Theology Today - Vol 49, No.2 - July 1992 - ARTICLE - Blurring the Boundaries: A Respinse to Howard C. Kee

239 - Blurring the Boundaries: A Response to Howard C. Kee

Blurring the Boundaries: A Response to Howard C. Kee
By Virginia Burrus

PROFESSOR Kee rightly suggests that the history of earliest Christianity is, in part, the history of the patriarchalization of the church. Like others before him, Kee observes that the New Testament texts offer evidence that women participated actively in the life and leadership of the earliest churches. This state of sexual egalitarianism did not, however, endure. Christian leadership began to be defined as an exclusively male concern, as Christianity identified itself more and more closely with those institutions rooted in the male-dominated political sphere. Eventually, women were explicitly denied access to official leadership roles in the churches and to other facets of Christian life as well, and theological justifications for this exclusion were elaborated. By the third century, patristic writers frequently claimed that the biblical stories of creation and fall indicated women's inferior and subordinate nature as well as their moral and theological weakness. They further interpreted Jesus' apparent failure to appoint any women to the apostolate as a deliberate indication of female incapacity for ecclesiastical leadership.

If it is difficult to argue with the main thrust of Professor Kee's argument for the patriarchalization of Christianity, there is still room for debate on a number of more specific points. I would like to focus critically on two methodological issues that raise questions about Professor Kee's selection and interpretation of texts and also about the resulting reconstruction of the early history of the patriarchalization of Christianity.

How do we in fact reconstruct the social reality of women's lives in a historical period that is not only chronologically remote but is also documented almost exclusively by texts written by, about, and for men? This question reflects the fundamental methodological dilemma facing anyone who attempts to shift the center of historical inquiry in order to focus on people or issues traditionally either marginalized or ignored by both historians and their sources. One problematic aspect of Kee's analysis is that he often proceeds as if the dilemma did not

Virginia Burrus is Assistant Professor of Early Church History at the Theological School of Drew University and the author of Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of Apocryphal Acts (1987).

240 - Blurring the Boundaries: A Response to Howard C. Kee

exist. He places great weight on certain legal or quasi-legal texts that severely restrict the rights of women, seeming to assume that such texts provide both adequate and reliable data about women's lives. His rather literal interpretations lead him to conclude that women in both Greco-Roman and Jewish cultures of antiquity were severely subordinated to men and never held religious leadership roles. Such a conclusion must, however, be questioned on methodological grounds alone. By looking primarily at legal texts and interpreting these texts literally, Kee appears to confuse prescriptive language, which may reflect a highly idealized set of standards never followed or even intended to be followed, with descriptive language. He also fails to acknowledge the biased and limited perspective of documents that reflect a male-centered and public-centered point of view.

Had Kee consulted a broader variety of texts and invoked more cautious principles of interpretation, his study might have yielded somewhat different results. For example, an examination of documentary sources (such as fragments of letters and contracts preserved on Egyptian papyri) in conjunction with a critical reading of ancient texts on "economics," or household management (such as Xenophon's (oeconomicus), would have highlighted not women's subordination but rather the strong managerial and leadership roles of women within the private sphere of the household. These roles extended themselves well beyond the household through patronage relationships of various kinds. As household managers and as patrons, pagan and Jewish women, like their Christian counterparts, did take on significant leadership roles in religion, both in the domestically-centered cult and in the more public arena, where they functioned as benefactresses, prophetesses, and priestesses. The point is this: Once we have acknowledged that legal texts do not always give us a complete or reliable picture of the role of pagan and Jewish women in antiquity, Kee's stark distinctions begin to blur, and it becomes doubtful that a sharp contrast between a primitive and egalitarian Christianity and a thoroughly patriarchal pagan and Jewish cultural environment can be maintained.

A second methodological question in response to Professor Kee's essay is how the rhetoric of controversial texts is to be interpreted and how the categories of orthodoxy and heresy are to be used, implicitly or explicitly, in the analysis of the ancient Christian documents. This is a particularly pressing question since so many of the surviving early Christian texts represent only one side of a conversation or dispute between two parties who both claim Christian identity. Historians should not be too quick to deny the claims of one group or another to reflect an authentically Christian viewpoint. Otherwise, we risk engaging in a kind of circular reasoning in which our preestablished desire to

241 - Blurring the Boundaries: A Response to Howard C. Kee

identify Christianity in a certain way - in this case as either "patriarchal" or " egalitarian" - determines our judgment of what is authentically Christian and what is heretical or deviant or marginal.

Kee has identified certain strata within the gospels as representative of a primitive "Jesus tradition." But even in these passages, I would argue, it is difficult to locate the unambiguous or "pure" egalitarian ethos that Kee lauds. References to conflict or controversy frequently occur in the traditions that Kee identifies as relating in some way to women, and there is no reason to assume that all of this reflects a dispute with opposition clearly "external" to the Jesus movement. Indeed, according to one story cited by Kee, Jesus himself had to be cleverly persuaded to listen to a non-Israelite woman. Similarly, the Pauline letters, the oldest extant Christian texts, preserve traces of controversy over women's roles, a controversy particularly highlighted in the dispute between Paul and the Corinthian women prophets, who espoused a more egalitarian view of Christian community than did the apostle.

Nor was this first-century tension between more egalitarian and more patriarchal perspectives transformed into a uniform and unanimous Christian patriarchial point of view in the second century, as Kee also suggests. Rather, differences and conflicts over women's roles continued to surface throughout subsequent centuries of Christian history. Consider, for example, the early second-century pastoral epistles, which witness not only to an emerging patriarchal form of Christianity but also to the radical opposition of other Christians, in particular the "widows" (who were probably not, as Kee suggests, simply welfare beneficiaries but, rather, women who lived outside the institution of patriarchal marriage and enjoyed considerable authority as well as autonomy within their communities). Consider, also, not only the point of view of the compilers of the Didache (which Kee uses as his primary example of second-century Christianity in the post-New Testament era) but also the point of view of the members of the same community who evidently needed to be convinced to honor bishops and deacons. If Kee is right that the Didache's bishops and deacons represented an emerging all-male clergy (a point not actually made explicit in the document), then the Didache may point to opposition to this development on the part of those who recognized more authority in others-(male and female?) prophets, for example. The continued importance of both female and male prophets in some late secondcentury Christian communities is highlighted in the texts documenting the so-called "Montanist controversy." In sum, if the diversity of Christian voices present in the ancient Christian texts is fully acknowledged, it becomes more difficult to locate either a "golden age" of egalitarianism or a clearly defined moment of "downfall" into patriarchy circa 100 C.E.

242 - Blurring the Boundaries: A Response to Howard C. Kee

III

Why does any of this matter? What are some of the consequences of embracing a more nuanced view of the history of women in the early church in which divisions between Christians and non-Christians and between first-century Christians and second-century Christians are downplayed? First, a blurring of religious or cultural boundaries in our historical reconstructions may cut against the smugness that frequently creeps into Christian discussions of Judaism and other religious traditions. The roots of a distinctive Christian feminism would appear to be entangled in Jewish and pagan traditions, rather than emerging in pure and radical opposition to those traditions. Second, a blurring of chronological boundaries in our historical reconstructions may cut against the tendency to locate orthodox or authentic Christianity almost purely in a statically defined "golden age" of the distant past. After all, how liberating is it for Christian women to be invited to focus exclusively on "the insights of Jesus and Paul"?