Return to the Beginning

Woman in Christian Tradition
by George H.Tavard, University of Notre Dame Press, 1973, pp. 27-47.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions

Considered as the source of Christian thought, the writings of the New Testament should be treated as a whole since it is as a unit that they have reached the present-day Church. Yet, seen from the point of view of the historian, they do not at all belong to the same cultural layer. Originating in different places and times, written by several authors, they constitute a conglomeration of disparate works, unified by their common interest in the good news concerning Jesus Christ, yet diversified by their background and by the immediate purposes and concerns of their authors and their first readers. My aim in this volume is theological; and I wish now to study the New Testament insofar as it shaped later attitudes regarding womanhood (as an idea) and women (as realities of flesh and blood). Yet the New Testament was not formed at one try; it contains more primitive and more recent material; it shows an evolution of concepts to have taken place in the very early Church at the time of, and immediately after, the Apostles. On account of this, we may cull diverging views of womanhood from the books of the New Testament. Such a phenomenon is already evident in regard to more fundamental aspects of the Christian kerygma: as a case in point, the picture of Jesus is not entirely the same in the Epistles of Paul, in the synoptic Gospels, in the writings of the Johannine corpus. Likewise the picture of woman. Owing to the influence of the Old Testament and of other Jewish thinking on the first Christian authors, we may expect the two great streams of Old Testament thought to be reflected in the New: woman appears in the cursed condition that she has inherited from the origins of mankind; yet she also is the type of the heavenly wisdom which presided over the foundations of the world and which was embodied in the best moments of Israel’s existence as the bride of Yahweh. Just as a prophet like Ezechiel could speak of Israel as being alternately the Lord’s unfaithful wife and his beloved companion, so can the New Testament authors unite in one vision the two images of womanhood, the one preserving the primitive blessings of Ishah, the perfection of mankind, the other embodying the tarnished image of Eve after the fall. The two perspectives may be found in one and the same author.

This is predominantly the case with Paul, with whom we shall begin. The letters of Saint Paul constitute the oldest historical layer of New Testament literature, having been written before the final redaction of the four Gospels. They also form by far the most comprehensive theological synthesis that has reached us from the primitive Church. The Johannine synthesis may undoubtedly be compared with it by its scope and depth; but the later date of the writings of the Johannine corpus call for a postponement of their examination until we have studied Paul and, subsequently, the synoptic Gospels.(1)

It seems indisputable that, doctrinally speaking, the writings attributed to Paul do not form one consistent entity. The differences that have been discovered between the Epistle to the Ephesians, the Pastoral Epistles, and the rest of the corpus witness to more than the historical growth of one man. They illustrate the fact that we do not read the work of one single author, but of Paul and at least one other person, possibly several. This other person, operating in the context of the Pauline churches and in the light of Paul’s authentic teachings, appealed to Paul’s authority to justify a development of Church tradition in a way which Paul himself may not have foreseen. In other words, the Pastoral Epistles revise Paul’s teaching in view of the settling down of Church organization after the departure of the Apostle. In a similar way, the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Acts of Luke are related to the Pauline corpus. The former adds a theological dimension to Paul’s views that Paul himself (if his endorsement of this letter is authentic, as I think it is) acknowledged as valuable. The latter complement the historical knowledge of Paul’s mission, relating it to the wider mission of the Apostolic Church.(2)

Be that as it may, Paul’s ideas regarding womanhood prove to be ambiguous. They may be, and have been, interpreted in either a misogynist or a pro-feminine direction. Both the prelapsarian and the postlapsarian traditions of the book of Genesis are reflected in Paul’s writings. Paul was a Jew and wrote like one. He could not easily prescind from the theological background to which, with all the primitive Church, he was heir.

The subjection of the wife to her husband in the Christian society of his time, as in Jewish society, to say nothing of the pagan society with which he was familiar, is abundantly illustrated in Paul’s letters. The picture of the Christian wife outlined in 1 Corinthians 11:2-6, is that of a person subject to her husband, who is “her head,” as Christ is the head of the husband and God the head of Christ. The married woman stands at the bottom of a hierarchy, at the top of which is God. Christ and husband mediate in between, so that the woman seems further removed from Christ and from God than her husband. Looking at this hierarchy downwards, woman becomes the “glory” (doxa) of man, as man the glory of God. In the Jewish context of this passage, the glory in question is conceived on the pattern of the shekinah of the Old Testament, the manifestation of Yahweh’s presence. In verse 7 Paul explicitly identifies this glory and the image of God which is man. In other words, only man is the image of God, the woman being only the image of man, a prolongation and manifestation of his power.

This is patently a very rabbinic passage. Paul has not yet emancipated himself (and how could he have done so?) from the thought patterns of his Jewish-pharisaic training. In a strongly patriarchal family structure, women are given status in society by the man who acts as the head of the family, whatever moral and effective authority they may actually enjoy within the family circle. Such was the Jewish way of life. Yet Corinth was in a pagan land, and the Corinthian Christians normally followed Greek customs. It is in this context that I understand Paul’s injunction, in 1 Corinthians 11:5, “For a woman it is a sign of disrespect for her head if she prays or prophesies unveiled.” This alludes to the fact that, at Corinth (whatever may have been the practice elsewhere), women participated in prayer and prophesied in the Ecclesia. They even did it, following in this a Greek custom, without veils on their heads. As at other moments of his career, Paul feels caught between the claims of Christian freedom, for which “all is permitted, although all is not expedient” (1 Cor. 6:12), and the Jewish conventions which cannot be discarded without polarizing the Christian communities to the breaking point. He appeals to a compromise which must have been formerly agreed upon: when women “pray or prophesy” they should at least wear a veil. If they wish to enjoy the spiritual freedom of public prayer and prophecy, let them renounce the material freedom of the Greeks not to wear a veil on their heads. A precedent for such a gentleman’s agreement between Jewish-Christians and Gentile-Christians had been set, at the so-called Council of Jerusalem, concerning practices forbidden to Jews. As verse 16 claims, this is the practice in all “Churches of God.” This expression I take to mean not all the Churches and not even the Pauline Churches especially, but rather the Palestinian Churches, which Paul, even after he turned to the Gentiles in his preaching of the Gospel, considered the standard to emulate and the model for all Churches. The “Churches of God” of 11:16 are identical with “the Churches of the saints” of 14:33.

Later in the same letter, Paul returns to this question, which, minor as it would seem, must have caused a great deal of discussion at Corinth. This time, Paul does more than express his disapproval of the Corinthian women’s behavior. He lays down the law for the future; and, as often happens when it seems urgent to stop a practice which is potentially harmful to the community, Paul’s injunction becomes stricter than the agreement he has alluded to. From now on, let the Corinthians apply the Jewish principle as such and imitate the Palestinian Churches: “As in all the Churches of the saints” (by which, again, I understand the Judeo-Christian Churches in Israel, rather than the mixed Churches of the diaspora and of pagan country) “women are to remain quiet at meetings, since they have no permission to speak; they must keep in the background, as Torah itself lays it down. If they have any question to ask, they should ask their husbands at home: it does not seem right for a woman to raise her voice at meetings" (14:34-35).

This old-fashioned Jewish position is hardly in keeping with the principle and the practice of prophecy. Acts 21:9 gives evidence that women were admitted to the ministry of prophecy, even in Jewish-Hellenistic circles; this was the case with the four daughters of the deacon Philip. Paul himself mentioned, in 11:5, the women-prophets of Corinth: but where can they prophesy, if they cannot even speak at the assemblies? On account of this dilemma, I suspect that Paul does not intend this stricter discipline to apply to prophesying by women: women prophets would have permission to speak. His problem is with those who intervene in meetings by asking questions that can very well be asked at home from their husbands.(3) At any rate, the stricter interpretation will be adopted and reinforced by 1 Timothy 2:11-15. As I read them, verses 11 and 12 are intended by the author to be an authentic interpretation of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35: “During instruction, a woman should be quiet and respectful. I am not giving permission for a woman to teach or to tell a man what to do.” The following argumentation (w. 13-14) derives from that of 1 Corinthians 11:8-10; yet the point is made with much more crudeness. In Corinthians, Paul stated: “For man did not come from woman; no, woman came from man; and man was not created for the sake of woman, but woman for sake of man.” In 1 Timothy, this becomes: “Adam was formed first, and Eve afterwards, and it was not Adam who was led astray, but the woman who was led astray and fell into sin.”

That Paul wished the Jewish subordination of women to men to be enforced in his Churches is one thing; that he was convinced by his theoretical, and strongly rabbinic, argumentation is another. The first point tallies with instructions given elsewhere: “Wives, obey your husbands, as you should in the Lord” (Col. 3:18); “Obey one another in obedience to Christ. Wives should regard their husbands as they regard the Lord, since as Christ is the head of the Church and saves the whole body, so is the husband the head of his wife; and as the Church submits to Christ, so should wives to their husbands, in everything” (Eph. 5:21-24). I will return to this analogy later. For the time being this text of Ephesians may serve to show that, in Pauline circles, the type of behavior enjoined in 1 Corinthians 14, came to be acknowledged as proper. The second point, however, demands another answer. Paul himself remained unconvinced by the objections he raised in 1 Corinthians 11:8-10 against the freedom of the Christian woman. For his next remark ruined the argument he had just used: “However, in the Lord neither is woman without man nor man without woman; for as woman comes from man, so does man come through woman; and they all come from God” (v. 11). As I understand “from” (ek) and “through” (dia), Paul asserts that woman, in Genesis, comes from man and, in keeping with the biology of his time, that man is born through (rather than from) woman; yet religiously speaking and in relation to God, this establishes no difference between them, for they both proceed from God.

Paul’s theology thus makes room for another principle concerning man and woman in Christ and in the Ecclesia, the principle of equality or, as I think it ought to be expressed, the principle of identity. Early in his writing career, Paul formulated it in his letter to the Galatians:

Before faith came, we were allowed no freedom by the Law; we were being looked after till faith was revealed. The Law was to be our guardian until the Christ came and we could be justified by faith. Now that that time has come we are no longer under that guardian, and you are, all of you, sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. All baptised in Christ, you have all clothed yourselves in Christ, and there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (3:23-28)

All Christians, Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, enjoy now the same freedom, based on their identity in Christ Jesus. Paul does more at this point than echo the old tradition concerning the paradisiac state of man and woman. It is in Christ, and not in Eden, that he now sees male and female. The pristine state has been restored, not yet for all mankind or to the full extension of nature, but only for those who are clothed in Christ Jesus through baptism in faith. If the world after the fall is dominated by the flesh (sarx), the faithful have been made spirit (pneuma). It is therefore in Paul’s Christology that one should look for the key to the real status of woman in Christ as Paul envisions it from the early days of Galatians. This Christology, fully developed in the latter days of Colossians, was adumbrated in 1 Corinthians 15: 45-50:

GREEK above

The first man, Adam, as Scripture says, became a living soul; but the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. First, the one with the soul not the one with the spirit; afterwards the one with the spirit. The first man from the earth, earthy; the second man from heaven. Those who are of the earth are like the former; those who are of heaven are like the latter. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly.

The eschatological passage refers directly to the faithful’s future estate, to which they will have access through the resurrection. The fulfillment of Christian life will introduce to a state higher than paradise. We shall not be, like the first Adam, “psychic,” but we shall participate in the “pneumatic” state of the second Adam. Both man and woman will be like the second Adam, like Christ. Thus, in the second Adam is to be found the heavenly archetype of both man and woman: they have only one model, Christ, the heavenly mankind. For the word “adam,” as we ought to recall, does not primarily designate the male, but mankind. The Christians have access, through Christ, to the heavenly pattern of mankind, at a level that brooks no distinction between “Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female.” As Paul will emphasize in Colossians, Christ is the pattern of all creatures, woman therefore included:

He is the image of the unseen God and the first-born of all creation, for in him were created all things in heaven and on earth: everything visible and invisible, Thrones, Dominations, Sovereignties, Powers—all things were created through him and for him. Before anything was created he existed, and he holds all things in unity. Now the Church is his body, he is the head. As he is the beginning, he was the first to be born from the dead, so that he should be first in every way; because God wanted all perfection to be found in him.... (1:15-19)

Yet as long as he lives on earth, the Christian is not fully in heaven. Being spirit and still remaining flesh (sarx), he finds himself caught in the agonistic dialectic that Paul describes in the letter to the Romans (chapters 7-8). If Christian men and women are raised in Christ beyond the distinction of sexes, they remain at the same time subject to the law of their flesh, which makes them male or female. Accordingly, Paul’s injunctions to his communities waver between a vision of the heavenly identity of male and female, to which the faithful have been elevated by the Lord, and the earthly reality of the sexual life. Indeed, we may surmise, from the evidence of 1 Corinthians 7, that much of the difficulties that troubled the Church at Corinth stemmed from the inherent dilemma of belonging to two worlds, Some of the Corinthians attempted to translate their eschatological freedom into their everyday experience. Prophesying without a veil was a minor liberty compared to the boldness of those who tried to experiment with what may be called spiritual promiscuity. Partnership between a man and a virgin woman or perhaps between several of both sexes could be an eschatological sign. The time is short (7:29). The world is passing away (7:31). It is better not to marry (7:28,32-35). Far from condemning the attempt to lead a heavenly life in the company of the other sex, for those who have the suitable charism, Paul praises it:

If a man has a partner in celibacy and feels that he is not behaving properly towards her, if, that is, his instincts are too strong for him and something must be done, he may do as he pleases; there is nothing wrong in it; let them marry. But if a man is steadfast in his purpose, being under no compulsion, and has complete control of his own choice; and if he has decided in his own mind to preserve his partner in her virginity, he will do well. Thus, he who marries his partner does well, and he who does not will do better. (7:36-38)

As the attempt at spiritual partnership in Corinth was breaking down under the law of the flesh, Paul agrees to transform these partnerships into regular marriages for those who cannot carry on. The others ought to persevere as they are according to their calling. The ones will live in marriage according to the image of this world; the others will live together according to the image of heaven.

In this light we should read the passage of the letter to the Ephesians relating to Christian marriage (5:21-33). This I take to be a commentary on Colossians 3:18-19); but it is also made in contrast to 1 Corinthians 7.1 do not consider it to come from Paul’s own pen. As the text suggests, the situation of Corinth was promptly overcome by the disappearance of virginal partnerships. In Ephesians, the marriage itself between two Christians is now modelled on Christ, whereas in Corinthians, it was the nonsexual union and the celibate life which were the images of heaven, untrammelled by the cares of this world and guaranteeing the freedom to wait upon the Lord. There was of course little point in keeping this hierarchy of values once virginal partnerships were no longer practiced. I understand Ephesians 5 to derive from a deliberate attempt to justify theologically the predominance of marriage over celibacy or the nonsexual unions of Corinthians 7, and the simultaneous waning of Christian freedom owing to the social domination of the male over the female in marriage. The heavenly pattern for marriage is sought in the union between Christ and the Church. This followed and reinterpreted the lines of thought of the Old Testament concerning Yahweh and Israel, which Paul had exploited in 2 Corinthians 11:2. Genesis 2:24 (“they will be two in one flesh”) is interpreted explicitly of Christ and the Church and implicitly of husband and wife. The “mystery” mentioned in verse 31 is not, as often suggested in translations and commentaries, matrimony, but the secret meaning of Genesis.

We have already noted that the Pastoral Epistles take a restrictive view of the position of Christian women, whose status does not seem any different from the Jewish women of the times. They must be quiet “during the instruction” (1 Tim. 2:11-12), that is, during the didactic kerygmatic part of the worship service. There is no suggestion that women are admitted to the rank of prophets, although there are still deaconesses (1 Tim. 3:11). Their refined dress must not consist, as for pagan women, in “braided hair, or gold and jewelry, or expensive clothes”; on the contrary, “their adornment is to do the sort of good works that are proper for women who profess to be religious” (3:9-10). Both 1 Timothy and Titus include a fairly long admonition to widows. In the communities established by the Apostle Paul, widowhood had become an institution. In 1 Corinthians, the Apostle had advised widows not to remarry; by now they were organized in a sorority fulfilling diverse functions at the service of the Ecclesia.(4) In Titus, their task consists in watching over the younger women, who need to be taught “how they should love their husbands and love their children, how they are to be sensible and chaste, and how to work in their homes, and be gentle, and do as their husbands tell them, so that the message of God is never disgraced” (Titus 2:4-6). The first letter to Timothy is chiefly concerned with making sure that the widows remain faithful to their commitment not to remarry. Such a fidelity is easier with widows who have reached sixty years of age and have fulfilled all their duties by their children or parents. The true widow must be able “to concentrate all her days and nights to petition and prayer” (5:5).

This cannot come, I think, from Paul’s own pen. Not because it contradicts 1 Corinthians 7:8 about the remarriage of widows: experience could well have shown that the advice given by Paul to the Corinthians was not normally applicable and could not be made the pattern for an organized order of widows. There is indeed a deeper discrepancy with Paul’s former teaching: the underlying understanding of womanhood is, in Pauline literature, entirely new. In what appears like a commentary on 1 Corinthians 11:7-10, the author of the letter to Timothy slants the doctrine in a new direction: “A woman ought not to speak, because Adam was formed first, and then Eve: and it was not Adam who was led astray, but the woman who was led astray and fell into sin” (2:13-14). This contradicts what Paul had clearly said in Romans 5: 12: “Sin entered the world through one man,” who is identified as Adam, the counter-type of Christ, the second Adam. But in 1 Timothy, sin does not enter the world through Adam—who is even completely cleared of responsibility —since he is said, contrary to Genesis, “not to have been led astray.” The burden of sin is now placed on Eve alone. This may be a curious midrash, but it is not Pauline doctrine.

Another fundamental idea in the Pastoral Epistles’ view of woman has not yet appeared in the Pauline corpus: “She will be saved by childbearing, provided she lives a modest life in faith, love and holiness” (1 Tim. 2:15). The meaning is plain: she will be saved by the fulfillment of her curse, by which she was condemned to multiple pregnancies and to her husband’s domination. Yet, if this is the true way of life and salvation for the Christian woman, then in no sense can she be said to have been saved by baptism in Christ Jesus; again, this is not Pauline. Furthermore, if this is the correct teaching, then there should be no room, in the Ecclesia, for unmarried women. Clearly, this runs counter to the position of Paul.

The Pastoral Epistles then present us with the picture of a Church at a turning point of its life. The charismatic age of the Apostles and prophets is drawing to a close; the times call for institutional rules and principles. By natural bias, by social pressure, and possibly as a reaction against the allurements of pagan womanhood, the pattern of life of Christian women is being reversed to that of Jewish women. The Pastoral Epistles embody principles that aim at justifying this state of things, as well as rules of conduct taking it for granted that a providential evolution has taken place. The liberty recognized by Paul must now be channelled through regular institutions: that of widowhood stands out; to the younger women, that of matrimony offers the only proper way of life, since it is through motherhood that they will obtain salvation.

To the same concern for updating a view of sex which had proved Utopian in the face of human shortcomings and which the extended delay of the parousia deprived of its chief rationale, I would attribute the passages of 1 Peter 3:1-7 on the obedience of women to their husbands. The text is more recent than Ephesians but older than the Pastoral Epistles. If it is of Petrine authorship, which I see no reason to question, it must have been written prior to 69. The Churches are now beginning to settle down in a semicompromise with the standards of surrounding society. Peter, beginning a famous line of Patristic literature, reacts strongly against adopting pagan conceptions of feminine beauty: “Do not dress up for show, doing up your hair, wearing gold bracelets and fine clothes; all this should be inside, in a person’s heart, imperishable: the ornament of a sweet and gentle disposition-this is what is precious in the sight of God” (3:34). Meanwhile, like Paul, he upholds the Jewish and Gentile principle of the married woman’s subservience to her husband: “In the same way, wives should be obedient to their husbands” (3:1). Peter justifies this subjection in three different ways. First, this obedience has an apologetic value, “if there are some husbands who have not yet obeyed the Word ...” (3:2). One may note the difference here between Peter and Paul. In Corinthians 7:12-16, Paul recognized freedom to divorce an unbelieving partner who refuses peaceful cohabitation. But the text of 1 Peter does not seem to agree: on the contrary, cohabitation should bring him to faith. Second, obedience is justified by the example of the holy women of the Old Testament, and specifically of Sarah, “who was obedient to Abraham and called him her Lord.” The text adds, for the consolation of Christian women: “You are now her children, as long as you live good lives and do not give way to fear or worry” (3:6). Finally, woman is “the weaker partner” (3:7), a point which is totally absent from Paul’s Epistles, including the Pastoral.

Admittedly, the believing wife as seen in 1 Peter is not bereft of her own dignity. Her husband must treat her with consideration and respect. For despite her natural weakness, the wife is “co-heir to the grace of the Life” (3:7). A last remark is addressed to husbands: “Then your prayers will not be hindered” (3:7). This alludes to the belief, which will be long echoed in the later tradition, that sexual intercourse interferes with, and troubles, the soul who wishes to pray. Paul mentioned this in 1 Corinthians 7:5: “Do not refuse each other except by mutual consent, and then for an agreed time, to have yourselves free for prayer.” Peter suggests that such a fear will be groundless if the man treats his wife properly. It does not seem concerned, however, with a similar effect on the wife’s prayers.

Our investigation of Paul’s letters raises a major question: is there further evidence in the New Testament that the first Christian kerygma included the promise of a return to the situation of man and woman in Paradise, before the antagonism of sexes appeared with the fall? Does Christianity imply the abolition in principle of the curse on woman and her subsequent subordination to the male principle? Was this standard Christian preaching, or a peculiarity of Paul’s interpretation of the kerygma? And if this belonged to the common paradosis, does it derive from Jesus himself, or is it a subsequent theological elaboration?

Precisely, if the three synoptic Gospels teach a common message about sex, it is that the present order of things in the Jewish world does not correspond to the primitive relationship of man and woman.

Let us take Matthew and Mark first.

Matthew 19:1-12 and Mark 10:2-10 present an interesting contrast with the views of Ephesians 5:21-33. For these pericopes are also presented as commentaries on the sayings of Genesis: they were made “male and female,” and “because of that man will leave his father and his mother and will cling to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh.” The commentaries come in answer to a question about divorce. In Mark, Jesus asks about the law of Moses, which, as his interlocutors note, permits a man to divorce his wife. Valid reasons for divorce were actually a moot point in Judaism around the time of Jesus. Following different principles of interpretation of the Law, the school of Shammai permitted divorce only for very serious reasons, whereas that of Hillel inclined to greater leniency. The question was therefore a proper one to ask a rabbi who claimed to teach with authority. Jesus’ answer, in the two accounts that we have, is entirely negative: “What God has united, man must not divide” (Matt. 19:6; Mark 10:9). Mark continues by pointing out the consequences of this doctrine: “The man who divorces his wife and marries another is guilty of adultery against her. And if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she is guilty of adultery too” (10:11-12). Hebraic law, unlike Roman law, did not permit the wife to initiate divorce proceedings; but Mark, having in view a largely Gentile readership, adds the case of divorce by the wife, which was a common practice among the Romans.

Matthew and Luke (16:18) are undoubtedly nearer to the original logion here. Matthew adds a more elaborate commentary with a polemical edge: “It was because you were so unteachable that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but it was not like this from the beginning” (19:8). He then draws the same consequence as Mark, with the notable difference that an exception is made: “except in the case of fornication” (19:9). I am not concerned at this time with the clause concerning “fornication,” which has been so debated among exegetes, but rather with the principle which commands the entire passage in Matthew: “It was not like this in the beginning.” The eschatological times that Jesus announces imply a recurrence of the primitive order of things between man and woman. For if Jesus speaks to Jews who inquire about his interpretation of the Law, this interpretation is itself given in view of the coming trial and consummation. The messianic day will bring back the prelapsarian situation: the composite quotation from Genesis combines a few words from chapter 1 (“they were made male and female”), which contains no reference to a fall, and a few from chapter 2 (“this is why a man leaves his father and mother ...”), before the occurrence of temptation and the curse. Jesus truly envisions a messianic restoration of the order of innocence.

This is, I think, substantially an authentic logion of Jesus. The radical departure from the prevailing opinions of the dominant pharisaic schools is too sharp to have arisen merely from a desire of the early Christian communities for moral or legal perfection. It could only come from the radical reformulation of the Law which seems to have characterized the preaching of Jesus himself. Yet I am inclined, too, to consider the Matthean clause (“except in the case of fornication”) as also belonging to the primitive version of this interpretation as formulated by Jesus. For if the trend of this passage truly evokes a recurrence of the time of innocence with the advent of the messianic day of the Lord, the Jews to whom Jesus spoke had not yet been introduced into the messianic Kingdom. They were not living in Eden, but in postlapsarian East of Eden. For them, therefore, the leniency of Moses remained valid. The sense then would be: when fornication (that is, adultery) has shown that a couple still belongs to the old order characterized by hardness of heart, then a divorce may be pronounced.(5) In this interpretation, the sequel of the Matthean story follows logically, in sharp contrast with this unredeemed legalism: “It is not everyone who can accept what I have said, but only those to whom it is granted. There are eunuchs born that way from their mother’s womb, there are eunuchs made so by men and there are eunuchs who have made themselves so for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can” (19:11-12). Whether or not this is an authentic logion of Jesus, it does contain the correct conclusion and lesson: the eunuchs who “have made themselves so for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” have perceived the coming of the Kingdom and have already, in hope, anticipated the paradisiac state. This is tantamount to what Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “The time is short. Those who have wives should live as though they had none....I say this because the world as we know it is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:29,31).

If these passages are read in the light of the logia on the resurrection (Matt. 22:23-30; Mark 12:18-25; Luke 20:27-36), it becomes clear that the “eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom” are already “sons of the resurrection”; they are similar to those who have resurrected, who have regained Paradise: “In the resurrection they do not marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven” (Matt. 22:30). Or, in the more Semitic version of Luke, “The children of this world marry and are given in marriage, but those who are judged worthy of a place in the other world and in the resurrection of the dead do not marry, because they can no longer die, for they are the same as the angels and, being children of the resurrection, they are sons of God” (20: 34-36).

More than the other two Gospels, the one by Luke urges anticipation and imitation of the life which will characterize the children of the resurrection. Luke does not include the great passage on marriage and divorce that we have studied in Matthew and Mark, but a brief logion which embodies substantially the same doctrine as the Matthean and Marcian pericopes: “Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another one is guilty of adultery, and the man who marries a woman divorced by her husband commits adultery” (16:18). This parallels Matthew 5:32, which itself duplicates the text of 19:9. In both cases, Matthew includes the fornication clause, which is omitted by Luke, as by Mark (10:2-10). That Luke should leave it out is consistent with his generally strict attitude in matters of sex. In the text containing the promise that one shall receive a hundredfold in the next life, Luke alone mentions him who abandons-not only, as in Matthew 19:27-30 and Mark 10:29-30, his house, brothers, parents, for the sake of the Kingdom—but also his wife. In the logion about carrying one’s cross Luke 14:25-27), where Matthew writes: “The one who loves his father or his mother more than me is not worthy of me; the one who loves his son or his daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (10:37), Luke adds brothers and sisters, also wife: “If someone comes to me, and does not hate his father and his mother and his wife and his children and his brothers and his sisters and even also his wife, he cannot be my disciple” (14:25-26).

That Luke recommends the actual separation of husband and wife is unlikely, as this would run against the explicit teaching of Paul and the entire morality of the Jewish background of the early Christian communities. Yet Luke certainly believes that a new way of life, which would include abstention from marriage, is possible and desirable, being in harmony with the coming Kingdom. For, as the pericope of 20:34-36 shows, Luke connects sexuality and death: “Those who are judged worthy of a place in the other world and in the resurrection of the dead do not marry, because they can no longer die....” As the Kingdom will abolish death, so will it do away with sex. At the back of this idea there lurks the Old Testament concept of immortality in one’s descendants, of prolonging one’s life in one’s children, in the “house” built to himself by the father of the race through his wife. In the Kingdom, this will no longer be. The children of the resurrection live forevermore and therefore do not need sex to obtain a substitute for immortal life. The Gospel of Luke contains little hint that the relationship of man and woman in marriage may have another dimension than that.

Luke significantly alters the parables which too openly compare the Kingdom to a wedding feast. The wedding invitation of Matthew 22:14 becomes a mere dinner invitation in Luke 14:15-24; and whereas the excuses given in Matthew by those who decline to come include no more than various forms of business, Luke adds the reason: “I have married and therefore I cannot come” (14:20), thus placing marriage among the obstacles to entering the Kingdom. The great parable of the ten virgins who wait for the bridegroom well into the night (Matt. 25:1-13) does not appear in Luke, who, on the contrary, has alone preserved the parable of the prodigal son who swallows up his property with harlots (15:11-32). Likewise, Luke omits Matthew’s statement that “publicans and harlots will go before you in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 21:31). Thus, Luke refers to evil relationships rather than to proper marital intercourse. He also tones down considerably the Old Testament analogy between woman and faithful Israel, which holds a significant place in the other Gospels. Admittedly, Luke keeps the wedding analogy in 5:34-35 (Matt. 29:14-17; Mark 2:18-22; John 3:29): “Surely you cannot make the bridegroom attendants fast while the bridegroom is still with them? But the time will come, the time when the bridegroom will be taken away from them; that will be the time when they will fast.” For this passage stresses the contrast between Jesus (the bridegroom) and John the Baptist or the Pharisees, rather than the marriage relationship: the bride is never identified, even indirectly or implicitly.

Yet Luke’s position is not encratic. For encratism would devalue sex as being somehow evil in itself. There is no such suggestion in the Gospel. Sex, however, belongs to this world, not to the Kingdom. The disciples may be married, for they still live in the world. Yet they primarily live in hope, already participating in the Kingdom, in which the sexual polarity will be abolished. To the extent that the Kingdom has been inaugurated the functions of the sexes have been overcome. This would seem to be the gist of the “proto-Gospel” of Luke, where the annunciation, the conception of Jesus without sexual intercourse, the visitation, and the birth of John in his parents’ old age show that the order of the universe is changing radically. Such an insistence of Luke on these marks of the messianic times throws light on his view of celibacy as a way of participating in the Kingdom. Luke’s perspective is dominated by the prelapsarian tradition on man and woman in paradise: the relationship of Adam and woman before sin has been restored. It is a spiritual, not a sexual, relationship. As a point of fact, Luke alone mentions that a number of women “who had been cured of evil spirits and ailments” accompanied Jesus and his disciples: “Mary surnamed the Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, Joanna the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, Susanna, and several others” (8:1-2). In these women we may see the prototypes of the “women-sisters,” who, according to Paul (1 Cor. 9:5) travel with “the other apostles, and the Lord’s brothers, and Cephas.” They are the feminine part or aspect of the new mankind inaugurated in Jesus.

We now come to the Johannine corpus. My inquiry will prescind from the debated question of the authorship of these pieces. Whether or not John the Evangelist is also the Apostle makes no difference to his teaching. I tend to think he is not the Apostle, but this need not affect our reading of his work. That the Gospel and the first Epistle come from one writer is normally accepted. That the other two letters have the same author is more questionable, though I tend to think that they do. That the Apocalypse comes from another pen I would myself hold. Yet all these writings may be treated jointly as belonging to one school of early Christian theology, and it is with this assumption that I approach them here. Though, still early, this theology is not as primitive as those of Paul and of the synoptic Gospels. The Johannine corpus dates from the closing year of the first century.(6)

The Gospel of John shows no hesitancy in giving considerable importance to the analogy of the wedding and to the place of women among the disciples. A number of events are to be found only in this Gospel: the wedding at Cana (2:1-12), the conversation with the Samaritan woman, who ends up by believing and herself spreading the Gospel (4:442), the friendship of Jesus with the two sisters of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary (11:1-44; 12:1-11), the women at the Cross (“his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary, the wife of Clophas, and Mary of Magdala”) together with the “disciple he loved” (19:25-27), the early visit of Mary of Magdala to the tomb, by which she became the first witness to the resurrection (20:1-18). To this must be added the story of the woman taken in adultery (7:53; 8:11), which, although originally notapart of the Gospel and not written by the same author, does fit the general tone and orientation and thus rightly belongs to the Johannine corpus. In this Gospel, too, the nuptial image is used in relation to John the Baptist; yet it is now John who speaks rather than, as in the synoptics, Jesus referring to John: “The bride is only for the bridegroom; and yet the bridegroom’s friend, who stands there and listens, is glad when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. This same joy I feel and now it is complete” (3:29). We are in the Prophetic tradition: the bride is clearly Israel and the bridegroom is Christ; the comparison is much more realistic than in the comparable synoptic pericope where the bride is never mentioned (Matt. 9:15; Mark 2:19-20; Luke 5:34-35).

The prologue to the Gospel throws additional light on the analogy. For close connections relate the image of the Logos in chapter 1 to that of Sophia in the books of wisdom. “In the beginning [arche] was the Logos ” (1:1). This “beginning” may be identified not only with that of Genesis (“In the beginning, Yahweh created the heaven and the earth ...”), but moreover with that of Proverbs 8:22 (“The Lord created me as the beginning [archen] of his ways ..."). With these texts alone, the Logos of John could be seen as latent in the Wisdom of God, and the sophiological reflection, which has appeared several times in the history of Christian thought, especially in Russian theology, would be provided with a starting point. But we should read John 1:1 also in the light of Wisdom 9:1-2: “God of the Fathers, Lord of mercy, who, through your Logos made the universe, and through your Sophia formed man....” That is, the Logos of John, which is not created, but simply “is” with God, must be identified with the Wisdom of God through which all creation takes place: “All was made through it” (John 1:3). In this case, the nuptial elements of the image of Sophia should be now transferred to the image of the Logos, who then becomes the feminine companion of God, pregnant with all creation. On the one hand, John sees the mystery of femininity at the level of Israel’s relationship to God; on the other he also sees it at the level of the Divinity itself, as manifested in the Logos-Wisdom of God.

This Word (Logos), who, in 1:2-3, is said to be “with God,” is reported, in 1:13, to have been “born, not of human stock, or by the will of the flesh, or by the will of man, but from God.” True, the Greek expression may be used of both the male or the female principle of generation. Yet the opposition to man (that is, male), on the one hand, and, on the other, the reference to the eternal presence of the Logos with God suggest his emanation from God as from a womb. This is confirmed by the wording of verse 18: “No one has ever seen God; it is the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, who has made him known.” The “bosom” may admittedly evoke a seating arrangement at table: the only Son lies next to the Father, that is, figuratively speaking, “in his bosom,” as John next to Jesus at the Last Supper. It may also suggest something else. Like the ancients generally, the Jews thought the future human being to be already preformed in his male ancestry. The female womb, recipient of the seed, provides a protective environment for its growth into a viable child. Likewise, the Logos is in the Father, but not as a lifeless seed still contained in its male principle. The Father acts as womb which provides the Logos with all that he is and he knows. The Father is actually a female womb. Finally, in another bold allegory, John compares the expectation of the Kingdom to a woman’s pregnancy: “A woman in childbirth suffers because her time has come; but when she has given birth to the child, she forgets the suffering in her joy that a man [anthropos: a human being] has been born into the world” (16:21).

The prevailing atmosphere here is rather distant from that of the synoptic Gospels. Starting with the image of the Logos in the bosom of God, the Gospel of John introduces the disciples to a transcendent mystery of nuptiality. Certainly, by now the first century is far advanced; there is less need than formerly to be hesitant about the belief that the old Israel has been displaced by the new Ecclesia as the bride of the Most High. If indeed, according to the tradition recorded by Irenaeus and Eusebius, John lived at Ephesus,(7) the nuptial image provided a telling contrast with the Ephesian cult of Artemis, the many-breasted mother goddess, whose devotees had rioted against Paul and the first Ephesian Christians during Paul’s third missionary journey (Acts 19:23-41). The communities of the province of Asia, for whom John writes, are not, like Corinth at the time of Paul, caught in the throes of a trend to licentiousness. Speculation on the preexistence of the Lord is now far advanced, and a Christian gnosis is already taking shape. Women have acquired standing in the Church, witness the second letter of John, which I take to come from the same pen as the Gospel. It makes little difference to the argument whether this short note was addressed to an actual woman or to a Church figuratively called “the Lady.” In either case, it fits the pattern of the Johannine corpus in its free approach to the symbolism of woman.

With the Apocalypse the feminine image in the New Testament reaches its apex, and the nuptiality which dominates the Johannine vision is fully elaborated.(8) Whether or not the seven letters to the Asian Churches originally constituted a separate document makes no difference here as to the content of Johannine theology. If they are read as originally not part of the book, they help us see John as a generic name for a series of authors writing in the same milieu and with identical leading concerns and ideas. Be that as it may, the seven letters sufficiently depict the fully developed Christian life as a return to Paradise: to Ephesus the promise is made that “those who prove victorious I will feed from the tree of life set in God’s paradise” (2:7); to Philadelphia, the pledge is that “those who prove victorious, I will make pillars in the sanctuary of my God, and they will stay there forever; I will inscribe on them the name of my God and the name of the City of my God, the new Jerusalem which comes down from my God in heaven, and my own new name as well” (3:12). Precisely, in both Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature, the symbols of woman and of the New Jerusalem are fused together so that the thought freely flows from the one to the other, as in the vision of a woman in tears reported in the Fourth Book of Esdras (a Jewish writing with early Christian interpolations): “And I looked. And behold, the woman no longer appeared to me; but a city was a-building, and a place with powerful foundations was shown to me” (10:27). The woman of the Apocalypse is the woman of Paradise, who is also the City of God, the New Jerusalem, the Ecclesia.(9)

The Apocalypse of John makes full use of this theme. Chapter 12 is focused on the image of the woman, and chapters 21 and 22 on that of the New Jerusalem, while the negative picture of the great prostitute, Babylon, in chapters 17 and 18 stands in striking contrast with the vision of the woman as City of God. No need to detail the parable of the prostitute, which derives straight from the Prophetic tradition: idolatry is a prostitution. Likewise Apocalypse 14:4 (“These are the ones who did not defile themselves with women, for they have kept themselves chaste, and they follow the Lamb wherever he goes. They have been ransomed as the first fruits of humanity for God and the Lamb. No lie was found on their lips; they are faultless”) speaks of the true believers as opposed to the idolaters. The text says nothing of marriage, but assumes the Prophetic image, fornication-idolatry.

The woman of chapter 12 appears in heaven, “adorned with the sun, standing on the moon, and with the twelve stars on her head for a crown” (v. 1). That is, she is a counterpart to the “heavenly man” appearing on the clouds of heaven in the book of the prophet Daniel (7:13; 10:5-6). She is pregnant and about to give birth to a “male child,” to whom, after he has been raised up to God and his throne, is given “all authority,” “victory and power and empire” having been won by God (v. 10). This child is the very man seen by Daniel in heaven, to whom also all power is given after he has been led into the presence of “the One of Great Age” (Dan. 7:13): “On him was conferred sovereignty, glory and kingship, and men of all peoples, nations and languages became his servants” (Dan. 7:14). There is one major difference between the two visions: The Apocalypse of John shows the man from heaven being bom of the woman (the People of Israel, the Ecclesia) and not as coming by himself, as in Daniel, on the clouds of heaven.(10) The carrier, so to say, is now the woman, who is seen in heaven with the celestial bodies as her attendants, as the man of Daniel is seen on the clouds. In both cases, the faithful people share in his victory: in Daniel, sovereignty belongs to “the saints of the Most High” (7:18-22); in John, “our brothers,” persecuted by the dragon, “have triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the witness of their martyrdom” (12:11). In both cases this victory takes place after a cosmic battle in heaven and on earth between Michael and “the prince of the kingdom of Persia” (Dan. 10:13) or “the great dragon, the primeval serpent, known as the devil or Satan” (Apoc. 12:9).

We may conclude from this that the vision of the woman with her child is a deliberate elaboration on the Danielic vision, which purports to convey the full meaning of the arrival of the man from heaven: this is the son of the woman Israel, sent by God as his divine Wisdom, who flees to the desert when the dragon tries to destroy her after failing to devour her son. John explicitly identifies the dragon with the “primeval serpent” who tempted the woman in Paradise, thus proceeding to a further identification of the heavenly woman with the woman of the restored Paradise. This woman, Israel, the People of God, mankind as God’s elect (cf. “the elect Lady” of the second letter of John) is neither Babylon (the Roman Empire) described in chapters 17 and 18 nor the old Jerusalem. She appears again in chapters 21 and 22 in the shape of “the New Jerusalem.”

The opening verses of chapter 21 recall the beginning of Genesis, when “the heavens and the earth” were created, and the Spirit hovered over “the water.” The seer of the Apocalypse witnesses no less than the new creation: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; the first heaven and the first earth had disappeared, and there was no longer any sea” (Apco. 21:1). The scene is thus set for a complete overhaul of the genetic enterprise, in what is both a recapitulation and a reversal of the first creation. The first creation led progressively to Adam and then to the woman as Adam’s perfection. The recreation now unfolding starts with the woman, in the form of “the holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, as beautiful as a bride all dressed for her husband” (v. 2). The traditional Prophetic themes of the bride of Yahweh, the building up of the City through the woman, the Wisdom, are intertwined in this complex picture. The vision continues with an inversed reenactment of Osea’s naming of his son. Born to Osea from his harlot-wife in his prophetic acting of Yahweh’s wooing of Israel, this child was called “Not-my-people.” On the contrary, the new bride, mother of the people, opens up a perspective of divine filiation: “Here God lives among men. He will make his home among them; they shall be his People, and he will be their God. His name is God-with-them” (21:3). To show how far-reaching is the naming of this child “His People,” John associates a renaming of God to it.

Another version of this vision follows, inspired this time mainly by Ezechiel’s description of the holy City: “One of the seven angels that had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came to speak to me, and said: ‘Come here, and I will show you the bride that the Lamb has married.’ In the spirit he took me to the top of an enormous high mountain, and showed me Jerusalem, the holy City, coming down from out of heaven ...” (21:9-10). There follows a detailed description of the City and its measurements, which leads to the remark that the City has no Temple: “I saw that there was no Temple in the city, since the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb were themselves the Temple, and the city did not need the sun or the moon for light, since it was lit by the radiant glory of God, and the Lamb was a lighted torch for it” (21: 22-23). That is, whereas the first creation led from Adam to the woman, the second goes from the bride to the bridegroom, to the new Adam, to the perfect mankind, which is no other than God and the Lamb. The adornments of the first creation, the sun and the moon, have become obsolete, for now the bride, having in herself the one who is “the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (22:13), encompasses the fullness of all things visible and invisible.

Thus the Johannine corpus, and by the same token the New Testament, ends on a vision of woman restored both to the all-holiness of her companionship with God and to the universality of her own dignity as the fullness of mankind. In the liturgical appendix to the Apocalypse, the ultimate dialogue is between the Spirit and the bride, between God and mankind: “The Spirit and the Bride say: come!” (v. 17).(11)

The evidence of the New Testament, as analyzed in the present chapter, may be summed up in the following points:

1. From Paul, from the Gospels, and from the Apocalypse, we may gather the fundamental thought of the authors of the New Testament regarding woman and the division of mankind into two sexes: the advent of the New Creation has, in principle, restored mankind to a paradisiac, prelapsarian state. The Christian woman is therefore no longer under the curse by which she was made servant to her husband and bound to a chain of painful pregnancies triggered by her desire for him. The Christian woman has become free.

2. Accordingly, as long as they expected a speedy return of the Lord, the early Christian communities (or at least those which were most sensitive to this aspect of the Christian newness) felt the call to discover a new type of relationship between men and women in the Ecclesia. The attempt was made, at least at Corinth, to lead a life of celibacy or even of nonsexual common life, these being favored by the Apostle Paul. This endeavor soon broke down under the impact of human weakness and the disenchantment occasioned by the unaccountable delay of the parousia.

3. The Gospel sayings on marriage and the injunctions of Corinthians, Colossians, Ephesians, 1 Peter to married persons trace a curve of thought by which the spiritual freedom of the married Christian woman, under the influence of both Jewish and Gentile customs, gave way to the older, although spiritually abolished, domination by her husband. Pious justifications were sought for the maintenance of this status quo despite the principle of Christian freedom still affirmed in the texts.

4. With the Apocalypse and the last apostolic writings, the image of woman is inseparable from that of the Ecclesia, a union already far advanced with Paul. What this meant for the Ecclesia, as Bride of the Lord, was fairly well indicated, but what it may also mean for woman was left in the dark. One may presume that Paul, sobered by the Corinthian experience, was eventually satisfied with letting well enough alone instead of pursuing the avenues that this could have opened. This conformed to his way of dealing with other delicate problems, like the relations between slaves and masters. As to the Apocalypse, its redaction came too late in the evolution of the early Church for such a line of thought to be adequately developed in it. The delay of the parousia and the necessities of day to day living had already reduced Christian marriage to a secular pattern. The Apocalypse marked a reaction back to the full implications of the Gospel. Yet it could not stop the trend to secularism.

5. At another level of thought, both Paul and John envision nuptiality, and therefore womanhood, as already part of the heavenly mystery now being revealed. The pattern for earthly womanhood is set, not only in the celestial image of the Church, but in God’s own Wisdom and Word.

Taken in its entirety, however, the New Testament, it would seem, left fundamental questions unanswered: how is Christian freedom to be embodied in the sexual relationship? How is the paradisiac state, to which Christians have been reintroduced by baptism and faith, to be experienced while the faithful, waiting in hope for the fulfillment of the promises, live and act their Christian love in the human forms of love? How does one live a prelapsarian life in a postlapsarian world? How is the disciple to participate in the mystery of transcendent nuptiality?

A question may legitimately be asked before this chapter closes. How many of the New Testament ideas about womanhood may be traced back to Jesus himself? If the Gospels were written after a few decades of Christian experience, though with the help of previously written or oral material, they inform us about the Christian communities more directly than about the ideas and deeds of Jesus. Yet it is reasonable to hold that Jesus, standing in the Prophetic line of Israel, would have occasionally used the feminine analogy to designate Israel’s relationship to Yahweh. Hence the parables comparing the Kingdom to a wedding feast, the allusions to the bridegroom and the bride, or the bridegroom and his friends (some of them already belonging to the preaching of John the Baptist) have a good chance of having preserved a core which genuinely goes back to the Lord. Jesus could then be seen as the last link in the perpetuation of the “prelapsarian” tradition about women. As they have come down to us, these parables make Jesus the bridegroom, thus placing redeemed mankind in a unique feminine relationship to the Savior. Yet in their original form they presumably maintained the Prophetic identification of the bridegroom with Yahweh. At any rate, the apostolic kerygma, which eventually came to the point of including an important item about Jesus as the new Adam with his feminine counterpart, the new Israel, was itself an interpretation of the function of Jesus as providing in himself the heavenly pattern for womanhood, the pristine perfection of mankind.

In another set of problems, the logion on marriage and divorce, in Matthew 19, Mark 10, Luke 16, may be considered authentic; and, as I have explained, this includes the “fornication clause.” With the inclusion of this clause, the logion testifies to the eschatological orientation of Jesus’ teaching, which sees womanhood in the light of the paradisiac restoration soon to be expected. The underestimating of the marital relationship which is evidenced in Luke does not derive directly from Jesus; it is Luke’s translation of the eschatological urgency which characterized Jesus’ preaching of the Kingdom and which Paul and the other evangelists expressed differently. All in all, the message of Jesus very probably included the chief item of the developed teaching of the New Testament, namely: the curse on the woman has been removed in the Ecclesia. The principle of the typological identity of woman with mankind in the Kingdom is part of the original good news.

Notes

1. Johannes Leipoldt, Jesus und die Frau (Leipzig, 1921); Die soziale Gedanke in der altchristichen Kirche (Leipzig, 1951), and Die Frau in der antiken Welt und im Urchristentum, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1955); Madeline Southard, The Attitude of Jesus toward Woman (New York, 1927); G. F. Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1925-1930); Joseph Bonsirven, Le Judaïsme Palestinien au temps de Jésus-Christ, 2 vols. (Paris, 1935); P. Ketter, Christus und die Frauen, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1944-1949); Fritz Blanke and Franz Leenhardt, Die Stellung der Frau im Neuen Testament und in alien Kirche (Zurich, 1949); Krister Stendahl, The Bible and the Role of Women (Philadelphia, 1927). Unless otherwise indicated, translations from the New Testament will follow the Jerusalem Bible.

2. Gerhard Delling, Paulus’ Stellung zu Frau und Ehe (Stuttgart, 1931); Else Kahler, Die Frau in den Paulinischen Briefen (Zurich, 1960).

3. For another interpretation, see Jean Daniélou, The Ministry of Women in the Early Church (London, 1961), p. 10.

4. Leopold Zscharnack, Der Dienst der Frau in dern ersten Jahrhunderten der christlichen Kirche (Gottingen, 1902); Henry Wheeler, Deaconesses Ancient and Modern (New York, 1889); Henri Chirat, L’Assemblée Chrétienne a l’âge apostolique (Paris, 1949).

5. For another interpretation, see Joseph Bonsirven, Le Divorce dans le Nouveau Testament (Paris, 1948).

6. See R. H. Charles, The Revelation of St. John (Edinburgh, 1920) I, xxix-lxi; Raymond Brown, The Gospel according to John (New York, 1966) I, lxxxvi and ciii-civ.

7. Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, IV; Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica, HI, 23.

8. André Feuillet, L’Apocalypse (Paris, 1963).

9. Yves Congar, Le Mystère du Temple (Paris, 1958).

10. Frederick H. Borsch, The Son of Man in Myth and History (Philadelphia, 1967).

11. Anscar Vonier, The Spirit and the Bride (London, 1935); Héribert Muehlen, L ‘Esprit dans l’Eglise, 2 vols. (Paris, 1969).

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