Tonight I am writing a paper for my phenomenal New Testament class on “Women, the Bible, and the Church,” with Dr. David Scholer. We are unabashedly studying the good, the bad, and the ugly. It is a class on how women in the church have been treated over the ages, and why. We’re reading a lot of extra-biblical texts tonight…old Origen, Tertullian, Augustine, et cetera.
“Do you think I’ll get marked down if I call the church fathers ‘bastards’ in my paper?”
-Molly, mid-paper, reflecting on all the ancient Christian writings that unapologetically perpetrated sexism and gross female subordination.
As ladies, it all sort of hurts our hearts, to be sure.
may the Lord forgive us (guys) for the way we have treated our sisters, daughters, mothers, wives these many years. We still don’t know what we are doing.
We have a collection of texts from the apocrypha in our personal library, and I remember after April finished reading them, the first thing she said was that most of the writers were incredibly sexist–disturbingly so.
I guess we can be thankful those didn’t make it into the Bible??
Hey Spain Dad,
Yeah, unfortunately, sexism was par for the course for most of the ancient world. One scholar likened most ancient women as being seen as either Goddesses, Whores, Wives, or Slaves (the title of her book). I’ll be doing some closer readings of the apocrypha in the next few months in class, so I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about such things in coming days.
And (I’ve slept),
Thanks so much for your kind confession/apology on behalf of men!