Were Women Really Empowered in the Gospels?

[00:00:00]What do the Gospels reveal about women in early Christianity? Hi everybody, my name is Robyn Walsh. I'm a scholar of New Testament and early Christianity and part of Patheos Biblical Studies. And this is a really challenging question and it's one that could get out of control, so let me put some parameters on my answer just to keep it focused. Uh so first of all, if we think about Gospels broadly, so here I'm thinking about the four canonical Gospels that most people are familiar with as well as Gospels outside of that canon, so what we might call the non-canonical or apocryphal Gospels. Uh generally with the possible exception of the Gospel of Mary, which I should do a separate video on. Um but even then, I think there's some debate. But generally speaking, I would say women are not presented in a way that is perhaps, let's say more egalitarian than you might expect from any other text in the ancient world. Now, what's hard about this is that Paul looms large. And Paul certainly does name certain women as being um deacons in the the church having certain authority positions in the church. He has lines like in Galatians where he talks about there are no there's no enslaved or free, there is no man or woman, right?

[00:01:11]Um he does seem to have more of that again egalitarian outlook, so it's hard not to read him into the Gospels. And in fact, I'm not even convinced that he's not a source for the canonical Gospels at the very least, if not the other Gospels, some of the other Gospels um that we might discuss as well. So it's hard not to import Paul. It's also hard not to import something like, say, the Pietà. Um so that image Michelangelo's image of um the Mother Mary holding Jesus after he's taken down from the cross. It's hard for us not to import those kinds of im- images, I think, uh into the text. But certainly something like the Gospel of Mark, uh Mary the mother doesn't even get that much time in the text, and Jesus isn't particularly nice to her when she is there.

[00:01:56]Uh I would say something maybe like the Gospel of Luke is a little kinder.

[00:02:01]And again, Gospel of Luke is supposed to be well aware of Paul, according to scholarly ideas about the development of that Gospel, especially if he's the author of the Acts of the Apostles, which really is starring Paul.

[00:02:15]But you have something like the Magnificat and these longer narratives about the so-called again nativity, but also the pregnancies of both Elizabeth and Mary. And I think that's really particularly interesting because it does seem to delve into the experiences of these women a little bit more.

[00:02:34]Now, if Mark is our earliest Gospel, then that is an interesting characterization, not only because you don't get that infancy narrative, but also the Gospel originally ended with the women going to the tomb to treat the body, which was the purview of women, being afraid and running away and saying nothing to anyone. Not exactly the greatest presentation of these women either in terms of just on basic level, the an explanation for the spread of the Christian movement of the Jesus movement. So, I think women are still presented in a fairly traditional role.

[00:03:07]Even something like the Gospel of Matthew gives a very particular genealogy through examples from the Hebrew scriptures of women who had to go to extraordinary measures to give birth in extraordinary ways, sometimes in even devious ways to make sure that God's intentions are seen through and that helps to go some distance in explaining Mary's role.

[00:03:30]And then you have someone like Mary Magdalene, who was most likely a rich widow or someone who was able to sponsor Jesus's mission, who in the 6th century is recast by Pope Gregory as a sinful woman or the sinful woman. Sometimes she's also conflated, especially in movies today, with the woman caught in adultery. And this is that passage wasn't even in the Gospel of John to begin with, >> [laughter] >> um the adulterous woman, but just because of the proximity of the appearance of Mary Magdalene with someone like the sinful woman in the Gospels. That conflation of women in the text was seen as really unproblematic in the sense that this is a tradition, and a false one that has stuck. So, uh the presentation of women in those texts not the greatest in the Gospels. If we can expand our view of this, and again, maybe this will be the source of another video, to include something like the Gospels, uh the non-canonical Gospels, something like the Gospel of Mary, or maybe even considering the letters of Paul, we might have something a little bit more um rosy.

[00:04:39]>> [laughter] >> Or something a little more um optimistic to say.

[00:04:43]Check out bartdehrman.com/bsalearning if you would like to think more about these issues. That's bartdehrman.com/bsalearning.