Unlike either the Renaissance or the Reformation, the Enlightenment had begun not as an attempt to rescue some hallowed past, but as an assault on the past in the name of the future. “If a century could be described as ‘philosophical’ merely because it rejected the wisdom of past centuries,” wrote the mathematician and philosopher Jean D’Alembert “. . . then the eighteenth would have to be called the ‘century of Philosophy par excellence.’ It was a period which sought to overturn every intellectual assumption, every dogma, every “prejudice” (a favourite term) that had previously exercised any hold over the minds of men.50
Christian feminists need to be aware that association with those who entertain such contempt for the past (and the Christian past in particular) is worse than fraternizing with the enemy: it is tantamount to sawing off the branch on which they sit.
* * *
In feminist terms, the historical record is, as most secular feminists seem to agree, one of unbroken patriarchy and intermittent bouts of more or less serious misogyny. No age but the present is congenial to them. But there are those for whom such a bleak vision of the past is too much. If women and men are truly equal and in every respect socially equivalent things, they suppose, it must at some time have been more rosy. So the search was on. They persuaded themselves that in far flung places and at times far distant, things had been different: there must have been thriving matriarchal societies, which, alas fell in the course of time, to the rapacity of men. Primitive matriarchy, interestingly, was a speciality of Soviet and Chinese communist ideology. The Standard English language history of the People’s Republic of China,51 for example, begins with an account of matriarchal communities along the Yangtze valley around 2,500 BC. The claim is largely evidence-free (no explanation is offered of how such information could have been gleaned from the archaeological evidence). In less doctrinaire times it has been withdrawn. Christian feminists, as we shall see, have sought comfort in the speculative reconstruction of what have been called “the earliest Christianities,” “fragments of a faith forgotten” located a lost Golden Age, among the papyri of the Egyptian desert and in the fragmented records of Gnostic communities long dead.
More rationally, the question has to be why patriarchy endured so long and has been universal across cultures and continents. Is there, as some religious traditionalists have claimed, something “natural” or even inevitable about patriarchy? Is the scriptural imagery of a male God redeeming creation through the action of His Son grounded in a language written into the human genes and upon the human heart? Some modern theorists have concluded precisely that. Steven Goldberg’s book of 1977, The Inevitability of Patriarchy,52 with its exhaustive catalogue and systematic refutation of every recorded claim about the existence of matriarchal societies, was greeted with a predictable hail of criticism from left-leaning academe. More irritating to them still was a review of the first American edition, by the anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Persuasive . . . accurate. It is true, as Professor Goldberg points out that all the claims so glibly made about societies ruled by women are nonsense. We have no reason to believe that they ever existed . . . Men have always been the leaders in public affairs and the final authorities at home.”53
Goldberg’s thesis that social structures inevitably reflect and express essential biological, hormonal, and physical differences between women and men—despite its unpopularity in some quarters—has received a good deal of support in recent years from other analysts. The work of Simon Baron-Cohen54 squarely confronts the received wisdom (current at least since John Stuart Mill’s deeply flawed The Subjection of Women) that male and female are “social constructs.” In a rather less theoretical mode, Steven Rhoads makes a case for adapting social policy to take account of the basic differences of aim and outlook between women and men.55 He has shown, as one professor of anthropology tersely put it, that the “the Empress of androgyny has no clothes.”56
Matriarchy, like the existence of Amazons, has always been located more in the imagination than in reality—in the territory of Rider Haggard, rather than that of serious anthropology. It is becoming increasingly clear that the notion of a feminist Jesus and a first century world peopled with Christian women priests is similarly inventive. These things never existed except in the minds of those who desperately want them to be so. They are myths answering a pressing need. That mythology is the subject of the chapters which follow. This is a book about the tales people tell when precedent is needed in order to justify an action for which there is no precedent.
* * *
We begin, necessarily, with Jesus. There has been, over the years, a recurrent, and perhaps understandable, attempt to harness the Son of God to every passing social and political bandwagon. C. S. Lewis identified this as the “Christianity and . . .” syndrome.
My dear Wormwood,
The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call “Christianity And.” You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing.57
“Study the New Testament,” a Chartist newspaper, enjoined its readers in 1841, “it contains the elements of Chartism.”58 “. . . we are all priests,” exclaims a character in Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale (1869), “the workman is a priest like the founder of Socialism, the Master of us all, Jesus Christ!”59 Since the almost routine nineteenth century identification of Christianity with soft-edged socialism the notion has come a long way. (“Christianity and vegetarianism” was Lewis’s favorite.) The logic behind the syndrome is simple but fallacious: because Jesus was a Good Man he must necessarily have favored all that the protagonist thinks to be good. On grounds scarcely more sophisticated or informed, feminists have claimed him for their own. We need therefore to ask, “What did Jesus think about women?” And whether, in a modern analytical sense, he thought about women at all.
The chapter following deals with the claims repeatedly made about St. Paul. Feminists have always been in two minds about Paul. For a long time he was portrayed as an egregious example of the blanket misogyny of his era. Paul was said to be the crucial agent in the transformation of the counter-cultural, radically egalitarian “Jesus Movement” into an institutional church which oppressed women.