Sexual harassment

When I first started blogging, it became increasingly clear to me that Aristotle's sexism and misogyny and gynephobia had penetrated the domain of Bible translation. So I wrote a post entitled, "Icky-ness: (womanly) Word Play in Bible Translation." Suzanne commented, first, following my post to say, "That is very striking. I had not ever read this passage in Greek, that I remember." And then she said, "Here is a truly gyn-icky-logical article."

The article she directed us to was by Daniel Wallace.  That was my introduction to Wallace and to his sexism.

And now Wallace's sexual harassment, it seems, has extended to others who would endorse his views or would practice his practices.   Not even a week ago, Suzanne noticed how he or his blog editors had silenced her:  "I can't interact with Dr. Wallace's post because I have been blocked for not backing down on points of accuracy in Latin and Greek, or something like that."  And then today, Suzanne has been warned by one of the men at the all-male BBB about being one who would "pursue the gender discussion on this posting."  Never mind that the BBB posting is all about Wallace's part-1 of his "review" of the NIV 2011, a "review" in which Wallace mentions gender many many times.  Never mind that the BBB posting refers to Wallace's review where Wallace himself even uses the word gender there exactly 13 times.  Go figure.  (Notice, I'd just been sitting by, listening into the conversation up to that point.  No longer.  Peter Kirk says you can discuss gender not at BBB but at his other blog.  Why?  I'd say you should also feel free to discuss Wallace and the NIV 2011 and gender here at this blog.)

There's much to say about Wallace's review per se.  Kirk has started in on one little point.  I'd like to pick that up just a little more here.  Kirk gets into the history but not necessarily the Greek.  And Wallace is not careful with his own Greek revisionism when he accuses the NRSV translation team of historical revisionism.  He says, at one point:

In 1 Tim 3.2, “married only once” [by the NRSV] translates the Greek phrase, “husband of one wife” (though some evidence has been suggested that this phrase might mean simply “married only once”). The text now sounds like Paul would allow women to be elders/bishops, but that seems to be a case of historical revisionism.

In fact, the Greek phrase is μιᾶς γυναικὸς ἄνδρα, mias gunaikos andra.  Please notice how "the Greek phrase" for Wallace is, rather, exactly the instead-English phrasing of the male-only ESV Bible translators, which they also allow in a footnote to be alternatively, literally, read as "a man of one woman."  Now, Wallace (in his parenthetical note) suggests "some evidence" for an expanded meaning.  But he doesn't tell us what he means by his italicized "some"; nor does he bother to direct us to where we might find this additional evidence for the additional meanings.  So may I please suggest we find the note that Ann Nyland gives for this Greek phrase?  Here is what Nyland says, pointing out how Paul to Timothy recognizes faithfulness to one's partner, whether one is a man or a woman, faithfulness whether one is a monogamous husband or a monogamous wife:

μιᾶς γυναικὸς ἄνδρα, mias gunaikos andra. "faithful to one's partner".  See also 1 Tim. 5:9, ἑνὸς ἀνδρὸς γυνή, henos andros gune.  For references to where this term, or its Latin equivalent, was used on epitaphs to describe a woman faithful to her husband, see C. Keever, And Marries Another, Hendrickson, 1991, pp. 91-2.  Dr. Instone Brewer states, "In New Testament times those phrases meant 'a one-woman man' or a 'one-man-woman', i.e., someone who was faithful.  Timothy was being told to make sure his deacons were not sexually immoral, which was very difficult in a society where you were allowed to sleep with your [female] slaves and where a host was expected to provide [female] prostitutes after a banquet."  Divorce and Remarriage in the Church:  Biblical Solutions for Pastoral Realities, Great Britain, 2003, p. 177.

Well, enough of Wallace's review for now.  What his blogging is doing and what the BBB now is doing is silencing a woman, preventing her from talking about gender while men only talk about women in the Bible and in Bible translation.  Yes, at least the BBB is restricting all of us from talking about women in the Bible and its translation or about aadvarks, as if the two were really the same.

Here, Suzanne rightly calls this "Sexual harassment," what Wallace is doing with his "biblical gynecology."  And see how she much more fairly deals with him, even on his terms, not silencing him or using sexual metaphors for the other, but through conversation and a comparison/contrast of views:

McCarthy vs Wallace

McCarthy vs Wallace 2

McCarthy vs Wallace 3

McCarthy vs Wallace 4

McCarthy vs Wallace 5

McCarthy vs Wallace 6

And related:

Faithful in little ...

Mike Heiser and Junia

Are complementarians biblical?

Junia resurrected

Junia, may she live forever

Gobsmacked at Dan Wallace

Dan Wallace compares the NRSV and the ESV 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

women on the cross

"Over and over again, I see in much of Christianity, a tendency to put women on the cross."
--Suzanne McCarthy

If you read Suzanne's Bookshelf, then you know she's not "radical"; does not use the offensive word "feminist" or the phrase "antimale" to identify herself; is fun and funny with her writing; and is, in different and profound ways, knowledgeable about the languages of the Bible and how Christians use that.  If you read what Suzanne posts, then you might think she's Mary Daly perhaps (or your caricature of Daly based on what others have told you about Dr. Daly and those radical feminist albeit philosophical and theological writings of hers).  To say, on the Saturday before easter Sunday, what McCarthy said (as quoted above here), that's perhaps radical (and as feminist as Daly).  I also say it's sad.  It's sad - not because she says it or when she says it but that it must be said and that she herself has to say it (again)(over and over).  What's really grievous is that she has to speak, as a woman, not only out of years of very careful study but also from experience.  What's really a-mazing (as Daly might put it) is that she has to point out these "Over and over again" observations of hers some 40 years after Daly had to start making them.  What's really curious is that many more of you blog readers read many other bloggers on the christian and jewish bible -- mainly men reading men fairly exclusively -- when, for you American men, it's during your "women's history month" of all times  -- without even knowing who you're missing, or why, or how, or even what.  And my question, now, on this day before Easter, is Who is this Christianity?  Are you?

Aristotle and the Indians (and Us Too)

I don't know about you, but one of my favorite things about blogging is having friends who teach me new things. One of my friends, Suzanne McCarthy of Suzanne's Bookshelf, is a prolific reader who reads blogs, essays, articles, and books, and shares pertinent snippets. At her suggestion, I've been reading Aristotle and the Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World by Lewis Hanke.

Would you like some snippets? And do, also, note below them how much Willis Barnstone makes some of the same observations Hanke has made. They both refer to Bartolomé de Las Casas and see him as instrumental in opposing Christianized Aristotelian slavery. Hanke includes (untranslated) some of the correspondence of Las Casas and a major proponent of enslavement of Indians as a natural class of slaves.

Here's from Hanke:

At first sight, the conjunction of Aristotle and the American Indians appears absurd and meaningless. One may ask why sixteenth-century Spaniards came to apply the ideas of a Greek, who lived four centuries before Christ, to the problems of their conquest of America. What did Aristotle say that had any relevance to the Indians? The explanation is simple. The opening up of a vast unknown world peopled by strange folk led the Spaniards as they advanced among them bearing the Cross to ask themselves who these people were. And in asking this, they found themselves involved in a larger question that Aristotle never had to face: How ought Christians to conduct themselves towards human beings who differ in colour, culture, and religion? Aristotle's authority remained so strong among Christian thinkers that some eminent Spaniards did not hesitate to apply his doctrine of natural slavery to Indians.

(page 1)

Of all the ideas churned up during the early tumultuous years of American history, none had a more dramatic application than the attempts made to apply to the natives there the Aristotelian doctrine of natural slavery: that one part of mankind is set aside by nature to be slaves in the service of masters born for a life of virtue free of manual labour. Learned authorities such as the Spanish jurist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda not only sustained this view with great tenacity and erudition but also concluded that the Indians were in fact such rude and brutal beings that war against them to make possible their forcible Christianization was not only expedient but lawful. Many ecclesiastics, including the noted Indian apostle, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, opposed this idea scornfully, with appeals to divine and natural law as well as to their own experience in America. The controversy became so heated and the king's conscience so troubled over the question of how to carry on the conquest of the Indies in a Christian way that Charles V actually suspended all expeditions to America while a junta of foremost theologians, jurists and officials in the royal capital of Valladolid listened to the arguments of Las Casas and Sepúlveda. All this occured in 1550, after Cortez had conquered Mexico, Pizarro had shattered the Inca empire, and many other lesser-known captains had carried the Spanish banners to far corners of the New World.

The idea that someone else should do the hard manual work of the world appealed strongly to sixteenth-century Spaniards, who inherited a taste for martial glory and religious conquest and a distaste for physical labour from their medieval forefathers who had struggled for centuries to free Spain from the Moslems....

A Scottish professor in Paris, John Major, was the first to apply to the Indians the Aristotelian doctrine of natural slavery. He also approved the idea that force should be used as a preliminary to the preaching of the faith, and published these convictions in a book in Paris in 1510.

(pages 12-14)

Now, here's from Barnstone also mentioning Las Casas:

Slavery was accepted by the church. When the Roman Empire became Christian, under Constantine, slavery continued, flourishing in the Byzantine Empire as well as in the West. It came to the New World in the sixteenth century under the Spaniards, a century before the English and French brought in slaves from Africa. Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566), a Spanish missionary and historian called "the Apostle of the Indies," heroically devoted his life to obtain, though without success, the complete abolition of slavery (the encomienda) among the native population in the New World. In order to save the souls of the Indians for Christian conversion, he proposed to import black slaves from Cuba, who had no souls, he claimed, to work in the mines. In Mexico, slavery was normal even in monasteries and convents. When Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648/51-95), the major poet of the colonial period, entered the cloistered Hieronymite convent of Santa Paula in Mexico City, she brought with her to her luxurious apartment two slaves, one Indian, one black, onw of whome she later sold to her sister Josefa for 250 gold pesos. Although Sor Juana's biography, Response to Sister Filotea (1691), was the first and truly most significant literary book concerning a woman's right to intellectual and artistic freedom prior to the publication of Virginia Woolf's emancipatory Room of One's Own, Sor Juana was unconcerned with the slavery that prevailed in working class Mexico during her lifetime.

Anciently, slavery was present in Israel and Christianity, in the Hebrew Bible and the Greek scriptures. There were rules concerning slavery in both the authentic and disputed letters of Paul. He asked for kindness to slaves and commanded that in the spiritual realm they be treated as brothers [siblings?] in Christ. With respect to the slave's obligations in the material world, in the letters in which he discusses slavery, he commands that a slave under threat of punishment, obey his master and not escape.

(The Restored New Testament, pages 856-57)

One of my hopes in posting such passages is to show that Aristotle's incorrect, racist notions can be exposed, confronted, and overcome.  Of course, Aristotle does not have a monopoly on the ideas that he conceived, on the methods he developed and used, or on the influence he has wielded.

Another blogger, Paula Fether, writes a post today entitled "Sound Familiar?" While Fether, like Barnstone, does not connect the notion of natural-born slavery back to Aristotle, she does connect slavery to Christian arguments for slavery that just happen to be Aristotelian. She gives a number of statements of logic before she appeals to us, her readers, to work through them:

I want to focus on two things right now: how these very arguments for slavery in the US could be lifted almost without alteration to support the resurgance of patriarchy / male supremacy in the Christian community at large, and also the charge that it is elitist to insist that accurate interpretation of scripture does require the expertise of scholars at some point.

Try reading through the quotes again, this time substituting “women” or “the subordination of women” for terms about slavery. You will be struck with the familiarity of the arguments, because the modern male supremacist movement has adopted practically all of them and merely changed the names....

[I] challenge anyone to say how these [arguments] apply to slaves but not women....

Whether we look at this from the perspective of proof-texts or an appeal to the whole teaching of scripture, there is no logically consistent way to make one set of arguments valid or invalid solely on the basis of the name of the group under examination. In other words, it would require a double standard or the fallacy of “special pleading” to make these arguments valid for the subordination of women but invalid for slavery.

Regarding the alleged elitism of arguing for some expertise in order to have an accurate understanding of scripture, we see first of all that if one rejects this argument on the topic of women, one must also reject it on the topic of slavery.

What Barnstone, Fether, Hanke, Las Casas, and McCarthy are doing is helping us see the connections between Aristotle's sexism, logic, and elitism and that of others' too, even in our cultures and our times.

more, like God: women speak

This is an update of an earlier post like God: women speak.

Suzanne has complete her series with McCarthy vs Wallace 4, McCarthy vs Wallace 5, and McCarthy vs Wallace 6. And her important observations in You shall love your .... complement well today's post by Linda Jones on Christianity and charity.

Hugo Schwyzer (a "pro-feminist" and "Christian" and "feminist" and man) returns to new postings today, engaging the following questions of women and men with faith and feminism:

A reader named Mercy (I have a few with that pseudonym, it seems) writes after participating in this discouraging discussion at Christianity Today. Mercy, a young committed evangelical, youth leader, and feminist, asks in an email
How do you deal, as a Christian feminist, with Christians who seem to still believe women are an after-thought of creation, who deny any feminine qualities of God, who think that because birth control wasn’t accepted by a church until 1930 it’s still evil….I could go one and on, but how do you do it? How do you reason with these people? How do you make them see you’re not a pagan, not renouncing Christ, etc, etc.? How do you live your beliefs?

And here's from Nancy Mairs:

"As my husband has often said, when you talk about Jesus, you reveal little — maybe nothing — about Jesus but a great deal about yourself."

"... as the Mexican American theologian Virgilio Elizondo puts it, that 'the role of the powerless is to evangelize the powerful.' A reviewer of one of my books once took me to task for accepting the tenets of feminist and liberation theology merely on faith, as though one could not possibly, after long contemplation and appraisal, continue to affirm them. But God's preferential option for the poor — expressed at least as far back as Isaiah's cry for the protection of widows and fatherless children — rings true to the Christian ethos. I must accept it, both on faith and on reflection, and act upon it if I am to carry out God's will. And in the tale of a dark-skinned peasant carrying to the conquistadores for their veneration the image of a dark-skinned Lady who promised her compassion to all humanity (even, I must suppose, the conquistadores) lies a model of the care I am, I believe, required to give."

A Dynamic God, pages 109 and 31.

like God: women speak

First, there's a helpful description written by Nancy Mairs of "feminine discourse" (at the end of this post).

And also there's linked here a poem "LIKE GOD (TAZRIA)" beautifully and profoundly written and spoken by the incredibly talented Rachel Barenblat after which she says,

The Hebrew word for womb is רחם / rechem; the Hebrew word for compassionate is רחמן / rachaman. Every time we call God Ha-Rachaman, "The Compassionate One," we're also subtly hinting at the existence of God's womb. (Kind of brain-breaking if one presumes that the word "God" is masculine, isn't it?) The ability to nurture new life in the womb and then bring it forth into the world is something women have in common with God -- at least on a metaphorical level.

And here and here and here is Suzanne's important series "McCarthy vs Wallace" in which she most carefully and insightfully writes explaining and exposing: "Once again, this is the level of [patriarchal hierarchy] scholarship used to keep Christian women out of leadership positions in the church."

And Gitl Wallerstein-Braun writes here to begin her essay on fundamentalist "Judaism and feminism" with a story of her own:

It was some twenty years ago, when I was summoned to meet the principal of the local ultra religious girls school attended by my four daughters. I left the meeting shell shocked by the unexpected rebuke I was given. Across the other side of the desk from me, the deadly serious young man castigated the immodest cut of the neckline of my dress.

This experience switched me on to the subversive agenda to keep us religious women in our place; from asking any questions about the disproportionate sacrifices we were compelled to make for our ancient way of life. We were denied all academic and literary stimuli. We were expected to endure the often devastating physical toll of multiple pregnancies and child births. So it dawned on me that our communal religious ethos may represent some issues other than teaching the fear and love of the Lord.

And there's Zohra Moosa, who writes here in answer of a rather logical and rather typical question of separation, of Islamic "Faith and feminism": "I was asked directly whether I found it difficult to reconcile the two, whether there were inherent tensions I had to navigate and how did I square my religion and my belief (the two were conflated in the question) with my feminist convictions."

And Asma Barlas writing again voices here that:

I do not like to call myself a feminist; yet, the label continues to stick!

The truth is that long before I learned about feminism, I had begun to glimpse a message of sexual equality in the Qur’an. Perhaps this is paradoxical given that all the translations and interpretations that I read growing up were by men and given that I was born and raised in Pakistan, a society that can hardly be considered egalitarian. Yet, the Qur’an’s message of equality resonated in the teaching that women and men have been created from a single self and are each other’s guides who have the mutual obligation to enjoin what is right and to forbid what is wrong.

But, then, there are those other verses that Muslims read as saying that men are better than women and their guardians and giving men the right to unfettered polygyny and even to beat a recalcitrant wife. To read the Qur’an in my youth was thus to be caught up in a seemingly irresolvable and agonizing dilemma of how to reconcile these two sets of verses not just with one another but also with a view of God as just, consistent, merciful, and above sexual partisanship.

It has taken the better part of my life to resolve this dilemma and it has involved learning (from the discipline of hermeneutics) that language--hence interpretation—is not fixed or transparent and that the meanings of a text change depending on who interprets it and how. From reading Muslim history, on the other hand, I discovered that Qur’anic exegesis became more hostile to women only gradually and as a result of shifts in religious knowledge and methodology as well as in the political priorities of Muslim states. And, from feminism, I got the language to speak about patriarchy and sexual equality. In other words, it was all these universes of knowledge that enabled me to encounter the Qur’an anew and to give voice to my intuition that a God who is beyond sex/ gender has no investment in favoring males or oppressing women either.

Now Nancy Mairs. She is not claiming at all to speak for God or even like God here. (She has written another book in which she discusses the Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith.) But here I wanted you to hear. To see her description of feminine discourse - as you yourself think about faith, perhaps your own faith, and perhaps even God. (Oh, and you have to get through a few paragraphs of patriarchy first, the dominant implication of a "chain of immortality" that is male first, but what's so new about that? Please be patient.)

. . . . What is hers by right he [the father] must take [from the mother] by force, through law, by giving it [Jacques] Lacan's Name-of-the-Father: "the patronym, patriarchal law, patriarchal identity, language as our inscription into patriarchy. The Name-of-the-Father is the fact of the attribution of paternity by law, by language." With his own tongue the father has named the baby. Now it is his. . . .

Once he gets her settled into domesticity, however, and gets a baby, the baby seems to belong to her, not him. They are forever together, nuzzling each other, rocking and humming and babbling. This doesn't much matter if it's a girl baby, since some stranger will one day get his own baby out of her; but if it's a boy baby, it's of his line, and he must wrest it away from its tricky mother and insert it into the chain of immortality he is forging. "No," he bellows, louder than Rumpelstiltskin, at the cowering child behind her skirts. "You can't have this one. This one is mine. He is my son." And named by the father, the child becomes a man.

In order to get what he wants, then, the father must have power to coerce those around him to meet his demands. To have power is to alienate oneself, however, because power is always power over and the preposition demands an object. The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false. . . . It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation. It demands rupture, the split into halves engendered by the abrupt erection of the phallus: those who have and those who have not. It speaks the language of opposites.

Which is not women's language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it. . . . The difference that emerges here is not the polarity intrinsic in the dominant discourse, which reduces "woman [explains Domna C. Stanton] to man's opposite, his other, the negative of the positive." No, this is an absolute and radical alterity that enfolds the other, as in pregnancy a woman's immune system shuts down in such a way that she shelters and nourishes, rather than rejects and expels, the foreign body within her: "Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on [observes Julia Kristeva]." Feminine discourse is not the language of opposites but a babel of eroticism, attachment, and empathy.

--voice lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, pages 40-42.