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The Two Shall Become One
By John Dart

IN the many valiant attempts to find evidence of early Christian teaching to support equality of the sexes, scholars, clergy, and laity alike swarm like bees around that flowery, colorful statement of Paul in Galatians: "For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

Some of Paul's other statements about a lesser role for women in the church, or in relationship to males, invariably make the nectar from Galatians 3:27-28 seem bittersweet. Has all the pollen been pulled that can be pulled from the "neither-male-nor-female" statement of in-Christ unity? Did a kind of Christian androgyny concept blossom briefly in the first few decades of Christianity only to wither in the second century in the move toward what we know as the orthodox church?

I think the answer is yes, but in order to consider evidence one has to look to some of the many Christian writings rejected by church fathers for inclusion in the New Testament, particularly the Gospel of Thomas. A collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus without a lifestory narrative, Thomas was partially uncovered in Greek papyrus fragments about the turn of this century and then found in full Coptic translation in late 1945. The first complete, modern-language translations were available by 1960.

Q. (somewhat antagonistically) Wasn't that so-called gospel found among a bunch of Gnostic heretical writings in Egypt?

A.(a bit condescendingly) Why, yes, the 52 titles are collectively known as the Nag Hammadi Library or Nag Hammadi codices after a town not far from the discovery site. But the library contains a rich variety of writings, some decidedly Gnostic, some Hermetic works, and many not so easily classified.

Q. If the church rejected the Gospel of Thomas, and hardly anybody is claiming anything wonderful for it today, why should we bother with a spurious Gnostic work?

A. It's true that many scholars believe the compiler(s) of the Gospel of Thomas rewrote familiar sayings from the Gospels, particularly Matthew and Luke, and created new ones-nearly all with Gnostic

John Dart is religion writer for the Los Angeles Times and author of The Laughing Savior: The Discovery and Significance of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Library (Harper & Row, 1976).

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emphasis on gnosis (knowledge) and awareness of one's spiritual origin. However, others have maintained that the Thomas sayings must have traveled through an independent tradition; they find that some parables seem to have a more primitive form in Thomas than in the synoptic Gospels. For this reason and others, Helmut Koester of Harvard thinks Thomas may have been written in the second half of the first century-rather than circa A.D. 140, the usual dating estimate. In form, Thomas resembles the presumed format of the theoretical synoptics saying source, "Q."

Q. (which stands here for "Question," not "Quelle," the German word for "source") I read the January 1978 issue of THEOLOGY TODAY, of course, and I remember two scholars ¹ referring to saying 114 of Thomas in a symposium on the Galatians theme. As I recall, Jesus is supposed to say he would make Mary a male so she could enter the kingdom of heaven. That sounds rather male chauvinist to me!

A. Aha! (Not that A. stands for Aha! It stands for Answer.) Aha! It can be argued that this tail-end saying in Thomas is an addition, possibly Gnostic. Here is the saying:

Simon Peter said to them, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of Life."

Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven."

There is also some dialogue in two Gnostic treatises, The Gospel of Mary and Pistis Sophia, in which Mary is used to make Peter look bad (possibly in polemic against groups citing Peter as their authority). A female change into males was also reported by church father Hippolytus to be part of Naasene Gnostic philosophy that "all Gnostics become bridegrooms, 'having been made male through the virginal spirit."' Most importantly, for our purpose, 114 is inconsistent with "neither-male-nor-female" sayings in Thomas and elsewhere.

Q.I know I shouldn't ask, but what are they?

A.Here they are:

Thomas 22

Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, "These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom."

They said to him, "Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?"

Jesus said to them, "When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female . .

¹ Adela Yarbro Collins, "An Inclusive Biblical Anthropology," p. 369, and Robin Scroggs, "The Next Stage: A Common Humanity," p. 400.

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II Clement

When the Lord himself was asked by someone when his kingdom would come, he said, "When the two become one, and the outside as the inside and the male with the female neither male nor female."

The Gospel of the Egyptians

When Salome asked when one would know that concerning which she had asked, the Lord said, "When you will tread your feet on the clothes of your shame and when the two will become one and the male with the female (will be) neither male nor female."

Q. What's this "tread your feet on the clothes of your shame" bit? That sounds weird.

A. Well, here's more on that from Thomas 37:

His disciples said, "When will you become revealed to us and when shall we see you?"

Jesus said, "When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then (will you see) the Son of the Living One, and you will not be afraid."

Q. Surely that's a Gnostic baptism or something.

A.It's often assumed to be the case, but Jonathan Z. Smith of the University of Chicago has provided evidence that saying 37 is not distinctively Gnostic but originated within archaic Christian baptismal practices linked with first century A.D. speculation about Adam and Eve. "The nudity of the initiant-a feature shared by early Christianity with the initiation rites of the Hellenistic Mysteries and Jewish proselyte 'baptism'-was found to be consistently related to the symbolism of new life or birth," wrote Smith.²

Q. "Born again," huh?

A. Right. And remember that Galatians 3:27-28 is not only radical rhetoric. Paul connects it with baptism. Wayne Meeks of Yale has argued that the idea of "no more male or female" was a reunification symbol in baptism in Paul's time. This kind of androgynous ideal, though impossible to actually live, was described also by Philo of Alexandria in the first century. Adam was widely thought to have been originally androgynous. "When early Christians in the area of the Pauline mission adapted the Adam-Androgyne myth to the eschatological sacrament of baptism, they thus produced a powerful and prolific set of images," Meeks said. "If in baptism the Christian has put on again the image of the Creator, in whom 'there is no male and female,' then for him (sic) the old world has passed away and, behold! the new has come." But, Meeks conjectured, the symbol proved too

² Jonathan Z. Smith, "The Garments of Shame," History of Religions, 5 (1966), p. 237.

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dangerously ambivalent for the emerging church, fading into innocuous metaphor, "perhaps to await the coming of its proper moment.' " ³

Q. I suspect you are giving Thomas more credit for authentic Christian material than scholars generally do.

A. It's true that Meeks finds the union of male and female in Thomas to be more otherworldly than that cited by Paul. But Meeks does not raise the possibility that two-shall-become-one and neither-male-nor-female are authentic older sayings as opposed to other Thomas references to making female into male and to the "solitary" or "single ones," which might be later additions.

Q. I sincerely doubt that any of this goes back to Jesus' time, if that is what you are hinting. I don't see "two shall become one" in Mark, Matthew, or Luke.

A. Have you checked Mark 10:6-8 lately?

Q. Oh, come on now (flip, flip, flip). This is where Jesus is debating with Pharises about divorce . . .

A.. . . Then Mark has Jesus saying, "But from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female,' 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and bejoined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.'"

Q.That's just quoting Genesis.

A. But note that the Revised Standard Version has a footnote saying that "other ancient authorities omit and be joined to his wife." Those other ancient authorities include the highly reliable Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. Our sentence in these manuscripts then reads: "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and the two shall become one flesh." Rather than a mistake, it is more likely the two central requirements for becoming disciples of Jesus were: (1) leaving father and mother (see Matt. 10:37-38, Luke 14:26-27, Thomas 55, 101 and 105; Mark 3:31-35, Matt. 12:46-50, Luke 8:19-21, Thomas 99, etc.); and (2) being reborn into a new life where the old distinctions are shattered. See the frequent references to disciples as children in the New Testament and Thomas.

So I'm saying that Mark 10, which deals with baptismal/discipleship themes in verses 13 through 31, has an earlier line that relates to those themes even though it is used in a discussion about divorce. Using such language, which had double meanings, may have not been unusual.

³ Wayne Meeks, "Image of the Androgyne," History of Religions 13 (1974) pp. 207-208.

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While warning against prostitution, Paul seems to hint (in I Cor. 6:16) that "the two shall become one flesh" was a line used in a ritual uniting the new believer to the Lord. Also, the Pauline author of liphesians used the expression in the midst of a discussion of marital love, and then added (5:32), "This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church."

Q. Look, this is a theology journal, not a biblical studies publication.

A.But you need to consider new and valuable sources, such as the Gospel of Thomas, which may have surfaced at the "proper moment." Consider that some eminent German scholars, without reference to Thomas, have argued that Jesus did not appoint a special group of twelve disciples, that this was a product of the post-Easter community.⁴ Now, Thomas nowhere refers to twelve disciples or "the Twelve." Salome is a questioner in Thomas and in the Gospel of the Egyptians (and she is named in Mark as one who ministered to Jesus in Galilee). There is the distinct possibility that Salome, Mary, and possibly other women were close disciples of Jesus … Wait, come back, I've got more …

⁴ Wilhelm Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha (Westminster, 1965), Vol. II, p. 28.