Sex, Gender, and Christianity

Priscilla Pope-Levison, John R. Levison, Pope-Levison, Levison

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781620320150
  9781498215046
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621895008
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Should women be priests? Should women submit to their husbands? Is premarital sex okay? Inflammatory questions such as these have splintered Christianity and polarized the church. In Sex, Gender, and Christianity, a cadre of seasoned college professors offers the modest proposal that honest, fruitful conversations about these questions will take place only if we develop the ability to deal with sex, gender, and the Christian faith with the academic rigor and perspectives of our various disciplines. This volume contributes an unprecedented collection of first-rate articles from a variety of disciplines--from the social sciences to history, from literary criticism to theology--that will challenge college administrators, professors, and students to address fractious questions in an atmosphere of scholarly inquiry.

part one

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Gender, Authority, and the Church

1 / Ideology and Experience in the Greek

Life of Adam and Eve1

John R. (Jack) Levison

I. The Prevalent Ideology

A. Eve’s Enduring Legacy

The opening scene of the television series Desperate Housewives begins with Jetsonesque music from the sixties and a medieval portrait of Eve that moves as Eve plucks the apple from the tree and hands it to Adam. In the final moment of this opening scene, the apple falls into the hand of one of the desperate housewives, who are mesmerizing a generation of those who inhabit TV Land. The more recent trailer begins with a split-second image of a serpent and apple. The first time I saw the connection between Desperate Housewives and Eve was in a U-Bahn station in Munich, on a billboard where five women—the desperate housewives—are lying in a huge box of apples. When I returned to Seattle, my students explained the whole “affair” to me.

The metamorphosis of Eve into Adam’s desperate housewife, of course, antedates the invention of televisions and subways. Two millennia ago, imaginations nearly went wild in their efforts to excoriate and isolate her, so much so that when Joan Wallach Scott contends that the establishment of gender requires “culturally available symbols that evoke multiple (and often contradictory) representations,” where does she turn?—to “Eve and Mary as symbols of woman, in the Western Christian tradition.”2 The resonance of these figures runs deep. Scott discerns in Mary and Eve “myths of light and dark, purification and pollution, innocence and corruption.”3

The representation of vulnerability to deception and a tendency toward seduction coalesced around Eve in Jewish and Christian antiquity.4 For example, Ben Sira, who taught toward the beginning of the second century BCE, offered the young men in his academy this instruction: “From a woman [or ‘wife’] is the beginning of sin, and on account of her we all die” (Sirach 25:24).5 Early in the first century CE, the Alexandrian philosopher Philo Judaeus accepted as axiomatic that woman, when created, would become for Adam the beginning of a sinful life (On the
Creation 151–52).6 In his allegory of the soul, pleasure is represented by the serpent, the mind by Adam, and sense perception by woman. “Pleasure,” he writes, “does not venture to bring her wiles and deceptions to bear on the man, but on the woman, and by her means on him” (On the Creation 165–66). Elsewhere he explains why the serpent spoke to the woman; quite simply, “woman is more accustomed to being deceived than man” (Questions and Answers on Genesis 1.33). The infamous passage in 1 Timothy 2 draws a similar association between Eve and womankind: “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor” (1 Tim 2:12–14). Of course, no ancient author can match Tertullian’s extended rant, in which he condemns all women for being Eve, the devil’s gateway (On the Apparel of Women 1.1).

B. The Greek Life of Adam and Eve

Though Tertullian’s may be the most infamous excoriation, a more detailed demonization of Eve can be located in the less well-known Apocalypse of Moses, or the Greek Life of Adam and Eve (GLAE), a pseudepigraphon composed sometime during the first three centuries CE. Tischendorf initially published this text in the middle of the nineteenth century.7 This pseudepigraphon, which is, in part, an inventive interpretation of Genesis 2–5, can be divided into four neat sections: patrimony, pain, parenesis, and pardoning.

Patrimony (1:1—5:3; retelling Gen 4:1—5:5). Long after the births of Cain and Abel, in a dream—a nightmare, really—Eve learns of the murder of Abel by Cain. Patrimony, however, does not belong to Cain; therefore, God commands Adam not to reveal to Cain the mystery that Adam alone knows. God then promises that Seth will be born to replace Abel. Adam—he is given credit, not Eve—makes or produces thirty sons and thirty daughters. After this flurry of births, an unknown condition—they do not yet know how to identify illness—befalls Adam, who gathers his children around him in traditional testamentary fashion.

Pain (6:1—14:2). Adam proposes that Seth and Eve should travel to paradise, beg God to send an angel into paradise to retrieve the oil of mercy, and return with the oil to alleviate Adam’s inscrutable suffering. This otherwise smooth story (6:1–2; 9:1–3; 13:1—14:2) is interrupted twice, first by Adam’s autobiographical recollection of the first sin (6:3—8:2), then by a wild animal that attacks Seth and accuses Eve of initiating, by her greed, the dominion over the wild animals (10:1—12:2). The scene ends when the archangel Michael denies Seth’s request, so he and his mother return incapable of relieving Adam’s duress.

Parenesis (14:3—30:1; retelling Gen 3:1–24). After Seth and Eve return from paradise, Adam again indicts Eve, providing an occasion for her to reveal her own perspective on the primeval sin in what might be called the Testament of Eve. Eve recounts, in a flourish of biblical and unbiblical elements: the envy of the devil; the entrance of the serpent, the devil’s tool, into paradise; Eve’s inability to resist the devil’s trickery; Eve’s taking of the fruit; Eve’s ability to persuade Adam to eat; God’s awesome entry into paradise on a chariot; the curses; and the expulsion of the first pair from paradise, despite angelic pleas for mercy. Eve does more than recount the story; the intention of her testament is parenetic. Eve ends her testament: “Now therefore, my children, I have disclosed to you the way in which we were deceived. And you yourselves—guard yourselves so as not to disregard what is good” (GLAE 30:1).

Pardoning (31:1—43:4). Following the Testament of Eve, Adam attempts to assuage Eve’s anxiety by promising their shared destinies. Eve then confesses her sin repeatedly and is subsequently instructed by an angel to watch Adam’s ascent. While she is watching, God’s chariot arrives in paradise, replete with an entourage consisting of angels, the sun, and the moon. Seth explains to Eve what she sees, including the inability of the sun and moon to shine in the presence of God. The story continues with the burial of Adam’s body and the sealing of his tomb until the burial of Eve should take place. Eve is subsequently buried, and the archangel Michael delivers final instructions about this burial to Seth.

C. Eve, the Prevalent Ideology, and the Greek Life of Adam and Eve

In the first thirteen chapters, there is much to be said about Eve—nearly all of it negative. Adam begins his autobiographical account of the first sin with the words, “When God made us, both me ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1: Gender, Authority, and the Church
• Part 2: Gender, Race, and Society
• Part 3: Gender, Sexuality, and Marriage