Toto

Holy Misogyny: Why the Sex and Gender Conflicts in the Early Church Still Matter by April D. DeConick

to be published in September.

The cover is available on her blog

The book was previously titled Sex and the Serpent

Roger Pearse

These Christians just don't get it, do they? Why on earth don't they just conform to the demands that we make up, just like everyone else does?

Together with the other members of the secret world elite *, I intend to make demands animal equality 'normal' next, just to show our power by making people endorse what they would previously have considered horrible and disgusting. What's the betting these Christian scum don't endorse animal marriage either?

Kill them all. It's the only language they understand.

I had that Nero Caesar in the back of the cab once.

All the best,

Roger Pearse
* Drat, I'm not supposed to mention that. OK, the "formerly secret world elite". Applications welcome (but only from people who are young, attractive, blond, and above all, female).

Iskander

stephan huller

“Blessed be God King of the universe that Thou has not made me a woman.”

PhilosopherJay

Hi Roger,

We're in agreement.
Yeah, these damn pagan women, let them take off their veils, and the next thing you know, they want to be educated and speak. Well, we taught Hypatia what happens to uppity women who go against Divine doctrine and speak their mind. They get skinned alive with potsherds. Yeah, you let them talk and teach in public and the next thing you know they want to wear men's clothing. Well, we taught Joan of Arc what happens when you go against the word of God and wear men's clothing. Burn the witch at the stake. That's the way Christians deal with all these Godless heathen devil women who imagine they're not sinners and the originators of all sin.

stephan huller

Actually I wasn't going to say anything but I actually really do support Roger Pearse. I don't want to go beyond that. I have a wonderful wife so I have to be careful what I say. But it really comes down to the question of whether modernism is a symptom of strength or decline. I happen to have been very influenced by Nietzsche growing up so I can't help but accept the second proposition. As such I mourn the decline of our culture because it was really was one of the best in human history. At the same time I can't think of any way to cure the malady. There is an inescapable logic to decadence. It's like cancer. You can't really argue against it. It's just there. Nevertheless celebrating the contagion as a great thing or a liberating cultural force is laughable. We also can't blame women for this one. It's we men who became systematically emasculated by the very rewards of being civilized. We did it to ourselves and systematically corrupted the very culture which set us free.

youngalexander

Does it? What the devil does DeConick's
"the female was systematically erased from the Christian tradition"
have to do with modernism?

Only marginally more astounding than Roger's
"just conform to the demands that we make up".

The whole plurry thing is 'just made up'. Modernisation is what keeps it going.

Us A's look on bemused while the Catholics refuse female priesthood & the Anglicans split because of it. Meanwhile the Muslims ...

As for being emasculated, cannot say that I have noticed much of that??

stephan huller

Because it's like the birther controversy in the united states. We focus on these things because there is some special interest group complaining and making a stink about something which isn't really that important and whose significance is blown out of proportion because it serves that group politically.

Christianity developed from Judaism. Judaism like most Middle Eastern religions assumes that women are the inferior sex. How far could earliest Christianity have challenged these basic assumptions? So Jesus talked to a broad on the side of the street. These people want to turn this into something political in contemporary society far beyond the original significance in ancient society.

God was still a man, he had a son there was no daughter of God or goddess in earliest Christianity. Women still had to unsex themselves like Lady MacBeth to get into heaven. Women were still viewed as inferior in earliest Christianity. There's no getting around any of this. It might not have been as bad as the stuff you read in Judaism and later in Islam. But let's get real - no Jewish man is going to worship a goddess because they all had overbearing mothers and overbearing wives. Religion was just an escape from the harsh reality of daily familial life.

stephan huller

And Jewish men probably didn't find cultic religious prostitution interesting because the secular variety was more efficient.

avi

My question regards her Nag Hammadi, Coptic sources. How does she correlate observations derived from those presumed second century codices, (i.e. the "old" Christian tradition") with our currently extant, most ancient, tenth century, copy of a copy, of someone's (presumed original) Greek version of the same "original text"?

Someone, somewhere, in the second century, writing in Greek, created a document. Someone else, presumably, at a later date, supposedly, translated this document into Coptic. Someone else, unknown decades later, buried the Coptic versions in a jar in the Egyptian desert, near the Nile River. Some other person, centuries later, found the original Greek text objectionable, or unfashionable, and therefore changed that text, retaining the Greek language.....

In order to write, authoritatively, that the oldest manuscripts indicate xyz, but subsequent versions of the same document, reveal, contrarily abc, suggesting erasure/modification/interpolation, doesn't one require more confidence in the authenticity of both sets of papyrus than we have today?

Do we even possess Greek manuscripts supposedly representing Gnostic writings by or about Valentinus, for example? So far as I am aware, all we posssess, for most of those earliest "Christians", are documents by "patristic" authors seeking to refute the arguments of those Gnostic "heretics", ostensibly refuting, in other words, the Coptic translations found at Nag Hammadi.

In my uneducated opinion, having read not so much as one word of the translations of the Coptic documents, it is improbable that one can accurately assert a more liberal view of women's role in the early church, based upon these Coptic translations of Gnostic thought. It seems more likely that one could be uncovering philosophy and thought of Jews and Greeks living in ancient Alexandria, rather than practice among nascent Christians residing in Rome or Jerusalem, in the same era--i.e. the very people who found Valentinus' texts (e.g.) objectionable.

avi