spin

If the men lopped off their jewelry, what were the christian women supposed to... umm,... lop off (or at least do...) for their faith??

And I'd recommend another reading of the texts, such as those of Tertullian, who was writing around 200 CE, Tertullian who was a Montanist, a specifically marriage disavowing group. What would you expect from him? Yet he is clear at the same time that we are dealing with abstinence, celibacy, stressing the voluntary nature of the position, rather than the lack of equipment. This stuff is fantasy, especially if there is a Jewish core to early christianity, for the notion of castration would have been abhorrent to any Jew and all the disciples were supposed to have been Jews. This is just too silly for words.

I'm sorry. Look, I know I shouldn't have read this thread. It's my fault.


spin

stephan huller

I've just answered that. Female genital mutilation (still practiced among the Copts) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_genital_cutting and possibly ritual mastectomies.

Of course these radical practices aren't necessary in western civilizations. Married women discover a loss of sensation in their clitoris quite naturally ...

spin

Umm, assuming that early christian women did do this (despite the total lack of any evidence suggesting it -- modern copts notwithstanding), what has that got to do with the efficacy of procreation? So the guys, lacking potency, can still get it up and sort of get off, but the women, well, they just had the clit chopped which doesn't stop procreation at all, just no getting off about it.

:huh:


spin

stephan huller

First things first Coptic women continue to practice ritual genital mutilation:

http://books.google.com/books?id=B_Y...coptic&f=false

"Of considerable concern to many women were the results of the research by Marie Assaad that showed that female genital mutilation (FGM) was also practised within Coptic Orthodox families, especially in rural areas."

Next Coptic priests were always considered to be experts in the art of male castration:

http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/con...ull/84/12/4324

And then there is the fact that our earliest representative of Alexandria tells us that there was an Egyptian gospel which seems to provide theological justification for these practices:

Clem. Alex. Strom. iii. 9. 64.

Whence it is with reason that after the Word had told about the End, Salome saith: Until when shall men continue to die? (Now, the Scripture speaks of man in two senses, the one that is seen, and the soul: and again, of him that is in a state of salvation, and him that is not: and sin is called the death of the soul) and it is advisedly that the Lord makes an answer: So long as women bear children.

66. And why do not they who walk by anything rather than the true rule of the Gospel go on to quote the rest of that which was said to Salome: for when she had said, 'I have done well, then, in not bearing children?' (as if childbearing were not the right thing to accept) the Lord answers and says: Every plant eat thou, but that which hath bitterness eat not.

iii. 13. 92. When Salome inquired when the things concerning which she asked should be known, the Lord said: When ye have trampled on the garment of shame, and when the two become one and the male with the female is neither male nor female. In the first place, then, we have not this saying in the four Gospels that have been delivered to us, but in that according to the Egyptians.

(The so-called Second Epistle of Clement has this, in a slightly different form, c. xii. 2: For the Lord himself being asked by some one when his kingdom should come, said: When the two shall be one, and the outside (that which is without) as the inside (that which is within), and themale with the female neither male nor female.)

There are allusions to the saying in the Apocryphal Acts, see pp. 335, 429, 450.

iii. 6. 45. The Lord said to Salome when she inquired: How long shall death prevail? 'As long as ye women bera children', not because life is an ill, and the creation evil: but as showing the sequence of nature: for in all cases birth is followed by decay.

Excerpts from Theodotus, 67. And when the Saviour says to Salome that there shall be death as long as women bear children, he did not say it as abusing birth, for that is necessary for the salvation of believers.

Strom. iii. 9. 63. But those who set themselves against God's creation because of continence, which has a fair-sounding name, quote also those words which were spoken to Salome, of which I made mention before. They are contained, I think (or I take it) in the Gospel according to the Egyptians. For they say that 'the Savior himself said: I came to destroy the works of the female'. By female he means lust: by works, birth and decay.

Hippolytus against Heresies, v. 7. "(The Naassenes) say that the soul is very hard to find and to perceive; for it does not continue in the same fashion or shape or in one emotion so that one can either describe it or comprehend its essence. And they have these various changes of the soul, set forth in the Gospel entitled according Egyptians ... [but they say that] a certain mortal soul separated from Venus (that is, from generation). But should the Moon pass into concupiscence for Endymion, and into love of her form, the nature, he says, of the higher beings requires a soul likewise. But if, he says, the mother of the gods emasculate Attis, and herself has this (person) as an object of affection, the blessed nature, he says, of the supernal and everlasting (beings) alone recalls the male power of the soul to itself.

For (the Naassene) says, there is the hermaphrodite man. According to this account of theirs, the intercourse of woman with man is demonstrated, in conformity with such teaching, to be an exceedingly wicked and filthy (practice). For, says (the Naassene), Attis has been emasculated, that is, he has passed over from the earthly parts of the nether world to the everlasting substance above, where, he says, there is neither female or male, but a new creature, a new man, which is hermaphrodite. As to where, however, they use the expression "above," I shall show when I come to the proper place (for treating this subject). But they assert that, by their account, they testify that Rhea is not absolutely isolated, but--for so I may say--the universal creature; and this they declare to be what is affirmed by the Word. " "For the invisible things of Him are seen from the creation of the world, being understood by the things that are made by Him, even His eternal power and Godhead, for the purpose of leaving them without excuse. Wherefore, knowing God, they glorified Him not as God, nor gave Him thanks; but their foolish heart was rendered vain. For, professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into images of the likeness of corruptible man, and of birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore also God gave them up unto vile af fections; for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature." What, however, the natural use is, according to them, we shall afterwards declare. "And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly"--now the expression that which is unseemly signifies, according to these (Naasseni), the first and blessed substance, figureless, the cause of all figures to those things that are moulded into shapes,--"and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet."

I think there is enough here to suggest that there was ritual castration in early Alexandrian Christianity developed from an Egyptian gospel. I strongly suspect that the first addition to Mark as described in the Mar Saba document is intimating a practice of ritual castration.

The bottom line of course isn't whether we can prove what practices second century Christians engaged in but whether it is reasonable to pursue the question of whether there might have been ritual castration practices in some early sects of Christianity. I think it is reasonable to presume that there might have been castration rituals in some sects - especially in Egypt.

The question of how widespread these practices might have been has yet to be determined. But that's the point of engaging in research, isn't it? We don't have to know the answer before we go in. Scholarship would be dreadfully boring if all the answers were predetermined.

Toto

Ancient Taboos And Gender Prejudice: Challenges For Orthodox Women And The Church (Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology, and Biblical Studies) (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Your statement that "... Coptic priests were always considered to be experts in the art of male castration" seems to be based on a reference to a monastery that castrated captures slave boys for the Ottoman court. It notes that there was a high death rate.

I find it hard to believe that Christianity would have survived or grown if this had been a widespread practice.

spin

Bottom line to me is that you still seem to be projecting your desires onto the texts. Lopping external flesh will not stop women from bearing children, so it is not relevant to a female equivalent to your hypothesized early christian removal of male equipment.

You seem to be confusing celibacy and its maintenance with castration. Of course, it doesn't help when your only early source is Montanist. And it is expressly the earliest period that I'm objecting to. It is so contrary to Jewish thought. Anything that impairs the body is a no-no.


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stephan huller

So you 'know' that there were no sects which took Matthew 19:12 literally. Only Origen and these misguided Russians. This is an absolute certainty, is it?

stephan huller

Then why bring your slaves all the way to Cairo? And why the Copts in particular? Surely if it wasn't assumed that they had some expertise the owners would just do it themselves or find someone else to do it.

Again this is just one study. We don't know what the mortality rates actually were.

stephan huller

But women do have sex drives and their pleasure is related to clitoral stimulation. If contemporary Christianity promoted the idea of women living in convents, then the removal of the clitoris would assure that girls would never have second thoughts about losing their virginity. If they weren't lured into sexual relations by their clitoris the only way they could produce children would be undergoing the trauma of rape or forced sexual relations. Abortion would presumably take care of that difficulty and - if you think about it - there would be no reason to suspect that her virginal state was compromised in any way.

In the case of men, castration would not prevent marriage but the production of children. A man could still be raped but again wouldn't undergo pleasure presumably (and certainly wouldn't produce any children as a result of his rape).

As such in my mind, castration seems to be a means to the desired means to the end described in the Gospel of the Egyptians - "I came to destroy the works of the female" - as castration would ensure that Christians couldn't or wouldn't produce children.

There is an underlying logic here. It makes more sense to me at least than having a priesthood walking around with a wounded bird locked in a cage screaming to get out whenever the altar boys need personal instruction. Could Jesus really be thought to have come to humanity to usher in a miserable state like that which the priests of the Catholic tradition find themselves in? Is this Paul's 'new man'? Or should we look to the Marcionites and the Naasenes for a more logical interpretation?

But then again what do I know. As I said I am not all a part of this tradition. I just have this naive notion that at one time it MUST have made sense. I can't believe that people were intended to be left in a divinely imposed state of sexual frustration ...

bacht

Well, these butchers were the bad guys that proto-Catholics were fighting right? Doesn't that make the RCC more heroic, more humane?