It was, however, a revolution more fundamental and more radical than that of 1688 that brought the feminism of the early Enlightenment to its apogee. The Declaration of the Rights of Woman was Olympe de Gouges’s response to the exclusion of women from the French National Constituent Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (August 26, 1789). It earned Olympe, a butcher’s daughter and playwright, her day at the guillotine.
Consequently, the sex that is as superior in beauty as it is in courage during the sufferings of maternity recognizes and declares in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following Rights of Woman and of Female Citizens:
Article I: Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinct can he based only on the common utility.
Article II: The purpose of any political association is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of woman and man; these rights are liberty, property, security, and especially resistance to oppression.
Article III: The principle of all sovereignty rests essentially with the nation, which a nothing but the union of woman and man; no body and no individual can exercise any authority which does not come expressly from it (the nation).
Article IV: Liberty and justice consist of restoring all that belongs to others, thus, the only limits on the exercise of the natural rights of woman are perpetual male tyranny, these limits are to be reformed by the laws of nature and reason.
Article V: Laws of nature and reason proscribe all acts harmful to society; everything which is not prohibited by these wise and divine laws cannot be prevented, and no one can be constrained to do what they do not command.
Article VI: The law must be the expression of the general will; all female and male citizens must contribute either personally or through their representatives to its formation, it must be the same for all: male and female citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, must be equally admitted to all honours, positions and public employment according to their capacity, and without other distinctions besides those of their virtues and talents.65
And so on, through another sixteen articles. What is clear, in article after article, is de Gouge’s almost casual identification of divine with natural law—Deus sive natura. Hers is a largely unconscious association of democratic politics, a priori egalitarianism, an abhorrence of hierarchies, and the new metaphysics of the radical Enlightenment. It is a heady combination, which, as one might expect, Daphne Hampson, in our own day, eagerly embraces.
One may believe of God that God is equally available to people in all times and places. Such is my position. That is to say I deny that there could be a particular revelation of God in any one age which henceforth becomes normative for all others . . . I am not a Christian because I do not credit, as I earlier put it, that nature and history could be other than closed causal nexuses or believe that there can be events which are in some way qualitatively different from other events.66
She goes on to point out that this a priori position has a compelling ethical dimension.
The question of the truth of the Christian picture of the world has increasingly come to be raised during the last two hundred years. In our age this has become an urgent question for many people and many others have left Christianity behind. The further question which feminism raises—to an extent which, I would contend, this has not been raised before—is that of whether it is moral . . . [or] . . . false to one’s belief in human equality.67
Anyone following the trajectory of feminism from Mary Astell to Daphne Hampson will be acutely aware that it begins a thousand miles from the world view of first century Jewry and moves inexorably away from it. Upon no presently agreed historical principle could Jesus be thought to have any place on that trajectory or even any inkling of the principles which governed it.
So, if Jesus was not—could not have been—a feminist, what did he think about women? How can we know? And does it matter anyway? It is a remarkable fact that traditionalists and feminists have found a degree of agreement on the subject. Both have supposed that he was at variance with the culture of his time. Their agreement involves divergent but related views of the significance of Jesus’s choice of twelve male apostles. Traditionalists see the choice of an all-male apostolate as crucially significant for future developments. It was an exceptional event, contrary they say to Jesus’s habitual attitude to women. As such it was determinative; it determined the constitution of the Apostolic Ministry for all time.
Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever [declaramus Ecclesiam facultatem nullatenus habere] to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.68
Pope John Paul II has made it clear that his office is to restate authoritatively and clearly the tradition of the Church: that Our Lord Chose only male apostles, and that his example is binding on the Church for all time . . . There is therefore almost a presumption in this report—a presumption that we may indeed justify the ways of God to man.69
Feminists, on the other hand, think that Jesus’s supposed habitual inclusion and encouragement of women simply demonstrates that his choice in the matter of Apostles was not his own. He was conditioned by the ambient culture. Jesus wanted to appoint female apostles; but knew in pragmatic terms that they would be unacceptable to those among whom they must work. His choice, in consequence, has little or no significance for the future.
Notice that both sides are agreed that Jesus envisaged a future in which his choice in the matter of apostles would be significant (or not!). But what if he had no future in mind? Of course it will be necessary to examine in detail every recorded encounter of Jesus with women in order to assess the credibility of the claims made about them. But it will be as well to begin by explaining that the cross-party consensus—that Jesus differed in his attitudes to women from those around him, and that his choice of male apostles had enduring significance—challenges some recent trends in the Quest for the Historical Jesus.
There are two kinds of truth about Jesus. The first is the truth attested by faith and found in the Gospels and later in the formularies of the Church. It involves, amongst other things, a wholesale acceptance of the place of Jesus in a salvation history extending through the Old Testament and beyond. The second kind of truth can claim less certainty than faith; it hangs on “scientific” historical inquiry. The second kind can claim no finality; historical research can never retrieve more than a part of the truth. It may even prove to be a very small part. The first kind of truth deals in metaphors, assertions, and affirmations; the second in guesses, surmises, and speculations. The Jesus Seminar, for example, which has made a significant contribution to the Quest for the Historical Jesus, even puts its conclusions to the vote. An important part of the search for an historically credible Jesus is the development of a technique for determining which of the sayings in the Gospels are his own words and which are the embellishments of the gospel writers, in the service of