[update] this kid hates the word "Christian": my response to Rachel's rally to restore unity

[update below]

Isn't there still time to join in Rachel Held Evans's "Rally to Restore Unity—a week-long celebration of Christian unity and fundraising effort for Charity:Water?"

How do you join in when you hate the word "Christian"?  No, as a kid, I didn't say this:

As a Jew, I had been led to feel cold chills at the mention of his name. Is this strange? For a thousand years Jews have lived among people who interpreted Christ’s will to mean floggings and burnings, ‘gentleman’s agreements,’ and closed universities.... 

I think very few Gentiles realize that even the most Americanized Jew usually shudders when he sees a church, a cross, or even the name of Christ in print. It is, of course, a shudder of fear; but it gives rise to hate immediately…. I have almost never met a Jew who wasn’t anti-Christian.

No, that's something that Joy Davidman wrote in some of her letters.  But since we're being personal, let me tell you what I was made to sing as a kid, as a missionary's kid, as a Christian MK:
Our parents heard the call of God
And followed His command
To preach the Gospel true and pure
Throughout a distant land

So we too have followed
And in this place called home
We too are sharing in the task
To make Christ Jesus known

For we are MKs
We love to share it...

The one who wrote those lyrics (and got us little kid MKs singing that when I was growing up in my home called Vietnam) was one of my missionary aunts.  Like Joy Davidman (when married to Mr. Gresham), my missionary aunt was abused by her husband.  I'm only bringing that up because she had the experience also that my own mother did.  The men wore the label, "Christian."

But that's not necessarily the only reason I hate the word, Christian.  Maybe I'll have to explain all of that another time.  Today, while there's still the rally for unity going on, I'd just like to remember that Jesus was not a Christian.  When he gave that new commandment, he wasn't talking to Christians.  When he said the sign of following him was unity in love, well, that's right, he wasn't talking about getting Christians not to abuse each other or their wives or their little kids.  And he never used the word, Christian either.  He didn't even use the word in Greek that we get our English word from. 

The point I'm trying to get at is that the word Christian automatically leaves out Jews who are not Christians.  Ironically, the first Jews to whom Jesus gave his rally to unity for were not even believers in Christian doctrines.  The closest followers of Jesus were, like him, all Jews.  And all of them were doubters in the resurrection, according to the gospels of Jesus.  Oh, and those gospels?  Not written by Christians either.  So for Christians to have a unity rally, that doesn't include non-believing Jews, is something, isn't it?  Such a rally doesn't call on atheists or Muslims or Mormons or agnostics either.  Unity is for Christians only?  Well, I guess that's sort of a start.  But that's sort of the way my life started too in a Christian family.  Now what?  Well, I think about the words of jesus a lot.  And here's my little sign:

(sorry for the scowl.  it's the sun in my eyes.  or i'm thinking about the tv show survivor where the Christian guy throws his teammates under the bus because he heard some message from Jesus about love.  and why are there so many Bible reading God talking Christians on the show this season?)

[update:

It's probably helpful to know that this missionary kid who hated the word Christian is still growing up.  He's now more often able to say, "I don't love that word."  Once he was an atheist in the closet; now he's most days a theist openly.  For Mother's Day, his mother is coming over for dinner, with her husband (this mk's dad), and that man has recently been making changes.  The retired missionary has been making amends, confessing past abuses, and seeking restitution, forgiveness, restoration, fulness in relationships, and reconciliations where possible.  The relationship that the mk has with his Christian father is in repair (more that it ever was).  The family breathes easier.  The family breathes easier even though that daddy has six cancerous brain tumors, a spine tumor, and stage 4 lung cancer, "incurable and untreatable," says the MD.  The phrase Holy Spirit has taken on new meanings in this family.  What seemed like impossible rifts between people are being overcome.  There's something like the unity rally, but just not so public, going on here.  At this kid does smile often more too:

progress.  not perfection.]

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?

Saving Christianity as Dorothy Sayers would have men do it

Yesterday, I linked to an essay by Frank Schaeffer.  Today, I want to offer a bit of an essay by Dorothy Sayers.

Both Schaeffer and Sayers address their contemporaries on the same topic:  an ugly side of Christianity.  Both share the same background:  preacher's kids.  Thus, as children of Christian ministers, these two rhetors (i.e., speakers and writers) criticize and critique Christianity from the inside:  as insiders.

For me, this is very interesting stuff.  What Schaeffer and Sayers have to say, the personal angst and authority with which they say it, and exactly how they say it is particularly interesting to me for the following reason:  I share this same background with these two.  My father is also a Christian minister (a pastor, a preacher, a missionary).  Thus, I greatly appreciate the logos, the ethos, and the pathos of the son of Francis A. Schaeffer and of the daughter of Henry Sayers.

I would, nonetheless, like us all to notice a difference between these two preacher's kids grown up:  one  "had to" live her life in her body, in the Christian church, sexed female.  ("Fe-male" is our marked English word, and how marked it has been in the English-speaking Christian church.)

Therefore perhaps, this same one, Dorothy Sayers, has been called the author of the "first feminist mystery novel":  Gaudy Night.   But if you read some of those Uncommon Opinions of hers, then you know how she understood how many people would mean the word feminism.  And if you have read her book, Are Women Human?, then you know how "irritated" the label, "feminist," made Sayers.  She insisted "that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual" (page 24).  She actually didn't like labels, didn't like being put into a box by labels.  And she didn't like women being put into boxes, especially not by religion, Jewish or Christian.  So she wrote to complain about the opinion of men, of Judaism and of the Church:

      Women are not human.  They lie when they say they have human needs:  warm and decent clothing; comfort in the bus; interests directed immediately to God and His universe, not intermediately through any child of man.  They are far above man to inspire him, far beneath him to corrupt him; they have feminine minds and feminine natures, but their mind is not one with their nature like the minds of men; they have no human mind and no human nature.  "Blessed be God," says the Jew [a man of course], "that hath not made me a woman."

       God, of course, may have His own opinion, but the Church [of Christian men of course] is reluctant to endorse it.  I think I have never heard a sermon preached on the story of Martha and Mary that did not attempt, somehow, to explain away its text.  Mary's, of course, was the better part--the Lord said so, and we must not precisely contradict Him.  But we will be careful not to despise Martha.  No doubt, He approved of her too.  We could not get on without her, and indeed (have paid lip-service to God's opinion) we must admit that we greatly prefer her.  For Martha was doing a really feminine job, whereas Mary was just behaving like any other disciple, male or female; and that is a hard pill to swallow.

       Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross.  They had never known a man like this Man -- there never has been such another.   A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them as either "The women, God help us!" or "The ladies, God bless them!": who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious.  There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything "funny" about woman's nature.

       But we might easily deduce it from His contemporaries, and from His prophets before Him, and from His Church to this day [of course mainly men].  Women are not human:  nobody shall persuade that they are human; let them say what they like, we will not believe it, though One rose from the dead.

(pages 66-69, Are Women Human)

But this long quotation from Sayers is here in the post only because most of us readers know her best for her translation of Dante's incredible poetry.  It's one of the best translations ever, and Sayers's rendering of his verse may be why many of us know Dante.  Alinza Dale Stone, writing Maker and Craftsman, a wonderful biography of Sayers, notes that "She also was sure that when Hell did come out she would be attacked for treating Dante as a great storyteller instead of a superhuman 'sourpuss'" (page 141).  If you know Sayers's story among men, then you get that certainty of the attack, which did come against her.  So when Sayers critiques the church of her father(s), it goes something more like this (from "The Other Six Deadly Sins" in the concluding pages, 82-85, of Creed or Chaos):

        But the head and origin of all sin is the basic sin of Superbia or Pride.  In one way there is so much to say about Pride that one might speak of it for a week and not have done.  Yet in another way, all there is to be said about it can be said in a single sentence.  It is the sin of trying to be as God....

        The Greeks feared above all things the state of mind they called hubris--the inflated spirits that come with overmuch success.  Overweening in men called forth, they thought, the envy of the gods.  Their theology may seem to us a little unworthy, but with the phenomenon itself and its effects they were only too well acquainted.  Christianity, with a more rational theology, traces hubris back to the root-sin Pride, which places man instead of God at the centre of gravity and so throws the whole structure of things into the ruin called Judgment....

Human happiness is a by-product, thrown off in man's service of God.  And incidentally, let us be very careful how we preach that "Christianity is necessary for the building of a free and prosperous post-war world."  The proposition is strictly true, but to put it that way may be misleading, for it sounds as though we proposed to make God an instrument in the service of man.  But God is nobody's instrument....

         "Cursed be he that trusteth in man," says Reinhold Niebuhr "even if he be pious man or, perhaps, particularly if he be pious man."  For the besetting temptation of the pious man is to become the proud man:  "He spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous."

         My Lord Bishop--Ladies and Gentlemen--it has been my privilege to suggest to you that in your work for the Moral Welfare of this nation you will be doing a great thing if you can persuade the people that the Church is actively and anxiously concerned not with one kind of sin alone, but with seven sins, all of which are deadly, and not least with those which Caesar sanctions and of which the world approves....

Right-Wing Christian Hatemongering Fueled [and Solved?] by Men

Frank Schaeffer asks something rhetorically in his essay, "Right-Wing Hatemongering Fueled by Christianity?"

He astutely asks "Can Christianity be saved from the Christians?"  And just as astutely, he answers that the answer to this question...

is not going to be found coming from [athiestic] people like Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris et al. Instead that answer may be found in the life and work of Christians such as former president Jimmy Carter, President Obama,  the late writer John Updike, and other public figures from Desmond Tutu to Nelson Mandela who's faith can be taken seriously because of the moral authority given them by their achievements outside the realm of theology.

Read the essay and ask who Schaeffer is leaving out altogether.  Yes, not a single mention of any woman whatsoever.  Do women play no role at all in the discussion?  I first heard Schaeffer on this subject recently as a guest on Rachel Maddow's show, but why no mention of women in politics, in atheism, or in Christianity who may damn or save the religion from without or within?  Who do you think of when thinking of an answer to the question, "Can Christianity be saved from the Christians?"

Of Course, What He Meant Is

Richard Alan Rhodes tells the world his middle name when translating one of the family names in the Bible - "using Barnstone’s idea of making the translation [to] sound more Jewish, especially in the names."

Of course, what Rich meant to say is he was using Willis's idea of making the translation sound less exclusionary of the Jews, especially less-Christian-only in the names.

BTW, the family name "Barnstone" is neither Jewish nor Polish.  What is it?

Speakeristas and Abortion

At another blog, some of my blogger (Christian) friends are having a conversation about (A) religious egalitarianism as opposed to (B) activist feminism.  Abortion seems to be one of the divides that separates these groups of people in two.  Who listens compassionately?

Let me just review some history to show the muddle men have made of this.  I'm not talking about mankind but males.

First, the man Aristotle does write in his Politics something that looks like an anti-abortion statement: "an abortion must be induced before the onset of sensation and life."  Aristotle seems to side with Hippocrates and his oath; and with anti-abortionists today.  However, in fact, Aristotle argues for infanticide when the baby is defective; Right-to-Life, anti-abortionists don't argue this.  And he writes also that females born are defective males; Right-to-Lifers don't address whether females are equal to males.  And he does not allow females to voice their opinions about their abortions or anything else; Right-to-Lifers say the pregnant woman's voice must be silenced only in favor of the fetus.  And Aristotle says that life or the soul is already in the sperm; Right-to-Lifers say that life begins at conception or very soon afterwards.  Aristotle also claims that sperm, of course, is male; that adultery is always wrong for the wife but is mainly wrong for the husband if he can't keep it a secret or if he's cheating when his sperm is most potent; and that premarital sex is fine but homosexual intercourse is not.  My suspicion is that Aristotle is motivated by fear of females and wants to keep them logically and politically separate from males.  Of course, these concerns of Aristotle do not seem to square very well with either Right-to-Lifers or Right-to-Choicers today.

Second, the man Solomon does seem, by conventional wisdom, to care about both a woman's rights and the right of a child to life.  Here the King does listen to two speakeristas, pleading their case.  Listening to women seems wise enough.  You know the famous story in the Jewish scriptures (I Kings 3:16-27).  However, in fact, this man is not completely unbiased, having 1000 virgins all to himself (700 wives, and 300 concubines).  Is perhaps this baby he's trying to save his?  

Third, the men on the U.S. Supreme Court listened to a speakerista named Jane Roe.  Again, this seems wise.  She tells them her name is really Norma Leah McCorvey and that she's been raped and wants to abort the fetus legally.  They are Christian men (three Presbyterians, two Methodists, an Episcopal, and a Lutheran) and two men who do not publicly claim that faith, but their majority decision to say Yes to the choice of this woman, and to women, is not based on Christianity but on the past practices of the male-only democracies of Greece and Rome.  (And the two dissenters--the Lutheran and one of the nonChristians--do not appeal to religion either but rather to the desire to keep the choice in the hands of "the people and to the political processes the people have devised to govern their affairs."  Of course, "the people" were mostly male gynecologists, husbands, boyfriends, and men who were local jurymen, lawyers, lawmakers, and judges).

Fourth, the men who are Christians today who call themselves heads of their wives want to listen now to that speakerista named Norma McCorvey because she has become one of them. You know her story of repenting of being

a ninth-grade dropout, [with] a tough life, [having] suffered physical and emotional abuse as a child, [having] spent some time in reform school in Gainesville, Texas, and [being] raped as a teen-ager. [Then having a] husband whom she married at age 16 [who] later beat her. [And of having struggled herself with] alcohol and drug abuse, and [who had] experiences with lovers of both sexes

She tells how she regrets leaving "[h]er first child, Melissa, [to be] raised by her mother; her second child [to be] raised by the father, and [having] agreed that [she] would never contact [this daughter]." She remembers how "[s]he drifted through a series of dead-end jobs, including work as a bartender and a carnival barker [and how once] she went public with her story, she worked in several clinics where abortions were performed and did some public speaking, garnering publicity and a little bit of celebrity."  The men now forgive all because she has made a different legal choice, but the choice that supports theirs not to have to listen to speakeristas all the time.

What if men listened more to women?  What if "Christian egalitarians" listened more to "the politics of feminism"? Could there be more culture peace and less culture war?

Anne Carson and Anne Lamott on Resurrection

Listen to silly Anne Lamott and foolish Anne Carson, wanting hoping desiring so gullibly to keep open the historic and literary possibilities of resurrection, as women see it. The one Anne speaks of Jesus, the other Anne of another Greek-fabled drama, Alcestis in Alcestis by Euripides.

Euripides, of course, is that one of whom the Historian F. A. Wright, in his Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle says: “Euripides and Plato are almost the only [male] authors who show any true appreciation of a woman's real qualities, and to Euripides and Plato, Aristotle, by the whole trend of his [sexist, bigoted] prejudices, was opposed.” But I’m reading the “scholarship” of another “historian” (supposedly) who scoffs, like Aristotle, at true appreciation of a woman’s views. I’m talking about James F. McGrath and his newly published book The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith. McGrath is crying for reviews, but not this one here. In his book, again and again (on more than a dozen pages so far), McGrath feels like he has to pooh pooh the inclusion of women as credible witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus in the gospel of Mark. Not surprising. His historiography is straight phallogocentrism. What I mean by that is this. Hélène Cixous, in her book Stigmata: escaping texts, translates and quotes “Clarice Lispector, who did not think in terms of phallogocentrism.” Cixous points out that Lispector provides a definition of the term: “We have seen this before; it is the ‘phallocratic system’ . . . this is how she [Lispector] conceives of it: a ‘system of inflexible last judgment, which does not permit even a second of incredulity’” (123). Now the English translation of Cixous’s French translation of Lispector’s Brazilian Portuguese has yielded the term. The three together have made “phal-” from Aristotle’s φαλλικὰ (“ph-a-l-l-ika”); “logo,” from Aristotle’s λόγος (or “l-o-g-os”) which he himself makes (by) his λογική (or “l-o-g-ikē” aka LOGIC); and “centric” from Aristotle’s κεντρική (or “k-e-n-tr-ikē”). McGrath, like father Aristotle, does not permit even a second of incredulity. He redefines “faith” and “history” under the guise of “religion.” Enough of that then.

Here’s Anne Lamott in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith:

I don't have the right personality for Good Friday, for the crucifixion: I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection. In fact, I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection vision of one of the kids in our Sunday school, who drew a picture of the Easter Bunny outside the tomb: everlasting life, and a basket full of chocolates. Now you’re talking.

In Jesus’ real life, the resurrection came two days later, but in our real lives, it can be weeks, years, and you never know for sure that it will come. I don’t have the right personality for the human condition, either. But I believe in the resurrection, in Jesus’, and in ours. The trees, so stark and gray last month, suddenly went up as if in flame, but instead in blossoms and leaves--poof! Like someone opening an umbrella. It’s often hard to find similar dramatic evidence of rebirth and hope in our daily lives. (140).

Here’s Anne Carson in Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides:

What does Alkestis' resurrection mean for the sacrificial contract that Admetos had negotiated with Death? This question is never addressed in the play. Mathematically Death is down one soul; common sense (what the Greeks call Necessity) tells us such a situation can’t last. But Herakles seems a character able to override common sense. He releases Alkestis simply by choosing to do so. As if to say, within every death a life stands waiting to be set free, should anyone have the nerve to do it. As if to say, try looking deep into a house, a marriage, or an idea like Necessity and you will see clear through to the other side. Death, like tragedy, is a game with rules. Why not just break the rules?

Rules broken by Euripides in Alkestis include the rule of closure. What are we to make of the ending? Can we be sure the veiled women is alive? that she is Alkestis? that she will live happily ever after with her husband and children? Critics have doubted all these. There is a kind of nuptial drama staged in the final scene--perhaps a parody of the ancient Greek wedding, which centered upon an unveiling of the bride before the eyes of her husband and some exchange of words between them--that stalls oddly at its peak moment. Here the bride is unveiled to her husband at 971/1121 (or so it seems to me; critics doubt this too) but she will not be permitted to speak for three days due to her death-polluted condition. An eerie silence carries her into the big dark house of her unconventional husband.

I find I want to say less rather than more about Alkestis. Not because there is less in this play but because the surface has a speed and shine that evaporate with exegesis, like some of [Alfred] Hitchcock’s plots. Or a trembling of laughter, terrible if it broke out. (248-49)

The Churches of Lesbos

Dear theist (especially Christian theist),
I grew up in Việt Nam singing from Thánh Ca in church. When my Texan parents took my siblings and me "home" to America for visits, we'd sing from the Baptist Hymnal. Did we know anything of Sappho, of her influence on us?

Dear feminist,
I am still fascinated by adult human conversion. The most profound changes have come for me, and for our fathers, when we and they have deeply listened to the other openly with audacious hope. Have the newer hymns of the Church of Agia Paraskevi been forgotten?

So, my friends, can we hear stories, our stories of transformation?
What about hymns and Sappho?

Let's listen: Over Sappho, over Lesbos Greece, over the Christian Church, there's been a clash. It's a loveless gong and a clanging cymbal sounded above the songs directed to the sky. It's a burning and a burying. A silencing of histories and of identities, of persons, like you and me. Shall we remember and respect?

------

Sappho's poem is generally titled the "Hymn to Aphrodite," although it is occasionally listed in some texts as "Ode to Aphrodite." The hymn is a genre that expresses religious emotion and is most often designed to be sung. Sappho's poem almost certainly was performed in this manner. Later hymns, for example those created during the Middle Ages when the creation of hymns became an important expression of religious fervor, were the sole genre of Christian religious expression. In Sappho's time, the hymn was no less fervent. Greeks believed in their gods as fervently as do Christians, who believe in their god and church as an absolute power. Sappho's hymn is analogous to a prayer. She pleads with her goddess, Aphrodite, to intercede on her behalf. She opens the poem with a request for help, moves quickly into recalling past instances when the goddess has helped her, and concludes with an acknowledgement that she and her goddess are united as allies. A careful study of Sappho's "Hymn to Aphrodite" acknowledges its place as a forefather to the later hymns of the Christian church.

http://www.answers.com/topic/hymn-to-aphrodite-poem-3

------

Sappho was a Greek poetess and teacher at a girls school on the Island of Lesbos during the 6th century B.C. The exact dates of her birth and death are unknown. Her lyric poetry was so exquisite that Plato called her the “tenth muse.” Much of her poetry was about both the ecstasy and pain of love, which was virtually unknown in poetry until that time. She also wrote hymns of praise to the Greek Goddesses, particularly Aphrodite.

Not much is known about Sappho’s life, and only a few of her works remain.

Early translators, disturbed that many of her passionate love poems were addressed to adolescent girls, simply changed their gender in translation to fit their world view.

Sappho’s books were burned by Christians in 380 A.D. at the insistance of Pope Gregory Nazianzen. The rest of her works may have been destroyed in 1073 A.D. when Pope Gregory VII ordered another book burning.

A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos and the world’s gay women. . . . One of the plaintiffs said Wednesday that the name of the association, Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece, “insults the identity” of the people of Lesbos, who are also known as Lesbians.

“My sister can’t say she is a Lesbian,” said Dimitris Lambrou. “Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos,” he said.

http://rashmanly.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/island-home-of-sappho-full-of-lesbians/

------

A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of praise, adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity/deities, a prominent figure or an epic tale. The word hymn derives from Greek ὕμνος hymnos "a song of praise". . .

Christian Hymnody. Originally modeled on the Psalms and other poetic passages (commonly referred to as "canticles") in the Scriptures, it is generally directed as praise and worship to God. Many refer to Jesus Christ either directly or indirectly.

Since the earliest times, Christianity has sung, "psalms and hymns and spiritual songs," both in private devotions and in corporate worship (Matthew 26:30; 1 Cor 14:26; Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:16; James 5:13; cf. Revelation 5:8-10; Revelation 14:1-5).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymn

------

Jesus was not a Christian

And he’s much more radically feminist than most Christians today. That includes Christians who are evangelical, Apostolic, Bible believing, and church going.

What marked beliefs and behaviors he has. There’s this care for human bodies, for looking on the inside, for interpreting the traditional Bible subjectively, for letting others translate all the important stuff.

His body is worn down and hungry one day as they have to travel through the dangerous land of bastards. He sends his apprentices off to find some fast food, and this woman shows up. To this very day, we still don’t know her name. But he’s a Jew and a Rabbi, which means he’s a man. Shouldn’t be talking to a woman, especially not alone, especially not a half breed woman, which means she’s a non-Jewess, who confesses she’s slept around a good bit and is in a relationship now with some guy she’s not married to. Since he’s approached her, the Rabbi I mean, she talks with him about trying to meet one of his physical needs (“thirst”), and he tells her she’s got it all backwards. When she believes him, she goes running off to the village to tell the mongrels in the town that this guy knows all about her (which means he knows something about them too). She’s good at piquing the men’s interest, and this time is no exception. This is all long before anyone had printed up one of those evangelical tracts or had published a gospel of John or had made a Jesus film. So she, being the very first evangelical, has to make up everything, which was fine with him in the first place. They all head back out to the suburbs to meet this guy and invite him home. Now, it’s a big “no no” for a Rabbi to cut through Samaria let alone to have dinner with any of the goyim-ish, with male gentiles let alone with women of any kind. But the apprentices’ kosher food doesn’t quite fill him up. So they just keep breaking rules, nervously at first. What starts happening is everybody starts changing. They all loosen up a good bit. The theological debates about who gets to worship God on the mountain fall flat. Accents mix. Life gets happy, and much more interesting for both the men and the women.

He’s ragged out again. Falls asleep in boats during the worst storms, and such. Tries to get alone with God every once and a while. People flock around him. He feels sorry for them, gut wrenching emotion. So he has his apprentices give them food, which he changes nature to do. Still, there are people pressing in. No surprise a Roman guy in uniform gets to him; the guy officially insists that they speak Latin (but he’s whispering something in Hebrew Aramaic on the side). Anyway, children and women get in to him too. There is this old women who can’t hide her bleeding. She wants to touch his body but settles on a little feel of the hem by his dusty feet. A big “no no,” touching a Rabbi I mean. So he calls her on it. Then he just melts, giving her the cure that no male gynecologist can. There’s also this Greek woman whose daughter has frequented one of those temples where the men get the little girls high on deities; now she can’t shake the habit, and the thing keeps giving her the shakes; so the desperate mother yells at him for help. Now here’s a public dilemma for a Rabbi. So he mutters something about the House of Israel and the mom tells him she’s just a hungry bitch of a dog. That does it. Just when we think he’s going to have her escorted off the premises, he makes a different kind of example of her. “Listen up everybody. If you’re a church goer especially. Now this is the kind of involuntary belief that will get you what you want from me.” So she gets what she wants. The little girl goes on to live a happier life as a woman. They all loosen up again. And the theological debates about who gets to worship God on the mountain fall flat. Languages mix. His apprentices think to themselves, “if we’re ever going to get published, looks like we’ll need to polish up on the Greek.” Life gets happy, and much more interesting for both the men and the women.

(Oh, when I first posted I meant to say this: There’s no debate over the death penalty, whether by stones or by sticks made into a cross. So some of the other Rabbis bring him a woman caught having an affair. They know the rules: she dies. He ignores the fact that it takes two to tango--that is, that adultery also requires an adulterer (the man) and that a trial also needs at least a couple of witnesses. He just bends his body over, sticks his finger in the dirt, writes something that they can read. To this day, we don't know what it was but the last time a hand wrote something mysterious on a wall the outcome wasn’t pleasant. It also required interpretation, and subjective interpretation at that. Anyway, they all end up fleeing the scene. Which means he’s more or less alone, again, with a loose woman. The Rabbi asks her where the prosecuting attorneys are? She doesn't know. The verdict? “Acquitted by the most Supreme Court of all. Now stay out of trouble.” Since nobody feels like debating anything anymore, because everybody is so glad they’re free and that they’ve got their own lives back, they all go home to party.)

He’s agreed to have a kosher lunch over at another Rabbi’s house. He’s hungry so why not? Everyone’s still following him, watching him. Then a woman comes and starts making a scene. They all suspect who she is because her silhouette’s recognizable in the shadows. And her perfume is pretty distinctive too. She pours some on his body and gets everything all wet with her undignified tears. She’s touching him. Throwing her hair on him, kissing him. Fine, it’s only his feet, but still. What’s interesting is what he does. Nothing. But what he says is this: “Reverend Pal, you should have done this for me when I came in. I’m your guest after all. Think of your floors and your maid if nothing else, man. I know real love and care when I see it. Back at you, Lady.” Now, I’m afraid to say, this whole episode ramps up the theological debates about who gets to worship God on the mountain. The talk goes into High Hebrew. His apprentices are really nervous now. And people are whispering things about a death wish. But the woman doesn’t forget any of it.

He’s dying now. Women are there watching the awful scene. The Greeks would call such baring of body “gymnastics” of the torturous kind, but the Roman men have things under control. It’s a multilingual, multicultural example. Too many lines crossed. And he’s still talking to women from up there, making sure his mother’s going to be okay, and his friends who’ve returned to the scene after hiding. Those women follow, taking their perfume and such. Crying still. A few days later, they see him first alive. Since it’s women who are there, he sends them off to get the men, off hiding again. They’re his first Apostles, the women I mean. The men will claim that title later, after theological debates rise again over who gets to worship God on the mountain. The men hope that will shut the women up, at least in church. They write a few things like that in Greek, remembering Eve first but forgetting Adam. They dust off the scrolls of Aristotle and find a nice way to know everything, including separate but unequal roles for men and women in nature from the Beginning. They have a hard time remembering the Rabbi’s care for human bodies, for looking on the inside, for interpreting the traditional Bible subjectively, for letting others translate all the important stuff. Miracles? Hyperbole? Too unorthodox. Too rhetorical. Too feminist. Too unfaithful to and deviant from the original text. So nobody needs to tell parables anymore.