by Sarah Ruden
I have to admit I was at first horrified to be addressing this topic. I don’t think that anyone who ever wrote about “the attitude toward women,” in any time and place and in any mind or collection of minds, has really taken into account how complicated it has to be. Women are oppressed—no kidding. But we’re oppressed mainly by the people we yearn to have sex and homes and children with, and many of these people try to stay on our good side in order to get the same things. But almost nobody has them in a peaceful state for very long, as if the human biological family had some sort of factory defect. All of the pain and the conflict between the genders seems to circle around this problem.
How was Paul supposed to deal with it? As far as we know, he was never married himself. For most of his adult life, he had no settled home. He had women friends and collaborators, married and unmarried, whom he valued, but the roles of women he saw around him in polytheistic society were so varied that, to me, it doesn’t even make sense that these people were all called “women.” In fact, the Romans had different ways to say simply “woman,” according to the class the woman belonged to, quite apart from the words for “woman slave,” “lady,” “matron,” and so on.
A female slave on a farm could have the worst of a cow’s and an ox’s lives. She might have started out as an exposed baby, picked up by a slave dealer to be raised like an animal for the most profitable purpose. He would sell her for labor as soon as she could do the simplest tasks, if she were healthy but not pretty enough to be a prostitute. Women laborers did not usually till the fields, but they hauled water, cooked over open fires, and processed rough wool during most of their time on earth. The Roman statesman Cato the Elder (later-third to mid–second century B.C.) famously wrote that a slave who wasn’t sleeping should be working, but it was more true for women than for men, who got to rest in their quarters while women continued working wool far into the night by lamplight, a scene I’ve encountered several times in poetry.
Women slaves (raped or consenting, but with no right to rebuff the master) usually got to raise their own children, but only because this made for a better product, the verna, or home-born slave. But a slave mother would have been a fool to ask for time off or easier tasks in order to care for her baby, as if it weren’t sturdy enough to basically raise itself, and deserved exposure.
I do not read of women slaves getting crucified, but I also do not read of owners’ ever treating them more respectfully because they were women, but instead hanging them up the same as men and beating them. In fact, some scenes in poetry suggest that ladies most often took out their frustrations as women on the helpless women they owned. Women probably tended to avoid execution because they knew better than to run away: out there, they would not enjoy even the protection that property had, and their relative physical weakness would ensure a more hellish life than at home.
What did such a woman have in common with this character in Apuleius’s Roman novel The Golden Ass (The Metamorphoses) of the mid-second century A.D.?
There I saw a woman walking along with an abundant troop of servants. I accelerated my own steps until I caught up with her. She had gold twisted around the gems she wore, and woven into her dress, the clear sign of a married lady. An old man, weighed down by his years, clung to her arm. The moment he spotted me, he said, “It’s him! By Hercules, it’s Lucius!” He gave me a kiss and hastened to murmur something in the woman’s ear.
“You’d better greet your mother yourself,” he then said to me.
“I’m embarrassed,” I said. “This is a lady I’m not acquainted with.” I was soaked through with an instant blush, and I stood with my head hanging.
Now she turned and gazed at me. “Look at him! He knows just how to behave—you can tell what a good family he’s from. He gets his modesty from that faultless mother of his. And, upon my life, he looks exactly like her. He’s tall but not too tall, slender but still juicy, and just rosy enough. He doesn’t wear that blond hair of his like a sissy. His eyes are quite a light blue, but they’re wide awake and glittering just like an eagle’s. His whole face is just a flower. He walks nicely but doesn’t mince.
“I cared for you with these hands, Lucius,” she continued. “How could I not have? I’m not only your mother’s relative, but we were raised together. Both of us descend from the family of Plutarch, we suckled from the same nurse at the same time, and we grew up with a bond like sisterhood. It’s only our rank that’s different now, because she married a great statesman, while my marriage keeps me in private life. I’m Byrrhena! I’m sure the people who reared you mentioned me often—don’t you remember? Don’t hang back but come and accept my hospitality—there shouldn’t be any difference between my home and yours.”
How would Paul have put together the two classes, the farm slaves and the models for Byrrhena, and everyone in between, and created a policy about “women”? And what about the ways women’s roles were changing? What about the ways the Christian church itself was changing them? And what about the other people who piled on, writing fake Pauline letters and tampering with real ones, in order to have their say in these riveting questions? The reliability of the Greek text is most controversial on the topic of women.
But when I looked carefully at the passages and the Greek and Roman works that showed their context, one thing did emerge pretty clearly: Shaw’s view of Paul as an oppressor could hardly be more wrong. I’ll start with the shortest but most troubling passage in 1 Corinthians that discusses women (14:33–36):
33 (As in all the churches of the saints, 34 women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. 35 If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. 36 Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only ones it has reached?)
The parentheses in the New Revised Standard Version show that many scholars believe the passage is not genuine, and they have their reasons.† But I don’t agree in the least that the words don’t sound like Paul. What strikes me as particularly Pauline is the use of the thematic word “churches.” At the beginning of Romans 1:18 also (see my chapter 3, this page), he repeats something key (in that case “wickedness” or “injustice”) in the same sentence. And it’s worth noticing which Greek word he is using for “churches” here in 1 Corinthians and emphasizing in this way.
First, some background on “churches.” The New Testament writers didn’t tend to use new or esoteric Greek words. Centuries of lazy or pretentious translations hide this. But really, a “disciple” (mathētēs, or discipulus in Latin) is just a “student,” an “apostle” (apostolos) just an “envoy.” The idea rendered in English as “church” (which is a Germanic word) wasn’t far-out: the Greek word, ekklēsia, meant “public assembly,” usually a city’s governing assembly, ancestor of our legislatures but in an ancient Greek democracy (or the remnants of one, institutions with their old forms but limited functions under the Roman Empire) open to all male citizens. It was the “place to be heard.” Every citizen had a right to speak, to try to make his opinions part of binding law.
Hundreds of years before Paul, the notion arose that women might be covetously eyeing the power of the ekklēsia. In Aristophanes’ comedy Ekklēsiazousae (Assemblywomen), women disguise themselves as men and infiltrate the Athenian assembly. But this was hilarious because it was impossible, ipso facto the opposite of the way things were or could be, as in Aristophanes’ other stories—of going down to Hades, for instance, to retrieve a popular dead tragedian, in Frogs. To gauge the enormity of female trespass on Greek male domains, it may be helpful to know that a married woman or widow caught in the stands at the Olympics was subject to the death penalty.
The opening of Ekklēsiazousae is pathetic—at least to us—in stressing the difference between where men and women were allowed to go. The women sneak out before dawn, by lamplight, so that they can organize without being noticed. Respecta
ble Athenian women could not normally be outdoors, let alone in the ekklēsia, but stayed at home in the semidarkness, engaged in distinctly feminine activities. Hence the ironic praise of the lamp, phrased like an invocation of a god:
PRAXAGORA: O bright eye of the lamp, from wheel-pulled clay,
The finest thing of clever men’s devising.
I’ll now expound your birth and your adventures.
Whirled on the wheel, shaped by the potter’s impulse,
You breathe the sun’s bright privilege from your nostrils.
Raise up the flaming signal that’s agreed on.
You’re the sole fitting witness for us women.
In our bedrooms you stand by us as we twist
In Aphrodite’s challenging endeavors.
Nobody walls you out—you oversee
With your own eye the curving of our bodies.
You alone shine within the secret crevice
Of our thighs, and singe away the downy hair.
And you assist our sneaking into storerooms,
Full as they are of grain and streaming wine.
You help—and don’t go yakking to the neighbors.
But though Aristophanes may seem sympathetic, he’s really not. The play is a fable about why women should stay home. True to the reputed female obsession with sex, the disguised women use their access to the ekklēsia to get a law passed that is bound to cause some controversy:
OLD WOMAN: By Aphrodite, I can make you do it.
Ooooh, I like snuggling up with men your age!
YOUNG MAN: I’m never going to submit, since women Your age repel me.
OLD WOMAN: Well, by Zeus, I’m holding Something that can compel you.
YOUNG MAN: What would that be?
OLD WOMAN: A law that says you have to come and see me.
YOUNG MAN: Huh? Tell me what it says.
OLD WOMAN: Okay. Here goes:
“The women have decreed that if a young man
Desires a girl, he may not hammer her
Until he pounds a hag. Should he not grant
This prior pounding but pursues the young girl,
It is permitted to the crones to seize him
By the peg and maul him with impunity.”
Athenians were extreme, but almost no Greeks or Romans thought women should participate in government. There was no approved public forum for any kind of women’s self-expression, not even in the arts and religion. They had ritual functions. Some were priestesses. All citizen women took part in public ceremonies from time to time, on special occasions. They watched, or made the motions and spoke the traditional words (if any). It was not on offer to do anything else. A few women created literature, but not apparently for reciting in public.‡
The Romans were, however, much more liberal than the Greeks. Juvenal complains of women elbowing into discussions in the street.
There’s a worse kind, though, sweeping through the city,
Bold enough to endure men’s conversation.
She chats with generals, looks them in the eye.
Her husband’s right there—all her milk’s dried up.
She knows the news from all around the world,
The Seres’ and the Thracians’ moves, the high jinks
With the stepmom, who’s in love, and which adulterer
Got sodomized.
This is probably as exaggerated as most scenes in Juvenal. But the difference between Greek and Roman women’s roles is interesting, especially in the case of Corinth. It was an old Greek city, but one sacked in 146 B.C. by the Romans, who then colonized it. Many Corinthians in the first century A.D. were ethnic Romans who had kept much of their culture, so if Paul found the women feistier than elsewhere in the Greek world, this would not be surprising. He may be setting limits closer to his own Greek and Diaspora Jewish norms. Bruce Winter explores this possibility in Roman Wives, Roman Widows and argues that the tension was worse because of the greater emancipation of Roman women in the first century A.D.
But whatever the exact standards of anyone involved here, modern readers tend to come at the passage in 1 Corinthians from the wrong angle. It would not have been remarkable that women were forbidden to speak among the Christians. It’s remarkable that they were speaking in the first place. It’s remarkable that they were even there, in an ekklēsia, perhaps for all kinds of worship and deliberation, and that their questions needed answers, if not on the spot. Paul’s negativity—even his typical snapping about authority—is extremely modest against the polytheistic background.
The satirist Juvenal illustrates how bad Greco-Roman attitudes could be. It seems that he thought a woman should never express a strong opinion on anything, even in private:
Worse is the one who hits the dining couch
With praise of Vergil—his poor doomed Elissa!§—
Makes famous poets face off, putting Homer
Onto the scale, hanging him there with Vergil.
The scholar, the professor are defeated,
The lawyer, herald silenced—even women—
So thunderous is the onrush of her words.
Juvenal does not only indicate that women should knuckle under and signal this by silence in public. He displays them as cheerfully, irredeemably evil. I am a woman, so I shouldn’t find any of this funny, but his women are funny, like a James Bond villain with a Persian cat and a shark tank, or like Inspector Dreyfus in the last Pink Panther movie, wanting to take a quick bathroom break before vaporizing the world.
Look at the rivals of the gods, the burden
Of Claudius.‖ When his wife sensed he was sleeping,
That imperial whore put on her hood and shrugged
Her Palatinea bed off for a mat. She set out
With a single maid and covered her black hair
With a blond wig, ticket to the steamy brothel
With its tattered curtain stretched across the entrance,
And her own reserved cell. There, billed as the “She-Wolf,”
She flaunted gilded nipples and the belly
You came from, “emperor’s son,” Britannicus.
She sweet-talked men, demanded money, lay there
All night, absorbing everybody’s thrashings.
When the pimp—so soon!—was furloughing his own girls,
She sadly left. All she could do was close
Her cell last, with her clit erect and burning.
Weary but still not satisfied, her cheeks
Smeared hideous with the lamp’s smoke, she brought back
The cathouse stink to the imperial couch.
I’m sure you understand the wrinkled nose,
The whisper between bosom buddies, Tullia
And Maura—yeah, her—as they pass the shrine.
At night, they park their litters for a piss
On Chastity’s image, flood it with sustained jets,
Then hump each other where the moon can see them.
Home they go. It’s your wife’s pee that you step in
At dawn, in going to attend your patrons.
Suppose I break the genre rules: my satire
Puts on a towering tragic costume, raves
Like loud-mouthed, lofty Sophocles, a new style
Beneath a Latin sky, on Italian hills.
Too mild, alas! Pontia shouts, “I did it!
I mixed the poison for my sons—you’ve got me.
I won’t deny the crime. I want to claim it.”
“You heartless viper! At a single meal—
You? Both boys?” “Seven would have been no problem.”
THE SECOND PASSAGE I want to look at (1 Corinthians 11:2–16) is less controversial in its text but still has some knots, and it is also very offensive to modern Western ideology.
2 I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions just as I handed them on to you. 3 But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife, and God is the
head of Christ. 4 Any man who prays or prophesies with something on his head disgraces his head, 5 but any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled disgraces her head—it is one and the same thing as having her head shaved. 6 For if a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair; but if it is disgraceful for a woman to have her hair cut off or to be shaved, she should wear a veil. 7 For a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection of God; but woman is the reflection of man. 8 Indeed, man was not made from woman, but woman from man. 9 Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man. 10 For this reason a woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels. 11 Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man or man independent of woman. 12 For just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman; but all things come from God. 13 Judge for yourselves; is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head unveiled? 14 Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him, 15 but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering. 16 But if anyone is disposed to be contentious—we have no such custom, nor do the churches of God.
Some scholars would not cry to see the whole passage placed in parentheses (like 14:33–36, discussed above), and they do have certain grounds for considering these verses not genuine. First, some of the words and sentiments sound like those in letters dodgily attributed to Paul. There is also some inconsistency with another, quite securely Pauline, part of 1 Corinthians. If the husband were supposed to be the head of the wife, the long passage on marriage would be the place to write that, not here; but there (1 Corinthians 7, discussed on this page) we get mainly a language of stark equality. And as a whole the veils passage wouldn’t exactly stand up as, say, an argument before the Supreme Court: it does not flow or persuade as well as it might—to a modern ear, anyway.
