A preserved ancient scroll, written in Greek

Since my last post, My Man Paul: Part One, I’ve gone on reading, and have added to my Pauline Studies bibliography a couple of websites (beliefnet.com and cbmw.org) and three books.. In 2012 the (wonderfully-named) Pheme Perkins wrote commentary on “First Corinthians” for a (also wonderfully-named) series Paidiea on the New Testament. While prowling around the basement stacks of the library at St Peter’s Benedictine Abbey in Muenster, Saskatchewan, I found 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. (1995). Finally, a friend’s Comment on my post led me to French author Emmanuel Carrère‘s The Kingdom, a truly genre-defying  recapitulation of Paul through his Letters and Luke’s Acts of the Apostles.

Thus fortified, I began reading Paul, focussing on two of the authentic Letters – Galatians and First Corinthians – whose chapters and verses were most often cited by the authors I was consulting. But across so many of the Letters it is already obvious that, in spite of strict, not to say harsh, demarcation of men’s and women’s social roles in Greco-Roman society, in the budding, proto-Christian communities that Paul co-founded, visited and corresponded with, a remarkable number of women were prominent.

Roman matron

Really, this is not to be wondered at, given the status of the materfamilias who exercised authority in the very households, “house churches,” where Paul addressed their members. Except for the cloistered girls and women of the upper classes, women – free persons as well as slaves – were also trades- and sales people who laboured alongside men. Pheme Perkins cites contemporary texts in which women are mentioned in trades having to do with textiles and food or as lessees of pottery shops and vineyards (often inherited). For instance, this delightful tombstone inscription: “I worked with my hands. I was a thrifty woman, I, Nicarete, who lie here.”

Paul, Aquila and Priscilla at work

And here is Paul (Acts 16) who, in Philippi, northeastern Greece, on his way to Thessalonica, sits down outside the city gates on a Sabbath day (there is no synagogue in Philippi) and speaks to the women who have gathered there for that very purpose. He names Lydia, “a seller of purple goods, who was a worshiper of God,” whom he baptized along with her household and whose hospitality he accepts. In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère imagines Lydia “as the kind of hostess who’s both generous and tyrannical, who always wants to do everything herself” and always cooks too much for the agape (communal) feast. And who can forget, once having met her in Acts 18:3, Priscilla, who along with her husband Aquila and apostle Paul, set up shop as tent-maker and leather-worker in Corinth?

St Phoebe the Deaconess

Across the Letters (those authentic as well as disputed),  the women step out in front of the crowd. I had gone in search for “women named in Paul’s Epistles” on the internet and found what I was looking for in the post, “Women in the Pauline Mission.” Chloe, Mary, Junia, “outstanding among the apostles,” Tryphena and Tryphosa, “women who work hard in the Lord,” Persis, Lucilla, Euodia, Syntyche, “co-workers,” Nympha and her “church house,” Apphia, Claudia, Livia, Priscilla, and Phoebe: “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon [or minister] of the church at Cenchreae, so that you may welcome her in the Lord as is fitting for the saints, and help her in whatever she may require from you, for she has been a benefactor of many and of myself as well.” (Rom 16:1-2)

Before I get too carried away, in the same article I read that of all the persons mentioned in the Letters in relation to the Pauline mission, 82% are men and 18% women. The article (author unnamed) is posted by the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, so I feel I know where this is going:

“As in Old and New Testament times, what is to determine women’s roles is not the dictates of contemporary culture but the designs of God. God’s plan is consistent from the time of creation to the age of the church, and from his pattern for the family to that of God’s ‘household.'”

But my “mission” is simpler: is there something in Paul to give me spiritual, ethical and creative sustenance as a woman in the 21st century?

The women in Paul’s letters – inside their communities – had already crossed boundaries when, sometimes independently of their husbands or fathers, they had been baptized “into Christ” and then assumed leadership roles, some more modest than others (from co-workers to outstanding among the apostles). These roles may have required of them to bear the same apostolic burden as Paul himself, “in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food,”  [2Cor 11:27] in cold and nakedness, wrapped in a meagre cloak. These hardships brought their own reward however: such women manifested “male virtues of courage, justice and self-mastery,” according to Karen Jo Torjesen. From his Letters, we know that Paul simply assumed that such bold women could speak authoritatively in worship services, lead local churches and travel as evangelists. [beliefnet.com] 

In its earliest formations, Torjesen understands the church as a social movement – she means its informality, “often counter-cultural in tone” and its flexibility in bringing women, slaves and artisans into its leadership. This strikes me as too idealized and categorical an assertion. But something had happened to these women, Phoebe and Priscilla, Junia and Lydia and the rest of them –  to embolden them, to bring them out from under the feminine virtues of the patriarchy,  chastity, silence and obedience, and into gender-bending adventure in the new communities of the followers of Paul’s Risen Lord.

I find this something in the second earliest of the Letters, to the Galatians (1Thessalonians is the earliest), written sometime between the late 40s and early 50s. (By comparison, most scholars date Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, at AD 65-75.) I find it in the baptismal formula, which has never stopped humbling me with its profound implications for human freedom. Yes, I know, I have been cautioned against reading Paul through the lens of “contemporary culture” (read: feminism) but, instructed as I may be in the realities of Paul’s historical context, I am the heir of twentieth-century Ukrainian Orthodoxy in western Canada in whose churches no female is allowed to contaminate the Sanctuary.

²⁷ For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. ²⁸ There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. [KJV]

Vats of ink have been used up in commentary about these two verses from Galatians chapter three. David Boyarin, author of A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, reads all of the (authenticated) Letters as the “spiritual autobiography of a first-century Jew” and as a “cultural critic” whose writings are “an extremely precious document for Jewish Studies.” As Christians, the biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan and authors of The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon, read him as evoking a radical equality among the baptized whose transfigured life commits them to “the life principle that when you come into the Christian community you are equal to one another in that community.” (My italics. As we shall see, that limitation on the writ of radical equality had profound implications for later generations.)

Early Christian martyrdom

An aside: When I was writing Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium, in which I follow the fortunes of St Demetrius Great Martyr of Thessalonica, I had come up against a conundrum: how to write about a martyr as the Church teaches his life (hagiography) or as scholars have documented him, an obscure Deacon in the Roman outpost of Sirmium (now in Serbia)? When I read that Paul had preached to Thessalonians, I took a creative decision that made Demetrius a slave in a pagan household in Thessalonica who had been secretly baptized “in Christ” and who then resolved to live according to Paul’s teachings to the Thessalonians 300 years earlier: “Live in peace with one another….encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with everyone. See that no one repays another with evil for evil, but always seek after that which is good for one another and for all people. Rejoice always.” [1 Thessalonians 5:12-25] My Demetrius is martyred, but namelessly, and thrown outside the city gates, his body unclaimed.

I see the “Jewish cultural critic” in this vision of transformative identity (“neither Jew nor Greek”) and social status (“neither slave nor free”). But what is promised for me, what “justice of equality” (Borg and Crossan) accrues to me in a new identity – the new creature that I am “in Christ” – neither male nor female?

The gyneceum

I am being promised a new human nature beyond or outside the hierarchy of gender, beyond difference in fact (ethnic, social, gendered), a dissolved femaleness (wife, mother) and an emerged, well, celibacy. There is a logic here: Daniel Boyarin argues that it is heterosexuality (penetration, conception, parturition) that produces the gendered female body and the only real equality between men and women is in the realm of “spiritual experience” beyond the body. (For me this poses the question: is a celibate woman female?) This is the realm of women’s freedom, unsubordinated to reproductive (hetero)sexuality and the gynaeceum, and free to be co-workers with Paul.    

Paul and Thecla

Take Thecla in the noncanonical, possibly Gnostic, Acts of Paul and Thecla “which celebrates the story of a woman converted by Paul who rejects her fiancé, adopts men’s clothing, and travels as an evangelist. Persecuted by the agents of family and state, she is vindicated by God through miraculous protection from harm. Paul reappears at the end of the story to affirm her role and commission her to preach in her hometown.” [beliefnet.com]

Saint Catherine of Siena

(Or, from the western Christian tradition, Catherine of Siena, (1347 – 1380), saint, mystic, Doctor of the Church, whose biography I followed briefly when on retreat at St. Peter’s Abbey. At lunch we remained silent (except for the slurping of soup) while Br. Kurt, in dramatic, stentorian tones, read from a biography. “Caterina Benincasa was born in Siena, the last of 25 children of the wealthy wool-dyer Jacopo Benincasa and Lapa di Puccio dé Piacenti. At the age of six, Catherine received her first vision, near the Church of San Domenico. From this moment onwards the child began to follow a path of devotion, taking the oath of chastity only a year later. After initial resistance from her family, eventually her father gave in and left Catherine to follow her inclinations. In 1363, at just 15 years of age, Catherine donned the black cloak of the Dominican Tertiary sisters.”

Dear Reader, she never married. 

Coming next: Part Three (final installment of My Man Paul posts): The Vexatious Veil

Tossed into this anti-Pauline polemic (although not necessarily a feminist issue) was the charge that Paul had deformed the message of the plain-spoken egalitarian Jew from Galilee by institutionalizing the early Christian communities as hierarchical, doctrinaire and, did I mention, misogynist centres of power.

I remember reading selected texts that “proved” the veracity of these charges and my spirit writhed under their abusive assault.

But I moved on, read feminist literature on other topics – wages for housework, Marx and feminism, rape and pornography, race and “difference,” the male gaze, the real meaning of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. And by not attending any longer any church of any denomination, I spared myself the particular torments of instruction in the Epistles of St Paul.

The decades passed. Then in 2001, as a result of my adventure with the Byzantine saint Demetrius (it would eventually produce my book, Prodigal Daughter) I was considering the value of my heritage in the Orthodox Church. I read, for example, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by the Classical historian Charles Freeman. Fellow Classicist Mary Beard summarized his argument in a review in the British paper, The Independent, as that “the authority of the church and its political supporters destroyed ‘the tradition of rational thought’ that was among the major achievements of the classical world.”

Normally, I would have nodded in full agreement with Freeman’s grievance about the anti-intellectualism of “irrational” religious faith, but this time, much to my surprise, I found myself upturned by it. Knowing something now of the Eastern Mind of Byzantium and Orthodoxy and being of some sympathy with it, I needed to be reassured that “faith” and “reason” were not necessarily mutually exclusive. As a writer of nonfiction in particular, I had a simple question to put to a priest/reverend/pastor: Why should I, a writer, whose stock in trade is my brain and a certain degree of  impertinence, succumb to a religious faith that arguably despises my intelligence?

I took that, rather artless, question to a friend of a friend, an Anglican priest in Edmonton, who leaped from his chair to seize a Bible and read to me from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” (Or even better, as I would later read in David Bentley Hart’s translation, “And do not be configured to this age, but be transformed by renewal of the intellect.”) Paul wrote that? I was at once disbelieving and heartened. Later I would come ’round to consider the meaning of the rest of his sentence but at that moment in the chancery of an Anglican church I sat straight upright in the knowledge that the deplorable apostle Paul, in the first decades after the death of Jesus, had reassured me of the value of my “intellect” in the exercise of whatever modicum of Christian faith I might eventually acquire. (Mark 9:24 “I have faith; help my faithlessness.” Hart trans.)

And so began my tutorship in the meaning of the Epistles of St Paul, in the course of which I have nevertheless remained an unshakeable feminist.

I could be accused of having read very selectively about Paul but I plead the necessity of having to make choices among the myriad texts that have been written on the subject. I have bought books as I have come upon them, and some titles and subtitles have jumped out at me as revising my earlier feminist antipathy. Here are some titles in my library: A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity by Daniel Boyarin; First and Second Corinthians: An Orthodox Bible Study by Fr. Lawrence Farley; What Paul Meant by (Catholic and Classicist) Garry Wills; Meeting God in Paul by former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams; Paul: The Mind of the Apostle by English writer and ex-believer A.N. Wilson; The First Paul: Reclaiming the radical visionary behind the Church’s conservative icon by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan; and Paul: A Very Short Introduction by E.P. Sanders. It was of course important to me that I read women writers and scholars on the subject. A “leading historian of antiquity,” Paula Fredriksen, wrote Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle; St. Paul, the Misunderstood Apostle by English writer and historian of comparative religion Karen Armstrong; and Paul: A Short Introduction by professor of Divinity, Morna D. Hooker. I have a couple of whimsical texts that I keep: written in 1957 by a British writer, H.K. Luce, “St Paul,” as part of a series, Lives to Remember I retrieved from a box of discards ; and, found in a religious goods shop in Thessalonica, St Paul’s Journeys to Greece and Cyprus by a Greek academic, A.J. Delicostopoulos.

And, because she has a lot to say about the Epistles (and was influenced by the  redoubtable feminist theologian, Mary Daly, who was dismissed for refusing to allow men to enroll in her classes at Boston College. ), Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins.

Whew.

Was it Caravaggio’s monumental painting, Conversion of St. Paul, that was the first narrative that I “read” of the journey of Saul, persecutor of Christians, on the road to Damascus to become Paul? If so, it was a disappointment to learn, in Acts 9:3-4, that there was no horse on the road to Damascus but only a mighty flash of light that threw Saul off his feet to lie prostrate on the ground, and a voice from within the light: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He was not so much blinded by the light as simply unable to see anything within its dazzling blaze. Thus, in about the year 33CE, Saul became Paul whom God had”set apart from birth,”  had chosen to reveal his Son to him and “through me in order that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles.” (Gal 1: 16) And so began his extraordinary travels around the Roman world of the eastern Mediterranean – Philippi, Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, Galatea – to establish or assist communities of fledgling Christians, to encourage, exhort, mediate, and above all to preach to them – and write letters – “the obedience of faith in Christ Jesus.” In his letter to the Galatians,  he rang the changes on the gifts of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness and self-control.” (Gal 5:22) It would prove to be a winning formula in a world of Imperial brutishness and profligacy.

I soon recognized Paul in icons as the balding, brow-furrowed one among the Apostles, said to have been bow-legged and unprepossessing in looks. He was a Greek-speaking urbanite from Tarsus, in the Roman province of Cilicia with the rights of a Roman citizen, and it is in Rome that he disappears from the record, perhaps executed, that is martyred, in a Roman prison.

And so I began to read. Fortuitously, even before I had read the Epistles in the Orthodox Study Bible  (King James Revised), I had picked up Borg’s and Crossan’s The First Paul and learned there are in fact three Pauls: the historical and radical Paul of letters by him; those by the conservative “Paul”, written by faithful followers after his death; and the reactionary, pseudo-Paul, the author(s) of letters  issued a generation or two after Paul in a very different world where Christians were martyred in successive persecutions in the dying days of the pagan Empire. (They would finally cease when Emperor Constantine issued an edict of toleration in 313 CE.) And then there are the obvious-to-scholars interpolated fragments of text, including those notorious teachings that we feminists cited as “evidence” of Paul’s misogyny. According to David Bentley Hart in a note about his translation of the New Testament, “the best critical scholarship regards [these] as a later and rather maladroit interpolation…almost certainly spurious.”

Well, then: fortified by this rather sensational information (I already felt like a cat that had been set among the pigeons) I was ready to read the Letters/Epistles themselves. I knew that, although the authorized Bible made no distinction among the letters as to authorship (they are all “by Paul”), I was now informed that there was only one authentic Paul and this is the one I would spend most time with.

16 Now I commend to you our sister Phoebe, who is also a minister [diakonos] of the assembly in Cenchrae, 2 that you may welcome her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the holy ones, and assist her regarding whatever thing she may need from you; for she has been a leader [prostatis] of many, myself included.

Thus spake none other than St Paul, in a Letter to the Romans. He spake also of Priscilla, Mariam, Jounia, Tryphania, Tryphosa, Persis and Julia, “who have labored in the Lord.” Of Jounia he added that  she was “of note among the apostles.” Apostle! The highest title of authority and honour in the early church.  The 4th century theologian and archbishop of Constantinople,  St John Chrysostom, said of his friend and correspondent,  the abbess and deaconess Olympias, that he was honoured as a man “that there are such women among us.” These were women neither silent nor submissive in those early assemblies whose leadership was acknowledged….and then are heard from no more. 

But, when I was reading about the history of Byzantium and the early church (research for The Prodigal Daughter) , I came across their descendants – from the late 4th to late 7th centuries – there, in the churches of Constantinople, their ordination as deaconesses provided for by liturgical manuals and analogous to the rite for male deacons. They presented themselves at the altar, bent their heads for the Bishop’s hands, received the prayers of consecration, and received communion. At the time of Emperor Justinian in the 6th century,  the staff of St Sophia consisted of sixty priests, one hundred deacons, forty deaconesses and ninety subdeacons. As late as the 12th century, Emperor Alexis I Comnenos concerned himself that “the work of the deaconesses be carefully organized” in the Church of St Paul, according to his daughter-biographer, Anna Comnena.

And so began my brief life as a fantasist of Byzantium: a deaconess in the great church, Hagia Sophia [Holy Wisdom], vested in embroidered tunic and orarion (stole), making  the circuit of its stupendous interior while I cense all the icons, clouds of burning frankincense billowing around me as I swing the gold censer in a fragrant arc. Then I step into the sanctuary, escorted by candle-bearers and fan-bearers and more incense, to hand the priest the bread for communion and  pour warm water into the chalice of wine for communion. The Divine Liturgy begins and I chant the long petitions of the Litanies, read the Gospel as worshippers crowd around me, help distribute communion, command the people, “Let us bow our heads to the Lord,” and dismiss them: “Let us go forth in peace.”

(Not so fast, Myrna.)

I wrote my book, became a member of the parish of St Elias Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Edmonton, and had entirely forgotten my fantasy until I wandered into a meeting of the St Phoebe Center for the History of the Deaconess one winter afternoon in New York City in 2014. It was their Women and Diaconal Ministry conference and I sat enthralled as I heard a succession of Orthodox women – a nun, a tonsured chanter, a couple of PhDs, a sophomore, a parish council president – speak of the possibilities of a revived “apostolic order of deaconesses” in the 21st century.

Never mind that the order disappeared  in the eastern church by the 12th century (in part because of a theological dictum that forbade women to approach the altar and carry out any service there during menstruation). Never mind that the role of deaconess never did include any of my fantasy: we did not fan the Holy Gifts nor distribute them to laity, we did not wear that lovely tunic – only the stole – nor participate in liturgical processions. We Orthodox have a long memory. For more than a thousand years deaconesses did serve, at adult baptisms, visiting the bedridden, chanting Matins, as educators. And here were women speaking of what deaconesses could do if the Order were restored (a petition, by the way, made of the Russian Orthodox Church back in 1855 by the sister of Tsar Nicholas I, of all people). Chaplaincy, spiritual direction, Ministry of the Word, Ministry of Philanthropic Outreach. A woman “learned Orthodoxy” by attending Liturgy and then joining the chanters in an Antiochian church. Another said that “as an ordained deacon I would have the Bishop’s blessing for what I already do: serve the poor in my neighbourhood. The deacon is the Samaritan woman at the well, the woman with the flow of blood, the Myrrh-Bearers at the tomb, and Phoebe.” A chaplain described the experience of praying the Lord’s Prayer over a woman in such pain that she could not  stop moving. “After the prayer, she fell asleep.” A nun gives spiritual direction to young people who approach her at the monastery, “becoming open to the transcendent.”

And so it went. What’s not to love about such women and their desire?

Yet they are a scandal to the Church.

I shall leave aside the crippling misogyny of early Church apologists such as Tertullian of Carthage – “Woman is a temple built over a sewer” – and repress the memory of my indignation when, as a secular feminist, I first encountered such texts, in order rather to take up the issue of current hostility to the idea of a revived female diaconate. The women and men of the St Phoebe Center are serious scholars who challenge “distortions and misrepresentations of the historical record,” “fallacies,” “detractors,” and “errors.” They retaliate by citing Byzantine traditions, 8th century Codeces, Ecumenical Councils, Canons,  Apostolic Constitutions, just to mention one of their published papers.They reference recommendations in 1976, 1980, 1988, 1997, 1999 and 2016 that call for” full restoration of the order of women deacons.”

It would not be correct to say they are met with resounding silence: they are met with vociferous argument. Holy Tradition has no place for deaconesses; God’s intended  “natural order of male and female” requires female subordination to men; the very idea is a plot by secular feminists to carry Orthodoxy down the slippery slope of female ordination, after which come acceptance of gay marriage, calling God “She,” ordaining LGBTQ priests and… schism. After all, look at those Anglicans and Protestants: you start with women who serve  liturgically, they are cross-bearers and candle-bearers, they help distribute the bread and wine, they read the Epistles, and before you know it they’re ordained deacons, then priests, then bishops (for example, Anglican Bishop Jane Alexander of Edmonton).

In the meanwhile, our Orthodox churches are bleeding members, (male) priests, and finances. “We can do so much more as a Christian community,” writes Valerie Karras, ThD, PhD, “if we do not shackle the talents of fully half of our body, if we do not ignore the spiritual gifts which the Holy Spirit bestows on women as well as men.”

There have been times when I have been deeply grateful for the Eastern Church’s treasury of her own antiquity. I think of the fragments of third-century mystical wisdom, of desert Mothers and Fathers, of the first hymnography and Christological theology. Of the icons and festal memory of women-equal-to-the-apostles such as Mary Magdalene. All of Christianity’s first texts, first liturgies, first councils and creeds are remembered and are even part of Sunday worship. Now I ask, with increasing bewilderment and impatience, why the Church doesn’t remember its own wisdom about the equal gifts that women and men represent in church life? Talk about selective memory! Here’s St Basil the Great in the 4th century, who wrote in The Human Condition of men and women, that “the natures are alike of equal honour, the virtues are equal, the struggle equal, the judgement alike.”

Because objections raised to the revival of the Order of deaconesses may hide their authors’ misogyny behind pious reverence of  man-made “tradition,” I’d rather remember the tradition of St Gregory of Nazianzus who railed against the hypocrisy of men who lay down laws directed against women but leave themselves unscathed. (Discourse 37) 

Carrie Frederick Frost, a scholar of Orthodox theology, makes an argument, in “Women’s Gifts and the Diaconate,” familiar from suffrage movements in the early twentieth century. She writes approvingly: “Even within the context of the Church’s conviction of the essential equality of women and men, there is no sense that the Church understands women and men to be perfectly equivalent” [her emphasis]. Suffrage rights had been claimed for women on the basis of women’s “essential” difference from men: Give us a broom and we’ll sweep the Augean stables clean of men’s disorder. We have babes in our arms: we will stop wars. Women are nurturing, pacific, family-fused, tenderly sentimental creatures. Frost’s case for the female diaconate in Orthodoxy similarly rests on the “incarnational reality” of women – by which I assume she means our embodied lives as females of the species . And so we have “a different perspective on authority, its judicious use, its abuse,” and because of our lived experience, as females, of violence, abuse and assault, “a different view of child-rearing, marriage and family life.” These are the “gifts” from which the church would benefit, if only women could be “theologically and pastorally trained”  into the diaconate. I can’t help wonder if their “different perspectives” might not eventually be trained on the Church itself, as an abusive institution that upholds patriarchy at the expense of so many women’s bodies and souls.

On a happier note: in 2017, His Beatitude Patriarch Theodoros and the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Alexandria reinstituted the Order of Deaconess within the borders of the Patriarchate, the entire continent of Africa, revitalizing “a once functional, vibrant, and effectual ministry.” Note the Patriarch’s hand on the woman’s head: what’s not to love?