prior to Irenaeus AH 1.1–8.22
Another influential analysis introduces further disagreement. Like Thom-
assen, Ismo Dunderberg also divides the Valentinian myths into two, Version
A and Version B. While Thomassen’s division focuses on the different accounts
of the number of aeons, Dunderberg focuses on the different reasons given for
15 DeConick, “The Great Mystery,” 326.
16 Thomassen, “Introduction to the Tripartite Tractate,” in Nag Hammadi Scriptures, 58.
17 Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 61.
18 Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 193.
19 Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 193.
20 Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 200.
21 Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 81, 263–268.
22 Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 267.
 Cosmic Gender 239

Wisdom’s fall. In Version A, Wisdom errs by trying to understand the Father on

her own, an assessment that may be found in Irenaeus (Haer. 1.4.1) and in the
Tripartite Tractate. In Version B, Wisdom tries to imitate the Father by creating
something on her own. This version may be found also in Irenaeus (Haer. 1.2.3)
as well as in A Valentinian Exposition.23 In spite of these differences, Dunder-
berg sees a fundamental similarity – both versions “describe Wisdom as a female
being violating the conventional role expectations connected with women.”24
Here, one observes not only that the criteria for identifying similarities and
differences within Valentinian texts are heavily disputed among scholars, but
also that gender plays into their analysis in different ways. Thomassen sees the
presence or absence of dyadic pairs in the Fullness as a key point of divergence
between the different types, thereby using gender as a means of establishing his
analytical categories. In contrast, DeConick finds that there are remnants of the
dyadic theology of gender in all of the texts, finding unity in their treatment
of gender. Dunderberg follows this view as well, seeing Wisdom’s violation of
traditional female virtues and roles as a universal feature of Valentinian thought.
Theories of a unified Valentinian view on gender face a number of problems,
however. The first is that according to the Tripartite Tractate, the actions of the
Wisdom character (in this case, the Word) are not construed in a negative light.
In fact, the text explicitly warns against such a construal by saying “Word should
not be criticized.”25 A potential problem for his analysis, Dunderberg responds
by claiming that the negative evaluation of Wisdom is merely “toned down”
here, but remains the same. He does not address the second difficulty, which is
that there is no female Wisdom character at all, only a male Word. Accordingly,
then, this case violates all of the shared characteristics that Dunderberg identifies
between both versions. There is no Wisdom, there are no conventional female
roles associated with the character, and the Word does not violate expectations
but rather fulfills them. The distinctiveness of the Tripartite Tractate thus points
to the ways in which gender itself functions as a point of implicit and explicit
dispute between Valentinian texts rather than a unifying feature that they share.
Insofar as this analysis of Wisdom hinges substantively on her gender misper-
formance, it does not seem viable to treat an iteration of the story wherein the
central character is now male as a mere “toning down” or slight change to make
it more consistent with the Johannine gospel. Instead, the entire framework must
be reimagined to take the differently-gendered character into account.
The complex representation of gender in these texts throws all of these
temporal and geographical models into question.26 Each approach proceeds by
way of separating out the exceptions to the general rule of Valentianian thought
23 Dunderberg, Beyond Gnosticism, 98.
24 Dunderberg, Beyond Gnosticism, 98, 106.
25 Dunderberg, Beyond Gnosticism, 98–99.
26 The time may have arrived to engage more seriously the question of whether or not
240 Taylor G. Petrey

in order to identify subspecies of the category. I think this methodological orien-

tation tends to miss the internal debate going on both between and within these
texts. So-called Valentinian texts do not offer a single perspective on gender, re-
productive capacity, gender roles, bodies, hierarchy, or moral tendencies. Further,
the attempt to resolve these difficulties by appealing to historical development
or geographical separation are not only speculative but offer little explanatory
value on the question of gender itself – how these texts represent the nature of
sexual difference in different ways. Without more reliable data for dating texts
like the Tripartite Tractate and A Valentinian Exposition, or for locating their
provenance, we cannot provide reliable explanations of difference based on these
factors alone. Rather, it would be better to explore these differences as conver-
sations, not just about the nature of the myth’s treatment of soteriology, Christol-
ogy, and pleromatology, but specifically about gender and sexual difference. Such
conversations not only may be found across the different Valentinian texts, but
these texts also represent competing views within them. No unified Valentinian
view of gender can be found.

Irenaeus’s “Great Account”

One example of diversity within Valentinian teachings about gender in the

Fullness comes from the principal piece of evidence for dyadic, male-female
aeons in this system. In the first eight chapters of his polemical treatise Against
Heresies, the so-called “Great Account,” Irenaeus characterizes the teachings of
Valentinus’s disciple Ptolemy. A full version of the text is extant only in Latin,
but significant portions of the Greek version are preserved in Epiphanius’s
Panarion. A recent study by Giuliano Chiapparini has argued that the Greek text
in Epiphanius is “very faithful” and that the Latin version of Book 1 is a fourth-
or fifth-century translation with elements of trinitarian controversy added in.27
His thesis that there were two different editions of this section of Against Heresies
reflecting different time periods, the 160s and 180s respectively, is less certain.28
Either way, the text became the blueprint for later anti-Valentinian writings by
Tertullian and Hippolytus in the early third century and Epiphanius in the late
fourth century.
The question of whether or not this account is a reliable report of Ptolemy’s
teaching cannot be resolved by dating it more precisely.29 Some remain con-

Valentinianism is even a useful category for historical analysis. Michael Kaler and Marie-Pierre
Bussières, “Was Heracleon a Valentinian? A New Look at Old Sources” HTR 99 (2006): 275–289.
27 Gíuliano Chiapparini, “Irenaeus and the Gnostic Valentinus: Orthodoxy and Heresy in
the Church of Rome around the Middle of the Second Century,” ZAC 18 (2013): 101–102.
28 Chiapparini, “Irenaeus and the Gnostic Valentinus,” 113–114.
29 For a useful summary, see Dunderberg, Beyond Gnosticism, 197–199.
 Cosmic Gender 241

vinced of Irenaeus’s general accuracy, in spite of his biased interests.30 Yet,

Irenaeus’s polemical and sarcastic remarks have damaged his credibility in
recent years.31 Militating against his reliability is the discovery of the Nag Ham-
madi texts that often challenge his interpretation.32 Furthermore, his interest in
collapsing differences among various thinkers and systematizing their thought
in order to present a more unified teaching makes it difficult to trust his de-
scription.33 Indeed, there is even a contradiction in Irenaeus’s own polemical
report between his claim to have laid out the doctrine that unites all Valentinians
and his claim that all Valentinians disagree among themselves.34 Still, he did
not invent the myth out of whole cloth, given its overarching similarity to other
Valentinian texts.35
The dominant interpretation is that Irenaeus’s account of Ptolemy’s pleromatic
system is based on male-female pairs. There is a great deal of evidence to support
this view. In his report, Irenaeus describes Ptolemy’s teachings about various
conjugal unions in the creation of the Fullness. “Each of these,” he explains, “is
male and female.”36 Furthermore, his description of the creation of these aeons
invokes the language of male-female reproduction. The first being, Depth, takes
a “seed” (semen) “to emit and deposit it as it were in the womb of Silence,” his
conjugal partner. She “received” the seed, becomes pregnant, and gives birth to
Mind and Truth.37 Mind and Truth then emit though conjugal union two other
beings, who in turn emit even more until there is a total of thirty aeons.
There are then two disruptions to this normal process of male-female con-
jugal union. In the first, Wisdom, searches for the First-Father, Depth, with
passion but without her conjugal partner, Desired. She is the last of the aeons,
the female half of the final pair. The rupture causes a problem. The connection
between Wisdom and the emotion of passion results in “a formless substance,
namely, such a nature as a woman could bring forth.”38 With the help of the
other aeons, Wisdom returns again to the Father, but after having created this
formless feminine substance named Intention.
The second disruption flows from the first. Outside of the Fullness, Intention
was boiling over. Without a male contribution, her formlessness persisted. The

30 Gíuliano Chiapparini, Valentino gnóstico e platónico, 279–296; Chiapparini, “Irenaeus

and the Gnostic Valentinus,” 105–109.
31 Alain Le Boulluec, La notion d’hérésie dans la littérature grecque IIe–IIIe siècles, 2 vols.
(Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1985), 1:113–253.
32 Christoph Markschies, Valentinus Gnosticus?.
33 Dunderberg, “The School of Valentinus,” in Companion to Second-Century Christian
‘Heretics’, ed. Antti Marjanen and Petri Luomanen (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 69–70.
34 Irenaeus, Haer. 1.11.1; see Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 14–16.
35 Dunderberg, “The School of Valentinus,” 71.
36 Haer. 1.1.1.
37 Haer. 1.1.1.
38 Haer. 1.2.3.
242 Taylor G. Petrey

aeon Christ, however, sees her, has pity on her, and provides a portion of the
male substance that allows her to take substantive form. This draws on embryo-
logical ideas of successive formations, wherein the seed is added to the female
contribution to then give shape and form to the embryo.39 Rather than fixing it,
Christ’s added formation to this substance causes further problems. Searching
for her source, but lacking in knowledge and excluded from the Fullness, passion
continues to work in Intention, now called Achamoth. Passion brings grief, fear,
and perplexity, all from her ignorance. In these emotions, the substance of the
material world comes to be – water from her tears, light from her laughter, and so
on. Afterward, Achamoth turns again in supplication to Christ. Having already
descended once, Christ sends Advocate in his stead along with the Angels to
attend to Achamoth. Advocate heals her by removing her passions.40 He then
takes these passions and mingles them with bodies, creating hybrid spiritual/
material creatures. The result is a three-fold creation: Achamoth’s material sub-
stance; Advocate’s ensouled substance; and finally, Achamoth’s spiritual sub-
stance that she herself produces after having been freed from passion.41
Based on this report, scholars have argued that this text puts forward a nor-
mative view of male-female complementarity. Dunderberg calls the actions of
Wisdom and Achamoth “gender bending” in their rejection of idealized roles for
women, and thus the cause of so many problems in the created order.42 Others
share this view. According to McGuire, “the gendered metaphors of Irenaeus’ ac-
count … provide graphic depiction of the calamitous consequences of indepen-
dent female activity and the benefits of restoring the rebellious female to her
proper place.”43 Gender roles, especially for women, are vital for preserving and
restoring order.
I want to suggest, however, that the picture is far more complex in Irenaeus’s
own account. Besides Wisdom’s disruption to dyadic, male-female reproduction
that causes a rift in the Fullness and the creation of the material world, there
is another disruption to male-female reproductivity in this text. In this case,
however, such a disruption is actually praised rather than seen as problematic. In
response to Wisdom’s affair and misbegotten offspring, the First-Father, Depth,
emits Limit “by means of Only-Begotten,” namely, the masculine Mind. This
emission takes place “as part of no couple, neither male nor female (sine coniuge
masculo-femina).” Irenaeus explains how this is possible: “sometimes Father
emits with Silence as a consort, then again he is above male and above female.”44
Here, the privilege of creating without a consort is reserved for the Father, who

39 Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 312–313.

40 Haer. 1.4.5.
41 Haer. 1.5.1.
42 Dunderberg, Beyond Gnosticism, 127.
43 McGuire, “Women, Gender, and Gnosis,” 262.
44 Haer. 1.2.4.
 Cosmic Gender 243

transcends sexual difference while also being in a male-female partnership.45 In

a related version of this myth, Irenaeus reports that according to the Marcosians,
the Father “is neither male nor female.”46 So much for the ideal of male-female
complementarity.
Disruptions to male-female complementarity continue to be the solution –
not just the cause – to the original rift caused by Wisdom. Limit and Intention
are two creations who are both emitted without male-female conjugal partners –
one who sustains and the other who subverts. Limit performs two major tasks
to sustain the aeons. First, he reconciles and restores Wisdom to her consort,
Desired. He does this by separating Wisdom from her passion and from her
offspring, Intention/Achamoth. Second, Limit sets up a boundary that excludes
Intention from the Fullness of the thirty aeons. Intention is described as “form-
less and shapeless,” but is still a “spiritual substance,” owing to her origins in
the Fullness. Nevertheless, “she is a weak and feminine fruit.”47 Her femininity
is contrasted with the masculinity of Limit who excludes her from the divine
realm. Yet, Limit does not acquire a conjugal partner – he remains alone even
while restoring others to their partners.
The Only Begotten (Mind), who emits Limit without his female partner,
continues to create on his own. After Limit restores Wisdom to the Fullness
and creates a boundary between the Fullness and Intention, the aeons set up
further protections. In accord with the Father’s forethought, the Only-Begotten
emits another conjugal couple, Christ and the Holy Spirit, “for the stabilization
and support of the Fullness.” This act of creation without a companion is also
a successful endeavor. Christ teaches the rest of the Aeons “the nature of their
conjugal union” and also that the Father is wholly incomprehensible to them,
and that they could only grasp him through the Only-Begotten.48 Yet, both Limit
and the Christ-Holy Spirit emanations take place without conjugal union – only
by means of “the forethought of the Father.”
While it might be possible to conclude that the teachings of Christ and the
Holy Spirit once again sustain the notion of male-female complementarity, a
closer look reveals that sexual difference is once again subsumed in sameness.
The Holy Spirit instructs the aeons that they are all equal even if divided along
gender lines. In this case, the male aeons “all become Minds and all Words and
all Men and all Christs.” Similarly, “the female aeons all become Truths and Lives
and Spirits and Churches.” In a description reminiscent of a ritual, Irenaeus then
explains that all the aeons sing hymns together, gather what is most beautiful

45 This theme of the male-centered androgyny has been explored recently by Benjamin
H. Dunning, Specters of Paul: Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, 2011), 5–8.
46 Haer. 1.14.1.
47 Haer. 1.2.4.
48 Haer. 1.2.5.
244 Taylor G. Petrey

with them, and “fittingly blend[] together and unite[] into one.”49 Their unity
is first found among their same-gendered peers and finally climaxes in unity
among all.
Moving beyond male-female paired reproduction, this act of conjugal union
of the all aeons together then results in another offspring. Each aeon takes what
is best from themselves and blends them together into one emission, whom they
call Jesus. This Jesus takes on the names of his fathers, namely Savior, Christ (also
called “the second Christ”), and Word, as well as All, since he is emitted from
the totality of the aeons. The unity of all the aeons also emit angels “to be [Jesus’]
bodyguard.”50 In neither case are dyadic pairs of male and female creating or
created here.
However, the ultimate destiny of Achamoth is to join with the single Jesus –
the one created from the union of all the aeons – to form a conjugal union in
the bridal chamber with him.51 Eventually, Achamoth will enter the fulness with
the Savior as her consort, leaving the intermediate realm between the spiritual
Fullness and material creation. At the same time, the spiritual seed of Achamoth
will join with the angels of Jesus in the bridal chamber as their brides.52 Here
again, even the gender of spiritual human beings must be rendered strangely. The
spiritual humans are all cosmically female – that is, brides to the cosmic angel
males – awaiting their eventual union.
The gender of many of these characters is not straightforward here. Without
a consort, Achamoth gives of her ensouled substance to form another creature,
the Demiurge, the God of the material world.53 Like the spiritual First-Father
who is both male and female, the ensouled Demiurge is called both Father and
also Mother-Parent.54 Similarly, the gender of his mother Achamoth is rendered
differently. Irenaeus explains that they call her “Ogdoad, Wisdom, Earth, Jeru-
salem, Holy Spirit, and Lord, in the masculine gender.”55 Her gender is even
more complex when she implants her “seed,” the spiritual substance, “secretly,
without his knowledge,” into the Demiurge so that when he created material
bodies there would be an element that could receive spiritual knowledge. In this
case, the dual-gendered Achamoth is the agent of creation of a spiritual sub-
stance; the dual-gendered Demiurge passively (and unknowing) receives her
seed. This report departs from ancient accounts of embryology that saw the male
as contributing the spiritual substance and the female the material substance.56
49 Haer. 1.2.6.
50 Haer. 1.2.6.
51 Haer. 1.7.1.
52 Haer. 1.7.1; 1.7.5.
53 Haer. 1.5.1.
54 Haer. 1.5.1.
55 Haer. 1.5.3.
56 For some classical studies of ancient embryology, see Erna Lesky, Die Zeugungs- Und
Vererbungslehren Der Antike Und Ihr Nachwirken (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1951);
 Cosmic Gender 245

In this reversal, Irenaeus reports that the substance of the flesh of the human
being comes from the male creator and “the spiritual element is from his Mother
Achamoth.”57
The complex gender of these characters is replicated in Valentinian scriptural
exegesis. Both male and female characters from scripture represent Wisdom and
Achamoth. Irenaeus reports that, according to his sources, Wisdom, the twelfth
aeon, is symbolized variously by men, including the twelfth disciple Judas and
the suffering of Jesus after twelve months.58 Yet, she is also symbolized by the
hemorrhaging woman who suffered for twelve years.59 The same complexity
holds true for the female Achamoth. The twelve-year-old daughter of the ruler
of the temple whom Jesus raised from the dead “is a type of Achamoth.”60 Anna,
the prophetess, is still another type of Achamoth, each one awaiting the coming
of the Savior to return her to her conjugal union.61 Yet, at the same time, Paul
is said to be another type, since like the aborted Achamoth, the Savior also
appeared to him as to “one untimely born.”62 Women veiling in 1 Corinthians
11 also becomes a type of Achamoth’s covering her face when the Savior came
to her with his angels. But Moses also veiled himself, thereby manifesting this
same event.63 Further, Jesus’ own suffering on the cross indicates the suffering
of Achamoth as she awaited someone to rescue her and bring her to the light.64
It is true that much of the structure of Ireneaus’s account of Ptolemy’s system
is built around the idea of multiple sets of male-female pairs. For instance, the
cautionary tale of Wisdom who strays from a male-female arrangement to create
on her own results in an ill-formed mess. At the same time, singleness, creation
from single or plural entities, and non-binary gendered characters are not en-
tirely ruled out here either. The creation of Limit shows the possibility of creation
from a single being. Also, the polyamorous creation of Jesus rejects monogamy
and exclusivity. Further, the First-Father, Achamoth, and Demiurge are not ex-
clusively male or female, but are both and can create on their own. Both before
and after her redemption, Achamoth behaves in ways that challenge expected
gender roles, including her reproductive capacity to create spiritual offspring in

Franz Rüsche, Blut, Leben Und Seele; Ihr Verhältnis Nach Auffassung Der Griechischen Und
Hellenistischen Antike, Der Bibel Und Der Alten Alexandrinischen Theologen; Eine Vorarbeit Zur
Religionsgeschichte Des Opfers (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1930). For more recent treatments, see
Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, L’embryon et son âme dans les sources grecques (VIe siècle av. J.‑C.-
Ve siècle apr. J.‑C.) (Paris: Association des amis du Centre d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance,
2007).
57 Haer. 1.5.6.
58 Haer. 1.3.3.
59 Haer. 1.3.3.
60 Haer. 1.8.2.
61 Haer. 1.8.4.
62 Haer. 1.8.2; cf. 1 Cor 15:8.
63 Haer. 1.8.2.
64 Haer. 1.8.2.
246 Taylor G. Petrey

imitation of the Father and her genderqueer titles and scriptural representations.
These ambiguities to binary gender call into question the symbolic support for
male-female coupling that many modern interpreters have found here. There is
not one ideal put forward, but multiple that are simultaneously embraced.

A Valentinian Exposition

Relative to the other versions of the protological myth, A Valentinian Exposition

is quite abbreviated. The work may have been catechetical; and it includes sup-
plemental sections on various rituals such as baptism and eucharist.65 The first
and last pages are missing, leaving no title for the text. No author is indicated, nor
is there any reference to external events that would help to locate it temporally
or geographically. The text is philosophically prosaic, recounting events and the
logic of why certain things have happened. Still, it provides enough information
to situate it within the broader set of issues under discussion in this article.
The fragmentary text of A Valentinian Exposition preserves a variation of the
protological story that we see in other Valentinian theological accounts, especially
that of Irenaeus. For this reason, some have identified it as a Western Valentinian
text.66 Yet, Thomassen sees it as a combination of different versions of Valentinian
thought (including those found in the Eastern Valentinian Tripartite Tractate),
not squarely representing any specific subcategory of Eastern or Western. In his
view, this attempted combination results in some difficulties such that the text’s
own argument does not always hang together.67 However, the fragmentary nature
of the text makes it difficult to know what connections may be missing that could
potentially address these gaps; indeed, as much as half of the text is missing.
Among the most interesting differences from Irenaeus’s version is a more
transparent effort to deal with the ontological questions of the one and the many.
A Valentinian Exposition assures readers that the Father exists as “oneness” and
“dwells alone in silence – ‘silence’ is tranquility.”68 This explanation seems to
interpret “silence” metaphorically not as the consort of the Father, but rather as
a condition of the Father’s being. However, this condition of “silence” becomes
hypostatically realized. Just a few lines later, the author claims that the Father
also exists as “twoness and as a pair and his partner is Silence.”69 This notion of
both a singularity and a duality seems to try to embrace monistic features as well

65 Elaine H. Pagels, “Introduction: NCH XI,2: A Valentinian Exposition,” in The Coptic

Gnostic Library, Nag Hammadi Codices IX, XII, XIII, ed. Charles W. Hedrick (Leiden: Brill,
1990), 90–91.
66 Pagels, “Introduction: NCH XI,2,” 92, 105.
67 Einar Thomassen, “Valentinian Exposition,” in Myer, Nag Hammadi Scriptures, 664.
68 Val. Exp. 22.20–23.
69 Val. Exp. 22.26–27.
 Cosmic Gender 247

as the dyadic features of the system attested in Irenaeus. From here, the Father
spreads out into the Son/Mind and then Truth, forming a Tetrad.70
The conflict within the text about whether the primal element is singular or dual
reflects a broader debate between Valentinians. Hippolytus reports that Valentini-
ans disagreed among themselves on exactly this issue: “Some of them …consider
the Father to be unfeminine, without syzygy, and alone. Others, considering it
impossible that any generation at all of begotten things could proceed from a male
alone, include … Silence as, of necessity, his syzygy.”71 Notably, the question of
the female element of the Father hinges on the capacity for reproduction. In the
case of A Valentinian Exposition, this debate over the single or dual gender of the
divine, its monism or dualism, is found within a single document. The text holds
that the Father is able to reproduce alone, but also that reproduction takes place
between the Father and his consort Silence. It has it both ways.
The Tetrad performs a different function in this text than in Irenaeus’s report.
Reproduction of the aeons does not proceed exclusively from pairs. Instead, the
Tetrad collectively produces the next four: Word and Life, Man and Church.72
Reproduction is not male-female here. After the creation of the second Tetrad,
however, the rest of the aeons come from dyadic reproduction. Ten more came
from Word and Life and twelve more from Man and Church. These are the thirty
aeons of the Fullness.73 The thirty then continued to bring forth more, one hun-
dred from Word and Life and three hundred sixty from Man and Church.
In A Valentinian Exposition, after the fall of Wisdom, Limit was placed to
contain the damage. As in Irenaeus, the emphasis on dyadic pairing is a key
theme as the cause and the solution to the fall of Wisdom. Specifically, Wisdom
repents for having “abandoned my partner.” “I used to be in the Fullness,” she
laments, “bringing forth aeons and producing fruit with my partner.”74 In the
surviving text, Wisdom’s partner Jesus is in the Fullness and comes out to meet
her. Unlike in Irenaeus’s version, the reader is not told how Jesus was produced.
Outside the Fullness, Wisdom’s seeds were “unfashioned and without form.” In
the rescue effort, Jesus takes these seeds and, working with Wisdom, reveals the
Fullness to them. Jesus then fashions these creations, separating out the good and
bad passions. This creation of a lower world is thus a shadow of the eternal, pre-
existent Fullness.75 The angels are paired with the seeds of Wisdom. This notion
of pairing is crucial: “For this is the will of the Father: that no one in the Fullness

70 Val. Exp. 25.18–20.

71 Hippolytus, Haer. VI.24.3–4.
72 This has some resemblance to the system described in Irenaeus, Haer. 1.11.1. See also
Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 232.
73 Val. Exp. 30.16–38.
74 Val. Exp. 34.24–31.
75 Val. Exp. 35.28–38; 36.18–19.
248 Taylor G. Petrey

shall be without a partner. Thus, the will of the Father is always to produce and
bear fruit.”76
A Valentinian Exposition continues this theme of male-female pairing in its
commentary on the early chapters of Genesis. The Demiurge fashioned human
bodies and these became the dwelling place for the spiritual seeds of Wisdom –
separating them from their angelic partners. But there was a rebellion among
the angels. The devil fell away and took with him many of them. They sought to
deceive human beings. Recounting the story of the fall, Cain and Abel, and the
angelic mating with women before the flood, the text depicts the world in chaos.
The work of saving this creation is undertaken, possibly in a missing portion of
the text. The restoration occurs when each one finds their proper partners. It
explains, “when Wisdom receives her partner, and Jesus receives Christ, and the
seeds are united with the angels, then the Fullness with receive Wisdom in joy,
and the All will be joined together and restored.”77 The soteriology of this text is
patterned after the idealized protology. The dyadic pattern is emphasized, just as
we saw in Irenaeus’s account.
Despite this strong thematic element, does this text represent procreation and
complementarity between male-female pairs exclusively? As we saw in Irenaeus,
the answer is once again no. We see various ways in which a dyadic pattern is
undermined. For instance, the prerogative of creation is reserved for the single
Father in the beginning, who alone is able to reproduce without a partner. His
simultaneous existence as both a singular and a dual being creates within himself
the ambiguity that allows for the subversion of gender in all that follows. The
Tetrad reproduces as a collective entity rather than in pairs. Further, the spiritual
seed originates with the female Wisdom and the material from the male Demiur-
ge, reversing the typical contributions of male-female partners in reproduction.
Finally, there are also instances where male and female do not always wind up
together. The partner of Jesus is not Wisdom whom he was sent to rescue, but
Christ, standing in stark contrast to the version found in Irenaeus. Thomassen
calls this an “odd idea.”78 The partners here are not consistently male and female,
but may also be two males.

76 Val. Exp. 36.28–34.

77 Val. Exp. 39.28–35.
78 Thomassen, “A Valentininan Exposition,” in Myer, Nag Hammadi Scriptures, 665.
 Cosmic Gender 249

Tripartite Tractate

The Tripartite Tractate is so named by modern scholars because of the three-

fold scribal division within the text. It offers a philosophical and mythological
account of the primordial creation that flows from the original being.79 The
longest part of this text, pages 51–104 in the manuscript, covers the emanation
of the aeons from the Father to the creation of the cosmos. The text makes no
explicit references to external events that would aid in dating it. As discussed
above, there is a debate about whether this version of the story precedes the
version reported in Irenaeus or reflects a later effort to make it friendlier to an
emerging orthodoxy. Either way, the narrative is a testament to the ways in which
the nature of sexual difference and male-female complementarity were contested
in Valentinian circles.
Like A Valentinian Exposition, the Tripartite Tractate addresses the problem
of the one and the many in the primal being, although it does so differently. At
the outset, the text seeks to resolve the paradox with a simple assertion: “The
Father is singular while being many.”80 This text emphasizes the singularity and
uniqueness of the Father rather than a dyadic ontology.81 It compares the Father
to a tree trunk, from which springs forth branches and fruit. This Father “has
given birth to the All and has brought it into being.”82 The name “Father,” like all
other names, is also inadequate to him. He defies language and description. He
has no form nor figure in any way.83
This emphasis on multiplicity within singularity leads to a completely differ-
ent account of the Father. Scholars have long noticed that the Tripartite Tractate
rejects male-female dyadic gender complementarity as a variation of the Valen-
tinian type. Deirdre Good’s close analysis of the text has addressed questions of
divine generativity.84 Her analysis demonstrates that in Coptic, the term “Father”
(ⲉⲓⲱⲧ) can refer to both a masculine individual as well as an “androgynous
divinity.”85 Coptic often prefers the masculine grammatical forms for subjects
that would otherwise be without gender or gender inclusive. For instance, there
is no word for “parents” in Coptic, so the plural term “fathers” (ⲉⲓⲟⲧⲉ) may refer
to both male and female. Good proposes translating the singular use of term
as “Parent” in this case, although the Coptic employs masculine pronouns to
describe the figure in question.
79 Einar Thomassen, Le Traité Tripartite: Texte Établi, Introduit et Commenté (Quebec: Les
Presses de l’Université Laval, 1999), 38–42.
80 Tri. Trac. 51.8–10.
81 Attridge and Pagels, “Tripartite Tractate,” 179.
82 Tri. Trac. 52.4–6.
83 Tri. Trac. 54.2–8.
84 Deirdre Good, “Gender and Generation: Observations on Coptic Terminology, with
Particular Attention to Valentinian Texts,” in Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, 23–40.
85 Good, “Gender and Generation,” 25.
250 Taylor G. Petrey

The monadic theology of this Parent infuses the way that the account imagines
divine generation. When it comes to describing how this being generates and
extends itself, the text explains that this being does not have a partner because
“that would imply a limitation.”86 Rather, it engages in “self-generation.”87 This
manner of generation does not create something outside of itself, but rather
“he has a Son dwelling in him.” The Son is a Thought that reflects the Parent
itself, and in this way, “the Parent bore him without generation.” The first couple,
Parent and Son, like the first individual, is not distinctively gendered as either
male or female – both are described in both male and female terms. This Son is
also called “Silence,” “Wisdom,” and “Grace,” using similar female titles to those
found in the dyadic accounts of the first beings.88
The Church is the next offspring, arising out of the love between the Parent
and Son. While the Parent and the Son are both without generation, they stand at
the head of a creation of the aeons. In Irenaeus’s account, there are thirty aeons,
but in the Tripartite Tractate, they are “without number.” The text explains,
“They have issued from him, the Son and the Parent, in the same way as kisses,
when someone abundantly embraces another in a good and insatiable thought –
it is a single embrace but consists of many kisses.”89 The terms for “someone”
(ⲛ̅ϩⲉⲛϩⲟⲉⲓⲛⲉ) and “another” (ⲛⲉⲩⲉⲣⲏⲩ) to describe the kisses and embrace are not
gendered terms. Furthermore, the author does not revert to female names to
describe the Parent’s companion, simply calling him the Son in the description
of the generation of the aeons. It is the Parent and Son who embrace and kiss.
As noted above, DeConick sees in this description a “softening” of the re-
productivity of these characters to make them more orthodox. Yet, she also sees
traces of the dyadic reproduction that she believes represented the earlier version
of the myth. A close reading shows that it is not reproductivity that is “softened”
in this text, but rather male-female complementarity. In truth, the sexual and
generative language in Tripartite Tractate is ubiquitous.90 The Parent is de-
scribed as “the cause of generation for the all.”91 The emanations are compared
to a “fetus.”92 The Parent’s defining characteristic is “the begetting by which he
begets them.”93 Every aeon has a name that is “each of the properties and powers
of the Parent.”94 First, the aeons exist within the mind of the Parent.95 After this,
their existence is completed by their birth, “just as people are begotten in this

86 Tri. Trac. 54.25–27.

87 Tri. Trac. 56.1–6.
88 Tri. Trac. 57.1–8.
89 Tri. Trac. 58.21–30.
90 Tri. Trac. 53.21–54.6; 56.31–57,7; and 59.36–60.1.
91 Tri. Trac. 55.38–40.
92 Tri. Trac. 60.30–34.
93 Tri. Trac. 67.19–21.
94 Tri. Trac. 73.8–9.
95 Tri. Trac. 60.18–22.
 Cosmic Gender 251

place.”96 The embryological language reflects ancient medial theories, moving

from seed to embryo to an entity finally being brought forth into the light to
see its parents.97 The aeons are “mental offspring,” “spiritual emanations,” and
“spiritual offspring.”98 The erotic and reproductive imagery here used to describe
the relationship between the Parent and the Son, or the Parent and himself, is not
governed by a male-female complementary logic.
These emanations can also reproduce. They share this quality with the Parent:
“being emanations and offspring of <his> procreative nature, they too, in their
procreative nature, have <given> glory to the Parent, as he was the cause of their
establishment.”99 But this reproductive capacity does not happen in pairs. In
their glorification of the Parent, they mingle and come together as one united
“pleromatic congregation.” All of the Parent’s offspring together reproduce as a
unified whole. The Son is the first creation, and then the aeons themselves, and
then collectively “they were parents of the third glory according to the indepen-
dence and the power which was begotten with them.”100 As Thomassen explains,
“in a sense, the aeons beget themselves, though this act of generation is made
possible only by the Father’s letting himself be known through the Son.”101 The
shift from ignorance of the Parent to knowledge enables the aeons’ independent
existence.
The absence of dyadic pairs of aeons is not the only gendered difference
between the Tripartite Tractate on the one hand and Irenaeus’s version and
A Valentinian Exposition on the other. In the latter versions, the feminine
figure Wisdom is the aeon who, seeking the Father, procreates on her own. In
the Tripartite Tractate, this role is performed by the masculine Word. The Word
is described with the characteristic of having “wisdom,” but it is not a proper
name.102 In some of the versions of Wisdom’s disturbance, her motivations
receive competing explanations.103 In this version, Word’s intent was good, but
he was the last of the aeons and was “small in magnitude.”104 Rather than work-
ing in concert with the rest of the aeons (not having a specific partner), Word
attempted to seek after the Parent on his own. This caused a rift as the Word split
and was then cordoned off by Limit. Yet, as discussed above, the text is at pains
to emphasize that this was all according to the will of the Parent and should not
be “criticized.”105

96 Tri. Trac. 62.3–6.

97 Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 309–14.
98 Tri. Trac. 63.33–35; 64.7.
99 Tri. Trac. 68.1–6.
100 Tri. Trac. 69.24–26.
101 Thomassen, Spiritual Seed, 179.
102 Tri. Trac. 75.27–76.2.
103 Attridge and Pagels, “Tripartite Tractate,” 181–82; Dunderberg, Beyond Gnosticism, 98.
104 Tri. Trac. 76.15–16.
105 Tri. Trac. 77.1–10.
252 Taylor G. Petrey

The offspring of the Word was but a shadow and a copy of the original Full-
ness, creating a second pleromatic entity. These copies were rebellious and dis-
obedient, vying over one another with a “lust for power.” In this quest, “all that
they thought about they have as potential sons … many offspring came from
them, as fighters, as warriors, as trouble makers, as apostates.”106 They are in
a “servile order” and “eagerly desire begetting.”107 Reproduction continues in
this realm in imitation of the realm above. Yet even in this lower realm, there
is nothing particularly important about complementary male and female pro-
creation. The problem with the offspring of the Word is not that he is without a
partner, but only that the emotions of the original passion infected his offspring.
In this case, the Word creates on his own three times – representing the material,
psychic, and spiritual offspring. He then orders the cosmos with these three sub-
stances.108 There is nothing essentially aberrant about the Word creating on his
own, since both good and bad offspring may result.
Yet in spite of the gender ambiguity of the Parent, Son, and aeons, this text
does not hold a positive view of femaleness. The creation of this lower realm is
actually explicitly rooted in anti-femininity. The splitting of the Word into the
upper and lower leaves the weaker part behind, “like a female nature abandoned
by her male element.”109 Eventually, this feminine part will continue to reproduce
itself, creating an entire image of what was above. The text explains, “those who
took form with [the Word], according to the image of the Fullness … are forms
of maleness, since they are not from the illness which is femaleness.”110 That is,
the original members of the Fullness are represented as males who reproduce,
while the lower Fullness is represented as female imitations. A few lines later, it
emphasizes, “passion is sickness.”111 This association of femaleness with weak-
ness, passion, and sickness is not merely hierarchical, but oppositional in nature
to maleness. In this case, gender is not about reproductive capacity, but rather
about moral qualities. Maleness is presented as the ideal, while femaleness is the
defective version, a sickness compared to the healthy male iteration. The result is
that the aeonic realm is full of masculine characters.
When the Word eventually repented and separated himself from his creation,
the entire (masculine) Fullness came together to try to rescue the defective
(feminine) creation. The protological unity forms the pattern for where this is
all going. There is an interruption of dissolution and alienation, but these are
temporary. The eschatology of the Tripartite Tractate reflects these same values.
Alluding to Galatians 3:28, the text explains, “For the end will receive a unitary

106 Tri. Trac. 79.36–80.7.

107 Tri. Trac. 103.34.
108 Tri. Trac. 95.17–104.3.
109 Tri. Trac. 78.8–13.
110 Tri. Trac. 94.11–20.
111 Tri. Trac. 95.3.
 Cosmic Gender 253

existence just as the beginning is unitary, where there is no male nor female, nor
slave and free, nor circumcision and uncircumcision, neither angel nor human,
but Christ is all in all.”112 Adding in the distinction between angel and human
to the Pauline formula, the text envisions a primal unity of all apparent divisions
as the ultimate destiny. This notion of unity is not sexually differentiated, es-
chewing both male and female. However, in this androgyny, the anti-femininity
is difficult to ignore, and seems tied to the elimination of female aeons like Wis-
dom – the Fullness without male and female is still depicted as male.
While DeConick has found in the reproductive language used here vestiges
of the heterogender politics present in other representations of Valentinian
thought, Williams points out that we should not ignore the “degendering” of the
myth and “avoid reading the gendering back into the material.”113 Building on
Williams’ point, I would also add that we should avoid homogenizing these texts
in terms of a single perspective on gender and instead pay attention to the cracks,
seams, and outright contradictions within and among these ancient Christian
voices. Indeed, in this case, pace Williams, I would further suggest that the ev-
idence does not exhibit “degendering” so much as different-gendering. That is,
the supposed absence of gender as a theme may still say something significant
about its reconfiguration in various Valentinian imaginaries.

Conclusion

Valentinian texts do not offer a singular view of sexual difference, reproductivity,

and gender roles. This feature is by no means unique, locating them well within
the same struggle over these topics as other early Christians. For instance, in her
evaluation of the Sethian version of the myth of the Fullness, Karen L. King’s
close reading of the Secret Revelation of John already shows that “no single
monolithic perspective on sex/gender will rule.”114 She contends that this text
“simultaneously reinscribes, negotiates, and critiques … imperial and patriarchal
social structures, as well as notions of sex and gender.”115 Even the variants in the
four manuscripts of the Secret Revelation can themselves serve as early witnesses
to disputes over the question of gender subordination within the interpretive
communities that preserved these texts.116
The diversity of sources within the Valentinian movement similarly com-
plicates the idea of a shared perspective on gender throughout the corpus. No

112 Tri. Trac. 132.20–28.

113 Williams, “Variety in Gnostic Perspectives on Gender,” 6.
114 Karen L. King, “Reading Sex and Gender in The Secret Revelation of John,” JECS 19
(2011): 519.
115 King, “Reading Sex and Gender,” 520.
116 King, “Reading Sex and Gender,” 534–536.
254 Taylor G. Petrey

matter how one divides Valentinianism between Eastern and Western versions or
layers the differences chronologically, the texts do not present a monolithic view
on gender roles, reproduction and sexuality, or male-female complementarity.
In these texts, there are beings that are both male and female, male beings that
reproduce on their own in ways considered unproblematic, group reproduction,
procreation through mental exercise, partnership between two males, protolog-
ical and eschatological expressions of transcending sexual difference, and also
male-female pairings. There is no single view within or across Valentinian texts
on what was wrong with the aberration to the cosmic order that either Wis-
dom or Word effected. And, once one abandons the idea that Valentinian texts
present a unitary view of gender, it becomes more difficult to determine in what
kinds of social practices the movement as a whole may have engaged. There were
certainly ample resources within these Valentinian myths for interpretations that
would offer queer alternatives to male-female complementarity.

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 Feminist Research in Jewish Studies
What’s in a Name?

Ronit Irshai

To Karen, for your support, wisdom, and friendship

Introduction1

Feminist insights that have gradually percolated into all streams of Judaism and
triggered radical changes in the religious status of women in the Jewish world
have led to significant changes in Jewish Studies as well. Under the influence of
feminist theoretical writings, scholars with a feminist consciousness went back
to the classic Jewish texts and applied diverse new tools made possible by the
various theories, as will be demonstrated below. In general, one can say that the
fruits of the incorporation of feminist thought into Jewish Studies are found
chiefly in research into the Mishnah and Talmud but are less prominent in the
study of modern halakhah (Jewish Law).
The present article examines this situation and proposes guidelines for en-
hancing this body of research, while emphasizing the fundamental difference
between feminist study of rabbinics (Rabbinic literature – Hazal) and feminist
study of modern halakhah.
In the first section of this paper I would like to put some order into what is
called feminist scholarship in Jewish Studies and propose that we distinguish
four categories within it. These distinctions will bring into sharper focus the sim-
ilarities and differences between feminist study in rabbinics and feminist study
of modern Jewish law – halakhah – and suggest possible directions for the study
of modern halakhah in the light of this comparison.
The distinctions between different types of feminist scholarship in Jewish
Studies are not merely conceptual. They also serve as an analytical tool that can
produce new research products. Accordingly, in the second section of this paper
I will present a case study related to male homosexuality to show how feminist
scholarship that takes gender as an analytic category for the study of modern
halakhah can produce new knowledge about the ways in which male and female
1 A more extensive version of this article was first published in Hebrew in Diné Israel:
Studies in Halakhah and Jewish Law 32 (2018): 195–230. I would like to thank the journal’s
editors for allowing me to publish it here. I would also like to thank my devoted research assis-
tant, Mr. Dvir Shalem, for his assistance in editing the article.
258 Ronit Irshai

identities are constituted. In so doing it can also contribute to the critical fem-
inist scholarship that contrasts contemporary halakhic insights with principles
such as equality and human dignity, chiefly with regard to women and their place
in the Jewish religious world.

1. What is Feminist Scholarship in Jewish Studies?

Four main categories can be identified under the broad umbrella of feminist
scholarship in Jewish Studies, each drawing on the various feminist theories.
1. Research that highlights the patriarchy, misogyny, and male perspective of
the text, and analyzes the power relations implicit in it. I will refer to this as
“critical feminist scholarship.”
2. Research that seeks to identify places where the text deviates from the
patriarchal gender system and produces respectful ideas about women, at
the very least improving their condition as against the current situation. This
type of scholarship I will call “mediating feminist scholarship.2
3. Research that takes gender as its main analytical category – what I call
“gender-focused feminist scholarship.”
4. Research with a feminist sensibility: By this I mean scholarship that is sensi-
tive to the power relations between the hegemonic center and the margins, to
oppression, to the intersections of status, gender, race etc. (intersectionality),
and to those on the margins of society.
The first and second categories might be viewed as sometimes contradictory, in
that the first approach exposes and criticizes the patriarchal structures, whereas
the second demonstrates the gradual progresses within and despite these struc-
tures. In any case, if women are the main research object of these two options
(along with the power relations between women and men), and the discourse in
these categories revolves around the ways women are treated in various domains
of life, gender-focused feminist scholarship and research with a feminist sensi-
bility may go beyond the exclusive reference to women and examine the ways in
which gender identities are constituted and/or consider the treatment of those
on the margins of society, both women and men.3

2 I have borrowed the term “mediating feminist scholarship” from Yael Shemesh, who used
it in the context of biblical scholarship. See Yael Shemesh, “Direction in Jewish Feminist Bible
Study,” Currents in Biblical Research 14.3 (2016): 372–406.
3 On a feminist reading of the talmudic literature, see Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Tal
Ilan, “Feminist Interpretations of Rabbinic Literature: Two Views,” Nashim 4 (2001): 7–14. In
this joint product the authors present their different approaches. Ilan places more emphasis on
uncovering and understanding the patriarchal culture in which the texts were created, where-
as Fonrobert focuses on gender as an analytical category and asks why the rabbinic culture
fashions gender the way it does.
 Feminist Research in Jewish Studies 259

Despite this categorization, I do not mean to assert that there cannot be inter-
sections between the different types. A study that employs gender as an analytic
category may produce findings that point to the text’s patriarchalism or sexism
as well as to deviations from it; the same is true of research moved by feminist
sensibility. I believe that categorization is valuable both as an analytic tool for
refining the goals of research and in order to characterize the affinities and
differences between feminist scholarship in the field of rabbinics and studies of
modern halakhah from a feminist perspective. I will deal with these later.

Critical Feminist Scholarship

In this paradigm, feminist scholars mined the immense vein in Rabbinic lit-
erature that refers to women and criticized the attitude reflected there. Critical
feminist scholarship emphasizes the patriarchal and misogynistic character of
this corpus.4 For example, Wegner came to the conclusion that the Mishnah
assigns women the status of a chattel.5 Baskin describes how the sages define
women as “other.”6 Safrai and Campbell-Hochstein look at the place of women
in halakhic midrashim and demonstrate how, despite the inclusive language, the
literary structure of the midrash perpetuates women’s exclusion and otherness.7
All of this is in addition to the general criticism of the status of women in Jewish
tradition, in both theology and halakhah.8

4 For a classic example of this, see Tal Ilan, Mine and Yours Are Hers: Retrieving Women’s
History from Rabbinic Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1997).
5 Judith R. Wegner, Chattel or Person: The Status of Women in the Mishnah (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988). On her central thesis that the Mishnah relates to women as
chattels, see Gail Labovitz, Marriage and Metaphor: Constructions of Gender in Rabbinic Lit-
erature (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 29–62.
6 See Judith R. Baskin, Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature
(Hanover: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 2002). For a review
of this book, see Ishay Rosen-Zvi, “Misogyny and Its Discontents,” Prooftexts 25.1–2 (2005):
217–227.
7 They write, for example: “When dealing with the diversity and quantity of such midrash-
im, a clear awareness of Otherness is created. The need to include, and the literary choice of
the inclusive midrash, in itself, place the object of the midrash on the outside, as an Other. The
norm, the standard structure, the simple dialogue – all of these propose a world with no women
or Others.” See Chana Safrai and Avital Campbell Hochstein, Women Out – Women In: The
Place of Women in Midrash (Tel Aviv: Miskal, 2008), 35 (Hebrew).
8 Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San Francis-
co: Harper & Row, 1991); Cynthia Ozick, “Notes Toward Finding the Right Question,” in On
Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Schocken, 1983), 120–151;
Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (Philadelphia: Jewish Pub-
lication Society, 1998); Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism
(Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004); Ronit Irshai, “Toward a Gender Critical Ap-
proach to the Philosophy of Jewish Law (Halakhah),” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2
(2010): 55–77.
260 Ronit Irshai

As noted by Rosen-Zvi, research based on this paradigm never attempted to

challenge the essentialism that assigned women a fixed and known essence. It
never sought to trace the modes in which that “female essence” is created and
constituted and accepted the patriarchal world picture while denouncing it.9
As I see it, studies of this type have had and still possess great importance,
because even if they can be dismissed as trivial (pointing out patriarchalism or
misogyny or androcentricity in a place where we expect to find them), they were
the first to systematically sketch out the scope of patriarchalism in the talmudic
literature, to bring the problem into the light, and open the door for comparative
interreligious research and an increased focus on the status of women in the
religious world in general. Nevertheless, it is possible that the feeling that studies
of this sort about ancient culture, including the talmudic literature and ancient
halakhah, have exhausted themselves is justified, if only because “they affirm
what we already know about women’s marginalization.”10 Statements like this are
strong evidence that the feminist critique has been assimilated to the point of
being taken for granted.

Mediating Feminist Scholarship

Mediating feminist research does not deny the patriarchal nature of the text;
in fact, taking as its point of departure that the text’s patriarchalism is an es-
tablished fact, it looks for places where the text deviates from that worldview.
Such research looks for voices that are opposed to the hegemony and tries to
identify systematic attempts to remedy the situation. It may do this by asserting
that later commentary added layers of patriarchalism, whereas the original text
was not infected by it; or, on the contrary, that the earlier strata were patriarchal,
but the talmudic sages gradually but systematically reduced this bias. Judith
Hauptmann’s Rereading the Rabbis and Daniel Boyarin’s Carnal Israel are out-
standing example of this type of scholarship.11 Hauptmann’s starting point is the
patriarchal nature of the biblical text and the incremental efforts by the talmudic
sages to improve the status of women. She believes, for example, that they work-
ed a major revolution about rape by shifting it from a crime against the father to
one against the woman herself. By requiring the victim’s consent to marry her
rapist, in contrast to the biblical law, they gave her a measure of control over her
9 Ishay Rosen-Zvi, The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual: Temple, Gender and Midrash (Leiden: Brill,
2012), 5–11.
10 Rosen-Zvi, The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual, 11. I believe, however, that the claim that such
criticism is only to be expected goes too far. Were that so, why didn’t men who engaged in
research about halakhah before the advent of feminist criticism engage in it, even if only to reject
it as trivial?
11 Judith Hauptman, Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice (Boulder: Westview Press,
1998); Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993).
 Feminist Research in Jewish Studies 261

future. The category of bogeret – a young woman who has reached puberty but
is not yet married – recognized her autonomy when she reached physical and
mental maturity. By creating this new category, the sages explicitly stipulated
that a woman has the power to decide with whom she will live and with whom
she will have sexual relations. This picture is very far from the Torah’s picture of
a woman who is delivered in marriage from her father to her husband.12
Parallel to this, Boyarin explicitly moves between assimilation of the feminist
critique and the goal (feminist in itself) on identifying resistance to patriarchy
within the text itself. As he puts it:
Reading texts as only misogynistic thus can in itself be a misogynistic gesture; conversely,
seeking to recover “feminist,” that is resistant or even oppositional, voices in ancient texts
can be an act of appropriation of those ancient texts for political change. This does not
imply in any way a denial of the patriarchy (if not misogyny) of the hegemonic practices
of the culture. The texts when read in the way that I am proposing to read them do not
only reflect a dissident proto-feminist voice within Classical Judaism; they constitute and
institute such a voice. This is manifestly the case with reference to the Talmud, which is
regarded as an authoritative source for social practice by many Jewish collectives up to
this day.13

Gender-Focused Feminist Scholarship

Starting in the 1990s, one can identify a paradigm shift in the study of rabbinics,
to what can be called “gender-focused.”14 I believe this paradigm shift should be
ascribed in part to the anti-essentialism in philosophy in general and to feminist
theoretical writings in particular.15 The anti-essentialist trend in feminism aimed
at deconstructing all the a priori assumptions about the essence of woman, and
in particular the link between a female essence and natural biological facts that
are ostensibly objective.16
In the early 1990s, Judith Butler articulated a radical anti-essentialism and
proclaimed that, in the world constructed by language, discursive structures
provide the only access to objects and phenomena. Consequently, she argued,
the category of sex, even though perceived as primary and natural, is in fact
constructed by the cultural discourse about sex, that is, through gender; and that

12 Hauptman, Rereading the Rabbis, 77–110.

13 Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 242.
14 See: Rosen-Zvi, The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual; Ishay Rosen-Zvi, “The Rise and Fall of
Rabbinic Masculinity,” Jewish Studies Internet Journal 12 (2013): 1–22.
15 On this tendency, see Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism:
The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” Signs 13.3 (1988): 405–436; Charlotte Witt, “Anti-Es-
sentialism in Feminist Theory,” Philosophical Topics 23, no. 2 (1995): 321–344.
16 On the influence of post-structuralism on feminist theory, see Diana Fuss, Essentially
Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989); Alcoff, “Cultural Fem-
inism.”
262 Ronit Irshai

is what organizes the approach to the biological and data referred to as “sex.”17
Butler’s gender inversion and realization that gender, as an ideology and as a
meaningful social activity, is what constructs sex, significantly reinforced the
need to understand the modes in which gender operates and the ways it con-
stitutes reality. From this point on, research attention was increasingly directed
towards this category.
In Jewish Studies, Tirosh-Samuelson wrote that as feminism matured intel-
lectually, it became clear that what is at issue is not just ameliorating women’s
condition in every domain of life, but also the cultural expectations and social
roles defined for women and men.18 A gender-focused analysis reveals how the
categories of maleness and femaleness function in a culture, and thus can elu-
cidate the inherent inequality and injustice of gendered social practices.
As a result of the paradigm shift from critical feminist scholarship to gender-
focused feminist scholarship in the field of rabbinics, gender became the main
category of reference and the questions that interested scholars had to do with
identifying the moments, modes, and sites where gender identities are con-
stituted. For example, Fonrobert argued that an approach that takes gender as
an analytical category for the study of the rabbinic culture seeks to do more than
simply uncover the female presence; it looks at the ways the rabbinic culture
creates imagined gendered spaces, notably the beit midrash (house of study) and
the home, the marketplace and the synagogue.19 She asks how maleness and
femaleness are created in the context of the cardinal value of Torah study, for
example, or in other contexts. This approach may also analyze why the talmudic
literature fashions gender as it does. Asking “why” more than “what,” even
though the question cannot be answered with any precision, says Fonrobert, has
a liberating effect by virtue of the challenge to the ostensibly neutral absolutism
of gendered structures.20 Classic examples of this paradigm shift can be seen in
the work of Fonrobert, Baker, Rosen-Zvi, Labovitz, Satlow, and others.21

17 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990).
18 Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, “Feminism and Gender” in The Cambridge History of Jewish
Philosophy: The Modern Era, Vol. 2, ed. Martin Kavka, Zachary Braiterman, David Novak,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 154–189.
19 See Fonrobert and Ilan, “Feminist Interpretations,” 9. The example presented there re-
lates to the gendered image of the beit midrash. The research questions proposed are whether
it is imagined as exclusively male and, if so, what “male” means here; and whether there are
any challenges to this image. The second stage in this kind of analysis would ask why the beit
midrash is pictured as male. Is it for reasons internal to the rabbinic culture? Or was it in-
fluenced by the Jews’ status as a minority culture in the Roman and Sassanian worlds? Research
of this sort has a creative element, because it challenges the interpreter of the talmudic literature
to inquire into the meaning assigned to being a woman or man at this particular moment in
Jewish cultural history.
20 Fonrobert and Ilan, “Feminist Interpretations.”
21 Fonrobert’s study of the talmudic tractate Niddah exemplifies how the gynecological
 Feminist Research in Jewish Studies 263

Scholarship with a Feminist Sensibility

Starting in the 1990s, in the wake of the criticism of the feminist essentialism
that assigns “women” to a broad and uniform category and is not sufficiently
sensitive to the intersections of race, social class, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on,
feminist writing began to emphasis the intersectionality of marginal locations.22
This stance made it possible to expand feminist sensibilities to other domains
and to redirect the perspective to the excluded in general, the powerless who
occupy the margins of society. This perspective does not address women or men
specifically, but weighs social arrangements and, in the context that is relevant
here, religious or halakhic arrangements that are in the service of the hegemony
but can do damage to those on the margins. A good example is an article by Julia
Watts Belser, who looks from a feminist perspective at how the talmudic sages
related to persons with disabilities.23 She asserts that
While analysis of disability in Jewish thought has primarily focused on the limits that
disability places on men’s capacity to fulfil specific religious obligations, a feminist inter-
sectional analysis of disability discourse in rabbinic marriage law illuminates the deeply
gendered nature of disability.24

Belser combines a gender-focused feminist analysis with a critical feminist anal-

ysis of how the talmudic sages viewed disabilities. But her attention to persons
with disabilities stems from the intersectional turn in feminist theory, what
I have called “feminist sensibility,” to the excluded and the powerless.
Another example is my own research about the two levels of halakhic
decision-making. There I related to the phenomenon of differential decision-
making, meaning the fact that there are two strata in halakhah. On the one hand

and physiological knowledge found in the rabbis’ discussions of menstruation illuminates their
conception of gender. See Charlotte E. Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian
Reconstruction of Biblical Gender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Cynthia Baker
examined the construction of female gender identity in the gendered space (home, market-
place, alleyway, courtyard): Cynthia M. Baker, Rebuilding the House of Israel: Architectures of
Gender in Jewish Antiquity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Gail Labovitz (Marriage
and Metaphor) discussed the metaphors of marriage and how they construct gender. Satlow
focused, inter alia, on the constitution of maleness. See Michael Satlow, “‘They Abused Him like
a Woman’: Homoeroticism, Gender Blurring, and the Rabbis in Late Antiquity,” Journal of the
History of Sexuality (1994): 1–25. Ishay Rosen-Zvi’s work on the sotah and evil inclination dem-
onstrate gendered forms of sexuality and ways of controlling it. See Rosen-Zvi, The Mishnaic
Sotah Ritual; Ishay Rosen-Zvi, “Sexualizing the Evil Inclination: Rabbinic ‘Yetzer’ and Modern
Scholarship,” Journal of Jewish Studies 60.2 (2009): 264–281.
22 On this see, inter alia, Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality,
Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991):
1241–1299; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the
Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990).
23 Julia Watts Belser, “Brides and Blemishes: Queering Women’s Disability in Rabbinic
Marriage Law,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84.2 (2016): 401–429.
24 Watts Belser, “Brides and Blemishes,” 401.
264 Ronit Irshai

there are rulings intended for the public at large, which are known to all and
which generally sets strict standards. On the other hand there are rulings issued
to individuals, which are generally much more flexible and sensitive and may
not comply with the public norm, and for this reason are frequently concealed
from the public eye.25 My main claim is that whereas the gulf between public and
private decisions permits flexibility and the resolution of problems in concrete
situations, the selective concealment mechanism that accompanies it is not im-
perative and can actually worsen the quality of life of the weak, who believe they
are required to meet rigid halakhic standards that are imposed on them and have
no real ability to choose a different option (when they in fact exist), because of
their lack of access to Torah knowledge or to the power centers in general.

2. Critical Feminist Scholarship about Modern Halakhah

In recent decades, the study of modern halakhah from a feminist perspective

has been conducted under the decisive influence of the feminist criticism of the
patriarchy and misogyny alleged to be inherent to every religious system. In the
Jewish context, these insights gave rise to critical feminist scholarship about both
theology and halakhah. With regard to halakhah, most of the research effort was
invested in domains where the discrimination is immediate and blatant, such
as the fundamental inequality between women and men in the field of Torah
study and the exclusion of women from that key arena for the creation of Jewish
culture; in marriage and divorce, with the built-in asymmetry and the property
aspect of qiddushin and its implications for divorce, which perpetuate female
passivity and leaves a wife almost totally dependent on her husband’s free will;
women’s exemption from time-bound precepts, which means a contraction of
the religious practices in which women may engage, mainly those that take place
in the public and community space (such as participation in a prayer quorum
[minyan] and Torah reading); and their exclusion from all the symbolic means
linked to the covenant with God.26 The last two decades, with the turn towards
attention to the body and sexuality, have seen an increase in the study of the con-
structed female body – in the contexts of sexuality, modesty, menstrual impurity,
and fertility – as a “problematic” body that is not appropriate or is not “complete”
and therefore is not bound by the precepts, but also as a negative body or at the
very least as one that is described and experienced in a negative fashion and
consequently requires external supervision and regulation (by men, of course;
25 Ronit Irshai, “Public and Private Rulings in Jewish Law (Halakhah): Flexibility, Conceal-
ment and Feminist Jurisprudence,” Journal of Law, Religion and the State 3 (2014): 25–50.
26 For a summary of these critical trends, see Ronit Irshai and Tanya Zion Waldoks, “Is-
raeli Modern-Orthodox Feminism: Between Nomos and Narrative,” Mishpat U’mimshal 15.1–2
(2013): 233–327 (Hebrew).
 Feminist Research in Jewish Studies 265

although thanks to the new feminist awareness there has been some change in
that women have been ordained as “halakhic advisors” in this particular field, so
women can now consult them instead of male rabbis).27

Critical Feminist Study in the field of Rabbinics and Critical Feminist Study
of Modern Halakhah

Here we need to distinguish between the feminist scholarship that seeks to unveil
the patriarchy of the talmudic text and scholarship of the same category about
modern halakhah and the type of criticism derived from this. Criticism of the
patriarchalism of the talmudic literature and early halakhah may indeed seem to
be a trivial exercise, but indirectly it has contemporary significance because the
ancient and sanctified text is deemed relevant and essential for contemporary
halakhic rulings. Nevertheless, there are a number of significant differences
when it comes to modern halakhah. First of all, unlike research focused on the
talmudic era, critical feminist research is far from exhausting itself in the realm
of modern halakhah. Second, if the accusation of triviality has some basis for
feminist study of the talmudic text, this is not the case with regard to modern
halakhah. As egalitarian ideas filter into all realms of life, we might expect to
see the spirit of the age resonating in halakhic rulings; an analysis and under-
standing of the mechanisms and ideologies that maintain the non-egalitarian
ideas are called for when this is not the case. Alternatively, it is no less interesting
if the contrary picture emerges, because that uncovers halakhic mechanisms that
make it possible to overcome the patriarchalism of the ancient halakhic text and
modify its concepts.28

Gender-focused Feminist Criticism of Modern Halakhah

The paradigm shift in the study of the talmudic corpus expanded and mod-
ified the perspective of feminist scholarship and added new layers to the body
27 See, e. g., Tova Hartman, “Modesty and the Religious Male Gaze,” chap. 3 in Feminism
Encounters Traditional Judaism: Resistance and Accommodation (Waltham, MA: Brandeis Uni-
versity Press, 2007); Ronit Irshai, Fertility and Jewish Law: Feminist Perspectives on Orthodox
Responsa Literature, trans. Joel A. Linsider (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012);
Susan Weiss, “Under Cover: Demystification of Women’s Head Covering in Jewish Law,”
Nashim 17 (2009): 89–115; Tamar Ross, “Feminism’s Contribution to the Halakhic Discourse:
‘A Women’s Voice is Nakedness’ as a Test Case,” Halakhah, Meta-halakhah, and Philosophy, ed.
Avinoam Rosenak (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute and Magnes Press, 2011), 35–64 (Hebrew).
28 An illuminating example of the assimilation of the value of equality by halakhic decision-
making can be found in an article by Daniel Sperber, an Orthodox rabbi, who permits women to
be called to and read from the Torah under the umbrella of the principle of “human dignity” as
outweighing specific halakhic rules, See Daniel Sperber, “Congregational Dignity and Human
Dignity: Women and Public Torah Reading,” Edah Journal 3.2 (2003); at http://www.edah.org/
backend/journalarticle/3_2_sperber.pdf
266 Ronit Irshai

of knowledge about the sages and gender. Similarly, one might expect that
the paradigm shift in the study of modern halakhah, from critical feminist to
gender-focused, could expand its research perspective to include questions that
were not asked or were not asked enough under the previous paradigm. For all
that the critical scholarship was important and trailblazing, we can now propose
to expand it with regard to the horizon of gender-focused inquiry, which leads
to consideration of the manner in which male and female identities (and the
spectrum between them) are constituted. It can also propose new research
sensibilities that stem from the contribution by feminist theories to the under-
standing of the other and the marginal in general and the ways in which they can
challenge regnant hegemonic outlooks.
As noted, research of this sort would seek to understand the way in which
gender identities and their content are constituted. The classic loci for this
inquiry are halakhic issues related to the contemporary laws of modesty and
the construction of the female identity by the male gaze, which constitutes the
female body in ways that are chiefly sexual, but also the male identity that is
constructed by the exclusively sexual perspective ascribed to it. The manner of
the transition from the attitude that women are prohibited to study Torah to
one that favors or at least permits them to do so calls for an investigation of the
gender identities produced by the responsa written in this context. For example,
we can inquire about the basic gender assumptions that underlie the distinction
between “female” branches of study (aggadah, midrash, philosophy) as against
“male” branches (Talmud, halakhah), the study methods that derive from this,
and what gender identities they constitute. In another matter, we can inquire
about the fundamental gender assumptions that bar women from participating
in public religious practices, whereas men are obligated in them. What is the
gender meaning of the concept of holiness in these contexts and how is the
gender category shaped through it? As stated, to date the study of contemporary
halakhah has focused on the ways in which halakhah discriminates against
women, but without sufficient attention to the gender identities, both male and
female, that are implicit in these laws and regulations, and their multiple im-
plications for modern life.
Next I will briefly demonstrate how a consideration of the ways in which
male gender identities are constructed in Orthodox responsa regarding male
homosexuality can expand our knowledge about the tangencies and differences
between the halakhic attitude towards the male “nature” and the female “nature.”
By so doing they can help us understand the ways in which male and female
identities and the content with which they are endowed are created, and also
contribute to critical feminist scholarship that studies the differences in light of
egalitarian concepts. In other words, I will present halakhic writing about male
homosexuality as a question of gender and not as a question of sexual orientation.
I will study halakhic texts in which the decisors consider the question of sexual
 Feminist Research in Jewish Studies 267

orientation through the prism of gender – how the male identity is constructed
through attention to the issue of sexual orientation.

3. The Construction of Maleness in Contemporary Halakhic Attitudes

towards Homosexuals: A Gender-focused Perspective
and its Feminist Implications

Halakhic writing about male homosexuality began to emerge as the phenome-

non became more prominent in Reform and Conservative Judaism (the more
liberal wings). Those movements began dealing with it intensively in the 1980s
and 1990s. In general one can say that today they fully accept homosexuals into
the fold, including their leadership and rabbinate, although this did not happen
without processes of clarification, splits, and significant resistance.29 In what
follows, I will analyze (briefly and provisionally) the ways in which maleness is
constructed in Orthodox halakhah through the prism of homosexuality, while
trying to elucidate the contribution of the gender perspective to the study of
halakhah from the critical feminist point of view as well.

The Construction of Maleness in Halakhic Writing about Homosexuality

A look at the construction of the concept of maleness in halakhic writing on male

homosexuality reveals that since the 1970s there has been a significant change in
how decisors understand the phenomenon. The trend in present-day Orthodox
halakhic rulings is towards recognition of the possibility of a “male nature”
that is not sexually attracted to women, even while, given the explicit halakhic
prohibition, gay men are called to change or overcome their orientation.30 In
what follows I will try to understand the gender implications that can be derived
from this.
In 1976, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, who was the most important halakhic
decisor for the Orthodox world in North America in the period after the Second

29 For a survey of the developments in the Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox move-
ments, see Roberta Rosenthal Kwall, The Myth of the Cultural Jew: Culture and Law in Jewish
Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 157.
30 On the changes in the attitude to homosexuality in Orthodox halakhic writing, see:
Tamar Ross, “Halakhah as Event: The Halakhic Status of Homosexuals Today as a Test Case,” in
Halakhah as Event, ed. Avinoam Rosenak (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2016), 375–430 (Hebrew);
Ronit Irshai, “Homosexual Identity and Masculinity in Contemporary Ultra-Orthodox Jewish
Law (Halakhah),” in Oltre l’individualismo. Relazioni e relazionalità per ripensare l’identità, ed.
Lorella Congiunti, Giambattista Formica, and Ardian Ndreca (Vatican: Urbaniana University
Press, 2017), 399–418; Ronit Irshai, “Homosexuality and the ‘Aqedah Theology’: A Comparison
of Modern Orthodoxy and the Conservative Movement,” Journal of Jewish Ethics 4.1 (2018):
19–46.
268 Ronit Irshai

World War, wrote uncompromising and harsh words about those who violate the
prohibition on male homosexual intercourse:
But there is no natural desire for homosexual intercourse; any desire for it is merely a
deviation from the path of nature onto another path, and even the wrongdoers who do
not avoid sin and transgression do not go there, because this evil inclination is motivated
only by the fact that it is something forbidden and performed with flagrant intent. … But
with regard to the sin of homosexual intercourse, the wrongdoer who transgresses it has
no argument to make and excuse himself, because the craving for this sin is unnatural.31

Later he writes that he sees this prohibition as more serious than others regarding
sexual conduct. There is good reason why it is called an “abomination,” inas-
much as there is no natural urge for it (unlike other forms of prohibited sexual
activity, which may result from the natural sexual attraction between women and
men, albeit improper and forbidden in the particular case). From here it is a very
short path to the assumption that a person who engages in it does so because
precisely out of a desire to violate the prohibition – that is, in order to flaunt his
rejection of the divine commandments. Such a person, Rabbi Feinstein believes,
is loathsome and despicable. If he is married to a women and his homosexual
conduct comes to light, the marriage is annulled retroactively:
Such a husband who is obsessed by homosexual intercourse, which is the greatest and
most despicable abomination of all, and a disgrace for the entire family, and all the more
so it is the most contemptible for his wife if her husband prefers this loathsome form of
intercourse to intercourse with his wife. There is no doubt that the marriage was based on
misinformation, and it is clear to us that no woman would have agreed to marry such a
loathsome and despicable and contemptible man.32

How is it possible to understand the “male nature” according to Rabbi Feinstein?

His words explicitly target the sexual act and not sexual desire. On the surface,
in this he is the faithful heir of the talmudic sages, who, according to Boyarin
and Satlow, were interested only in the act itself and did not label those with
a different sexual orientation as deviant.33 At the same time, the assertion that
nature itself is utterly opposed to such an appetite (“there is no natural desire for
homosexual intercourse”) involves a rigid and essentialist definition of the con-
cept of male “nature,” by means of which he seeks to reject the idea that one male
can be sexually attracted to another male. According to this nature, maleness is
defined exclusively by sexual attraction to women. There is not and cannot be
a natural situation in which a man is attracted to another man. If a man does
feel an urge to engage in sexual activity with another man, it is not the result

31 Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, Responsa Iggerot Moshe, Orah hayyim 4, § 115 (Hebrew).
32 Feinstein, Even ha-Ezer 4, § 113 (Hebrew). ˙˙
33 See mainly Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Inven-
tion of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Satlow, “‘They Abused
Him like a Woman.’”
 Feminist Research in Jewish Studies 269

of physical attraction and certainly not of affection or love. It is not evidence of

what we would call today a homosexual identity that leads to a same-sex act.
On the contrary, because such a sexual act is contrary to nature it has absolutely
nothing to do with identity or emotions. Another implication of Rabbi Fein-
stein’s remarks about the “nature of maleness” is that a man is defined exclusively
as one who penetrates (and is not penetrated). A male homosexual is engaging
an a “female performance” that denies his “true” nature and is consequently an
abomination.
Rabbi Feinstein’s exegetical process expresses a complex position that on the
one hand remains faithful to the talmudic sages and the halakhic tradition that
referred chiefly to the forbidden sexual act, but on the other hand fashions a
negative attitude towards this act by defining sexual attraction between men and
women as natural and consequently normal, thereby creating the heterosexual
identity. He takes a critical step that – if we accept the position of Satlow and
Boyarin – is a radical departure in Jewish tradition and leads to the constitution
of a homosexual identity that is “unnatural.” When certain sexual desires are ex-
cluded from the province of nature, the “unnatural” is constructed as abnormal,
deviant, and “other.”
Four decades have passed since Rabbi Feinstein wrote this responsum, during
which the conspiracy of silence about the topic in Orthodox society has started
to unravel. As more and more religious men have come out of the closet while
declaring their desire to remain faithful to halakhah, homosexuality has become
one of the most common topics in halakhic writing.
Now I will offer an analysis, from a gender perspective, of the construction of
the male identity in two polar positions currently found in the religious discourse
in Israel. One is that of Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, one of the leading rabbis among
the religious settler community known for referring religious homosexuals for
“conversion therapy.” The other is Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, (a leading liberal Or-
thodox rabbi in Israel) who takes a much more moderate stand.
Rabbi Aviner has written as follows:
Sometimes a boy or teenager or adult feels that he has a strong attraction specifically to
men and is filled with anxiety and concern: Is it possible to escape this? Of course, we are
asking about the orientation itself, and not the behavior. For this behavior is forbidden by
the Master of the Universe in one of stringent of the strict prohibitions in the Torah, and
there is no room for any legitimacy for it from any side or angle. If the Master of the Uni-
verse forbade, that means it is possible [to overcome or change it]. … It is not always easy,
and certainly not immediate. Sometimes the path is long, and our books on morality dis-
cuss it at length … But you have to know: it is possible to change and end the inclination
to a man and arrive at natural attraction to a woman and to marry, establish a family, and
live a full and contented married life.34

34 See “Rabbi Aviner to Homosexuals: This is How to Escape it,” Ynet (May 15, 2008) https://
goo.gl/oyNK8x (Hebrew).
270 Ronit Irshai

Later he adds:
This is the point he has to deal with: his self-image of his manliness. Sometimes it may
derive from the fact that he felt that his father was controlling and harsh to his mother,
and the child internalized that it wasn’t good to be a father, because a father is bad; and
sometimes it may be a result of too strong an identification with a dominant and strong
mother, or, conversely, one who is weak and put-upon; sometimes it comes from feeling
different in childhood or a feeling of being different in society; and there are other reasons
as well. In any case, his situation is that he does not feel like a man among men and as an
equal among equals.35

Rabbi Aviner, unlike Rabbi Feinstein, recognizes the existence of a homosexual

orientation, but does not allow that it is natural. On the contrary, he states
explicitly that the natural attraction is to marry a women and father children.
The attraction that a homosexual feels towards men is the result of a problem-
atic social construction (a controlling father, a dominant mother, etc.). Hence
he draws the logical conclusion: if homosexuality is socially constructed and
not an immutable essence, it can be modified. From a gender perspective one
can say that Rabbi Aviner has a rigid and essentialist conception of the male
nature, because he believes that the existence of a “homosexual nature” flies
squarely in the face of the Torah. That is, he understands the prohibition of male
homosexual intercourse as derived from the assertion about a normative male
nature that includes not only the sexual act but also the sexual orientation (that
is, homoerotic feelings or desires).
Rabbi Aviner is not the only who holds this position. In 1981, Rabbi J. David
Bleich, one of the heads of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at
Yeshiva University in New York, wrote as follows:
One should be aware of the distinction between homosexuality and homosexual conduct.
Some individuals are sexually attracted to members of their own sex … This deeply felt
attraction may or may not find expression in overt sexual activity. Persons afflicted in this
manner are homosexuals even if they remain celibate … There is indeed strong reason
to believe that Judaism regards homosexuality (as distinct from homosexual conduct) as
pathological. If homosexuality is an aberration, then, of course, a cure must be attempt-
ed … Thus, Jewish teaching would require that the homosexual seek psychiatric help
designed to overcome this tendency …36

According to Rabbi Bleich, not only does Judaism ban sexual acts between two
men; it also sees the homosexual identity, that is, homoerotic attraction, as an

35 “Rabbi Aviner to Homosexuals.”

36 J. David Bleich, Judaism and Healing: Halakhic Perspectives (New York: Ktav, 1981), 69–
73. The Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary is the flagship rabbinical school of Modern
Orthodoxy in the United States. It is affiliated with Yeshiva University, which offers academic
degrees in many fields. One of its leaders was Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik. Despite its broad
academic horizons, it frequently takes extremely conservative stands on the gender issues that
concern the religious world in the last generation.
 Feminist Research in Jewish Studies 271

aberration to be cured. The gender implication of this position emphasizes the

most significant element related to the construction of maleness: sexual attrac-
tion to women. The maleness of a man who is not attracted to women is doubtful
and must be repaired.
In contrast to these positions is that of Rabbi Cherlow, who clearly distin-
guishes the call to change one’s nature (or orientation) from that to refrain from
violating the Torah prohibition. In response to a questioner who took a position
very close to that of Rabbi Aviner, he wrote as follows:
You also state that God does not decree for a person a situation that he cannot deal with,
and infer from this that [the homosexual orientation] can be changed. This conclusion is
not logical and one does not follow from the other. Does the divine precept “You shall not
commit adultery” mean that a person can change his nature and character and not have
any desire for illicit relationships? Is this true of any precept whatsoever? What you can
say is that God enjoined us to withstand this trial, and this is what we say all the time. But
your assumption that it is possible to change one’s nature, and not only that but also your
call for a “profound self-examination,” has no basis.
You assume that if a person has a strong desire to escape this orientation and has the
desire and inclination for holiness and purity, and submits himself to the will of God – he
can escape this orientation. On the contrary, prove what you say, and then all the problems
will be resolved. However, you do not have a single proof for this – not from the Torah and
not from the real world. If so, what is the nature of your remarks?37

The implication is that Rabbi Cherlow entertains a flexible rather than es-
sentialist concept of “nature.” He does not understand the prohibition of male
homosexual intercourse as demonstrating that the male nature is to be attracted
to women only. For him “nature” is not defined as a fixed and a priori essence.
The “male nature” can be sexually attracted to men without detracting from
its maleness. At the same time, he holds that it is possible to refrain from the
sexual act in order to comply with the divine injunction. If we accept Boyarin’s
and Satlow’s position that the talmudic sages were concerned exclusively with
the prohibition and not with the “nature” ostensibly derived from it, Rabbi
Cherlow’s position is close to that. The difference between the call to change
one’s orientation and that to overcome the desire is significant, in the sense that
those who wish to change their orientation are in effect fixing in stone a clear
and distinct male nature that is sexually attracted only to women, whereas those
who wish to avoid giving in to it do not create an essentialist male gender that
can include only a heteronormal male identity. Of course, the very idea that a
person should overcome his orientation does not solve the problem of observant
homosexuals, because they are left with no outlet for sexual gratification. But the
gender analysis proposed here is intended mainly to deal with the gender-related
implications of the way in which male identity is fashioned, rather than with
37See “Rabbi Cherlow, the ‘Perhaps’ that you and those like you advance is dangerous,”
Kamokha: Orthodox Religious Homosexuals (Dec. 9, 2015) https://goo.gl/pFFWcj (Hebrew).
272 Ronit Irshai

the mechanisms of halakhic development and ways of dealing with the current
reality. All the same, the gender-focused analysis does highlight one interesting
point: when the construction of identity is more essentialist, it becomes more
difficult to find pragmatic halakhic solutions. As I will suggest, this applies to
women as well.
What are the gender implications of the differences among Rabbis Aviner,
Bleich, and Cherlow? How can a gender-focused analysis of halakhic responsa
about homosexuality contribute to critical feminist scholarship?
I believe that the knowledge about gender produced by gender-focused
feminist scholarship can serve as the basis for filling in and expanding critical
feminist studies. The gender identities or essences constituted by the halakhic
responsa provide extensive matter for critical feminist inquiries, especially if
there is a corresponding process regarding the manner in which gender iden-
tities, both male and female, are constituted. It is interesting to note that Rabbi
Aviner, faithful to his essentialist position, endows women too with a fixed and
clear nature, a nature that defines the horizons of their activity and participation
in both religious and secular life. This is not the place for a broad look at how
the female identity is constructed in Rabbi Aviner’s thought. Suffice it to note
that in many places he speaks of the female character and behavior as marked by
emotion, intuition, passivity, and so on.38 If we juxtapose the ways in which he
constructs the female and male identities we see the basic essentialism of both.
This essentialism is the thread running through his thought, about men and
women alike. Consider this passage from his book The King’s Daughter:
If so, men have the power of the intellect and women have the power of the emotions, and
this has many results. The intellect is fixed, whereas the emotions fluctuate. … Because the
power of a woman’s emotional soul is of varying intensity, it is impossible to impose on
her the obligation of the time-bound precepts. … From this principle we arrive at another
distinction: in general women have no place in public functions.39

And another example, in which Aviner is speaking in the voice of a young Or-
thodox woman:
Now I am a class teacher. … I love my work and am happy with it. But the moment my
first infant is born, with God’s help, I will stop. I will belong only to my children. If I have
to work in order to make a living, I will do so on a minimal level. Of course, I will work
faithfully, but only to the extent required, and also if I feel I need to clear my mind a little.
Motherhood is both a professorship and holy work. It is a colossal task. … My kingdom is
my home. I will be a professor for my home.40

38 See in particular Shlomo Aviner: Bat Melekh: Women in Judaism (Bet El: Sifriyat Havah,
2005) (Hebrew).
39 Aviner, Bat Melekh, 85–87.
40 This is an excerpt from an article he wrote in memory of Hannah Tau, the wife of Rabbi
Zvi Tau. See https://goo.gl/5Sz3nr (Hebrew). This kind of essentialism is typical of National-Ul-
 Feminist Research in Jewish Studies 273

In possession of the full gender picture about the manner in which male
and female identities are constituted, critical feminist scholarship stands on a
firmer foundation when it examines how halakhah excludes women and dis-
criminates against them. It is now confronted by broader questions. Are men
regimented in a way similar to women? Does the regimentation of men leave
them in positions of power in religious, public, and ritual domains – and if so,
how? Is the regimentation of the female body similar to that of the male body?
How is the exclusion of women from the public arena related to the way in which
the male nature is constructed? Is there a strong correlation between halakhah’s
essentialist attitude towards women and its essentialist attitude towards men? If
so, what does it mean? And so on.
As stated, the present article sought to broaden the perspective of research
into modern halakhah to include questions of the construction of gender, and
thereby to propose new questions that a gender-focused feminist analysis of this
sort should raise, such as its possible contribution to critical feminist scholarship
as well. I have tried to ask, more than to answer, how gender-focused feminist
scholarship that investigates the constitution of gender identities can intersect
with critical feminist scholarship and enrich the theoretical platform on which
the criticism is based. However, I do not want to suggest that a gender-focused
feminist analysis is restricted or can contribute only to critical feminist scholar-
ship. Obviously, it has a strong connection to research with feminist sensibilities,
since the ways gender is constructed in other marginalized groups in halakhah,
can expand feminist critique and demonstrate the relations not only between
women and male hegemony but with other groups as well. But this kind of
analysis goes beyond the scope of this article and deserve a separate treatment.

Conclusion

In this article I have tried to put some order into what is known as feminist schol-
arship within Jewish studies and shown the difference between critical feminist
investigation in rabbinics and critical feminist research of modern halakhah. By
analyzing the concept of maleness in contemporary halakhic responsa about
male homosexuality and comparing them to essentialist conceptions of women,
I have demonstrated how the gender-focused feminist scholarship of modern
halakhah can intersect with feminist criticism.
A look at the “male nature” that emerges from the halakhic attitude towards
male homosexuality reveals that Rabbi Feinstein, like Rabbi Aviner, constructs
the male nature as that which is attracted to women. The fact that in the real

traorthodox thought, which draws mainly on the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen
Kook and his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook. See Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah.
274 Ronit Irshai

world there are men who do not fall into this category makes no difference to
them. According to Rabbi Feinstein, such individuals’ sexual activity is not the
outcome of a different nature or even of a nature that has been damaged by a
problematic social construction. These men simply want to try out different
forms of sex and violate Torah prohibitions. In other words, Rabbi Feinstein con-
stitutes the male nature in an essentialist and rigid manner. In doing so he per-
forms what Judith Butler refers to as a gender act, as a discursive means by which
“natural sex” is created. When certain sexual acts are excluded from the domain
of nature, the “unnatural” is constructed as abnormal, deviant and “other.”
Rabbi Aviner, several decades later, has encountered men (some of whom
wish to continue to follow the dictates of halakhah) who confess to homoerotic
feelings and a sexual attraction to men. But he still believes that the nature of
maleness is fixed and that any flaws in the natural situation (caused by problem-
atic social constructions) can be modified and repaired. A similar essentialism
can be found in Rabbi Aviner’s writing about women. He is one of the most
prominent leaders of the anti-feminist line, which holds that in Judaism women
are different but equal and that their essential difference (biological and meta-
physical) does not diminish their stature but assigns them a different place in the
religious world and the family.
By contrast, Rabbi Cherlow upholds a more flexible concept of male nature,
one that recognizes the possibility of sexual attraction between men. This
position does not countenance homosexual activity, but its flexible essentialism
makes it possible to recognize the normality of homoerotic feelings and does not
label homosexuals as abnormal or deviant from the male nature. In this sense it
does not lead to homophobia. Not surprisingly, Rabbi Cherlow’s non-essentialist
approach to men is compatible with his view of religious feminism, which he
does not reject out of hand.41
Thus, a gender-focused analysis is not necessarily interested in the halakhic
outcome of particular responsa, or with whether they are lenient or stringent.
By asking questions about the construction of identity or “nature,” it opens the
door to comparison with the positions of the talmudic sages and expands the
horizons of the inquiry into how halakhah functions today to create a discourse
about gender, with all its social implications. Nevertheless, the gender-focused
analysis can enrich critical feminist scholarship, because the discovery of a strong
correlation between an essentialist view of both men and women would mandate
broader and deeper study of the matter. Critical scholarship could continue from
this point and look at the relationship between male and female gender identities
and at the ways they function in modern halakhah.

41 See Yuval Cherlow, Bein Mishkan La᾽egel: Hithadshut Datit Mul Reforma Ve-azivat
˙ Renewal as Opposed to Reform and
Hashem (Between Tabernacle and Golden Calf: Religious
Abandoning God) (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 2000) (Hebrew).
 Feminist Research in Jewish Studies 275

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III. Historiography
 Re-Visioning “Christian” Beginnings
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

In a wide-ranging article in the Review of Biblical Literature entitled “The End

of Christian Origins? Where to Turn at the Intersection of Subjectivity and His-
torical Craft,”1 Hal Taussig has summarized the past thirty years of scholarship
in the field, critiqued the “master narrative,” assessed the status of scholarship
on Early Christianity and elaborated the difficult work of writing the history
of Christian origins. I want to focus on his discussion in order to underscore
the contribution of the work of Karen King to the study of Early Christian his-
toriography in a feminist key.

The End of Christian Origins?

Taussig’s magisterial report on the state of the discipline is wide-ranging, insofar

as he carefully and critically reviews not only the work of leading male scholars –
e. g., Burton Mack, Jonathan Smith, Bart Ehrman, N. T. Wright – but also The
Westar Seminar on Christian Origins, Cameron and Miller’s edited SBL seminar
volumes, and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
Taussig focuses on the challenges that attend the epistemology of studying
early Christian origins, since this study has been haunted by unconscious Chris-
tian prejudices, with particular attention to the last three decades. Hence, he
emphasizes the epistemological importance of scholars identifying the social-
religious location of their work, stressing that scholars need to “own the ways
their own Christian involvement inhibits, inspires, complicates, undermines,
simplifies, and clarifies their study of Christian origins.” Taussig does so not
because he finds “confession of Christian subjectivity a governing scholarly value
in itself ” and is fully aware that “Christian confessionalism” has often led to “a
narrowing scholarly perspective.” Rather, he “seeks to shed light on the cultural
and subliminal (Christian) influences in the work of each scholar.”2
In so doing, Taussig attempts to focus on three epistemological issues:

1 Hal Taussig, “The End of Christian Origins? Where to Turn at the Intersection of Sub-
jectivity and Historical Craft,” RBL 13 (2011): 1–45.
2 Taussig, “End of Christian Origins?,” 3.
280 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

1. The ways Christians project their faith onto the study of Christian origins;
2. The mythical and not historical character of the study of origins;
3. Appeals to objective knowledge about Christian origins on the basis of either
scientific investigations or religious revelation.3
After having summarized, appreciated, and assessed each of the scholarly “orig-
ins” projects, Taussig discusses the “complexities of epistemology” and concludes
with a reflection on the future of the “Christian origins” research project.
Taussig’s work is exceptional in the field, insofar as it recognizes and dis-
cusses the significance of wo/men4 scholars’ path-breaking contributions to the
field, singling out Judith Lieu, Karen King, and myself as having made signif-
icant contributions to Early Christian Studies. He introduces his explorations
with an epigram by Judith Lieu, which articulates his evaluation of the field and
his concluding reflection on the vexing character of conceptualizing Christian
origins:
We can no longer confidently plot the growth of “Christian” ministry, doctrine or practice,
as if in so doing we were telling the story of the origins of Christianity … in our earliest
sources. Both “Judaism” and “Christianity” have come to elude our conceptual grasp; we
feel sure that they are there. … Yet when we try to describe, when we seek to draw the
boundaries which will define our subject for us, we lack the tools, both conceptual and
material.5

The significance of Lieu’s work consists in its marking of a decisive shift in

epistemology from the analysis of origins to an analysis of identity in studies of
early Christianity. For Lieu, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity
has become the decisive epistemological focus. Karen King’s work, in turn, is
concerned with the construction of Christian identity in terms of orthodoxy
and heresy and takes it as settled that Christian beginnings are emerging in the
second to fourth centuries CE.6

3 Taussig, “End of Christian Origins?,” 29.

4 By writing wo/men in a broken form, I seek to problematize not only the category of
wo/man but also to indicate that wo/men are not a unitary social group but fragmented by
structures of race, class, ethnicity, religion, heterosexuality, colonialism and age. I have done so
because I do not think that feminists can relinquish the analytic category “wo/man” entirely and
replace it with the analytic category of gender if we do not want to marginalize and erase the
presence of wo/men in and through our own feminist discourses. Finally, I use this way of sig-
nification in order to include subordinated men among those wo/men struggling for liberation.
For the problematic meaning of the term woman/women, see Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?”:
Feminism and the Category of Women in History (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990).
5 Judith Lieu, Neither Jew Nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity (New York: T&T
Clark, 2002), 227.
6 Taussig, “End of Christian Origins?,” 21.
 Re-Visioning “Christian” Beginnings 281

Taussig points out that my work stands out because it is explicitly theological,7
pointing to the subtitle of In Memory of Her, which reads: A Feminist8 Theological
Reconstruction of Christian Origins, focusing on my claiming of “a Christian
perspective for the work itself.” He observes, “Schüssler Fiorenza is not in the
least embarrassed about her role as a Christian theologian interested in the ques-
tions of Christian origins” and correctly sees that this hermeneutical ownership
“allows her entire project to have a self-conscious critical perspective that both
interprets and critiques other Christian theological and creedal positions.”9 The
qualification of my position as “theological and creedal” indicates Taussig’s un-
derstanding of the*logy10 as systematic or dogmatic the*logy, an understanding
that I don’t share.
Such a reading of my work in terms of systematic the*logy is an American mis-
reading that understands the*ology in a narrow sense as systematic or dogmatic
theology,11 whereas I understand my work as the*logical in a broader German
institutional sense, wherein the word refers to the whole range of the*logical
disciplines, inclusive of N*T and Early Christian Studies.
Moreover, Taussig’s reading of the sub-title of In Memory of Her seems to
overlook that I was not concerned with the problem of “Christian origins” as
distinct from Judaism, but sought to understand Christian beginnings within
Judaism.12 The book is not concerned with Christian origins sui generis, but
7 Taussig, “End of Christian Origins?,” 30.
8 Since the word “feminist” still evokes in many readers a complex array of emotions, neg-
ative reactions, and prejudices, and also a host of different understandings, it is necessary to
define it. My preferred definition of feminism is expressed by a well-known bumper sticker,
which offers the following tongue-in-cheek assertion: “feminism is the radical notion that wo/
men are people” (ascribed to Chris Kramarae and Paula Treichler). This definition accentuates
that feminism is a radical concept and at the same time ironically underscores that at the
beginning of the twenty-first century, feminism should be a common-sense notion. It alludes
to the democratic assertion “We, the people” and positions feminism within radical democratic
discourses, which argue for the rights of all the people who are wo/men. It evokes memories of
struggles for equal citizenship and decision-making powers in society and religion. According
to this political definition of feminism, men can advocate feminism just as wo/men can be anti-
feminist. In my understanding, feminism is not just concerned with gender but also with race,
class, and imperialism. It is concerned with kyriarchally – i. e., emperor, lord, master, father, elite
male-determined power relations of domination and their inscriptions in Scriptures, histories,
and institutional discourses.
9 Taussig, “End of Christian Origins?,” 31.
10 In order to indicate the brokenness and inadequacy of human language to name the
divine, I have switched in my book Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in
Feminist Christology from the orthodox Jewish writing of G-d, which I had adopted in But She
Said and Discipleship of Equals, to this spelling of G*d, which seeks to avoid the conservative
malestream association that the writing of G-d has for Jewish feminists. Since the*logy means
speaking about G*d or G*d-talk, I write it in the same way.
11 Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “Theological and Religious Studies: The Contest of the Fac-
ulties,” in Shifting Boundaries: Contextual Approaches to the Structure of Theological Education,
ed. Barbara G. Wheeler and Edward Farley (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1991), 120.
12 Cynthia Baker, “From Every Nation under Heaven,” in Prejudice and Christian Begin-
282 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

with “Christian” beginnings as a Jewish messianic (liberation) movement, prac-

ticing a discipleship of equals, a movement of Jewish wo/men. He also overlooks
that my work is not concerned with Christian identity, but with envisioning a
movement with a the*logical – ethical vision that was “Jewish” and had deep
“Jewish” roots. In Memory of Her is not concerned with the problem of how to
distinguish Christian roots from Judaism but seeks to articulate such Jewish
feminist roots. The Jesus- and Christ/Messiah movements were Jewish liberation
movements. Finally, the discussion of Christian origins needs to take note not
only of the discussion of historical method but also of historical interpretation
and hermeneutics, a discussion which is often missing in Early Christian Studies,
Hence, I attempted to articulate the feminist hermeneutic undergirding of In
Memory of Her for the first time in my article, “Feminist Theology as a Critical
Theology of Liberation,” which was published in 1975.13
This feminist hermeneutics was inspired by feminist liberation movements
and emerging feminist theory and historiography. Already in 1971, the feminist
poet Adrienne Rich was reflecting on the importance of the newly emerging wo/
men’s liberation movement for historical consciousness. In her article, “When
the Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” Rich pointed out that the work of re-
interpreting texts and re-writing history is an act of survival:
The sleepwalkers are coming awake, and for the first time the awakening has a collective
reality; it is no longer such a lonely thing to open one’s eyes.
Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text
from a new critical direction – is for wo/men more than a chapter in cultural history: it is
an act of survival. … We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than
we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.14

Feminist history writing is not so much an act of passing on a tradition as it is an

act of “interruption” and of “re-vision.”
In the past fifty years, feminist scholars have elaborated how, in the interest of
national identity formations, the practice of historiography has been shaped by
gender, race, class and colonialist interests.15 Malestream16 historical scholarship
has prioritized men’s history over wo/men’s, white history over the history of

nings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies, ed. Laura Nasrallah
and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 79–100.
13 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Feminist Theology as a Critical Theology of Liberation,”
TS 36 (1975): 605–626.
14 Reprinted in Adrienne Rich et al., Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose, Re-
views, and Criticism, A Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 167–168.
15 See Laura Nasrallah and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, eds., Prejudice and Christian
Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress Press, 2009).
16 I use the expression “malestream” – which, to my knowledge, was coined by the feminist
sociologist Dorothy Smith – not as a negative label but as a descriptive term since scholarship
and Christian tradition have been articulated by elite educated men.
 Re-Visioning “Christian” Beginnings 283

people of color, the political history of Western domination over the history of
struggles against it.17 Thus malestream historiography has produced scientific
historical “facts” in the interest of domination that exclude wo/men. Feminist
historians of early Christianity, in turn, have argued that the story of Christian
beginnings must be rewritten not just as the story of elite Western men, but also
as the story of wo/men from all walks of life and religious persuasions, of wo/
men who have made history. Unfortunately, Taussig’s review of Christian origins
does not critically reflect on this feminist category discussion18 that has shaped
feminist work on Early Christian beginnings.

Memory and History

When conceptualizing In Memory of Her, I sought to write a feminist re-vision

of Christian beginnings as an emancipatory Jewish movement. In Memory of
Her begins with a critical hermeneutical, textual linguistic, and epistemological
discussion of how a feminist re-telling of Christian origins can be accomplished.
My favored metaphor for history writing is not that of archeology (Foucault)
but that of making a quilt.19 A similar metaphor to that of the quilt is that of the
mosaic. To fashion a mosaic, artists gather all the little stones of information and
put them together into a different design in order to create a new picture.
When I set out to develop the reconstructive model shaping the narrative
of In Memory of Her, I did not start with the goal of producing an objectivist
empiricist description of what actually happened. Nor did I want to prove that
Jesus himself was egalitarian and without bias. Rather, I wanted to show that
the historiography of early Christian beginnings participates in the theoretical-
historical discourses of domination that have been produced by contemporary
scholarship. Consequently, I did not set out to prove that malestream early Chris-
tian historiography was factually wrong, but rather that it was wrong-headed
because its kyriocentric frameworks and positivist empiricist rhetoric did not
take the agency of wo/men into account.

17 For a feminist account of the development of scientific history as a discipline, see Bonnie
G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1998); Uta C. Schmidt, Vom Rand zur Mitte. Aspekte einer feministischen
Perspektive in der Geschichtswissenschaft (Zürich; Dortmund: eFeF‑Verlag, 1994). For antiquity,
see the excellent collection by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin, eds., Feminist Theory
and the Classics (New York: Routledge, 1993).
18 For the importance of category discussion, see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Between
Movement and Academy: Feminist Biblical Studies in the Twentieth Century,” in Feminist
Biblical Studies in the Twentieth Century: Scholarship and Movement, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler
Fiorenza, The Bible and Women 9.1 (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2014), 1–20.
19 See my collection of essays, Empowering Memory and Movement. Thinking and Working
Across Borders (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014), 339–350.
284 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

Compelled by the feminist critique of androcentric language and historiog-

raphy, I set out to show that the early Christian story could be told – and must be
told – otherwise. My question was not “did it actually happen?” or “what do we
know about wo/men in Early Christianity?” but “do we still have sufficient infor-
mation and source texts to tell the story of the movement carrying Jesus’ name
otherwise,” envisioning it as that of a “discipleship of equals”? My search was
not for unique and unblemished Christian origins, but rather for the possibility
of telling the early Christian story from a new perspective. This task, I argued,
involves not so much discovering new sources as it is rereading the available
sources in a different key.20
Thus, my work elaborated early on that a feminist reconstruction of Chris-
tian beginnings21 must critically investigate androcentric (or, more precisely,
kyriocentric – that is, emperor, lord, slave-master, father, elite male centric)
language and texts.22 It also has to scrutinize the positivist assumptions of his-
torical, sociological, and theological biblical scholarship contained within the
scientific models of reconstruction. Early Christian history, I have argued, must
be written as the memory of the struggles between those who sought to envision
and practice a “discipleship of equals,” on the one hand, and those who advo-
cated the kyriarchal order on the other, between those who sought to realize
the “ekklēsia of wo/men” and those who championed church patterned after the
model of the kyriarchally organized imperial household, which was stratified by
gender, slavery, and status. Such a kyriarchal household structure was seen as the
foundation of the empire, as a part of the “natural order” of the universe, and
believed to be divinely ordained. Consequently, “Christian Origins” discourses
must be careful not to position themselves in the spaces of domination but in the
critical alternative spaces of emancipation.23
The story of early Christian beginnings must be rewritten not only in Memory
of Him but also in Memory of Her. Like all subsequent history, Early “Christian”
history and its Jewish beginnings are best understood as a remembered past or
interpretive remembrance. In order to understand early Jewish/Christian begin-
nings as a feminist memory, I have argued that it is methodologically necessary
20 See, e. g., Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Recon-
struction of Christian Origins, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1994), xx.
21 I had originally formulated the sub-title of In Memory of Her as A Reconstruction of
Feminist Theological Beginnings but was persuaded by the editors to use “Origins” instead, a
change which implicated the book in the Foucaultian inspired “Christian Origins” discussion.
See Schüssler Fiorenza, Empowering Memory and Movement, 315–338.
22 See my early article, “The Study of Women in Early Christianity: Some Methodological
Reflections,” in Critical History and Biblical Faith: New Testament Perspectives, ed. Thomas
J. Ryan (Villanova: The College Theology Society, 1979), 30–58.
23 See Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Re-Visioning Christian Origins: In Memory of Her
Revisited,” in Christian Origins: Worship, Belief, and Society: The Milltown Institute and the Irish
Biblical Association Millennium Conference, ed. Kieran J. O’Mahony, JSNTSup 241 (London;
New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003), 225–250.
 Re-Visioning “Christian” Beginnings 285

to deconstruct the production of malestream canonical tradition and authority

in a hermeneutics of suspicion, to problematize androcentric/kyriocentric lan-
guage and text, and to construct heuristic reconstructive models that can retell
the early Christian story as the remembered past of both wo/men and men.
The discovery of cultural memory theory24 in Early Christian Studies25 has
confirmed and clarified my approach, albeit, as usual, those who hail this new
field of studies do not recognize such prior feminist work.26 When writing In
Memory of Her, which appeared in 1983, critical feminist historical work was
available; however, I was not familiar with cultural memory-theory but only with
critical. Memory theory as based on the work of Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945)
was revived as well as modified by Aleida and Jan Assmann, whose first writings
also appeared in 1983.27
But whereas Assmann sees his work in line with “Hans-Georg Gadamer’s for-
mula of the ‘ontological turn in hermeneutics’ as ‘ontological turn in tradition,”28
I worked with feminist historical theory and the political the*logy of Johann
Baptist Metz, who in turn was inspired by Walter Benjamin and the critical theory
of the Frankfurt School.29 However, these theoreticians did not understand “that
without the liberation of women, human liberation cannot achieve even the status
of an utopian dream.”30 Political and cultural memory must recognize the reality
of wo/men and remember not only the historical suffering and oppression of
wo/men but also their agency and leadership in the early Christian movements.
Halbwachs’s theory of social memory, rather than the cultural hermeneu-
tics of Assmann, seems to have greater affinity to such a reconstructive goal.
Halbwachs’s theory is succinctly summarized by Werner H. Kelber as follows:
24 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Scripture as Monument and Memory: Its Abuses and Uses,”
in Monument and Memory, ed. Jonna Bornemark, Mattias Martinson, and Jayne Svenungsson,
Nordic Studies in Theology/Nordische Studien Zur Theologie (Zürich: Lit, 2014), 145–162.
25 See, e. g., Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher, eds., Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past
in Early Christianity, SemeiaSt 52 (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005). It is inter-
esting that the editors do not explicitly focus on the ideological uses of the past in Early Christian
Studies, although they rightly deconstruct especially the methods of source and form criticism
and question the understanding of “tradition” historical critical studies. See especially Alan
Kirk’s introduction, “Social and Cultural Memory,” and the contribution of Werner H. Kelber,
“The Works of Memory: Christian Origins as MnemoHistory – A Response,” 221–248.
26 For the interest in memory theory and analysis, see the volume 28.1 (2002) of Signs on
“Gender and Cultural Memory,” which is focused, however, on contemporary history and not
on the ancient past.
27 See Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, and Christof Hardmeier, eds., Schrift und Gedächtnis:
Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation (München: Fink, 1983).
28 Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2006), ix.
29 See Marsha Aileen Hewitt, “Dialectic of Hope: The Feminist Liberation Theology of
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza as a Feminist Critical Theory,” in Toward a New Heaven and a New
Earth, ed. Fernando F. Segovia (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 2003), 429–443.
30 Marsha Aileen Hewitt, Critical Theory of Religion: A Feminist Analysis (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress Press, 1995), 170.
286 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

It remains the significant intellectual accomplishment of Halbwachs to have (re)dis-

covered the past as remembered past and to have defined it as a social construction that
consolidates the symbolic and historic group identity within the social framework (cadres
sociaux) of the present.31

The past is never discovered but always reconstructed. The memory theory of
Halbwachs seeks to dynamically link the present and the past with the future.
Whereas the social framework of the present shapes the remembered past, “the
past itself constellated by the work of social memory, provides the framework for
cognition, organization, and interpretation of the experiences of the present.”32
Hence the remembered past always seeks to provide traditions, models, and
visions for living communities today and in the future.
If memory shapes individual and collective identity, then it is important to
scrutinize the reconstructive models and images that scholars use to tell the story
of the remembered past. Historical objectivity does not consist in “pure” facts or
data but in the dynamic interrelation between the information gleaned from the
source and the unifying vision of the interpreter. Hence, for their “intellectual
re-creation”33 of the remembered past, scholars need to articulate theoretical
models and heuristic frameworks that open up the past for the present and the
future.
Such models and frameworks need to be tested out not only as to how much
they can make visible wo/men as historical actors, but also as to how much they
are able to transform kyriarchally defined collective memory. Only the presump-
tion of slave and freeborn, rich and poor, Jewish, Greek, Asian, or Roman wo/
men’s historical and theological agency, I have argued, will allow us to read the
slippages, ambiguities, gaps, and silences of androcentric – i. e., grammatically
masculine – texts,34 not simply as properties of language and text but as the in-
scribed symptoms of historical struggles.35

31 Kelber, “Works of Memory,” 223.

32 Kirk, “Social and Cultural Memory,” 15.
33 Gordon Leff, History and Social Theory (New York: Doubleday, 1971).
34 Dennis Baron, Grammar and Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Robert
H. Robins, A Short History of Linguistics (London: Longmans, 1979); Casey Miller and Kate
Swift, Words and Women: New Language in New Times (Doubleday: Anchor Books, 1977);
Gloria A. Marshall, “Racial Classifications. Popular and Scientific,” in The “Racial” Economy of
Science: Toward a Democratic Future, ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press), 116–127; for a comparison of sexist and racist language. see also the contributions in
Mary Vetterling-Braggin, ed., Sexist Language: A Modern Philosophical Analysis (Totowa, NJ:
Littlefield, Adams and Co., 1981), 249–319.
35 For the elaboration of such a “symptomatic reading,” see especially the work of Rosemary
Hennessy, Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (New York/London: Routledge,
1993).
 Re-Visioning “Christian” Beginnings 287

History and Power

Whereas in malestream biblical and Early Christianity scholarship the past and
its people are construed as the totally antiquarian “Other,” feminist and critical
emancipatory historiography has reconceptualized history as memory and
stressed the continuity with the past. As Deborah McDowell has put it, “what
we call the past is merely the function and production of a continuous present
and its discourses.”36 History as cultural memory of the past is firmly set in the
present that looks toward the future. It emerges
out of a complex dynamic between past and present, individual and collective, public and
private, recall and forgetting, power and powerlessness, history and myth, trauma and
nostalgia, conscious and unconscious fears and desires. Always mediated, cultural mem-
ory is the product of fragmentary personal and collective experiences … Acts of memory
are thus acts of performance, representation, and interpretation. They require agents and
specific contexts … Moreover, gender is an inescapable dimension of differential power
relations and cultural memory is always about the distribution of and contested claims to
power. What a culture remembers and what it chooses to forget are intricately bound up
with issues of power and hegemony, and thus with gender. Finally, the tropes and codes
through which a culture represents its past are also marked by gender, race and class.37

If emancipatory historical knowledge has the task of fostering the self-recogni-

tion and self-determination of subaltern wo/men, then feminist scholars cannot
just engage in the play of unending deconstruction but must also participate
in re-constructing and re-envisioning “historical origins” as an alternative dis-
course to that of domination. We must remain aware that we do so in a global
context not only of colonialism,38 market commodification, and positivist
science, but also in one of variegated movements for emancipation. We do so not
only within a religious fundamentalist context of exclusion and marginalization,
but also within that of emancipatory movements in religion that seek to change
institutionalized kyriarchal religions.39 Only after a critical deconstruction of the
36 Deborah McDowell, “Negotiating between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery after Freedom –
Dessa Rose,” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold
Rampersad (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1989), 147.
37 Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith, “Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduc-
tion,” Signs 28 (2002): 5–6.
38 See Kwok Pui-Lan, “Jesus/the Native: Biblical Studies from a Postcolonial Perspective,” in
Teaching the Bible: The Discourses and Politics of Biblical Pedagogy, ed. Fernando F. Segovia and
Mary Anne Tolbert (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998), 76.
39 For an excellent critical analysis of the involvement of religion in these global strug-
gles, see especially Penny Lernoux, Cry of the People (New York: Penguin, 1982); and Lernoux’s
last book before her untimely death, People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism (New
York: Penguin, 1989); Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Vintage Books, 1992);
Joan Smith, “The Creation of the World We Know: The World-Economy and the Re-Creation
of Gendered Identities,” in Identity Politics & Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in
International Perspective, ed. Valentine M. Moghadam (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994),
27–41; see also Diana L. Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras
288 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

kyriocentric scientific practices of the discipline are scholars able to engage in a

critical analysis of the sites on which the “facts” of history have been constructed.
As theorist Michel de Certeau has pointed out: Every ‘historical fact’ results
from praxis … It results from procedures which have allowed a mode of compre-
hension to be articulated as a discourse of facts.40 Hence, the preferred feminist
metaphor for history writing is the metaphor of “quilt – making” rather than that
of “archeology.” Quilt-making is a metaphor that understands historiography as
“history making,” as integrating the surviving, interpreted scraps of source-in-
formation like pieces of cloth into a new and distinct design whose colors project
a different hue in a transformed hermeneutical light.41
This metaphor calls for a redefinition of historical science and research in
the interest of emancipation. It compels us to turn towards an investigation of
contemporary scholarly reconstruction sites as well as to explore the values
and visions that shape emancipatory social movements which have struggled
and continue to struggle against kyriarchy. In other words, it does not suffice
to critically explore just the kyriocentric rhetorical site of the text. Rather, it is
necessary to shift attention to the social practices and contexts of the historical
agents active at this site.
The scholarly search for origins cannot simply focus on texts but must pay
attention to the people who have produced these texts. Such a shift in research
focus requires that studies of “Christian beginnings” articulate an alternative
ethos of writing early Christian history, an ethos and ethics that can transform
the discourses of “pristine origins” rather than uncritically incorporating them.
It calls for a redefinition of historical science and research in the interest of
emancipation.
The feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins has outlined three epis-
temological criteria for developing a critical self-reflexivity that could sustain
emancipatory oppositional scholarly practices.42 To adapt these criteria to Chris-
tian origins study one would need to ask the following:
1. Does a particular reconstruction of origins “speak truth to people about the
reality of their lives” and the lives of wo/men in the first century? Who are
the experts, what are the standards they used, and what counts as knowledge?
Who decides and why do we accept or reject what the experts say?

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 176, who writes: “A new wave of exclusivism is cresting around
the world today. Expressed in social and political life, exclusivism becomes ethnic or religious
chauvinism, described in South Asia as communalism. … As we have observed, identity-based
politics is on the rise because it is found to be a successful way of arousing political energy.”
40 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988),
15.
41 See Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Transforming Vision: Explorations In Feminist The*logy.
(Lanham, MD: Fortress Press, 2011); Schüssler Fiorenza, Empowering Memory and Movement.
42 Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapo-
lis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1998), 398–399.
 Re-Visioning “Christian” Beginnings 289

2. What is the “stance toward freedom” and equality in a particular source text
as well as in a particular rendition of Christian origins? What are its visions
of emancipation and the strategies of change suggested? Does it encourage
people to resist relations of domination and can it engender social and relig-
ious change?
3. Does a particular reconstruction of origins move people to struggle or does it
advocate the status quo? Does it provide an ethical foundation and framework
grounded in notions of justice and authority for struggle? How effectively
does it provide moral authority to the struggles for self-determination?

Historiography and Change

I am often asked whether it would matter to my reconstructive paradigm if it
could be shown that in fact wo/men did not participate in the early Christian
movements or that there was no impulse whatsoever in antiquity to radical
equality. “Does it matter,” my interlocutors inquire, “whether or not history
provides us with any examples of emancipation, equality, and justice?” In turn,
one could ask, “Does it matter to have a written history?” Since history shapes
identity and our view of the world, it matters in my view whether wo/men and
other subjugated peoples have a history, a history not only of violence and ex-
ploitation but also of liberation, agency, and equality – a history that is not just
utopian, but that has already been partially realized in the past. As long as history
is written by the winners, the marginalized and subjugated cannot afford to give
up the struggle for a written history.
To cease to write history in a different key would mean to concede the power
of interpretation to the historical winners. To give an example from my own
church context: Vatican pronouncements have insisted that wo/men cannot be
ordained. First, the fathers in the Vatican did so by relying on the myth that Jew-
ish wo/men had the status of chattel. Now, because of the influence of feminist
scholarship, they argue that wo/men cannot be ordained because Jesus and the
apostles did not ordain them although they could have, since wo/men belonged
to and had leadership in the early Christian movements. However, such an
argument still neglects to mention the critical consensus of historical scholarship
that Jesus did not ordain anyone.
It is obvious that historical argument serves here to maintain the second-class
citizenship of wo/men. Moreover, it has been shown that those churches that
ordain wo/men have dropped their biblical-historical arguments against wo/
men’s ordination as soon as they admitted wo/men to holy office. It is obvious
that the Vatican’s historical argument is shaped in the context of a politics of
non-ordination as a politics of power.43 Hence, it is critically important for
43See Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Hermann Häring, eds., The Non-Ordination of Wo/
men and the Politics of Power (London: SCM Press, 1999).
290 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

Christian feminists to shape a historical counter-argument that empowers wo/

men to resist such discourses of domination. Rather than abandoning historical
reconstructive work, we have to tell the story of Christian beginnings differently!
In order to do so we must de-legitimate not only the kyriarchal “myth of Chris-
tian origins”, but also its producers.
Since feminists are not concerned with conserving the world “as it is” but seek
to change it to fit their own experience of being as wo/men in the world, we are
less interested in an apologetic defense of Christian origins than in the historical
agents and subjects, Jewish wo/men, who have shaped the socio-religious mes-
sianic movements named after Jesus, the Christ (which means Messiah), move-
ments which are best understood as emancipatory Jewish basileia-movements.44
This contention has become more widely explored in the scholarly discussions of
this relation following the appearance of In Memory of Her.
Wolfgang Stegemann has analyzed discourses on Early Christian origins that
use the feminine organic metaphors of birth, mother and daughter, or twins, and
argued that “kinship metaphors produce hierarchies, inevitably so, if one speaks
of Judaism as mother and Christianity as daughter. The concrete significance of
the hierarchy depends on how one culturally or personally assesses the social
differences between mother and daughter.”45 Stegemann also rejects religion as
an anachronistic conception and argues that the emergence of Christianity is
best understood in cultural terms of ethnicity.
I am most convinced by Daniel Boyarin’s argument that we cannot speak
about Judaism and Christianity as two distinct opposing religions until the
fourth or fifth century CE. Until then, there are no sets of features that clearly
define “Jewish” and “Christian” in such a way that the two categories do not over-
lap. This proposal, carefully developed in Boyarin’s Border Lines and succinctly
argued in The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ, is revolutionary
insofar as it opens up the possibility of a non-supersessionist, non-colonizing
reading of the N*T in general and Early Christian beginnings in particular. On
the contrary, Betsy Bauman-Martin argues that all
first-century texts indicate clear understandings that to be Jewish was to be distinct in
a number of ways and the Christian writers defined their groups in contradistinction.
Indeed, the problem with some of Boyarin’s points are that if one takes his conclusions
seriously, there is no such thing as supersessionism as long as one of the parties claims a
share in the texts or concepts, regardless of how they view the other participants.46

44 See my book, Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Chris-
tology (New York: Continuum, 1994).
45 Wolfgang Stegemann, “The emergence of God’s new people: The beginnings of Chris-
tianity reconsidered,” HTS 62 (2006): 28.
46 Betsy Bauman-Martin, “Speaking Jewish: Postcolonial Aliens and Strangers in 1 Peter,”
in Reading First Peter with New Eyes: Methodological Reassessments of the Letter of First Peter, ed.
Robert L. Webb and Betsy Bauman-Martin (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 153n32.
 Re-Visioning “Christian” Beginnings 291

This argument is not quite correct, however, if one looks carefully at Boyarin’s
proposal that the writings of the N*T should be read as “Christian” Jewish
writings.
Boyarin convincingly argues that the notion of the “parting of the ways,”
which was supposed to have taken place after a period of fluidity at the end of
the first or the beginning of the second century, in fact took place much later. He
points out that the fluidity and diversity of Judaism did not end with the destruc-
tion of the temple or the so-called Council of Yavneh (ca. 90 CE) – a Talmudic
legend patterned after the famous imperial Councils of Nicaea (325 CE) or Con-
stantinople (381 CE). These ecumenical councils, which were called by the em-
peror, functioned to establish “a Christianity that was completely separated from
Judaism. At least from a juridical standpoint, then Judaism and Christianity
became completely separate religions only in the fourth century.”47 To illustrate
his point, Boyarin translates and quotes a letter of Jerome (347–420 CE), a Chris-
tian scholar, to his colleague Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE):
In our own days there exists a sect among the Jews throughout all the Synagogues of the
East, which is called the sect of Minei, and is even now condemned by the Pharisees. The
adherents to this sect are known commonly as Nazarenes; they believe in Christ the Son
of God, born of the Virgin Mary; and they say that He who suffered under Pontius Pilate
and rose again, is the Same as the one in whom we believe. But while they desire to be both
Jews and Christians, they are neither the one nor the other.48

The parting of the ways of Judaism and Christianity was completed by Roman
imperial power to serve imperial colonial interests. As a result, one could no
longer be both Jewish and Christian. The canonical consolidation of the Chris-
tian Scriptures took place at this same time. Every Christian reading of the Bible
is now necessarily supersessionist if we do not question such a reading.
If we should be able to read N*T texts such as Ephesians or 1 Peter49 as
fundamentally Jewish texts, Boyarin argues, we must give up the understanding
that “religions are fixed sets of convictions with well-defined boundaries,” an as-
sumption which does not allow for the possibility that one could at once be both
a Jew and a Christian.50 He suggests, therefore, that we speak of “Christian Jews
and non-Christian Jews” prior to the fourth or fifth century CE. If one accepts
Boyarin’s proposal to read 1 Peter as a “Christian: Jewish writing, one must,
however, still defend against supersessionism. This is because the scholarship on
1 Peter documents that Christian scholars and general readers alike continue to
read the letter in a supersessionist fashion, since the word “Christian” continues
to be understood in terms of difference to or over and against “Jew.” This con-
47 Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: The New
Press, 2012), 12–13.
48 Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels, 16.
49 I mention these writings because I have explored his thesis on these two writings.
50 Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels, 8.
292 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

tinuing misunderstanding was expressed by a puzzled student in my class on the

epistle:
When you say that 1 Peter should be understood as a Jewish text, it was not quite clear to
me whether you were referring to all in the Jewish tradition or only to those who accepted
Jesus as their Messiah. If the first is the case, how would you interpret 1 Peter 1:2, which
characterizes the readers as those “who have been chosen and destined by God, the Father
and sanctified by the Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ and to be sprinkled with his
blood?

Although I had argued that 1 Peter does not define the identity of its audience
over and against Jews/Judaism and that the letter can be read as a Jewish letter
addressed to a Jewish audience, the student still read it in Christian terms.
I wonder whether Boyarin’s suggested nomenclature “Christian Jews” and “Non-
Christian Jews” still allows for the misunderstanding of supersessionism, insofar
as it continues to privilege “Christian” or “Non-Christian” as defining terms.
Since Boyarin stresses that the coming of a Messiah had been imagined in
Jewish Scriptures long before the time of early “Christian Judaism,” I suggest that
we speak instead of “Jewish Messianism” rather than of “Christian Judaism” or
“Messianic Judaism” if we want to overcome the dichotomy Judaism/Christianity
and the Christian cooptation of the term “Messianic Judaism.” The Septuagint
(LXX) renders all thirty-nine instances of the Hebrew word for the ‘anointed
one’ Mašíah as Christos, an expression which the N*T writers seem to take up,
˙
since we find Greek transliteration of Messias twice in the N*T (John 1:1; 4:25).
In 1 Peter 4:16 (see also Acts 11:26 and 26:28) the term Christianos is used
to characterize the recipients of the letter either as “Jewish Messianists” or as
“Christians” if we assume the latter title has already congealed into a fixed group
appellation and title.
According to Horrell, most scholars agree that the designation Christianos
originated with outsiders. However, it is more difficult to determine whether
the term was coined as a popular label, as many suggest, or was formulated by
Roman authorities, as Erik Peterson has argued. Horrell follows Peterson’s lead,
assuming the popular claim that the term was first used in Antioch is correct and
agrees that it may have been coined by members of the Roman administration.
According to Peterson, the word might have originated in Latin-speaking circles
and for the “first” time in Acts 11:26 refers “to an official or juridical designation
rather than to informal naming.”51 Thus, the language seems to convey “a legal
or juristic sense, as in legal documents where it indicates something is now being
recorded that will henceforth have force.” Finally, in many non-Christian first-
century sources, the names “Christ” and “Christian” seem to be associated with
public disorder.

51 Erik Peterson, Frühkirche, Judentum Und Gnosis; Studien und Untersuchungen (Rome:
Herder, 1959), 67–69.
 Re-Visioning “Christian” Beginnings 293

Conclusion

If one shifts from a kyriarchal frame of reference to a radical democratic or egal-

itarian one,52 then one can no longer argue that Christianity superseded Judaism
or that wo/men were not members of the Jewish communities that produced
early Christian traditions and writings. If one cannot prove that wo/men did
not participate in shaping the earliest traditions, one needs to give the benefit of
the doubt to the textual traces suggesting that they did. Rather than taking the
andro/kyriocentric text at face value, one must unravel its politics of meaning.
The objection that this is a circular argument applies to all hermeneutical and
historiographical practices. For instance, social scientific studies that posit dual-
istic oppositions such as “honor and shame” as given “facts” of Mediterranean
cultures will read Early Christian texts “about women” within this theoretically
“constructed” kyriocentric frame of reference and thereby reproduce the cultural
“common sense” that wo/men are marginal people. So-called social scientific
narratives appear, however, to be more “realistic” and “objective” than feminist
ones because kyriocentric discourses function as ideologies that “naturalize”
the structures of domination as “what is.” That is, they make invisible the “con-
structedness” of their account of historical reality in terms of their own allegedly
scientific understanding and experience of reality. Therefore, malestream nar-
ratives of “how the Mediterranean world of Jesus or Paul ‘really was’” are easily
accepted as “common sense,” objective, scientific-historical accounts, despite the
fact that they are as much a “construction” as feminist ones.
Egalitarian social and religious movements striving to change unjust relations
of domination – which this reconstructive model assumes – are not just a product
of modernity but are found throughout history. Ancient social movements and
emancipatory struggles against kyriarchal relations of domination and exploita-
tion do not begin with the Early Christian movements. Rather, they have a long
history in Greek, Roman, Asian, African, and Jewish cultures. The emancipatory
struggles of Early Christian wo/men must be seen within this wider context of
cultural-political-religious struggles. Such a historical model of emancipatory
struggles sees the Early “Christian” – i. e., Messianic – movements that have kept
Jesus’ memory alive not over and against Judaism but over and against kyriarchal
structures of domination in antiquity and today. The history of these struggles
in antiquity and throughout western history, however, can only be written if and
when the facticity and plausibility criteria of malestream scholarship for judging
historical source information are questioned.
To argue for their own preferred version of reconstruction, scholars have de-
veloped the criterion of plausibility which judges source materials on the grounds

52See my book, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Democratizing Biblical Studies: Toward an

Emancipatory Educational Space (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009).
294 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

of whether their content can historically be made plausible as fitting into what
we “know” about the time and culture of the early Christian movements.53 Yet
this criterion of plausibility overlooks the fact that what is regarded as “common
sense” or “plausible” in a culture depends on the hegemonic ideological under-
standings of the status quo, of “how the world really is.” For instance, the as-
sumption that wo/men were marginal or second-class citizens in all forms of
first-century Judaism is steeped in present day kyriocentric assumptions and
perceptions of Jewish culture and religion. Such presumptions often make it im-
possible to assert plausibly that wo/men were equal members in the movements
claiming Jesus’ name if one understands them as Jewish movements.
The inability even of feminist scholars to assume the possibility of under-
standing the ethos of the early Christian Jewish-messianic beginnings as egal-
itarian and variegated, struggling against kyriarchal domination and believing
in the basic equality of all the children of G*d, bespeaks antifeminist tendencies.
It bespeaks a lack of feminist self-affirmation on the part of scholars who have
been socialized into kyriarchal academic disciplines.54 We all have internalized
dominant cultural prejudices, self-deprecation and misogynism to varying
degrees. As Judith Plaskow has stated so forcefully:
To take seriously the notion that religious history is the history of women and men
imposes an enormous responsibility on women: It forces us to take on the intellectual task
of rewriting all of history …. It reminds us that we are part of a long line of women who
were simultaneously victims of the tradition and historical agents struggling within and
against it.55

To write history otherwise and in a feminist key, means to resist the lure of
“common sense” malestream reconstructions of early Christian origins in which
wo/men continue to be seen as second-class citizens or Judaism understood as
superseded by Christianity. Hence, I suggest that the “common sense” criterion
of “plausibility” that justifies a kyriarchal world must be replaced with the
criterion of possibility.

53 This hermeneutical circle between a preconstructed image of Jesus and evaluations of

individual texts is recognized by Gerd Theissen/Dagmar Winter, Die Kriterienfrage in der Jesus-
forschung. Vom Differenzkriterium zum Plausibilitätskriterium (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and
Ruprecht, 1997), 206: “Ein zutreffendes historisches Gesamtbild ist eine Idealvorstellung, ein
Grenzwert, dem wir uns immer nur in Form von Plausibilität Annähern können.” However,
they do not critically question the plausibility criterion on the basis of this insight.
54 See my articles “Disciplinary Matters: A Critical Rhetoric and Ethic of Inquiry” in
Rhetoric, Ethic, and Moral Persuasion in Biblical Discourse: Essays from the 2002 Heidelberg
Conference, ed. Thomas H. Olbricht and Anders Eriksson (New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 9–32;
and “Rethinking the Educational Practices of Biblical Doctoral Studies,” Teaching Theology and
Religion 6 (2003): 65–75.
55 Judith Plaskow, “Critique and Transformation: A Jewish Feminist History,” in Lifecycles:
Jewish Women on Biblical Themes in Contemporary Life, vol. 2, ed. Deborah Orenstein and Jane
Rachel Litman (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing House, 1997), 99.
 Re-Visioning “Christian” Beginnings 295

In short, what is “conceivable” or “possible” and even “probable” historically

must be adjudicated in terms of an emancipatory reconstructive model of early
Christian beginnings as well as in terms of how scholars utilize their source-in-
formation and materials. Instead of asking, “Is it likely or plausible that Jewish
wo/men shaped the Jesus-traditions?” or “Is it likely or plausible that the wo/men
prophets in Corinth had a different theological self-understanding than Paul?”,
one must ask, “Is it historically possible and thinkable that they did so?”56
This shift requires scholars to prove that such a possibility did not exist at
the time. Such an argument would presuppose that scholars have studied not
only hegemonic historical formations but also the emancipatory elements in
Greco-Roman and Jewish societies. In using the criterion of possibility, one
must, however, be careful not to turn around and answer it again with reference
to what is deemed “plausible” and “common sense” truism.57
Such a change of theoretical framework from one that uncritically re-inscribes
“what is” to one that asks “what was possible” makes it easier to understand
Christian beginnings as shaped by the agency and leadership of Jewish, Greco-
Roman, Asian, African, free and enslaved, rich and poor, elite and marginal wo/
men. Those who hold the opposite view, for instance, that slave wo/men or Jew-
ish wo/men were not active shapers of life in antiquity, would have to argue their
point. A feminist reconstructive historical model of egalitarian possibility is able
to place the beginnings of early Christian movements “like the tip of an iceberg”
within a broader cultural-religious historical frame of reference that allows one
to trace the tensions and struggles between emancipatory understandings and
movements inspired by the radical democratic logic of equality on the one hand
and the dominant kyriarchal structures of society and religion in antiquity on
the other.
To argue for a possible and probable rhetorical reconstruction of early Jewish
messianic Christian beginnings as egalitarian does not mean that the extant
early Christian sources would not also allow for a hegemonic kyriarchal recon-
struction of these beginnings. The opposite is the case, since our sources are all
written in grammatically androcentric/kyriocentric language that functions as
generic rhetorical language. It only means that one needs to show that a feminist
egalitarian reconstruction not only is possible, in terms of a critical reading of the
extant sources with a hermeneutics of suspicion, but also preferable in terms of
the Christian identity constructions that it engenders. In other words, scholars
no longer can justify their reconstructive models in a positivist scientific fashion

56 See my book, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Minneapolis, MN: For-
tress Press, 1999).
57 This is the primary mode of arguing in Ekkehard and Wolfgang Stegemann, The Jesus
Movement: A Social History of its First Century (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999),
361–409, when discussing wo/men’s leadership in the Jesus movement.
296 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

but need to stand accountable for them and their political functions in light of
the values and visions they promote for today.
Such attacks against an egalitarian feminist model of reconstruction usually
come from antifeminist scholars and churchmen who are concerned with main-
taining the status quo. They are bent on debunking the possibility of an egalitari-
an ethos in the first century because they cannot imagine that early Judaism or
early Christianism could have been egalitarian. Most importantly, they cannot
assert an equal standing or even decisive leadership for wo/men in antiquity lest
that serve as precedent and legitimation for contemporary feminist scholars who
assert such equality.
Finally, a reconstruction of Christian origins as egalitarian does not mean to
assert that Early Christian movements were “new” and incomparable or that they
were the only movements at the time that were egalitarian. One wonders what
is so threatening in the idea of an egalitarian movement at the root of Christian
beginnings as Jewish messianic beginnings that provokes such misreadings.
To conclude: Taussig’s masterful review of the status of the field of Christian
origins research at the intersection of subjectivity and historical craft ends rather
cautiously:
Although I propose that both King’s work and these two groups [Westar Seminar and SBL
Redescription Group] show a way through the intersection of subjectivity and historical
craft, the question of where to turn at this intersection is larger than whether these efforts
will proceed much further. The epistemological challenges are so substantive and the re-
solve for advanced study fragile enough that one wonders whether there is enough energy
for much actual movement beyond the current blockage.58

I in turn have argued here that feminist theoretical work of a critical historiog-
raphy that takes emancipatory praxis as its touchstone and the*-ethical vision as
its goal provides a theoretical framework also for Christian Beginnings studies.
Critical historical scholarship cannot but strive for the contemporary signifi-
cance of its theoretical and historical work. Such significance must not only be
negotiated historically but also the*logically or religiously if it is to displace the
hegemonic academic and ecclesiastical myths of Christian origins.
Karen King’s feminist work on Gnosticism as well as on critical category for-
mation and framework-analysis59 continues to be pathbreaking in this work of
re-describing Early “Christian” history. Most importantly, her feminist work on

58 Taussig, “End of Christian Origins?,” 44–45.

59 See especially, Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2003); “Which Early Christianity?,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early
Christian Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015), 66–84; “No Longer Marginalized: From Orthodoxy and Heresy Discourse to Cat-
egory Critique and Beyond,” in The Bible and Women: An Encyclopaedia of Exegesis and Cultural
History. Volume on “Early Christian Writings,” ed. Outi Lehtipuu and Silke Petersen (Atlanta,
GA: Society of Biblical Literature, forthcoming).
 Re-Visioning “Christian” Beginnings 297

the Gospel of Mary of Magdala is invaluable in this task of re-describing Early

Christian historiography. Ad multos annos, Karen!

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 Locating the Religion of Associations
Stanley Stowers

One hopes that students will do better than their teachers. In Karen King’s case
the surpassing has been spectacular. Among the numerous particulars that
might be mentioned, she has brought a widely framed interest to her scholar-
ship not only in early Christianity and Greco-Roman antiquity but also in the
study of religion. The following, I hope, also addresses some of those several
interests.
Historians agree about the great importance of so-called voluntary associa-
tions – e. g., synodoi, koina, eranistai, hetaireiai, collegia, sodalicia, corpora – in the
Hellenistic age and Roman Empire.1 The ubiquity of religious practices in such
groups forms another area of agreement, although an older scholarship often
characterized such activities as mere pretexts for drinking, eating, and good cheer.
How to construe the category of associations with its many varieties of social for-
mation has proven more difficult. The work of John Kloppenborg, his colleagues
and students, has marked an advance on this problem of the category and other
issues.2 Here the criterion of social networks has been a methodological aid to
finding a broadly convincing five-fold typology based on relations of the house-
hold, of ethnicity or geography, of neighborhoods, of occupations and of “cults.”3

1 A case for the ubiquity of associations, especially in the Empire and their importance for
understanding the non-elite appears in Andreas Bendlin, “Gemeinschaft, Öffentlichkeit und
Identität: Forschungsgeschichliche Anmerkungen zu den Mustern sozialer Ordnung in Rom,”
in Vereine in der römischen Antike: Untersuchungen zu Organisation, Ritual und Raumordnung,
ed. Ulrike Egelhaaf-Gaiser and Alfred Schäfer, 9–40 STAC 13 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002).
2 E. g., John S. Kloppenborg, “Collegia and Thiasoi: Issues in Function, Taxonomy and
Membership,” in Voluntary Associations in the Graeco-Roman World, ed. John S. Kloppenborg
and Stephen G. Wilson (London: Routledge, 1996), 16–30 and the other articles in the volume
and Philip A. Harland, Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations: Claiming a Place in Ancient
Mediterranean Society (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003). Very helpful is Richard S. As-
cough, Philip A. Harland and John S. Kloppenborg, Associations in the Greco-Roman World:
A Sourcebook (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012) with an annotated bibliography and
the important web-site http://philipharland.com/greco-roman-associations. Abbreviations
for inscriptions and papyri follow G. H. R. Horsley and J. A. L. Lee, “A Preliminary Checklist
of Abbreviations of Greek Epigraphic Volumes,” Epigraphica 56 (1994): 129–169; J. F. Oates,
R. S. Bagnall, and W. H. Willis, Checklist of Editions of Greek Papyri and Ostraca, 5th ed., BASP
Supplements 9 (Oakville, CT: American Society of Papyrologists, 2001).
3 Kloppenborg and Wilson, Voluntary Associations, 16–30; Harland, Associations, Syn-
agogues, and Congregations, 28–53.
302 Stanley Stowers

As this and earlier scholarship has shown, there can be little doubt that many
“synagogues” and Christian groups were seen as and understood themselves as
associations.
Although the noted wide agreement on the importance of religion in associ-
ations prevails, one finds remarkably little discussion of their religious activities,
associated goals and beliefs, especially within some account of how ancient Med-
iterranean religion worked.4 An enormous amount of research exists regarding
their organization, legal status, relation to the polis/civic and imperial order,
occupational forms, patronage by the well-to-do and practices of honoring
members and benefactors.5 If one rejects the ideas that all religion in antiquity
was adherence to the official public norms of cities, ethnicities, or “the Church,”
or that one cannot detect differing modes or types of religiosity, then the alterna-
tive compels the historian to imagine a complex and dynamic map of interactive
practices, institutions, and sites of religiosity. This theory stands in opposition to
the once dominant “polis religion” theory, and the similar “common Judaism”
theory.6 In this essay, I aim to address the question of where the religiosity or
religiosities of associations lie on such a map. The tools for this endeavor come
primarily from a theory of ancient Mediterranean religion with three and then
by later antiquity four modes of religiosity.7 Although I believe that the modes
capture historical reality at certain levels of generality, the theory’s main use may
be as an analytical device, as this essay suggests.

4 Scholars certainly cite and discuss deities and rites mentioned in sources, but there is little
about how the practices worked and made sense. Jörg Rüpke has made pioneering progress
using the notions of the individual and of “lived religion,” although I think both approaches
have significant limitations. See his Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2018). Also pioneering is the cognitive approach of Jennifer Larson,
Understanding Greek Religion: A Cognitive Approach (New York: Routledge, 2016), 40–47.
5 The bibliography is huge. A good source for these topics is the Harland web site and the
annotated bibliography, both in n. 2 above.
6 Among the critiques of the polis religion theory, see Jörg Rüpke, Religion of the Romans,
transl. and ed. Richard Gordon (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 5–38; Julia Kindt, Rethinking Greek
Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 12–35. See Stanley Stowers, “Why
‘Common Judaism’ Does not Look like Mediterranean Religion,” in Strength to Strength: Essays
in Honor of Shaye J. D. Cohen, ed. Michael L. Satlow, BJS 363 (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic
Studies, 2018), 235–255.
7 Stanley Stowers, “The Religion of Plant and Animal Offerings Versus the Religion of
Meanings, Essences and Textual Mysteries,” in Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice: Images, Acts,
Meanings, ed. Jennifer Knust and Zsuzsanna Varhelyi (New York: Oxford University Press,
2011), 35–56; Stanley Stowers, “Why Expert Versus Non-Expert is Not Elite Versus Popular
Religion: The Case of the Third Century,” in Religious Competition in Late Antiquity, ed. Nathan-
iel DesRosiers and Lilly C. Vuong (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2016), 139–153;
Stowers, “Why Common Judaism” (see n. 6 above).
 Locating the Religion of Associations 303

A Theory of Mediterranean Religion

Only the most minimal review of the modes with more attention to the first
mode will have to suffice. The modes or types result first of all from two basic
inquiries – one charts the way that human cognitive propensities shape religion
and the other asks how social practices connected to religion cluster and form
networks of practices. The definition and ontology of religion emerges from
these inquiries as I have detailed elsewhere.8 The modes are not mutually ex-
clusive and individuals and social formations can exhibit more than one mode at
one time. The cognitively and socially most basic of the modes upon which the
second and third modes depend is the religion of everyday social exchange (the
RESE). The second is for convenience called “civic religion,” the religion of cities,
kingdoms, priestly aristocracies and similar formations controlled by elites who
shape religion according to their interests as the self-proclaimed guardians of
the religion of the whole population in question. The third mode arises from
competitive highly interactive fields of semi-independent literate and usually
literary religious experts who write, interpret and teach complex texts, often
narratives and law. Each of the modes represents different interests, clusters of
practices and social networks.
The religion of everyday social exchange features approachable deities and
similar non-evident beings (NEBs) such as local gods, the beloved dead, the
familiar heavenly bodies, angels, demons, ghosts, divinized humans, spirits,
vaguely identified agents, “high gods” imagined as local and many others. Par-
ticipants believe that these beings affect their lives in personally relevant and tan-
gible ways such as giving humans the offspring of animals and plants, children,
weather, health and illness, help and hindrance with the contingencies of life and
so on. Humans in turn want to build and maintain positive long-term relations
with the beings most relevant to their lives. Humans intuitively feel that many of
these normally unseen beings that are most relevant to living are naturally open
to alliances and even to entering into complex practices of human-like social
exchange, but with key differences from humans in that these NEBs can see what
people are doing but humans normally do not see them. Also, of course, many
of the beings have very great powers and abilities. These beings who inhabit the
world of cause and effect behind the scenes of everyday life normally do not
need the “material” gifts that people offer to them, but they take pleasure in these
and in sharing human pleasures, in acts and relationships of honor, of gratitude
and recognition. Some ancients thought of these beings as serving under a high
ruling god, but that did not eliminate the everyday and local qualities intrinsic
8 See n. 7 above, and Stanley Stowers, “The Ontology of Religion,” Introducing Religion:
Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (London:
Equinox, 2008), 434–449. A further development of my theory is found in the unpublished
paper read at several venues, “Religion as a Social Kind.”
304 Stanley Stowers

to this religiosity. Any approach that treats the ancients as if they lived in our
disenchanted world with a distant theoretical god rather than in a day-to-day
environment filled with palpably present, but normally unseen beings, is, I would
argue, a massive distortion. This religiosity does not require cities, temples, priests,
books or literacy, but can exist in and alongside these formations.
Three sorts of practices are central to the religion of everyday social exchange;
divinatory, communications from humans and kinds of exchange ideally based
on gift-giving. We moderns can scarcely imagine the importance of divinatory
practices and their constant role in everyday life. In the second mode, civic
religion, divinatory practices were also important and deemed essential for the
life of cities, but in contrast to the RESE, usually occurred in highly controlled
contexts belonging to aristocrats and elites such as in public animal sacrifice,
established oracles, with specialist diviners or prophets and offices like those
of the Roman augurs. Unlike the certain pronouncements and clear messages
of the third mode, the literate experts with their world of texts, the divinatory
messages of the RESE usually came in modest signs and traces or in dreams
and visions. Also unlike the experts, the mundane religiosity treated knowledge
about the moods and intentions of gods and NEBs as usually limited and often,
but not always, difficult to determine for the conduct of everyday coping, an
epistemological modesty. Households, farms, workshops, neighborhoods and
the activities of daily coping and common life-courses were the premier sites
of the RESE. The ubiquitous and most well known way of communicating with
gods/NEBs is prayer and prayer often accompanied the giving of gifts to gods/
NEBs that was the center of the imagined social relation of reciprocity between
unequals.9
Four criteria that aid in distinguishing the modes require brief mention:
(1) interests (2) modes of production (3) physical environment (4) social en-
vironment. The interests of most people in everyday life are often not the same
as the interests of cities, ethnicities and the elites and aristocrats who controlled
them. The two sets of interests can coincide, but often do not. For the present
purposes, I will simply note the last two criteria but comment on modes of pro-
duction. This criterion proves central to understanding ancient Mediterranean
and West Asian religion. That religion was thoroughly enmeshed in what we
call the economy. Economic production and consumption were seen as entailing
social exchange (not mere monetary), usually reciprocity, not only between
humans but also between humans and gods/NEBs.10 The gods gave the good

9 Although clearly fitting the category of gods/NEBs, the status of the dead is more ambig-
uous with certain advantages and disadvantages in relation to the living.
10 A large bibliography exists on non-commercial non-monetary (i. e., not by price equiv-
alence) exchange, especially in anthropology beginning with Mauss. See Jan van Baal, “Offering,
Sacrifice and Gift,” Numen 23 (1976): 161–178; Daniel Ullucci, “Contesting the Meaning of
Animal Sacrifice,” in Mediterranean Sacrifice, 62–67; Daniel Ullucci, The Christian Rejection of
 Locating the Religion of Associations 305

and necessary things of life and culture. The economy was inseparable from the
religion of everyday social exchange because most economic production took
place within households, involving family members, dependents (e. g., slaves,
apprentices), neighbors and social allies, and on land or in shops that belonged to
households. The practices of divination, prayer, and offerings to the gods/NEBs
were exchange relations usually modeled on ways of maintaining social relations
in the culture between more and less powerful humans. This was not a world in
which workers went back and forth between factories and offices dedicated to
economic production and houses dedicated to leisure, privacy and entertain-
ment, all mediated by impersonal monetary exchange.
The central sites of religious production in civic religion were temples and
similar “sacred” spaces with associated practices related to calendars of festivals,
processions, spectacles and entertainments for the gods and so on. This religion
entailed the sacralization of time that punctuated lives with regular and special
religious days, although the RESE had its even more local sacralization involving
the roles of gods/NEBs in the lives of families and households. The massive
collection, distribution, redistribution, storage and consumption of wealth took
place at temples. The elites, often aristocrats, claimed to represent the whole cit-
izen or ethnic population in their control and conduct of civic religion. Temples
collected, redistributed and consumed mostly agricultural goods produced on
land centered on households.11 Civic religion thus tied itself structurally to the
non-elites, the agricultural economy and the religion of everyday social exchange.
It also enforced a structural opposition in that temples and sacred spaces had to
be free from the pollution of childbirth, death and (variably) other pollutions
intrinsic to the lives of households and families. When someone prayed a votive
in a civic temple – “If my crops flourish, I will give you a sheep” – the RESE con-
nected with civic religion. If the god fulfilled the request, the person would offer
the animal at an altar with a civic priest perhaps getting the animal’s hide and
some meat. Of course, the farmer did not have to go to a civic temple in order to
carry out a votive exchange and civic temples were often not open to the general
public.
The production of the independent or semi-independent literate religious
experts consisted of intellectual practices related to literate forms of cultural
production.12 The expert’s products were writings, textual techniques, learned

Animal Sacrifice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 24–30; Richard Seaford, Reciprocity
and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City State (New York: Oxford University Press,
1994); Larson, Greek Religion, 40–47.
11 The massive slave estates that arose mostly in Italy and Africa represent a partial ex-
ception to this model.
12 There was much use of literacy and writing in civic religion that did not participate in
some literary field or serve freelance religious entrepreneurs. That “dominated” literacy and
writing usually did not escape the constraints of civic religion to participate in a field. On such
writing see, for example, Mary Beard, “Writing and Religion: Ancient Literacy and the Function
306 Stanley Stowers

interpretations, position-takings about what is true, just and good, narratives,

forms of teaching and transmitting knowledge and so on taking form from ex-
isting literary and literate traditions. Such production in contrast to that of civic
religion and the RESE was distinctly separate from the agricultural economy and
its products. The writer’s study could be anywhere and writings could circulate
anywhere. A kind of atopia characterizes the dynamics of the mode together with
a complex cultural economy. Experts accrued social capital rewarded in various
often non-obvious ways. While the RESE sprang from intuitive cognition, as did
much of civic religion, the literary experts depended heavily upon reflective and
rationalizing thought that was not intuitive.

The Place of Associations among the Modes of Religion

In light of this admittedly brief sketch of the modes, where does the religion of
associations fit? The religion of a large proportion, if certainly not all associa-
tions, appears to be an extension of the interests, sites, production, distribution,
consumption and exchange of the religion of everyday social exchange, but
frequently networked with and making alliances with aspects of civic religion
and civic power. Before discussing evidence for this thesis, a word needs to be
said about how most scholarship has treated the religion of associations, often
according to modernist assumptions.
Scholarship on the religious elements of associations has suffered from the
modern division of the individual’s and the social’s relation to the world into
semi-autonomous life spheres such as the economic, the political, the artistic
and the religious. Underlying this division was another, the division between the
instrumental areas of life and society and the symbolic areas. Art, including lit-
erature, were on the symbolic, non-instrumental side with religion often seen as
epitomizing the symbolic. Part of this separation had to do with the principles of
modern science becoming dominant for which divine causality was not admis-
sible, e. g., thunder and lightening caused by Zeus. Religion had to be relegated
to the symbolic and non-instrumental. It produced meaning for individuals and
social groups or perhaps identity and social solidarity instead.
Pervasively, scholars write that associations like the ancients in general natu-
rally practiced worship as if “worship” were a self-explaining concept. “Worship”
in our western tradition involves a kind of total honor and devotion and fits the
god imagined for “western monotheism” or the older idea of god as an ultimate
cosmic emperor. But how does the concept help when attempting to understand
beings, albeit usually much superior to humans, but conceived as locally present
and active social partners? However much honor one gives, the work that the
of the Written Word in Roman Religion,” in Literacy in the Roman World, ed. Mary Beard (Ann
Arbor, MI: Journal of Archaeology, 1991), 35–58.
 Locating the Religion of Associations 307

imagined divine human relationships do in the world stems from the practices
of intense social exchange with them, especially long term reciprocal relations.
The ship owner risks the voyage because he is confident of the long-term relation
built on gift exchange that he cultivated with Poseiden and the Dioscuri. To
simply talk about the worship of Heracles or Demeter or the Judean god in an
association does not explain anything and attributing only total adoration and
honor misreads the activities. Adoration and honor certainly occurred but in a
context of the ongoing imagined interaction of “persons.”
With the theoretical tools outlined above, I think it easy to see that the religion
of a large proportion of associations belongs largely to the RESE. Indeed, two
great categories of associations entail this conclusion; those based on household
connections and occupational groups. To these one can add associations based
on neighborhoods. With the theory, the former case is almost definitional and
can be illustrated by two atypical examples. Although unusual, the religion of
the two examples operates according to principles of the RESE and will illustrate
creative possibilities for family and household associations.
Epikteta of Thera founded an association (koinon) probably sometime in the
early second century BCE (IG XII, 3.330; LSCG 135; Laum 1914 II, no. 43).13 Her
family was wealthy and likely among the local elite. Following the death of her
two sons and her husband, she took control of the household. A sign of the fam-
ily’s status lies in their construction of a private Museion, a shrine to the Muses,
a group of goddesses who gave powers and abilities to poets, philosophers and
practitioners of other arts.14 Ideas had also developed linking the Muses to the
afterlife of the illustrious.15 Cults to heroines and heroes were common in Greek
civic religion, but this family distinguished itself by the heroization of its own
members and a cult to them. Yet we can recognize this as a fancy and perhaps
status-seeking Greek version of family funerary/mortuary practices seen across
the Mediterranean. Epikteta’s husband and two sons died before her and were
treated as heroes, kinds of NEBs.
The wording of the inscription in the form of a will that founds the association
shows great care in attributing authority for the completion of the Mouseion to
her husband and son, fulfilling their intentions, and mentions her legal guardian
(IG XII 3.330, 7–15). She describes the group as the “men’s association of rel-
atives” that seems to be a clever way of instituting a family based association
13 Andreas Wittenburg, Il testamento di Epikteta (Trieste: Bernardi, 1990). For a recent dis-
cussion, see Larson, Greek Religion, 289–91.
14 For the convoluted debate about whether Athenian philosophical schools were thiasoi
dedicated to the Muses, see Matthias Haake, “Philosophical Schools in Athenian Society from
the Fourth Century to the First Century BC: An Overview,” in Private Associations and the
Public Sphere: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and
Letters, 9–11 September 2010, ed. Vincent Gabrielsen and Christian A. Thomsen (Copenhagen:
Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2015), 57–91.
15 Larson, Greek Religion, 290–291 and the whole chapter.
308 Stanley Stowers

duly described as ruled by men, but actually involving women and even women
friends and children of the extended family.16 In spite of all of this “official”
deference, clearly Epikteta founds and authors the association. She also owns and
runs the household: “I shall administer what belongs to me.”17 The association is
to meet in the Mouseion that apparently housed the tombs of the heroes. Only
the family members are allowed to use the shrine with the exception of relatives
of Epikteta’s daughter, Epiteleia, in the case of a wedding. Weddings, of course,
were religious rites and important to the religion of everyday social exchange.18
This stipulation illustrates the connections, alliances and exchange between
families that was important for the RESE, in this case by marriage. Another
example appears in the detailed list of family members in the association,
including mention of those by adoption, that ends with four unrelated women,
apparently friends of Epikteta. These women are to be admitted along with their
husbands and children. Clearly this is a family association, and yet friendships,
alliances and social networks that reach out are important to what families were
and important for the RESE that is much more than the religion of families and
households in any narrow sense.
The major religious practices of the koinon, whose assembling is called a syn-
agogue (synagoge), were to take place during three days of annual meeting that
featured offerings given to the Muses and the three heroes, with Epikteta to join
their ranks at her death (177–94). Thus in Greek conception one sees exchange
with a group of gods whose activities were closely related to a cluster of specific
human activities and their products and to a category of NEB that Greeks
normally did not think of as gods, but as like gods in some ways.19 Heroines and
heroes, dead humans, were normally unseen but living beings who could watch
humans and had many often great powers. Most importantly, one could carry
on reciprocal relations with them like with gods. Other ancient Mediterranean
cultures had similar NEBs without a specific category for them that appears in
literary sources or inscriptions, but with similar practices. Judean cults at the
tombs of the Patriarchs form one example.20 They were of great importance in
the everyday religion of Romans.21
16 Anneliese Mannzmann, Griechische Stiftungsurkunden (Münster: Aschendorff, 1962),
142.
17 The translation is from Ascough, Harland, and Kloppenborg, Associations: Sourcebook,
145.
18 The specifics of weddings varied among Greeks and others, but see John Oakley and
Rebecca Sinos, The Wedding in Ancient Athens (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press,
1993); Karen K. Hersch, The Roman Wedding: Ritual and Meaning in Antiquity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 2010).
19 Larson, Greek Religion, 263–291.
20 Pieter W. van der Horst, Japheth in the Tents of Shem: Studies on Jewish Hellenism in
Antiquity, CBET 32 (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 119–137.
21 For a recent account that typically downplays the abundant evidence for interaction with
the dead, see Rüpke, Pantheon, 247–250.
 Locating the Religion of Associations 309

The focus of the three days were two sets of offerings corresponding to the
two categories of NEB. The decree of the association, its laws, specified offerings
of an animal in “the usual way,” plus cakes and cheese to the Muses on the first
day. On the second day the hero and heroine Phoenix and Epikteta, and on the
third, the two sons were to be given the same with the addition of a loaf of bread,
a different sort of cake and three fish. The latter items were customary funerary
offerings, not appropriate for immortal goddesses, but marking the status of the
family members as heroes. Both categories were to get crowns, probably placed
on statues of the Muses and perhaps a sculptural relief of the family dining
together in the afterlife. Although not spelled out in detail in the rules, each day’s
offerings would have been shared by the members of the koinon in a celebratory
feast in honor of the NEBs. The decree of the koinon also mentions a meeting in
which the first drink of the meal will be poured as a libation to the Muses and
the heroes and heroine. Epikteta endowed these practices of the association of
family and friends to go on indefinitely, long term reciprocal relations practically
imagined with these non-evident beings.
Not mentioned, but with certainty occurring would have been prayers to
accompany the offerings. All of the NEBs would have been praised and proba-
bly asked for some sort of help or oversight. Much evidence exists for intensive
reciprocity with heroes and heroines in civic religion.22 But these were often
founders of cities, civic institutions and aristocratic families. How recently dead
rather ordinary individuals would have been approached is not entirely clear.
Yet, even more ordinary families typical of the RESE without the wealth and
high status infrastructure gave gifts to their dead and expected help, of course,
with variation by time, place and ethnicity. The dead were asked to “send up
good things.”23 The Jewish writer of Tobit (4:17) throws out “Pour your bread
and your wine on the tomb of the righteous, and do not give to sinners,” as if
the maxim was well known common sense. Information provided by the dead
through dreams may have been the most widespread gift.
Unfortunately, we do not know anything about purity practices of the as-
sociation. The topic, however, raises some important and interesting issues. The
religion of funerary practices and tombs belonged to the RESE, specifically to
the family and not civic religion. Everywhere across the Mediterranean until
Christians eventually changed things, cemeteries and burial of the dead was

22 For a good discussion of heroes and heroines with excellent bibliography, see Larson,
Greek Religion, 263–309.
23 Larson, Greek Religion, 292 n. 16. Larson may be correct that the emphasis in classical
Greek cities was on gifts to the dead and not from them, but reticence in talking publicly
about the agency of the dead may be the real factor. Much evidence for reciprocity exists for
the Roman Empire, including for Christianity. See Ramsey MacMullen, The Second Church:
Popular Christianity A. D. 200–400, WGRWSup 1 (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature,
2009).
310 Stanley Stowers

outside of the city walls so as to protect the purity of the city’s temples, the foci
of civic religion. For Greeks, Romans, Judeans and others, to even enter a house
where someone had died and where there was a corpse resulted in pollution
of the person that could only be remedied variously by time and bathing.24
Households were also regularly subject to the strong pollution of childbirth and
more minor sources of defilement that were considered a part of everyday life.
We lack clear evidence about purity notions attached to houses in various cul-
tural areas. But one likely wanted places of household offerings and associated
meals to be pure.
Strikingly, with Epikteta’s association the tombs of the recently deceased are
in a sacred space devoted to deities. Even in Greek civic religion, the possible
pollution from heroic tombs was an issue, at least in certain periods and places.
At certain times and places tombs of some and not of other heroines and heroes
were considered polluting. Some priests were forbidden to approach heroic
shrines, usually considered tombs, because it would compromise the high level
of purity that their offices required.25 All of this ambiguity resulted from both the
paradoxical nature of the dead as NEBs and the ways that civic religion marked
the RESE as sometimes problematic. But hero cults were very popular, often
with a local quality that fit the RESE. They were fixed by family place, a tomb,
and these imagined counter-intuitive agents were former living human beings.
As such one could readily imagine them as understanding personal, local and
familial problems. Yet the dead paradoxically shared basic characteristics with
the “highest” of NEBs, gods, in spite of lacking immortality marked through
entry into their new state by death. In many cultures, including the ancient Med-
iterranean’s, gods were repelled by death.
Many associations of various types included the support of funerary and me-
morial practices as a part of their constitutions. Some even state these duties in
a way that entails stressing the pollution of death. The charter of an association
from Tebtunis in 43 CE, probably of tenant farmers, specifies, “If one of the
leaders should die, or his father or mother or wife or child or brother or sister
and any of the undersigned men does not defile himself, he shall be fined four
drachmas payable to the association.” A guild of sheep or cattle herders also from
first century Tebtunis required members to “defile” themselves and place wreaths
at the tomb. “To defile oneself,” means to come into proximity with the dead
through funerary and mourning rites. With this and other sorts of practices,
associations intertwined themselves with quintessential rites of family religion,
of the RESE. What everyone knew, but what would have rarely come into public
discourse, was that most people intuitively with varied kinds and levels of cul-

24 Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1983), 48–55.
25 Parker, Miasma, 39.
 Locating the Religion of Associations 311

tural reinforcement believed that their beloved dead became a kind of NEB who
was present near the tomb and who might send signs or messages, desired gifts
of drink, food and entertainment, could look into the lives of the living unseen
and might give certain sorts of help to the living.
Like Epikteta’s example a rather famous inscription (SIG 985; LSAM 20)
from Philadelphia in Lydia also illustrates how family and household as-
sociations reached out to those who were not family or household members.26
This “reaching out” and “extension” should be seen as intrinsic to the religion
of everyday social exchange, and therefore also intrinsic to associations closely
related to families, households and other similar locative social formations.
Quite apart from civic religion, personal and family friendships, alliances and
networks should be seen as natural to the social organization of the RESE. As in
the RESE where one reached out to establish and maintain long term relation-
ships of generalized reciprocity with gods/NEBs so also individuals, families,
and households sought similar relationships with other individuals, families,
and households.
The association from Philadelphia has been widely interpreted as a precursor
to supposed characteristics of Christianity with a large cult site and meeting
place.27 The group was supposedly egalitarian, open to all – “men, women, and
slaves” – with a membership recruited from the wider society. But as I have
argued elsewhere, the evidence better fits the elaboration and extension of a
large household cult that has become an association.28 Its rules do not proclaim
an “advanced morality” and social equality but reinforce the hierarchical order
and security of the household. Scholars have confused openness to participation
by various categories of people with equality. Participation and equality are not
the same thing. Differentiated participation by gender and rank is precisely how
the hierarchical social order reproduced and maintained itself. Free males par-
ticipated as free males, free women as free women, slaves as slaves and so on.
Unlike most inscriptions with the rules of associations, this one was not the
result of a meeting and a vote cited in the inscription. Rather the inscription

26 It is dated from late second century to early first century BCE. An important article
with translation, that in my view overplays similarities to Christianity is S. C. Barton and
G. H. R. Horsley, “A Hellenistic Cult Group and the New Testament Churches,” JAC 24 (1981):
7–41.
27 For this interpretation and bibliography see Barton and Horsley, “A Hellenistic Cult
Group,” and my article n. 28 below.
28 Stanley Stowers, “A Cult from Philadelphia: Oikos Religion or Cultic Association?,” in
The Early Church in Its Context: Essays in Honor of Everett Ferguson, ed. Abraham J. Malherbe,
Frederick Norris, and James W. Thompson, NovTS 90 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 287–301. The title of
my article draws the contrast between household religion and associations too sharply, although
the contrast is more muted in the article. My error is usefully noted by Korinna Zamfir, “The
Community of the Pastoral Epistles: A Religious Association?,” in Private Associations and the
Public Sphere, 214–215.
312 Stanley Stowers

purports to be instructions given by Zeus the Kindly in a dream to a certain

Dionysius for an association to be set up in his house with some members also
from the outside.29 Among its religious practices, the great emphasis given to
ritual purity is also odd, but makes sense in light of the anxiety that Dionysius ex-
presses about the conduct of those who enter his house.30 “Zeus has given com-
mands to this one [Dionysius] for the purifications and the cleansings and the
[mysteries?]” introduces the regulations. Again oddly, the monthly and yearly
sacrifices are mentioned almost inadvertently at the end. There is also nothing
about dues and finances. The rules of Zeus/Dionysius express great anxiety about
possible corruptions of the household such as adultery and an odd emphasis
on the gods punishing those who break the rules, even requiring that members
take an oath. All of this oddness can be explained if the association grew out of a
purely household cult with Dionysius’s anxieties about expanding it to outsiders.
The oddness points to an important characteristic of the religion of everyday
social exchange: Individuals, families and privately formed groups had room for
religious creativity that civic religion did not have. Their choices and patterns of
activity were often highly strategic, often idiosyncratic and therefore particular,
within the constraints of family tradition, degrees of privacy, and broader social
convention.
The religion of Dionysius’s association displays normal reciprocity with the
gods, but more stress on sanctions by the gods than typical as part of these ex-
change relations. In addition to the founder’s anxieties about his household and
the purity that the presence of gods in cultic exchange required, the stress on
bathings and other purifications may be related to mysteries that were part of the
association’s religious practices. The text is difficult on this point and some pos-
sible restorations would denote other practices, but “mysteries” seems the most
likely.31 These religious practices became widely popular in the Hellenistic age,
including in private groups. If following normal patterns, Dionysius’s mysteries
would have involved some sort of initiation in which a high level of ritual purity
would have been required and the revelation of some piece of sacred knowledge

29 For a translation, see Ascough, Harland and Kloppenborg, Associations: A Sourcebook,

82–84 (# 121).
30 Also somewhat unusual, the moralizing of purity should not be overplayed, especially in
light of the required oath that calls on gods to watch behavior more generally. The later Hellenis-
tic and Roman periods saw the influence of philosophy and the spread of purity as a moral met-
aphor. See, Angelos Chaniotis, “Reinheit der Körper – Reinheit der Seele in den griechischen
Kultgesetzen,” in Schuld, Gewissen, und Person: Studien zur Geschichte des inneren Menschen,
ed. Jan Assmann and Theo Sundermeier (Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 1997); John S. Kloppenborg,
“The Moralizing Discourse in Greco-Roman Associations,” in “The One Who Sows Bountifully”:
Essays in Honor of Stanley K. Stowers, eds. Caroline Johnson Hodge, et al., Brown Judaic Studies
356 (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 2013), 215–228.
31 I still see difficulties with reading “mysteries,” but now favor it instead of others as in
Stowers, “Cult from Philadelphia,” 291 n. 31.
 Locating the Religion of Associations 313

with the whole process promising an advantage in one’s future guaranteed by

some god or gods.32
In my admittedly speculative imagining of the cult site, Zeus and Hestia
(goddess of the hearth), a quintessentially Greek household pair, had altars
(mentioned in the text) at the center of the cultic layout.33 Alongside, and re-
dundantly was Agdistis who in parallel with Zeus was “guardian … of the house-
hold (oikos)” and apparently had the inscription at her altar or shrine. After other
examples from the period, the nine “savior gods” (e. g., Eudaimonia, Ploutos,
Hygeia, Agathe, Tyche) may have had their names inscribed on one altar. All
of this is typically Greek from the period with similar examples from house-
hold sites except Agdisitis, a form of the Great Mother popular in Phrygia and
Anatolia where Lydia is. This site, probably in a courtyard of some type, would
have been the place of Dionysius’s household religious practices with his family,
dependents and slaves and the place for the religious activities of the association.
The gods/NEBs side of reciprocal relations entailed that they watched and re-
membered what humans did and therefore would often give bits of information
useful to humans who appealed to them. Zeus gave instructions for founding the
association to Dionysius in a dream, something seen in the founding of other
associations.34 It seems likely that divinatory signs and messages would largely
play a different role in the life of associations than for individuals. Apart from
foundings by individuals, issues of authority would seem to have arisen for in-
dividuals appealing to bird flights or other typical signs to argue for some point
in the decision-making of an association, but none of this is clear. The corporate
activity of offering meat did feature reading the entrails, noting the way the fire
burned and the behavior of the animal, all regular means of obtaining clues to
the god’s will.35 One inscription (MDAI A 1941, 228) honors a certain Serapeion
for performing “good omened sacrifices” for the association, including “the
wives and children.”
Divine oversight also came to Dionysius’s association in the case of the oaths
to obey the rules that members had to take. Oaths appealed to the ability of
gods/NEBs to see people’s behavior. Oath-takers asked the god to punish them if
they broke the promise, here all seemingly for the security and prosperity of the
founder’s and member’s households with special anxiety about the behavior of
women. Almost as an afterthought, the inscription mentions the regular animal
and other offering to the association’s gods that typically included libations,

32 On mysteries and associations, see Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations, 45–49,

70–74 and 128–132. On “private” mysteries, see Larson, Greek Religion, 254–263.
33 Based on my “Cult from Philadelphia,” 288–293.
34 See James C Hanges, Paul, Founder of Churches: A Study in Light of the Evidence for
the Role of “Founder-Figures” in the Hellenistic-Roman Period, WUNT 292 (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2012).
35 Sarah Iles Johnston, Ancient Greek Divination (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 125–128.
314 Stanley Stowers

food offerings, incense burning, singing, praise in prayers and other gifts. This
household-based group shows all of the practices and patterns of everyday social
exchange, but with quite particular emphases. As shown by examples discussed
below, the Philadelphia association’s stress on good behavior even outside its
meetings is not unique in spite of scholarly claims.36 Attempts to create networks
of trust desired by households best explains the phenomenon, but of course, with
the help of gods familiar to the people and site.
The religion of occupational associations also frequently belongs to the RESE,
and made especially clear by the illuminating evidence of inscriptions and papy-
rus documents from Egypt. Most occupational work, workshops and retail shops
were located in or connected to homes and based on the labor of the house-
hold.37 To this one must add farming and pastoralism based on land belonging
to or leased by the family. These ancients believed that their production was only
possible with the aid of the gods. The relevant archeological sites with work areas
in good states of preservation often have altars and cult sites for thanking and
honoring the gods. These religious household/work sites have been clearly re-
vealed especially at Ostia and Pompeii.38 But the walls of houses and workshops
or the minds and interests of individuals do not circumscribe the religion of
everyday social exchange. Occupational associations illustrate this principle.39
Scholarship has dispelled the idea occasionally seen that guilds were kinds of
trade unions, but even more distorting has been the once dominant idea that as-
sociations were attempts to compensate for the supposed loss of meaning, break-
down of family life, and individualism of the Hellenistic age due to the supposed
degeneration of the polis.40 Writers once waxed eloquent about how the socially
rootless masses of the poor would band together in burial clubs so they could
at least have a place of final rest. The idea of even a category of burial societies

36 An advance on this issue is Kloppenborg, “Moralizing Discourse.”

37 Miko Flohr, The World of the Fullo: Work, Economy, and Society in Roman Italy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013); Clare Holleran, Shopping in Ancient Rome: The Retail Trade in
the Late Republic and the Principate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Andrew Wilson
and Miko Flohr, eds. Urban Craftsmen and Traders in the Roman World (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2016).
38 Jan Theo Bakker, Living and Working with the Gods: Studies of the Evidence for Private
Religion and its Material Environment in the City of Ostia (100–500 AD) (Amsterdam: Gieben,
1994); W. Van Andringa, Quotidien de dieux et des hommes. La vie religieuse dans la cites de
Vésuve à l’époque romaine (Rome: École française de Rome, 2009).
39 On guilds see, Jean-Pierre Waltzing, Étude historique sur les corporations professionelles
chez les Romains depuis les origenes jusqu’ à la chute de l’empire d’Occcident 4 vols. (Louvain:
l’Academie Royal de Sciences, des Lettres et les Beaux-Arts Belgique, 1895–1900); Onno M. van
Nijf, The Civic World of Professional Associations in the Roman East (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1997);
Harland, Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations, especially 38–44.
40 A now much discredited approach. See, for example, Philip Harland, “The Declining
Polis? Religious Rivalries in Ancient Civic Context,” in Religious Rivalries in the Early Roman
Empire and the Rise of Christianity, ed. Leif Vaage, ESCJ 18 (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Uni-
versity Press, 2006), 21–50.
 Locating the Religion of Associations 315

has been disproven.41 Many specialists now find that associations gave members
bigger and more luxurious funerals than average.42 More importantly, like com-
pensatory and deprivation theories of religion, compensatory theories about the
motivations for associations have been strongly criticized.43 Because the RESE
centrally involves positive socio-economic exchange with the gods embedded in
human socio-economic interaction, one seriously misunderstands the religiosity
by construing it as designed to mollify social and psychological deprivation. But
deprivation theories grow easily out of the Western and Christian polemics that
separated the social from the economic, the long term generalized relationship
with the god from gift-giving, the economic portrayed as a commercial relation.
A related misreading comes from the habit of seeing the rules of associations
as attempts to forestall the interventions of state authorities supposedly always
suspicious of associations.44 A more promising approach comes from the
sociologist Charles Tilly’s theory of trust networks that have strong social and
economic effects.45 The theory would help to explain a fact puzzling in light
of traditional scholarship on associations: dues and other costs for member-
ship were often very high so that the poor and less well-to-do would have been
unlikely to afford membership.46
A few associations were large with thirty or more members, but these
frequently cited examples of large memberships belie the fact that most associ-
ations were small, 10–25 members, usually all male. Much evidence illustrates
the ways that associations, including occupational guilds, stabilized households
and supported their interests, but not because the institution of the family was in
trouble. I have already noted the way that associations enlarged the social circles
involved in funerary and mortuary rites. The following charter (P. Mich. V 243)
from the early first century CE institutes monthly common meals at which we
can assume offerings and prayers took place, but many of the regulations consist
of rules that have families and households directly in view.47

41 Kloppenborg, “Collegia and THIASOI,” 20–23.

42 Philip F. Venticinque, “Family Affairs: Guild Regulations and Family Relationships in
Roman Egypt,” GRBS 50 (2010): 293.
43 Venticinque, “Family Affairs,” 273–94.
44 Venticinque, “Family Affairs,” 287–88; Jonathan S. Perry, “‘L’ État intervint peu à peu’:
State Intervention in the Ephesian ‘Baker’s Strike,’” in Private Associations and the Public Sphere,
183–205.
45 Charles Tilly, Trust and Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). The fol-
lowing have used Tilly’s theory: Andrew Monson, “The Ethics and Economics of Ptolemaic Re-
ligious Associations,” AncSoc 36 (2006): 221–238; Venticinque, “Family Affairs”; Kloppenborg,
“Moralizing Discourse,” 217, 226–227.
46 Venticinque, “Family Affairs,” 274–275 with bibliography in notes 4–6.
47 I owe this example and the stress on families to Venticinque, “Family Affairs,” 279–83.
The translation is by A. E. R. Boak, editor of P. Mich. For similar rules see P. Mich. ThV 244 that
adds the funerals of parents.
316 Stanley Stowers

If anyone marries, let him pay two drachmas [if he does not celebrate the rites], for the
birth of a male child two drachmas, for the birth of a female child one drachma, for the
purchase of property four drachmas, for a flock of sheep four drachmas, for cattle one
drachma. If anyone neglects another in trouble and does not give aid to release him from
his trouble, let him pay eight drachmas …. If anyone prosecutes another or defames him,
let him be fined eight drachmas. If anyone intrigues against another or corrupts his home,
let him be fined sixty drachmas. If anyone is given into custody for a private debt, let
him go to bail for him up to one hundred silver drachmas for thirty days., with which
he will release the men. May health prevail! If one of the members dies, let all be shaved
and let them hold a feast for one day, each bringing at once one drachma and two loaves,
and in the case of other bereavements, let them hold a feast for one day. Let him who is
not shaven in case of death be fined four drachmas. Whoever has no part in the funeral
and has not placed a wreath on the tomb shall be fined four drachmas. And let the other
matters be as the society decides.

It would be a misunderstanding to think that the fines indicate laxness and

difficulty in maintaining good relations and in the fulfillment of duties among
members. The opposite is the case. Rather, by voluntarily binding themselves with
concrete rules and sanctions they show their commitment to other members
and their families. Undertaking the self-binding eliminated the unreliable and
uncommitted and left those who could be trusted. Such associations thus ex-
tended the trust that belongs to the household into a larger network important
both for positive social relations and for business and commerce. But how did
mundane religiosity fit?48
The rules above imply numerous events and practices of the RESE all enlarged
and enriched by the participation of the association. Generalized reciprocity with
the gods mirrored reciprocity with others in the association, albeit reciprocity
among equals instead of gods, and relationships of long-term generalized reci-
procity are epitomized by trust. Weddings among the Mediterranean ethnicities
were events with prayers, offerings to the gods and numerous other activities re-
lated to gods/NEBs.49 Births usually involved pollution, purification, celebration,
thanksgiving, apotropaic practices, prayers and offerings.50 Purchasing property,
sheep or cattle were major events that called for thanksgiving and celebration
with the gods in view and the assumption of reciprocal exchange.
A scene from Plautus who is known for his realism about the family and
religion illustrates everyday assumptions about what to do when good things
happen. In Rudens (1205–07), celebration breaks out when parents are reunited
48 I am generally following Monson and Venticinque (notes 42 and 45 above) in this para-
graph.
49 We know nothing about Jewish weddings in the second temple period, but see Hersch,
The Roman Wedding; Oakley and Sinos, The Wedding in Ancient Athens (For both, see n. 17
above.).
50 Parker, Miasma, 63–64; Larson, Greek Religion, 138–141, 158, 162–163; Maurio Bittini,
Women and Weasels: Mythologies of Birth in Ancient Greece and Rome, trans. Emlyn Eisenbach
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
 Locating the Religion of Associations 317

with their long-lost daughter and the father says, “We ought to stop this kissing
at some point, my wife, and put me in finery so that I can make an offering
when I go in and approach the household Lares, because they have added to
our household. We have unblemished lambs and pigs at the house.”51 Plautus
assumes that an offering of celebration and thanksgiving to the divine guardians
of the household is the natural reflex. In some of these events including when a
member died, a meal of bereavement and memory or of celebration and thanks-
giving of the whole association would have been held that included the normal
gifts to the appropriate god or gods such as food offerings, libations, incense,
singing/music, flowers, prayers and so on. It would be remiss not to mention that
birthday rituals also fit into such celebrations of the RESE.52
Looking at only the associations clearly marked by close ties to families and
households leaves aside a great deal of evidence, even when limited to those
organized by occupations. Especially those organized by ethnicity or geography
and by focus on a particular deity might be seen as based on principles closer
to civic religion. The goals of the ethnic association would in this case be the
maintenance of culturally particular practice of the city and civic or ethnic
ideology. But such a conclusion would be hasty. One rarely finds in associations
a monopolistic principle of ethnic ideology or recognition of only one deity to
the exclusion of a world full of gods/NEBs related to the mundane interests of
the RESE.53
The associations of Romans and Italians of late Hellenistic Delos, for example,
combine elements in ways that show everyday and local interests together with
the ethnic and geographic.54 The choice of gods and festivals entailed central
everyday and local interests. Three of four associations were named after deities:
the Apolloniastai, the Hermaistai, the Poseidoniastai. Apollo was the ancient god
of Delos. Choosing Apollo meant reciprocity with the historic and present god of
place, even if it was not one’s “place of origin.” Hermes or Mercury was the god
of trade, commerce and banking that were the chief activities on the island and
were what brought the Italians there. Poseidon, of course, was ruler of the sea
and exchange relations involving protection for ships and shipping would have

51 Translations are my own unless otherwise specified.

52 For example, Karl Aretsinger, “Birthday Rituals: Friends and Patrons in Roman Poetry
and Cult,” Classical Antiquity 11 (1992): 175–193.
53 A key point because most scholarship on the religion of the ancient Mediterranean has
been organized by the binary opposition of polytheism versus monotheism, with the latter con-
strued as highly ideological.
54 The definitive guides are Philippe Bruneau and Jean Ducat, Guide de Délos, 4th ed. (Paris:
Boccard, 2005); Recherches sur les cultes de Délos à l’époque hellenistique et à l’époque impériale
(Paris: Boccard, 1970). For the Lares, the Compitalia and the associations, see Claire Hesenohr,
“Les Compitalia à Delos,” Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique 127 (2003): 167–249 and espe-
cially Harriet I. Flower, The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman
Street Corner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 175–191.
318 Stanley Stowers

marked that group. Cult directed toward Hermes would have been important
in many ways including the practice of contracts between parties taking place
with an oath and a sacrifice to the god calling him to be guarantor.55 There were
certainly religious practices of these groups that appealed to and reinforced
Roman or Italian identity, but the more directly practical and strategic aims are
also clear.
The fourth association, the Competaliastai (those who celebrate the
Compitalia), is interesting. The names on inscriptions show that most of the
members were slaves, with a few freedmen. In Rome and other places in Italy,
the Compitalia was a moveable-date mid-winter festival for the Lares. The Lares
were gods of place and compital shrines (compita) were at the cross streets that
defined the meeting of neighborhoods and neighbors.56 On farms the shrines
were at the corners of the property where neighbors would come together. The
Lares were very central to households where they protected and helped everyone
who belonged to the household and not just those with blood family relations
as tended to be the case with the Penates. This means that slaves and resident
freed persons related to them strongly. Household shrines were typically in the
kitchen or cooking area where slaves labored and the food for the household
was prepared. In Pompeii most houses had a painting in the cooking area of two
dancing Lares with a genius making an offering and frequently a small altar.57 In
Rome and other cities, the Compitalia was an inclusive festival of the city beloved
by slaves and freed persons. The compital shrines of neighborhood crossroads
beautifully illustrate how civic religion and the RESE could work together. Even
though the neighborhood magistrates (vicomagistri) of Rome were in charge of
the shrines and the festival, the compita were places that defined neighborhoods
and anyone, Roman or Greek, Jew or Phrygian, female or male, could make daily
and personal situational offerings at their altars.
After the Romans defeated Perseus, the Macedonian monarch, in the battle of
Pynda (168 BCE) they gave control of Delos to Athens and made the island a free
port.58 This means that the island had no Roman organization or administrative
structure with Compitalia shrines throughout and the civic festival. Never-
theless, the Competaliastai whose members were mostly Greek slaves born in the
East were dedicated to the Lares and to organizing a purely “private” festival. The
religious and other interests of these slaves were not primarily civic interests, but
surely related to their sense of place, the sites of their day to day lives on Delos.
55 Nicholas Rauh, The Sacred Bonds of Commerce: Religion, Economy, and Trade Society at
Hellenistic Roman Delos, 166–87 B. C. (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1993).
56 Flower (Dancing Lares, 40–75 and throughout) is superb on the local nature of the Lares.
My account mainly follows her book.
57 For powerful arguments that the domestic Lares are above all gods of the hearth and
kitchen see, Federica Giacobello, Larari Pompeiani: Iconografia e culto dei Lari in ambito domes-
tico (Milan: University of Milan, 2008). Also Flower, Dancing Lares, 46–70.
58 Bruneau and Ducat, Guide de Délos, 41–43.
 Locating the Religion of Associations 319

As the Lares illustrate, neighborhoods and place form another principle for
organizing associations related to the religion of mundane social exchange. Local
and locally strategic interests often guided those who organized for social ex-
change with the gods/NEBs based on shared place. Sometimes occupation and
place coincided for associations due to the habit of the same sorts of commercial
enterprises clustering on particular streets and neighborhoods as with the “Pur-
ple-Dyers of Eighteenth Street” in Thessalonike (IG X 2.1 291). One collegium in
Rome went by the name montani, the people or men of the mountain, meaning
the association of those who live atop the Oppian Hill (CIL 1.2 1003). They left
an inscription noting their work on an open-air shrine (sacellum) that would
have been significant for the people of the neighborhood. The fragmentary in-
scription mentions priests of the association, but no god in what remains. Clearly
reciprocity with some god/NEBs was important to the group and it likely would
have been a local deity or one with a locative interpretation. Andrew Wallace-
Hadrill and others have shown that neighborhoods in Greek and Roman cities
were perhaps even more than houses in some ways sites of intensively interactive
everyday life and identity, each a village of its own.59 The divinatory, offering/
honoring, praying, apotropaic and other practices of residents belonging to
neighborhood associations are native to the RESE, even if they sometimes also
entailed civic religious interests and practices also, but with the everyday and
local interests clearly primary.

Conclusions

Associations of the later Hellenistic and early Roman imperial periods display
great cultural and social variety. I have argued that the types or modes of religion
prove analytically helpful in showing that a significant portion of these groups
primarily exhibit the religion of everyday social exchange. I also suspect that
the argument could be extended to other kinds of associations and to a larger
proportion of them. These conclusions cohere with the scholarly habit of de-
scribing them as private (associations), although sorting out the quite different
nature of “the private” in antiquity remains a challenge. But counting gods and
cults is not enough, the kind of religion with its characteristic goals and practices
needs to be explained, and in relation to other religious arenas of the societies.
The long history of Christian propaganda that misrepresented ordinary Med-

59 E. g., Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 2008); Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Richard Last is conducting pathbreaking research
on neighborhoods and early Christianity in “The Neighborhood (vicus) of the Corinthian
Ekklesia: Beyond Family-Based Descriptions of the First Urban Christ-Believers,” JSNT 38.4
(2016): 399–425, and in papers and a forthcoming book.
320 Stanley Stowers

iterranean religion as based on a crass and selfish commercial relationship with

supposed gods has supported both the neglect and the misrepresentation of that
religion in modern scholarship.
I have no quarrel with the idea that associations related usually positively to
their civic environments and reflected these in their own expression, but the
idea has of recent, I think, been overemphasized to the detriment of everyday
religiosity.60 That associations sought the financial backing and support of well
to do patrons and honored the civic achievements of such people should surprise
no one. Their social world worked as studied hierarchy with needed benefactors
always above you. The gods were such benefactors, but also the elite in the cities
who normally considered regular membership in an association as below their
dignity. Even emperors, almost as distant as heavenly gods and who were per-
ceived as bestowing goods such as peace, prosperity and just government might
find god-like honors returned by an association. But none of this negated the
basic social exchange and everyday interests of the associations.
This analysis with a theorized approach to religion casts some light on Judean
and Christian groups organized as associations. Religious tradition and modern
scholarship has overwhelmingly characterized “Judaism” and early Christianity
in terms that fit my third mode, the religion of literate and literary experts.
Almost all of Jewish and Christian religious practices supposedly followed laws
and scripts from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and other early writings.
The cult of the temple followed Leviticus and other scripture. The Lord’s Supper
and Eucharist followed Pauline and Gospel texts. Ritual was about the com-
munication of meaning usually conveyed as a narrative about Israel or Christ
that the experts taught. The masses of highly educated Jews went to synagogues
to study Torah and follow a liturgy. Jewish life in the so-called second temple
period was dominated by expert interpreters of religious law. All of this would
have required the dominance of a highly literate body of expert interpreters and
a huge educational system for which we have no evidence. I believe that this story
only contains a nugget of truth at best, but I want to make a different point here.
Neither the religious practices nor the central religiosity of reciprocal gift giving
seen above in associations requires or features written literary texts and expert
interpreters. The associations did not focus on literary texts, their teachings and
interpretation with dominating roles for experts in particular literate traditions.
We do not find associations organized under figures like Paul, Justin, Valentinus,
or Irenaeus with their intellectualistic practices and interests.
Rather than once again declare the Jews and Christian groups unique, we
would do better to read the early Christian and Jewish writings more critically
and especially with the understanding that in the context of ancient Med-

60 For instance, in the views of the editors discussed throughout Gabrielsen and Thomsen,
Private Associations and the Public Sphere.
 Locating the Religion of Associations 321

iterranean religion they represent a particular social and cultural perspective.

Groups of Christ followers may in general not have described themselves in
quite the way that their highly literate and entrepreneurial would-be leaders did.
And because our only access to that movement, if that is what it was, comes by
way of a tiny collection of writings from the literate experts, we have little direct
evidence for the everyday religiosity of the majority. The writings themselves,
however, constantly criticize practices that seem to arise from the RESE while
also projecting visions of an ideal people of God that the non-experts should be
or become. As some scholars have done, it is easy to imagine, say Paul, strug-
gling to mold into shape a preexisting association that welcomed him, but not
with passive acceptance on the part of those people who had their own interests,
habitual practices and religious intuitions. That hypothesis has a good deal of
explanatory power.

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 A Roman Historian Looking at Early Christian religiones
The coniuratio and the sacramentum
in Second and Early Third-century North Africa

Carlin Barton

For Karen King

The “Roman” Caecilius, in the Octavius of Minucius of Cirta,1 offered an ac-

count of the Christians that modern scholars have often compared to the Livian
description of the Bacchants whose assemblies the Roman senate repressed in
188 BCE: they were a hateful and spiteful rabble, a plebs profanae coniurationis
composed of ignorant men and credulous women who met in secret at night for
strange fasts and “inhuman” meals. They ridiculed the sacra. They despised the
temples, the gods, and the priesthoods. They showed no respect for the marks of
honor and the purple robes of the magistrates. These desperate and deplorable
humans could not be governed even by threats of coercion (8.3–5).
In his commentary on the Octavius, Graeme Clarke dismissed Caecilius’
characterization of the Christians as “almost standard jargon to describe con-
temptuously any clandestine religious sect … [which] reflected the Roman
attitude toward such apparently subversive religious groups outside official
religion.”2 Using a different approach, Agnes Nagy asserted that “the new relig-
ious community” could change into a “coniuratio” and become a danger for the
ancient community from which it has come.”3
The easy and automatic assumption that “religion” was a universal category
clouds, like a cataract, the vision of historians of early Christianity as it does
Classicists. It hinders both Clarke and Nagy from seeing and accepting the
ways in which, for Minucius Felix as well as his fellow Africans Tertullian and
Apuleius, sacralizing and desecrating ignored the categories into which we dis-
sect the world. I will argue, in this paper, that Latin-speaking African Christians
would have recognized themselves as coniurati centuries before they could have
conceived of themselves as constituting a “religion” – precisely because they
sought to sacralize themselves both as persons and as groups.
1 Late 2nd or early 3rd century.
2 Octavius, 207 (emphasis mine).
3 “We want to point to the possibility that the new religious community changes into a
coniuratio and becomes a danger for the ancient community from which it has come” (Agnes
Nagy, “Superstitio et Coniuratio,” Numen 49 [2002]: 178–192).
326 Carlin Barton

As Daniel Boyarin and I argued in Imagine No Religion, the Latin words

religio and religiones were used to express an array of ideas – none of which
can be faithfully or adequately mapped onto our notions of “religion.” To sum-
marize with painful brevity: religio embraced a range of emotions from mild
anxiety to terror, feelings that resulted from recognition of, and careful attention
to, boundaries, borders, bonds, and obligations of all kinds – personal and
collective. Religio could also be the resulting scrupulousness, inhibition, and dis-
ciplined self-restraint of the religiosus, the person “filled with religio.” Religio was
frequently the bond, boundary, or “taboo” itself – or anything that brought that
bond or obligation to one’s attention. Importantly, religio had an array of neg-
ative meanings: it could designate the crossing or breaking of a bond, boundary,
or “taboo” (i. e. religio could be a crime or transgression) – and it could des-
ignate the resultant guilt that functioned as a curse.4 Anything sacralized was
very likely to be thought of as a religio or to trigger religio. But­– and I cannot
emphasize this enough – anything at all could be a religio or trigger the emo-
tions of religio.5 Religio constituted an internalized balancing system, a system of
self-governing, of self-disciplining typical of cultures without effective coercive
institutional policing, and so was much closer in its range of meanings to Latin
pudor than to our “religion.”6
While Tertullian (and his Latin-speaking contemporaries) did not have a
notion of a sphere of “religion” that corresponds to our own, he did use the word
religio in many of its traditional Latin senses (always adapting and modifying).
In an ongoing effort to show “what you can see if you stop looking for what is
not there,” I am going to focus on three of the concepts of religio that Tertullian
did have: firstly, the religio of the oath (coniuratio, sacramentum); secondly, the
religiones, the emotions produced by the oath (the sense of being bound and
obligated, committed, devoted, loyal7); and thirdly, the scrupulous restraint,
the disciplina created by these religiones. Latin notions of religio implicated
Tertullian (as it did his contemporary African Apuleius) in a web of associations
rent by our dichotomizing categories of “religion” (as opposed to “politics” or
“economics”), “sacred” (as opposed to “secular” or “profane”).

4 For an extended discussion of religio see Imagine No Religion; How Modern Abstractions
Hide Ancient Realities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), Part One: 15–118. While
I was generally responsible for the work in Latin and Boyarin for that in Greek, we agreed on
general principles and collaborated on the introductory and concluding generalizations.
5 Cicero, in what I think of as his “Platonic Turn,” associated, in very particular passages,
Latin religio with an idealized enhancement of the fearful authority of the senatorial hierarchy.
In doing so, he planted the seeds, in Latin, of our “religion”, a set of ideas that still had not
congealed in the time of Augustine. See Imagine No Religion, 39–52, and the “Conclusions” to
this article.
6 For an extensive discussion of pudor see Carlin Barton, Roman Honor: The Fire in the
Bones (Berkeley: University of California, 1993).
7 For the oath as a religio see Julius Caesar, Bellum civile 1.67; Cicero, Pro Balbo 5.12.
 A Roman Historian Looking at Early Christian religiones 327

Binding, framing, setting apart, was (and is) the first and fundamental act
of all sacralizing, and for Tertullian the baptismal oath, the sacramentum, was
the essential and initiatory act of sacralizing himself and his group. The bond
of the oath in its nexus of strong emotions inspired and constituted Tertullian’s
disciplina (the word most often used by Tertullian to describe his Christiani).
I want to look at Tertullian’s thought world – not back through the language
and perspective of modern Christians or scholars of Christianity but forward
through the language and thought world of the ancient Romans. I hope that
this will be useful, in some small way, to scholars thinking about early Chris-
tianity.

The Roman coniuratio

Latin offered very old and complex notions of the oath, of ius, of iurare, and the
iusiurandum. Latin ius (plural: iures) described, like Latin fides, both a plenitude
of being and its limitation.8 Ius was both the fullness of being (with its potential
to clash with that of another) and the bounded sphere defining the operation of
one’s will, one’s animus, what Georges Dumézil called “l’aire d’action maxima
reconnue dans chaque circonstance.”9 The verb iurare was to formulate, to define
or prescribe a sphere of action. The iusiurandum, the oath, was simultaneously
the sacralization and the limitation of the plenitude of one’s ius, the “formulation
of a formula” defining a sphere of action and the fulness of being. The iuratus
was the one engaged by the oath, the one whose sphere, whose “turf ” had been
formulated, defined, limited, charged.10 The oath was the sacramentum (“the

8 Fides (another complex and frequently mistranslated Latin word) entailed both the
fullness of power and/or the restraint of that power. For example, the defeated, the dediticii,
surrendered into the fides of the victorious general; i. e. they surrendered into his discretion (his
dicio). He could do with them as he chose. The self-restraint of the general was also his fides,
which restraint could result in his being “credited” or “credible”, which, in turn could evoke
in others the emotions of fides in the sense of trust. Important Latin concepts often expressed
whole systems of balanced complementarities and paradoxes impossible to translate by a single
word in modern European languages. For fides see Barton, Roman Honor, 12n45, 14, 18–19,
34n125, 59n129, 65n158, 68, 72, 142, 145, 150n79, 154, 156n110, 158n118, 166, 180, 182n111,
208, 262n88, 276, 282.
9 Georges Dumézil, Idées romaines (2nd ed. Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 31–45.
10 Periurium was a false or broken oath. Per had the meaning of “through,” “thoroughly”
and/or “very,” “extremely.” In Latin extremes frequently invert, and so the periurus was one who
had broken an oath, who transgressed the boundaries of his ius. Too much fullness of one’s
being burst forth and became a transgression, an inuria or injury against the being of others.
When a man could not restrain himself from breaching the boundaries that rendered him a
socius, a “sharer” in a societas with other men, he often provoked violent counter-transgressions.
The iudex was the definer, the apportioner, the “dictator” of the iures, the one who formulated,
prescribed, defined a sphere of action, especially when there was a clash of iures. The iudex
might dictate the formula of the iusiurandum (iurare in verba alicuius).
328 Carlin Barton

thing that made sacred” “the thing that set apart” “the thing that charged”)11 and
the auctoramentum (“the thing that augmented” “the thing that authorized”).12
The soldier’s sacramentum inaugurated the miles sacratus, the dangerous, dis-
ciplined, sacralized warrior.13
A coniuratio was, quite simply, a “swearing together”, binding together and
sacralizing of a group of iurati. Africans were as aware as Scythians, Romans,
Anglo-Saxons, Arabs, and Mongols, of the power of the oath to weld disparate
individuals and group into militant units. Jochen Bleicken believed that the
coniuratio was, indeed, the only way of swiftly uniting in purpose people who
did not possess common family bonds, affective bonds – or centralized coercive
institutions.14
In the Metamorphoses of Apuleius (from Madauros in Africa Proconsularis),15
the priest of Isis admonished Lucius that neither his birth nor his position nor his
learning had been of use to him.16 He bids Lucius,
Enlist in this sancta militia to whose sacramentum you were summoned not long ago.
Dedicate yourself today to obedience to our religio and take on the voluntary yoke of her
servitude; for as soon as you become the goddess’s slave you will experience more fully
the fruit of your freedom. Blind Fortune has no opportunity against those whose lives the
majesty of our goddess has emancipated into her own servitude (…) Let the irreligiosi see
and recognize their error (11.15).17

Here the religio of the sancta militia was the strenuous discipline to which the
initiate, bound by his sacramentum, was henceforward subject. The irreligiosi
were those unbound, undisciplined, unscrupulous.
The fiercer the oath, the more the life force, the energy, the will or animus of
the iuratus was compressed and concentrated. The more ardent and powerful
the pressure, the more dangerous and explosive the spirit – like a spark com-
pressed in the cylinder of a gasoline engine. An inscription reports “Isis”

11 The thing or person or wealth put at risk, put on deposit, set aside (and so sacralized) in
an oath or trial was also a sacramentum.
12 For an extended discussion of these ideas see Carlin Barton, “Savage Miracles: The Re-
demption of Lost Honor in Roman Society and the Sacrament of the Gladiator and the Martyr,”
Representations 45 (1994): 41–71.
13 For the sacramentum of the miles Mithrae see Tertullian, De corona 15.
14 Jochen Bleicken, „Coniuratio: Die Schwurszene auf den Münzen und Gemmen der
römischen Republik,“ Jahrbuch für Numismatik und Geldgeschichte 13 (1963): 57. The coniuratio
was most frequently and particularly used to constitute and cement versions of the raiding party
or warband, and to reinforce the power of its leaders.
15 Born ca. 125 CE.
16 Nec tibi natales ac ne dignitas quidem, vel ipsa qua flores usquam doctrina profuit ….
17 da nomen sanctae hic militiae, cuius non olim sacramento etiam rogabaris, teque iam nunc
obsequio religionis nostrae dedica et ministerii iugum subi voluntarium. Nam cum coeperis deae
servire, tunc magis senties fructum tuae libertatis. (…) Videant irreligiosi, videant et errorem
suum recognoscant.
 A Roman Historian Looking at Early Christian religiones 329

as saying, “It is I who ordained that nothing should be more feared than an
oath.”18
A coniuratio, a swearing together, could be for any collective purpose.19 Servi-
us tells us that “the word coniuratio could be used of ‘good things’ (res bona), for
coniuratio is a ‘neutral’ word” (nam coniuratio τῶν μέσων est) (Commentarius ad
Aeneidem 8.5).20 He tells us that the forces of the Fabian clan that set out to make
war against the Veians was a coniuratio (Commentarius ad Aeneidem 7.614).21
The Roman forces assembled in response to the sudden incursions during the
bellum Italicum and bellum Gallicum were coniurationes (Commentarius ad
Aeneidem 8.1). According to Livy, a coniuratio was sworn, traditionally and vol-
untarily, by Roman warriors before the time of the imposition, by the senate,
of a compulsory oath, – or over and above the oath that the soldiers swore to
their commanding officer (22.38.1–5).22 The powerful religiones: the disciplina
and fides created by the oath would cause those who were bound by it to fear
deserting the group. “The strongest bond of the military,” Seneca declared, “is re-
ligio: both love for the standards (signa) and the sacrilege (nefas) of desertion.”23
Enemies of the coniurati would fear such an augmented and sacralized common
will. “Fidelity” as a conscious and pre-eminent value was, to a large extent, the
goal of oath-taking.24 (As an aside, “fidelity” as a consciously formulated value
is singularly absent – as is the oath – in small scale kin-based societies before or
outside of the warband.)

18 Inscriptiones Graecae 12 Supplement, ed. F. Hiller von Gaertringen (Berlin, 1939): 99;
English translation by Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism and Christianity 100–425 CE: A Source-
book (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 53–54, p. 54.
19 Cf. Thomas N. Habinek, The Politics of Latin Literature (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1998), 76–81.
20 nota de re bona coniurationem dici posse: nam coniuratio τῶν μέσων est.
21 coniuratio … ut inter Fabios fuit.
22 The state administered the simple sacramentum that the soldiers would assemble at
the bidding of the consul and not depart until ordered (iussu consulum conventuros neque
iniussu abituros) (cf. Servius, Commentarius ad Aeneidem 7.614+8.1; Isidorus, Etymologiae
9. 3. 52). According to Hans Ulrich Instinsky the soldiers might add to this oath their voluntary
coniuratio, (“Schwurszene und Coniuratio,” Jahrbuch für Numismatik und Geldgeschichte 14
[1964]: 83–88). Using the same evidence, Jochen Bleicken distinguished the legitima militia
which was inaugurated by the sacramentum sworn individually before an authorized magistrate
and a coniuratio which was a way of quickly organizing an armed force in cases of a tumultus, a
sudden incursion, in which case the collective oath was not necessarily before, or to a magistrate
(cf. Livy 45.2.1; Bleicken, “Coniuratio,” 51–70; Jerzy Linderski, “Aphrodisias and the Res Gestae,”
Journal of Roman Studies 74 [1984]: 76).
23 Primum militiae vinculum est religio et signorum amor et deserendi nefas (Seneca, Epis-
tulae 95.35). He goes on: “[O]ther duties can easily be demanded of him and entrusted to him
when once the oath has been administered.”
24 See Livy’s description of the oath taken by Publius Cornelius Scipio (Africanus) with his
sword raised at Canusium to fortify the stricken and despairing survivors of Cannae in 116 BCE
(Livy 22.53.6).
330 Carlin Barton

The formation of the assembly of plebeian soldiers, the concilium plebis, with
its highly sacralized leader, the tribunus plebis, was the story of a coniuratio. The
soldier’s government (instituted in defiance of that of the senate) was authorized
by a powerful oath sanctioned by an exsecratio (a curse often accompanied by
and/or modeled by the slaughter of a victim [Livy 2.33]). Dionysius of Halicar-
nassus, writing in Greek in the time of Augustus, described the ecclesia of the
mutinous soldiers who assembled on the Mons Sacer:
Brutus,25 summoning [the plebeians] to their ecclesia, advised them to render this mag-
istracy (the tribunate of the plebs) sacred (hieros [= Latin sacrosanctus]) and inviolable
(asulos), insuring its security by both a law and an oath (horkos).26 (…) If anyone should
[violate the sanctity of the tribune] let him be sacred (exagistos estō [= Latin sacer esto])
and let his goods be consecrated (hiera) to Ceres; and if anyone should kill one who has
done any of these things, let him be guiltless of murder. (…) It was ordained that all the
Romans should swear (omosai) over the sacrificial victims to preserve it for all time, both
they themselves and their descendants; and a prayer was added to the oath that the theoi
of the sky and the daimones of the earth might be propitious to those who observed it, and
that the displeasure of the theoi and daimones might be visited upon those who violated
it, as being guilty of the greatest sacrilege. From this arose the custom … of regarding the
body of the tribunes as sanctified (hiera). (…) After they had passed this vote they erected
an altar upon the summit of the mountain where they had encamped and named it … the
altar of “Jupiter the Terrifier” (6.89.2–4; 90.1).

How much violence must be done to Greek and Roman speech and behavior
to parse Dionysius’ thought world into “religious” and “political”, “sacred” and
“secular”!27 It is a world of actively sacralizing and desecrating, not of passive
states of “religion” and “politics.”
After the dissolution of the societas of the res publica in a century of chaotic
civil wars,28 Octavianus, the future Augustus (“The Augmented One”), used the
25 Not the patrician Brutus. The (plebeian) founder of the plebeian government was as-
cribed the very same name as the (patrician) founder of the senatorial Republic: Lucius Iunius
Brutus. Competitive emulation and the mirroring of plebeian and patrician stories were very
common, as were Christian and Roman stories.
26 It is worth reiterating that something having been made sacer was, above all dangerous
(for good or bad), i. e. tabooed, to be noticed and treated with care.
27 Note that Tertullian still had no notion of a “secular” sphere as opposed to a “religious”
one. The saeculum of Tertullian was “this age” or “this world” as opposed to the better world to
come, the empire of god, “our time.” Tertullian preferred the word saeculum to mundus because
saeculum suggested temporal revolution to Tertullian, one age replaced by another. Compare
the word saeculum in the translation of Mark 10.29 by Cyprian [died 258 CE]: “‘There is no
man,’ he said, ‘that leaves house, or land, or parents, siblings, or wife, or children on account of
the kingdom of God, who will not receive seven-fold even in this time, but in the age to come
(in saeculo venturo) life everlasting.’” (‘Nemo est,’ inquit, ‘qui relinquat domum aut agrum aut
parentes aut fratres aut uxorem aut filios propter regnum Dei et non recipiat septies tantum in isto
tempore, in saeculo autem venturo vitam aeternam’ [De lapsis 12].) Eternity, for Tertullian, was
the cycle of the ages, the saecula saeculorum (Ad uxorem 1.1.3).
28 Dio asserts that the forces of both sides in the civil war between Anthony and Octavian
were bound by oaths (50.6.2 ff.).
 A Roman Historian Looking at Early Christian religiones 331

coniuratio in 32 BCE to “reconstitute” or “save” (with painful irony for many

Romans) the res publica and to unite the peoples of the Empire through an oath
of loyalty to himself personally:
The whole of Italy of its own free will (sponte sua) swore an oath of allegiance to me in mea
verba (i. e. in the words dictated by me)29 and demanded me as the leader in the war in
which I was victorious at Actium. The Gallic and Spanish provinces, Africa, Sicily, and
Sardinia swore the same oath of allegiance.30

Oaths of loyalty were subsequently sworn by consuls, equestrian officials, sen-

ators, soldiers and people to Tiberius, authorizing and legitimating his assump-
tion of power.31 After 38 CE these vows were renewed annually to the imperatores.
Peter Brunt and J. M. Moore have reconstructed this fierce vow from inscriptions
of the oath taken by both Roman residents and natives in Paphlagonia, Cyprus
Portugal, Asia and (perhaps) Italy:
I swear by Zeus, Ge, Helios, and all gods and goddesses and by Augustus himself that I will
be loyal to Caesar Augustus and to his children and descendants all the days of my life, in
word, deed and mind … and that on their behalf I will spare neither spirit (ψυχή) nor life
nor children, but in every way I will endure every danger in their interest. (…) If I should
infringe this oath or not act in accordance with its terms, I invoke on my body, spirit, life,
children, and my whole race … utter and total destruction down to the last of my line and
all who descend from me. And may the bodies of my family or issue not be received by
land or sea ….32

These new religiones,33 these ferocious commitments, like those of the late 2nd
century African Christians Perpetua and Felicitas, required a transfer of loy-

29 In Roman oaths (as in Roman confessions), when one person repeated the formula
dictated by another, the person dictating the oath (the dictator or iudex) established his or her
superior authority to the person who did not speak in his or her own voice. In that way the oath
(like a pax) could be used simultaneously to establish covenantal relations and distinctions in
rank; i. e. to establish both forms of community and hierarchy.
30 Iuravit in mea verba tota Italia sponte sua et me belli quo vici ad Actium ducem depoposcit.
Iuraverunt in eadem verba provinciae Galliae Hispaniae Africa Sicilia Sardinia (Res gestae divi
Augusti 25.2); cf. Suetonius, Augustus 17.2.
31 Dio 57.3.2; Tacitus, Annales 1.7+34.
32 Peter Brunt and J. M. Moore, Res Gestae Divi Augusti (London: Oxford University Press,
1967), 68–69. Cf. V. Ehrenberg and A. H. M. Jones, Documents Illustrating the Reigns of Augus-
tus and Tiberius, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 145–146 no. 315 (the oath of Gangra
3 BCE); Robert Sherk, The Roman Empire: Augustus to Hadrian (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1988), 31; Timothy Mitford, “A Cypriot Oath of Allegiance to Tiberius,” Journal
of Roman Studies 50 (1960): 75–79; Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1939), 288 n. 3; Peter Herrmann, Der römische Kaisereid (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1968), 123–126. Brunt and Moore emphasize that the formula of the oath varied as
did the names of the gods called as witnesses. Brunt and Moore describe this oath as a “religious
tie” (p. 68). I would note that, for the Romans, “religious tie” would have been a pleonasm.
33 In the report of the trial of the Numidian Christians from Scilla (180 CE) the word religio
can be understood as a militant discipline (in this case involving ardent loyalty to their leader).
Either in response to remarks not recorded in the transcript, or to the claim by the Christians
332 Carlin Barton

alties. The new commitments required a determined disciplined displacement of

one’s deepest ties to family and offspring.34
A coniuratio, then, was not a “plot” against the state … but it could be. Like any
warband, guild, school, sect, – or the Roman legion itself­ – coniurati could have a
purpose and a collective identity not in harmony with the interests and purposes
of the Emperor or senate. It was as swearers of joint oaths (coniurationes) that,
aroused by the murder of their champion Drusus, the Italians banded together
in bloody rebellion (the “Social Wars” of the early first c. BCE).35 The rebels
had bound themselves together in 91 by a sacramentum in which they devoted
themselves to Drusus:
I swear by Jupiter Capitolinus and the Vesta of Rome and by Mars … and by the Sun, etc.
that I will hold the friend and enemy of Drusus to be my friend and enemy and that I will
not spare possessions or the life of my children or of my parents if it be to Drusus’ advantage
and to the advantage of those who have taken this oath (Diodorus Siculus 37.11D [17B]).36

A coin struck during the Social Wars shows two groups of four warriors point-
ing with their swords towards a pig held by a kneeling youth between them in
front of a standard:37 a depiction of a blood oath or covenant (foedus).38 They
are “striking the bargain”, “cutting the deal” with their swords (Latin foedus
ferire, Hebrew kerot berit).39 (Foedus and fides share the same root: fid.) The

that they behaved scrupulously, being neither malefactors nor malevolent in their thoughts,
Satur­ninus the Roman proconsul is reported to have replied: “We also are religiosi and our
religio is simplex: we swear by the genius of our dominus the imperator and we perform sup-
plications on behalf of his salus, which things you should do as well.” (See Herbert Musarillo,
The Acts of the Christian Martyrs [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972], 86–89, line 3.) The
oaths and loyalties of the Christians and the Roman proconsul are in direct competition with
one another; they occupy the same space.
34 Ironically Gaius, according to Suetonius, “caused the names of his sisters to be included
in all oaths (omnibus sacramentis): ‘And I will not hold myself and my children dearer than I do
Gaius and his sisters.’” (Gaius 15).
35 The assemblies, oath-takings (coniurationes) and speeches of the Italiotes were reported
to the meetings of the senators. (Eorum [Italicorum] coetus coniurationesque et orationes in con-
siliis principum referuntur [Livy, Epitome 71].).
36 For this oath see Lily Ross Taylor, Party Politics in the Age of Caesar (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1949), 36–37, 45, 197n40, 198n67; 199n69.
37 C. H. V. Sutherland, Roman Coins (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1974), 65 no. 94
(= H. Grue­ber, Coins of the Roman Republic in the British Museum, Vol. 2. [British Museum,
1970], Social War no. 3).
38 See Anton von Premerstein, Vom Werden und Wesen des Prinzipats, Abhandlungen der
Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Abteilung, N. F. 15 (Mu-
nich: Beck, 1937), 27 ff.
39 Blood was highly-charged and so one of the prime instruments of sacralizing. The
slitting the throat of the animal simultaneously charged the oath and the oath-taker; it was
the ex­secratio, the making very sacred (ex-sacrare), the sacralizing curse that the oath-taker
placed on himself or herself as a deterrent against breaking the contract. Juvenal’s avaricious
perjurer, for instance, vowed to eat the boiled head of his own son should he forswear himself
(13.84–85). For the curse/prayer formula pronounced at the time of an oath or contract see
 A Roman Historian Looking at Early Christian religiones 333

foundational act of the res publica, the senatorial confederacy, was, in Livy’s ac-
count, the oath of Brutus, who, raising high the knife dripping with the blood of
the violated patrician matron Lucretia, swore to pursue Tarquinius Superbus, his
wife and children with sword and fire … and that he would not suffer another to
be king in Rome.40
Wherever the Romans saw militant fidelity they assumed that it was initiated
by an oath augmented with blood; the greater the loyalty, the bloodier the sac-
rifice, the fiercer the exsecratio. As an example, Sallust accounts for the extraor-
dinary loyalty unto death shown by the followers of the rebel Catiline during the
civil wars:
Catiline compelled the participants in his crime to take an oath, and he passed around
bowls of human blood mixed with wine. After uttering a fierce curse (exsecratio), and after
all had tasted it, as is usual in solemn rites, he disclosed his project. His end in so doing
was, they say, that they might be more loyal to one another (inter se fidi magis forent)
because they shared the common knowledge, the guilt (conscientia) of so dreadful a deed
(Catilina 22).41

Allen Brent assumed that, “The suppression of the Dionysiacs [i. e. Bacchants]
had been because they were considered to be practicing magical rites that would
threaten the pax deorum …. It was this threat that constituted it as a coniura-
tio.”42 In fact, any assembly of people not under the control of a magistrate was

Polybius 3.25.6; Ernst von Lasaulx, Der Eid bei den Römern, Verzeichnis der Vorlesungen der
Universität Würzburg 45 (Würzburg: Thein, 1844), 11; Rudolf Hirzel, Der Eid (Leipzig: Hirzel,
1902 [reprinted New York: Arno, 1979]), 137–141; Georg Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der
Römer (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1902), 325; Huguette Fugier, Recherches sur l’expression du sacré
dans la langue latine (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1963), 235.
40 Livy 1.59.1. The creation of the res publica was the founding of the senatorial confederacy
(reminiscent of the founding of the military confederacy of the Sons of Israel in Judges 19–20).
Lucretia played a role for the Romans not unlike that of the concubine of the Levite for the
Israelite confederacy. In both cases the violation and death of the woman served as the blood
sacrifice cementing groups (otherwise often hostile to one another) into a fighting force: the
great clans of the Romans and the “tribes” of Israel, respectively. Both confederacies were bound
by oaths (see Judges 20.8). Human sacrifices made for particularly strong blood oaths. See the
terrifying human sacrifices that were used to build the elite fighting force of the Samnites, the
“Linen Legion” (Livy 10.38.2–13).
41 For different versions of the blood oath to Catiline see Dio 37.30.3; Florus 4.1; Plutarch,
Cicero 10.4; Tertullian, Apologeticum 9.9. The language of sacrifice saturated all Roman de-
scriptions of war and never more so than accounts of the civil wars.
42 Allen Brent, A Political History of Early Christianity (London: T & T Clark, 2009), 69–72;
cf. 35–37. Brent made much use of the notion of the pax deorum in The Imperial Cult and the
Development of Church Order: Concepts and Images of Authority in Paganism and Early Chris-
tianity Before the Age of Cyprian (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 17–72. Before him, in an influential article,
Geoffrey de Ste. Croix found in the disturbance of the pax deorum the principal explanation for
the hostility of the Roman governing class to the Christians who refused to honor the gods
(“Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted?” Past & Present 26 [1963]: 29). The notion of the
pax deorum is, like Roman “religion”, a product of the scholar’s study. Latin pax (cf. Livy 6.41 fin.
and Virgil 4.56 + 10.31) did not mean what it does to us. Firstly, there was no general or normal
334 Carlin Barton

met with anxious suspicion by the senators. Meetings at night (coetus nocturni)
had been outlawed from the time of the earliest inscribed laws of the republic
(the “Twelve Tables” of the mid-fifth-century BCE). The sanction in this early
prohibition was sacralizing: cursing and devotion to a god.43 Unauthorized and
unsupervised assemblies signaled to the senate and Emperor the existence of
cabals of hostile slaves, plebeians, women, foreigners and/or other discontented
or non-privileged groups.44
Modern scholars are wont to compare the Roman repression of the Christians
to that of the Bacchants (described by Livy as a coniuratio intestina),45 because
both movements appear to fit our definitions of “religious” movements.46 The
coniuratio of the Bacchants did, indeed, involve sacrificuli, vates, sacra, and
sacerdotes. It also involved secret and nightly meetings in which mingled Roman
and foreigner, male and female, free and slaves. “Their number,” the informant
Hispala said, “was very great, almost a populus” (39. 13. 14).47 “A great fear,” Livy
wrote, “seized the patres … lest these coniurationes and gatherings by night might

state of covenant or contract between the gods and humans in Roman thought, any more than
there was between the Romans and their defeated peoples. Latin pax was the settlement dictated
and imposed by the victor on the defeated. It only bound the subjects. (Similarly, the Powers That
Be could not be bound by any laws or conventions. Omens and portents were the proof positive
of that.) It was only beginning in Augustan propaganda that the pax (imposed by Octavianus at
the end of the civil war) was given some of its benign, its “pacific” associations (like those in the
relief of Terra Mater [or Ceres] on the Ara Pacis) while the threat of coercion of Octavianus/
Augustus against his defeated enemies remained, as in the Res gestae, still explicit. For an ex-
tended discussion of pax see Carlin Barton, “The Price of Peace in Ancient Rome,” in War and
Peace in the Ancient World, ed. Kurt A. Raaflaub (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 226–55. Brent omits
many of the factors that tell against the idea of the pax deorum – such as the Roman practice of
evocatio (discussed below n. 48).
43 Porcius Latro, Declamatio in Catilinam 19 = XII Tables 26 (C. G. Bruns, Fontes Iuris
Romani Antiqui [Tübingen: I. C. B. Mohr, 1909], 34).
44 For the coniuratio organized by Piso and aimed at the assassination of Nero in 65 CE see
Tacitus, Annales 15.48.1.
45 39.8.1+3, 39.17.6.
46 See the charts in Robert M. Grant, Greek Apologists of the Second Century (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1988), 203–204; Robert M. Grant, “Pliny and the Christians,” Harvard Theological
Review 41 (1948): 273–274, 273; Steve Benko, “Pagan Criticisms of Christianity,” Aufstieg und
Niedergang der römischen Welt 2.23.2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), 1066–1072; Robert L. Wilken,
The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1984);
John North, “The Development of Religious Pluralism,” in The Jews Among Pagans and Chris-
tians, eds. Judith Lieu, John North and Tessa Rajak (New York: Routledge, 1992), 181–186;
Nagy, “Superstitio et Coniuratio,” 178–192; Brent, A Political History of Early Christianity, 35–37.
47 “As regards their number, if I say that there are many thousands of them, you cannot
help but be terrified, unless I shall at once add to that who and of what sort they are. First, then,
a great part of them are women, and they are the source of this mischief; then there are males
(mares [notice not viri, “men”]) very like the women, debauched and debauchers (stuprati et
constuperatores), fanatical (fanatici – a word that implied possession, enthusiasm, inspiration),
with senses stupefied (attoniti) by wakefulness, wine, noise and shouts at night. The movement
thus far has no strength, but it has an immense source of strength in that they grow more nu-
merous every day” (39.15.8–10).
 A Roman Historian Looking at Early Christian religiones 335

produce something of hidden treachery or danger …” (39.14.4). “Not yet have

they revealed all the crimes to which they have vowed themselves (coniurarunt).
(…) As yet it does not have strength to crush the res publica. Daily the evil grows
and creeps abroad … its object is control of the res publica (ad summam rem
publicam spectat)” (39.16.3).
In a miraculously surviving contemporary inscription, the senatus consulta
de Bacchanalibus of 186 BCE, the senators addressed the issue of the foederati,
the “confederated” Bacchants. It is very clear from the words of this inscription
what it was that unnerved the senators. They expressly, repeatedly, and very
emphatically forbade the Bacchants from making oaths, exchanging vows or
promises, or pledging their fides to one another:
Nor let them [henceforward] make oaths together, nor make vows together, nor make prom-
ises to one another, nor make covenants with one another, or give sureties,48 to one another.
Neve … inter sed coniourase neve comvovise neve conspondisse neve conpromesise velet,
neve quisquam fidem inter sed dedise velet (lines 13–15).49

Again, the insistence of the senators was on preventing the binding together of
the group by oaths and promises. It was never Bacchus/Liber/Dionysus the sen-
ators feared. On the contrary, the senators repeatedly iterated the possibility of
honoring Dionysus provided the cultores applied to the senate for permission to
meet and gathered in small numbers (op. cit. lines 4–6, 8–9, 15–22). Similarly,
the Romans never expressed the slightest fear of the gods of the Christians. The
Romans were confident that even the most powerful gods of even their most
adamant enemies could always be evoked, appropriated, “turned.”50 (Gods were
there for the making and the taking.51) Rather, the Roman authorities were
acutely alert to disloyalty and sedition, to congeries of humans swearing alle-
giance to “king” or “warrior” gods and their human counterparts. When Livy
wrote about the Bacchants he had in mind the “First Sicilian Slave War,” the
harrowing rebellion led by the wonder-working charismatic prophet and “King
of Syria” Eunus, and his faithful general Cleon,52 as well as the “Second Sicili-

48 “Good faith” deposits, warranties (also called, in Latin, sacramenta).

49 The senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus (ed. C. G. Bruns, Fontes, 164–166 = Inscriptiones
Latinae Selectae 18).
50 The Romans, like many ancient peoples, had a long history of appropriating their en-
emies’ gods. From the earliest days of the Republic they had a formal ceremony of “calling out”
(evocatio) their enemies’ gods (and offering them a home at Rome). They will continue to do so,
eventually turning the Christians’ gods.
51 Roman culture was centered on the cultivation and deployment of power, energy,
vitality, spirit (animus) rather than on “gods” per se. There were a countless myriad of spirits
of fluctuating and often momentary importance. War gods were always the “biggest” gods. The
Imperatores will be the first really significant big gods of the Romans.
52 See the accounts of Diodorus Siculus preserved in Photios and Constantine Porphyro-
gennetos (34/35.2.1–3.11); cf. Florus 2.7.1–8.
336 Carlin Barton

an Slave War,” led by the mantic “King” Salvius.53 The Romans knew very well
that all wars – “hot” or “cold” – were “holy wars,” all rebellions and resistance
movements were, especially when cemented by oath, religiosa in a very ancient
Roman sense.54 The whole of the modern debates over whether Jesus was
a violent revolutionary, an apocalyptic prophet, a wisdom teacher, a wonder-
worker or a magician, miss the point that the Romans – and Tertullian – would
not have perceived any of these possibilities as exclusive of one another, nor any
as being more “religious” and therefore more essentially positive, passive, or
benign.
Dio Cassius, a contemporary of Tertullian, imagined “Maecenas” advising
“Augustus” against sunomosiai (coniurationes), sustaseis (factiones), and hetai-
reiai (collegia/sodalitates). These groups, especially when they swore a common
oath or professed aloud a common creed (another form of oath of allegiance),
could be subversive of the power of kings (52.35–36). Indeed, Christiani might
seem, to the Romans, not unlike the followers of Judas of Galilee “the for-
midable teacher” and founder of Josephus’s militant “Fourth Philosophy,” who
reproached the Jews for recognizing the Romans as masters when they already
had The One Lord (and whose followers therefore refused to pay taxes to the
Romans). This “philosophical school” enflamed the anti-Roman rebellion in
66–70 CE and the resistance unto death of the Sicarii led by a grandson of this
same teacher.55

53 For the Second Sicilian Slave War see Diodorus Siculus 36.3.1–10.2 = Photios, Bib-
liotheca 387–90. The great social uprisings of the ancient Mediterranean were often contagious
proselytizing movements. Consider the horrific response of the other Peloponnesian rulers to
the reform movements of the Spartan Kings Agis and Cleomenes as described by Plutarch in
his lives of these kings. A modern American might think of the state’s reactions to separatist
prophetic leaders like Jim Jones and David Koresh.
54 Tacitus describes the forces that met the Roman consul Suetonius Paulinus (in command
of Britain from 58 CE), when he attacked the island of Mona (Anglesey): “A circle of Druids,
lifting their hands to heaven and showering imprecations, struck the troops with such awe at the
extraordinary spectacle that, as though their limbs were paralyzed, they exposed their bodies
to wounds without an attempt at movement. Then, reassured by their general, and inciting each
other never to flinch before a band of females and fanatics (agmen fanaticum), they charged
behind the standards, cut down all who met them, and enveloped the enemy in his own flames.
The next step was to install a garrison among the conquered population, and to demolish the
groves consecrated to their savage cults” (Annales 14.30).
55 For Judas of Galilee (also known as Judas of Gamala) see Josephus, Bellum Iudaicum
2.118, 2.433, 7.253; Antiquitates 18.3–9, 18.23; Acts of the Apostles 5.36–37; Richard A. Horsley
with John S. Hanson, Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements at the Time of Jesus
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), esp. 190–237; Christians, in a more “apologetic mood”
emphasized that they paid their taxes (Matthew 22.21; cf. Mark 12.14; Luke 20.21; Gospel of
Thomas 100); Passio Scillitanorum 6; Tertullian, De idololatria 15.3; [figuratively in Adversus
Marcionem 4.38.3; De corona 12.4]).
 A Roman Historian Looking at Early Christian religiones 337

The Christian coniuratio

In the Apologeticum Tertullian depicts the Christiani as a quickly multiplying

“Fifth Column” in the Roman Empire:
If we wished to play the part of open enemies and not merely hidden avengers (vindices
occulti), would we lack the power that numbers and resources give? (…) We are but of yes-
terday, and we have filled everything you have: cities, insulae, small settlements (castella),
towns, conciliabula, the camps themselves, the tribes, the decuries, the palace, the senate,
the forum. All we have left you are the temples. For what war would we not be fit and ready,
even if unequal in forces – we who are so glad to be butchered – were it not, of course, that
in ista disciplina we are given ampler liberty to be killed than to kill? (37.4–5)56

Tertullian’s fratres, his fideles, coming from disparate backgrounds, having no

necessary bonds of kinship, and, as yet, no effective centralized or coercive
powers or common creed, were set apart and bound together above all by their
common sacramentum.57 The Christian’s initiatory oath played a central role in
Tertullian’s thought.58 For Tertullian, it was a bond characterizing and character-
ized by the disciplina, the religio, of those who swore to it. Those who were not
bound by this oath of allegiance were the pagani. Pagani were for Tertullian, as
they were for the Romans, not our “pagans” but “civilians” – those not enlisted
by oath.59

56 Si enim et hostes exertos, non tantum vindices occultos agere vellemus, deesset nobis vis nu-
merorum et copiarum? Plures nimirum Mauri et Marcomanni ipsique Parthi, vel quantaecunque
unius tamen loci et suorum finium gentes quam totius orbis. Hersterni sumus, et vestra omnia im-
plevimus urbes, insulas, castella, municipia, conciliabula, castra ipsa, tribus, decurias, palatium,
senatum, forum; sola vobis reliquimus templa. [5] Cui bello non idnonei, non propti fuissemus,
etima impares copiis, qui tam libeter trucidamur, si non apud istam disciplinam magis occidi
liceret quam occidere?
57 Compare Pliny the Younger’s famous description of the Christiani who confessed to
meeting before dawn to chant to Christo quasi deo, and to bind themselves with a sacramentum
(sacramentum obstringere) – but, they emphasized, – not for the purpose of committing any crime
(non in scelus aliquod) (Epistulae 10.96.7).
58 The importance of the oath for Tertullian was, in part, because there was no infant bap-
tism in his group. Infant baptism would constitute a kind of “naturalization” making Christians
into a kind of state within a state. Binding individuals from infancy, like infant circumcision,
or the indelible branding of slaves, made this commitment involuntary and produced a kind of
“subjectship” bringing Christianity closer to the model of the patron-client, king-subject and
master-slave relationship. Both allegiance to and obedience to the Christian governmental/
ecclesiastical hierarchy then necessarily lost aspects of its ferocious voluntary quality even if
loyalty was still demanded and expressed in creedal oaths. (For circumcision as obligation from
birth see Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin, “Self-Exposure as Theory: The Double Mark
of the Male Jew,” Rhetorics of Self-Making, ed. Debbora Battaglia [Berkeley; Los Angeles: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1995], 16–42.)
59 Paganus appears twice in Tertullian (De pallio 4 and De corona 11.4) where it has the
meaning, common in Imperial Latin, of “civilian” as opposed to “enlisted in the military”:
“When a man has taken up the fides [i. e. sworn the oath of allegiance] and has been sealed
(signata) either it [his fides = oath] must straightaway be deserted – as is done by many – or
338 Carlin Barton

When he enters the water, he professes the fides christiana: … with our mouth we swear to
renounce the devil and his pomps and his angels.60

This oath was pronounced frequently in Tertullian: twice in De spectaculis, twice

in De corona; in De anima, in De idololatria; in De paenitentia; and in De cultu
feminarum. (Mysteriously, it nowhere appears in the treatise De baptismo.61
Not so mysteriously, given its fierce anti-Roman nature, it does not appear in
his more apologetic works.) The solemn vow formed the center of the initiatory
mysterium of the soldier of god, the miles dei:
all kinds of quibbling must take place lest something opposed by god should be committed
which is not permitted outside the military service, or, finally, that those sufferings must be
endured on behalf of God which the fides pagana equally stipulates/consigns.” (Dum tamen
suscepta fide atque signata aut deserendum statim sit, ut a multis actum, aut omnibus modis
cavillandum, ne quid adversus deum committatur, quae nec extra militiam permittuntur, aut
novissime, perpetiendum pro deo, quod aeque fides pagana condixit.) On the contrast between
the paganus as civilian and the miles as sworn-in soldier, see, for example, Pliny, Epistulae 7.25,
10.86b; Tacitus, Historiae 1.53, 3.43; Suetonius, Augustus 27; Galba 19; Juvenal 16.33; Quintus
Cervidius Scaevola [second half of second century CE]; Digesta 35. 2. 96; Aemilius Macer
[early-third century CE] Digesta 48. 19. 14; Vegetius, Epitoma rei militaris 2.23; Theodore Zahn,
“Paganus,” Neue Kirchliche Zeitschrift 10 (1899): 18–44; Adolf von Harnack, Mission and Ex-
pansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, trans. James Moffatt (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1961), 415–418; Einer Löfstedt, Late Latin (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1959), 75–78; Christine
Mohrmann, «Quelques Traits Charactéristiques du Latin des Chrétiens,» Études sur le Latin des
Chrétiens, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1961), 1:21–50, 27–28; Martin Heim-
gartner, “Paganus,” Brill’s New Pauly 10, ed. M. Landfester et al. (Boston: Brill, 2007), 338–339.
“Pagani were civilians who had not enlisted through baptism as soldiers of Christ against the
powers of Satan” (Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians [New York: Knopf, 1986], 30–31). The
first appearance of the word paganus with the meaning non-Christian was in the fourth century
and became accepted usage only with Augustine; it appears with that meaning in an inscription
from the early fourth century (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum X2 7112); its first appearance in
an imperial decree with the meaning of non-Christian is in a rescript of Valentinian (370 CE)
in the Codex Theodosianus 16. 2. 18. In everyday colloquial usage, it remained either “civilian” or
“rustic.” Garth Fowden attributes to “the lazy cunning of Christian apologists,” the term “pagan”
to describe non-Christians in a review of Lane Fox’s Pagans and Christians in the Journal of
Roman Studies 78 (1988): 176; see also David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation
and Resistance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998): 33.
60 Cum acquam ingressi christianam fidem in legis suae verba profitemur, renuntiasse nos
diabolo et pompae et angelis eius de ore nostro contestamur (De spectaculis 4.1) For the baptismal
oath as a rejection of “the devil, his angels and his pomps” see De spectaculis 24; De anima 35.3;
De idololatria 6.1–2; De corona 3.2–3, 13.7; De paenitentia 5.7; De cultu feminarum 2.4. A ver-
sion of this oath formed part of the “ordination” of Hippolytus (170–236 CE) (R. H. Connolly,
The So-Called Egyptian Church Order [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916], 184).
61 De Baptismo contains several passages which seem so anomalous to me that I suspect
either that it was not written by Tertullian, or that it was subsequently modified or interpolated.
The absence of any reference to the sacramentum is the most striking of these anomalies, but
there are others: chapter 17 contains the only passages in all of the corpus of Tertullian’s works
which appears to enthusiastically endorse an ecclesiastical hierarchy. (Could the author of De
Baptismo be the unknown redactor of the Passio Perpetuae which also pays honor to members of
an ecclesiastical hierarchy?) It is possible that, if Tertullian is indeed the author of this work, he
is playing, as in De anima, the role of “philosopher” (one of his more apologetic and mediatory
roles) and he does not want to highlight the clearly rebellious and anti-Roman sacramentum.
 A Roman Historian Looking at Early Christian religiones 339

From Ad martyras (3.1):

We were called to serve in the army of the living God, at the moment we answered with
the words of the sacramentum.62

From Scorpiace (4.5):

Soldiering under this sacramentum, I am challenged by the enemy. I am like him unless
I fight him.63

The “sign of God” (signum dei) marked on their forehead of the Christianus was
the seal, the indelible sign of the sacramentum that set apart the miles Christi
(De lapsis 2). This sacramentum created a fictive kinship, a “band of brothers,”
Tertullian’s fratres or fideles, whose singular quality was fervent loyalty. (In Ad
martyres, Tertullian expressed his admiration for the Greek heroine Leana who,
rather than betray her fellow coniurati, bit off her tongue [4.7].) It is hard to
exaggerate the importance, for Tertullian, of the image of his commilitones as
soldiers of Christ.64 He brands as desertores and infideles those not sufficiently
committed.
For Tertullian the baptismal oath bound the iurati against “the devil and
his pomps,” i. e., the Roman emperor and his mignons with their swaggering
exhibitions of power.65 (For the Roman/African bishop Cyprian,66 it will be an
oath against “the devil and the saeculum” (De lapsis 8) and an oath of loyalty
to Christ, having strong and deliberate martial overtones: it was, in Cyprian’s
words, the divinae militiae sacramenta (Epistulae 74.8; cf. De lapsis 7). “I wished”
[Cyprian’s broken confessor declares] “to contend bravely, and remembering my
sacramentum, I took up the arms of devotio and fides” (De lapsis 13).67 Cyprian’s
“soldiers of Christ” the confessores armed to endure suffering, imprisonment,
and death, offer a spectaculum gloriosum to God.

62 Vocati sumus ad militiam Dei vivi iam tunc, cum in sacramenti verba respondimus.
63 Huic sacramento militans ab hostibus provocor. Par sum illis, nisi illis manus dedero. Hoc
defendo depugno in acie, vulneror, concidor, occidor. Quis hunc militi suo exitum voluit, nisi qui
tali sacramento eum consignavit?
64 See Imagine No Religion, 74–95; Harnack, Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the
First Three Centuries, 414–416; id. Militia Christi: The Christian Religion and the Military in the
First Three Centuries, trans. D. I. Gracie (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981) Ch. 1. For the association
of the notion of the sacramentum with the soldier’s oath see J. de Ghellinck, Pour l’histoire du
mot sacramentum (Paris: E. Campion, 1924); F. J. Dölger, “Sacramentum militiae,” Antike und
Christentum 2 (1930): 268–280.
65 For H. Rahner, the pompa of Tertullian’s sacramentum was the Roman tyrant’s pompa
triumphalis in „Pompa diaboli; Ein Beitrag zur Bedeutungsgeschichte des Wortes πομπή –
pompa in der urchristlichen Taufliturgie,“ Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 55 (1931): 245,
256. J. H. Waszink and J. C. M. Van Winden thought that “the devil and his angels” represented
“the powers of evil in their totality” (Tertullianus, De Idololatria [Leiden: Brill, 1987]: 135). But
for Tertullian, “evil” and “this (Roman) saeculum” are not separable concepts.
66 Died 258 CE.
67 certare quidem fortiter volui et sacramenti mei memor devotionis ac fidei arma suscepi.
340 Carlin Barton

Tertullian’s Christian soldiers, devoted to their Lord in death, do not sound

like any forager bands or small-scale farming societies that I have studied in the
last two decades, but rather like the warriors of Tacitus’s Germania devoted to
death to their princeps, or the oath-bound thanes of King Hrothgar in Beowulf, or
the samurai devoted until death to his daimyo in Tsuramoto’s Hagekure.68
From Scorpiace:
I have been enjoined … not to honor or in any way show reverence to another than to him
who commands me, whom I am both bid to fear so that I may not be forsaken by him, and
love with my whole being, that I may die for him. [5] Soldiering under this sacramentum,
I am challenged by the enemy. (…) In defending [this oath], I fight hard in battle, am
wounded, hewn in pieces, slain. Who wished this fatal end to his soldier, but he who sealed
him by such a sacramentum? (4.4–5)69

The sacramentum of the soldier of god, the miles dei was a competing – and
so even more extreme – version of the oaths of loyalty to the Emperor and his
ministers, with their purpurae, fasces, vittae, coronae, contiones, edicta etc.70 In
De idololatria, Tertullian asks whether the fidelis might enlist or whether a man
serving in the Roman military could be admitted to the fides. He answers his
own question:
The divine sacramentum and the human sacramentum are incompatible, the standard
(signum) of Christ and the signum of the devil, the camp of light and that of dark. One soul
cannot serve two masters: Deus et Caesar (19.1–2).

David Wilhite, with other scholars, has shown how layered, complex and cos-
mopolitan, were the self-identifications of men like Tertullian and Apuleius.71
68 “To have left the field and survived one’s chief, this means lifelong infamy and shame: to
defend and protect him, to devote one’s own feats even to his gratification, this is the gist of their
allegiance: the chief fights for victory, but the retainers for the chief ” (Tacitus, Germania 13–14).
69 Praescribitur mihi … ne alium [deum] adorem aut quo modo venerer praeter unicum
illum, qui ita mandat, quem et iubeor timere, ne ab eo deserar, et de omni substantia deligere,
ut pro eo moriar. [5] Huic sacramento militans ab hostibus provocor. (…) Hoc defendo depugno
in acie, vulneror, concidor, occidor. Quis hunc militi suo exitum voluit, nisi qui tali sacramento
eum consignavit? «[Our] wrestling,” he declares, “is not against flesh and blood, but against
the world’s powers, against the spirits of malice” (adversus mundi potestates, adversus spiritalia
malitiae). It is right for us to make our stand against these not by flesh and blood, but by fides
and spiritus” (De ieiunio 17.8).
70 I argued in “Savage Miracles” that the sacramentum of the early Christians was modeled
on and competing with the sacramentum of the Roman soldier and even more on the ultra-
ferocious sacramentum of the Roman gladiator, “to be burned, bound, beaten and slain with
the sword.” (sacramentum iuravimus: uri, vinciri, verberari ferroque necari [Petronius, Satyricon
117.5].)
71 See, for example: David Wilhite, Tertullian the African (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007); Éric
Rebillard, Christians and their many Identities in Late Antiquity: North Africa, 200–450 CE
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012); Eric Osborn, “Tertullian as Philosopher and Roman,”
Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche 85
(1997): 231–247; Robert Sider, Ancient Rhetoric and the Art of Tertullian (London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1971).
 A Roman Historian Looking at Early Christian religiones 341

Tertullian, I believe, yearned to strip down, to purge himself of divided and con-
flicting – and so confusing and disabling – loyalties, obligations and desires.72
Through his sacramentum, the Christian warrior, the miles sacratus, severed his
ties with the powerful forces of “this saeculum” and defined, for Tertullian, a
simplified, clarified, more homogenous self.73 The religio of the warrior’s oath
could do for him what it did for the disparate coniurati of the warband: produce a
disciplined, steadfast, unwavering, dedicated, consecrated, fierce, fervent loyalty,
the fides of the Christian.74 The binding, for Tertullian was its own reward: a
sense of righteous purity.
In the separatist or insurrectionary framework of his thought,75 Tertullian’s
Christians swore and aspired together, forming exactly a coniuratio. The goal was
the replacement of the Empire of the Romans with one of their own – an empire
in which the cult of the king-god will embrace and subsume not just a sphere of
“religion” but every action and aspect of life.76
The oath was a very ancient way of sacralizing, of setting apart, of forging a
united any militant unit – long antedating “religion” and, like sacralizing itself,
not limited to, indeed integrating all spheres of a human’s life.

Conclusions: The “Religious” Framework

Two centuries after Tertullian, Augustine lamented that the Latin words that had
been, for lack of more serviceable recruits, dragooned into the service of Chris-
tianity, were not sufficiently “faithful.” Words like cultus, pietas and religio were
not sufficiently “devoted,” not sufficiently exclusive, not sufficiently god-centered
to frame and sacralize Christianity, to serve as fortresses against the ambient
mundus and the saeculum of the Romans. (“We are not able to say with con-
fidence that religio means only the cult of God” [De civitate dei 10.1].) The Latin

72 The hatred of dissidents and heretics that one finds Tertullian, as in Paul and Augustine
and Luther, arose, in part, because they wanted a simplified, purified existence and were dis-
appointed by the confusion, complexity and strife that others, claiming also to be Christians,
wantonly and unnecessarily introduced. Like Paul and Augustine and Luther, Tertullian felt
that, by breaking away, he might just be the authoritative figure in his group.
73 See the parallel of the Christian Roman soldier’s choice of the book above the sword and
his fatal decision to “hold to God” in Eusebius, Historia 7.15.
74 Fides is often translated, by modern Christians and scholars, as “faith” and used as a
synonym for “religion.” Herbert Musurillo, for example, translated the opening words of the
Passio Perpetuae (vetera fidei exempla) as “deeds recounted about the faith” rather than “ex-
amples of fidelity”.
75 As I point out repeatedly in Imagine No Religion, Tertullian’s apologetic “moments”
demanded other ideological positions.
76 The values of Tertullian’s were never the cultic behaviors of pastoralists and farmers;
his values were drawn, like those of the city-states of the Carthaginians, the Greeks and the
Romans, and our “religions” from those of the war band.
342 Carlin Barton

speakers of his time, he notes regretfully, “and not the just the imperiti but the
doctissimi as well” were aware that religio was observed in human relationships of
every kind; that both religio and pietas referred to the observantia of very human
relationships and obligations. (Cultus entailed, of course, “cultivation” of all
kinds.) He yearned for a dedicated and unambiguous language of Christianity,
purified of its excessively broad, complex, and negative associations.
Christians and scholars of Christianity have heard Augustine’s call and have
remade words like fides, paganus, deus, cultus, pietas, sacramentum and religio
into good Christian soldiers, abjuring the wide range of meanings and functions
they still had in the first centuries of Latin Christianity. Scholars have simplified,
purified and Christianized these words and then projected these definitions
back into the early centuries of Christianity. In that way, wittingly or unwit-
tingly, scholars of Christianity have acted and continue to act as advocates and
apologists for medieval and modern Christian ideologies. The early Christians,
dissolved in the infinite regressions of our mental mirrors, are lost to us.
We make our histories, our stories of the past, backwards. We begin from
what exists in the present. And our stories lead us back to the present – to us –
here – now. Sometimes the line that scholars find linking the past to the present,
however twisted, is way too straight – and one is left with the feeling of being
trapped in a solipsistic universe. One of my very first students taught me, “You
can’t see the picture when you’re inside the frame.” Alas, we are inevitably in-
side the frame of our own stories (especially when the emphasis is on the story
being ours.) Are we willing to imagine ourselves outside the picture? Are we
willing to risk losing our own central and sacred place, the sacralizing frames,
the ideologies and words that protect ourselves? – words that make the story
about ourselves? Can we imagine an ancient Christianity that is not about or for
modern Christianity, religiones that are not about our “religions”?

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 This Changes Everything
Spiritualists, Theosophists, and Rethinking
Early Christian Historiography

Denise Kimber Buell

The surviving texts among those discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945 have
deeply enriched our understanding of ancient cosmologies, devotional practices,
biblical interpretation, and more. Karen L. King has persuasively argued that we
still have room to travel before their significance is dislodged from long-stand-
ing interpretive frameworks in which they persist as heterodox, if not heretical,
whether one defines some of them as “Gnostic” or not. Throughout her career
King has demonstrated how not only the writings found at Nag Hammadi but
also texts such as the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Judas ought to be trans-
formative for our understanding of and approaches to early Christian lives,
thought, and history.
By lifting up some of the crucial contexts and ways in which “Gnosticism” gets
crafted and deployed in late nineteenth and early twentieth century scholarship,
King’s important study What is Gnosticism? offers a persuasive account of how
our interpretive approaches to ancient sources and dominant narratives about
early Christian history have their own histories, and these continue to matter in
the present.1 Newly surfaced ancient sources, such as the Nag Hammadi corpus,
may have the potential to “change everything” about how we view the past and
our present and possible futures in relation to it, but only to the extent that we
allow ourselves to question and revise the interpretive frameworks with which
we approach the past.
Alternative interpretive frameworks exist inside and outside academia, in the
past as well as in the present. In this essay, I build directly upon King’s What
is Gnosticism?, focusing on two groups of largely forgotten contributors to the
modern study of early Christian history from the second half of the nineteenth
and first half of the twentieth centuries, modern spiritualists and theosophists.2

1 Karen L. King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: The Belkap Press of Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2003).
2 Ideas in this paper are developed from talks given at Williams College, the Westar Seminar,
and Harvard Divinity School. My thanks especially to Jason Josephson Storm and Karen L. King
for feedback at earlier stages. The terms theosophy and theosophists predate the founding of the
346 Denise Kimber Buell

Spiritualists and theosophists may seem marginal now; their voices have been
rendered ghostly or aberrant in the study of early Christianity.
To understand how and why spiritualism as a popular movement and
theosophy as one of its esoteric offshoots are relevant, it helps to start with the
broader context. The second half of the nineteenth and even the first half of the
early twentieth century was a period in which biblical studies and church history
were becoming professionalized as academic disciplines and this was also an era
when educated and curious folks published and presented works without being
academics. Thus we should not draw too sharp a distinction between scholarly
writings and those of non-academics, let alone between academic and religious
writings, in the time period under consideration.
Spiritualists and theosophists were like rather than unlike those who we value
as forerunners of biblical and early Christian studies in important ways. Spiritu-
alists, the majority of whom had some relationship to Christianity, regularly
cited biblical passages to support their claims about spirit communication and
critiqued Christian practices and beliefs of their day. Theosophists found early
Christian forms of gnosis and the categories of “gnostics” and “Gnosticism” espe-
cially useful for articulating their own views.3 Founder Helene Blavatsky and
first-generation theosophists Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater appealed
to gnostics as the true early Christians and theosophists as their heirs. It might
seem easy in retrospect to see that their reconstructions of early Christian history
emphasized teachings and practices compatible with those they favored in the
present and proposed reconstructions they used to critique other contemporary
forms of Christianity. But the predecessors whose work we esteem within early
Christian studies also imagined that they were discovering the true origins and
development of early Christianity, often with an aim to reform Christianity in
the present.

Theosophical Society in 1875. Often associated with esotericism, and especially linked to the
visionary writings of Jakob Boehme and those who subsequently used his work, theosophy has
a longer history that also warrants exploration in relation to the study of early Christian history
and intersects with nineteenth and twentieth century discussions of Gnosticism. My focus in
this piece is restricted to the members and writings of the Theosophical Society.
3 “Gnosticism” remains a positive category for a number of people, including members of
the modern Gnostics churches, who look to non-canonical and especially the texts discover-
ed at Nag Hammadi as resources for their spirituality. Thanks to Stephen Patterson for this
comment in response to an earlier version of this essay (Westar Seminar on Early Christianity,
Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, San Diego, CA, November 2014.) Most of
these folks are not directly related to the spiritualists and theosophists discussed in this paper
(although spiritualists and theosophists are also part of the present religious landscape). It
would make an interesting project to explore the kinds of positive reception and contexts of
use Gnosticism finds today and to compare this with those of nineteenth and early twentieth
c. spiritualist and theosophists, along the lines of Courtney Bender’s ethnographic study, The
New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010).
 This Changes Everything 347

Furthermore, we should not underestimate the pervasiveness and popularity

of spiritualist séances and demonstrations in the second half of the nineteenth
century and well into the twentieth; many clerics and academics became fas-
cinated with and sometimes active participants in séances, psychical research,
and various forms of esotericism and occultism.4 Classicist E. R. Dodds, for ex-
ample, served also as the President of the British Society for Psychical Research.
We need to be cautious not to impose sharp distinctions when the historical
situation calls for greater nuance.
Spiritualist and theosophical interpretations of Christian origins have left
spectral traces upon biblical and early Christian studies. What folks associated
with spiritualism and the Theosophical Society had to say about early Christians
and especially Gnosticism informed mainstream academic views about how to
reconstruct early Christian history and how to deploy the category “Gnosticism”
in the process. Characterizations of Gnosticism as heretical or doomed to failure
because anti-institutional and strongly individualistic; doctrinally flawed espe-
cially in terms of understandings of sin and Jesus; corrupted by foreign thought;
dualistic; and elitist in its ideas about who has access to salvation; echo charges
made against spiritualists and/or theosophists in their heydays.5 In other words,

4 See, e. g., Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining
Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Steven Was-
serstrom’s book Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin
at Eranos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of
Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2007); Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Jason Josephson Storm, The Myth of Dis-
enchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2017).
5 Another standard characterization of Gnosticism concerns sexual ethics, with the as-
sertion that Gnostics adopted a lifestyle of either extreme asceticism or sexual libertinism. The
late second-century Christian author Clement of Alexandria’s mapping of Christian rivals as
either excessively ascetic (Tatian) or excessively permissive (Epiphanes) is the most common
source for scholars who claim that Gnostics lived out one of these extremes (Stromateis 3.5),
even though Clement does not himself ascribe these behaviours to “Gnostics.” Charges of
ethical extremism among Gnostics pre-dates the rise of modern spiritualism (e. g., Johannes
Laurence von Mosheim Institutes of Ecclesiastical History, Ancient and Modern, English trans.
by James Murdock and Henry Soames, ed. William Stubbs [Latin original 1737; 1741; repr.
London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green et al, 1863], 1:85). I have nonetheless
wondered whether it is a coincidence that biblical scholars call attention to sexual ethics as
evidence of Gnosticism’s problematic implications precisely when the counter-normative cul-
tural options available to late nineteenth c. Americans and Europeans included the celibate,
spirit-channelling Shakers, the vegetarian rigorists of Graham and Kellogg, and the Free-love
spiritual activism of Victoria Woodhull. Would calls for marriage law reform have sounded like
libertinism? For the foundational study about spiritualist activism with respect to gender, see
Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America,
2nd ed. (1989; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); see also Barbara Goldsmith, Other
Powers; The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York:
Knopf, 1998).
348 Denise Kimber Buell

spiritualists and theosophists served as foils for others to define their own views
of “true” early Christians.
Considering spiritualist and theosophical engagements with early Christian
materials and specifically what they defined as “Gnosticism” challenges us today
to question easy distinctions between academic and non-academic perspectives.
We may then rediscover an important set of voices whose perspectives on early
Christian history we need not share to appreciate both their sincerity and their
significance. Understanding them helps us in assessing and shaping ongoing dis-
courses about what is at stake in the present when we reconstruct early Christian
history and interpret ancient sources and how we evaluate our approaches for
doing so. Exploring the traces of spiritualist and theosophical views in scholar-
ship whose impact we still recognize as significant will help us to re-evaluate our
approaches to early Christian history.
We can learn much from recognizing and responding to what haunts our
fields.6 Such inquiry into what haunts has a family resemblance to reception his-
tory and histories of academic disciplines. All three foreground some present,
our present contexts in which we continue to grapple with the historiographical
issues about how to reconstruct early Christian history, or the contexts in which
our scholarly predecessors worked or other readers engaged ancient texts. What
distinguishes haunting is the notion of unfinished business and the invitation to
the one haunted to respond – that what occasions a haunting is either a trauma
or an unresolved possibility. In other words, to inquire into what haunts early
Christian studies is to presume that the present is not entirely as it ought to be.
As Avery Gordon puts it, always double-edged, a “haunting always harbors the
violence … that made it, and the … utopian,” the potential for alternatives to
present social structures and ethical relations.7 In seeking to achieve reconstruc-
tions of early Christian history that do not turn upon heterodoxy/orthodoxy, for
example, we need both to understand better the contexts in which this stubborn
binary has been able to continue to flourish while sometimes changing shape,
as well as to discern glimpses of alternative perspectives that may offer possible
aspects of lenses we may yet craft.
6 In my approach to haunting, I am most influenced by Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters:
Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997),
and Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the
New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (French orig. 1993; London: Routledge, 1994), but also
indebted to Carla Freccero’s valuable framing of their work in terms of queer temporalities
and historical analysis (Queer/Early/Modern [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006]).
See Denise Kimber Buell, “God’s Own People: Specters of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in
Early Christian Studies,” in Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender,
and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Laura Nasrallah
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 159–190; idem, “Hauntology meets Post-Humanism:
Some Payoffs for Biblical Studies,” in The Bible and Posthumanism, ed. Jennifer Koosed, Semeia
Studies (Atlanta: SBL Publications, 2014), 29–56.
7 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 207.
 This Changes Everything 349

Critical reflections on religious studies have focused on Christianity (or

theology more generally) as a constitutive exclusion in the study of religion and
secularism. But the disciplinary effects of spiritualism and esoteric movements
such as Theosophy upon the study of religion have received scant attention,8
and virtually no attention in biblical studies. This essay begins to address this
deficiency.

Setting the Stage: A Brief Overview of Spiritualism and Theosophy

Spiritualism is best described as a loose, popular set of movements held together

by the idea that the human persists after the death of the body and that “dis-
carnate” souls communicate with still embodied ones through mediums –
whether objects such as tables to be tipped or rapped, ouija boards, photographs,
or living bodies through whom discarnate souls may speak or direct hands to
write. Spiritualism is often said to have begun in 1848, with the rappings of the
Fox sisters in upstate New York, though it has important precedents in earlier
religious trends of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries including the
visions and teachings of Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Shakers, Methodism, and
the harmonial visions of Andrew Jackson Davis.9
Theosophy, in the form of the Theosophical Society, was founded in 1875 by
Colonel Olcott and Helene Blavatsky in the context of their interactions with
spiritualist practices and some esoteric practitioners including Eliphas Lévi.
Theosophy departs from spiritualism in offering both a systematic doctrine and
a coherent collective identity, even though many subgroups and variations of
theosophy arose in the wake of the Society’s founding. But like spiritualism,
theosophical writings were and often are authorized with reference to medium-
ship. They hold that the knowledge derives from a “master” who communicates
through a chosen person. Unlike spiritualism, theosophical groups structured
themselves around knowledge understood to be secret, but theoretically acces-
sible to all humans in a series of levels that correlate to levels of spiritual and
physical perfectability.
Spiritualists largely held the view that Jesus was fully human (where “human”
is importantly defined as characterized by spirit) and the epitome of a medium
able to communicate with divinity; thus, Jesus serves an exemplar of the kind of
spiritual development potentially available to all humans. Theosophists also view
Jesus as an exemplar for humans, though some viewed Jesus not as a perfected
8 Important exceptions to this rule include Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion; Kripal,
Authors of the Impossible; Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment.
9 See Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit and Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past:
Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2008).
350 Denise Kimber Buell

human but as a fully divine being whose divinity humans can also accomplish.
Both spiritualists and theosophists interpreted biblical and early Christian
sources to proffer an optimistic sense of human potential, whether by means of
insights gained from discarnate spirits and the training of one’s own medium-
ship (spiritualists) or by means of insights gained from adepts and initiation
corresponding to one’s own spiritual development (theosophists).
Despite important differences, spiritualist and theosophical writings none-
theless share some general tendencies in the ways they speak about Christian
origins. Most broadly, their writings tend to represent Christian history as a
story of universal truths manifested in a specific context and subsequently cover-
ed over or rejected.10 Their narratives locate Christian tradition within a much
larger, often explicitly comparative, framework in which they argue that neither
Jesus nor the central claims of Christianity were unique; if properly understood,
the key doctrines and practices of Christianity are glosses on insights (gnosis)
that predate and are not restricted to Christianity. For most spiritualists and
theosophists, the truths in Christianity could also be found in, if not causally
traced to, contexts including Mediterranean mystery cults, Egyptian religion
and Hermeticism, Greek philosophical thought, Buddhism, and Vedic Indian
traditions.
In the next two sections, I examine spiritualist and theosophical writings in
turn, showing how their views relate to those of their contemporaries.

Spiritualist Interpretations of Early Christian History

Salvation, in its more philosophic sense, is soul-growth –
divine unfoldment from the innermost outward, and a
strictly personal matter. My savior is the Christ principle. It
was born with me – it is in me – it is me. It was before the
wandering Galilean; before Abraham; before astral worlds
commenced their stately march through sidereal heavens –
it is pre-existent – eternal! ….
‘Work out your own salvation,’ is among the best of the
Pauline writings.
James Peebles, Seers of the Ages11

When spiritualism took off in mid-nineteenth century North America, its par-
ticipants and proponents were primarily from Christian backgrounds and many
maintained relationships to various Christian groups. It is not surprising, then,
10 Spiritualists also read biblical texts to support a universalizing kind of comparative
theory of religion in which Christianity is just one type of religion through which spiritual
truths may be accessed – but only in some contexts (Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions, 180–202).
11 James Peebles, Seers of the Ages: Spiritualism Past and Present. Doctrines stated and moral
tendencies defined (Chicago: Progressive Thinker Publishing House, 1903), 92.
 This Changes Everything 351

that biblical and early Christian writings were resources for spiritualists’ critiques
of centralized authority and institutionally determined structures as well as for
alternatives to Christian doctrines, notably about resurrection, Christology, and
salvation. Spiritualists looked to Christian origins to support their central claims
that those still living are able to communicate with the spirits of those who have
died (the discarnate). Spiritualists “built an entire religious system around belief
in spirit activity and [that] spirit communication” is available to all.12 In biblical
and other ancient writings, spiritualists found ample evidence that spirits com-
municate with the living and that this communication is available to all – the two
central tenets of this wide-ranging, diverse movement. The story of the “witch
of Endor” and the gospel scenes of Jesus’ transfiguration (Mark 9:2–10; Matt.
17:1–9; Luke 9:38–36), as well as Mark 13:27, Matthew 10:20, and John 14:12
were among the most cited biblical texts.
Spiritualist writings of the mid- to late-nineteenth century rarely invoke
the notion of gnosis but their critiques of nineteenth-century Christianity as
moribund and overly materialistic, their positive emphases on the spirit as the
persisting element of human personality, their disdain for the doctrine of atone-
ment, and their interest in connecting Christian ideas to non-Christian sources
may help us to understand modern depictions and critiques of ancient gnostics.
For instance, Spiritualists criticized Christian churches of their day as ossified
and doctrinally misguided. Unitarian minister turned spiritualist James Peebles,
who also served for a time as the editor of the spiritualist publication Banner of
Light, put it this way:
The age demands, not aping shadows, gloved gentry, nor cowled clergymen fashioned to
order in ‘Theological Seminaries,’ … not sluggish conservatives infected with stagnant,
deathly torpor, staying on earth as do oysters in their beds, praying for the Millennium,
because they then hope to ‘sit’ – sit under ‘ambrosial’ vines – fearing to brush down cob-
webs in their temples lest the roof fall in, and piously opposing the ‘new moon,’ out of a
profound respect for the old, forgetting the Carlylean maxim, that the ‘old skin never falls
from the serpent till a new one is formed;’ but it demands men and women enthusiastic
and full-orbed, who see in every soul a possible Christ, in every life a symbol-thought of
God …13

Peebles emphasizes the idea that religiosity emerges from the individual not the
institution. But as Bret Carroll has persuasively argued, spiritualists developed
a movement that simultaneously embraced strong individualism and structure.
They especially adapted Emmanuel Swedenborg’s cosmological visions of heav-
en and combined them with a concern to establish order in American society
that they perceived had been lost in the time since America’s founding. Thus,
12 Bret Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1997), 8.
13 James M. Peebles, Seers of the Ages, 18–19. In turn, spiritualists came under fire, esp. by
clergy (see Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions, 180–190).
352 Denise Kimber Buell

while critical of contemporary religious institutions and wider social practices,

spiritualists appealed both to Christian and American origins as the two ideal
forms they aimed to restore in their lives, directed by spirit guides.14 Spiritualism
spread quickly to the United Kingdom and Europe where its enthusiasts likewise
conjoined local social issues with religious ones.
Although strongly individualist, Peebles’s notion of salvation nonetheless
presupposes that the self is permeable: we all have a Christ-principle within and
thus are fundamentally connected. Each enfleshed person must pursue their own
salvation through soul-growth by becoming a medium for spirits. For spiritu-
alists, there are spirits out there to engage; spirits and mediums may be deceitful,
so one can and should cultivate one’s body to be the best medium for spirits and
to ensure one’s own spiritual advancement.15
Especially popular with spiritualist interpreters was the idea that Jesus had
been an ordinary human who developed himself into a particularly successful
and sensitive medium for spiritual forces. Abraham Wallace put it this way in a
1904 lecture to the London Spiritualist Alliance, that Jesus was “a highly gifted
psychic” who never claimed to be divine but was “the most divine expression of
humanity” and thus an exemplar for all humans.16 This understanding of Jesus
both supported and helped to articulate the view that human salvation is a matter
of self-cultivation – that all have a Christ principle within that can be developed,
that is the link between one’s living self and the spiritual plane.
This emphasis upon mediumship as the defining feature of Jesus and the view
that the Christ-principle preceded its manifestation in “the wandering Galilean,”
helps us to understand why some spiritualists, including Peebles, did not restrict
spiritual truths to Christian sources. In a move that resonated with some of his
predecessors and contemporaries, such as among the Transcendentalists and
Unitarians, Peebles suggested that the eternal truths he proffered had their his-
torical origin in India, and had traveled by way of Egypt and Judea to make their
way into Christianity, only to become corroded and degraded by doctrinal and
institutional deadweight: “It is averred, with great plausibility, that the Asiatic
Gnostics were acquainted with the Gymnosophists of India and the Magi of
Persia.”17 As we shall see later, theosophists take up this perspective of Christian
Gnostics as purveyors of universal truths as well.

14 See Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America, 9, 16–34, 36, 40, 60–84, 152–176. The
idea that Gnosticism “failed” because its adherents eschewed institutional structures persists,
implying that salvation by gnosis is individualistic and thus inimical to organized communities
of Christians (see e. g., Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels [New York: Vintage, 1979], 142,
178–179).
15 Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America, 107–119.
16 Abraham Wallace, Jesus of Nazareth and Modern Scientific Investigation: From the Spiritu-
alist Standpoint, 2nd ed. (Manchester, UK: Two Worlds, 1920), 13, 6. Also discussed in Buell,
“Hauntology Meets Posthumanism,” 46.
17 Peebles, Seers of the Age, 130.
 This Changes Everything 353

It was not only by distinguishing the Christ-principle from Jesus that

spiritualists unsettled Christian doctrines in mainstream churches of the late
nineteenth century. Spiritualist interpretations of Jesus also challenged the idea
of atonement, that Jesus’ death was necessary for human salvation. Peebles was
typical in asserting that salvation does not require the doctrine of atonement –
Jesus’ death on the cross is not interpreted as the central theological event:
Personal character, not the sacrificial blood of goats and kids under the law, not Christ’s
under the gospel, decide your individual destiny. Jesus’ merits saved him, none else. Your
merits must save you. Each soul is a manger, cradling a savior – God in man. The blood of
one cannot atone for the sins of another.18

This kind of salvation through ministering spirits is available to everyone, and

indeed this is what Jesus did. Some spiritualists left their congregations and those
who remained were often censured for lack of attendance or doctrinal deviance,
especially on the matter of rejecting atonement theology.19
Spiritualists also rejected the idea of physical resurrection, understanding that
what survives after death is the spirit.20 They correlated this view with the notion
of communication between the spirits of those discarnate and those still living
in bodies. Peebles appealed to early Christian “gnostics” to support this view:
“[Gnostics] held to the oriental philosophical theory, that all spirits emanated
from God, and were a part of him; … that Christ, as a heavenly spirit, was not
invested with a mortal body after his resurrection, or, better, emancipation.”21
Spiritualists thought with the dualism of spirit and flesh while seeking to
transform material, this-worldly practices. Spiritualists interpreted contact with
spirits to entail an ethical obligation to the dead as well as to the living to materi-
alize social arrangements that are more just in this life – not simply to hold on
for glory in Summerland, a term coined by Andrew Jackson Davis as the glorious
abode of the spirits. Indeed, spiritualists used spirit communications to comment
on social issues ranging from slavery to gender inequality to U. S. displacement
of Native Americans and imperialism.22

18 Peebles, Seers of the Age, 92.

19 Ann Taves adduces the case of a woman from my hometown of Oberlin, OH, Elizabeth
Schull, who was charged with “not attending church for two years, denying the ‘divinity of
Christ and the doctrine of the atonement,’ and ‘embracing modern Spiritualism” (Fits, Trances,
& Visions, 181). Shull, whose reply Taves quotes, appealed to the authority of her ministering
angels and on the correspondence between modern and ancient spiritualism to defend herself.
20 Spiritualists portrayed Jesus as a fully human exemplar for spiritual intercourse or medi-
umistic development. In this respect, spiritualists differ sharply from most scholarly character-
izations of early Christian Gnostics. While biblical scholars regularly characterize Gnostics as
having a docetic Christology, that is, interpreting Jesus as a divine redeemer who only appeared
to be human. Some favoured an adoptionist Christology, that is, the idea that Jesus was born
fully human but was spiritually transformed by the reception of the holy spirit at his baptism.
21 Peebles, Seers of the Ages, 130.
22 See Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past. That said, theosophists participated in and
354 Denise Kimber Buell

Spiritualists critiqued their contemporaries for excessive materialism. Spiritu-

alists’ assertion of the spirit as the essence of the person may make them appear
either dualistic or problematically averse to real world concerns. Nonetheless,
they displayed a confidence in the positive value of material existence even as they
privileged spirit communications as the basis for organizing embodied life and
advocated bodily practices aimed at achieving purification closer to that of spirits.
Spiritualist thinking with the dualism of spirit and flesh anticipates a recent
turn in scholarship on the texts and groups associated with gnosticism. Karen
King’s reading of The Secret Revelation of John also echoes the kind of reading
and social critique spiritualists performed in light of their higher valuation of
the spiritual – a view that in fact did not discount the significance of how one
lives while embodied. She interprets the distinction between spirit and matter in
The Secret Revelation of John as a critique of imperialist structures of the world,
offering a cosmologically framed narrative that accounts for its current grip on
the world while denying its existential legitimacy by appeal to a superior, spiritual
source.23

Spiritualist Ghosts in Protestant Historiography of Early Christianity

We find the kinds of ideas central to spiritualists in – or projected onto –
descriptions and assessments of “Gnosticism” in other scholarly writings on
early Church history. For example, in his 1868 lectures on “Gnostic Heresies,”
Oxford theologian Henry Longueville Mansel argued that “Gnostics” aimed to
place human knowledge above divine revelation.24 Gnostics, he claims, rejected
the idea of “redemption from sin” and the idea that evil takes the form of sin
“as a transgression on the part of a moral agent against the laws and will of a
moral Governor,” thus they challenged the doctrines of both original sin and
atonement.25 The criticisms that Mansel launches define almost exactly the
disputed areas between those aligned with spiritualism on the one hand, and
those aligned with institutional Christianity including most biblical scholars, on
the other hand.
Mansel defined Gnosticism as a distinctively Christian heresy. Although he
thought that the concept of gnosis and the philosophical perspective arising from
it should be traced to Plato (with Philo as an important Jewish interpreter), he held
that “it is not till after the Christian era that the term [gnosis] comes into use as
the distinct designation of a certain form of religious philosophy.” He continues,
helped to sustain and spiritualize some nasty ideas about race; not all spiritualists were progres-
sives.
23 See, e. g., Karen L. King, The Secret Revelation of John (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2006), 157–73.
24 Henry Longueville Mansel, The Gnostic Heresies of the first and Second Centuries, ed. J. B.
Lightfoot (London: John Murray, 1875), 8.
25 Mansel, Gnostic Heresies, 12, 13.
 This Changes Everything 355
In their actual use, if not in their etymological meaning, the terms Gnostic, Gnosis, Gnos-
ticism, as names of a sect of philosophers or the doctrines professed by them, have been
employed exclusively with reference to philosophical systems which have distinguished
themselves, not merely as ontological speculations, but also as heretical perversions of
Christianity.26

For Mansel, what makes Gnosticism a Christian heresy and not simply a “phi-
losophy from which the name and many of the leading ideas of Gnosticism are
borrowed” is “the idea of Redemption – of a Divine interposition to deliver the
world from the dominion of evil and its consequences.”27
Similarly, for Adolf von Harnack a generation later, Gnosticism threatened the
established doctrines of divine creation and redemption through Jesus’ death. In
his view, syncretism led gnostics to embrace the Hellenistic “soma-sema” (body
as a tomb) dualism of spirit and flesh and to make a false distinction between a
transcendent God and an inferior creator. These positions radically undermined
the idea of Jesus’ death on the cross as salvific, insofar as salvation was indexed by
physical resurrection. Although these beliefs were contested among early Chris-
tians, Harnack affirmed atonement and physical resurrection to be central to the
forms of Christianity that won.
Rejection of physical resurrection and the doctrine of atonement, two of the
specific doctrinal concerns that early Christian historians characterized Gnos-
tics as wrongly advancing, were ones spiritualists made vividly central in their
critiques of contemporary forms of Christianity. Spiritualists, however, did not
claim that any being apart from God was responsible for creation, even though
they privileged “spirit” and condemned materialism as a scourge of their day.

Modern Theosophy and Interpretations of Early Christian History

The real fact, therefore, is not that Gnosticism was a “heresy,”
a departure from the true “Christianity,” but precisely the op-
posite, i. e. that Christianity in its dogmatic and ecclesiastical
development was a travesty of the original Gnostic teachings.
William Kingsland, The Gnosis of Ancient Wisdom in
­Christian Scriptures or The Wisdom in a Mystery28

If spiritualist views appear only spectrally in modern characterizations of ancient

gnostics and Gnosticism, theosophists might be better described as forgotten or
26 Mansel, Gnostic Heresies, 2, 2–3.
27 Mansel, Gnostic Heresies, 3. He also claimed that gnostics “revived the idea, familiar to
the heathen but wholly alien to the spirit of Christianity, of one religion for the wise and the
initiated, and another for the ignorant and profane vulgar” (10); this idea is one that, as we shall
see below, theosophists did claim.
28 William Kingsland, The Gnosis of Ancient Wisdom in the Christian Scriptures or The Wis-
dom in a Mystery (London: Allen & Unwin, Ltd, 1937), 17.
356 Denise Kimber Buell

excluded (“ghosted” in the sense of largely erased from scholarly discussion).

As the quotation from Kingsland above indicates, theosophists explicitly dis-
cussed (and continue to discuss) their reconstructions of early Christian gnosis
and gnostics to support their own views. Theosophists were especially excited by
the mid-eighteenth century “discovery” of the Coptic manuscript Pistis Sophia,
which Blavatsky describes as “a genuine evangel of the Gnostics,” opining that
“it is genuine and ought to be as canonical as any other gospel.”29 G. R. S. Mead,
a theosophist who translated Pistis Sophia into English, argued that there was a
Christianized gnosis whereby Christians could access a singular and universal
gnosis, “the Religion of the Mind,” which he defined as “preeminently one of
initiation, of perpetual perfectioning” and potentially available to all.30 Mead
contrasted gnostic Christianity with the forms of Christianity that he viewed
as a “saving cult” focused on surface matters. Other theosophists argued more
strongly that Gnosticism was the lost essence of true Christianity and the true
Christian way to access a universal and eternal truth. Theosophists thus ex-
plicitly defined ancient Gnosticism as a positive precedent for their own views
and practices.
In this section, I highlight two main claims that theosophists made about
early Christian history: first, that the truths they found in Christianity were most
fully articulated in Christian Gnosticism but were not unique to Christianity;
and second, that ancient Gnosticism offers evidence for multiple levels of initi-
ation as one progresses spiritually. Although the members of the Theosophical
Society were certainly not the first to make esoteric arguments, these two claims
help us to understand better preoccupations with the question of the origins of
Gnosticism and charges of Gnosticism as elitist that feature in much modern
scholarship on Gnosticism.
Beginning with writings of the Theosophical Society’s co-founder Blavatsky,
theosophists insisted that Christian gnostics support the central theosophical
claim for
the existence of one primeval, universal Wisdom – at any rate for the Christian Kabalists
and students. The teachings were at least partially known to several of the Fathers of
the Church …. Origen, Synesius, and even Clemens Alexandrinus had been themselves
initiated into the mysteries before adding to the Neo-Platonism of the Alexandrian school,
that of the Gnostics, under the Christian veil.31

As this quote makes clear, Blavatksy and other theosophists argued for a uni-
versal wisdom to be discerned in sources from multiple traditions. They defined
29 Helene P. Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy 3rd
ed., (Covina, CA: Theosophical University Press, 1925, [1888 original]), 2:566n. 1206.
30 George R. S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: Some short sketches among the gnostics,
mainly of the first two centuries. A contribution to the study of Christian origins based on the most
recently recovered materials (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1900), 16, 17, 40, 44.
31 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine 3rd ed., 1:xliv.
 This Changes Everything 357

gnostics as those within the Christian tradition who best expressed and trans-
mitted this universal wisdom.
Jesus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Pistis Sophia, as well as polemical
sources such as Hippolytus, Irenaeus, and Epiphanius, serve as key referent points
for Theosophists in adducing the esoteric origins of Christianity, origins that
they see as continuous with the knowledge also available through other sources,
including Eleusinian mysteries, and some philosophical schools including neo-
Platonist and Pythagorean.32 As Kingsland writes:
I am not using the term Gnosis as applying merely to the tenets of certain Gnostic sects
which were more or less in evidence in the early centuries of the Christian era, but I am
using it in connection with a definite super-knowledge which can be traced back to the
remotest ages and the oldest Scriptures of which we have any literary records, and which
was taught by Initiates, Adepts, and Masters of the Ancient Wisdom in the inner circles
of those Mysteries and Mystery Cults which are known to have existed in Egypt and else-
where, even in remotest times.33

The theosophical insistence that Gnosticism is the true kernel of truth in Chris-
tianity but also found in non-Christian sources further illuminates concerns in
non-theosophical writings about Gnosticism’s origins.
As Karen King has ably discussed, a major scholarly preoccupation in the
nineteenth and twentieth century was seeking to determine the origins of Gnos-
ticism. Should it be defined specifically as arising within Christianity – and more
specifically as a heresy or aberration? Should it be defined as a non-Christian
worldview, philosophy, or religion that takes a Christianized form during the
second century? Scholars approached Gnosticism presuming that answering the
question of its origins was crucial for locating its place and significance in the de-
velopment of Christianity and for interpreting the largely polemical and negative
representations of heretics in ancient sources such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, and
Epiphanius. For example, W. H. C. Frend posits that “Gnosticism may perhaps
be regarded as a rival religion rather than a heretical manifestation of Chris-
tianity.”34 To understand Frend’s position, we need to know more about how he
defines Gnosticism’s main features and relationship to other ancient practices,
ideas, and movements. Frend writes,
[Gnosticism’s] approach to religion was so similar to that of other mystery cults as to have
no difficulty in harmonizing with them …. [The Gnostic’s] message, like that of a priest
of Isis or Cybele was one of personal salvation obtained through successive initiations
into mysteries, each providing the believer with a knowledge of how to overcome fate and

32 See G. de Purucker, Studies in Occult Philosophy (Covina, CA: Theosophical University

Press, 1945), 67; Annie Besant, Esoteric Christianity, or the Lesser Mysteries, 6th ed. (Madras,
India: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1953), 51–76.
33 Kingsland, The Gnosis of Ancient Wisdom, 14.
34 W. H. C. Frend, “The Gnostic Sects and the Roman Empire,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical
History 5.1 (April 1954): 30.
358 Denise Kimber Buell

outwit the planetary deities who watched over the destiny of each individual. The gnos-
tic Christ and Mithras were both bringers of personal salvation …. The rites and beliefs
common to Gnostics and the worshippers of Mithras which impressed contemporary
opinion were not fortuitous. Both cults were ultimately part-heirs to the astrological lore
of the Chaldaeans. The characteristics of Gnosticism may be traced back to the dawn of
known religion.35

Frend’s comments pack in many assumptions about Gnosticism: it predates

Christianity; it resembles a mystery religion in being a religion of personal salva-
tion through a series of initiations; and it can be traced to Chaldaean astrology
in particular. For Frend, “the Gnostic shared to the full in the religious syn-
cretism of the age,” despite a “show of exclusivity and mystery-making.”36 Frend
additionally characterized Gnosticism as “as school rather than a church,”37 thus
lacking in communal organization. He elaborates: “The Gnostics … could make
individual converts but they lacked the organization of the Catholic Church ….
They were not, as they put it (Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. iii.15.2) ecclesiastici.”38 For
Frend, then, the same kinds of claims that theosophists (and some spiritualists,
such as Peebles) made, that Gnosticism communicates, in Christian form, uni-
versal truths about personal salvation, could be used to argue that Gnosticism
was not only not the true form of Christianity, but rather either a different
religion or not even a religion at all but a school. True Christianity, for Frend,
then is something entirely different from Gnosticism.
Another first generation theosophist, Charles W. Leadbeater, shows us that
theosophists were well aware that they were offering a kind of counternarrative
to the development of Christianity that Frend would epitomize. Leadbeater maps
early Christianity as emerging along three lines: 1) “Gnostic philosophers,” 2)
the precursors of the “orthodox” whom he characterizes as “comparatively quiet
and respectable people who, though without any knowledge of the Gnosis, took
what they know of the Logia of the Christ as their guide in life,” and 3) “the
ignorant horde … whose only real religion was a vague hope of revolution.”39
For Leadbeater, as with Harnack, the orthodox party evolved in conflict with the
Gnostics but Leadbeater’s valuation is the converse of Harnack’s: “Being united
in its distrust of the higher teachings of the Gnostics, [the orthodox party] found
itself compelled to develop some sort of doctrinal system to offer instead of
theirs … to set up against the true one as propounded by the Gnostics.”40
Theosophists generally insisted that gnosis was not uniquely Christian but
rather, while Gnosticism took a distinctively Christian form, its insights per-
35 Frend, “The Gnostic Sects and the Roman Empire,” 29.
36 Frend, “The Gnostic Sects and the Roman Empire,” 30.
37 Frend, “The Gnostic Sects and the Roman Empire,” 29.
38 Frend, “The Gnostic Sects and the Roman Empire,” 36.
39 Charles W. Leadbeater, The Christian Creed: Its Origin and Signification, 2nd ed. (London:
Theosophical Publishing House, 1917), 25, 26.
40 Leadbeater, The Christian Creed, 26.
 This Changes Everything 359

meate many traditions of the world. Indeed, Christian Gnosticism or gnosticized

Christianity could be understood as the esoteric, and thus for theosophists the
true, form of Christianity that linked it fundamentally to esoteric forms of other
religions.
Although sharing with spiritualists a high valuation on knowledge gained
through spirit communication and revelation, and even sharing with spiritu-
alists the idea that spiritual improvement is open to all humans, theosophists
nonetheless shaped a much more clearly esoteric and hierarchical system such
that individuals had to pass through stages of initiation and levels of spiritual
insight.
With their strong emphasis on stages of human spiritual evolution correlating
with levels of initiation into spiritual knowledge, theosophists help us to under-
stand that the attribution of elitism and secrecy to ancient gnostics does not
merely reproduce ancient heresiological polemic. Theosophists looked to Chris-
tian origins to support their claims for an esoteric or hidden dimension to all
“major” religious traditions, which they viewed as springing from a common
source.
Annie Besant, one of the most influential Theosophists in early twentieth
century, aims in her 1901 work Esoteric Christianity “to prove clearly that in the
Early Church, at least, Christianity was no whit behind other great religions in
possessing a hidden side, and that it guarded, as a priceless treasure, the secrets
revealed only to a select few in its Mysteries.”41 For Besant, evidence for such a
hidden tradition in Christianity can be found in canonical writings including
gospels and Paul’s letters, the work of Clement of Alexandria, and “the famous
Gnostic treatise, the Pistis Sophia.”42 According to Besant, the first few centuries
of early Christianity featured the notion of secret doctrines but that, over time,
especially from the fourth century onward,
even the Christians were caught up in the whirlpool of selfish warring interests. We still
find scattered references to special knowledge imparted to the leaders and teachers of
the Church, knowledge of the heavenly hierarchies, instructions given by angels, and so
on. But the lack of suitable pupils caused the Mysteries to be withdrawn as an institution
publicly known to exist, and teaching was given more and more secretly to those rarer
and rarer souls, who by learning, purity, and devotion showed themselves to be capable of
receiving it. No longer were schools to be found wherein the preliminary teachings were
given, and with the disappearance of these, the “door was shut.”43

She held that “Gnosis” is what the Mysteries communicated,44 a gnosis of

human potential to become Christs.45 Kingsland maintains this view, a couple of
41 Anne Besant, Esoteric Christianity, 2–3.
42 Anne Besant, Esoteric Christianity, 34.
43 Anne Besant, Esoteric Christianity,79–80.
44 Anne Besant, Esoteric Christianity, 80.
45 Anne Besant, Esoteric Christianity, 103.
360 Denise Kimber Buell

generations later: “[Gnosis] is the mystic knowledge which effects regeneration,

rebirth into the full consciousness of one’s divine nature and powers as a ‘Son
of God.’”46 Within early Christianity theosophists such as Besant and Kings-
land found evidence for levels of spiritual development and initiation in both
biblical and non-canonical writings, charting a narrative of a move to suppress
the esoteric dimensions of Christianity over time (which, for Theosophists, is a
story of decline).
The association of gnostics with elitism thus emerges partly by comparison
with a modern esotericism and not only through interpretations of the ancient
charges against so-called gnostics and the followers of Valentinus. In a 1913
work that remained influential through the twentieth century, Wilhelm Bous-
sett states: “Basically Gnosticism is the native soil of all bluntly supernaturalistic
theory of revelation …. Gnosis is … mysterious wisdom which rests upon secret
revelation; one might better call the Gnostics Theosophists. Gnosticism is the
world of vision, of ecstasy, of secret revelation and the mediators of revelation, of
revelational literature and of secret tradition.”47 Bousset’s description of Gnos-
ticism links it with Theosophy, on the basis of their ideas not just of revelation
but of secret tradition.
Certainly, ancient Christian polemicists charge their rivals with teaching
that some humans are “saved by nature” while other humans are not, with
“puffing themselves up” with their claims to gnosis while belittling other Chris-
tians for merely having faith (pistis); and with secret apostolic traditions. But
theosophists’ emphasis on both the existence and value of revelatory knowledge
and also the need to acquire this knowledge through a progressive series of
initiations under the guidance of those further along the path of spiritual ev-
olution than oneself may have sharpened modern scholarly reconstructions of
early Christianity.

46 Kingsland, The Gnosis of Ancient Wisdom, 14. Charges of elitism and the association of
both ancient Gnostics and modern Theosophists with esoteric knowledge as a path to salvation
are entangled also with theories of race. Any attention to the haunting aspects of spiritualism
and Theosophy must also tackle the question of how these movements as well as the emerging
fields of biblical studies and comparative religion helped to construct and perpetuate racialized
and racist interpretive frameworks. I plan to explore this intersection in a future work, but see
the excellent analysis by Gauri Viswanathan on their convergence in the work of Theosophist
Annie Besant in colonial India (Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief [Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998], 182–207).
47 Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of
Christianity to Irenaeus, English trans. John E. Steely (1913; ET, Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1970),
252–253; my emphasis. See also Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis (Göttingen: vanden Hoeck
and Ruprecht, 1907). It is possible that Bousset has in mind the longer tradition of theosophical
thought associated with Boehme and his heirs. Both are associated with esotericism though not
identical.
 This Changes Everything 361

Nag Hammadi
We are now in a position to return to the texts that, in my own childhood, I felt
“changed everything” about my own relationship to Christian tradition. This
additional angle of vision afforded by recovering the perspectives of spiritu-
alists and theosophists can help us to understand better some of the interpretive
responses to the Nag Hammadi find. Shortly after the spectacular discovery at
Nag Hammadi, a number of scholars weighed in on its significance. Writing in
the late 1950s, Jean Doresse locates the find in relationship to “Gnosticism” in
ancient and modern thought:
The words Gnosis (gnōsis = Knowledge) and Gnosticism relate to certain sects which,
during the first centuries in which Christianity was developing, competed with it upon
its own grounds … the memory of the Gnostic sects, after the days when they had been
eliminated by orthodox Christianity, did not attract much attention. Thenceforth these
heresies were dismissed by historians of the Church as fantastic dreams which a little light
had been enough to dispel. It was not until the eighteenth century, that epoch of universal
curiosity – an epoch in which, moreover, there were mystics, occultists and hermetists
searching for spiritual food in all the most ancient and peculiar places – that the Gnos-
ticism of antiquity began to be thought less unworthy of interest.48

As his remarks make clear, Doresse defines Gnosticism as ancient, sectarian,

heretical competition for the orthodox Christianity that vanquished it; he traces
the current interest in Gnosticism to more recent historical circumstances,
an interest sparked by what he calls an age of “universal curiosity” especially
epitomized by “mystics, occultists, and hermetists.”
It was indeed during the eighteenth century that Europeans encountered doc-
uments in what are now referred to as the Codex Askew and the Bruce Codex
that were said to be penned by gnostics, in contrast to previous writers who had
simply discussed gnostics.49 Both Coptic codices were brought to Great Britain in
the second half of the eighteenth century and acquired by the British Museum.50
The texts contained in these two codices are the Pistis Sophia and a part of The
Books of the Savior (Askew Codex), and the two Books of Jeu and an untitled
text (Bruce Codex).
But this spiritual food was not actually made available until well into the fol-
lowing century. Only in 1851 was the Codex Askew published, first in Latin, and
later in French and English (1901), and then German (1905). The Bruce Codex
was first published in French (1891), and then in German (1892) and English
48 Jean Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics, trans. Philip Mairet (French
original, Paris: Librairie Plon, 1958; English trans., New York: Viking, 1960), 1.
49 Both codices are in Coptic and understood to be translations of Greek originals (as is also
the case for the texts preserved at Nag Hammadi).
50 The Bruce Codex was purchased in 1769 in Thebes by James Bruce during his travels and
acquired by the British Museum in 1842 while the Codex Askew was acquired in 1785 from the
Askew estate (Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics, 64–65, 76–77).
362 Denise Kimber Buell

(1933). Also in the late nineteenth century, 1896, a third Coptic codex, known
as the Berlin Codex, came to light, containing The Gospel of Mary, a version of
The Secret Book of John, The Sophia of Jesus Christ, and Acts of Peter, though
these texts were not published until 1955. Thus, the discussion about gnostics
and gnosticism until the late nineteenth century continued to be based primarily
upon polemical sources of the early Christian heresiologists. Nonetheless,
esoteric thinkers and practitioners approached these sources with new lenses,
inclined to question the legitimacy of the dominant heresiological rhetoric, even
as they were questioning the dominant religious and royalist rhetorics in their
modern contexts.
As Doresse notes, starting at the beginning of the nineteenth century, some
modern works began to be published that focus on gnostics or Gnosticism. He
marks out Jacques Matter’s 1828 Histoire critique de Gnosticisme for special com-
ment, arguing that Matter’s definition of gnosticism as “the introduction into the
bosom of Christianity all the cosmological and theosophical speculations which
had formed the most considerable part of the ancient religions of the Orient and
had also been adopted by the Neo-platonists of the West,”51 found favor among
“a generation which was as attracted to mystical marvels as those of the previous
centuries had been allergic to them: it went far to make Gnosticism fashion-
able.”52 Matter argued that Gnosticism was a form of “theosophical” thought,
drawing syncretistically from other philosophies and religions, including by
making a distinction between exoteric and esoteric teachings.53 Although Matter
himself clearly viewed Gnosticism as a heresy, Doresse’s point is that Matter’s
work fueled interest in gnosticism as a positive resource rather than confining
it to a problematic hurdle in the triumph of Christian orthodoxy. Doresse cites
Flaubert and Barrès as among those whose works illustrated modern interest in
Gnosticism, and singles out for criticism archaeologists who, “too susceptible to
the taste of the public” have been overly quick to label as gnostic “monuments
and relics dug up from the soil of Roman and Byzantine Egypt.”54
Although hinting at his discomfort if not disdain, Doresse tells us nothing
more about the public with a taste for Gnosticism or about the kinds of mystical
marvels captivating his eighteenth and nineteenth century predecessors. In fact,
it is surprising that he highlights these modern factors at all. One might expect
mention of the discovery of ancient manuscripts or monuments as they bear on
the study of early Christian movements including those labeled “gnostic,” but
why mention modern mystics, occultists, and hermetists? Why comment that

51 Jacques Matter, Histoire critique du Gnosticisme, et de son influence sur les Sectes reli-
gieuses and philosophiques des six premiers siècles de l’ère chrétienne (Paris: F. G. Levrault, 1828),
16; cited in Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics, 2.
52 Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics, 2.
53 Matter, Histoire critique du Gnosticisme, 13.
54 Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics, 2.
 This Changes Everything 363

Gnosticism became fashionable in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the

wake of Matter’s work?
Doresse’s references to eighteenth century mystics, occultists, and hermetists
need to be interpreted in terms of what he does not mention – the flourishing
and popularity of spiritualism or spiritism in nineteenth century Europe, Great
Britain, and North America as well as the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century mystics, occultists, and hermetists who took a very active interest in re-
interpreting early Christian history and in claiming Gnosticism for themselves,
especially the members of the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875. Indeed,
the theosophist G. R. S. Mead was the first to publish an English translation of
Pistis Sophia from the Askew Codex in 1900.55
Spiritualists and theosophists continued the trends that Doresse notes in
describing the eighteenth and nineteenth century studies of Gnosticism, which
linked it to a wide variety of sources and which framed ancient gnosis to include
both negative and positive valences. If Jacques Matter’s 1828 study offered a neg-
ative interpretation of Gnosticism, which nonetheless sparked positive interest
in Gnosticism in its reception as Doresse bemoans, Charles William King’s 1864
The Gnostics and their Remains is Matter’s positive counterpart. King, a numis-
matist at Cambridge University, proposed that Gnosticism was of Indian origin,
transmitted to the Mediterranean world via Buddhism.56 For King, Gnosticism
was less a heresy than a Christian expression of a pre- and non-Christian way
of thinking and living. The Gnostics and Their Remains became widely cited by
members of the Theosophical Society to support their universalizing esoteric
views. Theosophists and their spiritualist, occultist, and hermetic predecessors
and contemporaries actively engaged questions of Christian origins, and found
inspiration in the “cosmological and theosophical speculations” that Matter and
Doresse among others found problematic about Gnosticism.

55 G. R. S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten; idem, The Gnosis of the Mind (London:
The Theosophical Publishing Society, 1906); idem, The Hymns of Hermes (London: The Theos-
ophical Publishing Society, 1907).
56 Charles William King, The Gnostics and their Remains, Ancient and Medieval (Originally
published 1864; 2nd rev. ed., 1887; repr., San Diego: Wizards Bookshelf, 1982). King’s expertise
was in gemstones and numismatics but The Gnostics and their Remains was cited extensively
by theosophists and reprinted by theosophists. King’s skepticism of what Karen King calls the
“master narrative” of Christian origins made him a useful source for theosophists. For example,
King excoriates an earlier study of Gnosticism in English that unquestioningly accepts the
heresiological perspective; King states that this earlier study errs by “taking for granted, upon
the bare word of their opponents, that the various Teachers of the Gnosis were mere heretics,
that is, perverters of the regular (!) Christian doctrine which they had at first embraced as a
divine revelation, he [Walsh], like his guides, did not trouble himself any further to investigate
the true origin of their systems, but was content with roughly sketching their most prominent
features; whilst in explaining their extant productions, he refers all, however diverse in nature,
to the same school, and interprets them according to his own preconceived and baseless views
of their character” (King, The Gnostics and their Remains, xiii).
364 Denise Kimber Buell

The Specters of Spiritualism and Theosophy

in early Christian Studies: Concluding Thoughts

Even this preliminary re-examination of scholarly discussions of gnostics and

Gnosticism from the nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries in light of
spiritualism and theosophy enables us to understand facets of these discussions
differently. My argument is not that spiritualism and theosophy explain every-
thing about the category of Gnosticism but rather that these movements played
an unrecognized or underappreciated role in its shaping and deployment, even at
historical remove. Debates about whether Gnosticism is a phenomenon internal
to Christianity or pre-Christian or overly infused with elements of its context,
identification of Gnosticism as primarily a view of salvation as attained by stages
of initiation through the transmission of secret knowledge, and characterizations
of gnostics as doctrinally problematic find counterparts in either the views of
spiritualists and theosophists or criticisms made of them.
Although spiritualists and theosophists departed from many of their Christian
contemporaries by asserting that truth is not exclusively found within Christian
tradition, they actually resemble other Protestants in their time, including those
who devised historical criticism, by looking to Christian origins with a goal of
restoring or recovering true Christian modes of being perceived to have become
lost or distorted over time. Spiritualists and theosophists may have asserted the
primacy of mediumship to authorize their views in contrast to the primacy of
philology and archaeology found in historical criticism, but all held themselves
to be promoting scientifically legitimate ways of accessing and cultivating truth.
Indeed, although spiritualists were critiqued for failing to meet scientific
standards of investigation, they were certainly known for using and explaining
themselves in terms of the latest technologies and appeal to scientific legitimacy.
As Jeffrey Sconce puts it, “American Spiritualism presented an early and most
explicit intersection of technology and spirituality.”57 One of the early spiritualist
publications, The Spiritualist Telegraph, was named after Samuel Morse’s 1844 in-
vention. Spirit photography was a popular form of this new imaging technology,
and by the end of the nineteenth century, the telephone and radio supplanted the
telegraph as the new frontier for imagining and evaluating wireless communica-
tions, including those from spirits.58 As the emergence of psychical research in
57 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 25. He further holds that “many of our contemporary
narratives concerning the ‘power’ of electronic telecommunications have, if not their origin,
then their first significant cultural synthesis in the doctrines of Spiritualism” (25). See also
Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America, 66–71.
58 See Clément Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) and Louis Kaplan, The Strange Case of William Mumler,
Spirit Photographer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); on telephone and
radio, see Sconce, Haunted Media, 59–91.
 This Changes Everything 365

the late nineteenth century suggests, a number of folks were willing to entertain
spiritualist claims using precisely these technologies.
As Daniel Cottom puts it, “spiritualists … would not allow scientific authority
to be owned by scientists and confined to the procedures and logic being codified
with increasing rigor throughout this century.”59 Spiritualists both embraced
the changes in their world and offered an alternative version of the definition of
scientific practices and knowledges. Spiritualists forged a path through dualisms
such as rational/irrational and belief/empiricism as well as spirit/matter and self/
other, in ways that destabilized the security of claims about the distinction of
religion from science or of the claims of any “science” to exclude experiential
claims.60 In a speech delivered at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religion, Cora
Richmond, a widely known medium and co-founder of the National Spiritualist
Association, made this connection explicit: “All scientific minds who have inves-
tigated the phenomenal phases of this movement readily admit, and many of
them openly declare that Spiritualism will compel a re-statement of science.”61
In her view, some of this re-thinking entailed proofs for the persistence of the
human personality after the death of the body and thus for immortality.62
In this combination of association with presentist concerns and divergence
from what is claimed or perceived as the dominant center, spiritualism recalls
the way that Gnosticism gets defined in many texts as heretical because it sullies
pristine earliest Christianity with foreign and “faddish” ideas.
Directly on this point, biblical scholar Francis C. Burkitt, in his 1931 lectures
on ancient Gnosticism (funded by an endowment established by telegraph in-
ventor Samuel Morse) writes: “The various forms of Gnosticism are attempts to
reformulate and express the ordinary Christianity in terms and categories which
suited the science and philosophy of the day.”63 Burkitt’s assessment strikes me as
self-consciously aware of competition in his own day over the right to articulate
what constitutes real science: “When the Church of the second century rejected
what seemed to be a scientific account of Religion and clung to an annalistic
account it was taking a course that was appropriate to the time and therefore
truly scientific.”64

59 Daniel Cottom, Abyss of Reason: Cultural Movements, Revelations, and Betrayals (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 60.
60 Spiritualists were very much part of the Enlightenment project of and for reason, as Cot-
tom has argued: “spiritualism [was] … defined, in part, … through a struggle epitomized by the
question of who would control the name and legacy of reason” (Cottom, Abyss of Reason, 17).
61 Mrs. Cora L. V. Richmond, “Presentation of Spiritualism. A Paper Arranged by the
Guides of Mrs. Cora L. V. Richmond for the Word’s Parliament of Religions at Chicago, October
1893” (Washington, D. C. National Spiritualists Association, 1893), 5.
62 See Richmond, “Presentation of Spiritualism,” 5–6.
63 Francis C. Burkitt, Church and Gnosis: A Study of Christian Thought and Speculation in
the Second Century (1931; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1978), 58.
64 Burkitt, Church and Gnosis, 147–48.
366 Denise Kimber Buell

In addition to contested definitions of scientific authority, the late nineteenth

and early twentieth century context shared by spiritualists and theosophists with
those skeptical of their claims, is one of empire and Christian mission. Although
this topic exceeds the scope of this essay, it is another axis along which claims
about Christian origins and “Gnosticism” specifically unfold.65
Spiritualism and theosophy thus constitute unrecognized precedents and
sites for unrealized possibilities in both religious studies and ethics. After all,
what constitutes the broader inheritance for Christians is contested by different
heirs, insiders to the plural forms of Christianity, and interpreters who distance
themselves from or stand outside this entire tradition. As Jacques Derrida insists,
“one must filter, sift, criticize; one must sort out the several different possibles
that inhabit the same injunction.”66 Spiritualists and theosophists activate some
of the possibilities in early Christian texts, authorizing their readings under
the sign of gnosis to embrace the idea that every human has an element of the
divine within – a simultaneously individualistic and radically contingent notion
of humanity – and that individuals must work out our own salvation precisely
by making ourselves open to external spiritual agencies. Spiritualist practices
embody a non-linear temporality – futures and pasts commingle in the present
through spirit communications with the living. By contrast, historical criticism,
the central method of modern biblical studies, does not accommodate the
possibility of ghosts – that there might be something that could disrupt linear
temporalities. To reckon with the legacy of spiritualism and theosophy on early
Christian studies requires consideration of the epistemological and ontological
claims of spiritualists and theosophists – claims that destabilize notions of
rationality and agency by which biblical and early Christian studies have largely
authorized themselves as academic disciplines. In other words, the legacy of
spiritualism and theosophy for early Christian studies may extend far beyond
the question of “Gnosticism.”

65 For some preliminary thoughts, see Denise Kimber Buell, “The Afterlife is Not Dead:
Spiritualism, Postcolonial Theory, and Early Christian Studies,” Church History 78.4 (December
2009): 862–872; and Gauri Viswanathan, “The Ordinary Business of the Occult,” Critical In-
quiry 27.1 (2000): 1–20; see also Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past, 66–93.
66 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 16. I do not mean to suggest that Derrida is the first to articu-
late this point; this is a central insight and basis for authorizing virtually all feminist, womanist,
postcolonial, queer, and other liberationist as well as deconstructive engagements with biblical
texts.
 This Changes Everything 367

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America. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Buell, Denise Kimber. “God’s Own People: Specters of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in
Early Christian Studies.” Pages 159–190 in Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Inves-
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Early Christian Studies.” Church History 78, no. 4 (December 2009): 862–872.
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Studies.” Pages 29–56 in The Bible and Posthumanism. Edited by Jennifer Koosed.
Semeia Studies. Atlanta, GA: SBL Publications, 2014.
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1997.
Chéroux, Clément et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2005.
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York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the
New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf (French orig. 1993). London: Rout-
ledge, 1994.
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–. Secret Revelation of John. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
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368 Denise Kimber Buell

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 Courage, Betrayal, and the Roman State
Persons Enslaved to Christians in the Persecution at Lyons (177 ce)

Bernadette J. Brooten

Enslaved identity is central to the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons
(Eusebius, Hist. eccl., 5). Written by Gallic Christians, the Letter contrasts “good”
and “bad” enslaved persons in this account of a persecution sent to fellow believ-
ers in Asia Minor.1 The persecuted Christians in 177 Lugdunum (Lyons) in Gaul
consist of both enslaved and free persons. Their betrayers, who maintain their
own religious identities, are enslaved to some of these persecuted Christians.
The Roman governor is presented as abiding by Roman criminal procedure
with respect to free persons, but as breaching it by accepting testimony from the
enslaved non-Christians without interrogating them under torture. The Letter
attests that, “certain of our gentile slaves” enter the stage of the bloody drama
as “also arrested.” Had they not betrayed their Christian owners, the Letter may
not have mentioned them at all. Terrified, they observe the tortures suffered by
their Christian mistresses and masters, whom they betray even without being
tortured. The Christians apparently expect that these enslaved gentiles should
offer their own necks on behalf of their masters and mistresses, which aligns with
what other slaveholders expected.2
The Letter depicts Blandina as subverting Roman slaveholders’ assumptions
about persons with an enslaved identity, namely that they are weak in character
and, as susceptible to torture, without honor. The authors of the Letter imbue her
prayers while hanging on a pole with Christological significance. They depict
her as a kind of Christa-figure, as a woman in whom Christ crucified is made
manifest to others. One might argue that Blandina herself disappears, so that
the onlookers see only Christ.3 Accordingly, Blandina is an owner’s best possible
1 I thank the Ford Foundation and Constance Buchanan; the MacArthur Foundation; the
National Endowment for the Humanities; the Israel Institute for Advanced Study; the Harvard
Women’s Studies in Religion Program and Ann Braude, Vered Noam, Rami Reiner, and Michal
Linial; and the École biblique and archéologique française de Jérusalem for their support of
various stages of this research. I thank also Sari Fein for her research assistance and Taylor
Petrey for his editorial work on this chapter.
2 See, e. g., Pythias, enslaved to the Empress Octavia, who refused to tell lies about Octavia,
even though cruelly tortured (Dio Cassius 62.13.4).
3 Candida Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 113.
370 Bernadette J. Brooten

enslaved laborer, one who shares her mistress’s religion and stands by it until the
very end.

Christological Blandina

The Roman governor who tortures and executes the enslaved Blandina, along
with her unnamed mistress and others, executes them in accordance with social
stratification and legal status, generally reserving the less painful and less humili-
ating sword for those who claim Roman citizenship, but are not of the highest
status (i. e., who are humiliores, rather than honestiores), and wild beasts, along
with other tortures, for enslaved and lower status non-citizens. Not only does
Blandina amaze her torturers by withstanding the harshest, most inhumane
treatment; she also inspires her fellow Christians while hanging on a pole to
serve as food for wild beasts in an amphitheater likely equipped with state-of-
the-art technology for efficiently and safely bringing in lions and other exotic an-
imals. Far from representing Blandina as a victim, the authors of the Letter of the
Churches of Vienne and Lyons, from which some of the community originated,
imbue her prayers while hanging on this pole with Christological significance:
She seemed to be hanging in the shape of a cross and with her unceasing prayers en-
gendered eagerness in the combatants watching the struggle, who, with their external
eyes, saw through their sister the one crucified for them, that she might persuade those
believing in him that everyone who suffers for Christ’s glory will be forever connected
with the living God.4

The narrative depicts this enslaved woman’s suffering as representing Christ’s

suffering. Her prayer inspires and encourages those at risk of the same. With her
witness, she persuades her Christian sisters and brothers that their suffering for
Christ will have meaning and will ensure them eternal communion with God.
Through her martyrdom, Blandina preaches and leads without any hint that her
enslaved status weakens her message or marginalizes her witness. On the con-
trary, suggests Virginia Burrus, “her power resides in her bottomless capacity for
shame as both a woman and a slave.”5
Blandina’s partially clad female body and her female suffering evoke Jesus on
the cross and her own spiritual power. The text’s authors have carefully searched
the scriptures to make sense of these traumatic events. The image of the enslaved
Blandina hanging from what the onlookers interpret as a cross reminds the
reader of Paul’s Letter to the Philippians 2:5–11. These verses quoting a hymn,
which likely predates Paul, represent Christ as a pre-existent being who takes on

4 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.41 (Trans. my own).

5 Virginia Burrus, Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 27.
 Courage, Betrayal, and the Roman State 371

the form of an enslaved person obedient even to the point of crucifixion, widely
known in the Roman world as an execution method for enslaved persons and po-
litical rebels. At a later point, the narrative directly quotes this hymn.6 Blandina’s
mistress fears that her slave-woman will be too weak and insufficiently bold to
confess her faith, but, like Christ in the Philippians hymn, Blandina chooses obe-
dience even unto death on a cross. She could have escaped death by refusing to
confess her faith, could have even betrayed her mistress and other Christians. In-
stead, together with her fellow “noble athletes,” Blandina’s actions create a woven
wreath “of various colors and flowers to offer to the Father,” for which they will
“receive the great crown of immortality.”7 Thus, like Christ, their obedience to
the point of death will result in God’s lifting them up and exalting them.
This narrative is a picture of a courageous enslaved woman fully accepted
by the Christian community as equal to its free members and as deserving of
memorialization. While contemporary scholars and educated Christians are
aware of her gender and her status as legally enslaved, an early Christian ideal of
equality, or, in any case, of equal worth and dignity, seems to prevail. In contrast,
Roman officials may tend to torture enslaved persons over free ones (Pliny), to
execute enslaved persons and low-ranking non-citizens differently than Roman
citizens (the governor in Lyons), or to outrage Roman concepts of social status
by subjecting both enslaved and high-ranking persons to the same form of ex-
ecution (Hilarianus, with respect to Perpetua and Felicitas).8
I will question this view, but first wish to make clear that I agree fully with
the analysis by Elizabeth A. Goodine and Sheila Briggs of the remarkable and
unusual representations of two martyrdoms: of Blandina standing for Christ and
bringing others to faith in him and of Perpetua and Felicitas standing hands
held, side by side.9 Like the deaths in the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas,
Blandina’s death comes last and is the fatal culmination of those being tortured.
Briggs specifically points out how rare this representation was and is not claiming
to address every aspect of the narrative.

6 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.2.2.

7 On how the narrator rhetorically constructs Blandina’s gender, see Stéphanie Machabée,
“The ‘Cheap, the Unseemly, and Readily Despised’ One: A Rhetorical Analysis of Blandina’s
Gendered Performance in The Martyrdom of Lyons and Vienne” (MA thesis, McGill University,
2013).
8 Pliny the Younger, Letters 10.96; Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas 18–21.
9 See Elizabeth A. Goodine, Standing at Lyon: An Examination of the Martyrdom of Blan-
dina of Lyon (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2008); Elizabeth A. Goodine and Matthew W. Mitchell,
“The Persuasiveness of a Woman: The Mistranslation and Misinterpretation of Eusebius’ His-
toria Ecclesiastica 5.1.41,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 13 (2005): 1–19, and Sheila Briggs,
“Gender, Slavery, and Technology: The Shaping of the Early Christian Moral Imagination,” in
Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies, ed. Bernadette J. Brooten, with the
editorial assistance of Jacqueline L. Hazelton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 165–166.
372 Bernadette J. Brooten

Roman Torture Theory

The Roman governor and the city officials carrying out the tortures and ex-
ecutions of the Christians in Lyons and Vienne rely on what Elaine Scarry has
identified as the “difficulty in expressing physical pain,” that is, that pain does
not have a voice and that words cannot adequately express the experience of
pain. She argues, “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unshar-
ability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.”10 The
Roman governor and city officials, all male Roman citizens, display the power
of the Roman state through their capacity to inflict it in frighteningly arbitrary
fashion. Both the free and enslaved Christians, as well as their enslaved non-
Christian laborers, never know what will happen next, and they have no means
whereby to express the pain that they experience. The officials effectively take on
the role of masters over the three categories of persons, including by choosing
when to follow the Emperor’s rescript that Roman citizens should be beheaded,
rather than thrown to the beasts. These officials, however, also live with the very
significant constraint of how to maintain order in a region in which crowds rage
against followers of the new, strange, and foreign religion. The tortures and be-
headings, which presumably at least temporarily satisfy the crowds, must never-
theless also serve the added function of terrifying the onlookers on at least some
level, because they vividly demonstrate the spectacular power of the Roman
state, even over citizens. They perform their elite masculinity through their
decisiveness, resoluteness, mastery over their own emotions through at least
some attention to Roman criminal procedure, and through instructing others to
implement their orders to incarcerate, torture, and execute.
The workers who carry out the hard physical labor of whipping, clubbing,
tending to the wild animals, heating the iron chairs and applying them to the
intended victims, maintaining and placing the nets over those about to be killed,
cleaning up the arena after the show, etc., will be low status persons (probably
all men), perhaps enslaved. They are the legs, the arms, and the hands of the
high-status Romans, their surrogates for this deadly work. They hear the screams
up close, somewhat shielding their Roman citizen supervisors or masters from
the distasteful work of torture and execution. As men, they display their physical
strength and skills; as low status persons they carry out others’ decisions.
Citizenship is a crucial category, because if Roman magistrates follow
proper criminal procedure, they differentiate sharply between free and enslaved
persons, between citizens and non-citizens, and between “more honorable” and
“more humble” citizens (Latin: honestiores and humiliores).11 Gender manifests
10 Elaine Scarry, Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985), 3–4.
11 On harsher punishments for enslaved persons than for free persons, see Digest 48.8.4.2
(Ulpian [ca. 170–223], on a rescript by Hadrian); 47.9.4.1 (Paul [second – early third century],
 Courage, Betrayal, and the Roman State 373

itself in the questions of nudity in the arena and of pregnancy and childbirth.12
Intersectional analysis of the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons requires,
then, first an elucidation of torture theory and of the historical development
of torture in relation to legal and social rank. The ancient Athenian judicial
system distinguishes free persons from enslaved ones, with the latter viewed as
incapable of speaking the truth – except under torture. Athenian orator Demos-
thenes (4th c. bce) explicitly approves the efficacy of torturing enslaved persons,
stating that if free witnesses and enslaved witnesses are both available, juries
should prefer the enslaved ones. Free witnesses, whom one may not torture,
might not tell the truth. In contrast, “no statements made as a result of torture
have ever been proved to be untrue.”13 Torture “frees” enslaved persons from
the duress of their owners. Enslaved persons would fear punishment from their
owners for disclosing incriminating evidence against them. The Athenian dem-
ocratic solution is to counterbalance fear of punishment by a master or mistress
with the even greater fear of torture.14 Beyond that, deemed to be defective in
character, the enslaved are seen to need the purifying touchstone of torture to
bring out the truth. As Page duBois has compellingly outlined, the Greek verb
for “torture”15 (basanizō) derives from the noun for a dark stone that bankers
used to test the purity of gold, because rubbing gold against this stone left a
specific mark on it. In other words, the testing of truth was always at the heart of
the semantic field. The Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons uses this same
Greek verb for torture.
Roman law marks enslaved bodies for interrogation under torture, for pun-
ishment by flogging, and for execution by crucifixion or other ignominious
means. It grants the highest-ranking elite Roman citizens the privilege of a swift
and honorable death by the sword or the possibility of avoiding immediate death
through relegation or deportation to a distant location, such as an island. This,
at least, is the early Roman ideal, but one that breaks down over time. From
the time of the Roman Republic to the time of the Christian Roman emperors,

on a rescript by Antoninus Pius), on which see Jean-Jacques Aubert, “A Double Standard in

Roman Criminal Law? The Death Penalty and Social Structure in Late Republican and Early
Imperial Rome,” in Speculum Iuris: Roman Law as a Reflection of Social and Economic Life in
Antiquity, ed. Jean-Jacques Aubert and Boudewijn Sirks (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michi-
gan Press, 2002), 105.
12 See Perpetua, whose baby suddenly no longer needed nursing, thereby leaving her free
for the arena, and Felicitas, whose prayer to give birth in her eighth month was answered. She
too, was then able to suffer martyrdom with her companions (Martyrdom of Perpetua 6, 15).
13 Demosthenes, Private Orations 30, Against Onetor 37. Translation from Page duBois,
Torture and Truth (New York: Routledge, 1991), 50 (Trans. slightly altered).
14 Page duBois explicitly notes Lycurgus’s assessment that torturing enslaved men and
women produces real facts and was therefore “by far the most just and most democratic course”
(Lycurgus, Against Leocrates 29; duBois, Torture, 51–52).
15 The verb βασανίζω: “to examine closely, cross-question” and “to question by applying
torture” (LSJ, s.v.) developed from the noun βασάνος.
374 Bernadette J. Brooten

torture spreads from its original target of enslaved persons, first to the lowest
free ranks of society and then even into the broad middle level. Early Imperial
legislation marks citizen bodies and even those of freeborn non-citizens as
honorable by prohibiting torture of them and by designating free persons’ tes-
timony as valid on its own, rendering superfluous coercion to elicit the truth.16
In contrast, enslaved persons may not step forth as witnesses, but should rather
be interrogated under torture.17 Over several centuries, however, the dual-penal
system comes back to bite the descendants of the citizens of the Republic who
designate torture for enslaved persons. The Roman emperors define themselves
as masters (domini), rendering even some citizens vulnerable to torture, that is,
effectively treating citizens as if they were enslaved. Throughout all of this, the
Romans remain very careful to preserve the link between slavery and torture.
Thus, in the Imperial period, a magistrate has first to condemn a citizen to capital
punishment, thereby making the condemned person a “penal slave” (servus/a
poenae).18 Only after enslaving the condemned person is the magistrate allowed
to torture the former citizen to obtain information about accomplices to the
crime. By the time of Emperor Constantine, however, Roman law allows the
torture of even some high-ranking persons.19
In spite of the neat division between the torture of the enslaved and the non-
torture of at least some citizens, torture remains problematic for the Roman state.
Ulpian (second to third century), one of the foremost Roman jurists, explicitly
acknowledges that torture can yield unreliable testimony:
It is stated in constitutions that reliance should not always be placed on torture – but not
never, either; for it is a chancy and risky business and one which may be deceptive. For
there are a number of people who, by their endurance or their toughness under torture are
so contemptuous of it that the truth can in no way be squeezed out of them. Others have so

16 Digest 48.6.7 (Ulpian [ca. 170–223]; Sentences of Paul 5.26.1 on the Julian Law on Public
Violence.
17 Joachim Ermann, „Die Folterung Freier im römischen Strafprozeß der Kaiserzeit bis
Antoninus Pius,“ ZSS 117 (2000): 424, notes that sources distinguish between ‘witnesses’ (testes)
and ‘interrogations’ (quaestiones). He argues that this Republican position did not change in the
imperial period.
18 Digest 28.1.8.4 (Gaius): “But those who are condemned to be beheaded or to fight with
wild beasts or to the mines lose their freedom and their property is forfeited to the state from
which it is apparent that they lose testamenti factio” (Trans. Alan Watson, The Digest of Justinian
[Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985]). (Testamenti factio is the legal capacity
of a person to make a testament.)
Digest 28.3.6.6 (Ulpian [ca. 170–223]): “But even if someone has been condemned to cap-
ital punishment, to fight with beasts or to be beheaded, or condemned to another punishment
which deprives him of life, his testament will become ineffectual and that not at the time when
he is killed, but when he comes under sentence; for he is made a servus poenae.” (Trans. Watson).
For discussion, see Ermann, „Folterung,“ 426; and Hans Wieling, „Unfreiheit als Delikts-
strafe,“ in Corpus der römischen Rechtsquellen zur antiken Sklaverei, Part I: Die Begründung des
Sklavenstatus nach dem ius gentium und ius civile (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999), 18–20.
19 Theodosian Code 9.19.1 (316 ce), on which see Aubert, “A Double Standard,” 103.
 Courage, Betrayal, and the Roman State 375
little endurance that they would rather tell any kind of lie than suffer torture; so it happens
that they confess in various ways, incriminating not only themselves but others also.20

“Constitutions” are imperial enactments; thus, the hesitation is not Ulpian’s

alone. Emperors and at least this jurist, one of the most influential among the
Roman jurists, anticipate the later recognition, extending in the twenty-first
century, that torture may not produce the truth. Examples from both the Re-
publican and Imperial periods of enslaved and freedpersons bravely holding up
under torture in defense of their owners or patrons, even when the latter may
have been guilty, bear this out.21
In spite of the recognition that torture could yield unreliable testimony, it
remains integral to the Roman criminal justice system. Having defined their
own bodies and those of their social equals as non-torturable, Roman jurists and
officials willingly assume the risk that someone might give false testimony under
torture. They hold up cases in which torture produces truth.22

20 Digest 48.18.1.23 (Ulpian [ca. 170–223]) (Trans. Watson). Aristotle, Rhetoric

1376b–1377a, also writes about the problematic evidentiary value of torture.
21 Valerius Maximus (first century bce – first century ce) 6.8.1 praises an enslaved boy who
held up under multiple tortures in support of his master, Marcus Antonius, who was accused
of incest.
Emperor Caligula (37–41 ce) summoned an actress named Quintilia to obtain incriminat-
ing testimony against Pomponius Pennus on the charge of treason. Quintilia was apparently
a freedwoman and mistress to her patron Pompedius. As she entered, Quintilia is reported to
have stepped on the foot of one of the co-conspirators to signal her resolve to hold up under
torture. Indeed, Quintilia, who bravely withstood particularly cruel torture, disclosed no crime.
Even the notoriously brutal Caligula, moved by Quintilia’s appearance after the torture, gave
her a large gift of money to compensate her. My presentation of Quintilia is a composite drawn
from three sources: Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 19.5 §§ 35–36; Suetonius, Caligula 16.4; and
Dio Cassius 59.26.4. Suetonius does not mention her name, but describes her as a freedwoman
who did not disclose the crime of her patron. Dio Cassius calls her his mistress. For discussion,
see Leonhard Schumacher, Servus Index: Sklavenverhör und Sklavenanzeige im republikanischen
und kaisterzeitlichen Rom (Forschungen zur antiken Sklaverei 15; Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982)
144–145. Schumacher notes that Quintilia may have been freed by Pompedius’s wife, because
her family name (gentilicium), Quintilia, is not his own.
Tacitus (ca. 56–58 – ca. 120) presents a freedwoman named Epicharis as withstanding
torture without betraying her fellow conspirators in the 65 ce plot to replace Nero with Piso
(Annals 15.51, 57). See especially Rhiannon Ash, “Women in Imperial Roman Literature,” in
A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, ed. Sharon L. James and Sheila Dillon (Malden,
MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) 449–451; Thomas Späth, “Masculinity and Gender Performance
in Tacitus,” A Companion to Tacitus, ed. Victoria Emma Pagán (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,
2012), 448–450.
22 For example, in the Digest 48.18.1.27, the jurist Ulpian (ca. 170–223) reports the case
of Primitivus, an enslaved man who was so fearful of being returned to his master that he
accused himself of homicide and claimed accomplices. The governor Voconius Saxa was sus-
picious and had Primitivus interrogated under torture. When Primitivus admitted that he had
not committed homicide and that there were no accomplices, the governor wrote to Marcus
Aurelius and his co-emperor Lucius Verus. In their response, they praised Saxa for having “acted
prudently and with the excellent motive of humanity” (Trans. Watson) and ordered him to sell
Primitivus and to compensate the owner. In their view, torture had clearly proven its worth.
376 Bernadette J. Brooten

Torture is nevertheless problematic in yet another respect: The state hesitates

to intervene between a private owner and their human property, for to do so
would disrupt the dominance relationship.23 According to a legal principle of the
Republican period: “interrogating a slave against the master is not allowed.”24
Roman law explicitly prohibits enslaved persons from accusing their owners.25
For the state to torture enslaved persons to produce incriminating evidence
against their master or mistress comes dangerously close to allowing enslaved
persons to accuse their owners. Testimony of the enslaved that led to the death
penalty of the owner would de facto give the enslaved person a power over the
owner that slavery is meant to prevent. By using “power,” I am not implying
that I conceptualize an enslaved tortured person as powerful, but rather that,
within the logic of Roman slavery, testimony from enslaved persons against their
owners has power. Therefore, if enslaved persons come forth on their own, they
are not be believed: “Credence is not given to a slave who confesses something
relating to his master of his own accord; for it is not right in matters of doubt for
the master’s well-being to be entrusted to the whim of his slaves.”26
For this and other reasons, in the earliest period, the Romans hesitate to inter-
vene into the slavery relationship by applying torture to enslaved persons to elicit
incriminating information about their owners. Tacitus (first–second century ce)
refers to an ancient senatorial decree that prohibits interrogating under torture
an enslaved servant belonging to a person accused of a capital crime.27
The rise of the Empire represents a shift toward an increase in the torture of
enslaved persons against their owners. Emperor Augustus (27 bce–14 ce) is-
sues an edict with these words: “I do not think that interrogations under torture
ought to be requested in every case and person; but when capital or more serious
crimes cannot be explored and investigated in any other way than by the tor-
turing of slaves, then I think that those [interrogations] are the most effective
means of seeking out the truth and I hold that they should be conducted.”28 Dio
Cassius (second–third century ce) reports that Augustus orders that when it was
necessary to torture enslaved servants against their owners, the judge should
sell the person to the state or to him, so as to torture the person legally (i. e.,
For discussion, see: Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 169; Ermann, “Folterung,” 428.
23 Schumacher, Servus Index, 2, defines this as a problem of the relationship between a
public matter (res publica) and a private matter (res privata). The Roman legal challenge was to
create the legal basis for using the enslaved person “as the master’s property for the benefit and
protection of the general public against the master’s interests.”
24 Cicero, De partitione oratoria 34.118.
25 Digest 1.12.1.8 (Ulpian [ca. 170–223]); for further references and discussion, see W. W.
Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery: The Condition of the Slave in Private Law from Augustus
to Justinian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), 88.
26 Digest 48.18.18.5 (Ulpian [ca. 170–223]) (Trans. Watson).
27 Tacitus, Annals 2.30: vetus senatusconsultum.
28 Digest 48.18.8 (Paul) (Trans. Watson).
 Courage, Betrayal, and the Roman State 377

in accordance with the senatorial decree). In this case, Augustus is apparently

referring to torture in treason cases.29 Dio presents Tiberius (14–37 ce) as so
extreme in his prosecution of disloyalty to himself as emperor that he even
allows enslaved persons to accuse their owners, and that he has enslaved persons
tortured to elicit testimony against their owners.30 Tacitus excoriates Tiberius
for circumventing that same ancient senatorial decree by means of a “new juris-
prudence” in that he first sells off the enslaved servants of Marcus Scribonius
Libo Drusus to the state so that they no longer technically belong to Libo, who
is accused of treason.31 Seneca writes that Gaius Caligula tortures senators “as if
worthless slaves.”32 Dio reports that Claudius allows enslaved persons to accuse
their owners of plotting against him and even tortures the masters themselves up
to and including senators, although he had previously promised not to torture
free persons.33 Tacitus also reports that Nero tortured the slave-women of his
wife Octavia in an effort to accuse her of adultery. Some of the slave-women
produce false testimony, while others bravely hold up under torture.34 Tiberius,
Gaius Caligula, Claudius, and Nero are known in antiquity as brutal and capri-
cious emperors, who make clear that they will treat anyone as if enslaved and will
not respect the rights of slaveholders over their human property.35
Disloyalty to the emperor, that is, treason (crimen maiestatis), becomes one
of the main crimes for which the Romans allow the torture of the enslaved to
extract truth when their owners are accused.36 Roman officials and jurists re-
main acutely aware that enslaved persons’ fear could alter their testimony and
that they have to balance fear of torture with fear of one’s owner. To prevent
the enslaved from being afraid to speak out about their masters or mistresses,
29 Dio Cassius 55.5.4; see P(eter) A. Brunt, “Evidence Given under Torture in the Princi-
pate,” ZSS (Romanistische Abteilung) 97 (1980): 257 (on this passage), who argues on the basis
of this and evidence that I present in what follows, that enslaved servants were normally sold
before being tortured, including in adultery cases.
30 Dio Cassius 57.19.1–2 uses the term ἀσέβεια, “impiety,” for not properly venerating the
emperor. Dio stresses that Tiberius not only had enslaved persons tortured against their owners,
but even citizens and other free persons.
31 Tacitus, Ann. 2.30. See also Ann. 3.67, in which Tacitus states that Tiberius sold the en-
slaved servants of Gaius Junius Silanus to the treasury-agent in order to interrogate them under
torture concerning the accusation of treason (maiestatis crimen).
32 Seneca, On Anger 3.18–19.
33 Dio 60.15.6.
34 Tacitus, Ann. 14.60.
35 Peter Garnsey, Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1970), 145, notes that treason particularly rendered even high-ranking citizens liable to
torture.
36 Justinian Code 9.41.4 (rescript of Septimius Severus and Caracalla, 196 ce). Other crimes
in which the torture of the accused person’s enslaved servants was allowed included money
matters if the truth could not be reached in any other way (Digest 48.18.9. proem [Marcian
(early third century) referring to a rescript by Antoninus Pius]), adultery (Digest 48.5.28 [27].6
[Ulpian (ca. 170–223)] states that the Julian Law on Adultery itself orders that the enslaved
household servants be interrogated under torture), and false census returns.
378 Bernadette J. Brooten

the magistrate makes enslaved persons who have been tortured the property of
the state, so that they do not have to return to owners against whom they have
provided evidence.37
Limitations on the use of torture pepper the legal archive. Emperor Hadrian
writes: “Recourse should only be had to the infliction of pain on slaves when the
criminal is [already] suspect, and is brought so close to being proved [guilty]
by other evidence that the confession of his slaves appears to be the only thing
lacking.”38 Hadrian goes on to direct that the judge should start with the “most
suspect person and the man from whom the judge believes that he can most
easily learn the truth.”39

Blandina and Roman Authority

I observe that, in its narration of Blandina and of the enslaved betrayers, the Letter
contrasts with contemporaneous Roman law, which views enslaved individuals
as both persons and things, although, according to Roman law, enslaved persons
are things with respect to being bought, held, and sold, but persons when, for
example, they commit certain crimes.40 From the Roman standpoint, the serious
crime in question (although never explicitly named) apparently brings Blandina
and other enslaved Christians under the jurisdiction of a magistrate. This crime
justifies Roman legal intervention into the otherwise sacrosanct, absolute power
of a master or mistress over their enslaved laborer, who would normally them-
selves punish an enslaved person’s transgression. The Christian representation of
these enslaved persons displays no interest in the Roman legal conceptualization
as persons in some respects and things in others, instead presenting them as
nothing other than persons, as fully capable of ethical decision-making, that is,
as moral agents.
Upon closer examination, however, these depictions also conform to the
intellectual framework of mastery and slavery. The carefully crafted Letter of
the Churches of Vienne and Lyons represents Blandina’s martyrdom in the most
graphic possible way, transforming a Roman tale of criminal liability into a
Christian narrative of religious-athletic discipline and steadfast courage.41 Its

37 Digest 48.5.28.11 (Ulpian [ca. 170–223]): “The reason then for making the slaves public
property is so that they may speak the truth without any intimidation and may not, fearing that
they are going to return to the power of the accused, be obdurate under torture.” Even if, under
torture, the enslaved deny the charge against their master or mistress, the state still confiscates
them, lest they have an incentive to lie under torture in the hope of reward from the owner”
(Digest 48.5.28.13 [Ulpian]) (Trans. Watson).
38 Digest 48.18.1.1 (Ulpian) (Trans. Watson).
39 Digest 48.18.1.2 (Ulpian) (Trans. Watson).
40 See, e. g., Pauli Sententiae 5.18.1.
41 See Virginia Burrus, “Torture and Travail: Producing the Christian Martyr,” in A Feminist
 Courage, Betrayal, and the Roman State 379

author or authors successfully recast ignominious tortures and deaths as mo-

ments of triumph with athletic crowns of victory. The protagonist Blandina ex-
emplifies Tertullian’s pithy saying, “the blood of the Christians is seed” (semen est
sanguis Christianorum), which means that martyrdom creates new believers.42
Blandina’s enslaved status and her femaleness each promote the Christian mes-
sage differently. As an enslaved person, she counts as insignificant and worthy of
disdain, which ultimately makes the glory that appears in her more remarkable.
Judith Perkins argues that the text’s focus on the weakest and most marginal in
society, such as Blandina and a fifteen-year old boy killed with her, as triumphing
over the Roman governor effectively redefines power and “plays out a drama
that explicitly calls into question Roman authority.”43 While the text does sub-
vert the Roman cultural conception that a person who is punished ignomin-
iously is an ignominious person, a closer analysis reveals that it also conforms
to Roman views of how enslaved persons should behave. Specifically, Blandina
is the faithful slave woman who is not only loyal to her mistress’s religion and
to her, but who also exceeds all expectations.44 Blandina thereby contrasts with
the enslaved gentiles in the narrative who betray their Christian owners, the
expectation being that the enslaved household staffs of Christians should rather
have suffered torture for their masters and mistresses, even though they do not
share their religious beliefs.45
Replete with torture, the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons identifies
as enslaved only Blandina and the enslaved staff who betray their Christian own-
ers. Sanctus, who is asked whether he is enslaved or free, refuses to answer, but
the question itself is of legal relevance to the magistrates. The Letter’s earliest
readers and the audience in the arena would know the close association between
slavery and torture just outlined, albeit without knowing the finer points of
Roman legal reasoning or its historical development. Thus, the audience in the
arena expects that Blandina, who counts as worthless, may well be tortured,
thereby confirming her worthlessness. Blandina’s unnamed “human mistress”
(literally: “fleshly mistress”: sarkinē despoinē), a term that relativizes her control
over Blandina, because it implies a spiritual master, has low expectations. In fact,
she is quite distressed that Blandina would not even be strong enough to confess

Companion to Christian Literature, ed. Amy-Jill Levine, with Maria Mayo Robbins (London:
T&T Clark, 2008), 56–71, 63–67.
42 Tertullian, Apol., 50.13.
43 Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian
Era (New York: Routledge, 1995), 113–115 (quote on 115).
44 For another example of a loyal slave woman, see Sozomen, Church History 8.5, in which
a slave woman assists her mistress, a follower of Macedonius (who denies that the Holy Spirit
is of one substance with the Father), by substituting a piece of bread for the Eucharist that the
mistress had received – whereupon the bread miraculously turned into stone.
45 See J. Albert Harrill, Slaves in the New Testament: Literary, Social, and Moral Dimensions
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 159–163, upon whose careful analysis I build.
380 Bernadette J. Brooten

her faith, “because of the weakness of the body” (sōma).46 While one can read
this as Blandina living with a particular illness, disability, or general poor health,
the word sōma is one of the usual terms for enslaved person.47 Ancient readers
might therefore also see in this phrase the view that, as a slave woman, Blandina
is weak in character.
The Letter depicts Blandina as performing both her gender and her en-
slavement in such a way as to transcend the audience’s and the implied readers’
expectations of her, so that “the gentiles themselves confessed that never before
among them had a woman suffered so much and so long.”48 Both Christians
and non-Christians witness Blandina suspended from a pole. The Christians see
therein Jesus’ crucifixion, and the non-Christians likely also see the pole as cru-
cifixion, a form of execution for enslaved persons considered even worse than
being thrown to the beasts.49 As an enslaved woman, Blandina proceeds from her
expected weakness to be “filled with such power” that she defeats her torturers,
becoming like a “noble athlete.”50 Beyond that, Blandina attains the most noble
form of motherhood, namely spiritual motherhood over a boy named Ponticus,
whom she encourages and who dies before her.51 Like the mother of the seven
sons in 2 Maccabees, Blandina urges on Ponticus and she is then executed as the
last of the martyrs.52 The narrative presents Blandina as rising to greater heights
than any of her fellow martyrs. She begins at the lowest level, namely that of
an enslaved woman expected to fail, but masters the ever greater and greater
challenges presented to her by her torturers. Blandina is thus the best exemplar
of courageous martyrdom in the narrative.

46 Eusebius, Hist. eccl., 5.1.18; see also Tacitus, Annals 15.57, who writes that Nero, assuming
that a female body would be unable to stand up to the pain, put the freedwoman Epicharis to the
rack. Like Blandina, Epicharis held up and betrayed no one.
47 E. g., Rev 18:13; Polybius, Histories 12.13.5.
48 Eusebius, Hist. eccl., 5.1.56; trans. Kirsopp Lake, Eusebius: The Ecclesiastical History, LCL
(Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 1926), 2:435 (Trans. slightly altered).
49 See Digest 48.10.8 (Ulpian [ca. 170–223]), on which see Jean-Jacques Aubert, “A Double
Standard,” 110.
50 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.18–19. See Machabée, “The ‘Cheap, the Unseemly, and Readily
Despised’ One.”
51 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.53–55. Candida R. Moss notes that, in an echo of the Maccabean
martyrs, Blandina is said to be the mother of “children” in the plural (τέκνα) (5.1.55), even
though Ponticus alone appears in the role of her child (Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 112).
52 See especially 2 Macc 7:21–41. See Candida Moss, who criticizes this use of a non-Jewish
martyrdom account, if it leads one to think that martyrdom occurs only among Christians.
In Moss’s view, the author of the Letter was parasitically using a religiously powerful Jewish
martyrdom scene to further a Christian agenda (The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians
Invented a Story of Martyrdom [New York: HarperOne, 2013], 70–72).
 Courage, Betrayal, and the Roman State 381

Citizen Martyrs

The Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons describes the executions of the
“notable” Vettius Epagathus and the Roman citizen Attalus much more briefly
and discretely than the enslaved Blandina.53 Other Roman citizens, presumably
also Christian, remain unnamed, with the Letter mentioning only that the gov-
ernor asks Rome what to do with them and then beheads them.54 After the initial
arrests and before the Letter has named anyone else, Vettius Epagathus tries to
intervene with the governor on behalf of the others. The Letter presents Vettius
as a man of status who expects that he can, through appeal to accepted Roman
criminal procedural principles, remind the governor that the accused first need
to be heard.55 Vettius’s appeal against the irrational judgment evokes the anger of
the crowd, apparently because of his status. The governor behaves like the crowd
from which he theoretically should differ and simply demands to know whether
Vettius is a Christian. Vettius confesses to being a Christian and is martyred –
with no details at all on the form of execution.56
At a later point, the narrative introduces Attalus as having immigrated to
Gaul from Pergamon in Asia Minor, where he had strongly supported his fellow
Christians. He appears as the butt of tremendous rage by the mob, the governor,
and the Roman soldiers, but then does not come on the scene again until he
and three others, including Blandina, are brought in to battle the wild beasts.57
Following graphic descriptions of extreme violence toward Blandina and others,
the crowd loudly calls out for the well-known Attalus, who is then led around the
amphitheater. As if to placate the mob, someone carries a Latin placard before
him that reads, “This is Attalus, the Christian.” A tension then emerges between
the crowd that clearly wants to see Attalus’s blood and the Roman governor, who,
upon learning that Attalus is a Roman, that is, a Roman citizen, sends him back
to prison so that he can await a response from the emperor.58
As a citizen, Attalus has the right to a more dignified punishment. The Roman
governor meticulously follows proper criminal procedure in writing directly to
Emperor Marcus Aurelius to ask what he should do with the persons apparently
claiming Roman citizenship. Upon receipt of Marcus Aurelius’s legal response
(rescript), the governor has some persons executed by the method considered

53 In one of many allusions to what will become the New Testament, the Letter depicts Vetti-
us as resembling Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, who “liv[ed] blamelessly according to
all the commandments and regulations of the Lord.” Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.9; Luke 1:6.
54 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.44, 47.
55 See Ari Bryen, “Martyrdom, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Procedure,” ClAnt 33 (2014):
243–280, 255–257.
56 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.9–10 (9: ἐπίσημος).
57 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.17, 37.
58 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.44.
382 Bernadette J. Brooten

suitable for citizens, namely beheading, which is quicker and less painful.59 The
reader expects that Attalus is among those whom the governor beheads, but,
reminiscent of gospel depictions of Pontius Pilate, the Letter presents the gov-
ernor as driven by a raging crowd.60 Thus, on the next day, Attalus, “to please the
mob,” is brought back into the amphitheater to be thrown to the beasts.61 Attalus
is ultimately tortured on a burning hot iron chair, from which he speaks Latin
words of protest and faith.62
In part, the governor is precisely following Roman criminal procedure in
his treatment of Attalus. Whereas in the earlier Roman Empire, Roman citizens
who appeal their convictions to the emperor might be allowed to go to Rome
in person, by this point Roman governors simply write to Rome and await the
emperor’s rescript before proceeding. All of this demonstrates that the Roman
governor knows of his potential liability under the Julian Law on Public Violence
promulgated either by Julius Caesar or Augustus. This law prohibits magistrates
from torturing or executing Roman citizens whose cases are under appeal.63 At-
talus would have been a plebeian citizen, rather than a high-ranking one, but this
law was meant to protect even plebeians. In the course of time, magistrates bend
the Julian Law on Public Violence by condemning plebeians more quickly to
penal servitude.64 Upon becoming “penal slaves” (servi/ae poenae), condemned
citizens lose their rights of citizenship and could be tortured to obtain infor-
mation about any accomplices. The governor could have condemned Attalus
and the other Roman citizens to penal servitude and then interrogated them
under torture about fellow Christians once he had obtained Marcus Aurelius’s
permission for them to be executed. In spite of public pressure, however, this
Roman governor respects both the letter and spirit of the Julian law and does
not condemn Attalus quickly so as to able to torture him. Instead, he patiently
awaits Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s rescript. Only then does he execute Attalus
and others “who appeared to have Roman citizenship.”65 The governor seems to
be granting those who claim Roman citizenship the benefit of the doubt when
he refrains from torturing them. He orders them to be beheaded, which is the
classical and honorable method for executing plebeian Roman citizens. As the
Letter depicts the crowd, his ordering torture would have strengthened the gov-

59 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.47.

60 John 19:8–15, in particular, presents Pilate as heavily swayed by a roaring Jewish mob.
61 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.50.
62 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.52.
63 Digest 48.6.7 (Ulpian [ca. 170–223]); Sentences of Paul 5.26.1. The latter source implies
that the practice goes back to the Republic, because it states that citizens had earlier appealed
“to the people,” but now to the emperor.
64 Janne Pölönen, “Plebeians and Repression of Crime in the Roman Empire: From Torture
of Convicts to Torture of Suspects,” RIDA 51 (2004) 217–257, especially 220. Pölönen argues
that the Severan period (193–235) was a major turning point.
65 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.45.
 Courage, Betrayal, and the Roman State 383

ernor’s standing with them. For that reason, the governor’s restraint seems more
likely to derive either from his own understanding of himself as a moderate man
or from a concern that the emperor might view him as being able to control a
volatile situation with no more than the necessary force against Roman citizens.
Ultimately, however, he tortures Attalus, and apparently the beasts kill him, al-
though the Letter does not describe the form of death at all.
Why does the Letter from the Churches of Vienne and Lyons describe every
detail of Blandina’s suffering, but provides no details of the suffering of the
unnamed citizens? Perhaps the higher status of Vettius Epagathus and Attalus
leads to the authors’ greater reticence in graphically depicting deaths that are
shameful from a Roman standpoint? To be sure, the Letter quite graphically
evokes the smell of Attalus’s burning flesh on the red hot iron chair. Neverthe-
less, the length and detail of the descriptions of these public forms of violation
differ significantly from the extended representations of Blandina’s suffering. At
the culminating point of her travails, the officials put her (apparently naked)
into a net and throw her to a bull, the quintessential symbol of masculinity,
rendering her death highly gendered.66 Historical differences in the level of suf-
fering between Blandina and her higher status fellow martyrs alone do not ex-
plain why the Letter does not describe the amphitheater deaths of the unnamed
citizens and of Vettius Epagathus and Attalus. The spectacular violence against
Blandina, while it may have a historical foundation, also serves the rhetorical
function of demonstrating how high the enslaved Blandina rises on the ladder
of courage.

Blandina as “Good Slave”

J. Albert Harrill insightfully observes the irony in some of the martyrs’ names
in the Letter, which is reminiscent of the meaningfulness of names in ancient
novels.67 He draws attention to “Biblis” (from Greek biblis, a [fragile] strip of
papyrus); to “Pothinos” and “Martyros” who have desire (Greek potheinos)
for martyrdom; and to “Sanctus,” who is blessed (Latin sanctus). The name
“Blandina”68 derives from the Latin adjective blanda, which can mean “charm-

66 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.56.

67 See Harrill, Slaves, 159–162, who also notes, “Perpetua does not have a long life; the slave
Felicitas does not have good fortune” (160).
68 The name “Blanda,” of which “Blandina” is a variation, occurs in three first-century in-
scriptions from the city of Rome for enslaved or freedwomen (Corpus inscriptionum latinarum
VI 6500 [Blanda], 20396 [Iulia Pyladi l(iberta) Blanda, i. e., Blanda, the freedwoman of a member
of the Julian clan named Pyladus or Pylada], 22733 [Murtia L. lib. Blanda, i. e., Blanda, the freed-
woman of a member of the Murtian clan named “L.,” which could be Lucius, Lucia, Licinius,
Licinia, or another name]). The male name “Blandus” also occurs for enslaved or freedmen
(C. I. L. VI 5670, 5905, 9904, 25466, 7353). See Heikki Solin, Die stadtrömischen Sklavennamen:
384 Bernadette J. Brooten

ing, ingratiating, attractive, seductive,” “[f]lattering deceptively, insincere,” or

“[a]greeable to the senses or feelings, sweet, soft.”69 This range of meanings is
not unexpected in names that owners give to enslaved persons. A master or mis-
tress might designate as “sweet, seductive, soft” an infant girl or one whom they
had purchased.70 Or an owner might feel that a specific girl or enslaved females
on the whole tend toward deception and insincerity. Harrill argues that a reader
may expect Blandina to be insincere or ingratiating only to discover through the
truth of torture that she is quite the opposite and that Biblis turns out not to be
fragile at all.71 Conversely, the reader may see the names of Pothinos, Martyros,
and Sanctus as designating their precise relationship to their ordeals.72 Harrill
implies that the coincidence of names with meanings that would be known to
the earliest readers is too striking to be accidental. “The system of name giving
suggests that Blandina is a fiction serving the author’s faith and not a historical
person.”73 Harrill’s main thesis is “that name was one of many tags in the scene
pointing to a ‘faithful slave,’ along with her stereotyped behavior.”74 Harrill and
I agree that this carefully crafted narrative presents Blandina as a faithful en-
slaved person, although we diverge on our level of skepticism. The existence of
enslaved names with an ironic meaning in grave inscriptions leads me to con-
clude that not only novelists, but also slaveholders themselves assigned ironic
and demeaning names to enslaved persons.
According to the Letter’s depiction, Blandina is a Christian master’s or mis-
tress’s best possible enslaved laborer, one who shares her mistress’s faith and
stands by it until the very end. In this, Blandina contrasts sharply with the
Christians’ enslaved betrayers, whose arrest the Letter does not mention at first.
Or perhaps the Roman officials do not arrest them at the beginning, focusing
instead on those known to be Christian. Had they not betrayed their Chris-
tian masters and mistresses, they may not have been mentioned at all. As it
is, these enslaved gentiles confirm the proverb cited by Seneca: [you have] “as
many enemies as you have slaves.”75 Perhaps memories of abuse by their Chris-
tian masters and mistresses added to these enslaved servants’ unwillingness

Ein Namenbuch, Part 1: Lateinische Namen (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1996), 76–77. Other names of
enslaved and formerly enslaved persons that Solin classifies together with “Blanda/-us” include
“Hilarus,-a” (“cheerful” – occurs frequently), “Lascivus,-a” (comparable in meaning to the Eng-
lish cognate), “Laetus,-a” (“cheerful,” “happy,” “pleasing”).
69 P. G. W. Glare, Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1982) s. v.
70 While contemporary readers might be unable to imagine that a Christian mistress would
have pimped her slave-girl or slave-woman, at least as early as the Synod of Elvira (early fourth
century), precisely that was recognized as a problem (Canons of the Synod of Elvira 12).
71 See Burrus, “Torture and Travail,” 56–71, 56, 64, who notes Biblis’s manliness and
suggests that she may have been enslaved.
72 Harrill, Slaves, 160.
73 Harrill, Slaves, 162.
74 Harrill, personal correspondence (September 23, 2018), for which I thank him.
75 Seneca, Letters 47.
 Courage, Betrayal, and the Roman State 385

to endure torture on their behalf. Everyone, both slaveholders and enslaved,

likely knows that Roman law requires enslaved persons to be interrogated
under torture when the crime of treason is at stake, although the Letter does
not specifically name treason as the crime. The Roman officials believe them,
even though they speak freely and not under torture. The governor’s reliance
on testimony from these enslaved persons belonging to Christians constitutes a
breach of Roman criminal procedure.76
The Letter depicts the enslaved betrayers as falsely accusing their Christian
masters and mistresses of “Thyestean dinners and Oedipean intercourse.”77
In Greek mythology, as a revenge for Thyestes’ adultery with Airope, who was
married to Thyestes’s brother Atreus, Atreus serves Thyestes a meal of his own
sons, whom he unknowingly eats. Oedipus kills his father and marries his moth-
er. In other words, the enslaved gentiles falsely accuse their Christian masters
and mistresses of cannibalism and incest.78 Perhaps these servants themselves
employed the widely understood cultural references to Thyestes and Oedipus.
For the Christian author, however, “Thyestean dinners and Oedipean inter-
course” are so abominable that Christians should not speak or think about them
or even believe that they can occur. By placing these terms in the mouths of the
gentiles in their possession, the author may be reminding the reader that gentiles
themselves invented the abominations of cannibalism and incest.
These accusations make public the tensions existing within Christian house-
holds whose enslaved servants hold fast to their own ancestral religious practices.
In the Roman world, slaveholders of any sort expect their enslaved laborers to
bow to their will and accept their authority (auctoritas). In the late second and
early third centuries, Christians throughout the Roman Empire were acutely
aware of the risk of betrayal by the persons whose bodies they own, but whose
minds and words they cannot control.
A few decades before the Gallic persecution, Justin Martyr similarly charges
his “pagan” opponents, who also claim that Christians eat human flesh: “For

76 Digest 48.18.9.1 (Marcian [early third century]): “In those cases, where the torture of
slaves against their masters should not be employed, it has been stated that that not even inter-
rogation [without torture] is valid; much less admissible are [voluntary] informations laid by
slaves against their masters.”
77 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.14.
78 See also Christian author Athenagoras (second half of second century), Legatio 3.1,
who writes, “They [i. e., the non-Christian crowds] make three charges against us: atheism,
Thyestean dinners, Oedipean intercourse” (precisely the same terms as in Eusebius: Θυέστεια
δεῖπνα and Οἰποδείους μίξεις). For further references and discussion of these charges, see Bart
Wagemakers, “Incest, Infanticide, and Cannibalism: Anti-Christian Imputations in the Roman
Empire,” Greece and Rome 2nd Ser. 57 (2010): 337–354; F. L. Roig Lanzilotta, “The Early Chris-
tians and Human Sacrifice,” in Onder Orchideeën: Lustrumbundel: Nieuwe oogst uit de Tuin
der Geesteswetenschappen te Groningen, ed. J. van Dijk (Groningen: Barkuis, 2010), 169–185;
and Andrew McGowan, “Eating People: Accusations of Cannibalism against Christians in the
Second Century,” JECS 2 (1994): 413–342.
386 Bernadette J. Brooten

having killed some because of the slander against us, they also dragged in our
household slaves, either children or weak women, to be interrogated under
torture, and by horrific torments forced them to confess to those fabricated
deeds that they themselves openly perpetrate.”79 Justin does not specify whether
or not these enslaved laborers are “pagan” or Christian. The image of tortured
children and women, even if enslaved, aims to elicit sympathy on the part of the
implied readers, which may imply that the servants are themselves Christian.80
The grammar is unclear on whether or not Justin views the enslaved persons
belonging to Christians as confessing to deeds that they themselves ostensibly
committed or as betraying their Christian masters and mistresses.81 Since the
direct object of the verb is the deeds, it is more plausible that the servants were
tortured into confessing that they had engaged in cannibalism in Christian
homes, which, of course, also implicates the Christian slaveholders. The Romans
likely put these enslaved persons to the torture to elicit incriminating evidence
on the Christian slaveholders, but the interrogation could also have included
questions about their own practices in the homes in which they had intimate
knowledge of all goings-on.
At just the same time as the persecution of Christians in Gaul, Athenian
Christian Athenagoras, in writing to refute “pagan” charges of “atheistic meals
and sexual relations,”82 makes the exact opposite claim, namely that those held
in bondage by Christians have never charged them with such crimes. Athe-
nagoras tries to deflect these outside charges by representing the Christians as
chaste and ethical and their opponents as the real perpetrators of such crimes.
In that context, he refers to Thyestes, who had intercourse with his daughter in
order to have a son who could avenge Atreus’s crime against Thyestes.83 Echoing
Euripides’ Oresteia, Athenagoras comments, “Oh! How could I ever utter such
unspeakable things?”84 Athenagoras charges those who accuse Christians of
cannibalism as lying and as never themselves willing even to claim that they have
ever been eyewitnesses. By way of further justification, Athenagoras writes, “we
have slaves, some more, some fewer, from whom we cannot escape detection, but

79 Justin Martyr, Second Apology, 12.2,4 (ca. 150–155). As at Lyons and Vienne, Justin
reports of Christians being charged with atheism and impiety (3.1).
80 Under Roman law, a person younger than fourteen is normally not to be tortured in a
capital case concerning another person, which sheds light on Justin’s complaint that even en-
slaved children were tortured. Digest, 48.15.1 (Callistratus [second to third century], concerning
a rescript by Antoninus Pius [138–161]).
81 The verb κατεῖπον can mean “denounce” in the juridical sense, but in this case the direct
object of κατειπεῖν is not the Christian slaveholders, but rather ταῦτα τὰ μυθομολούμενα, i. e.,
“those fabricated deeds.” For that reason, I have translated κατειπεῖν as “confess.”
82 Athenagoras, Legatio 31.1 (176–180 ce).
83 Athenagoras, Legatio 32.1.
84 Athenagoras, Legatio 34.1; cf. Euripides, Oresteia 14 (with reference to Thyestes): “why
should I recapitulate things that must not be told?”
 Courage, Betrayal, and the Roman State 387

not one of them has ever falsely accused us of such things.”85 In addition, in 314,
the Synod of Ancyra in central Asia Minor recognizes that persons enslaved to
Christians may betray them.86 Like other slaveholders in the Roman world, the
Christian congregations in Lyons and Vienne, those mentioned by Justin Martyr,
Athenagoras, and the Synod of Ancyra have good reason to fear their “domes-
tic enemy,” not simply because oppressed persons may hate those who oppress
them, but also because of Greek and Roman understandings of truth.
By acting upon testimony given by non-Christians enslaved to Christians
and by not obtaining that evidence under torture, the Roman governor trans-
gresses ancient and established rules of Roman criminal procedure. Perhaps the
governor follows proper criminal procedure with respect to accused Roman cit-
izens – even if Christian (except for Attalus), because that will make him appear
humanitarian, law-abiding, and measured. His moderate treatment of Christian
Roman citizens could strengthen the impression in Rome that he is in control of
a difficult situation. From a different perspective, the Letter’s stress on the fact
that the enslaved gentiles betray their owners even without torture underscores
the governor’s lawlessness. The Christian implication is that he should have
tortured their slave-men and slave-women, and that they should have suffered
like their Christian masters and mistresses.

Enslaved and Slaveholding Christians

While this narrative appears at first to value “good” enslaved persons like Blan-
dina equally with free ones, closer examination has revealed that the legally free
Christians hold more complicated views about slavery. On the one hand, in spite
of the potential risks to them posed by their “domestic enemies,” they desire to
benefit from enslaved labor. According to the narrative’s rhetoric, their misfor-
tune lies not in slaveholding, but rather in holding in bondage persons willing to
betray them with the most horrific lies even without being tortured.
Viewed intersectionally, these slaveholding Christians, as Christians, are
vulnerable to persecution by the Roman state. As slaveholders, they are simulta-
neously privileged and vulnerable to betrayal. A Roman governor who accepts
enslaved testimony obtained without torture intensifies this tension and actually
alters what it means to be a slaveholder. In addition, the Roman state that granted
these Christians the right to hold persons in slavery has now undercut a slave-
holding status that even in the absence of a hated Christian identity harbors the
85 Athenagoras, Legatio 35.3 (Athenagoras: Legatio and De Resurrectione, ed. and trans.
William R. Schoedel [Oxford: Clarendon, 1972], 82, 84); discussed by Harrill, Slaves, 153–54.
86 Synod of Ancyra, canon 3, in Fonti, Fascicle 9: Discipline générale antique (IVe–IXe), ed.
and trans. Périclès-Pierre Joannou (Grottaferrata [Rome]: Italo-Orientale «S. Nilo,» 1962–1964),
vol. 1, part 2, 58.5.
388 Bernadette J. Brooten

possibility of betrayal by domestic workers. Thus, under the present circum-

stances, these Christians’ slaveholding has rendered them hyper-vulnerable to
martyrdom.
As an enslaved woman, Blandina was always vulnerable to torture by the
Roman state, even had she not been Christian. Ancient onlookers in the am-
phitheater at Lyons would have already witnessed other enslaved women placed
on display so that that might enjoy their spectacular suffering. In line with the
Roman ideal of the loyal enslaved domestic, she not only shares her mistress’s
religious practices and beliefs; she exceeds all expectations. Ancient views of
torture as suited to enslaved persons may have shaped, even subconsciously, the
Letter’s graphic representations of Blandina’s suffering. The work stresses her
femaleness in several ways. As a condemned woman, hers is the culminating
death in front of a crowd that would enjoy it as the spectacular end of the show.
Blandina is, however, a sister within the Christian community and attains the
status as spiritual mother to Ponticus and her other fellow martyrs, effectively
giving her specifically female kinship ties, albeit not legally recognized ones.
Kinship embeds one within a community in a way normally not allowed to en-
slaved persons.
Like Blandina, the non-Christians enslaved to Christians were vulnerable to
torture by the state and to whippings and other violence at the hands of their
masters and mistresses, prohibited neither by Roman law nor by Christian teach-
ings. Being enslaved to Christians renders them hyper-vulnerable to torture by
the state. The testimony that they give out of fear brings them no benefit other
than being spared torture.87 Some of the Christians in the region survive, at the
minimum those who write the Letter, which raises the question whether the en-
slaved persons who state that their owners practice cannibalism and incest suffer
reprisals by these or other Christians.
The Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons represents a precarity of the
lives of all enslaved persons well documented in many other sources within
the Roman Empire. Enslaved life with Christian slaveholders was apparently as
precarious as that with other masters and mistresses, even or perhaps especially
when these Christian slaveholders were at risk of persecution.
Karen King has thought deeply about both torture and martyrdom, and her
own moral compass challenges us to ask how our research relates to human
flourishing. In response to the question why have Christians throughout his-
tory both opposed and supported torture, King puts forth the idea that when
Christians have seen themselves as agents of God, they have felt justified in sup-
porting torture or carrying it out themselves.88 Thinking with King, one may
87 Eusebius, Hist. eccl., 5.1.14: “fearing the tortures that they saw the saints suffering.”
88 Karen L. King, “Christianity and Torture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and
Violence, ed. Michael Jerryson, Juergen Juergensmeyer, and Margo Kitts (Oxford Handbooks
Online, 2013). See also Karen L. King, “Willing to Die for God: Individualization and Instru-
 Courage, Betrayal, and the Roman State 389

read the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons as assuming that all enslaved
persons belonging to Christians should be willing to suffer torture in support
of their owners’ faith, which should also be their own. The Christian Blandina
exceeds expectations, whereas her fellow non-Christian enslaved laborers do not
even have the courage for the onset of torture. One can read Blandina’s courage
and ability to withstand torture as serving to condemn her fellows’ disloyalty to
their Christian masters and mistresses, although I do not construe that as the
main point. The narrative presents Blandina as an agent of Christ, indeed, as
one through whom the audience can see Christ. In line with King’s thesis, the
audience’s view of Blandina as an agent of Christ lends theological weight to an
expectation of loyalty even under torture. Future researchers of the responses
to the Blandina story throughout Christian history could fruitfully test King’s
thesis on that material. Have the story’s readers reflected deeply on the horrors
of torture depicted therein, leading them to reject torture, and specifically the
torture of enslaved persons? Or has it signifyed great courage and faith in the
face of persecution, without impinging upon the practice of torture?

Bibliography

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 The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus
(P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463)
Rethinking the History of Early Christianity
Through Literary Papyri from Oxyrhynchus

AnneMarie Luijendijk1

“My own preferences and interest have to date most directly

concerned what previously unknown Christian texts dis-
covered in Egypt over the last century might bring to the
discussion.”
Karen L. King2

Karen King has made important contributions to many different conversations

in the field of early Christian studies, including (but certainly not limited to) the
diversity of early Christianity, Nag Hammadi studies, the Gospel of Mary, and
gender in early Christianity. In this paper, I weave together several threads of
King’s scholarship by studying the two Greek fragment of the Gospel of Mary,
P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463, as part of the diverse bookish milieu of the
ancient city of Oxyrhynchus. This paper thus accepts King’s exhortation to study
religion locally.
In her book and articles on the Gospel of Mary, King offers significant new
insights for the interpretation of this recently discovered text.3 In this contribu-
tion, I study the materiality of the manuscripts and the sociology of reading of
the Gospel of Mary in the third century. For that purpose, my approach relates to
that of Mary Rouse and Richard Rouse in their work on Medieval manuscripts.
They wrote: “Our question of the written record … is not primarily ‘what?’ (what
does the text say, what does it mean?). Our questions are ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ Why
was it written – from what source? and for what purpose? How was it written
(the mechanics, both material and intellectual)? … Why in this specific form?
How and why does it differ from its analogues – in an earlier time, at a later time,

1 I am very grateful to Laura Nasrallah and Brent Nongbri for their helpful feedback on
this piece.
2 Karen L. King, “Factions, Variety, Diversity, Multiplicity: Representing Early Christian
Differences for the 21st Century,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 23.3–4 (2011): 229.
3 Karen L. King, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle (Santa
Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 2003).
392 AnneMarie Luijendijk

a different place?”4 Scholars also refer to this approach as new – or material –

philology.5
In order to address questions like those of Rouse and Rouse, I introduce the
three extant manuscripts of the Gospel of Mary and then concentrate on the
two Greek fragments, P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463, examining their scribal
features, handwriting, and book format. Finally, I zoom out to the larger social
and cultural reading context at Oxyrhynchus in the third century.

Finding the Gospel of Mary

The year 2018 marked the eightieth anniversary of the re-appearance of the Gos-
pel of Mary after a roughly fifteen-hundred-year hiatus. The identification and
publication of this long-lost text happened in the serendipitous ways through
which papyrus texts often resurface. This case of textual rediscovery was due
to a fortuitous collaboration between Colin Roberts, a papyrologist in Oxford,
England, and Carl Schmidt, a Coptologist in Berlin, Germany. When sorting
the papyri at the John Rylands collection in Manchester as he prepared volume
three of the Rylands papyri, Roberts had at first classified the fragment we now
know to contain parts of the Gospel of Mary “among the nameless apocrypha
not uncommon in the papyri.” Noticing the name Mary Magdalene in the text,
however, prompted him to reach out to Schmidt in Berlin, who had recently
written about her role in the Pistis Sophia.6 Schmidt responded: “To our sur-
prise we find in the still unpublished Coptic-gnostic Papyrus Berolinensis in the
department of Egyptian papyri in the first place a treatise with as subscript the
title: Εὐαγγέλιον κατὰ Μαριάμ.”7 At once the Gospel of Mary was attested in
both a Greek and Coptic version.

4 Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts
and Manuscripts, Publications in Medieval Studies 17 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1991), 1.
5 On new philology, see, e. g., Bernard Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de
la philologie, vol. 8 (Paris: le Seuil, 1989); Speculum, 65 (1990), especially Stephen G. Nichols,
“Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” Speculum 65.1 (1990): 1–10; and for early
Judaism and early Christianity, the chapters in Liv Ingeborg Lied and Hugo Lundhaug, Snap-
shots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New
Philology (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017). On “the oral/aural sensibilities of the practice of writing”
in the Apocryphon of John, see Karen L. King, “Approaching the Variants of the Apocryphon of
John,” in The Nag Hammadi Library after Fifty Years: Proceedings of the 1995 Society of Biblical
Literature Commemoration, ed. John D. Turner and Anne McGuire, NHMS 44 (Leiden: Brill,
1997), 105–137 (quote at 106).
6 Colin H. Roberts, ed., Catalogue of the Greek Papyri in the John Rylands Library, Man-
chester III (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1938), 18.
7 „Zu unserer Überraschung finden wir in dem noch unpublizierten koptisch-gnostischen
Papyrus Berolinensis der ägyptischen Papyrusabteilung an erste stelle (sic) eine Abhandlung,
 The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463) 393

Colin Roberts published P. Ryl. III 463 in the Catalogue of the Greek and
Latin Papyri in the John Rylands Library Manchester in 1938.8 The Berlin codex,
P. Berlol. 8502, was eventually published in 1955.9 The Rylands remnants of the
Gospel of Mary consist of two matching fragments of a page that formed part of
a codex.10 It corresponds to page 17, lines 5 to 21, and pages 18, line 5, to 19, line
5 of the Coptic text. In the style of handwriting, one recognizes a professional,
secretarial hand, writing “without great care and perhaps in haste.”11 According
to Roberts, the fragment was purchased at the site of Oxyrhynchus.12 This is also
the provenance of the third known manuscript of the Gospel of Mary.

die als Unterschrift den Titel trägt: Εὐαγγέλιον κατὰ Μαριάμ.“ Quoted by Roberts in P. Ryl. III,
18.
8 See also discussions and re-editions of this papyrus in, e. g., King, The Gospel of Mary
of Magdala, 10; Dieter Lührmann, Die apokryph gewordenen Evangelien: Studien zu neuen
Texten und zu neuen Fragen, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 112 (Boston: Brill, 2004),
112–120; C. M. Tuckett, The Gospel of Mary, Oxford Early Christian Gospel Texts (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 7–8, 112–118; Thomas A. Wayment, The Text of the New Tes-
tament Apocrypha (100–400 CE) (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 42–44; Lincoln H. Blumell and
Thomas A. Wayment, eds., Christian Oxyrhynchus: Texts, Documents, and Sources (Waco, TX:
Baylor University Press, 2015), 232–235.
9 Walter Curt Till, Die gnostischen Schriften des koptischen Papyrus Berolinensis 8502, Texte
und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 60 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag,
1955); re-edition Hans-Martin Schenke, 1972. The Berlin codex contains the Gospel of Mary,
the Apocryphon of John, the Wisdom of Jesus Christ, and the Act of Peter in Coptic. Two of
these texts, the Apocryphon of John and the Wisdom of Jesus Christ, also form part of the Nag
Hammadi codices, and therefore the Gospel of Mary is included in many Nag Hammadi pub-
lications, including a critical edition in The Coptic Gnostic Library: A Complete Edition of the Nag
Hammadi Codices, v. 3. Nag Hammadi Codices III, 3–4 and V, 1; Nag Hammadi Codex III, 5; Nag
Hammadi Codex V, 2–5; Nag Hammadi Codex VI; Papyrus Berolinensis 8502, 1 and 4, ed. James
M. Robinson, Institute for Antiquity and Christianity (Boston: Brill, 2000). See also Lührmann,
Die apokryph gewordenen Evangelien, 106. On the publication history of the Berlin codex, see
King, The Gospel of Mary, 7–11. The provenance of this codex is unknown. On the provenance
and discovery of the codex, see Brent Nongbri, God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest
Christian Manuscripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 92–93.
10 Roberts indicates that he matched the two pieces that had been stored in different boxes,
P. Ryl. III, 20. An image of the papyrus is available at https://luna.manchester.ac.uk/luna/serv
let/detail/ManchesterDev~93~3~55542~223276?qvq=q%3A463 %3Bsort%3Areference_num
ber%2Cimage_sequence_number%2Cimage_title%2Cimage_number%3Blc%3AManchesterD
ev~93~3&mi=0&trs=2#
11 Alan Mugridge, Copying Early Christian Texts: A Study of Scribal Practice, Wissenschaft-
liche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 362 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 378–379,
no. 476.
12 It is listed as “Acquired in 1917; Oxyrhynchus” (P. Ryl. III, 18). The 1917 purchase came
through Rendell Harris. Roberts wrote at the end of the edition: “The small strip which com-
prises the outer side of the leaf was in a small packet with a few other literary fragments, the
provenance of all of which was definitely stated to be Oxyrhynchus. It was not until later that
I came across the main fragment of the leaf in a separate folder to which no provenance was
assigned. There is no reason to doubt that the origin of the text is Oxyrhynchus” (P. Ryl. III,
20).
394 AnneMarie Luijendijk

In 1983, this third manuscript (and second Greek) with the Gospel of Mary
appeared in volume fifty of the series The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. It was edited by
Oxford papyrologist Peter J. Parsons (P. Oxy. L 3525).13 It contains the Greek
version of page 9, line 1 to page 10, line 14 of the Coptic text. This is a much-
damaged papyrus, measuring 11.5 by 12.0 cm.14 None of its margins are pre-
served. The copyist wrote in a documentary hand along the fibers. With its blank
back, this fragment once formed part of a book roll. P. Oxy. L 3525 was found
during the third excavation season at Oxyrhynchus by Bernard Grenfell and Ar-
thur Hunt. As we will see below, at this city a large number of Christian and other
literary and documentary sources have been preserved (albeit in fragmentary
condition). They present an unparalleled opportunity to contextualize Chris-
tian fragments within their larger social and cultural milieu.15 In what follows,
I analyze the handwriting and book format of P. Oxy. L 3525, with this question
in mind: What does this physical format of a book roll written in a documentary
handwriting reveal about its writer and its readers?

P. Oxy. L 3525: A Christian Roll with Documentary Handwriting

Rouse and Rouse observe that

Every manuscript that survives was created not casually but deliberately, as a result of
someone’s decision that it should exist …. Subsequently, virtually everyone who owned
it, everyone who read it seriously, every copyist who made a copy from it … left revealing
personal and cultural fingerprints. The fingerprints do not necessarily tell us the names of
the makers or users of the manuscript, but invariably, and directly, tell us a great deal about
them.16

In our fragment of the Gospel of Mary, I distinguish three kinds of fingerprints

that convey information about the people behind this manuscript: an uncom-
mon use of nomina sacra, documentary handwriting, and choice of the roll for
the book’s format.

13 See also discussions and re-editions of this papyrus in King, The Gospel of Mary of
Magdala, 11; Lührmann, Die apokryph gewordenen Evangelien, 107–12; Tuckett, The Gospel
of Mary, 7–8, 108–111; Wayment, The Text of the New Testament Apocrypha (100–400 CE),
43–44; Blumell and Wayment, Christian Oxyrhynchus, 229–232. An image is available online at
http://163. 1. 169.40/gsdl/collect/POxy/index/assoc/HASH8756/8e335fb6.dir/POxy.v0050.n35
25.a. 01.hires.jpg
14 P. Oxy. L 3525 consists of two fragments; the smaller fragment is unplaced and contains
what probably amounts to three letters.
15 Since the provenance of the Berlin Codex (P. Berol. 8502) with the Coptic parts of the
Gospel of Mary is unclear (see Nongbri, God’s Library, 92–93), I will focus in the contextualiza-
tion only on the Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus.
16 Rouse and Rouse, Authentic Witnesses, 3.
 The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463) 395

First, in the small segment of text that is preserved, the copyist17 penned
in full several words that in most Christian manuscripts are contracted as
nomina sacra: “lord” (κύριε, l. 20) and savior (σωτῆρ[ος, l. 14).18 Yet “humans”
(ἀν(θρώπ)ου[ς, l. 12) is written as a nomen sacrum.19 It is a good reminder
that in the early period to which this fragment belongs, the practice of writing
nomina sacra is still somewhat flexible.20 Similarly to our fragment, the so-called
Willoughby Papyrus with the Gospel of John (𝔓134) also uses the nomen sacrum
for ἄνθρωπος but writes θεοῦ (God) in full.21 Mugridge found that idiosyn-
crasies in the application of nomina sacra appear across different types of texts
(and are not restricted to texts that later were deemed non-canonical). They also
do not occur particularly in manuscripts written by unskilled writers, in fact, he
concludes that, “it is quite clear that irregularity in use of the nomina sacra does
not correspond to the hand of an unskilled copyist.”22 Nevertheless, the freedom
in this manuscript is noteworthy. The uncontracted form of κύριος is especially
striking, because even in contemporaneous third-century documentary letters

17 Peter Parsons distinguishes between “scribes” (“a professional member of a sacred call-
ing”) and “copyists,” and states: “We owe our literary papyri not to scribes, but to copyists.” Peter
Parsons, “Copyists of Oxyrhynchus,” in Oxyrhynchus: A City and Its Texts, ed. Alan K. Bowman
et al., Graeco-Roman Memoirs 93 (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 2007), 262–263.
18 Admittedly, the word κύριε is difficult to read in the papyrus, since only traces of the top
of the letters are visible in the last line. But as far as I can see, there is no supralinear stroke to
mark the nomen sacrum.
19 For a discussion on the word ἄνθρωπος written as nomen sacrum, see Christopher
M. Tuckett, “‘Nomina Sacra’: Yes and No?,” in The Biblical Canons, ed. J.‑M. Auwers and H. J.
de Jonge, BETL 163 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, Peeters, 2003), 436. There, Tuckett notes
that “ἄνθρωπος seems to occur rather irregularly: it is already present in e. g. the Chester Beatty
papyrus of Numbers + Deuteronomy (2nd century) and in the Bodmer papyrus 𝔓66, but not in
others.” What is striking in our papyrus is the fact that ἄνθρωπος is contracted but not κύριος.
Tuckett (437–438) refers specifically to our papyrus. He concludes: “If the reading is correct, it
provides an instance where one of the four ‘primary’ words was not abbreviated with a nomen
sacrum … The scribe thus does appear to know the system of using abbreviations in this way,
but has evidently not chosen to use it in relation to κύριος.” See also Tuckett, The Gospel of Mary,
82; Mugridge, Copying Early Christian Texts, 132.
20 On the use of nomina sacra in (documentary) papyrus manuscripts, see, e. g. Malcolm
Choat, Belief and Cult in Fourth-Century Papyri, Studia Antiqua Australiensia 1 (Sydney: An-
cient History Documentary Research Centre, 2006), 119–125; Larry W. Hurtado, The Earliest
Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins (Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans, 2006),
93–134; AnneMarie Luijendijk, Greetings in the Lord: Early Christians and the Oxyrhynchus Pa-
pyri, Harvard Theological Studies 60 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 57–78;
Lincoln H. Blumell, Lettered Christians: Christians, Letters, and Late Antique Oxyrhynchus, New
Testament Tools, Studies, and Documents v. 39 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2012), 49–51. As Tuckett
(“‘Nomina Sacra,’” 450), remarks: “at the earliest point we can reach, the system was not so
regulated at all but displayed considerable variation.”
21 See Geoffrey Smith, “The Willoughby Papyrus: A New Fragment of John 1:49–2:1 (𝔓134)
and an Unidentified Christian Text,” Journal of Biblical Literature 137.4 (2018): 942–943.
22 Mugridge, Copying Early Christian Texts, 134–135, quotation at 135.
396 AnneMarie Luijendijk

this word is frequently contracted.23 Yet this full rendering of κύριος is also
telling – many of these documentary letters with nomina sacra are letters of rec-
ommendation or introduction; letters from a clerical milieu where writers were
accustomed with writing nomina sacra.24 As we will see next, the handwriting
of this piece situates it in a different milieu, which partly explains this loose use
of nomina sacra.
The second impression relates to handwriting. The copyist of this text wrote
in a style of handwriting that is normal for documents but highly uncommon
for literary texts.25 Unlike other copyists of Christian literary works,26 this one
made few concessions to the reader, either through size of handwriting, spacing,
diaeresis, paragraphoi and/or other features.27 Still, the writing is legible; there
is no Verschleifung.28
A documentary hand such as this, in contrast to a literary hand, is a gift to
the palaeographer because the writing can be compared to a wealth of securely
dated documents to help in assigning a date. Based on comparison with dated
documents, the handwriting of P. Oxy. L 3525 fits in the third century.29
The documentary handwriting and the roll format made Parsons conclude
that this is “an amateur copy.”30 I would like to nuance this assessment. To be
sure, there are Christian texts written in non-literary hands, such as certain
amulets or writing exercises, that qualify as unprofessionally written. This text,
23 See especially Choat, Belief and Cult in Fourth-Century Papyri 119–124; Luijendijk,
Greetings in the Lord; Blumell, Lettered Christians.
24 See Luijendijk, Greetings in the Lord, 81–124. According to Mugridge, not all copyists of
Christian literary texts that penned nomina sacra were Christian by profession (Copying Early
Christian Texts, 135–137, 153–154.)
25 Parsons characterized it as “a practiced cursive of the third century” (P. Oxy. L 3525, 12).
Alan Mugridge describes the hand as a “smallish cursive without shading, quite uneven in letter
shape and placement, the whole giving the impression of a trained scribe writing in haste and
with little care, and far from a customary book hand.” He grades it as “2–.” Mugridge, Copying
Early Christian Texts, 378, no. 475. In his evaluation system, the “2” this signifies a “secretarial”
or “plain” hand, the minus sign “indicate(s) less … skill” (Mugridge, Copying Early Christian
Texts, 22).
26 For instance, Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early
Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 74 (“The relative frequency with
which accents, punctuation, and breathing marks occur in Christian manuscripts, compared
with the larger run of ancient literary texts, corroborates a special interest in public reading”),
and 229; also Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, 177–185.
27 See also Parsons, P. Oxy. L 3525, 12: “No sectional signs, except diastole; in 12 a blank
filled by the extended top of the letter before serves as punctuation.”
28 I thank W. Graham Claytor for this observation.
29 Similar documentary hands are P. Oxy. XXXI 2568; XXXII 2569; XL 2894; IXL 3498; LXI
4120 (through a Palpap search: “after 250, language Greek; provenance Oxyrhynchus). P. Oxy.
XL 2894’s inventory number, 22 3B 15/D(21)a, is close to that of P. Oxy. L 3525 (23 3B 12/E(1)a;
more on the inventory number below). The roll format probably also points to a third-century
date; as Nongbri (God’s Library, 138) notes, “the roll format was largely supplanted by the codex
by the end of the fourth century.”
30 Parsons, P. Oxy. L 3525, 12.
 The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463) 397

however, is written by a skilled writer but in a style that has no pretensions to

be literature. Mugridge deems it to be written by a “trained scribe writing in
haste and with little care.”31 The handwriting of P. Oxy. L 3525 differs from other
pieces of Christian literature in that it is penned in a proficient documentary, but
not literary, hand.32
In the larger practice of writing in antiquity, the boundaries between styles are
not rigid but fluid. Just as some writers copied out what we think of as literary
texts in handwriting style they also used for documents, so other writers used a
more literary style of handwriting in documents, for instance, in letters.33 Writ-
ers thus chose what they considered the most appropriate, convenient, familiar,
or feasible style of handwriting for their texts.34
One should not confuse P. Oxy. L 3525’s style of handwriting with what Colin
Roberts in his book Manuscript, Society and Belief in Early Christian Egypt called
“reformed documentary,” a mix of documentary and literary handwriting that is
common in Christian literary papyri.35 What makes this fragment distinct from

31 Mugridge, Copying Early Christian Texts, 378, no. 475.

32 For the range of handwriting in early Christian manuscripts, see Mugridge, Copying
Early Christian Texts, especially the overview on 22–25. Out of 545 Christian manuscripts that
he examined, Mugridge (25) classifies 83 in this category, “2–.” These are quite evenly spread
between different types of content: Old Testament (17 manuscripts), New Testament (17 manu-
scripts), ‘apocrypha’ (11 manuscripts), and patristic (10 manuscripts). On the other end of the
writing spectrum are highly professional copyists of mainly classical literary manuscripts, see,
for instance, William Allen Johnson, Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2004), especially chapter 2: “Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis,
and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll,” 15–84.
33 For instance, P. Oxy. XII 1592 is a letter written in a book hand. For a discussion, see
Luijen­dijk, Greetings in the Lord, 74–78. Other examples are, e. g., P. Oxy. LVI 3858, and P. Herm.
Rees 4 and 5.
34 As Raffaella Cribiore remarks: “Accomplished writers knew a variety of writing styles
and knew when and where each was appropriate” (Writing, Teachers, and Students in Graeco-
Roman Egypt, American Studies in Papyrology 36 [Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996], 6).
Mugridge concludes that “all writers (including those who could barely write) could use some
form of documentary hand, but that papyri written in ‘book hand,’ bearing in mind that the
term is not an exact one, were usually written by trained scribes.” Mugridge, Copying Early
Christian Texts, 21.
35 Colin H. Roberts, Manuscript, Society, and Belief in Early Christian Egypt, Schweich Lec-
tures 1977 (London: published for the British Academy by the Oxford University Press, 1979),
14: “they employ what is basically a documentary hand but at the same time they are aware that
it is a book, not a document on which they are engaged. They are not personal or private hands;
in most a degree of regularity and of clarity is aimed at and achieved. Such hands might be
described as ‘reformed documentary’.” Kim Haines Eitzen, however, found that “When we limit
ourselves to specifically Christian texts and include the Christian papyri from the third century,
we may continue to locate them on the spectrum between literary and documentary hands,
but they appear toward the literary end of the spectrum.” Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power,
and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 65.
According to Pasquale Orsini and Willy Clarysse, “Some extant New Testament manuscripts
are written in … canonical or normative scripts, but others follow a wide range of other graphic
patterns, not only book scripts … but also scripts which had their origin in bureaucratic and
398 AnneMarie Luijendijk

most other Christian literary texts is that in a pile of documentary texts one
would not be able to pick out this copy of the Gospel of Mary as in any way dis-
tinctive.36 This kind of fully documentary hand is uncommon among the literary
Christian Oxyrhynchus papyri (and literary papyri in general).37
What clues does this handwriting give us about the copyist of P. Oxy. L
3525? In what milieu should we locate the writer of a text like this? Recent
insights by papyrologists Roger Bagnall and Rodney Ast help to contextualize
the handwriting style of this text.38 Both scholars problematize the use of the
word “scribe.”39 As Ast remarks, papyrologists often use the word scribe as a
synonym for “handwriting,” thereby ignoring the agency of the person who
wrote.40 Both Bagnall and Ast conclude that educated individuals participated

chancery practice … and even cursive and informal documentary hands.” “Early New Tes-
tament Manuscripts and Their Dates,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses. Louvain Journal of
Theology and Canon Law 88.4 (2013): 455–456. The latter they discuss under VI.c “Some New
Testament manuscripts are written in cursive and informal documentary hands” (459). They
classify three New Testament manuscripts in that category (out of 73 manuscripts).
36 Parsons, P. Oxy. L 3525, 12, comments, “only the content and the nomen sacrum … show
it to be more than an ordinary document.”
37 A different kind of documentary hand can be seen in P. Oxy. X 1230, Revelation, 4th
cent. Mugridge describes it as “the hand of an unpractised writer” (Copying Early Christian
Texts, 280–281, no. 259). On the handwriting of the Christian Oxyrhynchus papyri, see also
AnneMarie Luijendijk and Brent D. Nongbri, “Cultural and Textual Exchanges in Late Antique
Oxyrhynchus,” in Cultural and Textual Exchanges: The Manuscript Across Pre-Modern Eurasia,
ed. Paul C. Dilley and Katherine Tachau, Studies in Manuscript Cultures (Berlin: de Gruyter,
forthcoming).
38 Roger S Bagnall, “The Readers of Christian Books: Further Speculations,” in I papiri
letterari cristiani: atti del Convegno internazionale di studi in memoria di Mario Naldini, Firenze,
10–11 giugno 2010, ed. Guido Bastianini and Angelo Casanova (Firenze: Istituto papirologico
G. Vitelli, 2011), 23–30; Roger S. Bagnall, “The Councillor and the Clerk: Class and Culture on
a Roman Frontier,” TAPA 147.2 (2017): 211–233; Rodney Ast, “Writing and the City in Later
Roman Egypt. Towards a Social History of the Ancient ‘Scribe,’” CHS Research Bulletin, 29
March 2016, http://www.chs-fellows.org/2016/03/29/writing-and-the-city-in-later-roman-
egypt/.
39 As Bagnall (“The Readers of Christian Books,” 28) observes: “The category ‘scribe’ is,
although commonly evoked liked this in papyrological scholarship, far from self-explanatory.
Even if we rather arbitrarily leave out from it the scribes who copied books in a more or less
professional manner, and restrict ourselves to more documentary varieties of scribes, the term
may suggest someone in whose work the writing was itself the principal task.” See also Bagnall,
“The Councillor and the Clerk,” 21: “Serenos was near the top of the local economic and social
hierarchy, but he did much of his own administrative work.” Bagnall compares Serenos and the
writer of the Kellis Agricultural Book as educated but not elite people.
40 Ast describes issues with the term scribe both as a term and as a social matter: “the
title ‘scribe,’ which properly denotes a professional copyist or clerk, is used very freely in dis-
ciplines such as papyrology and paleography to describe nearly every kind of writer, from the
tax collector who authored a receipt, to the concerned father who wrote a letter to his son.”
Ast remarks that there is a social side to this also, “an unwillingness to look beyond the text
at the individual responsible for creating it. … A failure on our part to address social forces
behind the production of texts of any given type. Writers were, at least to some extent, educated
individuals, … anyone, in effect, who had received what Teresa Morgan terms a ‘literate educa-
 The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463) 399

in the administrative writing culture. Bagnall argues that the writers and readers
of Christian books were not only the metropolitan civic elites and members of
the (higher) clergy such as bishops and presbyters, but also a managerial class.
The latter entails educated professionals, people (probably mostly men) who
do not write as their main task, as is the case with the traditional image of the
monastic scribe, but rather those for whom writing constituted a part of their
work. According to Bagnall, “most of the highly fluent writers of accounts and
documents were probably not ‘scribes’ in the narrow sense of writing things
down for other people from dictation, but professionals who wrote a great deal
in the course of their work, where the work was primary and the writing an
instrument.”41 We should not conceive of these men “merely as clerks, drudges
of the writing-bench.” Rather, these business agents and managers (pronoetai,
phrontistai, boethoi), Bagnall notes, had enjoyed an education in Greek literature
and grammar.42 We know one such Christian business agent from Oxyrhynchus
by name: Leonides, a flax merchant, who possessed a sheet with the beginning of
the Letter to the Romans, and collaborated with a church lector.43
So the copyist of our text of the Gospel of Mary, who wrote in a documentary
hand was not amateurish, but a relatively educated person with an interest in
Christian literature, probably not wealthy or interested enough to spend much
money on an expensive, professionally produced copy. We do not know if the
copyist of this text was multifunctional and could also write in a more literary
handwriting.44 If our copyist did, it is noteworthy that he or she did not apply it
here.

tion.’ … They all illustrate the kinds of lives that educated individuals in Greco-Roman society
could and did lead.” “Writing and the City in Later Roman Egypt. Towards a Social History of
the Ancient ‘Scribe,’” 1§ 1.
41 Bagnall, “The Readers of Christian Books,” 28. See also Peter Van Minnen, “House-to-
House Enquiries: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Roman Karanis,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie
und Epigraphik (1994): 245. According to Van Minnen, “The scribe who wrote the first tax roll
was not a simple clerk, but the collector of money taxes himself.” This man, named Socrates,
possessed several Greek literary texts and seems to have applied his learning playfully, using a
Greek word otherwise only known from Callimachus as nickname for a tax payer.
42 Bagnall, “The Readers of Christian Books,” 28.
43 See AnneMarie Luijendijk, “A New Testament Papyrus and Its Documentary Context: An
Early Christian Writing Exercise from the Archive of Leonides (P. Oxy. II 209/𝔓10),” Journal
of Biblical Literature 129 (2010): 575–596; AnneMarie Luijendijk, “Books and Private Readers
in Early Christian Oxyrhynchus: ‘A Spiritual Meadow and a Garden of Delight,’” in Books and
Readers in the Pre-Modern World, ed. Karl Shuve, Writings from the Greco-Roman World Sup-
plement Series 12 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2018), 101–135.
44 On “multifunctional scribes,” see Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters, 32. Haines-Eitzen
(33) notes: “A variety of clues suggests that scribes who were normally involved with preparing
nonliterary documents could also write or copy literary texts and apparently did so … The
existence of mixed archives – archives in which both documents and copies of literature have
been found – also points toward scribes who were multifunctional.”
400 AnneMarie Luijendijk

Thirdly, the book format yields additional information about the owner of
P. Oxy. L 3525 and the manuscript’s intended use.45 As Rouse and Rouse note
in their work on Medieval manuscripts, “a book’s physical dimensions reflect
the image its maker has of the book he was making, the use it was to serve, and
how it was to be read … it is the physical element – the size, the quality of the
parchment, the elaborateness (or the lack) of decoration – which tells one about
the social locus of circulation.”46 In this case, the maker deliberately chose the
roll format for this text. Since most (preserved) Christian manuscripts are
produced in codex format, the choice of the roll format merits further inves-
tigation.47
What does the choice of roll for the Gospel of Mary indicate about the social
location of this text?48 The papyrological record contains multiple Christian rolls,
although they occur significantly less frequently than codices.49 At Oxyrhynchus,
45 The documentary handwriting does not necessarily go together with the book format;
there are other Christian book rolls with distinctly literary hands, such as the Genesis roll,
P. Oxy. IX 1166 in very fine biblical uncial handwriting. See also Mugridge (Copying Early Chris-
tian Texts, 38): “There is little correspondence in general between the form of ‘book’ and the
quality of handwriting.”
46 Rouse and Rouse, Authentic Witnesses, 4.
47 As e. g., Nongbri (God’s Library, 21) notes: “‘the book’ in the early Christian centuries was
almost always the codex.” See also Gamble, Books and Readers, 81: “if not every early Christian
text was written in a codex, it would not contravene the evidence of the papyri that the codex
was the heavily preferred form of the early Christian book well in advance of its broad adoption
outside Christianity.” For a balanced overview of the data on Christian codices and rolls, see
Nongbri, God’s Library, 21–24. As Nongbri (God’s Library, 23) rightly remarks: “The claim that
Christians demonstrated a preference for the codex format well before others in the Roman
world rests in large part upon the early dates often assigned to Christian codices. It is perhaps
more prudent to say simply that the vast majority of Christian books that have survived are in
the codex rather than the roll format.” See also Roger S. Bagnall, Early Christian Books in Egypt
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 70–99; Nongbri, God’s Library, “Appendix,
Christian Books from Oxyrhynchus,” 273–280; and Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney,
“Christians and the Codex: Generic Materiality and Early Gospel Traditions,” JECS 27 (2019):
forthcoming.
48 I am inspired here in particular by the scholarship of Donald McKenzie, Harry Gamble,
and William Johnson: McKenzie talks about “the sociology of texts” and “the full range of social
realities which the medium of print had to serve [and] the human motives and interactions
which texts involve at every stage of their production, transmission, and consumption,” Bib-
liography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 15; Gamble
about “a sociology of early Christian literature,” Books and Readers, 43, and Johnson about “the
sociology of reading,” “Toward a Sociology of Reading in Classical Antiquity,” The American
Journal of Philology 121.4 (2000): 593–627.
49 On Christian rolls, see also Mugridge’s overview of texts (until the end of the fourth
century) has 16 Old Testament rolls, 4 New Testament, 6 Apocryphal, 10 Patristic (Copying
Early Christian Texts, 45.) See also Mugridge, Copying Early Christian Texts, 35–46 and Nathan
Carlig, “Les rouleaux littéraires grecs de nature composite profane et chrétienne (début du IIIe –
troisième quart du VIe siècle),” in Proceedings of the 28th International Congress of Papyrology,
Barcelona 2016, ed. Sofía Torallas Tovar, Alberto Nodar Domínguez, and Albarrán Martínez,
María-Jesús (Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in press), 35–46. A search on the Leuven
Database of Ancient Books (LDAB): for bookform = roll, religion = Christian gives 133 hits;
 The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463) 401

Christian texts comprise 33 rolls and 156 codices.50 These include several rolls
with Septuagint (or Old Greek) books, such as Genesis, Leviticus, Amos, and
Psalms; varying from a calligraphic copy of Genesis (P. Oxy. IX 1166)51 to a less
formal copy of Psalms (P. Oxy. XXIV 2386).52 For some of these Septuagint rolls,
it remains uncertain whether Jews or Christians copied and read them. This is
in and of itself interesting for questions regarding the diversity of Christianity
at Oxyrhynchus. Does it mean that perhaps Jews and Christians were less dis-
tinct from each other than scholars may have thought?53 Are our criteria for
determining ownership are too rigid or imprecise? Or were Jews and Christians
reading and sharing the same texts?54 These questions cannot be answered at this
point but are worth pondering.
Since this copy of the Gospel of Mary is found on a roll, one might reasonably
think that writings on rolls is a format used for non-canonical Christian books.
Yet this is not the case. Several texts that later became part of the New Tes-
tament canon exist in roll form, although admittedly we have fewer of those; at
Oxyrhynchus only the Gospel of John and the Epistle to the Hebrews.55 Most

bookform = codex, religion = Christian presents 4664 hits. This is about the reverse of the data
for bookformat of classical texts: bookform = roll, religion = classical gives 4064 cases; book-
form = codex, religion = classical gives 986 hits.
50 Narrowed down to Oxyrhynchus:
Bookformat = codex, religion = classical; provenance = Oxyrynchos: 263 results
Bookformat = roll, religion = classical; provenance = Oxyrynchos: 1968
Bookformat = codex, religion = Christian; provenance = Oxyrynchos: 156
Bookformat = roll, religion = Christian; provenance = Oxyrynchos: 33 (32 of those Christian
rolls from Oxyrhynchus are written in Greek; one in Syriac).
51 For the handwriting, see Mugridge, Copying Early Christian Texts, 164, no. 10. On the
sociology of reading Genesis at Oxyrhynchus, a letter of recommendation introduces to Sotas,
the Oxyrhynchite bishop, a catechumen in Genesis (P. Oxy. XXXVI 2785). Study of the book of
Genesis is part of the Christian catechumenate in this period, see Luijendijk, Greetings in the
Lord, 116.
52 “Probably the hand of a trained scribe, but writing without great care,” Mugridge,
Copying Early Christian Texts, 200, no. 94.
53 See, for instance, Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, The Ways That Never
Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN:
Fortress Press, 2007).
54 This seems incontrovertible from a larger historical point of view; think here, e. g., of
Origen, Eusebius and his role in the preservation of Philo, Jerome, Chrysostom, etc.
55 P. Oxy. X 1228 = 𝔓22, Gospel of John, 3rd cent. The text is written on the verso of a
roll, recto is blank. See Larry W. Hurtado, “A Fresh Analysis of P. Oxyrhynchus 1228 (𝔓22) as
Artefact,” in Studies on the Text of the New Testament and Early Christianity, ed. Paul Foster,
Juan Hernández, and Daniel Gurtner (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 206–16; AnneMarie Luijendijk,
“Reading the Gospel of Thomas in the Third Century: Three Oxyrhynchus Papyri and Origen’s
homilies,” in Reading New Testament papyri in context / Lire des papyrus du Nouveau Testament
dans leur contexte, ed. Claire Clivaz and Jean Zumstein, BETL 242 (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), 251
n. 44. And P. Oxy. IV 657 + PSI XII 1292 = 𝔓13, the Epistle to the Hebrews, on a reused roll
with Livy on the recto. On this papyrus, see Luijendijk, “Books and Private Readers,” 115–20;
Nongbri, God’s Library, 234–37. As Nongbri (234) notes, “This piece … happens to be the most
substantially intact Christian book that has survived from Oxyrhynchus.” Another fragment
402 AnneMarie Luijendijk

Christian rolls preserved at Oxyrhynchus bear homiletic and exegetical works.56

Some of these Christian rolls suggest a learned milieu, such as Irenaeus’s Adver-
sus haeresis on a new roll (P. Oxy. III 405, third century), or an onomasticon of
Hebrew names with Greek explanations, written in a literary hand on the back
of a land register (P. Oxy. XXXVI 2745, third century).57 The ancients regularly
reused written rolls for both literary and documentary texts. In addition to the
onomasticon, several other Christian texts are penned on reused rolls. Another
roll with a land register was reused for copy of the Gospel of Thomas (P. Oxy. IV
654).58 But this also happened to rolls with a literary text as first text, such as a
Latin epitome of Livy, reused for the Epistle to the Hebrews (P. Oxy. IV 657).59
Book rolls are also not exclusively an early phenomenon, but continue as book
format, not only for the Torah among Jews, but also for Christian texts. Within
the larger history of the book, Christian texts continued to be copied on rolls in
to the Byzantine period.60
Thus the book form of our fragment of the Gospel of Mary can be contex-
tualized with a broad array of texts, including scriptural, both Septuagint and
New Testament texts, homiletical, martyrological, scholarly, and exegetical
works. This indicates that book format or handwriting is not a determinative
factor for analyzing individual books; we can only look at the individual text
and not make broad generalizations. While the copy of the Gospel of John from
Oxyrhynchus on a roll (P. Oxy. X 1228) may have been read privately, another
copy of that same Gospel of John on a codex written in a beautiful biblical uncial
hand may have been read in a liturgical setting (P. Oxy. XV 1780).61

of the Gospel of John, probably written on a roll along the fibers, 𝔓134, 3rd cent., was recently
published, see Smith, “The Willoughby Papyrus,” 935. From Dura Europos in Syria, there is
P. Dura 10, a fragment of the Diatessaron on a roll, see Jan Joosten, “The Dura Parchment and
the Diatessaron,” Vigiliae Christianae 57.2 (2003): 159–175.
56 Nongbri, God’s Library, 234: “The only class of literature in which rolls outnumber
codices is patristic sermons and exegesis. Of the twenty-five rolls, seven are reused; that is to
say, the Christian material has been copied on the back of a roll previously used for another
purpose.” These rolls include, for instance, P. Oxy. L 3529, the Martyrdom of Dioscorus, 4th
cent.; PSI I 26 and 27, the Martyrdom of Christine, 6th–7th cent.; P. Oxy. LXXVI 5074, Cyril of
Alexandria, reused roll, 7th–8th cent.
57 “This is the hand of a trained scribe,” Mugridge, Copying Early Christian Texts, 395, no.
514.
58 See Luijendijk, “Reading the Gospel of Thomas.”
59 On P. Oxy IV 657, see Luijendijk, “Books and Private Readers,” 115–120. More generally
on documentary rolls reused for classical texts, see Mariachiara Lama, “Aspetti di tecnica libraria
ad Ossirinco: copie letterarie su rotoli documentari,” Aegyptus (1991): 55–120.
60 See, for example, Victor M. Schmidt, “Some Notes on Scrolls in the Middle Ages,” Quae-
rendo 41 (2011): 373–383; Guglielmo Cavallo, “La genesi dei rotoli liturgici beneventani ala luce
del fenômeno storico-librario in Occidente ed Oriente,” in Miscellanea in memoria de Giorgio
Cencetti (Torino: Bottega d’ Erasmo, 1973), 213–229; Stefanos Alexopoulos and Annewies van
den Hoek, “The Endicott Scroll and Its Place in the History of Private Communion Prayers,”
Dumbarton Oaks Papers 60 (2006): 145–188.
61 Mugridge describes this as a “regular, large, bilinear biblical uncial with shading” and
 The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463) 403

Analyzing book format and manner of reading matters because scholars often
assume a correlation between liturgical reading and scriptural status. Accord-
ing to Gamble, “Liturgical reading was the concrete setting from which texts
acquired theological authority, and in which that authority took effect.” But he
admits that “not every document that was liturgically read became canonical.”
(He mentions the Shepherd of Hermas and 1 Clement, texts that did not become
part of the canon.)62 Larry Hurtado takes this position a step further. In several
publications, he argues that Christian texts written on book rolls were not con-
sidered scripture in antiquity.63 An important aspect of Hurtado’s argument is
the relation of book format (roll or codex) to canonical status of a particular
Christian writing. He writes: “it appears that Christians strongly preferred the
codex for those writings that they regarded as scripture (or, at least, writings that
were coming to be widely so regarded.”64 According to Hurtado, already in the
deems it “clearly the hand of a trained scribe writing with proficiency and great care.” Mugridge,
Copying Early Christian Texts, 248, no. 195. On private and public reading, see Scott Charles-
worth, “Public and Private – Second- and Third-Century Gospel Manuscripts,” in Studies in
Scripture in Early Judaism and Christianity, ed. Craig A Evans, Library of Second Temple Studies
70 (London: T & T Clark, 2009), 148–175; Dan Nässelqvist, Public Reading in Early Christianity:
Lectors, Manuscripts, and Sound in the Oral Delivery of John 1–4, Supplements to Novum Tes-
tamentum 163 (Boston: Brill, 2016), 15–16. Nässelqvist defines private reading as “reading for
oneself … the reader is the sole recipient or beneficiary of the reading event.” “The qualifier
‘public’ in public reading does not indicate whether it occurs in a private or public setting, or
somewhere in between, but rather that a text is read aloud for one or several listeners with the
intention of giving a correct rendering of the text according to contemporary conventions.” He
concedes (16), however, that “when applied to manuscripts, the labels ‘public’ and ‘private’ thus
indicate features of their production and intended use, rather than in which settings they were
actually employed. A codex described as produced for public reading could, for example, be
loaned and used in private settings, such as in a private study.” “‘public manuscript’ denotes an
early Christian manuscript that is produced for public reading.” (p. 16).
62 Gamble, Books and Readers, 216.
63 Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, 43–89, esp. 57–58; Larry W. Hurtado, “The New
Testament in the Second Century: Text, Collections and Canon,” in Transmission and Reception:
New Testament Text-Critical and Exegetical Studies, ed. Jeff W. Childers and David C. Parker
(Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2006), 10–11; Larry W. Hurtado, “Manuscripts and the Sociology
of Early Christian Reading,” in The Early Text of the New Testament, ed. Charles E. Hill and
Michael J. Kruger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 55–59; Larry W. Hurtado, “The
Greek Fragments of the Gospel of Thomas as Artefacts: Papyrological Observations on Papyrus
Oxyrhynchus 1, Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 654 and Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 655,” in Das Thomas-
evangelium: Entstehung, Rezeption, Theologie, ed. Jörg Frey, Enno Edzard Popkes, and Jens
Schröter, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der
älteren Kirche 157 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 19–32. For example, in his discussion of P. Oxy.
IV 655, the Gospel of Thomas on a fresh roll, Hurtado concludes: “given the strong general
preference for the codex among ancient Christians, especially for texts used as scripture, the
choice to copy a text in a fresh roll surely further indicates that this text (or at least this copy
of the text) was not used as scripture, i. e., not read publicly in worship settings” (“The Greek
Fragments of the Gospel of Thomas as Artefacts,” 30).
64 Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, 57. Emphasis original. Hurtado concludes his
discussion of the Thomas fragments with the observation that “on the basis of this brief case
study of the remnants of three Oxyrhynchus copies of what appears to be basically the text that
404 AnneMarie Luijendijk

earliest period none of the Christian writings that later became canonical was
penned in a new roll. (He maintains that reused rolls were always used for private
reading).65
From the current evidence, as Hurtado observed, none of the writings that
later would come to be included in the New Testament canon was copied into
a (new) roll in this early period. Yet to me this does not necessarily mean that
Christian readers of whatever stripes did not consider texts in rolls scriptural.
As David Brakke convincingly argues, most scholarship on the New Testament
canon has been teleological in approach, as if it were “a story with a single plot
line.”66 According to Brakke, “it is simply anachronistic to ask of writers of the
second century which books were in the canon and which not – for the notion
of a closed canon was simply not there. We must not continue to place Christian
authors on a trajectory that leads inevitably to Athanasius’s supposedly definitive
list of 367.”67 This insight applies not only to early Christian authors, but also to
manuscripts. One cannot conclude yet that all texts written on rolls or on both
rolls and codices had no scriptural status before the concept of a canon. Texts
were copied by different scribes, for different people and different communities.
We have to examine this on the basis of the individual manuscripts and local
communities. It is clear that what is at stake in these scholarly discussions goes
far beyond classifications of book format and style of handwriting. Behind the
simple facts of the materiality of these ancient manuscripts lurk normative ques-
tions about authority, access to sacred texts, the New Testament canon and its
date, and thus fundamentally, the master narrative of early Christianity.
In sum: A manuscript like this fragment of the Gospel of Mary was not the
property of an elite household, where educated slaves copied texts and read them
out loud in the triclinium during lavish dinner parties.68 I do not imagine that
its owner would bring out this roll to show it off to friends, as Lucian’s much
maligned “ignorant book collector” did with his preciously produced books.69

we call the Gospel of Thomas, we can say that there are strong reasons to hesitate to ascribe the
text a scripture-like status, at least among those Christians whose usages is reflected in these
artifacts” (Hurtado, “The Greek Fragments of the Gospel of Thomas,” 83).
65 Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, 57: “There are no second-century Christian
copies of writings that became part of the Christian canon on rolls. Indisputably, in the entire
body of Christian manuscripts of the second and third centuries there is no instance of a New
Testament writing copied onto the recto side of a roll.”
66 David Brakke, “Scriptural Practices in Early Christianity: Towards a New History of the
New Testament Canon,” in Invention, Rewriting, Usurpation: Discursive Fights over Religious
Traditions in Antiquity, ed. Jörg Ulrich, Anders-Christian Jacobsen, and David Brakke, Early
Christianity in the Context of Antiquity 11 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2012), 265.
67 Brakke, “Scriptural Practices in Early Christianity,” 266.
68 See especially Johnson, “Toward a Sociology of Reading in Classical Antiquity”; William
A Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Com-
munities (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
69 Lucian, “Lover of Lies, or The Doubter,” trans. A. M. Harmon, Loeb Classical Library 130
 The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463) 405

At Oxyrhynchus, the owners of the Johannine codex in biblical uncial, with its
calligraphic hand that resembles that of the Codex Sinaiticus (P. Oxy. XV 1780 =
𝔓39), may have proudly displayed it;70 others could boast with a roll containing
the Gospel of Thomas (P. Oxy. IV 655) in a small, neat script in so-called Severe
Style, a style of handwriting frequently used for classical works.71 From its
physical features, this manuscript with the Gospel of Mary was probably at home
among those of the managerial class. This unconventional Christian manuscript
with its workaday, non-literary handwriting in fact indicates that its owner was
literate, but not among the elite literati.72

Oxyrhynchus and the diversity of Early Christianity

With three different manuscript witnesses, the Gospel of Mary is well attested in
late antique Egypt, as King rightly notes, “Because it is unusual for several copies
from such early dates to have survived, the attestation of the Gospel of Mary as
an early Christian work is unusually strong.”73 With both P. Oxy. L 3525 and
P. Ryl. III 463 found at Oxyhrynchus, we now turn to the larger context of the
Gospel of Mary in that city. Oxyrhynchus, a provincial capital in middle Egypt,

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). See also Christopher P. Jones, Culture and Society
in Lucian, Repr. 2014 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), chapter 10.
70 Just as it is now in the Museum of the Bible, in Washington, DC, as part of the Green
collection. For the date, see Clarysse and Orsini, “Early New Testament Manuscripts and Their
Dates,” 470. Clarysse and Orsini (450) recognize eleven biblical majuscule hands among New
Testament papyri, out of 91 total.
71 On the Severe Style, see Lucio Del Corso, “Lo ‘stile severo’ nei P. Oxy.: una lista,” Aegyp-
tus 86 (2006): 81–106. Remarkably, of the 248 manuscripts with this handwriting style from
Oxyrhynchus that del Corso collected, P. Oxy. IV 655 is the only Christian text. I thank Brent
Nongbri for pointing this out to me. Mugridge classifies this as a professional, calligraphic hand:
“the hand … of a trained scribe writing with skill and care.” Mugridge, Copying Early Christian
Texts, 295, no. 286.
72 Willy Clarysse has shown that the owners of literary papyri were also those who left
behind documentary texts: “those hundreds of literary texts [found in Egypt, AML] were all
copied for, and read by, the very Greeks who lived in Egypt from Alexander to Mohammed.
Each one was originally written with a specific purpose and used by a particular person or group
of persons: books were kept in the libraries of gymnasia, temples or private individuals …” “Lit-
erary Papyri in Documentary Archives,” in Egypt and the Hellenistic World. Proceedings of the
International Colloquium Leuven 24–26 May 1982, ed. E. Van ’t Dack, P. Van Dessel, and W. Van
Gucht, Studia Hellenistica 27 (Leuven: Orientaliste, 1983), 43.
73 King, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, 11. See also Tuckett, The Gospel of Mary, 9–10, who
unnecessarily downplays the evidence: “in terms of manuscript attestation in relatively early
papyri, the Gospel of Mary is relatively well attested. One may compare the situation with some
other documents of the New Testament: e. g., the Gospel of Mark is attested in only one early
papyrus manuscript (𝔓45). But too much should not be made of this. The extent of the extant
evidence is presumably due to chance and accident, as much as anything; and the relative figures
involved (one manuscript for Mark, two manuscripts for the Gospel of Mary) are very small in
absolute terms and hence not necessarily significant statistically.”
406 AnneMarie Luijendijk

is the find spot of a huge number of texts, mainly papyrus fragments, relating to
all walks of life especially in the Greco-Roman period,74 including 233 Christian
literary texts (published so far).75 What stands out immediately among these
Christian texts is how diverse they are in many respects, especially in content
and materiality.
Scholars acknowledge this diversity of texts found at Oxyrhynchus.76 Here
I want to delve deeper and ask what this means. What is this evidence of? This
diversity is found along many axes: we find diverse contents, theologies, genres,
and materiality. At Oxyrhynchus, there is the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel
of Matthew; the Gospel of Thomas and the Epistle to the Romans, the Epistle
of James, martyrdoms, a church calendar, amidst a whole range of other texts,
several of which are otherwise unattested. The coexistence of these different texts
at Oxyrhynchus is fascinating because they come to us neutrally, as it were, out
of the ground. Previously, our knowledge of some of these texts only emerged
through heresiological literature or polemical contexts.77 Moreover, this array
of sources with widely different theological viewpoints contrasts sharply with
the portrayal of Oxyrhynchus as an exclusively orthodox city in the early fifth-
century account of the Historia monachorum.78
One complicating factor in understanding the diversity is that although these
texts derive from one city,79 the Oxyrhynchite Christian texts do not constitute
74 See, for instance, P. J. Parsons, City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007). The size of the manuscript find at Oxyrhynchus is
mind boggling. Nongbri (God’s Library, 227) notes: “The most reliable reports suggest that
Grenfell and Hunt recovered a total of about half a million papyrus and parchment items.”
75 A search on the Leuven Database of Ancient Books for provenance Oxyrynchos and
religion = Christian gives 233 results. Nongbri creatively avoided the thorny hindsight issue of
canonicity by presenting the fragments according to genre, as follows: 42 Gospels (including the
two copies of the Gospel of Mary); 26 Hebrew scriptures (LXX and Old Latin); 23 Letters; 23 Pa-
tristic sermons/expositions; 19 Revelatory literature; 8 Acts and legends; and a few others (God’s
Library, 231–233, see also the Appendix on 273–280). There are also 25 Christian amulets. See
also Blumell and Wayment, Christian Oxyrhynchus (with the exclusion of Septuagint texts).
As this book was about to go to press, the Egypt Exploration Society released for the first time
important information about still unpublished papyri relevant for early Christian Oxyrhynchus:
“some twenty New Testament inedita,” “some ten patristic texts,” and “over eighty Septuagint
and related texts” (!), see “Unpublished EES Biblical Papyri,” Egypt Exploration Society, 7 March
2019, https://www.ees.ac.uk/news/unpublished-ees-biblical-papyri; Brent Nongbri, “Un-
published Christian Papyri from Oxyrhynchus: Some Numbers,” Variant Readings, 8 March
2019, https://brentnongbri.com/2019/03/08/unpublished-christian-papyri-from-oxyrhynchus-
some-numbers/.
76 E. g., Eldon Jay Epp, “The Oxyrhynchus New Testament Papyri: ‘Not Without Honor
Except in Their Hometown’?,” Journal of Biblical Literature 123.1 (2004): 14–18; Luijendijk,
Greetings in the Lord, 18–21; Blumell and Wayment, Christian Oxyrhynchus, 17–20.
77 So, unlike in the writings of ecclesiastical authors such as Clement, Origen, Athanasius
(to mention Egyptian authors), who engage polemically or apologetically with texts, here we
have books as silent and much mutilated witnesses.
78 See Luijendijk, Greetings in the Lord, 3–6.
79 Nongbri (God’s Library, 240–242) cautions that not all pieces published in the Oxyrhyn-
 The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463) 407

one library; they do not emerge from a more or less deliberate collection. (Con-
sider in contrast the carbonized literary remains of perhaps as many as 1100 rolls
in the library of Philodemus [and later Piso] at the Villa dei Papiri in Hercula-
neum;80 or the archive of Dioscorus of Aphrodito, with its mix of documents
and literary compositions.81) So if these texts do not constitute one collection,
what then does it mean that all these texts come from one city? Obtaining a
fine-grained view turns out to be difficult. Given the find circumstances of texts
among ancient trash and the excavation methods at the end of the 19th and early
20th century at Oxyrhynchus, it is for the most part impossible to determine what
texts were found together as part of a collection. But some progress has been
made here.
Several scholars, most recently George Houston in his book Inside Roman
Libraries: Book Collections and their Management in Antiquity, have recon-
structed among the Oxyrhynchite materials privately owned libraries containing
classical works.82 This is done chiefly on the basis of remarks Grenfell and Hunt
made about their excavations. Houston reconstructs five classical Oxyrhynchite
libraries; the largest one (“Breccia + GH3,” after the excavators who found it)
comprised sixty-eight rolls, written in different hands by professional scribes.
This library belonged in all probability to a certain Sarapion alias Apollonianus,

chus Papyri volumes have a secure Oxyrhynchite provenance. Furthermore, evidently a major
complication for the Oxyrhynchite materials is that all these remnants of books were found
discarded in ancient trash heaps. It is still unclear how this skews the evidence, apart from the
fact that most books only survive in fragments, having been torn up before being disposed of or
disintegrated on the trash heap itself. On this topic, see AnneMarie Luijendijk, “Sacred Scrip-
tures as Trash: Biblical Papyri from Oxyrhynchus,” Vigiliae Christianae 64.3 (2010): 217–254;
Nongbri, God’s Library, 230.
80 See David Sider, The Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum (Los Angeles: J. Paul
Getty Museum, 2005); Francesca Longo Auricchio and Mario Capasso, “I rotoli della Villa er-
colanese: dislocazione e ritrovamento,” CronErcol 17 (1987): 37–47; George W. Houston, Inside
Roman Libraries: Book Collections and Their Management in Antiquity (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2014), 87–129.
81 See Leslie S. B. MacCoull, Dioscorus of Aphrodito: His Work and His World, The Trans-
formation of the Classical Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Jean-Luc
Fournet and Caroline Magdelaine, eds., Les archives de Dioscore d’Aphrodité cent ans après leur
découverte. Histoire et culture dans l’Égypte byzantine, vol. Études d’archéologie et d’histoire
ancienne 15 (Strasbourg: De Boccard, 2008).
82 Houston, Inside Roman Libraries; George W. Houston, “Grenfell, Hunt, Breccia, and
the Book Collections of Oxyrhynchus,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 47.3 (2007):
327–359. See also the articles of the two Italian scholars who pioneered this: M. Serena Funghi
and Gabriella Messeri Savorelli, “Note papirologiche e paleografiche,” TYCHE 7 (1992): 75–88;
M. Serena Funghi and Gabriella Messeri Savorelli, “Lo ‘scriba di Pindaro’ e le biblioteche di
Ossirinco,” Studi Classici e Orientali 42 (1994): 43–62. For owners of Christian books from
Oxyrhynchus, see Luijendijk, “A New Testament Papyrus and Its Documentary Context”;
Luijendijk, “Books and Private Readers.”
408 AnneMarie Luijendijk

strategos in the Arsinoite and Hermopolite nomes in the early third century (if
indeed documents found with the literary papyri belonged together).83
But who were the owners and readers of the Christian texts found at Oxy-
rhynchus? If these texts do not constitute one library, should we imagine an
audience reading a diverse array of Christian writings, ranging from Thomas
to Mark, Matthew to Mary? Or should we reconstruct these circles as different
social groups? A “heretical” group, reading the Gospels of Thomas, Mary, Peter,
and an “orthodox” group, reading Matthew and John?84 Given the state of the
evidence, in the majority of the texts from Oxyrhynchus, classical and Chris-
tian, we cannot determine where they were found and in proximity with what
other textual materials, whether documentary or literary. Where I was able to
identify ownership, however, these papyri belong in what we would deem, in
this hindsight perspective, diverse collections: P. Oxy. I 1, a page with the Gospel
of Thomas, may have belonged to the same owner or collection as P. Oxy. I 2,
the Gospel of Matthew.85 In our work on the paleography of the Oxyrhynchus
texts, Brent Nongbri and I noted, with Arthur Hunt, a copyist who produced a
manuscript with the now-canonical Epistle to the Hebrews and another with the
now-apocryphal Acts of John. Both have the same style of handwriting and may
have been commissioned by the same reader.86 There is no way to distinguish
between canonical and non-canonical here in any material way.
Moreover, the few known owners of Christian books at Oxyrhynchus appear
to be lay Christians, women and men. Indeed, church leaders such as Clement,
Origen, and John Chrysostom, among others, recommended studying scriptures
at home.87 I assume that Christian texts and documents were also in the posses-
sion of churches or libraries affiliated with churches but so far there is no evidence
to prove what manuscripts those were.88 Multiple documents from Oxyrhynchus
mention “the Holy Church” (ἡ ἁγία ἐκκλησία) of Oxyrhynchus, as it is called, but
83 Houston, Inside Roman Libraries, 144–146.
84 Texts represent the communities they were written in and for and by whom they were read,
but not exclusively. It is possible that people read multiple texts with what we consider different
theological perspectives. Ancient scholars such as Clement, Origen, Eusebius, Epiphanius, etc.,
know of works they vehemently disagreed with and seem to have had them in their libraries. Just
as we modern scholars have a variety of books, some of which we appreciate more and others less.
85 See Luijendijk, “Books and Private Readers,” esp. 115–120. The papyri were found close
together during the first excavation season, which prompted Grenfell and Hunt to suggest that
they might have constituted “the remains of a library belonging to some Christian.” Bernard
P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt, “Excavations at Oxyrhynchus (1896–1907),” in Oxyrhynchus:
A City and Its Texts, 2007, 348. See also Luijendijk, “Books and Private Readers.”
86 See Luijendijk and Nongbri, “Cultural and Textual Exchanges in Late Antique Oxyrhyn-
chus.”
87 Luijendijk, “Books and Private Readers,” 120–129.
88 It is possible that a small dossier of letters of recommendation and other correspondence
relating to the third-century Oxyrhynchite bishop Sotas formed part of a church archive. On
this dossier, see Luijendijk, Greetings in the Lord, 81–151. Church buildings are mentioned in
documentary papyri from the beginning of the fourth century (P. Oxy. XXXIII 2673, Blumell
 The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463) 409

they treat such matters as meat orders to a local butcher called Serenus. They are
not literary manuscripts.89 Again, because we lack the archaeological evidence
or other indications of the find spot of the papyri, we cannot establish which lit-
erary or liturgical manuscripts belonged to “the Holy Church of Oxyrhynchus.”
I guess that these would be the better legible, well-executed manuscripts, such
as P. Oxy. XV 1780, the fragment of a third-century codex with the Gospel of
John, or P. Oxy. LXX 4759, a piece of a large, sixth- or seventh-century codex
containing the martyrdom of Pamoun in excellent Alexandrian Majuscule hand-
writing. But besides the high quality of production and legible handwriting,
there is nothing that conclusively suggests that these manuscripts constituted
church property; they might just as well have been owned by wealthy lay people.
One external form of diversity among these Christian manuscripts lies in their
physical production, ranging from expensive, professionally produced books
to cheap, quick, unprofessional copies of texts.90 This suggests socio-economic
diversity among the owners of these Christian manuscripts. Another aspect of
this material diversity relates to the disposal of manuscripts: overall, the Chris-
tian fragments from Oxyrhynchus are relatively small fragments, whereas the
classical libraries contain more substantial pieces. Only a few of the Christian
manuscripts consist of more than a fragment.91 Possibly, these Christian texts
are small because they had been deliberately destroyed before being discarded.92
As is the case with the large majority of the papyri found at Oxyrhynchus, it is
impossible to reconstruct where exactly this papyrus of the Gospel of Mary was
found; in which kôm, in what layer of the garbage heap, in proximity with what
other papyri, etc. That of course greatly hampers our understanding of the social
context of these sources. For the Gospel of Mary, the inventory number of P. Oxy.
L 3525 – 23 3B 12/E(1)a – indicates that this papyrus was found by Grenfell and
Hunt’s team of “110 workmen” in the third excavation season (3B) at Oxyrhyn-

and Wayment, Christian Oxyrhynchus, no. 114; P. Oxy. I 43v); relevant later sources are P. Oxy.
XI 1357 and LXVII 4617. See Luijendijk, Greetings in the Lord, 19–20.
89 Trismegistos Archives lists 12 documents as part of the archive of the Holy Church of
Oxyrhynchus, dating to the fifth century. See also Nikolaos Gonis, “Seventeen Beinecke Papyri,”
APF 61.2 (2015): 343–345, about a small archive of meat “Order to Supply Meat” (no. 12, from
the year 484).
90 The sheet from Leonides’s papers with Rom. 1:1–7 is an exception; it is larger than most
Christian fragment but then it is not a part of a codex but a writing exercise or perhaps amulet,
see Luijendijk, “A New Testament Papyrus and Its Documentary Context.”
91 For instance, the reused roll with the Epistle to the Hebrews (P. Oxy. IV 657), discussed
above, and the Oxyrhynchite Philo codex (LDAB 3540; P. Oxy. IX 1173, P. Oxy. XI 1356, P. Oxy.
XVIII 2158, P. Oxy. LXXXII 5291, PSI XI 1207, P. Haun. I 8, see Brent Nongbri, “The Oxy-
rhynchus Codex of Philo of Alexandria,” Variant Readings, 13 May 2018, https://brentnongbri.
com/2018/05/13/the-oxyrhynchus-codex-of-philo-of-alexandria/; Brent Nongbri, “Excavating
the Oxyrhynchus Philo Codex,” Variant Readings, 14 May 2018, https://brentnongbri.com/
2018/05/14/excavating-the-oxyrhynchus-philo-codex/). For a list of the more substantial re-
mains of Christian books, see Luijendijk, “Sacred Scriptures as Trash,” Appendix, 250–254.
92 See Luijendijk, “Sacred Scriptures as Trash,” 244–245, 249.
410 AnneMarie Luijendijk

chus in 1903–1904.93 In this season, they dug at several mounds where they had
already worked in the first excavation seasons (1896–1897). This, together with
the fact that Grenfell and Hunt did not keep a thorough archaeological report,
renders finding a detailed archaeological context for this papyrus impossible.
Let me nevertheless attempt to sketch what we can know of the broader
archaeological context for this manuscript. At least 18 other papyri,94 both doc-

93 Grenfell and Hunt, “Excavations at Oxyrhynchus (1896–1907),” 355–357.

94 Since the editors of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri began to indicate excavation season and
box number (see the front matter of volumes XLII and XLIV), these other texts from the same
box as P. Oxy. L 3525 have been published. The data below are acquired through a search on
Trismegistos (last updated 03/03/2019) for “inventory = 23 3B” with additional pieces from
other searches. I thank my former research assistant Kacie O’Connell for compiling files with
inventory numbers.
1. 23 3B 1/M(1–3)b TM 68394 = West, Studies in the text and transmission of the Iliad
p1275, Homer; Greek; papyrus; date: 2nd–3rd cent.
2. 23 3B 1/Q(1–3)a TM 68267 = West, Studies in the text and transmission of the Iliad
p1101, Homer; Greek; papyrus; date: 2nd–3rd cent.
3. 23 3B 1/Q(1–3)b and P. Harris I 38/TM 59814 / LDAB 918 = Euripides, Medea = Bir-
mingham, Cadbury Research Library P. Harris 179 + Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum Add 109
+ Oxford, Sackler Library, Papyrology Rooms; Greek; papyrus; date: 2nd cent.
4. 23 3B 2/E(1–2)a TM 68439 = West, Studies in the text and transmission of the Iliad
p1338, Homer; Greek; papyrus; date: 2nd–3rd cent.
5. 23 3B 2/G(1–3)b TM 88940 = P. Oxy. LXIX 4732 Ro descr. = Ro; Greek; papyrus; date: 3rd
cent.; TM 69516 = P. Oxy. 69 4732 Vo: Isocrates, De pace = 23 3B 2/G(1–3)b Vo; Greek; papyrus;
date: 3rd cent.
6. 23 3B 3/H(4–5)c Ro = P. Oxy. 46 3285 Ro descr./ TM 111052; Greek; papyrus; date: 2nd
cent.(no image available) TM 63672 = P. Oxy. XLIV 3285 Vo: Legal code = 23 3B 3/H(4–5)c Vo;
Greek; papyrus; date: 2nd half of the 2nd cent.
7. 23 3B 3/K(1–2)a TM 101346 = P. Oxy. LXVIII 4674: LDAB: “love spell of attraction
with historiola of Isis-Horus-Seth, voces et figurae magicae and drawing” and “drawing of two
mummies, folded in antiquity”; Greek; papyrus; date: 4th–5th cent.
8. 23 3B 3/N(1–4)b TM 68456 = West, Studies in the text and transmission of the Iliad
p1357, Homer; Greek; papyrus; date: 3rd cent.
9. 23 3B. 4/B(1)a TM 388551 = P. Oxy. LXXX 5245: Recipes; Greek; papyrus; date: 2nd cent.
10. 23 3B 4/L(2–4)a = West, Studies in the text and transmission of the Iliad p1028, TM
68215 Homer; Greek; papyrus; date: 3rd cent.
11. 23 3B. 12/A(1)+(2) = P. Oxy. LXXIII 4961 Authenticated Copy of a Petition to the
Prefect; date: 14 November 223.
12. 23 3B. 12/D(1–2) (a) + (3–4) (a) TM 739014 = West, Homerus. Odyssea (BSGRT)
p. xxxvi no. 317 descr., Homer; Greek; papyrus; date: 3rd cent.
13. 23 3B 12/E(1)a = P. Oxy. L 3525 TM 64187: Gospel of Mary =; Greek; papyrus; date:
3rd cent.
14. 23 3B 13/E(1–2)a = P. Oxy. XL 2895 col. 1/TM 16604: Application to receive the Corn
Dole; Greek; papyrus; date: 269–270; and P. Oxy. XL 2895 col. 2/TM 16605 =: Application to
receive the Corn Dole; Greek; papyrus; date: 14 January 270.
15. 23 3B. 12/F(1–2)a = P. Oxy. LX 4076 Report of Property Registrars; date: 320?
16. 23 3B. 12/H(1)a = P. Oxy. LII 3674 Plato, Laws 9. 854 C–D; date: 2nd cent.
17. 23 3B 13/E(3)a Ro = P. Oxy. XLII 3028/TM 16427: Official Correspondence.; Greek;
papyrus; date: 232–247; and on the verso: 23 3B 13/E(3)a Vo = P. Oxy. XLII 3048/TM 16446:
Proclamation of Iuridicus and Registration of Corn; Greek; papyrus; date: 3 March 246.
 The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463) 411

umentary and literary, filled the same box, box 23, as P. Oxy. L 3525. Presumably,
those papyri were all found relatively close together during the excavation. The
literary papyri in this box include, in addition to the Marian fragment, six differ-
ent manuscripts of Homer, one each of Plato’s Laws, Euripides’s Medea, and Iso-
crates’s De pace. The box also includes three semi-literary texts: medical recipes,
an Egyptian legal text in Greek, and a love spell. Furthermore, the box contained
fragments of seven documents (two of which form the recto of one of the [semi-]
literary texts mentioned above). It would have been exciting to have a match in
handwriting between one of the documents in the box and the Gospel of Mary,
but as far as I could ascertain, the handwriting of these documents differs from
the (documentary) handwriting of our papyrus. Also otherwise I could detect
no obvious connections between these papyri. Most other boxes show this same
variety of sources. Within the larger reading environment at Oxyrhynchus, this
suggests that Christian texts are read along with classical literature. Indeed, in
this period, educated Christians who owned manuscripts with Christian texts
probably also owned and read other works of literature, such as Homer, or Iso-
crates.95
Overall, the third excavation season (which was not just limited to box 23)
yielded multiple Christian literary texts in addition to the fragment of the Gospel
of Mary, namely fragments of two different copies of the Gospel of Matthew, of 2
Corinthians, an amulet with the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, a hymn, and
the Lord’s Prayer, also a Jewish Psalm roll.96 Several fourth- and fifth-century

18. 23 3B 13/L(1–4) TM 171884 = P. Oxy. LXXVIII 5138: Isocrates, Nicocles; Greek;

papyrus; date: 4th cent.; LDAB: “clumsy hand.” Codex.
95 For instance, according to Andrew Carriker’s calculations, Eusebius’s library at Caesarea
contained, about 400 works (possibly even more but at a minimum 288), including writings by
philosophers, historians, Jewish authors, Homer (Iliad and Odyssey), Hesiod, and a wide range
of works and documents by Christian authors, plus contemporary documents. See Andrew
Carriker, The Library of Eusebius of Caesarea, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 67 (Boston:
Brill, 2003), 299–311. On Christian education more generally, see Raffaella Cribiore, “Why Did
Christians Compete with Pagans for Greek Paideia?,” in Pedagogy in Ancient Judaism and Early
Christianity, ed. Karina Martin Hogan, Matthew Goff, and Emma Wasserman (Atlanta, GA:
Society of Biblical Literature, 2017), 359–374.
96 Christian (and Jewish) texts from the third excavation season:
– 20 3B.36/J(4)b; 20 3B.38/N(1), and 27 3B.41/J(1–2)c = P.Oxy. LXXVII 5101, 1st–2nd cent.;
Jewish roll with Psalms, LXX Ps 26,9–14; 44,4–8; 47,13–15; 48,6–21; 49,2–16; 53,6–54,5.
The fragments of this roll were stored in two different boxes (20 and 27, which can mean that the
manuscript had been dispersed over the garbage heap, or that the separation happened when
the fragments were boxed. In any case, this case of fragments from one roll in different boxes
justifies taking this broader look at other Christian manuscripts found in the third excavation
season. This happens commonly among the papyri found at Oxyrhynchus (another example is
the Philo codex, or the Hebrews/Livy roll, P. Oxy. IV 657)
– 27 3B. 38/N(1)a = P. Oxy. LXIV 4404 (𝔓104) 2nd cent. = Matt 21:34–37, 43, 45
– 27 3B. 41/C(1–3)b = P. Oxy. LXIV 4401 (𝔓101) 3rd cent. = Matt 3:10–12, 3:16–4:3
– 3B 6/IV P. Oxy. LXXII 4845 = 4th cent.; 2 Cor
– 25 3B. 58/E(c) = P. Oxy. LXXVI 5073, 3rd–4th cent., amulet with Mk 1:1–2.
412 AnneMarie Luijendijk

Christian documentary letters also come from this season97 (as far as we know;
this is only when we have excavation numbers). The Gospel of Mary may have
been read with one or more of these texts.
When we further contextualize P. Oxy. L 3525 alongside papyri outside
of box 23 to the larger manuscript find at Oxyrhynchus, we find that the two
Greek fragments of the Gospel of Mary (P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463) share
material features with the three Greek fragments of the Gospel of Thomas found
at Oxyrhynchus, P. Oxy. I 1, IV 654 and 655. These fragments are all dated by
palaeography to the third century. Two of the three fragments of the Gospel of
Thomas (P. Oxy. IV 654 and 655) are, like P. Oxy. L 3525, written on a papyrus
roll. This is significant, because, as noted above, Christian manuscripts are mostly
produced in codex format. Like one fragment of the Gospel of Thomas, P. Oxy.
IV 655, this Gospel of Mary is written on a new roll. The other Gospel of Thomas
fragment on a roll, P. Oxy. IV 654, is written on the back of a documentary roll.
It has multiple literary features and copious aides to reading out loud, such as
paragraphoi and diaereses, and in that respect differs substantially from P. Oxy.
L 3525.98 P. Oxy. IV 655 is written in an exquisite literary hand, especially known
from manuscripts of classical texts, rather than Christian ones. The documentary
handwriting of P. Oxy. L 3525 differs distinctly in style from these two scrolls of
the Gospel of Thomas. Yet both of these texts are also known in Coptic trans-
lation in later, fourth- and fifth-century codices: the Gospel of Thomas in Nag
Hammadi Codex II and the Gospel of Mary in the Berlin Codex. I should note
here also that one of the other texts in the Berlin Codex, the Wisdom of Jesus
Christ (Sophia Jesu Christi), is also attested in Greek at Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy.
VIII 1081).99 Thus, far from isolated use in a monastic community in Upper
Egypt, these kinds of texts circulated more widely in Egypt and over several
centuries. Such texts, like the Gospel of Mary, which disappeared in the course
of history, were not just random and aberrant sources. They were not merely the

– 22 3B. 16/F(3–4)a = P. Oxy. LX 4011, a hymn, 6th cent. (with Ps 75.2, 6, 67.2; Isa 40.9; Zach
1:11)
– 20 3B. 36/H(1–3)a = P. Oxy. LX 4010, 4th cent.; a piece with the Lord’s Prayer.
97 Christian letters from the third excavation season:
– 24 3B. 68/G(d) = P. Oxy. LVI 3864, 5th cent., Appammon to Dorotheus
– 25 3B. 6/L(a) = P. Oxy. LVI 3865, late 5th cent., Samuel to Martyrius
– 39 3B. 78/J(1–3)b = P. Oxy. LVI 3858, 4th cent., Barys to Diogenes
98 On the reading aids in P. Oxy. IV 654, see Luijendijk, “Reading the Gospel of Thomas,”
245–246, 253–254. Dan Nässelqvist (Public Reading in Early Christianity: Lectors, Manuscripts,
and Sound in the Oral Delivery of John 1–4, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 163 (Boston:
Brill, 2016), 58) interprets reader’s aids in miniature codices and reused rolls not as indications
of public reading but as gestures towards “weak readers.” He observes (60): “The practical
aspects of manuscripts, including the layout of the text and the use of lectional signs, have a
significant impact on the lector’s task of employing them in public reading.”
99 The Wisdom of Jesus Christ forms also part of the Nag Hammadi texts, preserved in
codex III and V.
 The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463) 413

fodder of heresiologists, examples of disregarded sources. Rather, these sources

were more commonly read, appearing in different forms and hands.

Conclusions

A closer look at the “fingerprints” left by the copyists of the Gospel of Mary on
the two Greek manuscripts we examined brought us to a milieu where literate
professionals who were not necessarily among the local top elite wrote this text
out for themselves. It is particularly interesting to have these two fragmentary
witnesses for reading the Gospel of Mary from the ancient Egyptian city of
Oxyrhynchus, where they were read among a large diversity of literature.
The numerous discoveries in the last century of new sources for early Chris-
tianity within a known provenance help to understand the full scope and di-
versity of early Christianity and fill in gaps in what Graeme Clarke terms our
“third-century ignorance.”100 They confront us with the vulnerability of textual
transmission, both by providing evidence for sources that we thought were “lost”
and by surprising us with completely unknown sources that we did not even
know we were missing!
These texts are diverse in their materiality, theology, and chronology. When
we meet them in the ancient cities where they were used, we find that it is not
just a simple case of heresy preceding orthodoxy, as Walter Bauer importantly
argued,101 or of different locales having diverse theologies. Instead, we see that,
even in one place, there is evidence for different reading practices. Moreover, the
material on the ground suggests that this diversity of collections was common
practice. In “Which Early Christianity?” Karen King urges scholars to analyze
early Christianity with an eye to practice:
The results of this historiographical method would be to demonstrate where and how the
“textual” resources, cultural codex, literary themes, hermeneutical strategies, and social-
political interests of various rhetorical acts of Christian literary production, theological
reflection, ritual and ethical practices, and social construction simultaneously form multi-
ple overlapping continuities, disjunctures, contradictions, and discontinuities, both locally
and trans-locally. Such historiographical enterprises will result in more than one “true

100 In his lengthy contribution on “The Third Century” in the Cambridge Ancient History,
Graeme Clarke notes that “Until the Great Persecution and its aftermath in the early fourth
century brings to light valuable evidence for the geographical spread of Christianity … we are
forced to be content, for much of the preceding century, with extremely fitful testimony.” Graeme
Clarke, “Third-Century Christianity,” in The Cambridge Ancient History, ed. Alan Bowman,
Averil Cameron, and Peter Garnsey, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
589. At several points in this chapter (594, 610, 611), he mentions this “third-century ignorance.”
101 Walter Bauer, Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum, Beiträge zur his-
torischen Theologie 10 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1934).
414 AnneMarie Luijendijk

and authentic” account of early Christianity diversity, but not in a narrative of Christian
triumph.102

I hope this contribution forms a small part towards that larger goal.

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IV. Epilogue
 As If the Way We Think about the World
is the Way the World Is
Sarah Sentilles

To prevent the people they’d enslaved from escaping, ancient Scythians, horse-
riding nomads, blinded them, and during American slavery and Reconstruction,
reckless eyeballing, looking at a White person, especially a White woman, was
forbidden to those classified as “slaves” or “colored,” but my nephew, who is five,
who is Black, who has the longest eyelashes, wants to have a staring contest,
wants to see who can look at the other person without blinking, without turning
away.1

A police officer made eye contact with him and Freddie Gray ran and officers
chased him and arrested him and though he had asthma and requested an inhal-
er (which he was not given), and though he shouted in pain (“His leg broke and
y’all dragging him like that,” an observer can be heard shouting on the video),
police loaded him into a van. Gray died a few days later after being treated for
three fractured vertebrae and a crushed voice box, “the sorts of injuries that
doctors say are usually caused by serious car accidents.”2

Accuracy is essential to the myth of drone strikes’ effectiveness, but even

the companies that developed the software used in targeting have disputed the
technical precision of Hellfire missiles.3 The blast radius extends 50–60 feet.
Shrapnel travels even further. One of the reasons the missiles are not as precise
as people might like them to be is due to something called latency – the delay
between the movement on the ground and the arrival of the video image by
satellite to the drone pilot. This delay gives the people on the ground time. When
they hear an American drone overhead, they run.4
1 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look,” Critical Inquiry 37.3 (2011): 482.
2 David A. Graham, “The Mysterious Death of Freddie Gray,” The Atlantic, April 22, 2015.
Accessed online http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/the-mysterious-death-
of-freddie-gray/391119/
3 International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School
& Global Justice Clinic at NYU Law. “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to
Civilians From Us Drone Practices in Pakistan,” footnote 31, accessed online http://chrgj.org/
wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Living-Under-Drones.pdf
4 “Living Under Drones,” footnote 32 (http://chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Liv
ing-Under-Drones.pdf).
424 Sarah Sentilles

Walter Scott was stopped by police officer Michael Slager for a broken tail-
light, and he ran, and Slager chased him. On Feidin Santana’s cellphone video
you first see a chain link fence, then trees, then Scott running, shirt green, pants
dark, sneakers white, then Slager raising his gun and shooting Scott eight times
in the back. Slager handcuffs Scott, who is already lying facedown on the grass,
and walks back to the spot where he fired the shots, nearly twenty feet away from
Scott’s body, picks an object off the ground (which turns out to be the taser he
claimed Scott threatened him with), and walks back to drop the object by Scott’s
body. Later, at his trial, Slager will say he was so afraid of Scott that his mind was
like spaghetti. While he awaits his trial, the person held in the cell next to his will
be Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who murdered nine Black people when
they were praying in their church.

In the hotel lobby of the beach resort where we’re staying, my nephew and
I feed the peacocks. The bar gives us glasses full of peanuts, and we walk in search
of the birds, their tales dragging on the cool tiled floor or fanned into iridescent
blue, and when our glasses are empty, we play “I Spy.”

In “The Body and the Archive,” Allan Sekula traces how the camera began
to be used by police departments in the 1880s, revealing that the modern day
mug shot emerged out of eugenics. The camera became a tool for using people’s
own bodies against them. Facial expression, bone structure, the set of your ears,
the color of your skin became proof of your criminality, whether you’d done
anything illegal or not. Mug shots facilitated, quite literally, “the arrest of their
referent,” Sekula writes.5

There are at least two types of drone strikes: personality strikes, aimed at
named, high-value terrorists, and signature strikes, aimed at groups of suspected,
unknown militants – that is, people whose individual identities are not known.
The New York Times reports that originally the term signature strike was used to
suggest the specific ‘signature’ of a known high-level terrorist, such as his vehicle
parked at a meeting place. But the meaning of the word has changed; now it
means the signature of militants in general. Young men with guns. Young men
congregating in areas controlled by extremist groups. Or just, young men.6

Some photographs of men in Guantánamo show them with shackled hands,

noise canceling headphones over their ears, blackout masks over their eyes.
Others show them with hoods covering their faces.
5 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 7.
6 Scott Shane, “Election Spurred a Move to Codify U. S. Drone Policy,” New York Times,
November 24, 2012. Accessed online https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/world/white-hou
se-presses-for-drone-rule-book.html
 As If the Way We Think about the World is the Way the World Is  425

“Don’t eyeball me,” American guards yelled at detainees in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib
prison.7

My nephew’s father, my brother-in-law, is a veteran and a nurse, and he is

Black. At the resort he is one of the only Black people who is not employed by the
hotel. One night, when we’re walking home from dinner, he says, “Watch this.”
He moves away from the rest of us and stands next to a tree in the path, looking
at the moon. A woman, blonde and White like me, walks by, and he says, “Good
evening,” and she doesn’t answer and moves to the far edge of the sidewalk, away
from him.
“It’s so easy to frighten y’all,” he says to me.

In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry argues that blindness is stitched into the
fabric of torture. You cannot have torture without it. What Scarry calls “the act
of disclaiming or self-blinding” – denying that another person is in pain – allows
the torturer to do his work. “[The torturer’s] blindness, his willed amorality, is
his power,” Scarry writes.8 It is not that power makes one blind, or that power
is always accompanied by blindness; rather, blindness is power. Empires are not
possible without blindness, without “a refusal to recognize and care for those in
agony.”9

Over the course of 13 years, Philando Castile was pulled over by the police at
least 49 times. Tinted windows. Broken seatbelt. Driving at night with an unlit
license plate. On a summer night, after calling his sister to ask if he could bring
her some dinner, he was pulled over again, this time for a broken taillight. Castile
told officer Jeronimo Yanez he had a permit to carry a gun, and Yanez shot him.
Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, streamed the aftermath on Facebook
Live, her voice steady, calling the officer sir, her four-year-old daughter in the
back seat. Stay with me, she says, blood turning Castile’s white shirt red.

I spy with my little eye something that is red.

I spy with my little eye something that is blue.
I spy with my little eye something that is black.

7 Mirzoeff, “Right to Look,” 482.

8 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1985), 57.
9 Scarry writes, “The most radical act of distancing resides in his disclaiming of the other’s
hurt. Within the strategies of power based on denial there is … a hierarchy of achievement,
successive intensifications based on increasing distance from … the body: a regime’s refusal to
recognize the rights of the normal and healthy is its cart; its refusal to recognize and care for
those in agony is its airplane” (Ibid., 57).
426 Sarah Sentilles

Francis Galton, one of the founders of the mug shot, was a eugenicist, a
racist, an advocate of “social betterment through breeding,” and a favorite of
the Nazis.10 In England, he used photography to organize human beings into
types – the thief, the murderer, the shoplifter, and so on. To do so, he created
composite images, multiple exposures on a single photographic plate. He’d
gather people convicted of the same crime – a dozen murderers, for example –
and he’d arrange the first murderer in front of the camera, take off the lens cap
for an exposure, and cap the lens again. He’d then position the second murderer
in the same spot as the first, take off the lens cap for a second exposure, then cap
the lens again, superimposing one face on another on another on another until
it was time to develop the image, which would be presented as a single face: this
is what a murderer looks like. His thinking went something like this: If you know
what a murderer looks like, you can arrest people who look like murderers before
they kill anyone. If you know what a thief looks like, you can arrest people who
look like thieves before they steal anything. Anticipate misdeeds before they are
committed. Wipe crime off the street.

The first targeted drone strike, allegedly carried out by the CIA in February
2002 in Afghanistan, killed three men. Reports suggested the CIA thought one of
the men was Osama Bin Laden because of his height. When questioned, author-
ities confirmed it was not Bin Laden, but they didn’t know whom they had killed.
“We’re convinced it was an appropriate target,” a Pentagon spokeswoman said,
but added, “we do not yet know exactly who it was.”11

In Galton’s composite images, you can see ghosts of ears, hairlines, collars,
and noses that don’t fit into the generalized face he hoped to create. The failure
of photography to perfectly confirm the subject’s criminality is visible; humanity
leaks through.

Though aerial photographs are treated as evidence – as more dependable than

regular photographs – they are difficult to read. The first aerial images needed
textual supplements, index cards describing what to see. Interpreters underwent
special training, a “re-education of sight.”12 The images block normal habits of
seeing and are enmeshed within complicated layers of encoding.13 You can look
10 Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 42.
11 International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School
& Global Justice Clinic at NYU Law. “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to
Civilians From Us Drone Practices in Pakistan,” footnotes 34–40 (http://chrgj.org/wp-content/
uploads/2012/10/Living-Under-Drones.pdf).
12 Paula Amad, “From God’s-Eye to Camera-Eye: Aerial Photography’s Post-Humanist and
Neo-Humanist Visions of the World,” History of Photography 36.1 (2012): 82.
13 Amad, “From God’s-Eye to Camera-Eye,” 81. Amad is engaging Sekula, “The Instrumen-
tal Image,” 28.
 As If the Way We Think about the World is the Way the World Is  427

at them and not have any idea what you are seeing. “Aerial images mean nothing
to the untrained eye” – a nothingness that makes them susceptible to misappro-
priation. “For all the allure of transcendent vision they promise,” Paula Amad
writes, “it is more accurate to describe aerial images as exemplifying the blind-
spot of western rationality.”14

He’d been blind from birth when Jesus spit on the ground and made mud and
spread the mud on his eyes. Go wash, Jesus told him, and when he washed the
earth and the spit from his eyes, he could see. Those who saw the blind man was
no longer blind questioned him and his parents, and then they questioned Jesus,
who spoke to them of gates and sheep and wolves and thieves and shepherds.
I am the gate for the sheep, he said, and no one understood him, and they put
stones in their hands and threatened to throw them.

Rather than Galton’s general image for murderer, for thief, Alphonse Ber-
tillon, a police official in Paris in the mid-1800s, wanted to document every
individual criminal – an archive of criminality, not a composite. Each morning
he photographed people arrested the day before. 11 measurements taken of
every body – an elaborate system of image and number and text, arranged on
a card, then filed away. With his pages of ears, of faces, of numbers recording
cheek width and foot length and height, he was sure he could predict repeat of-
fenders, keep them locked away. His goal was to eliminate what he understood
to be the “social menace” of vagabonds, anarchists, and recidivists.15 Biological
determinism: photographs of the body turned into a weapon used against the
body.16

My brother-in-law and my nephew play catch in the pool, and when my

brother-in-law gets out of the water to retrieve the ball, a White man walks up to
him. “I know I know you,” the White man says.
“I don’t think so,” my brother-in-law says.
“No, seriously. Football, right?”
Then the man touches my brother-in-law’s shoulders, his chest, his stomach.
“You can tell me which team you play for, man,” he says. “I won’t tell any-
one.”

The CIA pays bounties to those willing to identify terrorists. 5000 dollars is a
life-changing sum for an informant in Pakistan’s Federally Administrated Tribal
Areas whose annual income is estimated to be the equivalent of 250 dollars.

14 Amad, “From God’s-Eye to Camera-Eye,” 83.

15 Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 33.
16 Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 18–55.
428 Sarah Sentilles

The informant makes a calculation: Is it safer to place a GPS tag on the car of a
dangerous terrorist, “or to call down death on a Nobody (with the beginnings of
a beard), reporting that he is a militant? Too many ‘militants’ are just young men
with stubble.”17

Perfect surveillance would be like having a “lidless eye” that could enact a
“persistent stare.” But there is no perfect surveillance. Sometimes a drone has
to leave the target it’s watching before another aircraft is ready to take its place.
When this happens, it’s called a “blink.”18

Under President Obama, the drone program expanded to include more sig-
nature strikes based on what’s called a pattern of life analysis, defining character-
istics associated with terrorist activity.19 What counts as a defining characteristic
was not clear. Some officials described the policy as a “reasonable man stand-
ard.”20 ProPublica reports, “Asked what the standard is for who could be hit,
former Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter recently told an interviewer:
‘The definition is a male between the ages of 20 to 40. My feeling is one man’s
combatant is another man’s – well, chump who went to a meeting.’”21 In 2012,
the Times paraphrased a view shared by several officials that “people in an area
of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up
to no good.”22 The Times also reported that some in the Obama administration
joked that when the CIA saw “three guys doing jumping jacks,” they thought it
was a terrorist training camp.23
Skeptics argued that men loading trucks with fertilizer could be bomb makers,
but they might also be farmers.24

George Zimmerman, the self-appointed neighborhood watchman who killed

Trayvon Martin, appealed to the circular logic of Florida’s Stand Your Ground
law, which says all you have to do to turn murder into self defense is to say you

17 Graham, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/cnns-bogus-drone-
deaths-graphic/259493/
18 Josh Begley, “Visual Glossary,” https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/a-visual-glossa
ry/#credit
19 http://www.livingunderdrones.org/report/
20 Cora Currier and Justin Elliott, “The Drone War Doctrine We Still Know Nothing
About,” ProPublica, February 26, 2013, accessed online http://www.propublica.org/article/
drone-war-doctrine-we-know-nothing-about
21 Currier and Elliottt, http://www.propublica.org/article/drone-war-doctrine-we-know-
nothing-about
22 http://www.livingunderdrones.org/report/
23 http://www.livingunderdrones.org/report/
24 Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and
Will,” New York Times, May 29, 2012, accessed online https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/
world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all#p
 As If the Way We Think about the World is the Way the World Is  429

felt afraid, to say you felt threatened, and in a racist society that teaches you to
fear Black men, such a claim is easy to make and goes unquestioned, a learned
emotional response to the body of another is the only reason you need.

Officials in the Obama administration insisted civilian casualties in Pakistan

were “exceedingly rare,” in the “single digits.” The White House’s low estimates
may have been a result of the fact that the administration considered “all milita-
ry-age males [killed] in a strike zone to be combatants … unless there is explicit
intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”25 But drone victims’ bodies
are “frequently dismembered, mutilated, and burned beyond recognition,”
the Living Under Drones report points out. And there is little evidence that US
authorities even visit drone site strikes or investigate the backgrounds of those
killed.26 “Indeed,” the report says, “there is little to suggest that the US regularly
takes steps to even identify all of those killed or wounded.”

A gun store in Florida that proclaimed itself a “Muslim Free Zone” sells prints
of a confederate flag painted by Zimmerman, who later auctioned the gun he
shot Martin with for more than 100,000 dollars.
At a restaurant, Zimmerman complimented a man on his confederate flag
tattoo, and then bragged about killing Martin. Another man overheard Zimmer-
man and punched him in the face.

The man on television says he’ll block all Muslims from entering the country,
says he’ll kill the families of terrorists, says he’ll dip bullets in pigs’ blood to kill
Muslims, says the only way to close Guantánamo is to shoot everyone inside, says
Mexico is not sending its best, says immigrants are rapists. He can’t apologize for
the truth, he says. He doesn’t have a racist bone in his body, he says.27

My brother-in-law and I wait in line for drinks at the poolside bar. The White
man who thinks my brother-in-law plays for the NFL stands behind us. “I know
I recognize you,” he says. “Why won’t you tell me who you are?”

25 http://www.livingunderdrones.org/report/, Footnotes 159–162.

26 http://www.livingunderdrones.org/report/, Footnote 164.
27 Washington Post Staff, “Full Text: Donald Trump Announces a Presidential Bid,” Wash-
ington Post, June 16, 2015: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re
not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and
they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re
rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Accessed online https://www.washingtonpost.
com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/06/16/full-text-donald-trump-announces-a-presidential-
bid/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9beed49e2931; Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “Donald Trump’s False
Statements Connecting Immigrants and Crime,” Washington Post, July 8, 2015, accessed online
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/08/donald-trumps-false-
comments-connecting-mexican-immigrants-and-crime/?utm_term=.35d0b64c829d
430 Sarah Sentilles

Project Angel Fire: The pilot flies high over Fallujah, 15 to 16,000 feet above
the city, well out of missile range, the belly of his plane carrying an array of
cameras. The pilot orbits the city, six hours at a stretch, and every second, click,
the cameras take a photograph. If there is an explosion – easy to see on aerial
footage – the operator on the ground monitoring the images can zoom in, watch
the explosion, and go back in time in one-second increments to see who planted
the bomb. Once the person who planted the bomb is identified, the operator
moves the images forward in one-second increments, until the bomb-planter
returns to a house or compound or building. They send in the troops.28
There is a movement to bring Project Angel Fire to American cities, to send
planes to circle above high crime areas, a man said on the radio. Click click click
click click. “Imagine what would be possible,” he said.

When I teach Jacques Lacan’s “mirror stage,” I tell my students what Lacan be-
lieved happens when babies first recognize themselves in the mirror. Before they
see their image in the mirror, infants experience the world as flowing through
them. Everything is one: wind, mother, milk, breast, skin, father, sisters, warmth,
sunlight, darkness, laughter, music, silence. The act of self-recognition – the act
of knowing that’s me – is a moment of both identification and alienation. To
become an I you become separate from everything that is not I. You never re-
cover. You are never the same.
Franz Fanon critiques Lacan, reveals the racialized dynamics involved in
claiming the mirror image as oneself.29 The real “Other” for the White man is not
his own reflection in the mirror, Fanon argues, but the false image he constructs
of the Black man. To become an “I” the White man must make an “Other,”
must insist the “Other” is not-the-self. The relationship between the “I” and the
“not-I,” Fanon explains, is not a simple psychic process of misrecognition and
projection, not an act of looking in the mirror. It is “the racializing of the ego
(white) in relation to the materiality of other bodies (black).”30 It is saying “I am
this” and “You are that.”

28 RadioLab, “Eye in the Sky,” June 18, 2015. Accessed online https://www.wnycstudios.org/
story/eye-sky
29 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London and New
York: Routledge, 2000), 43.
30 Ahmed, Strange Encounters. This passage is a paraphrasing of two passages from Fanon:
“When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan, one can have no doubt that the real
Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely. Only for the
white man The Other is perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely as not-self – that
is, the unidentifiable, the unassimilable.’ … That is, the encounter through which the subject
assumes a body image and comes to be distinguishable from the Other is a racial encounter”
(43); and “The relation of the ‘I’ to the ‘not-I’ is determined, not simply by the psychic processes
of misrecognition and projection, but by the racialising of the ego (white) in relation to the
materiality of other bodies (black)” (43).
 As If the Way We Think about the World is the Way the World Is  431

“Write down what you see when you look in the mirror,” I told my students
when I taught Fanon’s critique of Lacan.
Myself, the White men in the room wrote.
A woman, the White women wrote.
A Black man, the Black men wrote.
A Black woman, the Black women wrote.

In a textbook I used when I taught critical thinking at a state university, there

is a photograph of two White men and two Black women. The two White men in
the picture wear white clothing. White shorts. White pants. White button-town
shirts. White hats. The man on the left has one hand on his hip. His other arm
is stretched out from his shoulder to connect with the arm of the man on the
right side of the photograph. Standing under their arms, framed by them, caged
by them, are two Black Aiome women in Papua New Guinea. The women are
topless. They wear dark skirts made of grasses and beads. They hold hands.
The White men measure the Black women’s bodies with their arms. We are so
tall, they are so small, I imagine the men telling their friends. We wear clothes;
they are nearly naked. We are men; they are women. We are light; they are dark.
We are civilized; they are savages. When you make yourself the measuring stick
of civilization, everyone else falls short.

In Frames of War, Judith Butler defines the frame “as a structuring device
that actively interprets what is real and what is not.”31 Butler investigates “the
frames through which we apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of
others as lost or injured.”32 In other words, she examines how we are trained to
see each other – and she argues that a recognition of the how of seeing can lead
to a new kind of seeing. She thinks it’s possible to “frame the frame,”33 to see the
glasses we wear that shape and misshape our perceptions of the world. When
frames that are supposed to remain invisible become visible – when they break,
when they fail – meaning changes, worlds change. Butler argues that “frames”
determine which lives are recognizable as lives and which lives are not, but, when
frames break, “other possibilities for apprehension emerge.”34
My mentor Karen King put it this way: “We live our lives as if the way we
think about the world is the way the world is; how we think about the world,
then, makes all the difference.”

Despite their name, Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) are not unidentified,
Sara Ahmed argues in Strange Encounters. Rather, they are identified as un-
31 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable (London, New York: Verso, 2009), 1.
32 Butler, Frames of War.
33 Butler, Frames of War, 8.
34 Butler, Frames of War, 12.
432 Sarah Sentilles

identified, as strange, alien, outside the categories we define as “us” and inside
the categories we define as “them.” It is possible that if you were to encounter
an alien, you wouldn’t recognize one, Ahmed writes. The cultural imagination
that trains us to imagine aliens as “little green men” restricts your vision. Blinds
you.35
When I read Ahmed’s book, I thought of Mary Magdalene in the garden,
weeping at the tomb, which is empty, Jesus’ body gone. “Why are you crying?”
two angels ask her, one sitting where Jesus’ head should have been, the other at
his feet.
“They have taken my lord,” she says. “I don’t know where they put him.”
She turns from the angels and sees a man in the garden. “Did you take my
lord?” she asks. She thinks he’s the gardener.
“Mary,” the gardener says, and hearing him speak her name, she knows he’s
Jesus. She reaches for him. “Don’t touch me,” he says.
Soaking in a heated pool one winter night under the stars, I watched a group
of teenagers. They laughed. Splashed each other. Whispered. Dove into snow
banks and back into the warm water. Then their talk turned to Jesus. “Our
generation is really lucky,” one of the girls said. “Jesus is definitely coming back
in our lifetime.”
“Yeah,” said another kid. “The proof is right there in the bible. Pastor showed
me.”
If Jesus ever planned to return to the world that killed him, he must have
already come, a second time, a third, a fourth and fifth, but, again and again,
we didn’t recognize him. While we watched for the blonde blue-eyed Jesus of
stained glass windows, he was a woman thrown over the bow of a slaver’s ship, a
refugee turned away at the border, a honeybee, an ancient oak cut down to make
room for more condominiums, an ant.

Bibliography

Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. New York: Rout-
ledge, 2000.
Amad, Paula. “From God’s-Eye to Camera-Eye: Aerial Photography’s Post-Humanist and
Neo-Humanist Visions of the World.” History of Photography 36.1 (2012): 66–86.
Becker, Jo and Scott Shane. “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will.”
New York Times, May 29, 2012. Accessed online https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/
world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all#p
Begley, Josh. “Visual Glossary,” https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/a-visual-glossa
ry/#credit
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable. London: New York: Verso, 2009.

35 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 1.

 As If the Way We Think about the World is the Way the World Is  433
Currier, Cora and Justin Elliott. “The Drone War Doctrine We Still Know Nothing About.”
ProPublica, February 26, 2013. Accessed online http://www.propublica.org/article/
drone-war-doctrine-we-know-nothing-about
Graham, David A. “The Mysterious Death of Freddie Gray.” The Atlantic, April 22, 2015.
Accessed online http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/the-mysterious-
death-of-freddie-gray/391119/
International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School &
Global Justice Clinic at NYU Law. “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma
to Civilians From Us Drone Practices in Pakistan,” footnote 31, accessed online http://
chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Living-Under-Drones.pdf
Lee, Michelle Ye Hee. “Donald Trump’s False Statements Connecting Immigrants and
Crime.” Washington Post, July 8, 2015. Accessed online https://www.washingtonpost.
com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/08/donald-trumps-false-comments-connecting-
mexican-immigrants-and-crime/?utm_term=.35d0b64c829d
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “The Right to Look.” Critical Inquiry 37.3 (2011): 473–96.
RadioLab. “Eye in the Sky.” June 18, 2015. Accessed online https://www.wnycstudios.org/
story/eye-sky
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1985.
Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October, Vol. 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64.
Shane, Scott. “Election Spurred a Move to Codify U. S. Drone Policy.” New York Times,
November 24, 2012. Accessed online https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/world/
white-house-presses-for-drone-rule-book.html
Washington Post Staff. “Full Text: Donald Trump Announces a Presidential Bid.” Wash-
ington Post, June 16, 2015. Accessed online https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/
post-politics/wp/2015/06/16/full-text-donald-trump-announces-a-presidential-bid/
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 List of Contributors

Carlin Barton is a professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Giovanni B. Bazzana is a professor of New Testament at Harvard Divinity School.
Daniel Boyarin is the Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic
Culture at the University of California, Berkeley.
Bernadette Brooten is the Myra and Robert Kraft and Jacob Hiatt Professor of
Christian Studies, Emerita at Brandeis University.
Denise Kimber Buell is the Dean of Faculty and Cluett Professor of Religion at
Williams College.
Margaret Butterfield is an independent scholar.
Carly Daniel-Hughes is an associate professor of religions and cultures at Con-
cordia University.
Benjamin H. Dunning is a professor of theology at Fordham University.
Judith Hartenstein is a professor of Protestant theology at the University of Ko-
blenz-Landau
T. Christopher Hoklotubbe is an assistant professor of religion at Cornell College.
Ronit Irshai is a senior lecturer in the gender studies program at Bar Ilan Univer-
sity and a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman institute in Jerusalem.
Marcie Lenk organizes educational interfaith programs in Jerusalem.
AnneMarie Luijendijk is a professor of religion at Princeton University.
Laura S. Nasrallah is the Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and
Interpretation at Yale Divinity School and Yale University.
Elaine Pagels is the Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at
Princeton University.
Silke Petersen is an appointed professor of New Testament at Hamburg Univer-
sity.
Taylor G. Petrey is an associate professor of religion at Kalamazoo College.
436 List of Contributors

Adele Reinhartz is a professor of classics and religious studies at the University

of Ottowa.
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is the Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity at
Harvard Divinity School.
Sarah Sentilles is a writer and cultural critic.
Angela Standhartinger is a university professor at Philipps University Marburg.
Stanley Stowers is a professor emeritus of religious studies at Brown University.
 General Index

2 Clement 14 Augustus (emperor) 330–31, 336, 376–77,

– ekklesia in 74–76, 87–90 382
– pneuma in 77–87 Aviner, Shlomo 269–74

Abel, see Cain Bacchant 325, 333–35

Acts of John, see John, Acts of Bagnall, Roger 389–99
Acts of Peter, see Peter, Acts of baptism 12, 53, 68, 128, 147, 246, 327, 339
Acts of Thecla, see Thecla, Acts of – and bridal chamber 229–32
Adam 167, 214–19, 225, 231–32 Basilides 10, 54–58, 64, 66
– see also Cain; Eve; Paradise Bauckham, Richard 37, 42, 44
adultery 218, 225, 228, 271, 312, 377 Bauer, Walter 5, 116, 413
aeons of the Fullness 235, 238–48, 252–53 Berlin Codex 96–97, 110, 140, 362, 393,
Ahmed, Sarah 135–37, 151, 155, 431–32 412
alienation toward the world, mythologi- Besant, Annie 346, 359–60
cally founded 10–11, 96, 98–99, 101, Bhabha, Homi 11, 122, 127
103–4, 107–10 binding together 30, 316, 327–28, 335,
– see also Allogenes, Book of; Mary, 341
Gospel of – see also oaths
Allogenes, Book of 10, 95, 98, 101, 103–7, Blandina 14, 62, 369–71, 378–81, 383–84,
109–10 387–89
– see also alienation toward the world, – see also Letter of the Churches of Vienne
mythologically founded and Lyons; martyrdom; slavery; torture
Andrew (disciple) 97, 140, 144 Blavatsky, Helene 346, 349, 356
androcentricity 149, 223–24, 260, 284–86, body of Christ 75, 84–85, 87, 89–90
295 Boer, Esther de 98, 100, 107
– see also kyriocentricity; misogyny; Boyarin, Daniel 116, 260–61, 290–92,
patriarchy 326
angelomorphology 51, 68, 78, 228, 230, bridal chamber 214, 217–19, 223–32, 244
261 – see also baptism; marriage
Apocryphon of John, see John, Apocry- Brown, Dan, see Da Vinci Code, The
phon of Butler, Judith 11, 113–14, 118–19, 128,
ascent of the soul 97–99, 103–9, 140 261–62, 274, 431
Askew Codex 361, 363
association, voluntary 301–2, 306–7, Cain 218, 225, 248
309–15, 319–21 – see also Adam; Eve
– see also koinon cannibalism 385–86, 388
– household 307, 311–13 canon 284–85, 291, 395, 401, 403–4, 408
– neighborhood 307, 319 Cassian, Julius 10, 54, 62–63
– occupational 307, 314–15 – see also Docetism
Attalus 381–83, 387 celibacy 63, 147, 200, 202, 206, 209, 220,
Augustine of Hippo 291–92, 341–42 270
438 General Index

– see also chastity; virginity; widowhood – focused on gender 258, 261–63,

chastity 175, 181, 202–3, 206–8, 211 265–66, 272–73
– see also celibacy; virginity; widowhood – Jewish 257–67
Cherlow, Yuval 269, 271–72, 274 flesh of Jesus 52–54, 63–64, 68
childbirth 305, 310, 373 – see also dualism
Christology 49–51, 53–55, 58–59, 62–66, Foucault, Michel 7, 85, 283
123 Frankfurter, David 37–39, 44–45
– pneumatic 66, 77–79, 89 Frend, W. H. C. 357–58
circumcision 39, 253 Friesen, Steven 35, 38–42, 45–46
Clark, Elizabeth 5–6, 148, 220 Fullness, aeons of the, see aeons of the
Clement of Alexandria 54–56, 59–60, Fullness
62–63, 67, 178, 357, 359
codex, see Askew Codex; Berlin Codex; gender
Tchacos Codex – feminist scholarship focused on 258,
261–63, 265–66, 272–73
Da Vinci Code, The 141, 150–51, 155–56 – ~ roles 12, 139, 173, 177, 240–42,
DeConick, April 237–39, 250, 253 245–46, 253–54
defilement 24, 222–23, 225, 228, 310 – and sexual difference 235–36, 240, 243,
– see also purity; virginity 249, 253–54
Dio Cassius 336, 376–77 – in Valentinian 235–36, 239
Docetism 49–54, 58–65, 68–69 Gnosticism 4–5, 95–97, 101–3, 139,
drama, Greek 182–83 236–37, 345, 361–62
drone strikes 423–29 – see also alienation toward the world,
dualism 49, 247, 353–55, 365 mythologically founded
– see also flesh of Jesus Gnosticism, anti- 73–74, 88
Duff, Paul 39, 45 – see also 2 Clement 14
Dunderberg, Ismo 238–39, 242 God as husband 198–202
dyadic pairs 239, 244, 247, 251 Gospel of Jesus’ Wife 150, 155
– see also aeons of the Fullness Gospel of Peter, see Peter, Gospel of
Gospel of Thomas, see Thomas, Gospel of
Eileithyias, cult of 175–76 Grenfell, Bernard 394, 407, 409–10
ekklesia 10, 37, 74–77, 83, 87–91, 284–85
– see also 2 Clement 14 halakhah 13, 257–60, 263–67, 269,
embryology 242, 244–45, 250–51 273–74
– see also seed Halbwachs, Maurice 285–86
eucharist 215, 232, 246, 320 hands, washing of 20–21, 23, 25–29,
Euripides 174, 386, 411 31
Eusebius of Caesarea 2, 61–62, 191 handwriting of ancient manuscripts
Eve 167, 215–19, 225, 231–32 392–94, 396–99, 402, 404–5, 408–9,
– see also Adam; Cain; Paradise 411–12
Harrill, J. Albert 383–84
fantasy (psychoanalytic notion of) Hermas, Shepherd of, see Shepherd of
135–36, 143–48, 154–55 Hermas
– see also solidarity, fantasy of homosexuality 13, 257–58, 266–74
femaleness 236, 252, 262, 379, 388 – see also orientation, sexual
– see also maleness Hooker, Morna 21–23, 28
feminist scholarship 13, 138, 141–42, 151, Hunt, Arthur 394, 407–10
155, 273–74 Hurtado, Larry 403–4
 General Index 439
Ignatius of Antioch 10, 39, 45–46, 49–50, – The Gospel of Mary of Magdala 3–4,
52–54 141, 150, 405
In Memory of Her, see Schüssler Fiorenza, – Searching the Scriptures 9, 139, 141
Elisabeth – What is Gnosticism? 4, 9, 139, 150,
incest 385, 388 345–46
– see also Oedipus – “Which Early Christianity?” 1, 114,
Irenaeus of Lyons 54–58, 60–62, 66–68, 413–14
235, 237–39, 246–51 Kingsland, William 355–37, 359–60
– “Great Account” 240–46 koinon 307–9
– Against Heresies 62, 88, 235, 237, 240 – see also association, voluntary
Isaiah, Book of 10, 28–31, 35, 37–38, Kraemer, Ross Shepard 138, 147–48
40–41 kyriocentricity 283–85, 287–88, 290,
293–95
James, First Apocalypse of 96, 98, 104 – see also androcentricity
Jerome 63, 122, 291
Jesus Lazarus 160–61, 164–66
– criticism of Pharisees 21–24, 28–33, Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons
164 369–70, 373, 378–82, 387–89
– flesh of 52–54, 63–64, 68 – see also Blandina; slavery; torture
– as Messiah 11, 116, 119–25, 127, 161, Leviticus 10, 20, 23–25, 31, 33, 320, 401
164–65, 169 libraries in antiquity 406–9
– suffering of 53–58, 60–61, 64–65, Lieu, Judith 66–67, 280
68–69, 245, 370 literacy in antiquity 13, 303–6, 320–21,
Job, Testament of 173, 185, 191 405, 413
John of Patmos 35–36, 38–41 Livy 329, 333–35, 402
John, Acts of 10, 64–65, 408
John, Apocryphon of 4, 96–97, 99, 114, male-female complementarity 242–43,
135 248–54
– see also John, Secret Revelation of maleness 252, 262, 267–69, 271, 273–74
John, Gospel of 52, 159–69, 215, 395, – see also femaleness
401–2, 409 malestream 282–83, 285, 287, 293–94
John, Secret Revelation of 4, 253, 354, Mansel, Henry Longueville 354–55
362 Marcion 10, 54, 58–60, 62–64, 68
– see also John, Apocryphon of Marcus Aurelius 381–82
Josephus 180, 336 Marcus, Joel 19–20, 22–23, 26–27, 30–32
jouissance 146–48, 152, 155 marriage 62–63, 197–207, 211, 213–14,
Judaism, Messianic 113, 116–20, 127–28, 216–21, 225–32
292 – see also bridal chamber; remarriage
Judas, Gospel of 4, 65–66, 345 Martha (of Bethany) 11, 159–61, 164–66
martyrdom 9, 14, 114, 370–71, 378–83,
King, Karen 388–89, 406
– works of 3–4, 8–9 – see also Blandina; slavery; torture
– career 137–42 Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas 147,
– contribution to early Christian his- 371
toriography 279–80, 296–97, 391 Mary (of Bethany) 11, 159, 164–66
– on “Gnosticism” definition 51, 95, 213 Mary Magdalene 8, 139–48, 155, 159–61,
– Gospel of Jesus’ Wife 150–51 167–69, 392, 432
– on Gospel of Mary 100–1, 139–42 Mary, Gospel of 103–9, 144–45
440 General Index

– composition of 394–99 patriarchy 149, 236, 258–61, 264–65

– discovery of 362, 392–94, 409–11 – see also androcentricity, misogyny
– format of 400–5 Paul, Apocalypse of 107–8
– “gnostic” labeling of 95–103, 110 Pausanias 12, 175–76
– Karen King’s analysis of 139–40, 345, Perpetua and Felicitas, see Martyrdom of
391–92 Perpetua and Felicitas
McGuire, Anne 236–37, 242 Peter, Acts of 65, 362
Mead, G. R. S. 256, 262 Peter, Gospel of 10, 54, 61–62, 65
Miriam (biblical figure) 83–85 Peter, Revelation of 56–58, 66
Mishnah, women in 257–59 phantasy, see fantasy
misogyny 148, 258–61, 264, 294 Pharisees, Jesus’ criticism of 21–24,
– see also androcentricity; patriarchy 28–33, 164
Moses 22, 25, 27–28, 181, 183, 245 Philip, Gospel of 65, 141, 213–16, 220–22
mother, relationship with 147–48 Philo of Alexandria 59–60, 173–75,180–
Moxnes, Halvor 85–87 84, 190–91, 354–55
Pistis Sophia 356–57, 359, 361, 363, 392
Nag Hammadi texts 4–5, 114, 135, 139, Plato 49, 59, 174, 222, 230, 345, 411
236, 345–46 Plutarch 12, 176
– history and discovery of 50, 241, Polycarp 61–62, 207
361–62 Pratscher, Wilhelm 73–75, 88
New Jerusalem 10, 35, 41–42 priestesses 173–76, 181, 197–98, 205–9,
– see also Revelation, Book of 211
nomina sacra 394–96 Prigent, Pierre 35, 41–42, 44
non-evident being (NEB) 303–5, 307–11, Ptolemy 238, 240–41, 245
313, 316–17, 319 purity 20–28, 31–33, 39, 209, 309–13
nudity 64, 373, 383, 431 – see also defilement; virginity

oaths 312–14, 318, 326–33, 337–41 rabbinics 257, 259, 261–62, 265, 273
– see also binding together Refutation of All Heresies 50, 54–55, 58
Obama, Barack 428–29 remarriage 199–202, 204–6, 208
occultism 347, 361–63 – see also marriage; widowhood
Oedipus 146, 385 reproduction 241–42, 244, 247–48,
– see also incest 250–52
ordination of women 142, 289–90 Revelation of Peter, see Peter, Revelation of
orientation, sexual 266–71 Revelation, Book of 35, 40–41, 43–46
– see also homosexuality – see also New Jerusalem
Origen 4, 356–57, 408 Roberts, Colin 392–94, 397
orthodoxy 9, 139, 236–37, 249, 348, 362 Rouse, Mary and Richard 391–92, 394,
– relation to heresy 7, 95, 100, 115–16, 400
122, 280, 413
otherness 6, 259, 287, 430 Samaritan woman 11, 160, 163–64
Satan, synagogue of 35–36, 38–41, 43–46
Pagels, Elaine 4, 45, 236–37 Scarry, Elaine 372, 425
pain 40, 61, 149, 372, 378, 425 – see also pain; torture
– see also Scarry, Elaine; torture Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth 43, 138–39,
Paradise 214–18 149, 159, 281–83, 285, 290
– see also Adam; Eve Scott, Joan Wallach 143–45, 153–55
Parsons, Peter J. 394–97 – see also fantasy
 General Index 441
Second Discourse of the Great Seth – see also Theosophical Society
56–58, 66–68 Therapeutrides 173, 180–84, 190–91
Sedgwick, Eve 149, 152 Thomas, Gospel of 98–99, 402, 405–6,
seed 227, 241–42, 244, 247–48, 251 408, 412–13
– see also embryology Thomassen, Einar 238–39, 246, 248, 251
Seth, Second Discourse of the Great, see torture 8–9, 369–71, 378–80, 382–89, 425
Second Discourse of the Great Seth – see also Blandina; Letter of the Churches
sexual difference 140–41, 235–36, 240, of Vienne and Lyons; martyrdom; pain;
242–43, 249, 253–54 slavery
Shepherd of Hermas 74, 76, 78–87, 89–91, – Roman theory of 372–78
403 Tripartite Tractate 61, 235, 237–40, 246,
Similitude 5 76, 78–84, 89, 91 249–51
Simon of Cyrene 51, 55–58 Tuckett, Christopher 73, 78, 83, 98
slavery (in antiquity) 369–74, 387–88
– see also Blandina; Letter of the Churches Valentinian Exposition, A 12, 235,
of Vienne and Lyons; torture 238–40, 246–48, 251
solidarity, fantasy of 11, 146, 150, 153, 155 Valentinianism 237–40, 253–54
– see also fantasy Valentinus 54, 59–61, 63–64, 238, 240,
Song of Songs 167–69 360
soul, ascent of the 97–99, 103–9, 140 Virginity 12, 189, 198, 202, 206–7, 222–23
spiritualism 346–47, 349–54, 363–66 – see also celibacy; chastity; defilement;
suffering of Jesus 53–58, 60–61, 64–65, purity
68–69, 245, 370 voluntary association, see association,
synagogue of Satan, see Satan, synagogue voluntary
of
washing of hands 20–21, 23, 25–29, 31
Talmud 257–58, 260–63, 265–66 widowhood
Taussig, Hal 79–81, 283, 296 – see also remarriage; Tertullian
Tchacos Codex 10, 95, 103 – remarriage in 202–5
terrorism 120, 424, 427–28 – in Tertullian 197–202, 206–11
Tertullian of Carthage 58–60, 66–68, Wilhite, David 202–3, 340–41
197–98, 205–10, 240, 325–27, 336–42 Williams, Michael 213, 220, 236, 253
– see also marriage; widowhood Wisdom 238–39, 242–45, 247–48, 253–54
– on marriage and widowhood 197–205, Wisdom of Jesus Christ 96, 99, 412
210–12
Testament of Job, see Job, Testament of Yaldaboath 96, 102
Thecla, Acts of 147–48 Yeshua 113, 115, 118–19, 126–27
Theosophical Society 347, 349, 356, 363 – see also Jesus
– see also theosophy
theosophy 345–51, 353, 356–59, 364 Zimmerman, George 428–29