Violated and Transcended Bodies: Gender, Martyrdom, and Asceticism in Early Christianity
Abstract
Given its eschatological orientation and its marginal position in the Roman Empire, emergent Christianity found embodiment, as an aspect of being in the world, problematic. Those identified and identifying as Christians developed two broad responses to that world as they embraced the idea of being in, yet not of it. The first response, martyrdom, was witness to the strength their faith gave to fragile bodies, particularly those of women, and the ability by suffering to overcome bodily limitation and attain the resurrection life. The second, asceticism, complemented and later continued martyrdom as a means of bodily transcendence and participation in the spiritual world.
Bakom några av de mest inflytelserika av den tidiga kyrkans fäder och mödrar döljer sig en förebildernas förebild, den idag närmast okända tonårsflickan Thekla från Ikonion (första århundradet e.Kr.), som enligt berättelsen lämnade en bekväm över-klasstillvaro för att i Paulus efterföljd sprida evangeliet i Mindre Asien. Den här artikeln analyserar hur Thekla fungerar som förebild för senare generationers kristna, som Gregorios av Nyssa och hans storasyster Makrina (300-talet e.Kr.), och diskuterar hur Theklas berättelse kan fungera förebildligt i en nutida frikyrklig kontext.
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This book reveals exciting early Christian evidence that Mary was remembered as a powerful role model for women leaders—women apostles, baptizers, and presiders at the ritual meal. Early Christian art portrays Mary and other women clergy serving as deacon, presbyter/priest, and bishop. In addition, the two oldest surviving artifacts to depict people at an altar table inside a real church depict women and men in a gender-parallel liturgy inside two of the most important churches in Christendom—Old Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the second Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Dr. Kateusz’s research brings to light centuries of censorship, both ancient and modern, and debunks the modern imagination that from the beginning only men were apostles and clergy.
In 1902, British Syriac scholar Agnes Smith Lewis published the oldest Dormition manuscript, a narrative about the death of Jesus’s mother. Its fifth-century text described scenes where Mary exorcised, healed, sealed, sprinkled water, preached, and led the apostles in prayer. Later copyists, however, independently redacted these heterodox markers of Mary’s ecclesial authority, and Dormition homilists went further, adding orthodox markers of female respectability to their texts. Supplementing the traditions about female priesthood in the Dormition narrative, other early Christian writings about Mary the mother, or a female protagonist named just “Mary,” contain literary artifacts indicating that their authors believed she had been a Eucharistic priest. The heterodox nature of these writings suggests their composition belongs to the second century at the latest, along with the Protevangelium and the Gospel of Mary. As such, they may contain first-century oral traditions about a Jewish woman named Mary, the historical mother of Jesus.
Christianity developed within a matrix of religious traditions, nearly all of which promised what they defined as salvation. For Judaism and the other Greco Roman religious traditions that influenced formative Christianity in the period from the first through the fourth and early fifth centuries of the Common Era, the term “salvation” could be understood as embracing three general categories. In the first, salvation denoted safety, rescue, or being made secure by a powerful force that overcame other powerful and hostile forces rendering one’s existence in this world and the next powerless and helpless. Salvation could also mean “salvage,” the restoration of the person or the world to some original but lost perfection or, at the very least, the removal of the restrictions of suffering, limit and death that hedged about the human situation.
Thanks to several biographical studies based on Cardinal Rampolla's monumental Santa Melania giuniore, senatrice Romana , the history of the early-fifth-century heiress and ascetic, Melania the Younger, is fairly well known. Her grandmother, Melania the Elder was an even more notable figure in the history of the Church during the second half of the fourth century. She is of particular importance in tracing the history of late-fourth-century asceticism and monasticism. Round her career, in a way, revolve many of the historical and chronological problems in connection with Jerome and Rufinus of Aquileia, Paulinus of Nola and Severus Sulpicius. Details of her travels are our surest approach to datings and to the authenticity of much of the material found in Palladius' Lausiac History. At the same time, she was an extremely interesting, well-travelled, and forceful figure coming at the apex of the western patristic period. Hence her career bears pointed scrutiny.
An English translation of the oldest and most important early Christian non‐canonical writings. It is based on the earlier collection edited in 1924 by Montague Rhodes James. The book is divided into the conventional categories of gospels, acts, epistles, and revelatory texts. A long subsection deals with stories of Jesus’ infancy and childhood. Another section deals with fragmentary gospel texts on papyrus. The bulk of the book is given over to second‐century legends of individual apostles. Another section covers apocryphal acpocalypses. An appendix gives a selection of stories about the Virgin Mary's assumption and dormition. Each translated text is prefaced with an introduction and select bibliography. Full indexes of citations and themes are provided.
This is a study of how women figured in public reaction to the church from New Testament times to Christianity's encounter with the pagan critics of the second century CE. The reference to a hysterical woman was made by the most prolific critic of Christianity, Celsus. He was referring to a follower of Jesus - probably Mary Magdalene - who was at the centre of efforts to create and promote belief in the resurrection. MacDonald draws attention to the conviction, emerging from the works of several pagan authors, that female initiative was central to Christianity's development; she sets out to explore the relationship between this and the common Greco-Roman belief that women were inclined towards excesses in religion. The findings of cultural anthropologists of Mediterranean societies are examined in an effort to probe the societal values that shaped public opinion and early church teaching. Concerns expressed in New Testament and early Christian texts about the respectability of women, and even generally about their behaviour, are seen in a new light when one appreciates that outsiders focused on early church women and understood their activities as a reflection of the group as a whole.
This study focuses on the impact of the ubiquitous ancient institution on the emergence and early development of Christianity. Slaveholders as well as slaves were pivotal in early Christian circles. The centrality of slavery affects not only the reconstruction of the social histories of the emerging churches but also theological and ideological analyses of Christian rhetoric. Slaves were designated and treated as bodies. The bodies of slaves were the sexual property of their owners; the bodies of slaves were also vulnerable to regular abuse. Free persons were anxious to protect their bodies from the kinds of violations to which the bodies of slaves were regularly subjected. Christians who argued that true slavery was spiritual in nature often depended on somatic metaphors; in its reliance on metaphors of enslavement and liberation, Christian discourse encodes widespread cultural anxiety about preserving the integrity of the free body. In its generally uncritical acceptance of the institution of slavery, early Christianity transmits the ethical patterns of a slaveholder morality
Christian martyrdom is a performance that employs the body as both an instrument and an arena in which to portray a message about ideal Christian behavior in opposition to “the world,” enacting a sacrificial death imitating that of Jesus. Drawing upon Greco-Roman traditions of the hero myth and the Stoic noble death, as well as Hellenistic, Jewish narratives of death in obedience to God’s law, Christian martyrologists constructed the propaganda of martyrdom. Their rhetoric of resistance, both spoken and enacted, transformed elite concepts of Roman imperial virtue by applying them to a despised minority. The public ordeal of the martyrs shows their transformation from an identity defined by “the world” into a new identity-that of the triumphant Christ-proclaimed through the spectacle of their dying. Martyrs’ worldly bodies thus are visibly and spectacularly transformed by annihilation into vessels dedicated to the power of their God.
In recent years, martyrdom and political violence have been conflated in the public imagination. Rubén Rosario Rodríguez argues that martyr narratives deserve consideration as resources for resisting political violence in contemporary theological reflection. Underlying the three Abrahamic monotheistic traditions is a shared belief that God requires liberation for the oppressed, justice for victims, and - most demanding of all - love for political enemies. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim martyr narratives that condone political violence - whether terrorist or state sponsored - are examined alongside each religion’s canon in order to evaluate how central or marginalized these discourses are within their respective traditions. Primarily a work of Christian theology in conversation with Judaism and Islam, this book aims to model religious pluralism and cooperation by retrieving distinctly Christian sources that nurture tolerance and facilitate coexistence while respecting religious difference.
Does martyrdom hurt? The obvious answer to this question is "yes." L. Stephanie Cobb, asserts, however, that early Christian martyr texts respond to this question with an emphatic "no!" Divine Deliverance examines the original martyr texts of the second through fifth centuries, concluding that these narratives in fact seek to demonstrate the Christian martyrs' imperviousness to pain. For these martyrs, God was present with, and within, the martyrs, delivering them from pain. These martyrs' claims not to feel pain define and redefine Christianity in the ancient world: whereas Christians did not deny the reality of their subjection to state violence, they argued that they were not ultimately vulnerable to its painful effects.
The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies responds to and celebrates the explosion of research in this inter-disciplinary field over recent decades. As a one-volume reference work, it provides an introduction to the academic study of early Christianity (c. 100-600 AD) and examines the vast geographical area impacted by the early church, in western and eastern late antiquity. The book is thematically arranged to encompass history, literature, thought, practices, and material culture. It contains authoritative and up-to-date surveys of current thinking and research in the various sub-specialties of early Christian studies, written by leading figures in the discipline. The articles orientate readers to a given topic, as well as to the trajectory of research developments over the past 30-50 years within the scholarship itself. Guidance for future research is also given. Each article points the reader towards relevant forms of extant evidence (texts, documents, or examples of material culture), as well as to the appropriate research tools available for the area.
This book is a study of the contribution of women to the development of the newly legitimate Christian church in the twilight of the Western Roman Empire. There are many women noted for the example of their life in this period, regarded amongst the luminaries of the day; but while their male mentors, the patristic authors have retained their fame, the women who surrounded and influenced them have all but disappeared from sight. The women themselves are partly to blame for this, for in order to be pious it made sense to disguise one's sex sometimes literally: Dr Cloke gives examples of those whose sex was discovered only after their death - they sought to become androgynous, a third sex before God. This book looks at a multitude of examples in some detail and takes an overview of the role of Christian women at this time. It should appeal not only to historians, classicists and theologians, but also to anyone who takes a general interest in the changing status of women over the the centuries.
This book uses the martyrs' imitation of Jesus in the acts of the martyrs as a window into the history of ideas. It argues, first, that the presentations of the deaths of the martyrs are modeled on portrayals of the death of Jesus in early Christian literature and practice. Given that the martyrs are presented as Christ figures, they serve as narrative reinterpretations of the death of Jesus and can serve as valuable, early sources for the reception history of the New Testament. It also argues that the assimilation of the martyrs to Christ goes further than the narrative contours and stylistic features of their deaths. In the depiction of the salvific value of the martyr's death, the postmortem functions of martyrs in heaven, and the martyrs' status vis-à-vis Christ in the afterlife, the martyrs continue to be presented as Christly figures. As a result, the martyr acts can also contribute to our understanding of the development of ideas about Jesus (Christology) and the way in which human beings are saved (soteriology) in the early church in the pre-Constantinian period.
In Unreliable Witnesses, Ross Shepard Kraemer shows how her mind has changed or remained the same since the publication of her groundbreaking study, Her Share of the Blessings (1992). Unreliable Witnesses scrutinizes more closely how ancient constructions of gender undergird accounts of women's religious practices in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Kraemer analyzes how gender provides the historically obfuscating substructure of diverse texts: Livy's account of the origins of the Roman Bacchanalia; Philo of Alexandria's envisioning of idealized, masculinized women philosophers; rabbinic debates about women studying Torah; Justin Martyr's depiction of an elite Roman matron who adopts chaste Christian philosophical discipline; the similar representation of Paul's fictive disciple, Thecla, in the anonymous Acts of (Paul and) Thecla; Severus of Minorca's depiction of Jewish women as the last hold-outs against Christian pressures to convert, and more. While attentive to arguments that women are largely fictive proxies in elite male contestations over masculinity, authority, and power, Kraemer retains her focus on redescribing and explaining women's religious practices. She argues that gender-specific or not, religious practices in the ancient Mediterranean routinely encoded and affirmed ideas about gender. As in many cultures, women's devotion to the divine was both acceptable and encouraged only so long as it conformed to pervasive constructions of femininity as passive, embodied, emotive, insufficiently controlled, and subordinated to masculinity. Extending her findings beyond the ancient Mediterranean, Kraemer proposes that more generally, religion is among the many human social practices that are both gendered and gendering, constructing and inscribing gender on human beings and on human actions and ideas. Her study thus poses significant questions about the relationships between religions and gender in the modern world.
Theorists who specialize in ideology critique have noted various ways in which ideology operates to "fix" representations of the self: through stereotyping, naturalizing, universalizing, and de-historicizing of the self. Certain types of narrative writing and intertextual writing practices also serve as carriers of ideological meaning. In this essay, the writings of the Church Fathers pertaining to women are mined to demonstrate the ideological operations that can be noted therein. The effort to "re-historicize" these writings is explored in relation to the social location of the Fathers. The essay concludes with a brief suggestion that the ideological construction of an essentialized "woman" by the Fathers was not entirely successful, being in part subverted by both the patristic authors themselves as well as by the women whose identities they attempted to "fix."
The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas has often been read as a factual account of early Christian martyrs. Without denying its historicity, I nonetheless reconsider this important narrative in light of its own emphases on rhetorical sophistication and contemporary Christian education. Reviewing the literary work as a whole, rather than preferring "authentic" sections attributed to Perpetua, I find an inherent sense of logic guided by oratorical notions. Sequential, progressive, beautifully argued, the Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas is not only about rhetorical contests but is itself a subtle and intriguing rhetorical work that rewards attentive reading.
Early Christian legends of monastic women disguised as men have recently been the object of psychological, literary, sociohistorical, anthropological, and theological study. In this article, I will raise new questions about these legends from the perspective of the poststructuralist theory of intertextuality. What are the cultural "texts" that these legends "play upon"? What does this intertextuality tell us about how such legends participated in late antique cultural discourse on gender and the female body? Here, I examine five cultural "texts" reworked in the legends: 1) the lives of earlier transvestite saints like St. Thecla; 2) the Life of St. Antony; 3) late antique discourse about eunuchs; 4) the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife from Genesis; and 5) the textual deconstruction and reconstitution of the female body in early Christian literature. These "intertexts," along with key christomimetic elements in the legends, suggest how binary conceptions of gender identity were ultimately destabilized in the figure of the transvestite saint.
Journal of Early Christian Studies 6.3 (1998) 413-430
It is a striking -- and disturbing -- fact that historians can locate no feminine equivalent of Peter Brown's "holy man." To be sure, Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Sebastian Brock named their book of translations Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, yet an inspection of its contents suggests that most "holy women" described in these texts were martyrs (with extra luck, dying as virgins); none appears to function as the precise female counterpart to the "holy men" described by Brown. In addition to martyrs such as these, we hear much in early Christian literature of women ascetics -- but again, they do not function as "holy men."
Early Christian sources concerning asceticism vary in the denseness of their coverage of women, from "none" in the Historia monachorum, to "nearly none" in Theodoret's History of the Monks of Syria, to "some" in the Apophthegmata patrum, to "considerable" in Palladius' Lausiac History. The fullest treatment of women, however, lies in the letters to and memorials of women by writers such as Jerome, and in the full-blown vitae of women such as Olympias, Macrina, Melania the Younger, and Syncletica.
Yet, oddly, the fuller the accounts of such early Christian "holy women," the less they look like Peter Brown's "holy men." The women about whom vitae are composed are not those who illustrate the social mobility or "achieved status" of Brown's "holy men"; their status rather derives from their vast inherited wealth and social position, whose prestige they carry into monastic life. It is their aristocratic status that renders them fearless to confront threatening governors and coercive emperors, as the cases of Melania the Elder and Olympias suggest. The patronage they exercise is not rural, as is that of so many "holy men": the women are largely identified with cities and towns -- Constantinople, Jerusalem, Rome, Bethlehem. Nor is their patronage of the sort that Brown describes (resolving disputes, forwarding lawsuits, helping villagers to meet tax demands). Rather, they appear to follow older, urban-oriented models of patronage -- except that their gifts are now for establishing churches and monasteries, not for the erection of statues and civic buildings, or the endowment of clubs and guilds. Moreover, they are not generally recorded as having worked miracles during their lifetimes, as are "holy men": Gregory of Nyssa adds a few such miracles to the end of his Vita Macrinae, while feats paltry in both kind and number are reported in the Latin version of the Life of Melania the Younger. After her death, Olympias' body is said to work miracles, but we hear of none during her lifetime. Nor are Jerome's women miracle-workers. The "holy women of the Syrian Orient" described by Ashbrook Harvey and Brock occasionally elicit a miraculous event by their mere presence, but such deeds are said to occur "not by her will or by her word," in contrast to the intentional cures, exorcisms, and other wondrous feats worked by Brown's "holy men." Women may be said to have Christ "in" them, since as baptized Christians they have "put on Christ" (Gal 3.27), but it is not said that Christ is "made accessible" through them, as it is for Brown's "holy men": "gender-bending," although prevalent in ascetic literature, did not, apparently, stretch this far. Thus the women whom we might have imagined as the female counterparts of Brown's "holy men" in fact are not.
Yet there is, I think, a further reason why our confidence regarding the recovery of "holy women" is shaken. It is the fullest, most detailed, sources pertaining to women ascetics that give us the greatest pause. These texts are the most "literary," the most rhetorically constructed, and hence, I shall suggest, should arouse the most hermeneutical suspicion. Far from uncovering "the women themselves," we encounter literary set pieces by male authors. The very "literariness" of these texts constitutes the first theoretical problem I wish to address, before I turn to the documents pertaining to women's asceticism for a reconsideration of what they offer: holy women? holy words? whose words?
Feminist historical scholarship has, these past decades, been rudely challenged by...
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