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Prof: This topic today is really fun.
I love the Acts of Paul and Thecla.
It is such a bizarre document.
I hope you read it before class as the syllabus instructed you
to.
It's not an easy document to get into if it's the first time
you've come across this kind of non-canonical early Christian
literature.
Sometimes we'll call this stuff "apocryphal"
which is just the Greek word for "hidden."
This is not part of the apocrypha that's published in
your Bible, your study Bible if you bought
the Bible that I requested which was the Oxford Study Bible with
Apocrypha.
That apocrypha, as I explained at the beginning
of the whole semester is Jewish literature that was written
sometime in the Second Temple period and it's not explicitly
Christian literature for the most part.
When people talk about The Apocrypha that's published in a
modern Bible, they're talking about that
Jewish literature that survived in Greek mainly.
In fact this is why those books were rejected by the reformers
Martin Luther and Calvin, and Melanchthon.
They tended to not use the apocrypha in a Protestant Bible
precisely because they wanted to go back to the Hebrew Bible like
the rabbis were using, and so The Apocrypha,
although it has continued to be part of the Roman Catholic
Bible, and as something having a
secondary status, has not been part of the
Protestant Bible.
That term "apocrypha" refers to that very varying
list because what is actually even included in that Jewish
apocrypha varies according to which publication you may pick
up.
Sometimes people will also use this word "apocrypha"
for what they call something like New Testament apocrypha or
early Christian apocrypha.
That's kind of a misleading term because there's nothing
hidden about this literature at all.
It's always been there, it's just not part of the
Christian canon.
Some of it is entirely orthodox, some of it is rather
heretical, and some of it is somewhere not
completely in tune with later orthodoxy but nevertheless
reflecting what was definitely orthodox in its own day.
All this literature is written in the second century,
our document today, the Acts of Paul and
Thecla, was composed in the second
century and it was considered quite good literature by many
early Christians.
It just wasn't part of the New Testament, mainly because people
knew it was a bit later of a document, not so much because of
concerns for orthodoxy.
One of the purposes of my teaching this course,
one of my purposes of teaching all of my courses,
is to get students to start thinking completely differently.
In other words, you've noticed,
perhaps, that one of the things I stress
in my lectures is how odd the ancient world is,
even how odd early Christianity is from what most of us tend to
come at it.
This is because I teach New Testament studies and the
history of early Christianity almost like ethnography.
I try to get you to imagine yourself coming into a culture
that's really different from the culture you grew up in.
This is something I think is basic to religious studies as a
discipline, and religious studies teaches
you to look at some kind of group of people,
or an activity, or a belief structure that
seems to you initially absolutely bizarre.
And you think, how could any rational person
do that?
How can any rational person belief that?
To keep looking at it seriously and to look at it with enough
sympathy that you actually can see eventually how it is
perfectly rational.
This document today is a great place to illustrate that,
because whenever I teach this document to people your age,
eighteen to twenty-two year old college students,
if you read this carefully and you get into this stuff,
it should be bizarre to you.
This document depicts young people who are attracted to a
version of Christianity that forbids having sex entirely.
It's completely ascetic.
The Paul in the Acts of Paul and Thecla says,
if you have sex you're probably not going to go to heaven.
Basically the gospel mentioned in this document is continence,
by which this document means avoiding sex.
And that's going to be bizarre enough because people in the
modern world kind of have the idea,
well why would somebody join any movement that forbade ***
intimacy entirely?
What kind of draw did that have for people?
Why did that gospel succeed?
What may be surprising to you is it did succeed.
In the ancient world a lot of people,
especially it seems sometimes even young people,
were drawn to early Christianity precisely because
it was ascetic.
It taught this radical asceticism of watching what you
eat and especially avoiding sex, or if not avoiding sex
entirely, severely limiting *** intercourse and ***
attraction.
\What is it about the ancient culture,
what is it about these people that caused them not only to be
converted to Christianity but to be converted especially to a
form of it that was radically ascetic?
In order to see why that kind of Christianity was--because
that's the actual kind of Christianity that was successful
in the ancient world.
If you were listening to most modern American Christians,
modern American people generally, what are the two most
important teachings about Christianity in the minds of
most Americans?
The family, the importance of the family,
and by that they mean the heterosexual nuclear family,
but even the liberal churches which are willing to recognize
gay relationships, they still construe that as gay
marriage or just gay versions of the nuclear family.
The family is the most important thing about
Christianity in the minds of a lot of Americans.
The second thing is nationalism, patriotism.
If you took away patriotism and nationalism, and the family out
of Christianity, most people in modern America
wouldn't recognize it as such.
What's odd is that, when you read these ancient
documents, that's precisely the two things that Christianity
attacks.
This form of early Christianity was anti-family,
for the most part, and it was anti-patriotic.
The people who say, but this is traditional
Christianity, those people don't know their
history before 1950, because the church,
the overall Christian churches were never pro-family for the
first 1500 years of its existence.
The Roman Catholic Church, up until the Reformation,
always had as its official position,
not just popular ideas, its official position was
celibacy is superior to sexuality.
If you have to have sex, if you can't control yourself
you're allowed to get married and have sex within the bounds
of marriage.
But the better thing, the better virtue would be to
avoid sex entirely for your entire life.
The next best thing is to have sex if you need just to make
babies, but then as soon as you have
your babies, stop having sex and be ascetic
the rest of your life.
If your spouse dies, you are permitted to get
remarried, most of the time,
but the higher virtue would be in remaining unmarried and
remaining celibate for the rest of your life.
That was considered the doctrine in Christianity,
at least up until the Reformation, so the sixteenth
century.
When people talk about "traditional family
values" being traditionally the Christian way,
they're not talking about Christianity as it existed from
the time of Jesus all the way up until around 1600,
and even then from 1600 until 1950,
the ideal form in most Christianity was not the nuclear
family but some kind of household.
In Puritan New England, people didn't live in little
nuclear families-- townships, the New Haven
Colony, the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
they were organized into households that were run by the
male head of household, his wife under him,
children under that, servants and other free people
often living in the household also or connected to the
household.
If you are, for example, an adult male,
twenty-five years old in New England,
in Puritan New England, and you weren't married,
you weren't really supposed to live alone or with other men.
That happens sometimes, but the town fathers--
and these colonies were ruled as communities,
not individual people--the town fathers would want to put you
into somebody else's household, into the household of another
man.
They certainly wouldn't let women, adult women live
separately.
Notice, this is not individualism in the modern
sense, and it's not the nuclear family in the modern sense,
these are extended family households.
That was the New England Protestant way.
When did the idea that the best form of the family was the
nuclear family come about in popular culture overall?
The 1950s.
When people talk about that being the Christian thing
they're forgetting the vast sweep of Christian history.
They're just ignoring it.
This document is a good place to see why that made sense for
people, especially in the ancient
world, and to make it-- since for the Middle Ages and
all the rest of the time you'll have to take another course.
One of the things I want you to do is enter into this text as if
you're an ethnographer, an anthropologist and try to
see how does this make sense, how does this gospel that this
text proclaimed, how did it make sense to people
and why was it so wildly popular,
because it was wildly popular.
First, you have to know a bit about the Greco-Roman novel.
I talked about this early in the semester when we talked
about the Acts of the Apostles.
Greek novels are very interesting, there are six of
them that survive in almost whole,
and in fragments of a lot of others,
and you can find these in the English translation.
Help me out teaching fellows, what's the name of the
collection of the Greek novels?
It's called something like Collected Greek Novels,
yes.
Reardon is the editor: R-E-A-R-D-O-N.
If you want to dip into these just get the collected ancient
novels - edited by Reardon and read through some of them.
They're very entertaining.
One of the things that the typical plot is,
a woman of high elite status, these are--
these usually are people--young people of elite families--
they're usually set in classical Greece although
they're not written until the first century,
second century, third century of our era,
but they're often set in a more classical Greek setting.
They are upper class people: a young woman who's of an upper
class family falls in love with a young man who's also from an
upper class family, and in a few of the Greek
novels they actually get married and have a little honeymoon,
a brief honeymoon period, and then all hell breaks loose
and something happens.
In some cases they don't even get to consummate their love yet
because something intervenes.
Usually what happens is a disaster strikes.
In one--I think I mentioned this to you,
by Chariton, Chaereas and Callirhoe,
in one the husband gets jealous thinking that his wife has had
an affair he-- in a fit of rage--he kicks her,
she falls over and everybody thinks she's dead.
So he's grieving and grieving because of course he's still
madly in love with her.
They're both madly in love with each other.
But they bury her in the tomb, the big family tomb that's on
the shore by the water.
Of course like--and Shakespeare stole mercilessly from these
kinds of things-- she wakes up in the tomb after
they've already sealed the tomb and she can't get out,
and she says, woe is me, they've buried me,
I will never see my loved one.
Pirates, who happened to be outside, there were always
pirates in these things, lots of pirates.
Pirates happened to be outside, they hear her crying,
and they break into the tomb.
They were just going to do a little tomb robbery,
they were just attempting a tomb robbery,
but they find this living maiden--not maiden anymore she's
had sex now so she's a maid, not a maiden anymore.
Anyway a beautiful young woman and they decide,
well great this--we can get more for her than from the stuff
in here.
We'll kidnap her, sell her as into slavery at
some other port.
And they do.
So they take her off, they take her around over to
Asia Minor, modern day Turkey.
And there they sell her to this wealthy man.
He falls in love with her, so he decides to marry her.
And then something else happens and they go to the King of
Persia, and the King of Persia falls in love with her.
So he steals her away from the Greek guy.
And then wars break out.
And her husband as soon as he finds that she's been stolen
away, he starts traveling all around the Mediterranean looking
for her.
And he'll get just to Alexandria in Egypt the day
after she's been sold off to slavery someplace else.
These two traipse around the Mediterranean looking for
their--because they're madly in love and they want to consummate
their marriage.
And of course everybody falls in love with both of them.
No matter where this young woman goes every man around
falls in love with her, and that causes problems all
over the place.
Of course in the ancient world everywhere the young man goes
everybody falls in love with him,
both women and men, because that was quite common.
And so they both have all this eroticism.
They're describing their beauty all the time.
Usually there's someplace in the novel where they can get
naked.
Where somehow the plot happens where she's stripped because
she's going to be punished, or he's stripped because he's
going to be crucified, or something has happened and
the story kind of concentrates on how beautiful their bodies
are.
In other words, the novels are about being
faithful to the person you loved in your youth,
because they both try not to have sex with anybody else if
they can at all do that.
Be faithful to your lover from your youth.
But the *** drive is just all the way through the novel.
The novels are full of eroticism and the eroticism of
the eye.
This Acts of Paul and Thecla is so wonderfully
like those things because it also uses eroticism.
Did you notice how often Thecla is portrayed as gorgeous and
even stripped so you, as the voyeuristic reader,
can imagine her naked body before she's thrown into the vat
of killer man-eating seals.
You remember that scene.
The *** is here in this text, but the *** is used to
the opposite purpose.
The *** is used to actually teach you to avoid sex.
To really read this text of the Acts of Paul and Thecla
it helps if you know the way these ancient Greek novels often
work.
Let's look at the text now, and I'll show you some of these
things.
Look at paragraph 18.
I don't know if you have the pages, there are a couple of
different editions that I've used in this class.
I don't know which I had for downloading with you but I'm
going to not talk about page numbers most of the time but
paragraph numbers because the texts are all divided up into
paragraph numbers.
In paragraph 18, Thecla has gone off to prison.
Of course the story goes that she hears Paul preaching in her
hometown, and she falls in love with him just from hearing his
preaching.
Now the text doesn't really say she falls in love with
him, right?
But it describes her as being enamored of Paul,
at least of his gospel, and so she goes to visit him in
prison.
He's been thrown in prison because wherever Paul goes he
gets into trouble with the men of the city.
And it's always the men of the city he gets in trough with,
right?
It's because he's teaching wives not to have sex with their
husbands anymore.
Well, this gets the guys upset.
He's teaching unmarried women not to get married and young men
not to get married.
Well, if you don't get married and you don't have sex,
you're not going to have children, you're not going to
have babies, and the households will all
fall apart.
So Paul gets in trouble precisely because of his
anti-household, anti-sex message because the
men of the city know full well that if you don't have sex and
you don't have households, you're not going to have a city.
Civilization is going to fall apart, in their view.
He's arrested, she goes to visit him in
prison, and then it says,
"To the jailer she gave a silver mirror,"
a mirror is in the ancient world is a typical sign for
femininity in women.
On tombstones you'll often see a mirror carved when it's a
girl, a young girl who's buried at that tomb.
So she gives the jailer her silver mirror.
She went into Paul and sat at his feet and heard him proclaim
the mighty acts of God.
Paul feared nothing but comported himself with full
confidence in God, and her faith was also
increased as she kissed his fetters.
Next paragraph down 20: "He commanded Paul to be
brought to the judgment seat.
But Thecla rolled herself on the place where Paul taught as
he sat in prison."
She's rolling around in the dust where Paul had sat earlier.
Did you ever hear old people talk about how in very strict
Roman Catholic schools and stuff,
guys were not supposed to sit in the same folding chair that a
girl had just sat in because it would be warm,
and that was considered a little too ***?
Yep.
People were screwed up.
"She stood there looking steadily at Paul,"
and a little further, "Thecla sought for Paul as
a lamb in the wilderness looks about for shepherd."
In paragraph 22: The young men and the maidens
brought wood and straw that Thecla might be burned,
and as she was brought in naked the governor wept and marveled
at the power that was in her.
I'm not too sure about the writing here.
Notice how over and over again in this text there's something
about kissing or marveling, or looking, and right at the
point where you think that the body should be what's being
referred to, the author says something like
"power" or "message."
There's a direction toward the body all the way through this
text, and then a diversion of your
attention as a reader away from the body to the gospel.
But the body is still there just hovering right around the
edge of your vision.
So the text does that over and over again.
Look at paragraph 25--well over and over again--
I'm not going to go through anymore examples of that because
they're just all the way through the text.
Sex is the driving force of this piece of literature even
though the piece of literature is going to try to teach you not
to have sex, and so there's also desire and
passion all the way through.
But, as I said, the main message of the text is
don't have sex.
So look at paragraph 5, this is where Paul is giving
his own version of the beatitudes that you're familiar
with from Matthew and Luke.
Paul's version is very different though,
right?
It says in paragraph 5: When Paul was entered into the
house of Onesiphorus, there was great joy,
bowing of knees, breaking of bread,
and the word of God concerning continence and the resurrection.
Now the word "continence"
there is just referring to asceticism,
but in this text it doesn't mean just controlling your sex
life, it means not having sex
entirely.
When this author, this translation says
"continence," you read that as complete
*** asceticism, so that's the message.
Notice how continence is linked to resurrection,
so the avoidance of sex is directly linked to the
resurrection of the body in this text.
These are the beatitudes: Blessed are the pure in heart
for they shall see God.
Blessed are they who have kept the flesh pure [and don't be
misled in this text that means not having sex]
for they shall become a temple of God.
Blessed are the continent for to them God will speak.
Blessed are they who have renounced this world for they
shall be well pleasing unto God.
Blessed are they who have wives as if they had them not for they
shall inherit God.
Now that's actually almost a quotation from Paul's letter.
Paul talks about having, as if you did not have,
and this sort of thing, living your life "as
if."
"Blessed are they who have fear of God for they shall
become angels of God."
Now it might help you to know there that angels in the ancient
world are often depicted as androgynous, as not being
***.
Anybody seen the movie "Dogma"?
How many have seen the movie "Dogma"?
Raise your hand so I can see them.
If you haven't seen the movie "Dogma"
go rent it.
It's a highly important theological movie.
It's a very theological movie actually.
If you've seen it you remember there's a place where the angel
who's appearing to the woman who's going to be the chosen
one, the Mary-type figure,
he appears in her bedroom in the middle of the night,
right?
She thinks he's there to *** her so she takes a baseball bat
and she's going to try to-- and he's trying to not get
pummeled with the baseball bat, so he pulls his pants down to
show her that he's an angel.
Why does that work?
Because he doesn't have genitalia, and so that proves to
her, or it's supposed to prove to her, she's just confused.
She doesn't know her angelology properly.
If she knew her angelology she would know that angels,
at least in one dominant form of tradition,
are androgynous, so they don't have genitalia or
they're either completely male or something like that,
so that's why Paul says in this beatitude,
"You will be as the angels of God."
"Blessed are they who have kept their baptism secure."
Again one of the teachings of early Christianity like this
was, once you're baptized you're not allowed to sin anymore.
Baptism, according to some teachings in early Christianity,
would cleanse you of all the sins you had committed up until
the time you're baptized.
What if you sin after your baptism?
Well, there might be other ways to get forgiveness for that,
but you're in trouble.
This is why a lot of emperors would not get baptized until
their deathbed, because they wanted to make
sure--emperors have to sin, they have to kill people,
they have to fight wars, so the idea was you just don't
get baptized until right before you die and then you can go to
heaven.
That's what this is talking about, keeping your baptism
pure.
Below that the last blessed, "Blessed are the bodies of
the virgins for they shall be well pleasing to God and shall
not lose the reward of their purity."
Right below that in paragraph 7:
Thamyris sat at a nearby window and listened night and day to
the word of the *** life, as it was spoken by Paul,
moreover she saw many women and virgins going into Paul,
she desired to be counted worthy herself to stand in
Paul's presence.
Now look right at paragraph 9: "All the women and young
people go into him and are taught by him.
You must, he says, fear one single God only and
live chastely.
And my daughter also, like a spider at the window
bound by his words, is dominated by a new
desire."
This is her mother talking because her mother is very upset
that Thecla has done this because Thecla broke off her
great engagement to the richest guy in town in order to follow
Paul.
So the mother doesn't like this."...
dominated by a new desire and a fearful passion."
So notice desire and passion again are still part of the
narrative, but now they're redirected to a desire and a
passion precisely for celibacy.
Also, the bad guys in this are anti-ascetic.
Look at paragraph 13.
Paul and the good guys are all ascetic.
In paragraph 13, in fact, right above that this
is Demos and Hermogenes-- now a bunch of the names in
this document actually come from Pauline literature from the New
Testament.
So this writer probably knows the Pastoral Epistles and some
of the other writings that make up the New Testament because the
writer is taking details out of Paul's life,
as you would see it in the New Testament,
like these names for example.
Demos is mentioned in the Pastoral Epistles as someone for
forsook Paul, "being in love with the
present world," is what it says,
so this writer is talking--using the same name.
Demos is a bad guy here who had been a follower of Paul but he's
now betraying Paul.
They say, "Who this man is we do not know.
But he deprives young men of wives,
maidens of husbands, saying otherwise there is no
resurrection for you except you remain chaste and do not defile
the flesh but keep it pure."
They know what Paul's teaching, this radical asceticism,
and Paul links this to the resurrection.
If you're not chaste and pure, you won't experience the
resurrection.
Thamyris said to them, "Come into my house you
men and rest with me."
And they went off to a sumptuous banquet with much
wine, great wealth, and a splendid table.
Notice, these guys who betray Paul are not only teaching that
people should get married and have sex,
but they're also having great wine,
they're having a lot of food, they're doing all the
anti-ascetic stuff.
They're anti-ascetic.
The enemies of Paul, and the gospel here,
are the anti-ascetics, and of course that makes you
think, who does this look like that
we've been reading lately who says,
"Drink a little wine for your stomach's sake"?
It's the writer of the Pastoral Epistles.
Remember we saw that?
The writer of I Timothy admonishes Timothy to drink
wine, not to be an ascetic and avoid wine.
The writer of the Pastoral Epistles teaches that it's the
enemies of Paul who forbid marriage.
So the Pastoral Epistles, if this author knows the
Pastoral Epistles, he's writing against it.
And if the Pastoral Epistles knows the Acts of Paul and
Thecla, they're written against this.
We don't know that they knew each other exactly,
although it's entirely possible that this author knew Paul's
writings.
So, basically, what is the problem of life
according to this author?
Sex and family.
What's the answer to life?
Avoiding sex and family, and then you experience the
resurrection.
What is the deeper problem then that this is addressing?
Here the problem you can see it in paragraph 17.
This is Paul talking to the proconsul:
"The living God, the God of vengeance,
the jealous God, the God who has need of
nothing, has sent me since he desires
the salvation of men that I may draw them away from corruption
and impurity, all pleasure and death,
that they may sin no more."
Notice corruption, impurity, pleasure,
death, those are all linked together.
And here's the clue that helps you see what's going on with the
allure of asceticism for these ancient Christians.
In the ancient world… This is something that's also
changed radically since the 1970s.
The 1970s changed dramatically with regard to family,
sexuality.
It's the time of the *** revolution.
The time of the people's attitudes changing completely.
We went back on that in the 1980s with the AIDs scare,
and then the way right wingers used AIDS to try to make sex
fearful to everybody.
But that was sort of reactionary.
The 1980s and a lot of the 1990s was reactionary to the
*** revolution.
What happened in the 1970s that changed the way people thought
about these sorts of things?
Two things that were big pushes toward changing people's
attitudes about sexuality and the family.
The women's movement, which basically was springing
off the civil rights movement and saying that women and men
are equal, the radical notion that women
are people is what feminism is, so women and men are equal.
Now why was that so important for issues like sex?
Because the way sexuality had always been construed up to that
point was that the sex act itself,
the heterosexual sex act--and homosexual sex acts were always
interpreted in the frame of heterosexual sex--
the heterosexual sex act embodies in its very practices
the hierarchy of man over woman.
The idea is, man is superior.
He's supposed to be on top.
So the preferred position is the missionary position.
And in fact, in ancient Judaism and
Christianity it was considered abominable--
it was considered sex "against nature"--
to have the woman penetrate the man in any way.
Why?
Because they considered it only natural that the man is the
superior one and he penetrates the woman.
It's male to penetrate; it's feminine to be penetrated.
And they believed that whether it was ***/*** sex,
or whether it was oral sex, or whether it was anything.
Any kind of *** intercourse in the ancient world,
and this continued pretty much all the way until the modern
world, the man is superior,
masculinity is superior, and femininity is inferior.
And that's embodied in the sex act itsel: the superiority of
the penetrator and the inferiority of the penetrated.
That's why the word "***,"
is a bad thing, although actually most of think
actually doing it is not such a bad thing.
Why is that in our--in slang and curse words we still use
words like "that sucks"?
A lot of people don't even know that it refers to sex,
but yeah of course it refers to sex.
Something that "sucks"
is considered bad, it's not considered bad to
be sucked.
Something that *** is not bad, it's considered bad to be
***.
Why is that?
Because our entire history has penetration is superior;
it's inferior to be penetrated.
It's embodied in our culture.
That started to be challenged--now see you may find
this kind of weird that I'm insisting so literally on the
interpretation of these words because that may not be the way
you use them or hear them.
What I'm saying is that if it's not the way you use them or hear
them is because society has changed radically in the last
thirty or forty years.
No longer is it automatically considered that women are
inferior to men, and therefore the sex act is
not considered to be one that necessarily has to be
hierarchal.
The reason that people in the ancient world,
if they opposed homosexual sex, the reason they opposed it is
they assumed that one man would have to be penetrated by another
man, and that was horrible because
it disrupted the hierarchy.
Or a woman would have to penetrate another woman,
and that also disrupted the hierarchy.
It has to be man/woman because the hierarchy is man/woman,
and every sex act was supposed to imitate that hierarchy.
That changed radically beginning in the 1970s.
The other big thing that changed was the Pill.
Now of course there had been contraception for years and
years before that, for time immemorial.
Human beings have always known how to avoid getting pregnant to
some extent.
But with the 1970s and the wide availability of contraceptive
medicines, drugs, it was much easier to
have heterosexual sex and not be worried about whether you were
going to get pregnant.
Before that, and this is also something that
people your age just have trouble getting through your
heads, before that every time a woman
had heterosexual sex of any kind of penetrated way--
the normal way people were having sex she was--
she had to at least be partly worried that she was going to
get pregnant.
Every time a man and a woman had sex, pregnancy,
the danger of pregnancy, was always there hanging over
their heads.
They could accept it and they could want it,
but if they didn't want it, it was still hanging over their
heads.
That's not true for us today.
We have enough reliable means of contraception that we can
pretty much decide that we want to have sex just for fun without
worrying about pregnancy.
These two things, the women's movement,
which challenged the basic hierarchy of the sex act,
and the availability of contraception,
radically changed notions of sex.
Before that, and here's what goes back to
the ancient world, I've mentioned this before and
we've been talking about other texts already but just to
review: for the ancient mind, sex was simply one cog in a
wheel.
Why did you have sex?
In order to make babies.
Why did you need to make babies?
Because so many of them were dying all the time.
I think I've told you the statistic that in the ancient
world, for the population of the Roman
Empire just to remain stable-- not for it to grow,
just for it to remain stable-- every woman who lived to
childbearing age, which was considered about
fourteen in the ancient world, had to have an average of five
childbirths for the population to remain stable.
Think of these girls, every one of you would have to
have at least five childbirths on average just to maintain the
population.
That just shows how many people died in childbirth,
how many women died in childbirth, how many infants
died.
So in people's minds, every birth was automatically
linked in their mind to death.
Because it was a dangerous thing, people died often in
childbirth, women died giving birth, and so many children
died.
They also knew that they had to keep having babies or the
population would shrink, and populations in the ancient
world did often shrink, and that was dangerous because
whole cities could disappear.
Whole populations could disappear if the birthrate
didn't remain high.
Every birth was considered--because you had to
have babies; why do you need babies?
Because people were always dying.
The idea was you have sex, birth, death,
decay.
Sex, birth, death, decay, sex, birth,
death, decay, that's all what life is.
Life is a big circle of sex, birth, death and decay.
Now comes Christianity which says, we're going to teach you
to break that cycle.
How do you break the cycle?
Well, it may not be intuitive to you,
but this seemed to be intuitive to a lot of ancient people who
incorporated this into their teachings about Christianity.
The Christians said, stop it at sex.
Break the cycle at sex.
And that's why in these text--it's not intuitive to us,
but it's intuitive to them--that if you want to stop
that cycle of sex, birth, death,
and decay the easiest place for human beings to stop it is at
sex.
Just break the cycle.
Don't have sex, don't have childbirth,
don't have death.
And of course they believed they had an answer for the death
part because they believed, with Christianity,
with Jesus Christ, you would have resurrection,
the body would be raised, so you don't need childbirth
anymore.
If you're a faithful Christian you'll live forever anyway,
so you don't need to replenish the population by having more
babies.
All the people who are Christians, who come into
Christ, will be resurrected and will live forever,
so there's no need for more and more population.
The reason that these texts, and this is not the only one,
this is just one place where it's very clear,
because whenever Paul talks about sex he also talks about
death.
He talks about corruption and he talks about resurrection.
So this text very clearly pulls all of these issues into one
another.
The basic sensibility of this gospel that we moderns don't
have, and you have to imagine
yourself back into their world, is the radical availability of
death and the linkage of death with sex in ancient minds,
and then also the linkage of all these other things with
sexuality and death and corruption.
Christianity said, stop the cycle at sex and you
get rid of death, radical as that may sound to
us.
The problem of course is, in this text,
the people who find that message very compelling are
young women, a lot of wives,
although not all of them, and even young men.
Also, people who find that message compelling happen to be
lionesses.
The female animals also like this message,
right?
Who are the ones who gang up on the bad male animals who are
trying to attack Thecla in the arena?
The female lion.
The text is set up as an opposition.
Now notice, I said young men are also included in the good
side of this sometimes.
What is the opposition to Paul's gospel?
It's not men versus women, right?
What is the opposition?
It's male heads of households against everybody else who would
be members of their household.
The people who opposed Paul the most in this text are male heads
of households, precisely because they
recognize that challenging the centrality of sex and childbirth
will in itself challenge their households.
In their system, you have to have sex and
childbirth in order to maintain the household structure.
They're the ones who are against Paul,
so Paul appeals mostly to women and young people.
I already think--I read part of that in paragraph 7,
"The women and the virgins are going to hear him."
In paragraph 9 it talks about women and young people going to
him and are talking to him, so that's who it.
Then in 12, I read this passage in paragraph 12,
"He deprives young men of wives and maidens of
husbands," so he's depriving the men who
want to continue the household structure and that's why they're
opposed to him.
Notice paragraph 26 and 27: this guy sees Thecla in a
different place, Alexander sees Thecla,
and he falls in love with her.
As is typical in these kinds of texts, there's always a
beautiful woman, no man can resist her.
He says he wants to marry her: "I did not wish to marry
Thamyris, I've been cast out of the city ...
Taking hold of Alexander [so here she takes hold of this
Alexander] she ripped his cloak,
took off the crown from his head and made him a laughing
stock.
But he, partly out of love for her and partly in shame at what
had befallen him, brought her before the
governor.
And when she confessed that she had done these things he
condemned her to the beasts.
But the women were panic stricken and cried out before
the judgment seat, "An evil judgment!
A godless judgment!"
But Thecla asked the governor that she might remain pure until
she was to fight with the beast.
[In other words she says; just don't make me have sex.
I'll be glad to go into the arena and fight with the beast,
just don't make me have sex.] A rich woman named Tryphaena,
whose wife [correction: husband]
had died, took her under her protection
and found comfort.
When the beasts were led in procession they bound her to a
fierce lioness, and the Queen Tryphaena
followed her.
And as Thecla sat upon her back, the lioness licked her
feet, and all the crowed was amazed."
You have this situation where--what's the problem with
Alexander?
He's shamed.
So in this honor/shame system of the ancient world,
this is also an important point: male heads of household
occupy the position of honor.
By tearing his clothes, by knocking his crown off,
she shames him in public, and this of course totally
disrupts this hierarchy of the man over the woman,
and that's part of what's going on here.
Women who refuse their role as child bearers,
as sex objects, shame the men who put them in
that role.
And so that's what the conflict is about, shaming men and
rebelling against the household structure.
Then of course there's the solidarity of women with
everybody else.
Notice in this, Paul himself is rather
ambiguously placed.
He's a man.
What is Paul's role in all of this?
I think it's interesting that Paul doesn't come across in this
text, at least in my reading, as being a totally positive
character.
It praises him, of course, and presents him as
a man of God.
But notice some of the things that Paul does.
Paul refuses to baptize her.
Remember, she has to baptize herself.
This is that wonderful scene where she's being martyred--
they're trying to martyr her again,
and they strip her naked, and then they have this big vat
of killer man-eating seals-- yes that's what it says.
You probably didn't even know there were man-eating seals,
but there were in the ancient Mediterranean world.
Instead of waiting to be thrown into the vat of man eating
seals, a lightning bolt comes out of
the sky, strikes the water,
all the man-eating seals die, so God saves her.
And then, though, not to let the scene finish
she-- she's all right,
there's water, she's asked Paul to baptize her
once and he wouldn't do it, so she throws herself into the
water and baptizes herself.
This is a woman!
You're not supposed to let women go around baptizing
themselves!
That could just disrupt all kinds of stuff.
Paul, at one point, says he doesn't even know her
in one place.
He refuses to baptize her.
And Paul gets in trouble.
He runs off and hides in caves and stuff.
Who's the big hero of this story?
It's not Paul.
He's one of the heroes but it's really Thecla.
It's this woman who totally refuses to accept her role as a
baby factory.
And that's what women are in the ancient world,
baby factories.
She totally refuses to accept that role.
She baptizes herself when Paul hesitates to baptize her.
And then of course at the very end of the document,
remember how it ends?
She goes to Paul and she says she wants to be a follower of
his, and he kind of--again he kind of just says,
no go leave me alone.
Paul is not all that great with her.
What does she do?
First she inherits a bunch of money;
another rich woman left her a ton of money,
so she's able to support herself and her mother.
I guess she and her mother, by the end of the thing,
are now on good terms.
I mean if you survive lightening and man-eating seals,
and God saves you, maybe your mother will like you
better and let you not get married.
She supports herself financially through an
inheritance that she gets from another woman,
and then what does she do?
She cuts her hair short, she dresses like a man,
she actually becomes an Apostle.
She goes off to spread the message of this ascetic,
sex avoiding, anti-family,
anti-household gospel that she got from Paul.
Thecla becomes her own Apostle spreading the message.
Notice what kind of gospel she's going around teaching.
This is not pro-family, this is not patriotic,
this is not nationalism.
This is putting all your eggs in the basket of the kingdom of
God.
That's the only thing worth living for, is the kingdom of
God.
How do you get into the kingdom of God?
By avoiding sex and avoiding the household,
that's how you get in and enjoy--and remain.
How do you avoid death?
By being resurrected.
This message is a very *** message, in a sense.
It's not getting *** eroticism or *** desire and
throwing it all out the window.
It's actually using eroticism and the appeal to beauty,
and the appeal of *** desire, and it's capitalizing on
it.
The author is trying to get you, as a young person who's
afraid about death, to convert to a message of the
gospel that will liberate you from the cycle of corruption and
death, that you will get into if you
agree to go along with sex, birth, death,
decay, and that's what you do if you choose the household.
It's a radical document.
Now the question is, is this a feminist document?
It's a good question.
Its raises Thecla up even above Paul,
and it gives a message of liberation to women,
at least from whatever it is that keeps them down at the
time, which is the patriarchal
household.
It gives them a way out of that.
This is one of the reasons that there are a lot of women in the
ancient world who became nuns, who wanted to avoid the
household, and you had women running away from their husbands
all the time.
Church leaders talk about it.
Why?
Because that was--you had to get out of the household if you
wanted to have any kind of independence or liberty.
If you wanted to have any kind of exercise of power you had to
get out of the male dominated household.
So Christianity, the whole strain of
Christianity appealed to precisely those kinds of people,
and the author is trying to get you as a young person to make
that choice also.
Now the big question is do you think it's feminist?
Is this feminism or is there something wrong with thinking
about it as feminism?
If you're writing a paper this week maybe you can talk about
that.
Another big question is, do you think this author is
actually attacking the Pastoral Epistles?
Are the Pastoral Epistles attacking this author?
They are presenting two diametrically opposed versions
of Paul.
They both claim Paul as their author.
They both claim to be representing Paul's gospel,
Paul's message.
But one of them is very pro-household,
and marriage, and sex, and childbirth;
and the other is anti-marriage, anti-household,
anti-childbirth, and anti-sex.
They both claim Paul as the author of their gospel.
Do they know each other?
That's the interesting historical question.
Or is it just by accident that we have these two very radically
different appropriations of Paul?
All of those questions I hope you'll talk about in your
discussion groups later this week,
and if you're writing papers, push yourself to answer some
big questions in your papers.
Any questions?
Yes.
Student: Is it possible or conceivable that a woman
would have written it?
Prof: Is it possible or conceivable that a woman would
have written it?
It's completely possible.
We don't know who the author was.
Wait, is this the one that--what's the one that
Tertullian says up--okay he knew--we actually know that it
was written by a priest, right?
Student: Yes.
Prof: This one wasn't written by a woman,
but for some of the text in the ancient world they could be
written by-- Student: Not everyone
believes Tertullian.
Prof: What?
Student: Not everyone believes Tertullian.
Student: >
Prof: Okay Tertullian--some people say
Tertullian was wrong.
Tertullian is a church father who wrote around the year 200 in
Latin.
He knows the story, and he condemns it partly
because he doesn't want Thecla baptizing herself.
She's too big for her britches in Tertullian's view.
Tertullian says that they know who wrote it and it was a man
but the Teaching Fellow says that other people dispute that.
Okay, see you next week.