the Evangelical Caste System

The "evangelical caste system" is what Jocelyn Andersen calls an ecclesiastical and household construct based on "old arguments traditionally used to keep men and women enslaved in illegitimate bondage based on sex." After conducting "extensive personal research into the Patriarchy movement" and after reading the Bible carefully for herself with respect to the Patriarchy, Andersen is coming out with a book entitled Woman this is WAR! Gender, Slavery, and the Evangelical Caste System.

The last time I heard anyone use the word caste to refer to any part of the Christian church was toward the end of last year.  This raised an eyebrow, I imagine, but was hardly the passionate, provocative declaration that Andersen is making, and that she has to make, because she's a woman, a woman with an all too common story this late in human history.

In November last year, blogger Peter Kirk called the historical teaching that has promoted "Church leadership by a special caste of pastors or priests" a "deeply de-Christian doctrine."  In other words, the notion and practice of a caste system is not to be seen as Christian at all.  Kirk, an Anglican, doesn't look at the systematic construct of an ecclesiastical caste in relation to gender so much, and he casts blame for such a doctrine on the Christian appropriation of "the values of the world." Nonetheless, he sees as another "deeply de-Christian doctrine" the idea that "Leadership is male"; that's a "concept," he says, "which also seems to have been imported into the church from the surrounding culture." One of Kirk's responders, Gary Simmons, commented to speculate that pragmatism and not the assimilation of culture values is the source: "I agree there should be no formal 'caste,' but as an American of Protestant background from the Bible Belt, I will tell you that having no clear authority structure (like a caste) has its drawbacks and frustrations."  They, and none of Kirk's other responders with him, further discussed male leadership as part of the caste and how that, as biblical teaching, might be outdated or de-christian or damaging to women, men, and children.  Perhaps other things were more interesting to them in the conversation because they are not women and are men.

In a recent related post at another blog, John Hobbins defends Christians in general and bashes what he calls "standard-issue feminists" in particular (as if there's a necessary divide between the two beyond his own thinking); the former but not the latter, he says, have reduced the global gendercide reported by the Economist.  Hobbins asserts that "Korean Christianity remains strongly complementarian [i.e. the male is the leader] in the pulpit and the home" to suggest that such teaching and practice "stands in contradiction to femicide" but that, in contrast, "democratic capitalists and feminists ... have failed" [in opposing male-over-female hierarchies] to so stand against gendercide.  Hobbins is "an ordained pastor in the Waldensian Church" and a prolific blogger.

In a responsive post today at yet another blog, Suzanne McCarthy points out that male bible-bloggers who are the most read, Hobbins included, create a very odd position for female bible-bloggers.  It's not just the strong assertions, like Hobbins's, that complementarianism (i.e. the caste-like teaching and practice) is actually helping women in the church around the world but it's also the censorship that a powerful male bible-blogger engages in (albeit at his own well-read blog) that limits women in the conversation about the very caste system that silences many.

However, perhaps Andersen's new book will get more of us talking and will allow women to talk with men and with one another.  The comparisons of a caste with some domains of evangelicalism (along the lines of gender and slavery) should have more of us considering whether and how we rank.

Subversive Rhetoric: Against Slave-Owning Americans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans

If you get there before I do

Coming for to carry me home

Tell all my friends I'm coming too

Coming for to carry me home

      Within a matrix of overwhelming repressive power, the rhetoric of the spiritual and its ability to "play" in and among the interpretive gaps and disjunctions between the social worlds of slave and slave holder became a powerful subversive tool against repression.  Such rhetoric is political; it takes sides.  It simultaneously subverts and directs power.  Black preachers and others who employed the song ["Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"] for political purposes carefully crafted a multivocal rhetoric in which both slave and slave master could participate, albeit with very different interests and understandings.
      Since the rhetoric was appropriately constructed to attend to each group's social and political interests, each group could participate in their own symbolic world of meaning.  The slaveholder certainly would not have been aware that the rhetoric signaled the arrival of the Underground Railroad and the slaves' intent for freedom here instead of the hereafter.  Those slaves who had not read 2 Kings or heard the story of Elijah preached might not have been aware that there was another signification for the rhetoric in the planter class's romanticized notions of slave piety.  Only those individuals who traveled between both worlds, such as slave preachers, would have understood the rhetoric's double signification and why the song needed such a multivalent character to be effective.
      The separatist rhetoric of Ezra 9-10 and Nehemiah 10-13 is similarly multivalent.  Like the spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," the rhetoric of Ezra and Nehemiah also emerges from a context of repression.  Judah suffered under Persian domination that was no less brutal than that of the Assyrians and Babylonians before them or that of the Greeks and Romans who succeeded them.
---
above, an excerpt from the chapter "Ezra and Nehemiah," by Rev. Dr. Herbert Marbury, Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt University, and Clergy of the North Georgia United Methodist Conference, in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel's Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora.  (HT David Ker)

Sifting: An African American Woman Reading

below, an excerpt from her chapter "Sirach," by Dr. Naomi P. Franklin, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Virginia Union University, and Preacher at Pilgrim Journey Baptist Church, in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel's Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora.  (HT David Ker)
-----
      For Africana people, Sirach [also known as Ecclesiasticus, written by Jesus son of Sirach and translated into Greek by his grandson] is problematic, for it contains misogynistic advice and negative advice about slaves.  However, alongside that negative information, one finds constructive advice about living.  His [i.e., the author's] teachings are contradictory.  In one chapter, he speaks of the "wickedness" and "anger of women" (25:13, 15), yet in the very next one he speaks about the happiness of the man who finds a good wife (26:1).  His greatest appreciation seems to be for a silent wife, seeing her as a gift from the Lord (26:14).  This reflects the influence on Sirach of Hellenism, with its narrow view of the place of women in society and its negative view of women ([Claudia] Camp ["Becoming Canon: Women, Texts and Scribes in Proverbs and Sirach"] 2005: [page] 377).  For Africana women in particular and the community in general, these teachings must be eschewed.  Likewise, readers will find the negative advice about slaves and their treatment disconcerting, given our long and tortuous experience of slavery.
      While Sirach is part of the corpus of Wisdom literature, there is much within it that cannot be considered wisdom in the modern context.  His advice regarding women and children and how to live in society must be sifted in order to find that which can be useful in a modern context....

Sifting: Principled Preaching

During black history month in the United States of America, a place where not very long ago Africans were not Americans but were the slaves of Euro Americans, I went to church.  The preacher preached right through I Timothy 5:17 - 6:2, verse by verse.

The context here is important.  The preacher is himself Euro American, and male, a husband.  He grew up in New York but is preaching on Valentines Day in Texas. And his text is by another Euro male (a Roman citizen writing in imperial Greek as a Jewish male elitist, purist, who's converted to a sect of Judaism that he once tried to crush politically) to another Euro male (a late-circumcised half-Jew Greek) on how to order an assembly (a synagogue, an ekklesia) of people consisting of half slaves and half women.

(White, Euro American friends of mine invited me to this church this day in this place; there are others like them, like us, in the audience but no Africans or African Americans among us, not even one.  I'm going to make a big deal out of my own personal context here so perhaps you'll be willing to consider yours with me.  A number of bloggers - you included - can and do look at the text that I heard preached on Sunday.  Each one of us, yes you and me, read the text through our own gendered, and our own raced, lens.  We have history, histories.  We either want change, need change, or we resist change.  We sift the text.  White, Euro Males tend to let the text be -- to read it as authoritative twenty centuries later in the place where they are on top.  They -- and some of you -- tend to be in the top positions in their assemblies, whether Jewish, Muslim, or Christian.  They -- and some of you -- tend to take the top place in their marriages over their wives.  They  -- and some of you -- tend to hold the top positions in their places of employment.  They -- and some of you -- tend to read the text as normative for them.  But, thankfully, none of us can use the text now to justify slavery, as it was used for so long until just recently.  Thankfully, we all have to sift through the first-century text that has been used, once upon a time, to sanction African slavery among us!  We have Black history, and this is our black history month.  We can remember.  So listen in, with me, to this pastor sifting now.)

"The elders in the first century," said the pastor in America in the twenty-first century, "were men only."  And he added, "If I had written this, there would have been women elders too.  But notice the principle of honor - double honor - for those in senior positions."  (I Timothy 5:17)

"Paul has Timothy turn with him to a principle of the Jewish scripture for the way a congregation was to treat elders and pastors," he added.  "I'm from the City, so what do I know about oxen and muzzles and treading grain?  Notice, however, the principle of allowing the ones doing work for others to benefit from the work."  (I Timothy 5:18)

"Here the writer takes much care to describe the care in keeping elders on the hook.  Let's include youth pastors and senior pastors and all paid leaders today in this principle."  (I Timothy 5:19, 20, 21, 22)

"Now we come to a parenthesis in the text.  It's direct advice from Paul to Timothy about using alcohol, using wine.  I don't know why Paul put that in the text and why he put that here exactly.  It seems to be the principle of best-known medicine."  (I Timothy 5:23)

"Now Paul comes back to the points he was making earlier.  The principle is that nothing leaders do will ultimately be in secret." (I Timothy 5:24, 25)

"Today, we don't live in a society with slaves.  When this was written, half of society was enslaved.  The text gives us a principle analogous to our current situation but, of course, it's different.  We don't live as slaves or as slave owners.  The principle we can make is to the workplace, to being employees, to having a boss.  We can give honor to our bosses, 'all honor.'  And if we're a boss who is a believer, then there are principles of honor for us too."  (I Timothy 6:1, 2)

Notice the humility of the pastor preaching.  Notice his appeal to the text and his appeal to his own context now - so far away, as if reading somebody else's mail.  Notice too our legacy of whites and blacks reading the texts now, in different places, during our black history month.

(Suzanne's Bookshelf has been linking to a number of bloggers' posts on the issue of using the texts to justify gendered positioning in the twenty-first century:  here, here, and here.  These are worth reading for more on this principle of sifting for principles.  The sifting principle -- which also is used by white euro males -- must be used by African American women; for example, here's a scholar and preacher, Dr. Naomi Franklin, who introduces the principle of sifting a text.)

Women, Africana Reality, and the Bible

      What immediately comes to mind when I ponder further my connectedness with my sisters and the Bible is my encounter with the latter at the Elminah Castle in Ghana in 2000.  I stood in one of the rooms, angered by a poster with a quotation from Psalm 132:14.  The core of the poster's message was that God was in the place of slavery!  There, at the western corner of the African continent, I remembered how this book, which has come to be valued and shunned by many African peoples, functioned to sanction all forms of oppression that were to become their painful legacies.  Some were hurled from that same location to the Americas, which some remained to be subjugated and colonized.  I remembered how the Bible was systematically used to sanction racial segregation in South Africa.  As sons and daughters of Africa bore, and still bear, the brunt of their Blackness, the daughters have been, and still are, at the receiving end.  The latter are connected in their struggles against a variety of life-denying forces in their local contexts and globally....

     I first encountered the Bible in early childhood at home (ga-Mphahlele), in the church, and later at school.  My family formed part of a group designated majakane, a church-going African people who supposedly (that is, mainly in public) shunned African traditional customs.  The majakane stood in contrast to the so-called heathens (bahedene) who openly rejected Christianity.  They freely engaged in African traditional life.  In that setting, the Bible was successfully used to divide kindred peoples!  I later came to embrace it in my teen years when I got attracted to Pentecostal theology.  Later, I encountered it as a university student in biblical studies classes, as a graduate student of Hebrew Bible, and now as a bosadi (womanhood) Hebrew Bible scholar.

--
a couple of paragraphs from a chapter with the title I've borrowed here as the title of my post.  It's in the book The Africana Bible: Reading Israel's Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora.  (HT David Ker, who may now regret giving it to me.)  The excerpt above is from Madipoane Masenya (ngwan'a Mphahlele).

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.

Barnstone, Aristotle & Paul

Its disturbing message reveals how strong were the ties of many early Christian Jews with the Roman Empire and its vast slave network, which Paul, as a possible Roman citizen, espouses without criticism.

     For all these good reasons, because the Bible should sing us into its depths and rapture, Romans and Corinthians begin the letters.  A Bible like a novel, play, or opera has a movement leading to the reader's pleasure and enlightenment.  As with the classical drama, following Aristotle's dictum, we have suspension of disbelief in order to become fully involved in the drama and achieve catharsis.  All these instructions are applicable to the Bible, and they work for the believer and the skeptic.

     The Bible is a work of art.  Were it not art, were it simply an instruction manual, it would not satisfy or convince, and very likely wound not have survived.

--Willis Barnstone, "Introduction, Canon of the Restored New Testament," page 116, The Restored New Testament: A New Translation with Commentary, Including the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary, and Judas 

Indulging Our Fiction Persistently

The conditions on the slave ships--in which thousands died crossing the seas--the treatment slaves often received, and, in a special way, slavery based on skin color, cannot just be passed over. For complex reasons still debated by historians, Englishmen, continental Europeans, and Americans indulged in the fiction that the black [hu]man was not a person and could therefore be treated as a thing. This fiction covered their hypocrisy. Actually they harked back to Aristotle's definition of a slave as a living tool. . . .

--Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live, page 114, 1976

Record numbers of blacks and Hispanics are earning diplomas, but the disparity between their salaries and those for Anglos in the workplace is bigger than it has been in almost a decade, according to census data [in the USA] released Monday. "The lesson of most economic downturns is minorities are the last hired, first fired," said Roderick Harrison of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

--Hope Yen, "Census: Racial disparities in higher-paying jobs persist," Fort Worth Star-Telegram, page 1, Tuesday, April 28, 2009

What Aristotle Looked Like

In every department of civilized existence, the influence of Aristotle must be taken into account, and his judgment of women’s position in society—a view sincerely held and on the whole most temperately expressed—has had far more effect on the world than have the idealist theories of Plato. . . . in [Aristotle’s] time the position of women could hardly have been altered for the worse, but by his blind followers in later ages [his view hardly budges since] his slightest word [is] regarded almost as inspired truth . . . . If he had been a little more of a poet and idealist—in other words, if he had not been Aristotle—he might have taken another view [on the need for women to be submissive to men] . . . . Aristotle’s influence in this matter has been an enormous hindrance to human progress.

--F. A. Wright 

Aristotle wore his hair short and had male pattern balding, I think.  This was his ideal hairstyle, and he railed on the Spartan men who in fact let their hair grow long and their women go wild.  Aristotle probably looked a little like Seinfeld’s George Costanza but with his glasses off. 

His ideal age for a man to marry a young girl?  Aristotle’s real, actual age.  The peak time of a man’s body and a man’s mind?  Yep, you guessed again: Aristotle’s real, actual age. The ideal system for a male-dominant household and for ownership of natural-born slaves?  Right again.  Aristotle’s system.

   Aristotle would have loved those lines from Alexander Pope (if he didn’t so hate poetry and barbarian mother tongues such as Pope’s English): 

“Whatever is [for Aristotle], is right [for nature].” -- which is a translation of Pope's "Whatever is, is right."

Here’s some evidence from Aristotle’s writings and his life:

“The front part of the head goes bald because the brain is there and man is the only animal to go bald, because his brain is much the largest and moistest. Women do not go bald."

--Aristotle, DE GENERATIONE, 784a (translated by A. L. Peck, 1943)

When he was around 37 years old, Aristotle married a girl named Pythias who likely was around 18 years of age; at that time, he wrote his treatise on Politics in which “he specified as the optimal nuptial ages thirty-seven for the man and eighteen for the woman” (Abraham Edel, Aristotle and His Philosophy,  page 14).  The implications are not missed by F. A. Wright, who declares, “The whole arrangement is obviously wrong” (213); and Wright explains:

The gap between husband and wife is far too great for any real physical or moral companionship.  The husband, moreover, remaining unmarried until the age of thirty-seven, can hardly be supposed to have escaped from the illicit connections which were allowed and encouraged. . . [and] to say that such an one is in his prime is surely to mis-state the case (213). 

In the Rhetoric (1390b), Aristotle did in fact say that the prime age for a man’s body is thirty-five but for his mind forty-nine.  At the time he wrote this, Aristotle was forty-nine and had already outlived Pythias, who would have been thirty.  They had a daughter named Pythias who would have been, at age twelve, approaching the baby-bearing age if still a few years from the optimal marrying age.

            Wright notes related personal issues:

The art of being a grandfather also under this system [of Aristotle’s] tends to disappear, for a man could hardly hope to see grandchildren of his own, if neither he nor his sons married till they were thirty-seven:  his daughters, of course, . . . on marriage passed altogether out of their father’s life (213). 

By Aristotle’s arrangement, then, his daughter Pythias and any grandchild she might bear would be under another man’s authority.  And it does not take much imagination to picture, through the years, the various problematic issues for a wife, a mother, a concubine, and a grandmother, who experience different translations and distanced relationships with respect to men.  It is important to consider the other women, children, and slaves in Aristotle’s life and their problems.  History does record that Aristotle fathered another child, a son named Nichomachus by a wife or concubine or slave named Herpyllis although the details are sketchy (Edel 14). 

And we do know that “[un]questionably,  Aristotle owned numerous slaves. . . [which he logically rationalized by] a kind of structural racism” (Neel, Aristotle’s Voice, page 19).  These are not unimportant facts when one is translating Aristotle’s Rhetoric rhetorically and feministically.  Jasper Neel, goes on to observe that “[i]n Aristotle’s system, soul is privileged over body, intelligence over emotion, humans over animals, men over women, and freemen over slaves” (26).  However, Neel claims “Aristotle did not need to spend much time on slavery in the Rhetoric because he had justified it in detail in the Politics, the master art in which his rhetoric is a subsidiary” (16).  For Aristotle, “rhetoric” does not have the status of other “arts.”  Neel adds, “And by now, of course, it is clear why we read the Rhetoric alone, pretending that it can be extracted from the political and social theories in which Aristotle embedded it. . . .  [T]hrough his eyes, things ‘make sense’ in a terrifying way” (18).   Our readerly pretense is that “rhetoric” does not need to fit in the context of Aristotle’s terrible, terrifying map of knowledge.  Neel specifies that Aristotle’s terrifying map of knowledge includes “[s]lavery, sexism, and racism [which together as a system] made perfect sense to Aristotle, even though he clearly knew persuasive and cogent arguments against them all” (25).

Far too

For far too long, far too many of us have believed far too much of what Aristotle believed and taught on slaves, women, and children:

"It is clear, therefore, that some men are by nature free and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right."

"A husband and a father rules over wife and children, both free, but the rule differs: over his children it is a royal, over his wife a constitutional rule. For although there may be exceptions to the order of nature, the male is by nature fitter for command than the female, just as the elder and full-grown is superior to the younger and more immature."

Some 2,308 years or so later, senators in the U.S. Senate (led by co-sponsors Dianne Feinstein, Norm Coleman, John Cornyn, Richard Lugar, Barack Obama) unanimously voted for January 11 to be the U.S. National Human Trafficking Awareness Day.

Some, if far too few, will be aware today.

Same Kind of Different As Me

Have you ever witnessed slavery? Ever seen a marriage in which the wife is subjugated to the husband?

Yesterday, I saw slavery firsthand and shook the hand of a former slave. And this morning, I read Suzanne McCarthy’s testament to the “handicapped form” of marriage in which the man dominates the woman. A link to McCarthy’s post is below. Here’s who I met yesterday:

Denver Moore is the co-author of Same Kind of Different As Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman who Bound Them Together. It’s the bestseller on amazon.com’s “Ethnic and National” top-five short list (with Tony Dungy’s and Clarence Thomas’s biographies; with David W. Blight’s book including the autobiographical manuscripts of slaves Wallace Turnage and John Washington; and with Barack Obama’s statement of political vision, now with Oprah Winfrey’s backing). On page 3, Moore says:

I worked them fields for nearly thirty years, like a slave, even though slavery had supposeably ended when my grandma was just a girl. I had a shack I didn’t own, two pair a’ overalls I got on credit, a hog, and a outhouse. I worked them fields, plantin and plowin and pickin and givin all the cotton to the Man that owned the land, all without no paycheck. I didn’t even know what a paycheck was.

Yesterday, Moore and his co-author, Ron Hall, shook hands with a few of us. They had come out to tell their stories, and their story together: the story of how a woman, Debbie Hall, brought them together in a very unlikely friendship. The whole event of their story telling was unlikely yesterday. None of us really escaped slavery and its effects today. It was December 9, 2007 in the United States of America. (This is the place where “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” where slave-holding men mention their Creator and their endowments – without a mention of blacks or women – when they make their declaration of independence from a monarch who incites against them the red “merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”)

More specifically, it was 7am, and we were in Texas, in Fort Worth (aka “Cowtown” and “Where the West Begins”). We were at the National Cutting Horse Association's best-of-the-best Futurity event. And we were in the worship service of the Cowboy Church there. I counted every person in the arena: 102 whites, 1 black. It was a scene reminiscent of the keynote address of this year’s Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, where during lunch white feminist scholar Krista Ratcliffe showed colored slides of colored women rhetors and spoke from lessons of her book Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness while we the audience of mostly whites ate desserts served by the hands of the all-black wait staff, mostly women.

Moore followed Hall, and began his story by thanking God for helping, by thanking us his audience for listening, and by thanking the elite cutting horse owners and the Will Rogers Coliseum authorities for doing what they do. Moore quickly specified: “When I was living on these streets here in Fort Worth, yall gave me some good work, cleaning yalls horses stalls here. Keep doin what yall do.” Moore was not being disingenuous; nor was there a hint of sarcasm in his voice. No. Just plain gratitude. In his body, he found appreciation for the good in the bad. Slavery, in the form of sharecropping and homelessness and physical abuse by white racists, had once and perpetually taught him profound bitterness. But, yesterday, Moore talked as a changed and as a changing human being. (Hall did too). Yesterday, as Moore spoke and as he sang a blue Negro spiritual of struggle and hope, there was not a throat without a lump in it (though I noted through blurry eyes that several of the tough Texas cowboys can still hold back their tears).

We all came into the arena the same; and now we’re some kind of different. Buy the book. Listen very, very carefully. (Click here for McCarthy’s insights. Interpret the views very, very carefully). Consider change.

The Letter's Literary: A Personal Translation

In this post, I try my hand at translation of a book of the Bible, though I'm no Bible translator. I'm working my way through the Greek, as the host language; my English is the guest. The interlation (i.e., Greek and English side by side) below is to show the personal, the embodiment, the word play (i.e., wiggle room and playfulness in language). If Willis Barnstone attempts to recover the Hebrew senses lost in the Jewish gospels of Yeshua and in Israel's Apocalypse of Yohanan, I'm hoping to restore some of the Greek senses (for instance, the allusion to the gods in the names, such as Timothy and Epaphras). (With the English, especially the punctuation and name choices, I do confess "taking liberties," as Iyov once put it. For instance, the letter is redesigned as a memorandum; and Paul is Smally -- I just couldn't use either Pee Wee or Tiny, as those two names are infamously claimed.) I would appreciate any feedback from others, especially those who are more experienced translators, those who would have disagreement with my translation, and anyone amused by it in any way.

I'm trying, here, to translate Philemon for these few reasons:

1) It's the only book I can work through quickly to consider its whole start-to-finish context (though that itself is within the first century Roman imperial context, which looks back to various waves of Greek influence).

2) The "book" really is a letter. It is "someone else's mail" - as theologian Richard B. Hay calls Paul's first letter to the Jewish, Christian Greeks in Corinth; and that makes you and me "eavesdroppers." In Kenneth Pike's theory, then, we are principled "etic" observers, outsiders who will change the text and be changed by it, depending on whether and how we go in.

3) The little letter is highly rhetorical, and John Hobbins constantly brings attention to the rhetorical (even when he translates into English Matthew's Greek translation of a sermon of Jesus; more on Hobbins' translation in a moment, with a link to it).

4) As rhetorical and epistolary on the specific issue of slavery, Paul's letter is ambiguous in a number of different ways:

a) first, it is a letter that became a scriptural proof-text for both sides in the U.S. Civil War;
b) second, though a mere letter, it uses principles of rhetoric to make a strong argument (i.e., it delays the main point -- the freeing of the slave Onesimus and even the identification of who the letter is about -- until after the principle disputer, Philemon, has been reasonably won over by enthymeme and epideictic).
c) third, the ambiguous, rhetorical letter on slavery is applicable to other issues such as hermeneutics around whether a husband must be lovingly "over" a wife who must submit;
d) fourth, the ambigous rhetorical letter applicable to many question of human equality is literary (i.e., the proper nouns play with common nouns poetically, semantically; the incidence of chiasmus is frequent; and the implied touch of Paul's chained hand to the paper adds a splash to the poetic punch.)

Now, before jumping right in, I'll mention another huge problem right off the bat. By calling Philemon a letter but by translating it also as literature, we're mixing categories. Logic might say:

premise 1 - letters do not equal literature.
premise 2 - Philemon is a letter.
conclusion - Philemon does not equal literature.

And we could go on like that more, for to translate in a literary fashion something that is not literature is not logical. Not only it is illogical to call letters literature, but it's also unreasonable to use literary translation principles on a epistolary text. (Rather, we might more rationally use Formal Equivalence OR Dynamic Equivalence).

Peter Kirk makes this point in a comment on Elshaddai Edward's post, "Is it time for a new translation acronym?":

I would deny that of much of the Bible, in any meaningful sense of the word “literary”. The Gospel of Mark, for example, is not literary in style, nor in intent; the only meaningful sense in which it is literary is that it has been considered so by some literary critics, judged as if it were literary and found wanting. Similarly, Paul’s letter to Philemon is not “literary” but a personal letter. So, to use the term “literary translation” for Bible translation seems to imply either the false assumption that the original is literary or, in violation of Lingamish’s principle [i.e, "A literary translation will not be literary in ways that the original is not"], an attempt to distort a text which was not originally literary into a translation which is.

So I'd like to go back to the N-dimensionality of language, that Kenneth Pike talks about. Language is not so logical as, well, syllogistic logic. Language's categories (despite all Noam Chomsky's helpful theorizing) do not have the government and binding of "either/or" binary features manifesting in the performance of deep structure grammatical competence, if you'll allow the repetition of the jargon. Aristotle might like that if Chomsky would just translate his theory back into Hellenistic writing. Pike reminds us again and again: Person Above logic.

So now we can mention again John Hobbins' translation of Matthew 23. Note Hobbins' perspective on a sermon (i.e. a discourse with "hortatory" features): he calls it literary. And I say, if it fits as Matthew's Greek translation of Jesus's Hebrew Aramaic sermon within the context of Matthew's Greek gospel within the context of a multilingual multicultural first-century Israel, then why not allow "literary translation" of the literature. Barnstone flat out calls Matthew's gospel literature (while not denying its prosaic qualities, which he says most English and most Christian translations reduce the text to).

And note how Sir Philip Sidney writes The Defense of Poesy. How ironic that he must use rhetoric and Prose to defend Poetry. Why not use Poesy (i.e. Poetry)? And could poetry prove the worth of rhetoric and of prose too? Of course! Again, it is we the people writing and reading and speaking and listening who see the various qualities (sometimes ironic, sometime unintended by the author) as various letter or literature, poetry or prose, formally equivalent or dynamically equivalent or literarily equivalent.

So here is Philemon, first in the original Greek (with some re-formatting -- it's my poor html that doesn't quite do what I want), and second in a kind of original English:

1 Παῦλος δέσμιος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ
καὶ Τιμόθεος ὁ ἀδελφὸς

Φιλήμονι τῷ ἀγαπητῷ καὶ συνεργῷ ἡμῶν
2 καὶ Ἀπφίᾳ τῇ ἀδελφῇ
καὶ Ἀρχίππῳ τῷ συστρατιώτῃ ἡμῶν
καὶ τῇ κατ' οἶκόν σου ἐκκλησίᾳ

3 χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη ἀπὸ θεοῦ πατρὸς ἡμῶν καὶ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ

4 εὐχαριστῶ τῷ θεῷ μου πάντοτε μνείαν σου ποιούμενος ἐπὶ τῶν προσευχῶν μου 5 ἀκούων σου τὴν ἀγάπην καὶ τὴν πίστιν ἣν ἔχεις πρὸς τὸν κύριον Ἰησοῦν καὶ εἰς πάντας τοὺς ἁγίους 6 ὅπως ἡ κοινωνία τῆς πίστεώς σου ἐνεργὴς γένηται ἐν ἐπιγνώσει παντὸς ἀγαθοῦ τοῦ ἐν ἡμῖν εἰς Χριστόν

7 χαρὰν γὰρ πολλὴν ἔσχον καὶ παράκλησιν ἐπὶ τῇ ἀγάπῃ σου ὅτι τὰ σπλάγχνα τῶν ἁγίων ἀναπέπαυται διὰ σοῦ ἀδελφέ 8 διό πολλὴν ἐν Χριστῷ παρρησίαν ἔχων ἐπιτάσσειν σοι τὸ ἀνῆκον 9 διὰ τὴν ἀγάπην μᾶλλον παρακαλῶ τοιοῦτος ὢν ὡς Παῦλος πρεσβύτης νυνὶ δὲ καὶ δέσμιος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ 10 παρακαλῶ σε περὶ τοῦ ἐμοῦ τέκνου ὃν ἐγέννησα ἐν τοῖς δεσμοῖς Ὀνήσιμον 11 τόν ποτέ σοι ἄχρηστον νυνὶ δὲ καὶ σοὶ καὶ ἐμοὶ εὔχρηστον 12 ὃν ἀνέπεμψά σοι αὐτόν τοῦτ' ἔστιν τὰ ἐμὰ σπλάγχνα 13 ὃν ἐγὼ ἐβουλόμην πρὸς ἐμαυτὸν κατέχειν ἵνα ὑπὲρ σοῦ μοι διακονῇ ἐν τοῖς δεσμοῖς τοῦ εὐαγγελίου

14 χωρὶς δὲ τῆς σῆς γνώμης οὐδὲν ἠθέλησα ποιῆσαι ἵνα μὴ ὡς κατὰ ἀνάγκην τὸ ἀγαθόν σου ᾖ ἀλλὰ κατὰ ἑκούσιον 15 τάχα γὰρ διὰ τοῦτο ἐχωρίσθη πρὸς ὥραν ἵνα αἰώνιον αὐτὸν ἀπέχῃς 16 οὐκέτι ὡς δοῦλον ἀλλ' ὑπὲρ δοῦλον ἀδελφὸν ἀγαπητόν μάλιστα ἐμοί πόσῳ δὲ μᾶλλον σοὶ καὶ ἐν σαρκὶ καὶ ἐν κυρίῳ 17 εἰ οὖν με ἔχεις κοινωνόν προσλαβοῦ αὐτὸν ὡς ἐμέ 18 εἰ δέ τι ἠδίκησέν σε ἢ ὀφείλει τοῦτο ἐμοὶ ἐλλόγα

19 ἐγὼ Παῦλος ἔγραψα τῇ ἐμῇ χειρί ἐγὼ ἀποτίσω

ἵνα μὴ λέγω σοι ὅτι καὶ σεαυτόν μοι προσοφείλεις 20 ναί ἀδελφέ ἐγώ σου ὀναίμην ἐν κυρίῳ ἀνάπαυσόν μου τὰ σπλάγχνα ἐν Χριστῷ 21 πεποιθὼς τῇ ὑπακοῇ σου ἔγραψά σοι εἰδὼς ὅτι καὶ ὑπὲρ ἃ λέγω ποιήσεις 22 ἅμα δὲ καὶ ἑτοίμαζέ μοι ξενίαν ἐλπίζω γὰρ ὅτι διὰ τῶν προσευχῶν ὑμῶν χαρισθήσομαι ὑμῖν

23 ἀσπάζεταί σε Ἐπαφρᾶς ὁ συναιχμάλωτός μου ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ
24 Μᾶρκος Ἀρίσταρχος Δημᾶς Λουκᾶς οἱ συνεργοί μου

25 ἡ χάρις τοῦ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ μετὰ τοῦ πνεύματος ὑμῶν

FROM:

1 Smally -- A Chained Prisoner of Anointed Joshua
and God Guy -- A Brother

TO:

Buddy – Our Loved-One and Co-Worker
2 and Loveless – Our Sister
and Horseman – Our Co-Warrior
and the Entire Group Called to Your House, Buddy

TO YOU ALL:

3 Favor and Peace

FROM:

God – Our Father
and Joshua Anointed – Our Master

4 Blessed favor goes to my God when my memories of you, Buddy, are made vivid in my prayers. 5 I keep hearing about your love – and your belief, which you hold in your possession before Master Joshua – for each one made supremely special. 6 So I’m praying that your partnership in belief is actively birthed – in the expansive knowledge of everthing that’s good in each one of you – for our Anointed One.

7 What I hold in my possession is joy, and much of it -- not to mention a call from beside you to be encouraged – and that’s all because of your love Buddy. And that love through you, Brother, refreshes the supremely special ones to their gut-level core. 8 Now, much of what I hold in my possession – from the Anointed One – is boldness: a boldness to order you to do the right thing. 9 Through love, there’s much more: a call to you alongside, to encourage you, Buddy. This is Smally here, the old guy; and now I’m even a chained prisoner of Anointed Joshua. 10 I’m beside you, calling you around now to my child -- the one I birthed in my chains -- I’m talking about Handy. 11 He’s the one who was useless to you once, but who is now -- to me and to you -- very useful in the most blessed ways. 12 He’s the one I’m sending back to you, Buddy. He’s my gut-level core. 13 He’s the one I had been counseled to hold in possession for myself, so that you, Buddy, could serve me in these chains of that Blessed Announcement to the World.

14 Apart from your knowing all about it, though, I didn’t have any wish to make a single move. I did wish that -- by no obligation -- there’d be that goodness of yours, rather by your own free will. 15 Perhaps, in fact, he was apart from you an hour, so to speak, so that for ages to come you’d hold him in your possession -- 16 no longer as a slave -- rather, as above a slave: a loved brother -- especially to me -- but so much more to you, Buddy, not only in the flesh but also in the Master. 17 If you hold onto me now as a partner, then take him back as you’d take me. 18 If, however, he’s committed some injustice, or has a debt, against you, then state that on my bill.

19

I will repay so that there’s no statement of your debt, Buddy: that you owe me your own self. 20 Yes, Brother, I myself need something handy from you as you’re in the Master: refresh me to my gut-level core in the Anointed One. 21 Persuaded by how you’ve heard me before, I’m writing to you now, Buddy, seeing once again that you’re going to go above and beyond to make good on this statement. As you’re doing that, please get a guest room ready for me. 22 I’m expecting, in fact, that the requests each one of you is making will bring favor to you all.

23 GREETINGS TO YOU BUDDY FROM:

Aphrodite’s Guy – my co-inmate in Anointed Joshua
24 And my co-workers – Warrior, Valorman, PopulaceMan, and Lukan

25 WITH THE BREATH OF EACH ONE OF YOU:

The favor of the Master – Joshua Anointed