by Melvyn Bragg
There are gay militants today who tear out of the Bible the page on which that verse of Leviticus is printed. Perhaps it might be better to put a note in the margin instead. ‘David and Jonathan’ is one simple suggestion. Yet in some Christian countries – Nigeria is a leading example – Leviticus is held to be right and with St Paul speak for Church law. The Anglican communion is riven between the traditionalist Nigerian faction and a liberated faction determined to have homosexuals as priests and bishops. English Anglicans are uneasily trying to find a middle ground, not least by continuing their own long tradition of unobtrusively accepting homosexuality in their own priesthood.
There is the growing view that the Church should keep out of private life. The boundaryless world of a hegemonic religion which believed it could direct and micro-manage not only life before birth but life after death and all that happened between these two, is, in the secular world, long gone and not missed. It is good riddance. In this regard, as with its edicts on women and homosexuality, the Bible dogmatists and literalists have suffered in direct proportion to people and nations becoming more tolerant. History is on the side of those attempting the choppy waters of increasing individual liberty and an increasing willingness to take responsibility for one’s own destiny. The modern secular world has reached back to the classical world and the waters have closed over certain unsustainable prejudices in the Bible.
One of the positive aspects of the last century in Bible studies in the English-speaking world (and elsewhere, though for obvious reasons I am limiting myself to the English-speaking world) is the entrance of the feminist critique. This has not only identified the abuse and marginalisation of women in the Church and in the Old and New Testaments, it has refreshed their stories in the act of reinterpretation.
Some stories are hard to redeem – the rape of Tamar, Jepthah sacrificing his daughter, Lot offering his daughters to the men of Sodom, and the many cases in which women are the property, the enslaved, of men.
At times it can seem that one of the closet aims of the Bible is to calumniate women. Some of the key verses which feminist commentators use to show the Bible in what understandably they see as its true colours include this from Paul’s Epistle to Timothy in the New Testament: ‘Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.’ And Paul to Corinthians: ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.’
Not surprisingly, it was the Quakers, in the seventeenth century, who found an authoritative voice to challenge all this. Margaret Fell, a northerner, known as the ‘Mother of Quakerism’, would have none of it. In her book Women’s Speaking Justified, she found key biblical arguments to support the place of women in Church leadership. As in the British Civil Wars, the King James Bible found itself as ammunition for both sides of the debate.
Curiously, given the apparent obsession in the Old Testament with woman as the source of evil, the wicked seducer, the harlot and the temptress, it is in the Old Testament that certain verses appear which are the pillars for a new non-misogynistic world. Margaret Fell goes to Genesis: ‘And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel.’ There is an undeniable equality here.
Margaret Fell also points out that in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Psalms and Revelation, the Church is known as a woman. Therefore to speak against women is to speak against the Church. Christ’s teaching mission is also invoked. Mary Magdalene has already been referred to, but Margaret Fell points out that in the Gospel according to St John, Jesus preaches equally to women and to men. He preaches to the Samaritan woman at the well and to Martha, both of whom testified to their belief in Christ as the Messiah at a time when few others accepted Him.
She rebuts Paul’s admonitions by imagining that he was speaking of irreverent women and ungodly women only. Margaret Fell appears to have set in motion what has eventually become a thriving and intellectually satisfying re-examination of the place of women in the Bible and therefore in Western history. It is not difficult to leap from Margaret Fell’s seventeenth-century Quakerism to the formidable and numerous feminist scholars of today.
Among them are David Baker who studied the Pentateuchal stories and pointed to the mother-centred voices that challenge the patriarchy which is so much in the foreground. Then there is Musa Shoman-Dube who starts with the adage that when the white man met the African, the white man owned the Bible, and the African the land. Soon it was reversed. This not only brings in the colonialist heritage but, tellingly, includes the story of the Canaanite woman’s daughter. In another book which she edits, Musa Shoman-Dube introduces the subject of women in African oral storytelling. In establishing a new balance, it can help to depress the prominence of men.
Barbara J. Essex’s book Bad Boys of the Bible: Exploring Men of Questionable Virtue subjects to scrutiny the heroic and moral status given to Adam, Cain, Abraham, Lot, Jacob, Jepthah and Samson. Several books examine the women who saved the life of the child Moses abandoned in the bulrushes. Jane Schalberg in The Illegitimacy of Jesus suggests that is just what it was – a normal but illegitimate birth. This, if true, would establish an ‘illegitimacy tradition’ and could open up ‘fuller human and deeper theological potential’.
James I, whose name is so closely associated with the 1611 Bible, was a biblical scholar, widely erudite, but also, as King James VI of Scotland, a notoriously zealous persecutor and executor of witches. The great majority of these were women and every one, we can safely assume, was innocent. Every one of these women was victimised in large part because of a masculine, controlling, darkly sexually charged obsession with the alleged evil brought into the world by Eve. Four hundred years after the King James’s publication it is a new generation of the daughters of Eve who are rolling back 2,000 years of perverse and destructive prejudice.
It is a vigorous, positive analysis which has reformed traditional ideas by discovering deeper and other possibilities latent in the very stories that once denigrated and all but denied half the human race. The women of modern scholarship have liberated the women in the Bible and led them out of Egypt. Material in the Bible has proved the defence of what was most offensive about it. Those whom it tried to silence have used it to speak out and claim their equal rights.
For centuries, men used the Bible to reduce the great majority of women to little more than objects, vassals, marginal creatures. In the last century, women have used that same Bible to reinforce the liberated, complex, rich history and future of women. When God is referred to nowadays, it is very often as She.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE BIBLE AND WOMEN
As early as the seventeenth century, women began to outnumber men in the congregations in the Protestant, especially the nonconformist, churches. Sometimes the attendance was two-thirds women, one-third men. In the more radical groups, like early Quakerism, women were given roles denied them by all other Churches. It became a currency of congregational conversation that, as Richard Allestree, an English clergyman, and Cotton Mather, a minister in Massachusetts, said, women were more spiritual than men. Men, they thought, inverting Eve, were slaves to passion. ‘Devotion is a tender plant,’ said Allestree, ‘that requires a supple, gentle soil; and therefore the feminine softness and plyableness is very apt and proper for it . . . I know there are many Ladies whose Examples are reproaches to the other Sex, that help fill our congregations, when Gentlemen desert them.’
Mary Wollstonecraft was to abominate that stereotyping of women, but in one way it was a useful beginning. Without the stereotyping as pliable, docile, devoted, there might have been a lesser chance of women beginning their long journey, still unfinished, to equality in the Church. Those re
marks of the Anglican Richard Allestree were radical in that they challenged and contradicted the great Church Father St Augustine – enemy of Eve – who had condemned the uncontrolled passion of women, their sinful wilfulness.
Women came to see the Church as a place in which they could fight their cause. Politics were barred; universities were barred; the law barred them from its offices. But the Church had chinks in its armour and the rapiers of clever and brave women pierced it. It provided a path both to join and to challenge the Established Order.
Mary Astell, for instance, whom Diarmaid MacCulloch describes as ‘a celibate High Church Anglican Tory with a lively interest in contemporary philosophy’, attacked John Locke, whose philosophy of freedom excluded half the human race; and in the 1690s, set out her own version of Christian feminism. ‘That the custom of the world,’ she wrote, ‘has put Women, generally, in a state of Subjection, is not denied; but the Right can no more be proved from the Fact, than the Predominancy of Vice can justify it . . . one would . . . almost think that the wise disposer of all things, foreseeing how unjustly Women are denied opportunities of improvement from without, has therefore by way of compensation endowed them with greater propensions to Vertue, and a natural goodness of temper within.’
A century later, another gentlewoman, from Devon, Joanna Southcott, a Methodist, gave vent to visions and prophecies that led to a large-scale apocalyptic movement which retained female leadership, despite challenges from men who wanted to be at the forefront of this uprising. Joanna Southcott’s box of prophecies which caused so much alarm and excitement is still to be opened – but only in the presence of twenty-four Anglican bishops.
There were others. Two Scottish sisters for example, Isabella and Mary Campbell, said to be of rare holiness, spoke in unknown tongues and inspired what became a charismatic and widespread Pentecostal movement. In 1853, a Congregational Church in New York ordained Antoinette Brown as a minister; the first woman outside the Quakers to hold such an office in modern Christianity. Women volunteered for missionary work, the Great Awakening released into activity thousands of women who made the Church their transport through society and the King James Version their guide. These and many others were the forerunners who pointed the way to the ‘Bible Women’ who did so much to alleviate the scarcely credible destitution of the poverty-stricken.
The English word ‘charity’ comes from the Bible, a translation of the Latin word ‘caritas’ which could also mean ‘care’ or ‘love’. Charity combines both and in St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians it is given its crown. ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.’ The King James Version is the only English Bible version to translate ‘caritas’ as ‘charity’ rather than as ‘love’.
Charity had been seen by the Christian Church as part of its purpose from the time of Christ. It had been considered a Christian virtue. Its administration was largely left to the Church. The consequences of the publication of the King James Bible included a growing belief on the part of individuals that the pursuit of charity was an obligation and a responsibility for the individual: the individual who had been released into full participation with their Creator and their Redeemer.
In Victorian Britain and in roughly the same period of history in America, there was a spectacular surge in the creation of charitable organisations which took on the desperate condition of the outcast impoverished, often diseased and malnourished masses cramped into the slums of the new industrial cities. These organisations were Bible-led and that Bible was the King James Version. There was something simple, basic and good about their mission, which was to help the weak. But there was also the colouring of the times: the weak had to prove that they were deserving.
The role of government was very limited. The government’s argument was that doling out large sums of relief to the poor would only encourage poverty, especially among the undeserving poor. There was an accepted level of destitution. The general view was that poverty was the result of personal failure—laziness, idleness, greed, or sin. In that respect – the moral sphere – it was thought the Bible could make a crucial contribution. This view was challenged by individuals like Henry Mayhew, who argued that this was not a moral problem but a social problem. The poor were not poor because they were immoral. If they were immoral it was because they were poor. They were poor because they could find no work and accumulate no money.
The Co-operative Movement and the Friendly Societies, connected through membership with the nonconformist branches of the Protestant Church, took a slightly different view. They encouraged self-help and reached out to those unable to rise to that challenge. They did not bring in what could in practice be a rigid and unhelpful distinction between the undeserving poor who brought neglect upon themselves and the deserving poor, to be rewarded and worthy of salvation.
Then there were individuals: Octavia Hill (1838 – 1912). She worked as a child with her sister in a toy workshop. By the age of fourteen she was running it. Her workshop, which from the description was appalling, was thought to be better than most of the sweatshops which were making Britain the ‘workshop of the world’. The toy workshop was subsidised by Christian Socialists. This group was to have a strong part in the British charity movement and it gave to Octavia Hill a desire for social reform which melded with her strong Christian principles.
Octavia Hill’s impact is proof that an individual, however skilfully she might seem to be riding on the tide of an economic and social turn of history, can make a substantial difference. She was convinced that young, unmarried Christian women of the middle class should go into the world of extreme poverty and serve God and the poor. They acted as rent collectors and supervisors. Ellen Ranyard, founder of the ‘Bible Women’, deliberately hired women from the working classes. She thought they would be more able to make easy contact with the women they went to help and to whom they sold Bibles.
Octavia Hill led by example and was a major force throughout the charity and welfare organisations of the nineteenth century. She campaigned successfully for social housing and for the availability of open spaces for the poor, a campaign which was key in the establishment of the National Trust. She was a founder member of the Charity Organisation Society (now the charity Family Action) which formed the basis of modern social work.
The latter society emphasised Bible study and encouraged attendance at Sunday school and Church. The Bible was the enabler in all of this. A strong prevailing idea was that those in poverty were so placed because of their ungodliness. Bible study and the practice of the Christian faith were to be made crucial to rehabilitation. Many of the poor, we are told, grudged the enforced Christianity as the price they had to pay. Those ignored for so long by Christianity or atavistically wary of its claims on them were often reluctant to accept the faith even though they benefited from the works. But they were made well aware that the Bible was part of the cure.
Just as vigorous as Octavia Hill was her contemporary, William Booth (1829 – 1912), who founded the Salvation Army. He came from the school that believed that poverty, vice and crime were indisputably linked to sin. His army took up the King James Version as it marched into the slums and war zones, banners flying, drums beating, tambourines cascading with shimmering sounds. Booth wrote In Darkest England and the Way Out: he knew his ground on the first part of that title: the second he found in the Bible.
In the book, he sets out the cityscape, in which he worked:To the dwellers in decent houses, who occupy cushioned pews in fashionable churches, there is something strange and quaint in the language they hear read from the Bible. Language which habitually refers to the Devil as an actual personality, and to the struggle against sin and uncleanness as if it were a hand to hand death wrestle with the legions of Hell. To our little sisters who dwell in an atmosphere heavy with curses, among people sodden with drink, in quarters where sin and uncleanness are universal, all those Biblical sayings are as real as the quotations of yesterday’s price of
Consols are to the City man. They dwell in the midst of Hell, and in their daily warfare with a hundred devils it seems incredible to them that anyone can doubt the existence of either one or the other.
Booth describes these Christian women, the Bible Women, who were so outstanding on the battlefields of nineteenth-century charity. Booth in this instance writes of the remarkable phenomenon of the ‘Slum Sister’.
The slum sister is what her name implies, the Sister of the Slum. They go forth in Apostolic fashion, two-and-two living in a couple of the same kind of dens or rooms as are occupied by the people themselves, differing only in the cleanliness and order, and the few articles of furniture which they contain. Here they live all the year round, visiting the sick, looking after the children, showing the women how to keep themselves and their homes decent, often discharging the sick mother’s duties themselves; cultivating peace, advocating temperance, counselling in temporalities, and ceaselessly preaching the religion of Jesus Christ to the outcasts of society.
Those of religion will recognise such people. In the current secularism of British society it is worth drawing attention to the practical dedication of those who came not so long ago before us and brought comfort and relief to many ‘outcasts’ and acknowledge that this was inspired by what were believed to be the Words of God and Jesus Christ. I am sure it can be proved that non-religious women behaved just as well, applied themselves just as devotedly. That does not detract from those whose vocation was inspired by the King James Bible. These British Bible Women who, they might have said, were ‘about their Father’s business’, are now foreigners here in what was once their land. We know them not. But they helped make it the better land it became and William Booth, flags flying, tambourines shaking, knew what he was praising.
