any person ... faithful to their partner

In the previous post, I quoted Ann Nyland's exegesis of a Greek phrase in I Timothy 3:2.  Let's look at that a little more.  First, however, let's back up to I Timothy 3:1.  Eventually, then, let's go even further back to Aristotle and his Politics.

In I Timothy 3:1, Nyland translates the Greek pronoun τις as "any person."  NRSV translates it "whoever" and so does NIV 1984, TNIV, and NIV 2011; ESV, similarly, translates it "anyone."  Lest anyone misses it, Nyland also gives a footnote to make clear that the little pronoun is "Non gender-specific in the Greek."

The question then becomes, for I Timothy 3:2, must the "anyone" or the "any person" be restricted to males only.  Is this what Paul was writing to Timothy as we read their mail?  For Nyland, it doesn't really matter so much because she finds that Paul uses similar phrases for partner faithfulness in a relationship, whether he's specifying a one-woman man or a single-man woman.  Thus, she has her readers consider together Paul's two phrases:

μιᾶς γυναικὸς ἄνδρα, mias gunaikos andra. "faithful to one's partner".  See also 1 Tim. 5:9, ἑνὸς ἀνδρὸς γυνή, henos andros gune. 

Let's just compare what NRSV, TNIV, NIV 2011, NIV 1984, ESV, Richmond Lattimore, Willis Barnstone, and Julia Smith have respectively done with these Greek phrases in English translation.  And then we'll get back to Aristotle.

married only once / married only once - NRSV

faithful to his wife / faithful to her husband - TNIV, NIV 2011

the husband of but one wife / faithful to her husband - NIV 1984

the husband of one wife / the wife of one husband - ESV

married to one wife / widow of one husband - Lattimore

a man of one wife / the wife of one man - Barnstone

husband of one wife / wife of one man - Smith

Most translators specify some sort of marriage relationship in the phrase.  The Greek, nonetheless, does not demand this.  Moreover, most of these translators use a gendered spouse word for the one phrase or the other.  NRSV and Nyland, nonetheless, see this spouse gender specification as not so important for Paul.  The context of widows makes clear what is what in 1 Tim. 5:9.  And the "any person" or "whoever" or "anyone" of 1 Tim. 3:1 (the τις) seems to leave wide open the question of the gender, although clearly Paul has written ἄνδρα and the γυνή when referring to the sorts of persons who might be faithful to their partner.

Now, when we leave Paul and go back to Aristotle, the household rules and the politics of city states and the practices of leadership get much, much more restricted.  One little and very clear example is Aristotle's assertion as follows.  There's his Greek and then H. Rackham's English translation (1277b, around line 20):

ἀνδρὸς καὶ γυναικὸς ἑτέρα σωφροσύνη καὶ ἀνδρεία (δόξαι γὰρ ἂν εἶναι δειλὸς ἀνήρ, εἰ οὕτως ἀνδρεῖος εἴη ὥσπερ γυνὴ ἀνδρεία, καὶ γυνὴ λάλος, εἰ οὕτω κοσμία εἴη ὥσπερ ὁ ἀνὴρ ὁ ἀγαθός· ἐπεὶ καὶ οἰκονομία ἑτέρα ἀνδρὸς καὶ γυναικός· τοῦ μὲν γὰρ κτᾶσθαι τῆς δὲ φυλάττειν ἔργον ἐστίν).

temperance and courage are different in a man and in a woman (for a man would be thought a coward if he were only as brave as a brave woman, and a woman a chatterer if she were only as modest as a good man; since even the household functions of a man and of a woman are different—his business is to get and hers to keep).

What Aristotle is assuming and is asserting to be scientific fact is that men and women are different such that they really are not partners at all in the human race.  They're not partners, that is, unless you objectively see females as deficient males and as lesser than males in every role, in each domain.  Aristotle would regard Paul and Timothy as barbaric if they allowed a woman to hold office over a man, to be the bishop of a church, and so forth.  The real interesting question for us today is How much, if at all, did Paul follow Aristotle and whether he tried to get Timothy and other men to do the same?

Nyland (and perhaps the NRSV for I Timothy) seems to suggest that Paul is much more egalitarian that Aristotle's Nature would let him be.  What matters for Paul, Ann Nyland appears to claim, is that any person may prove responsible and may be recognized when faithful to their partner.

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 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse

Mom and Dad came over a few months ago and saw I was reading, The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse: Recognizing and Escaping Spiritual Manipulation and False Spiritual Authority Within the Church by David Johnson and Jeff VanVonderen.  After we talked about the book some, Dad immediately began to confess and to ask our forgiveness for his abuses.  The next day, Mom found the book in a bookstore, and the two of them read it together.  Not long after, she started confessing and mending relationships, noting to me how subtly she'd hurt one of her own siblings who'd been expressing doubts about God, which my Mom had wanted no part of and had chastised this sibling for.  It's a book I'd not recommend everybody read.

The authors write for Christians, or at least for church goers who have been abused by church leaders; and they write just a bit for the abusers too.  If you've read it then you know how the authors dedicate the book to "the weary and heavy laden, deeply loved by God, but because of spiritual abuse, find that the Good News has somehow become the bad news."  And, at the end of the book, they write to abusers:  "Even if you've abused others, God still extends his arms to you and says, 'Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.'  Does this sound like a welcome invitation?  We believe it is from the heart of God."  In the middle of the book, they also give this same quotation, saying, "It is possible that Matthew 11 gives one of the best descriptions of Jesus' earthly 'job description.'  If you want to see His stance toward tired, wounded, struggling, people, here it is."

I'm bringing this up because there's talk in the bibleblogosphere of bullying.  So you might say this blogpost of mine is how I respond to how Joel Watts responds to how "Peter Kirk responds to Anthony Bradley," which includes how Bradley responds to how Rachel Held Evans responds to Mark Driscoll for what she calls Driscoll's bullying, which could be seen also as his homophobia (if you read one of the many posts she links to).  I am weary now.  Heavy.  Heavy laden.  So what should I do?

Yesterday, my neighbor and friend told me how sad she is we're moving.  "And, do you know what kind of neighborhood it is you're moving to?" she asked.  "Tell me," I responded.  "Up through the 1970s, your new neighborhood was full of houses that were only deeded to whites.  When we were looking to buy there then, we were told, don't bother." 

You see, my friend is, by her own self-identity, "black."  In other words, she's African American.  She knows the history of discrimination of whites against black in the United States very well.  She knows her history very well.  She knows it personally.  Sometimes the abuse of blacks by whites is very subtle.  Sort of like the power of spiritual abuse of Christian church leaders and powerful bloggers. 

At any rate, my neighbor pressed.  She knows I'm white.  In other words, I'm Euro-American.  She told me that when she was a little girl, her mother took her into a department store that only whites frequented.  A young white store clerk grabbed the little girl by her pony tail and exclaimed to her mother, "You negroes must leave this store right now."  The mother looked at the clerk and apologized.  She looked at her daughter and told her that she must also apologize.  "This is the same mother," said my neighbor, "who used to beat me.  And now she was telling me to apologize.  For what?  For being black?  For going with her into a white store?  What did I do wrong?"

My friend and neighbor confessed.  "I used to hate it when Martin Luther King came on tv.  He'd talk of freedom.  But he'd stir everybody up.  He'd make for tension.  What good is freedom when it's just going to get you in line for more abuse?  Why couldn't he just be quiet?  Why did everybody have to listen to him?  I was a little girl then.  The attitudes were deep."

The attitudes run deep.  Very very deep.  This is some their power.  The subtleties reinforce the power and perpetuate the abuses.  I'm not saying I have answers for anybody else right now.  I'm just blogging.  I do think fb, twitter, and blogging, like pulpiteering and pony-tail grabbing can be abusive.  And yet, and yet.  I still believe in good news and in good change.

To Use Hitler's Deutsche, Aristotle's ἑλληνίζειν

Den gewaltigsten Gegensatz zum Arier bildet der Jude.
The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew.

So glaube ich heute im Sinne des allmächtigen Schöpfers zu handeln: Indem ich mich des Juden erwehre, kämpfe ich für das Werk des Herrn.
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will if the Almighty Creator: by resisting the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord..

Denn ein rassereines Volk, das sich seines Blutes bewußt ist, wird vom Juden niemals unterjocht werden können. Er wird auf dieser Welt ewig nur der Herr von Bastarden sein.
For a racially pure people which is conscious of its blood can never be enslaved by the Jew. In this world he will forever be master over bastards alone

--Adolf Hitler

τὸ γὰρ θῆλυ ὥσπερ ἄρρεν ἐστὶ πεπηρωμένον·
The female is, in fact, as it were, a mutilated male.


Hence it is manifest that all the persons mentioned have a moral virtue of their own, and that the temperance (sophrosyne [σωφροσύνη]) of a woman (gunaikos [γυναικὸς]) and that of a man  (andros [ἀνδρός]) are not the same, nor their courage and justice, as Socrates thought, but the one is the courage of command, and the other that of subordination, and the case is similar with the other virtues.

--Aristotle

Why would anyone want to use Aristotle's words or Hitler's?  What if you're a Jewish woman?

My wife, who works in words as a professional writer, recently shared with me the ways some women, in fact, have well appropriated not only Aristotle's words but also his advice about how to use them persuasively.  Look here:

Aristotle’s Ancient Guide to Compelling Copy

and here:

What Aristotle Taught Us About Web Content Development

My spouse was actually endorsing what Amy Harrison and Elise Redlin-Cook were doing with Aristotle's language, with his conception of rhetoric, as clarity and as persuasiveness.

This isn't to say that she doesn't understand the evil of Aristotle's words, his straightforward ugliness towards females, towards women, towards any other, any barbarian.  No.  In fact, my life partner actually gave my dissertation on the awful phallo-logo-centricity of Aristotle's τὸ ἑλληνίζειν an apt, 2-word nickname.  She named the academic project of mine:  Aristotle Exposed.  She and many understand it's not just that Aristotle used his words, his sexist and racist logic, to put down females and to denigrate non-Greeks un-like him. 

It's also the way Aristotle used language.  His logic left no room for womanly or for barbarian ways of using language.  He taught his elite Greek male-only students to avoid ambiguities, to scoff at hyperbole, to ridicule parable, to work only in what's "Natural" and never in anything else (such as the speakeristic, poetic, the lyrical, the dialectical, the supernatural).  He didn't teach his boys in his AkaDemy (his school for the People) to listen.

So let's listen.  Listen again to Sister Prudence Allen and then to rhetoric scholar Krista Ratcliffe listening to Aristotle:

In these statements the superior valuation of man over woman is explicitly stated [by Aristotle]. However, it is also present in the theory of contraries and in other aspects of Aristotle’s thoughts about sex identity. Aristotle stands out from his predecessors in that he a complete rationale for his theory of sex polarity. He developed reasons and arguments for the philosophically significant differentiation of the sexes and for the superiority of man over woman. Therefore, he is correctly identified [by historians] as the founder of the sex polarity position…. [H]e also laid the groundwork for another theory of sex identity in his philosophy of definition.

--Allen

Aristotle’s Rhetoric assures students who study his rhetorical theory that they will learn not only how to produce enthymemes but also how to analyze them, and in a culture whose texts were primarily oral, such analysis implies listening. But Aristotle’s theory never delves into how to listen. Moreover, his production/ reception linkage is more complicated than his assurance allows.

Aristotle’s treatise of rhetoric was gender blind.

[Likewise, his treatise of politics is one in which w]omen, slaves and children were relegated to the category of ‘earthly possession’ for which men bargained. To redefine women’s position, feminist theories of rhetoric must critique this concept of language to determine if, and how, it can be made more inclusive. For how we assume language functions, more than anything else, determines how we read and write the cultural as well as the textual.

--Ratcliffe

Listen again.  Allen helps us recall how Aristotle lays a groundwork with language, the groundwork for thinking of males as superior to females.  Now, of course, Aristotle was not the first man to do this.  But, as Ratcliffe also rightly observes, Aristotle's teachings on rhetoric and on politics functioned as categorical and categorizing language that somehow [if wrongly and incongruently] appealed to Nature.

So we come back to Hitler.  Why Hitler?  Well, he's also sexist and racist by how he uses language.  Does that mean we shouldn't use his language?  No, but it means we'd do well to know exactly how he used it.  We would do well to remember that he would not use our language, that he would not want language to be used so liberally, so freely.

My eldest daughter just gave me Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning.  Toward the end of the edition she gave me, Frankl tells this story about language and making meanings by it:

An American woman once confronted me with the reproach, "How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler's language?"  In response, I asked her if she had knives in her kitchen, and when she answered that she did, I acted dismayed and shocked, exclaiming, "How can you still use knives after so many killers have used them to stab and murder their victims?"  She stopped objecting to my writing books in German.

To be fair to this American woman, Frankl was quite aware of just how awful, how sexist and how racist, the propaganda of Hitler really was.  Frankl experienced the effects.  Hitler's German is worse than just a kitchen knife.  It was a two-edged sword.  It was a gangster's switchblade, a guerilla's machete, a sadist's scalpel.  It was an IED, a terrorist's home-made bomb, an improvised explosive device.  It was Aristotle's Greek all over again, extreme racism and sexism in the guise of moderate rationality and by appeals to nature.  It was boxing up the Other in tight categories and putting oneself above as the default, unmarked Natural superior. 

Our question today (in these last few days of this Women's History Month) doesn't need to be whether we can use Adolf Hitler's Deutsche or Aristotle's ἑλληνίζειν.  We can.  And we can also do more.  We can use language inclusively, creatively, extremely.  We can listen to that preacher in the church down the street who exclaims that the Bible and Nature conspire against women to keep them silent.  We can eavesdrop on the husband who tells his wife that she is his helpmeet, his complement, his to-be-submissive God-given object, for "the Bible tells me so."  We can overhear the mostly-male politicians and the rule of law again and again justifying why males will have to continue to make more than women in the workplace.  We can ponder, sleeplessly if we must, how it is that young girls must still fear and must still have to work so hard at protecting themselves from being raped, fondled, abused, objectivized by men.  There is much more we can do.

You Belong in Church if Your Body's Not Colored, Sexed, Oriented, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.....

No. I'm not a colored person. Neither an adolescent female nor a woman.  Not a homosexual.  Neither bisexual nor transgendered.

So, yes.  Of course, I belong in church.  So don't put me in one of those little boxes.  And back off a minute while I decide whether I'm going either with Rob Bell (who emerges after 1 hour and 4 minutes of a sermon and begins to give us people a heart breaking and cutting story about some woman who's been in abusive relationships and has been cutting herself)  or with John Piper (who gives us people answers -- yeah answers beyond feelings and empathy and bodies and aid -- yeah answers, about those 5 biblical purposes including that 1 "great gift" for those whose bodies are colored yellow).

So.  Stop telling me that Jesus was not really a Christian but was a Jew and that his favorite foreign word for people was μετανοεῖτε·  Stop telling me that Azusa today means anything more than APU, the big evangelical university, where lots of us people study (the majority of us) and where a bigger percentage of us teach.  And don't make people, people like me, read blogposts that might make us change our minds about our church choice either.  

Reviving Mary Magdalene: Emergency Rescue Work

You may imagine why my life partner, my spouse, has been reading aloud to me pages of Dr. Mary Pipher's wonderfully helpful (anthropology / psychology / sociology / spiritual) book.  She's asked me to read some of the pages for myself too.  As we read together, as I study alone further, we're not doing academic exercises.  We're involved in our own emergency rescue work.  It's work together as parents, equals, a mother and father.  We're raising a son and daughters in a misogynistic culture, much like yours I'm guessing.  But I'm not writing as an alarmist or to alarm you.  You know.  You know where you live, what your own children must negotiate, and how set against women (y)our society can be.  Read the books, the glossy magazines.  Read Dan Brown's view of Mary Magdalene in his pop book that has "only two female characters in his lengthy novel -- the love interest of his alter ego symbologist and an elderly nun who survives for all of two pages" (as David Lose points out; HT Shawna R. B. Atteberry).  Read the traditional Christian view of Mary Magdalene, even as Dan Brown would use fiction to challenge it; Stefan Lovgren, reviewing Brown's novel for National Geographic, says the historical obvious:  "Depicted by the Church as a prostitute, Mary Magdalene was an intimate disciple of Christ."  Why the focus here on Mary Magdalene?  Well, of course why!  Why has she been so mischaracterized?  What's that say about your culture?

So, in this post, I'd love for us to look at how gynophobic and misogynistic views affect us all in profound ways.  Can we think about and make some change?  The subtitle of the post really could have been, "Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls," or "Saving Ourselves," or "Saving the Self of Mary Magdalene," or "Saving the Bible from Misogynists." 

But enough of what I have to say.  Below are 5 important statements for us all (all related):

1.

The male interpreters and writers want to see a prostitute, so that’s what they write about. For the record Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute either.

-- Shawna R. B. Atteberry, "Good Stuff I Read This Week"

2.

Mary Magdalene has always been the subject of both popular and scholarly intrigue. Was she the wife of Jesus, his complete initiate, a Goddess or a priestess? Did the Church dramatically alter her image to deny her importance? These questions have inspired representations of her in art, film and literature, from "Caravaggio" to "The Last Temptation of Christ" and "The Da Vinci Code". The "Mary Magdalene Cover-Up" is the first book to bring the original sources that have informed our current day view of Mary to a wider audience. Esther de Boer has brought together an impressive array of texts from the first century, when Mary Magdalene was alive, to the sixth century, when her image as a penitent sinner was invented. Each text is accompanied by an informed and lively commentary by the author placing it in its historical context. This combination of original texts and commentary enables the reader to draw their own conclusions about this most enigmatic of first-century women.

-- from Esther de Boer, HT April DeConick

3.

It is extremely important to note that the Bible NEVER associates Mary Magdalene with prostitution or sexual immorality of any kind. Most people don’t realize this and, in fact, think that that is her primary memorable feature. Why is it so important to get it straight? Here are just a few reasons:

1. It’s wrong; as such, it misrepresents the contents of the biblical texts.
2. It misrepresents our earliest evidence of the nature of Christianity.
3. It perpetuates the notion that many women in the Bible were sexually immoral or suspect.
4. It belittles the bold, central role that women have always played in Christian history, including our own era.
5. It continues the historical and ongoing tendency to reduce the importance of females in general and restrict them to the limited categories of wife, virgin, mother, or whore.

Each of those categories is tied to male control of female sexuality.

--Jaime Clark-Soles, "Introducing the Real Mary Magdalene:" and Engaging the Word: The New Testament and the Christian Believer

4.

It has traditionally been assumed that the Bible promotes a special feminine role for women.  Yet we are immediately faced with the problem:  what model shall women emulate?  Eve?  Mary?  Sarah?  Mary Magdalene?
      In the New Testament, Jesus is held up as the one model for both men and women.  This central biblical teaching can in one stroke expose as a purely human invention the idea of special "feminine" roles for women.  To take Eve as a model of "true feminism," for example, would be like taking Adam as the example of "a real man."  [and who would we take as the masculine, male counterpart of Mary Magdalene?]

--Philip Cary, "One Role Model for All:  The Biblical Meaning of Submission," in Reta Halteman Finger's The Wisdom of Daughters: Two Decades of the Voice of Christian Feminism

5.

     We need to change society if we are to produce healthy young women. But I can't single-handedly change the culture, and neither can the families I see [in counseling].  I try to help families understand some of their daughters' behavior as a reaction to a misogynistic culture and its manifestations at home, with friends, in school and in the larger community. We work together to assess the impact of the culture on the life of each family and to develop plans for damage control. It's emergency rescue work.

--Mary Bray Pipher, Ph.D., Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

The Actually Good Samaritan, A Woman

Here are 4 related posts on the Good Samaritan as a Woman or the Samaritan Woman as not so bad.  They're also posts on how the human (female) perspective gets lost (or tarnished) in interpretation too often:

1.

For years I’ve been saying that jumping to the conclusion that the Samaritan Woman Jesus meets at the well of Jacob is a prostitute is nothing but male fantasy (which is why it’s been wrong for 2,000 years. The male interpreters and writers want to see a prostitute, so that’s what they write about.

-- Shawna R. B. Atteberry, "Good Stuff I Read This Week"

2. 

He [Jesus] eventually invites her [the Samaritan Woman] to call her husband, and when she replies that she has no husband, he agrees: "You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband" (4:18).  And that's it. That's the sentence that has branded her a prostitute. Conservative preacher John Piper's treatment is characteristic. In a sermon on this passage, he describes her as "a worldly, sensually-minded, unspiritual harlot from Samaria," and at another point in the sermon calls her a "whore."

--  David Lose, "Misogyny, Moralism and the Woman at the Well" (HT Shawna R. B. Atteberry)

3. 

In her response to Jesus, the Samaritan woman introduces the idea that theirs is both a gender and an ethnic difference. Here, however, she is safe and intimacy with Jesus is based on the sharing of truths.

Our ideas about intimacy often have sexual connotations and it is interesting that in her disclosure about having five husbands, we regard her immoral, aware as we are of her unusual noon-day visit to the well (so she might avoid day-break or evening crowds). Reader-response theories wonder if the text seeks to undo us for the judgements we impose on the text. She might have outlived her husbands in a culture where levirate marriage was the norm, or more convincingly Schneiders (1997, 249) argues that 'the entire dialogue … has nothing to do with the woman's private moral life.' Schneiders (1997, 247) and Moore (2003, 282) believe there is an allegorical significance to the woman's five husbands being representative of Samaria's colonial past, with the present man representing 'the Samaritans' false worship of the true God,' (Barrett, 1965, 225).

--  Rachel, "The Samaritan woman's encouragement to us to engage in theological discourse"

4.

Give it until the very end, until you have nothing left.  And then your reward will come.

     How readily women hear that message!  How easily we believe these words.  Give all.  Don't question.  Don't be angry.  Don't doubt that your reward will be on some distant horizon....

     The parable of the Good Samaritan came to my mind, but with a new lesson, one particularly for women.

     ...a Samaritan, as she journeyed, came to where he was, and when she saw him, she had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring oil and win, then she set him on her own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.  And the next day she took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, "Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay when I come back." (adapted from Luke 10:33-35 KJV)

      She left.  She left!  The woman tended to his wounds, brought him to a safe place, took care of him, and paid his way.  And then she left.
--  Peggy Weaver,  "The Good Samaritan Woman"

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).

Euripides & St. Peter: Feminist & Weaker Sexist?

In this post, I want to get us examining (re-examining perhaps) a word that Euripides and then St. Peter used in reference to women. First, however, I would like to look at what readers of Euripides have said about him and his "feminism." And then could we conjecture about Peter's view of women?  Finally, shall we compare how the two men use the one word?

Euripides is the Greek playwright. And the Peter I'm interested in is the Jewish disciple of Jesus writing in Greek nearly five hundred years later -- the one who's called Saint Peter.

Of Euripides, much has been written with respect to his views on women.  For example, historian F. A. Wright, in his Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle, says this:

“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.”

Likewise, English professor Louis Markos, in his From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics, says this:

“The 'sentimental' Euripides is a self-conscious artist who cannot ignore his own age to sweep his reader off to a mythic neverland.  He was keenly aware of the injustices of his day--the brutalities of war, the subjugation of women, the ill treatment of foreigners and illegitimate children--and he projected these contemporary issues and struggles back into the legendary settings of his tragedies, rather as Arthur Miller's The Crucible projects the dangers of McCarthyism back into the 'legendary' days of Puritan New England.  That the plays of Euripides make their points without sinking into polemic or allegory is a tribute to the complex and subtle artistry of their maker.  They are a tribute as well to his insight into human nature and his gift for giving dramatic voice to the mental anguish and internal rage of the dispossessed.”

In addition, Anne Carson, a Greek classicist and translator of several of Euripides's works, says this of the nature of the playwright:

“He was also concerned with people as people--with what it's like to be a human being in a family, in a fantasy, in a longing, in a mistake.”

And Ann Nyland, a Greek classicist and translator of the New Testament, finds the Greek words of Euripides to be helpful in understanding the words of the writers of the gospels, Acts, the epistles, and Revelation -- especially as the words that figure in the often-ignored “case of gender (mis)translation and anything pertaining to women” in much Bible translation.

Now, has anyone said about St. Peter that he showed “true appreciation of a woman's real qualities” and that he “was keenly aware of the injustices of his day--the brutalities of war, the subjugation of women, the ill treatment of foreigners and illegitimate children”?

Well, maybe.

Suzanne McCarthy posted recently that Peter Leithart is suggesting what she calls “an unusual interpretation” of I Peter 3:7 in Leithart's blog post.  The interpretation is that St. Peter is perhaps less sexist than his fellows and his predecessors.  In fact, St Peter may even favor women -- promoting them from a more sexist Judaism to a more feminist Christianity.

The phrase so unusually interpreted is ὡς ἀσθενεστέρῳ σκεύει.  It can be transliterated hos asthenestero skeuei, and it has been often translated as “as weaker vessels.”  St. Peter's word that Leithart keys in on is σκεύει / skeuei /.  Leithart interprets it as “temple” vessels for the “New [Christian Church, not-old-Jewish Tabernacle] Covenant.”  Christian wives, as such “vessels,” are now by St. Peter included in the “service.”

From here, I'd like us to compare how the “feminist” Euripides used the word σκεύει / skeuei / with how the perhaps “weaker-sexist” St. Peter used it.

The main objection in comparing how the two men used the word is their contexts and their time.  Euripides writes during a life time of world war nearly 500 years before St. Peter writes during the days of a fairly stable empire.  So to overcome the objection, I want to look at an author who is a likely contemporary of Peter.  I want to show that Chariton, writing the first-century novel Callirhoe, uses the word in question the way Euripides did some centuries earlier.

Here's from the translation by G. P. Goold:

“That is why I [Callirhoe, the beautiful woman protagonist of the novel] have been handed over like a mere chattel [σκεῦος, / skeuos /] to I know not whom...”

Elsewhere in the novel written in the first century (when St. Peter wrote his letter), there is this:

“...next, a royal abundance of funeral offerings, first the gold and silver of the dowry, a beautiful array of garments [κάλλος καὶ κόσμος / kallos kai kosmos /] (for Hermocrates had contributed much from the spoils of the war), and the gifts of relatives and friends. Last of all followed the wealth of Chaereas...”

What I am trying to show is how the word σκεῦος, / skeuos / relates to women.  It has to do with material goods, which Goold translates “mere chattel.”  The second quote given is to show the war context and specific examples of the sorts of σκεῦος, / skeuos /, imagined by a novel's author and by his readers.

Now, we can turn to Euripides.  In the play, The Suppliant Women, we read the following conversation between two characters.  The English translation is by E. P. Coleridge (and we wish Carson had translated this play too); but watch for the Greek word of Euripides, which is reinserted within the brackets below:

Iphis -- Why do you deck yourself in that apparel?

[σκευῇ / skeue / δὲ τῇδε τοῦ χάριν κοσμεῖς / kosmeis / δέμας]    

[[UPDATE -- I just found Michael Wodhull's 1888 rendering, a more literal translation of this line above as:

"But on what account Thy person with that habit hast thou graced?"]]

Evadne -- This robe conveys a strange meaning, father.

Iphis -- You have no look of mourning for your lord.

Evadne -- No, the reason why I am decked in this way is new, perhaps.

Iphis -- Do you then appear before a funeral-pyre?

Evadne -- Yes, for here it is I come to take the prize of victory.

Iphis -- What victory do you mean? I want to learn this from you.

Evadne -- A victory over all women on whom the sun looks down.

Here, the characters of Euripides understand the word σκευῇ /skeue/ to refer to material goods, and in this case to “apparel.” [[or something like a worn “habit.”]]

In comparing Euripides's (and Chariton's) use of the word σκευῇ /skeue/ with St. Peter's use of it, we are left with questions:

Is St. Peter instructing married men to look at their wives as “weaker vessels” or perhaps as “fragile and feeble material goods”?

And if St. Peter is using the word in the same way other writers have used it, then does this make St. Peter more of a feminist or even some sort of “weaker” sexist?

Or, given the Bible as some "God-inspired" text that surely somehow favors men and women equally and always, should we just stop asking these sorts of questions?

Sexual Violence: Big Problem, You-and-Me Solution

"It is a men's issue because 95 percent of sexual violence is conducted by men," explained Rebecca Alexander, OASIS program coordinator of the ETSU Counseling Center.
--Here's more at John Shuck's blog, Shuck and Jive.

"We live in a rape culture in which men (especially straight, cis men) are socialized and encouraged to be sexually aggressive, and so it is no surprise that they are....

These 76 men, just 4% of the sample, were responsible for 28% of the reported violence. The whole sample of almost 1900 men reported just under 4000 violent acts, but this 4% of recidivist rapists results in over 1000 of those violent acts.

If we could eliminate the men who rape again and again and again, a quarter of the violence against women and children would disappear. That's the public policy implication....

Cultural and institutional reform to reduce sexual assault begins with knowing who we're really dealing with. And it isn't otherwise good boys who just made a mistake. But they're sure grateful we think they are."

--Here's more from Melissa McEwan at the blog, Shakesville.

Exploring Barnstone: Anti-Semitism, Slavery, and Sexism in the Bible

My blogger friend John Hobbins attacked me earlier this year for saying there is “sexism in the Bible.” John noticed how I'd been trying to restore some of that at my other blog by translating.   Back then, I wished John had explored in greater detail what translators like Ann Nyland and Willis Barnstone had been saying and doing.  Both Nyland and Barntone see sexism in the New Testament and consider the need to recover the New Testament, to restore the text, by translating, and translating creatively.

John's attack against me was an odd turn, I thought, because months earlier he'd thanked me "for introducing Barnstone to a wider audience." John also exclaimed:

You are absolutely right, J. K.: Barnstone rocks. Most scholars cringe before his creativity. May they enjoy the reward of their pedantic conservatism: the insurance men will praise them. As for me, I prefer skydiving with the likes of Barnstone.

And John added: "This Barnstone guy seems worth exploring in greater detail."

Very few in the biblebloggersphere have explored Willis Barnstone or his new robust translation of the New Testament and what he himself says about it .  (Many more, it seems, have been excited by Robert Crumb's graphically illustrated version of Robert Alter's Genesis -- though far fewer have dared to say anything about its sexism and anti-Semitism.)

So in this post, I'd like to begin to explore Barnstone a bit more.  Below are some quotations of him from Barnstone's new, restored New Testament translation. He discusses anti-Semitism, slavery, and sexism in the Bible.

Here's Barnstone on the anti-Semitism in the traditional Christian Bible translations:

The scriptures are anti-Semitic just because Jews are falsely slammed in "words" that, as [Karen] Armstrong notes, "for centuries inspired the pogroms that made anti-Semitism an incurable disease in Europe."

I address this dire and central question of disenfranchising Yeshua [aka Jesus] of his religious identity in two ways:  by restoring the probable Hebrew or Aramaic names to biblical figures and framing savage anti-Semitic passages in a historic context in the introduction and the textual annotation.

(page 19)

On the slavery in the Christian Bible translation tradition, Barnstone observes:

    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.

(pages 856-57)

The above comment is in introduction to Paul's letter to Philemon.  But Barnstone notes the pro-slavery arguments elsewhere:

The demanded behavior of slaves in I Peter, while stupefying, is not as offensive to contemporary understanding as its fuller articulation in the Pastoral Letters and in Paul's letter to Philemon.  However, here [in Peter's letter] as there [in Paul's], there is no hint of moral dilemma with respect to the institution [of slavery].  Indeed, the author of the sermon, as in the Pastorals, associates God's grace with obedience of slaves to masters.

(page 1002, footnote 31, a fn on I Peter 2:18)

Observing sexism in the Bible, Barnstone translates Paul's (or a pseudo-Paul's) first letter to Timo-theos this way, with some commentary:

11 Let a woman learn in silence and in full submission.
12 I do not allow women to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man.*
She must be in silence.
13 Adam was formed first. Then Eve.
14 Adam was not decieved, but the woman was deceived an became a transgressor.
15 She will be saved through childbearing, if she remains in faith and love and holiness and good behavior.**

*The word "man" in Greek can also secondarily mean "husband." However, by not choosing a specific word for husband, the Greek leaves the command open to all states of womanhood with respect to men.

**The extreme degradation of women in these famous verses, while often explained away, remains a fierce source of contemporary debate and protest. The kindest thing one can say in Paul's defense is that they were in all likelihood composed by church authorities between two and five decades after his death. However, the forgers using Paul's name were attempting to reproduce Paul's presumed thing.

(pages 935-36)

Likewise, in his footnotes on verses of Paul's first letter to Corinthians, Barnstone says this in viewing sexism in the text:

[Paul, whose authorship is not in dispute here] is contrasting the woman whose head must be covered, with the man whose head must not be covered (11.4). The more general meaning of the head covering is to give freedom to the man and to confine the woman to modest subservience. It is said that a woman exposing her hair in public reveals loose general morals and promiscuity.

In the next lines Paul develops the intense differences in station between man and woman, husband and wife, by the exposure or revelation of hair. He tells us that a man needs no cover since he is "the semblance . . . of God," but a woman need cover because she is the semblance of man. Paul pushes the parallel metaphor too far, since if the woman is indeed the semblance of man (even as a small relection), she is a semblance of an uncovered man and so she too should necessarily be uncovered.

The basis for Paul's assertion is that man was created before woman in both creation stories, in Genesis 1.27 and 2.7. The notion that woman was created "for the sake of man" has been a sore point emphasizing Paul's less-than-amenable position concerning the position of women, which is always subservient to men....

Paul now [in 11.15] acknowledges that women have a natural covering [i.e., their relatively long hair], which should imply they need no head covering. Then, catching the trap into which his metaphors have led him, he state succinctly states that if anyone wishes to take up a "contentious" line of reasoning, neither he and his group nor the synagogues of God have the custome of permitting women to go bare-headed.

(pages 738-39, fns 97, 98, and 102)

In his introduction ("Why a New Translation"), Barnstone gets at what he means by "restore" with respect to translating.  "And third," he enumerates, "I wish to translate as verse what is verse in the New Testament, as in Yeshua's speech..., following a practice that... has prevailed in rendering Hebrew verse as in the Song of Songs, the Psalms, and Job."  Barnstone sees as central to restoring (that is, as central to his project) that restoration of a Jewish, abolitionist, and feminist voice in the New Testament, namely Barnstone's translating of Yeshua (aka Jesus).  Barnstone adds:

    On all questions of faith versus fact, I take a neutral stance and address them in annotations.  As far as possible, I limit these matters to indicating a historical context of biblical happenings, always with the awareness that more is unknown than known.  In her brilliant Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, Paul Fredriksen presents her first fact, from which all historical speculation must radiate:  "The single most solid fact about Jesus' life is his death: he was executed by the Roman prefect Pilate, on or around Passover, in the manner Rome reserved particularly for political insurrectionists, namely, crucifixion.  Constructions of Jesus primarily as a Jewish religious figure, one who challenged the authority of Jerusalem's priests, thus sit uncomfortably on his very political, Imperial death:  Pilate would have known little and cared less about Jewish religious beliefs and intra-Jewish religious controversy.

    As to denominations--Jewish, Christian, Muslim, the world--while respecting all views, I have not pitch for any camp.  There is no more polemic or preselytizing here than were this book a new version of the Odyssey or of Sappho's fragments, yet I hope that my love for these extraordinary world scriptures will show through.

(pages 14-15)

I do hope that John Hobbins and other bible bloggers too will explore more what Barnstone's done and is doing with greater detail.  To say that there's sexism in the Bible (and anti-Semitism and slavery) does not mean, as John has claimed it it does, that the Bible cannot be light to the outsider, the reader, so saying. "Good open-minded reader," Barnstone addresses those of us who will listen, "here is one translator's way to find the past of a book that may bring you light" (page 8). I think fellow blogger Michael Carden (at his blog Jottings: Michael Carden's Biblio-Blog: Reflections on Bible, Religion, Society, Sexuality, Politics) is listening. Michael takes note of "Ideology and translation of biblical texts" and of the difference translation can make.  A translator of the Bible does well, he says, when she or he "plays with and releases the text from such straitjackets and allows it to be revelation no matter how uncomfortable that might be." I myself am grateful to Barnstone for giving us the insight, courage, and willingness just to try to follow his lead. There are indeed various wayS of approaching the Bible, its sexism, and its translation.

Equal Pay in the UK? Not yet!

April 28th was Equal Pay Day in the USA. At that point, women here, on average, earned just 78 pennies to each Dollar men here, on average, made.  Given that a man and a woman started working the same job on January 1, 2008 in America -- then April 28, 2009 symbolized how far into 2009 the woman had to work to earn, finally, as much as the man, who stopped his work on December 31, 2008.

Today is Equal Pay Day in the UK.  Think there's equal pay there yet?  Think again.

It's depressing and sad, but read more here and here and here and here.

Growing Up in the West: Women

You don't have to be a woman growing up in the Middle East or in Africa - in Afghanistan or in Mozambique - to experience the pains of sexism. The horrors of misogyny are in the West, in the USA and in Canada and in the UK. But the solutions are here too, and you and I can be a part of the solutions.

Here are reports from the blogosphere today:

With a few exceptions, the mainstream media continue to kill stories about honor killings and attempted honor killings in North America. How often did you read stories about the honor killings that took place in Toronto (07), Dallas (08), Atlanta (08), Oak Forest, Illinois (08), Alexandria (08), Buffalo (09), and Kingston, Canada (09)—on and on, until the most recent attempted honor killing in Phoenix?

--from Phyllis Chesler at Chesler Chronicles, "Spinning Out Of Control: Honor Killings and Media Bias"

[A c]rime fiction writer and reviewer for the Literary Review is refusing to review any more crime novels because of the high levels of misogynist violence, the Guardian reports.

--from Jess McCabe at The F-Word blog: Contemporary UK Feminism, "Crime fiction reviewer refusing to review any more books because of misogynist violence"

In fact, it turns out that even among the most economically privileged women, the recession has been bad! (GASP!) And not only that—women have actually fared worse than men!

Female chief executives earned just 58 percent of what their male counterparts did in 2008, and their compensation packages were slashed three times as much as their male peers, according to a survey released on Monday. 

--from Melissa McEwan at Shakesville, "Shocked, I Say!"

--

Two suspects were in custody Monday, but police said as many as five other men attacked the [15-year-old] girl over a two-hour period Friday night outside Richmond High School. “She was raped, beaten, robbed and dehumanized by several suspects who were obviously OK enough with it to behave that way in each other’s presence,” Lt. Mark Gagan said. “What makes it even more disturbing is the presence of others. People came by, saw what was happening and failed to report it.”

It is impossible for me to believe that the people who stood by and did nothing are human beings- any more than the persons who perpetrated the act. Human beings don’t act this way. Or rather, don’t stand around watching and laughing while this kind of thing goes on.

--from Jim West at Dr. Jim West, "Total Deprvity: The 12 Who Watched A Rape, And Did Nothing"

The Campaign to End Rape coalition is conducting a survey on women’s attitudes to and experiences of rape and the law.

--from Laura Woodhouse, The F-Word blog: Contemporary UK Feminism, "Survey: Women, Rape and the Law"

Ban Crumb?

Theophrastus, whose blog is called "What I Learned from Aristotle," asked me:

Do you propose we ban Aristophanes, the New Testament, Justin Martyr, Augustine, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dumas, Twain, Pound, Eliot, Burroughs, and Rushdie on parallel grounds of religious prejudice, racism, sexism, and violence?

My answer?  No.  And I don't think we should ban Genesis on parallel grounds, or Aristotle either.  The question was whether I would ban Robert Crumb's illustrated Genesis.  I thought it was a funny question, but one logically like a question Aristotle himself might ask.  Aristotle favored censorship, especially to protect children from the profane, but also to protect citizens of Greek city states from poetry and rhetoric and sophistry and woman talk and parables (aka fables) and hyperbole and other such nonesense that might weaken the power of politics.  Aristotle did censor Aspasia, the non-Greek woman, a kept woman perhaps, whom Plato, Socrates, and Pericles admired.  Although several Greek teachers of Aristotle loved Aspasia and wrote of her, learning from her, Aristotle himself despised her (and her type explicitly) and hasn't ever mentioned her once in any extant text of his that we have.

(But Theophrastus might have known even feminists call for censorship.  Ironically, for example, feminist rhetoric scholar Carol Poster has written an essay, "(Re)positioning Pedagogy: A Feminist Historiography of Aristotle's Rhetorica" for the purpose of banning Aristotle's work on rhetoric from the canon of feminist rhetorics. Her move is very Aristotelean, very separatist, very binary, very phallogocentric.)

In contrast, and Theophrastus might have known this better, feminists like Maya Angelou and Anne Carson and Sara J. Newman and Prudence Allen and F. A. Wright (and me too) not only read Aristotle very very carefully and study him very very carefully but also advocate that anyone who can would read his works very very carefully, as sexist and as misogynistic and as gynophobic as many of his works are.

I don't think Aristotle would have liked Robert Crumb (the profane barbarian) very much.  But that's not to say they're not very much alike in some respects.  Here's a bit of what others have found the latter to be like:

Art critic Robert Hughes talks about "Crumb's mean, grubby vision of human beings trapped in their meshes of hysterical frustration and lust." Crumb's wife, Aline, says, "Well, he is a sexist, racist, anti-Semitic misogynist." (As for anti-Semitic, Crumb flirts with big-nosed Jewish stereotypes — the demanding female, the wily, voracious male.)

Since the '60s, Crumb has shown a world that fits his vision. There's the prankster-pederast guru, Mr. Natural, revealing the meaning of life (as I recall from long memory): "Don't mean diddy-wah-diddy." Lenore Goldberg and her Girl Commandos are nightmare feminists avenging themselves on men. Angelfood McSpade is a thick-lipped black stereotype, uptight Whiteman can find sexual satisfaction only with a yeti. Little Mr. Snoid climbs up the backs of Crumb's amazons to work out his id-rage and perversities. Chuck the Duck is hip to the sweat of one's brow; he says, "Life is mostly hard work."

Crumb himself has written: "I am constantly disgusted by reality, horrified and afraid. I cling desperately to the few things that give me some solace, that make me feel good. For me to be human is, for the most part, to hate what I am. When I suddenly realize I am one of them, I want to scream in horror."

Please know that by posting a third post on Crumb I'm interested in your reading and studying his art, as you will.  When his own wife, his second Jewish wife, says such things about the artist, then it's fair, I think, not to be afraid to give his work a fair assessment.

Because I am a Girl

Because I am a Girl

that problem called Feminism

We had dinner with another couple last night when the topic of my dissertation came up.  My wife has come up with the very clever (very simple if not at all simplistic) 2-word summary of the project: "Aristotle exposed"; but she decided also to drop the f-bomb, that one (complicated) word:  "feminisms."

"Ah," replied the other woman, looking at her husband.  "Feminism sorta resonates with women.  But it's really a problem at the end of the day.  It's making men become feminized in this country."

"Men," added the man, looking at his wife, "are 'blue' in the way they speak and listen.  Women are 'pink.'  But the feminist movement has caused everyone to have to listen and to talk 'pink.'"

As casually and as quickly as and as gently as she was able, my wife tried to shift the conversation.  Now we were talking about the other couples' visit to Pakistan.  They appreciated many things there.  They noted the good, the bad, and the ugly.  We all puzzled over the on-going practices of purdah, vani (young-girl marriages), watta satta, and honor killings.

At the end of the day, I couldn't decide whether our conversation had been "blue" or "pink."  Blame the confusion on that problem called "feminism."

sexism in its most obvious form

Judge Guido Calabresi, former Yale Law School dean and [Sonia] Sotomayor's mentor, now says that when Sotomayor first joined the Court of Appeals, he began hearing rumors that she was overly aggressive, and he started keeping track, comparing the substance and tone of her questions with those of his male colleagues and his own questions.

"And I must say I found no difference at all. So I concluded that all that was going on was that there were some male lawyers who couldn't stand being questioned toughly by a woman," Calabresi says. "It was sexism in its most obvious form."

--from "Is Sonia Sotomayor Mean?" by Nina Totenberg

[HT Ann Friedman "Sotomayor is not meaner, just femaler"]

Of Paul and Pooh, Language and Logic

Yesterday's post left this suggestion that Paul borrowed his nasty word skubala (σκύβαλα) from Jesus. What do you think? Did Paul write using language that was not entirely politically correct? A few things should be clarified and carefully noticed about skubala before looking at an even more startling word that Paul borrowed.

First, the Jesus (or Joshua) whose writings Paul may be reading is the ostensible son of Sirach ( בן סירא). And the son of Jesus, the grandson of Sirach, is the self-identified translator of the writings of Sirach. All of the synoptic gospel translators (Mark, Matthew, and Luke - writing about that other Jesus) quote from this translated LXX Book of Sirach even if none quotes the word Paul appropriates. So we'd do well to see what the first translated Jesus supposedly says in Hebrew (even if the texts are lost) and how his son translates (and purports to translate) that into Greek while living in Egypt more than 100 years before Paul was born.

Second, it's not just the Greek word skubala (σκύβαλα) but how and why that particular word renders the Hebrew in a place like post-slavery Egypt that is fascinating. The word occurs nowhere prior to this use by the son of Jesus. Sylvie Honigman at the University of Tel Aviv in reading one history of the LXX suggests the Jewish translators didn't follow either the Exodus paradigm or the Alexandrian (a neo-aristotelian) paradigm but rather the Homeric paradigm when translating. Maybe Jesus's son, in translating, is coining the word from some of Homer's works. Paradigms aside, there seems enough extant lexical material to suggest this. For example, in the Odyssey, Agamemnon recounts his betrayal and murder by his wife Clytemnestra: "I threw (ballon, βάλλον) my hands around the sword as I died, but the dog-eyed (kunopis, κυνῶπις) one turned away, and, though I was on my way to the house of Hades, she didn't dare close my eyes or shut my mouth with her hands. So nothing else is more dreadful or more dog-like [kunteron, κύντερον] than a woman...." And in the Iliad, Zeus says to his wife "Nothing's more disgustingly doglike than you." [Ou seokunteron allo, οὐ σέοκύντερον ἄλλο]). And Helen has already mourned, "Slutty bitch that I am!" [eskekunopidos, ἔσκεκυνώπιδος]). If the Greek word is a translator's neologism, an awakening of dogged sexism, then a hint to its meaning as "pooh" comes from a counterpart word in the proverb of Jesus. The entire proverb (27:4) reads: Ἑν σείσματι κοσκίνου διαμένει κοπρία, οὕτως σκύβαλα ἀνθρώπου ἐν λογισμῷ αὐτοῦ. This has been translated into English by the Revised Standard Version committee as follows: "When a sieve is shaken, the refuse remains; so a man's filth remains in his thoughts." The word σκύβαλα is translated "filth," and the word kopia (κοπρία) "refuse." The two words work parabolically or appositively in comparison, in interlation, to define and refine one another analogically. It's sort of like what the Miller Analogies Test measures, except the proverbial parallels are to be extended, personally, to the reader's own life. The language is to be profound. What is lost in the RSV translation is the bitch-female-dog connotations of the former word (when just looking at Homeric cognates); alas, as mentioned, the Hebrew original is completely gone. We can, however, measure whether the RSV "refuse" gains much in English translation by comparing how other LXX translators have rendered Hebrew with the Greek kopia (κοπρία). The Hebrew words so translated into Greek are domen (דמן ) and 'ashpoth (אשפת) with meanings of "dung" and "piles of poo." I think Benjamin G. Wright's English (NETS) translation of the Greek of the son of Jesus is not bad: "With the shaking of a sieve, refuse remains--so a person' offal in his reasoning." But the Greek sounds more like this to me (in English): "In a shaken sifter remains a pile of crap--so does that scooped puppy poop, you mortal humans, in your own statements."

Third, then, when Paul uses skubala (σκύβαλα) in his letter to readers in Philippoi, he's already called out "the dogs" or perhaps "the bitches" (touS KUnas, τοὺς κύνας) to distinguish himself from his fellow Jews who were insisting on male (penis) circumcision as a necessary mark on the body. So he plays on this derogatory term by downplaying his own personal, physical heritage as "dog throw-up" if not "bitch shit" (SKUbala, σκύβαλα). To see the gendered issues here is not too much of a stretch. (It's not, I'm saying, much at all like Sigmund Freud, as the-rapist, discussing penis envy that isn't really there.) The language Paul chooses is dirty on purpose.

Fourth, Paul seems extremely interested as Jesus was in adult human conversion, in personal transformation. I'm talking now about the Jesus to whom Paul was committed, the one whose opening word for Mark, his first translator, was metanoeite (μετανοεῖτε). It means something like "change your mind, re-think everything!" This brings us to a second, perhaps more startling word that Paul borrowed. He borrowed a word that Aristotle coined when human language and when a human statement (i.e. logos, λόγος) was, for Aristotle, not enough. The word is "logic" (or logike, λογικὴ).

(I've gone on elsewhere about how the -ic (-ικὴ) suffix is dirty and sexist. It was so dirty that LXX translators seemed to avoid it as politically incorrect. And so when tiptoeing around words like "log-ic," "rhetor-ic," and "erot-ic" and therefore even "eros," they only slipped twice.)

So what do you think? Why does Paul slip in "logic" (or logike, λογικὴ) in his letter to Roma? It's in Romans 12:1-2, where Paul is talking about the mind, change, and re-thinking everything. Here's the text:

Παρακαλῶ οὖν ὑμᾶς ἀδελφοί διὰ τῶν οἰκτιρμῶν τοῦ θεοῦ παραστῆσαι τὰ σώματα ὑμῶν θυσίαν ζῶσαν ἁγίαν εὐάρεστον τῷ θεῷ τὴν λογικὴν (i.e. "logical") λατρείαν ὑμῶν. Καὶ μὴ συσχηματίζεσθαι [OR συσχηματίζεσθε] τῷ αἰῶνι τούτῳ, ἀλλὰ μεταμορφοῦσθαι [OR μεταμορφοῦσθε] τῇ ἀνακαινώσει τοῦ νοὸς [ὑμῶν] εἰς τὸ δοκιμάζειν ὑμᾶς τί τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ εὐάρεστον καὶ τέλειον.

Here's the RSV English for comparison:

I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual [λογικὴν] worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Do you think "spiritual" renders "logic" well? Is it really a politically incorrect word? Or does the RSV (or your favorite translation) make it otherwise? What's Paul doing with language and logic?

Post-race-and-gender Politics Question

(Let's not use f-words today.) Let's ask (instead), How long have the politics of the USA been post-racial and post-gender (and post-Aristotle)?

"Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then."
--G. Gordon Liddy
(HT Allison Gaudet Yarrow of The Sisterhood)























--President Richard M. Nixon with his Chief of Staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman
(HT Karen Tumulty of Time Magazine)

Aristotle was one of the earliest to tackle the problem: he saw menstruation as a sign of female inferiority, related to the passive part he felt women played in reproduction.
(--from Janice Delaney's, Mary Jane Lupton's, and Emily Toth's
The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation)

But menstruation is not just any cyclical occurrence. It involves the shedding of blood, which is itself a dire event, with or without group synchrony and astral coincidences, and at least intuitively associated with acts of deliberate bloodshed. Aristotle observed in the Historia Animalium that menstrual blood runs "like that of an animal that has just been stabbed" in sacrifice and Hippocratic medical texts used the same analogy.
(--from Barbara Ehrenreich's
Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passion of War)

For the Hippocratics the weakness of a woman's body (her porous flesh) caused menstruation; for Aristotle menstruation caused her physical weakness.
(--from Sarah B. Pomeroy's
Women's History and Ancient History)

Aristotle tells us that the highpitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices. If you hear a man talking in a gentle or high-pitched voice you know he is a kinaidos (“catamite”). The poet Aristophanes put a comic turn on this cliché in his Ekklesiazousai: as the women of Athens are about to infiltrate the Athenian assembly and take over political process, the f****ist leader Praxagora reassures her fellow f*male activists that they have precisely the right kind of voices for this task. Because, as she says, “You know that among the young men the ones who turn out to be terrific talkers are the ones who get f***ed a lot.” This joke depends on a collapsing together of two different aspects of sound production, quality of voice and use of voice. We will find the ancients continually at pains to associate these two aspects under a general rubric of gender. High vocal pitch goes together with talkativeness to characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control. Women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category. Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable. Just how uncomfortable may be measured by the lengths to which Aristotle is willing to go in accounting for the gender of sound physiognomically; he ends up ascribing the lower pitch of the male voice to the tension placed on a man’s vocal chords by his testicles functioning as loom weights.
(--from Anne Carson's
Glass, Irony, and God
- the unoffending *s have been added for our comfort.)

Females blurt out a direct translation of what should be formulated indirectly [as by a syllogism of logic] . . . . [S]ince woman does not bound herself, she must be bounded. The celebrated Greek virtue of self-control (sophrosyne) has to be defined differently for men and for women, Aristotle maintains. Masculine sophrosyne is rational self-control and resistance to excess, but for the woman [according to Aristotle] sophrosyne means obedience and consists in submitting herself to the control of others.
(--from Anne Carson's
Men in the Off Hours)