Negative campaigning in the years 100 – 600

[Caro]

If you think repression of women and/or negative campaigning are recent phenomena, read this from this week’s Newsweek:

The dispute—resurrection of flesh or of spirit?—would dominate the first three centuries of Christianity. Orthodox clerics worried that the Gnostic belief in resurrection as spiritual release would compromise their teaching that Christ physically suffered on the cross to atone for the sins of man. They called the Gnostics pagans and hedonists and spun wild tales to make them look profane. (The church writer Epiphanius, writing in the fourth century, claimed that Gnostics believed Jesus had forced Mary to watch him eat his own semen.) When the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the year 312, the orthodox won the power of the state, and the sword. Fearing that bishops enforcing the new orthodoxy would destroy the texts, monks tried to erase all evidence of the Gnostic tradition. They buried the Gospels, with their powerful portrait of Mary Magdalene, in the sand.

The role played by women in the early church was also being erased. Jesus clearly had a rare empathy for women. Luke tells us that in addition to Mary, Jesus' Galilean ministry included an array of other women in prominent roles, including Susanna and Joanna, wife of Cuza. Luke also offers as a model of faith the story of Mary (a different Mary) who put aside concerns of keeping a household to listen attentively at the feet of Christ. Jesus' "last shall be first" message of salvation in the next life would certainly have been appealing to women who felt oppressed in this one. "Jesus was not a social reformer; he was focused on the apocalypse," says Bart Ehrman, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina and the author of "Peter,Paul and Mary Magdalene.""But his message would have been appealing to an egalitarian."

It wasn't long after Jesus' death, however, that male church leaders took steps to subordinate women. "As the church submits to Christ," Paul wrote to the Ephesians, "so wives should submit to their husbands." Yet Paul's letters also contain references to female missionaries throughout the empire. Among these wom-en was Junia, whom Paul calls "outstanding among the apostles," and admits was in Christ "before I was." Christians in the first and second centuries came to believe in a trinity that included a holy spirit, filled with a decidedly feminine grace.

Yet as church teachings evolved, women took on a more sinister role: carriers of earthly sin. In the immediate aftermath of Jesus' death, his followers explained the resurrection as evidence that the apocalypse was at hand. But as the years passed and the kingdom of God did not come, church teachers needed a new theory of the Resurrection. By the second century, they had come to think of Jesus' time on the cross as the fulfillment of a Biblical cycle in the works since Eden. Jesus had died, the clerics now said, to rid the world of Adam's sin. But women, with their tie to sexual reproduction, were a problem, a reminder that the good work would not be done until Christ's return. Bishops barred women from the ordained ministry and accused them of spreading sin. "On account of ... " the prolific third-century author Tertullian wrote, addressing women, "even the son of God had to die."

It was only a matter of time before the Magdalene also came under attack. The moment arrived on an autumn Sunday in the year 591, in a sermon preached at the heart of the Catholic Church. Taking the pulpit at the Basilica San Clemente in Rome, Pope Gregory the Great offered a startling conclusion about the Magdalene: she had been a whore. Before she came to Christ, Gregory explained, Mary's sins were manifold: she had "coveted with Earthly eyes" and "displayed her hair to set off her face." Most scandalously, she had "used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts." Looking out at his audience, a somber mass of monks, Gregory gave Mary a new identity that would shape her image for fourteen hundred years. "It is clear, brothers," he declared: she was a prostitute.

But it was not clear at all. Gregory's remarkable assertion was based on the idea that Mary was the unnamed "sinful woman" who anoints Jesus' feet in the seventh chapter of Luke—a conflation many contemporary scholars dismiss. Even if she were the sinful woman, there is no evidence in any Gospels that her sins were those of the flesh—in the first century, a woman could be considered "sinful" for talking to men other than her husband or going to the marketplace alone. Gregory created the prostitute, as if from thin air.

According to the article, “The Da Vinci Code” resurrects Mary, but still doesn’t give her her due.

or all its revolutionary claims, "The Da Vinci Code" is remarkably old-fashioned, making Mary important for her body more than her mind. In the movie, we see a stricken, shadowy Magdalene with swollen belly being spirited out of Jerusalem by a crowd of attendant men. But we never hear her voice. "The Da Vinci Code" seems to think that the secret tradition of Mary Magdalene speaks to the carnal. In reality, it tells of something far more subversive: the intellectual equality of the sexes. The current Magdalene cult still focuses on her sexuality even though no early Christian writings speak of her sexuality at all. "Why do we feel the need to re-sexualize Mary?" wonders Karen King, author of "The Gospel of Mary of Magdala.""We've gotten rid of the myth of the prostitute. Now there's this move to see her as wife and mother. Why isn't it adequate to see her as disciple and perhaps apostle?"

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

[rodeodance]

1. Bringing women back into history historians -last 30-40 years have done

wonderful work in this area.