Bettany Hughes, an expert in ancient history, was quoted recently in London’s Daily Telegraph as saying that Christianity “was originally a faith where the female of the species held sway. To oppose the ordination of women bishops in the Church of England is to deny the central role women played in the faith’s founding.” She added: “Who knows whether God is a girl, but mankind has turned to the female of the species for good ideas.”
It is not clear from the report whether Ms. Hughes was speaking as a Christian or as an expert in ancient history, but it doesn’t really matter, for she is wrong on both counts. In fact, though, her remarks can be connected loosely with two very old Christian heresies, Marcionism and Montanism, which seem to have undergone something of a revival among trendy religion pundits.
Marcion of Sinope taught that the teachings of Jesus were totally at odds with what the Old Testament revealed about the God of the Jews. Consequently, Jesus had been the messenger and savior sent by a previously unknown heavenly father, a merciful and compassionate God, to redeem mankind. The God of the Jews, by contrast, was an arbitrary, legalistic, punitive, and jealous god who had no connection whatsoever with Jesus or his message.
This meant that the Hebrew Scriptures had no authority for Christians, since they were the revelation of an inferior god to whom Jesus and his teachings stood in opposition. But it also meant, since Marcion’s views conflicted with the clear sense of most of the New Testament, that these books had either been corrupted at an early date or else had been the work of ignorant disciples. And so, Marcion produced his own heavily edited New Testament Canon, consisting of one gospel (a bowdlerized version of Luke) and ten of St. Paul’s epistles, themselves heavily edited, as well as his own Antitheses contrasting the inferior creator God of the Old Testament with Jesus the heavenly father of the New Testament.
In creating his own Scripture, Marcion appears to have driven the Church not only to confirm its acceptance of the Old Testament books as authoritative, but to begin to reflect on the identity and authority of the Christian books that comprised its New Testament.
Marcion himself went to Rome in the early 140s, setting himself up as a Christian teacher and apologist. His startling views soon drew the attention of the Roman Church authorities, and, after some contentious exchanges, Marcion was excommunicated, and went on to found his own church. Strange and arbitrary as Marcion’s ideas may appear to us, in its own time his theological system was subtle and intellectually appealing. Indeed, it would be no easy task to prove Marcion’s ideas any more fantastic in their context than those of Ms. Bettany Hughes in ours.
Montanus, a younger contemporary of Marcion, claimed to be a prophet who spoke in ecstatic utterances when possessed by the Holy Spirit. Unlike Marcion and his followers, Montanus and his colleagues did not, at least at first, have strictly theological differences with Church authorities. Rather, they claimed that their revelations clarified and supplemented what was obscure in Scripture, and they commanded a rigorous asceticism, forbidding second marriages under any circumstances and mandating strict fasts.
As time went on, they met with skepticism and opposition, and in some regions had to found their own separate congregations after being expelled from churches. They may have allowed female bishops and presbyters, while setting up a new superior order, or orders, of prophets and apostles over the bishops and presbyters; and they allowed the apostles and prophets to forgive sins.
The Montanist impulse, the desire to supplement or reinterpret the Bible, or the tradition of Christian doctrine and practice generally, has recurred constantly among Christians. One may think of the Millerite “great disappointment” of 1844 which, far from killing off their prophetic credibility, underwent various adjustments and in the end produced the various strands of Adventism, or how the Jehovah’s Witnesses (themselves an offshoot of a strand of “Milleritism”) continued to spread and increase after the world did not come to an end in 1914.
Contemporary academics and intellectuals generally do not incline much towards inspired utterance, ecstatic or otherwise, nor for prophesy (unless they wish to characterize as “prophetic” the expression of some political or social notion conventional in their circles), and so Ms. Bettany Hughes may owe relatively more to Marcion than to Montanus. But the very exuberance of her language, and the remarkable absence from her remarks of the kind of qualifications by which academic pundits can, if necessary, beat a safe retreat from exaggerated claims, may well betray an echo of what Montanus’ opponents labeled in their day “the Phrygian frenzy.”
William J. Tighe is Associate Professor of History at Muhlenberg College.
RESOURCES
William J. Tighe, England Swings
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Comments:
In a class I attended the remark was made that every theological heresy recapitulates as a ecclesiastical error, i.e., errors in "What is God" return as errors in "What is Church". For example, one might argue Marcionism (errors in letting go of Biblical tradition, i.e., the Old Testament) move to errors in liturgical tradition, how we worship.
How acknowledgment of this historical reality draws parallels to someone who denied the central theological facts of Jesus' message is beyond me. What Ms. Hughes says is probably true and hardly controversial (unless the idea of women having power really bothers one), while Marcion's idea shatters the whole premise of Christianity. One is a popsicle stick, the other a baseball bat.
Anyone who spends enough time studying the Early Church Fathers and Church History realizes that the Church elevated women. One only need to look at the status of inside and outside the Roman Empire. Christ elevates everything he touches; and God chose a woman to be key in the Salvation of the world. Christ entered this world through a woman and a family. And it was women and the Christian family which changed to course of History
Name one in the first 400 years. I'll give you a hint, there are, but the layout is very one sided.
"Jesus broke many rules and often made social decisions that offended the self-righteous religious authorities of the time"
One wonders how the Rule-Maker-In-Chief ended up being a rebel. I thought that was someone _else's_ role. Marcion does indeed shatter the whole premise of Christianity. One wonders how dead irony is to some people.
The repetitive use of that phrase "the female of the species" makes her sound like an alien observing humans from afar.
This is a basic (and fallacious) intellectual exercise, the supposedly objective analysis of humanity...by humans.
"I fear Dr Tighe is quite unnecessarily charitable to Bettany Hughes. She is no successor to ancient heretics (Marcion or Montanus), but a disciple of the Dan Brown school of theology. The title of her first book 'Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore', in which she tells us more about Helen than Homer ever dreamed of, gives the game away. The Conspiracy, for Hughes, is the Great Misogynist Plot of immemorial origin which has all but eradicated evidence of the crucial role of women in the development of all religions, from the moment when Zeus the Upstart stole the authority of Gaia his grandmother. Basically it has been downhill since then, with Christianity taking a leading role in suppressing the 'female divine'. She even revels in the cruelty and bloodthirstiness of these female deities.
Hughes is an Anglican (though not unexpectedly she thinks her local Vicar is a bit of a wimp). What a sub-feminist sentimentalist like Rowan Williams (he opined that women bishops would 'humanise' the episcopate, you will remember!) makes of this blood and guts view of female spirituality is anybody's guess."
I was unaware that the expertise of this "expert in ancient history" was as farcically pretentious as her "thesis."
As to mcasey's comment that "But most evidence I've seen suggests that women did play a major role among the disciples and early Church. Whether that means there should be women priests is another question, but the early Church was full of females and they made important decisions" I simply reply that that which is asserted without proof can be denied on the same basis, and I do so deny it.
I was thinking exactly the same thing. I kept waiting for the connection between Marcion and Dr. Hughes to be made, but it never came.
@JP:
Are you sure you know which side you are on here? First you claim that anyone who questions gender roles in the church today must be secretly trying to strip the Church of all moral authority--a highly dubious claim. Then, in the next paragraph, you essentially agree with Hughes that women were central, along with men, to the authority and mission of the early Church. This is quite confusing!
Very good point. My apologies. Here is a start:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5KjRxHi61Q
This women is an archeologist, so her evidence is very...concrete. There are other videos of her lectures, but this was easy to find. Hopefully, folks can enjoy this evidence without labeling the Dr. a heretic or dissident or whatever. It's hardly conclusive, but the evidence is there.
This has confused me for decades.
That is the "best construction." One may, however, challenge the assumption, that when one sees women described as "episcopa" (as in the famous mosaic inscription in the Zeno chapel of the church of Sta Prassede in Rome where the mother of the pope that had it built is described as "Theodora episcopa") or "presbytera" that they were female bishops or female priests. More likely (on the analogy of Constantine's mother, St. Helena, being referred to as "Helena Augusta," meaning the Emperor's mother) "episcopa" meant "bishop's mother" (or possibly "bishop's wife," but married bishops were a rarity by the Fourth Century), and "presbytera" meant the wife (or mother) of a priest. This being so, the "burden of proof" is on those who would try to employ such inscriptions as proof of the existence of "female bishops" and "female priests," just as the burden of proof is likewise on those who would wish to claim, assuming for the sake of the argument that there were in fact female bishops and priests among some Early Christian sectarian groups, that there were such in the Catholic Church.
Clearly, though, no one, other than Christ Himself, played a more central role in the Faith's founding than the Blessed Virgin Mary. She was there at the Annunciation when, by the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus was conceived; she was there in the 30 years of His life prior to the start of His mission; she was there at the crucifixion; she was a witness to the fact of His Resurrection; she was there when the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles; and she was there when the Gospels were first spread by word of mouth.
†