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

Дзвони дзвонять бам-бам-бам, Чи до школи, чи до церкви, час-час-час…The bells are ringing, ding-dang-dong, To school or to church, it’s time-time-time.

I knew how to make the sounds of each letter (Ukrainian vowels,unlike the Russian, are pronounced without variation) and I knew there were “false friends” that lurked among them: В was not “b” but “v” and Н was not “h” but “n.” But what I revelled in were the letters that arrived from another calligraphic imagination altogether. Д or “d,” Я, not a backwards R but “Ya,” Б or “b.” Further on into the Cyrillic ABCs (in Ukrainian there are 32 letters), I relished the shaping of Ш or “sh,” Щ or “shch as in fresh cheese,” Ч or “ch,” Ц or “ts,” and, most fun of all, Ж, or “zh.”

See, you can read Cyrillic too.

The fact that in Ukrainian you needed only one letter where in English – or, God help us, Polish – you needed at least two in Latin letters to make the same sound (Щ = szcz in Polish) eventually confirmed for me the wisdom of the ancestors in choosing such an efficient representation of the sounds of most Slavic speech. As a result I can read – but not necessarily understand – Russian, Belarusian, Serbian, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Bulgarian. This is handy for figuring out newspaper headlines or street names or where a bus is going. Or, in a museum cafe in Sofia, I read that the “vegetarian menu” is offered in Bulgarian as “Lenten.”

I loved drawing the letters, curlicues and whorls and slanted strokes in the cursive, long before the letters arranged themselves into discrete sound clusters and then words. So for me the written Ukrainian language was first a design, such as one could trace on an embroidered cushion. Pleasing, like the swirl of my own name written on the flyleaf of the Reader on mum’s lap: Мирося Косташ. I don’t think I thought of these letters as exotic. Private, yes, belonging to this homely place in the pool of light under the lampshade or, later, belonging to the church, including its basement (Saturday and Sunday schools) where none but hyphenated-Canadians would gather to study on weekends. Even before I could read them, I had seen the letters all my life, again in that private space of my father’s newspaper from Winnipeg, Український Голос or “Ukrainian Voice” and on the fragile airmail letters that came all the way from relatives in Джурів, Dzhuriv, in the УРСР, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. And in a crabbed kind of cuneiform (to my childish eye) on the icons in the church.

And when I went to Greece the first time, I discovered I could read that too, or make a stab at it: shop signs, bus stations, icons. Once I had sounded out the letters (and thanks also to all those “Greeks” i.e. fraternities at the university with their  ΦΔΚ and ΣΑΜ emblazoned above their porches), I was already a foot in the door of Greek script. Γ = Г, Δ = Д, Φ = Ф, Λ = Л, Π = П….easy-peasy.

(In this respect, at least, I was not as naive as the American writer, Mary Norris, who wrote recently in the New Yorker “on the pleasures of a different alphabet,” the Greek in her case. “It had never occurred to me,” she writes, “that a person could become literate in a language that was written in a different alphabet.” I do admit that I am transfixed by the obvious literacy of a person reading right to left in the pages of an Arabic book or in vertical columns of Mandarin.)

And when I went to church in Greece, I had a field day: Ecclesia! Theotokos! Episkop! Liturgia! Khristos! And then learned the exact same vocabulary in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Just so, we Ukrainian-Canadian Orthodox are instructed to refer, in English, to an eparchy (Greek) and not to a diocese (Latin), to Divine Liturgy (Liturgia), not Mass, to the Mother of God (Theotokos) rather than to the Virgin Mary. This is no mere whimsy: our Orthodox Christianity is the fruit of missions among the Slavs of emissaries from Greek-speaking Constantinople, not Latin Rome. So when the need arose for a vocabulary of Christian terms and concepts that had no Slavonic equivalent, Greek was adopted holus-bolus. For example, the names of the priest’s vestments in English: Phelonion (robe),  Epitrahilion (stole), and Epimanikia (cuffs). Or translated into tormented (to me, trying to memorize the Creed, for instance) neologisms for ” Who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified” come up with five- and seven-syllabic words. 

I could read these words, i.e. sound them out, in my Children’s Prayer Book but, until the Church decided to publish bilingual editions of the Liturgical books we used, I hadn’t the foggiest idea what a lot of the words meant. Rivnopokloniaiemyi, anyone? I memorized The Nicene Creed as a child, one ghastly sound group after another, but I had no idea what I was professing “to believe” until I read the English text. (Whether I then “believed,” is another issue.)

According to Mary Norris, “the English alphabet is descended, via the Latin, from the Greek alphabet, which, according to Herodotus, was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet. Well, that’s interesting:  that all those languages written in Latin letters (Czech, English, Turkish) should have the same root as Cyrillic letters? It seems I have been labouring under the illusion of the utter strangeness of the one to the other. And for this I account the story of how the Cyrillic alphabet came to be.

If you, dear Reader, have ever paused to wonder why this particular European alphabet is called “Cyrillic,” you could logically assume that it is attributed to the divine work of St Cyril (“Apostle to the Slavs” together with his brother, St Methodius) of whom you will have heard in order even to pose the question. They were 8th century monks and theologians from Thessalonica in northern Greece who were sent by the Byzantine emperor, Michael III in Constantinople, on a mission to Slavic Great Moravia, at the request of Prince Rastislav. The Prince requested translations of Scripture and Psalters into Slavonic and an alphabet in which to do so. The first attempt at the alphabet was not in fact Cyrillic but Glagolitic (it looks like this: Ⰳⰾⰰⰳⱁⰾⰹⱌⰰ) and nothing came of it. Rastislav’s successor did not support their work and the Slavonic Liturgy was briefly deemed heretical.

But all was not lost. Although the disciples of Cyril and Methodius were expelled from Moravia, they were welcomed by Boris, ruler of the First Bulgarian Empire, who gave them a scriptorium in Ohrid (Macedonia in former Yugoslavia) in which to work out a new, improved alphabet that would be called the Cyrillic in honour of their masters. And this one stuck. According to Wikipedia, Cyrillic is derived from the Greek capital letters script, augmented by letters from the older Glagolitic alphabet, including additional letters  for Old Slavonic sounds not found in Greek. There you have it. From Ohrid to Kyiv to…Edmonton.

Imagine,then, my aggrieved astonishment, on a visit to Venice, to hear a British travel guide address his group waiting to enter St Mark’s Basilica: “Strange as it may seem, you will see Greek in this Christian church.” Note to tour guides: San Marco is known architecturally as an example of eleventh-century Italo-Byzantine style and the mosaics in the main porch are in “a fairly pure Byzantine style.” In fact, to quote the official website of the Basilica, “essentially Byzantine in its architecture, the Basilica finds in the mosaics its natural integrating element.” And that’s where you will read that troublesome Greek.

Fast forward a decade and I was busy travelling around most of Slavic Europe, including Ukraine, in search of the history, politics and culture that explained my generation of ’68 under Communism. I had already written a book about the Sixties in Canada and now was eager to find out how my counterparts in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and, sort of, in Ukraine experienced their 1960s. The book that resulted, Bloodlines: A Journey Into Eastern Europe (1993), my first real achievement of creative nonfiction, records the rather bruising reality check I experienced as a Western feminist and New Leftist. But the journey had taken me beyond social and political realities. I realized that, since my sojourn in Two Hills, I had been excavating successive layers of personal identity and now, far from having come to bedrock in the history of Eastern Europe, I had laid bare an unsuspected deeper layer, Byzantium.

In retrospect, I can see how it crept up. As mentioned in an earlier post, I had frequently sought peace and quiet of mind and spirit in Orthodox churches and monasteries as I moved around. But these were not yet “Byzantium” to me but simply sites of cultural familiarity. Then I picked up on the jokey contrasts made by local wits between the cultures of espresso vs Turkish coffee, wine vs vodka, Austro-Hungarian vs Ottoman Turkish streetscapes, Latin vs Cyrillic alphabets, right-bank vs left-bank Danube, and the barely-disguised desire of speakers to be associated with the “European” side of the equations. Most dramatically, in Warsaw, after interviewing a young historian of modern Polish history, I walked with him along the city walls above the Vistula River, and followed his gaze as he pointed eastward, across the river to the Praga district, and to the prominent silhouette of a Russian Orthodox church, and exclaimed, “There is Asia!”

I was stunned. “Wait a minute,” I wanted to protest. “My relatives live over there, way east, and they’re not Asians,” but I caught myself on the defensive: what was this anxiety that he and I shared not to be excluded from “Europe”? More to the point, why did an Orthodox church lie outside Europe in this historian’s mind?

In 1988 I was in Kyiv, capital of the fast-receding Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, during the commemorations of the 1000th anniversary of the Christianization – or Baptism – of Kyiv and the land of Rus’ in 988. Christianity was brought to what would become the Ukrainian people not from Rome but from Constantinople. It is an oft-told tale, of how emissaries of Prince Volodymyr of Rus’, still a pagan, had ventured into the great church of Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, in Constantinople, stood under its immense dome and wondered whether they had been transported to Heaven. Their report convinced Volodymyr to establish Byzantine Christianity on his lands and it was this Baptism that we were celebrating in Kyiv with all the pomp and circumstance as could be mustered by clergy and politicos not to mention the faithful masses. It took me another decade to get started but I knew that I had to write a book about Byzantium, the matrix, the Mother Lode, the progenitrix of the spiritual and popular culture of the Ukrainians, including those emigrants 900 years later who built those onion-domed churches on the Canadian prairie and parkland.

But Byzantium is huge. A thousand years of imperial history: the Second Rome, after the fall of that other one, that endured until the Ottoman conquest in 1453. Immensely wealthy and powerful at its zenith, missionary to the southern and eastern Slavs, repository of Hellenic arts and sciences, interlocutor with neighbouring Islam, “The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles of the dancing floor,” as W. B. Yeats had it – what would be my subject?

I tell that story in Prodigal Daughter, how I stumbled on the iconographic representation of St Demetrius of Thessalonica, Great Martyr and Myrrh-streamer, martyred in 304 AD in the northern Greek city of Thessalonica, in the last of the Roman persecutions of Christians. He returned in the sixth century to defend his beloved city by performing miracles that saved it from marauding Slavic tribes. Perhaps the even greater miracle was that these same Slavs would in their turn come to venerate him as one of their own, a saint of Byzantine Christianity safeguarded for them in the Orthodox Church. I knew I had my subject: I would follow Demetrius around the Byzantine world and tell the tale of my people and his.

And so I went back to church. For purely research purposes, you understand – to immerse myself in the world of St Demetrius’s legacy as lived by Ukrainian Orthodox Christians of Canada. I started in Saskatoon (where I was writer-in-residence for a year) in Holy Trinity Cathedral, I bought my first Bible, the Orthodox Study Bible Revised King James Version, I memorized whole swatches of Liturgy, belted out the ancient hymns…and began to write my book. The book was published in 2010 and I’m still in church.