Theology for the Masses

This is my second post on early Christian sources for women’s leadership.  Today we are going to look at inscriptions.  They are a great source for attitudes in Antiquity.  Today I want to look at some epitaphs, or burial inscriptions. [1]

A note about sources: If you notice, most of these are from later antiquity [2] .  I am sure that for some of you, this delegitimizes the validity of the claims.  You need to realize the nature of our sources.  Any physical sources for Christianity before the 3rd century are almost non-existent.  This is because of two interrelated factors.  First, Christians are persecuted both by the state intermittently and by the Roman “pagan” populace for being a supertitio.  Secondly, there just aren’t that many Christians in the empire up until this point.  I’d be like looking for female Mormon headstones in the late 19th century compared to today.

What we see is that during the 3-6th centuries, there were definitely women elders and deacons in various locations within the Roman Empire.  Women are in positions of leadership in the early church, both as elders and deacons, as bishops and presbyters.

Secondly, we also see a variation of gendering of the term deacon.  Sometimes it is used in the feminine and sometimes it is used with females in the masculine.  What is uncertain about the terms deacon and deaconess is the responsibilities that each conveyed.  There is abundant literary and physical evidence for deaconesses who’s job it was to minister to women to avoid suspicions of lewdness.  Male deacons were charged with men; women deacons were charged with women.  However, the pairing of deacon in the masculine with a female creates some confusion.  Is this just a regional naming practice or does it denote something deeper?  Were there deacons who were charged with the ministering to the entire congregation?  Given the evidence of Pliny’s letter to Trajan, this seems to be the case.  However, it is still uncertain as to which is the case.

1) Elder Kale, Centuripae, Sicily, 4th-5th Century CE

Here lies Kale the Elder.  She lived 50 years blamelessly.

2) Elder Ammion, Ucak, Phrygia, 3rd Century CE

Diogas, the bishop, for Ammion [f.], the elder, in memory

3) Sophia the Deacon, the Second Phoebe, Mount of Olives, Jerusalem, late 4th Cent. CE

Here lies the servant and bride of Christ
Sophia the deacon, the second Phoebe,
Falling asleep on the 21st of the month of March
In the 11th indiction
…Lord God…

4) Deaconess Athanasia, Delphi, Greece, 5th Cent. CE

The most pious deaconess Athanasia,
having lived a blameless life modestly,
having been ordained a deaconess by the most holy bishop Pantamianos,
made this monument: in it lie her remains.
Anyone who dares to open this monument,
in which the deaconess has been deposited,
will have the portion of Judas,
the betrayer of our Lord, Jesus Christ…

5) Deacon Maria, Archelais, Cappodocia, Turkey, 6th Century CE

Here lies Maria the deacon, of pious and blessed memory,
who in accordance with the speech of the apostle [3] reared children,
practiced hospitality, washed the feet of the saints, shared her bread with the afflicted.
Remember her, Lord, when you come into your kingdom.

6) Monument erected by Domna, the Deacon, Bulduk, Turkey, unknown date

Domna the deacon, daughter of Theophilos the elder, set up [the monument] to her father-in-law, Miros, and to her husband, Patroklos, in memory.

7) A Vow fulfilled by the Deacon Agrippiane, Patrae, Greece, unknown date

The Deacon Agrippiane, most beloved of God, made the mosaic because of her vow.

8) A Vow Fulfilled by a Deaconess, Stobi, Macedonia, 4th or 5th Century CE

Because of her vow, Mat(rona?) [or “of the vow of the maton], the most pious deaconess, paved the exedra with mosaic.

1. Source: Ross Shepard Kraemer, Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook (Oxford University Press, USA, 2004). [↩]
2. to use Peter Brown’s conception of the ages [↩]
3. 1st Tim 4:10 [↩]

Good morning peoples.  I am relatively unschooled in the issues of Hebrew Bible literary formation.  Danny, over at Personman, references a History Chanel documentary which claims a rather uninspiring view of book and canon formation in hist post entitled :: The Bible Unearthed.

I felt like I had good things to say over there about issues surrounding the edge of history and the edge of faith, but am ignorant as to the claims made in the documentary.

If you are knowledgeable in these areas and wish to comment, please do over there. (And I am pretty much asking/begging you to).

Go forth and check out the Biblical Archeology Society’s website. I love their magazine, the Biblical Archeology Review, but I had not checked out their website until The Christian Alert alerted me to its presence this last week.

The site has some pretty good stuff up, such as this glorious piece: The Eucharist—Exploring Its Origins By Bruce Chilton. It give me that which I crave – academic explorations of Christian history issues that are not primarily rooted in doctrinal claims of 21st century denominations.

Check it out.

Our very own Hank from Think Wink points us to the missing portion of 1^st Corinthians that was recently discovered over at Ecclesiophilist!

LINK

I give you the Church of the Transfiguration, Kizhi, Russia.

While I maintain that buildings are not what makes the Church, this is a most beautiful structure. There has always been something fascinating in the beauty of man’s creations seeking to honor the Creator with the work of their hands.

I came across it while reading up on the history of Christianity in Russia. Meditate on the following:

The early period of Russian church history – the Kievan era, extending from 988 to the early thirteenth century- has a particularly attractive character. Among its most striking features is a ‘kenotic’ quality, a spirit of loving compassion and humility. The ancient sources contrast the savagery of Vladimir prior to his conversion with his gentleness as a Christian, shown for example in his refusal to employ capital punishment. After his death in 1015, two of his sons, Boris and Gleb, declined to protect themselves against the attacks of their elder brother; choosing the path of non-resistance, they allowed themselves to be killed rather than shed the blood of others in self-defense. [1]

Powerful and challenging

1. The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity pp.152-153. [↩]

In preparation for some posts I am working on, I want to talk about history in Antiquity. It is very easy to import modern ideas and standards of history writing onto Ancient texts. However, to do so, will skew one’s reading of the text in a way that the author did not intend. The following are several concepts to keep in mind when reading ancient texts. [1]

1) Lost in Translation Often the only copies of texts that we have today are copies of copies. Furthermore, they are often translations of the original text. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas was probably written in Syriac, but the earliest copy we have is written in Greek. On top of this, sometimes the original texts were translations of the speeches being recorded. An example of this last point are Jesus’ speeches recorded in the Gospels. Jesus spoke Aramaic; the Gospels were written in Greek. [2] It is important keep this process in mind when the exact order of words is being scrutinized.

2) History was for instruction, not for tracking details Ancient histories were not designed to be modern ones. Their primary focus was not on keeping track of historical minutia, nor was it designed to show a character’s development throughout time. Instead, it was designed to illustrate lessons to be learned by the reader. There was “… great freedom with which many ancient writers adapted their materials to achieve such goals…” [3] This frame of mind should be accounted for when when studying ancient texts of all origins.

3) Look – Peter wrote this; hence it must be true Ancient authors had no problem with attributing works to authorities in order to give their work credibility. Christians have not been immune to this phenomenon. As early as the middle part of the first century, Christian leaders were complaining about letters being written in their name that contradicted with their positions. [4] The problem for “Christian texts” only got worse as the years went on. Robin Fox writes:

In the period c.400-600, “aggressive forgeries” added false letters to the collection of almost every early Christian Letter writer. These fake texts of theology helped to enlist the great authorities of the past on this or that side of a contemporary schism or unorthodoxy. [5]

Imagine someone finding a letter from Paul where he argues quite clearly for each of the five points of Calvinism. The problem was so bad that it was not until the 1500s that people could begin to sort the forgeries from the authentic letters. [6]

4) Good Forgeries Even when people were not outright co-opting authorities for the sake of their own positions, there is the problem of attribution. It was common in Classical and Hellenistic Greek culture for a student to classify their own positions and work as their teacher’s work. For example, there are more texts attributed to Aristotle that he could have humanly wrote. It is hard to determine in some cases where the teacher’s writing ends and the student’s begins. James H. Charlesworth has delineated the above idea into seven rough categories: [7]

1. Writings not by an author, but containing some of the author’s own thoughts
2. Writings by someone who was influenced by another work whom the work is attributed
3. Writings influenced by someone who was influenced by the earlier works of another author to whom the work is assigned
4. Writings attributed to an individual, but actually deriving from a circle or school surrounding that individual
5. Christian writings attributed by their authors to an Old Testament personality
6. Once anonymous writings that have been incorrectly attributed to another individual
7. Writings that intentionally try to deceive the reader into thinking the author is someone else

Quite naturally, the accuracy, dependability, ect, depends on which category the text being examined falls.

5) Recording Speeches There were not any tape recorders or stenographers around in Antiquity. Because of this, not all of the speeches recorded in ancient texts are verbatim copies of the original works. As a matter of fact, people recording the speeches often either gave abridged or paraphrased versions of the speech in question. Sometimes, the speech was elaborated on for the sake of effective rhetoric. Thucydides, an ancient Greek historian, admitted as much in his History of the Peloponnesian Wars.

I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches I have listened to myself and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for in each situation.

After about 300 B.C.E speakers issued written copies of their speeches to combat this problem. [8]

6) Say it enough, and people will think it is true Remember Hitler’s idea of the “Big Lie?” Same principle at work. If an author had a agenda to push, there was nothing to keep the author to fudge the facts to push their version of history. In a less deliberate manner, if errors crept into the historical record and subsequent authors relied on erroneous accounts of history for their facts, the resulting account will carry or perhaps magnify the original error, intentional or not.

Despite these difficulties, it is still possible to sift through historical manuscripts to uncover the most likely account of history by our modern standards of accuracy. My next post will deal with how to correct for these errors.

1. The above list was taken from Novak. Christianity and the Roman Empire: Background Texts. pp 3-7 [↩]
2. The Canonical ones were all written in Greek. There is a slight chance that the Gospel of Matthew was written in Hebrew, but it is most likely that it was written in Greek like the rest [↩]
3. Novak. Ibid. p.4 [↩]
4. See Second Thessalonians 2:1-5 [↩]
5. Novak. Ibid. p.4 [↩]
6. Fox. Ibid. p. 154. [↩]
7. James Charlesworth. “Pseudo-Epigraphy”. Encyclopedia of Early Christianity. p.765-767 [↩]
8. Novak. Ibid. p.6. [↩]

Here is the link to an incredible video on Youtube.com in which the Institute of Religious Research presented the case for the Mormon Scripture of the Book of Abraham is not an accurate translation. If the Book of Abraham cannot be trusted, then may be the book of Mormon can’t be trusted either. Check out the video, it is almost an hour long and is very interesting with the Egyptology used to examine the scrolls.

The Forbidden Gospels Blog: The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says

“I didn’t find the sublime Judas, at least not in Coptic. What I found were a series of English translation choices made by the National Geographic team, choices that permitted a different Judas to emerge in the English translation than in the Coptic original. Judas was not only not sublime, he was far more demonic than any Judas I know in any other piece of early Christian literature, Gnostic or otherwise.”

DeConick contends that the Gospel of Judas is not about a “good” Judas, or even a “poor old” Judas. It is a gospel parody about a “demon” Judas written by a particular group of Gnostic Christians known as the Sethians who lived in the second century CE. The purpose of the text was to criticize “mainstream” or apostolic Christianity from the point of view of these Gnostic Christians, especially their doctrine of atonement, their Eucharistic practices, and their creedal faith which they claimed to have inherited from the twelve disciples.

I came across this today at slackivist via katagrapho. Slackivist is trying to discuss the purpose of origin stories. He begins by looking at a question of why crow’s feathers are black and then looks at the ultimate answer to the question:

Q: Why are the crow’s feathers black?

A: Courage and helping others are good. Remember that every time you see a crow.

Fred then suggests that the same thing happens in Genesis.

Q: Where do rainbows come from?

A: Selfishness is destructive — to you and to every living creature. Remember that every time you see a rainbow.

Again, the answer isn’t directly related to the apparent question because the apparent question isn’t really what the story is about. This may seem complicated, but if you read these stories it’s quite obvious. They’re not subtle about it. Their message is not some hidden meaning that needs to be decoded. It would be very difficult, in fact, to read or hear such stories without taking away the meaning they are meant to convey.

Thoughts? I can’t really give any of my own analysis of anything until next week (note the question posing nature of all most posts the last few months). Is this a good way to approach the book of Genesis? What are the pros? What are the cons? What are the ramifications/implications of each? Can one maintain inspiration and view some of the Bible stories in this manner? Once again, merely saying it is a Liberal Christan idea only sidesteps the issue. There may be things of value in Liberal Christianity. There may be things that desperately need to be changed in Conservative Christianity. Don’t just sling mud, help us understand the issues.

I am about to head to hear Elaine Pagels lecture on a new book from her and Karen King on their interpretation of the Gospel of Judas. I’ll post the audio and other notes tomorrow.

Pretty cool news out of Jerusalem (HT: Codex.).

First Temple wall found in City of David | Jerusalem Post

A wall from the First Temple [period (my addition)]was recently uncovered in Jerusalem’s City of David, strengthening the claim that it is the site of the palace of King David, an Israeli archaeologist said Thursday….

A 20-meter-long section of the 7-meter-thick wall has now been uncovered. It indicates that the City of David once served as a major government center, Mazar said….

Mazar estimates less than a quarter of the entire wall has been uncovered so far, and says that it is the largest site from King David’s time ever to have been discovered.

I would have to agree with Jim Davila about the wording in the article:

There has to be an error here, perhaps just a word inadvertently omitted. Mazar must have said that she found a wall from the First Temple period, not a wall from the First Temple itself. Any surviving wall of the Temple would be buried under the Temple Mount platform and could not be excavated. It sounds as though this wall is actually from the monumental building she found earlier.