Video Transcript: Introduction and Questions of Method

Hello, and welcome to this course. In this first segment, we're going to talk about some  introductory questions. First of all, the question that we are dealing with literature we're  dealing with something that people wrote a long time ago. And when you write anything,  even if you're writing a letter to a friend, or you're writing a letter home, you have a certain  perspective, and we call this a bias. It's the the perspective from which you write. And it  might have to do with the relationship you have with the people you're writing to, it certainly  has to do with your context with your situation, where you are. And it also has to do with who  we are from the beginning of our lives, the whole formation of who we are. And so we can  refer to that as a literary bias. And everybody who is writing any of these texts that we're  going to look at, including biblical texts, especially biblical text, also has that perspective, that bias from which they come. And so every time we read an old text and ancient text, or even a modern text, we have to be aware of the perspective from which the author comes, which  might not be the same as our own perspective. So that's really what we mean by a literary  bias. And we have to be aware of that in the interpretation of texts. And what we're going to  do in this course, is to look at a number of texts that have to do with women in the early  church. Unfortunately, we don't have anything really with one small exception, one possible  small exception, that's actually written by any of these women, but they are texts written  about the women, and about what they do, and about how they ministered, how they served  in their churches. And so these are texts that we're going to look at. And as with any texts, we we have to look at what's the perspective from which the author is coming. Now a second  point is about what I call social disparities. Now, and then. So we've looked at bias, we talked  about literary bias, now we're talking about social bias. So what I mean by that is, the, the  way the society is constructed. And we're going to talk more about that in detail as we get  into some of the later segments, because we're going to look at various groups of people in  the ancient society, the ancient Mediterranean, Roman society that produced the biblical text. In this case, we're looking at New Testament, but we're going to look at other texts that come  from pretty much the same society within a range of about 300 years. And the social  disparities, then were perhaps even greater than the ones in which so many of us live. And  I'm aware that the people watching this will come from all different kinds of contexts, from  different countries, and different social levels, men and women, and that in every case, we  have our own perspective and our own particular situation to deal with, whether that is a  situation that is freeing for us or that is oppressive. So when we talk about social disparities,  we have to be aware of how things are different for different people. We talk today, in many  circles, about inequality, about growing social and economic inequality that is happening all  over the world. And economists and social scientists are very aware of this. Well, in this  ancient society in which these people lived and worked, there was also a great deal of social  disparity, some of it built in, in a formal way, such, that is perhaps different from most of our  experience today. And so there were recognizable differences in social class. And some of the  people we're going to talk about, toward the end of the course, when we get into the fourth  and fifth centuries, are from the very top of the social ladder. They are the elites. They were  fabulously wealthy. Those are the people whose voices we hear, they survived, they had the  ability to write about their experience. And one of the challenges when we're looking at at  something like ancient Mediterranean society in which the New Testament came to be, one of  the things that we try to do is to try to find the voices of the other people. And as we move  through the course, I think you'll, you'll see more of what I mean by that. Now, the third point  is the possibility of retrieving women's voices. And I already said, we only have one possible  exception of a woman actually writing and that is Perpetua. In the very well known martyrdom account of The Acts of Professional Infelicitous. There is a point in that narrative in which the  Narrator The person who's telling the story says, well, now I'm going to let Perpetua speak in  her own words. And so you have a different voice going on there. And, and I think that it is, in  fact, something written by this woman Perpetua because we know she was well educated.  And however, some some others doubt that some scholars say it's just it's a literary turn in  which someone else pretends to be her voice. But we'll look at that another time. So except  for that, we don't have literature actually written by women. We have literature in which  women appear, in which there are women whose names we know. You think of the Gospels, 

for example, there are a number of women and we will examine them and their role in a  future segment. But we know names of women from the Pauline letters, we know names of  women. And in the case of the Pauline letters, surely real women to whom, or about whom  Paul is writing. But, we don't hear from those women themselves. We don't have the voices of the women. For example, Paul, in I Corinthians 11, excuse me, I Corinthians 5 is talking about  women prophets. And we don't have the voice of those women prophets. answering back. So  that's a problem. We don't know how the women themselves received the things that are  written about them. Because we don't have their response and their answer. Another problem is the assumption that when we have masculine plural words, we're only talking about men.  Greek, is the language in which the New Testament and much of this early Christian literature  was written is a gendered language. Words, nouns and adjectives have gender, adjectives,  the gender of adjective has to agree with the noun. And so when you have references to  groups of people, it will always be masculine plural, unless it is specifically intended to say  this group is composed only of women and feminine plural. So ordinarily, unless you're talking about specifically a group of women, and you know that because of the way the the language  is gendered, and it's going to be masculine plural, but a masculine plural can refer to a mixed  group of men and women. And this is another case in which the women's voices are simply  silent. So it's problematic if we always think that when there is a masculine plural that only  men are present. Now, there's some interesting exceptions to that in the the introductions to  Peter's preaching in the first chapters of Acts, Acts of the Apostles. He gets up and he says andres adelphoi , for literally men, masculine people, brothers. And so there, you get the idea  that the author of Acts is saying this is a group that's only composed of men. And yet, even in  those situations, which are are public places, there have to have been women there. I mean,  we know from the way the economy works, that poor women, lower class women were out  there selling their stuff, you know. And then there were women present and and their voices  are really silent, because they're not even recognized as members of the group. And there are other situations. And I give two examples here. The word diakonos and we're going to talk  about that a lot later. The diakonos is a masculine word, which we usually translate Deacon,  and we'll talk about some of the levels of meaning of that word, but it's a masculine word.  And yet in Romans 16:1 Phoebe is called a Diakonos. So a masculine word is applied to a  woman, Phoebe is a woman's name. So one has to be careful not to assume that every time  you get the word diakonos that it's referring to a man, if it's uncertain. And the comparative  example there, and we'll talk about that again later is Philippians 1:1 where Paul is addressing the Philippian community with its episkopoi diakonoi. We'll talk about episcopals another  time, but diakono plural, masculine plural diakonos. It's a mistake to assume that that refers  only to men because we have an example of a woman with that title in Romans 16:1. And the  other example that I cite here, Romans 16:7, Junia. Andronicus and Junia, whom Paul says are, first of all, they were either relatives or people from the same city, as he, in the word to me,  neither one. And they were in Christ before me, he says, so they were members of the  Christian community before Paul. And they are noteworthy noteworthy among the apostles.  There's a great deal of discussion about what that exactly means. But probably what it means is, in the group of people who are known as apostles, they stand out. So in this case, you have Junia, a woman is her husband, probably is Andronicus, is probably another missionary couple like Prisca and Aquila, and their apostles. So every time you get the reference to apostles,  unless you're specifically referring to the 12, in the way that some of the Gospels set that up,  Paul talks about apostles elsewhere in his letters. It's a mistake to assume that we're only  talking about men. So this is a, this is a question of interpretation, to be careful about  masculine plural words. The next point is the role of women in the role of women in the New  Testament, the role of women in the Pauline letters, the role of women da da ta da. And what  is a role? How do you how do you understand what a role is, is that a function is that we talk  about roles in movies in drama, and that's playing a part is that the same thing that we mean  here? And so that's a kind of an open question and, and the problem with taking the role of  women in such in such is you're, you're looking at in the kind of abstract way and not really  dealing with the lives of the real women. So the idea of agency. There's a lot being talked  about these days in examining the whole question of agency, what is agency The the ability 

to act in a way that assumes responsibility responsibility for the person responsibility for what you're doing. And that that has been particularly examined in a situation in oppressive  situations. When people are in situations in which they are not free to act the way they would  like, for instance, in being imprisoned, how does a person assume any kind of autonomy, any  kind of responsibility for who I am and what I do. And even in very oppressive situations, there are ways in which people find a freedom to act the freedom to make a decision one way or  another, there are all kinds of stories of people who have acted heroically in situations of  oppression. Now, in the case of women and women in this ancient world, which is what we're  looking at, there were very defined roles, especially for upper class women, how did they  assume their own agency, their own personhood within those roles, and sometimes the the  study, and this is the bias of the interpreters now, the modern modern interpreters is that  they, they are not acting within any kind of agency if they remain within traditional roles, that  only breaking out of those roles is an act of agency. And that's been re examined now. And,  and I think that there's much more awareness that that assuming a traditional role taking it,  taking it on wanting it loving it is also an activation. So this is something we'll talk about more as we go. And finally, the the problem with taking women as a special topic. Do you want to  when you're looking at a new book about early Christianity, do you want to find in the index  women? What does that mean? If we have taken women out as a special topic? Does that  mean everything else is about men only? You see the problem there. So women are half of the human race you know, so to to treat women as a special topic, which we we do need to do.  But it still has its problems? Because then we're kind of saying okay, well then then the rest of it is the world of men except where you specifically have women and that's not so because  the women are participating all the time in the regular life of the society. So those are some of the things that that I lay out as a beginning for this. This adventure, this journey that we will  be on together.