Danny Schiffer
Honour, will, and power are all masculine traits in the ancient Roman imagination. Crucifixion was an incredibly emasculating and shameful way to die. For one, you are submitting to the state, and secondly you are literally penetrated (Moore 2002). As early Christians reframed Jesus’s death from shameful, to noble, they transmuted the figure of Jesus itself. Feminine sin was
transformed into masculine divinity. This can also be shown in various early Christian texts showcasing women who would become “honorary men” for being such courageous and noble Christians. I am suggesting that as the gospel of a masculine redeemer whose salvation is poured out for all spread across the ancient world, a phenomenon of Christian women being defined as unwomen was created. Salvation’s association with masculinity created a trope of women who ceased to fit into their gender role and became unwomen through abstaining from sex, dissolving class distinctions, practising masculine virtues, and performing/experiencing miracles that point to gender transition.
I. Jesus in Transition
Though Jesus is born male, that is not enough to be defined as a man in the Roman world. He is transitioned into femininity at the hands of the state through torture and crucifixion, and at the hands of the religious authorities by accusing him of blasphemy. Jesus is dominated by Pilate, Roman soldiers, and Herod before his execution. The resurrection of his body was also a resurrection of his masculinity, proving his death a noble one of self-mastery rather than the death of humiliating failure.
As Stephen Moore puts it in his chapter on the apostle Paul, proper male-female relationship mirrors the proper God-human relationship, which Jesus exemplifies to the early Christian by submitting completely and entirely to God (2002). Thus, Jesus takes on the female position. This is Jesus acting as a role model for the Christian community. Jesus then has to act divine when he is resurrected. Now the community must take on the female position, as Jesus is righteous and Godly– worshipped instead of worshiping. The positions are switched throughout the story, and Jesus fulfills roles of man and unman, feminine representation of humanity and masculine representation of God.
It is just this willingness to take on something shameful and feminine that makes him masculine however– it is exemplifying self-mastery and dominating sin, “For the Jesus of Romans is a woman forever in the process of becoming a man.” (Moore 2002). Early Christians reframe Jesus’s femininely weak death as one of power and nobility by linking it to self-mastery (Conway 2008). In an attempt to re-claim Jesus’s masculinity and honor post-crucifixion, the claims of Jesus’s prior knowledge of his death are created or emphasized. Knowing of your own death and going bravely forward, dying for a cause you believe in cast Jesus as a soldier. Jesus remains cool and collected in front of Pilate, as he’s passed around by various tormentors. The Passion narrative turns into a narrative of resisting passion (Conway 2008). This can be linked to the spread of stoicism, which encouraged precisely the same resistance to passion and self-mastery as a masculine virtue (Koester 2006). This philosophy and practice was exclusive to men. Early Christianity drew upon stoic ideals as many texts create lists of vices and virtues (things of the spirit and things of the flesh for Paul). Jesus is cast as a stoic ideal man, who resists and keeps his composure even in the face of torture, and inspiration for Christians to become manly passion-resisting stoics.
Sin is associated with submission and femininity, but that is conquered by righteousness, domination and masculinity. Since resistance to sin through self-mastery is a masculine virtue, it follows that sin is in the female role. Sin is something to be dominated, and submitting to sin is against nature just as submitting to the authority of a woman would be against nature. Sin is a weakness, and holiness gives one strength over it. Jesus is subject to the sins of the world through his life and through the passion narratives but when he rises again, he brings news that now anyone can experience masculine salvation. This is exemplified in the recursive saying, “There is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.”
II. Miraculous Masculinization and the Unwoman
Often the meaning of “there is no male nor female” gets lost as an endorsement of androgyny or declaration against discrimination. It is a form of ancient androgyny, but not how we would use the word today. It is a subsuming of the feminine into the masculine. It is not that we are all both male and female and therefore equal, it is that we are now all male and therefore equal (Meeks 1974). As a reaction to the idea that salvation is now for all people, early Christians begin to imagine the possibility of a holy woman. They portray her not as holy in her femininity, but rather so holy she is no longer feminine. The salvation has to be masculine, otherwise it would be passive and fleshly. This masculine salvation was now poured out to all. All could be redeemed from their penetrated states. When we look at the Pauline epistles, it is clear that there is a stark dichotomy– one is either of the spirit or of the flesh. Paul’s dualistic and stoic theology makes it clear that there is only spirit or flesh, and that salvation brings spirit. Paul wants to dissolve the distinction between peoples by making all of them of the spirit, not by saying that spirit and flesh are the same. The woman, the Gentile, and the person living of the flesh are all capable of being just as good as the Jewish Jesus-following man, who lives by the spirit. (Gal. 5:16-26, Rom. 8:1-17 [NRSV])
Drawing upon Stephen Moore’s definition of “unman,” a categorization of all non-men genders in the ancient mediterranean, I’m proposing the use of a term “unwoman.” It must take into account biological sex, class, and sexual action/position. If an unman is one who does not fulfill all of the requirements of man (adult male, upper class Roman citizen, penetrator and never penetrated), the unwoman is one who would be a woman but has ceased to fulfill all the requirements (adult female, upper class Roman citizen, penetrated and never penetrator). Therefore to be made an unman would be to fall in honour and power and to be made an unwoman would be to rise in honour and power. The examples of early Christian unwomen I will discuss make a point to show that they were originally upper class, establishing that they were in fact women and not just female slaves or female non-citizens. However, they rid themselves of class distinction, setting free all their slaves in the case of Melania the younger, or living with their servants as sisters in Macrina’s case. As gender was defined sexually, virgin would not be considered the same as woman. They abstain from sex, practice virtue, and are holy– all things that broke the mold of the ancient Mediterranean woman. They rise beyond women through living as devout Christians, becoming Christian unwomen.
This mechanic of Christianity providing a way for women to raise themselves up through masculine salvation is more or less plainly stated in The Life of Macrina. Gregory of Nyssa, the author, states that Macrina was “…A woman who by means of the Christian faith raised herself to the highest peak of human virtue…” “This person was a woman – if indeed she was a woman, for I am not sure it is right to refer to someone by their sex when she had transcended her sex.”
(The Life of Macrina). A pagan education, such as the story of Troy’s sufferings, are depicted as stories of corrupt women, and instead Macrina is educated on the Psalms and the Wisdom of Solomon in her youth, which do not center women and are virtuous. She stays a virgin her whole life, as her fiance dies before they could marry. When describing her relationship with her younger brother Peter, it describes Macrina acting as both Father and Mother to the child. At her death, Gregory compares her to Job. A miraculous healing attributed to Macrina is that she healed herself of a breast tumor. Breast cancer being a disease that primarily affects women, this can easily be read that she healed herself of the infirmity of femininity through following Christ. All signs point to Macrina being an unwoman, a female Christian who had tasted masculine salvation and therefore transcended her sex.
The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas was a text originating in the last first century, with extant manuscripts in both Greek and Latin (The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas). In a semi-autobiographical style, it recounts a story of the arrest, imprisonment, and martyrdom of a woman named Perpetua. When Perpetua is condemned “to the beasts” to be executed brutally and publicly, she has a vision. The vision is a sign that she will be victorious (not by living but in the eyes of God), but a key component is Perpetua’s masculinity performance. If she is not saved from death, we must ask what exactly she is being saved from. In the vision she is fighting an Egyptian man, though later in the story she actually fights a heifer. She is stripped before the fight and “finds she is a man.” Other young men who are supporting her come and rub her in oil, as per the custom of the time. She vividly describes each action of the fight, as if reveling in the glory. She is triumphant, she dominates the Egyptian. The Egyptian, especially because he is a foreigner, an unman, is defeated and takes on the feminine role as Perpetua experiences masculine salvation. She is not liberated from death, she is in fact liberated unto death from her feminine life. She becomes a Christ-like figure for the virtue of transmuting passivity and domination into a noble death. She is an example of salvation being available to all people, but still having gender requirements.
I would also mention Melania the younger, Gerontius writes about her life seemingly at request of some authority in the church. He writes “In case anyone should criticize me for praising a woman, I would say that one should not refer to her as a woman but as a man because she behaved like a man.” (The Life of Melania the Younger). Melania wished to remain a virgin, but was forced to marry and bear her husband two children. However, after she fulfills her husband’s wishes, he supports her desire for virginity and asceticism and joins her in the ascetic lifestyle. They begin to view each other as brother and sister, rather than wife and husband. This shirking of wifely duties gives her agency, and she and her husband begin to act with equal authority as they decide to devote themselves to charity. She was saintly, performing various miraculous healings and leading many into the ascetic Christian lifestyle.
III. Conclusion
Jesus, crucified upon the cross, was a figure associated with shame, submission, and above all femininity. Because he is redeemed from the crucified state, and indeed that becomes the foundation of Christianity, salvation can be read as a journey from feminine to masculine. This combined with the egalitarian teachings of Christianity created a genre of stories recounting lives of women redeemed into masculinity. They are sympathetic characters; one is meant to understand that it is not their fault they happened to be born female. These women are taken as examples to early Christians, that through the salvation brought to them by Jesus, even women can be made better– the best women, of course, being a man to the ancient Mediterranean. Holiness and sainthood take these “women” from passive to active, making them unwomen.
Bibliography
Conway, Colleen M. Behold The Man: Jesus and Greco-Roman Masculinity. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Koester, Helmut. “The Apostolic Fathers and the Struggle for Christian Identity.” In The Expository Times 117, no. 4 (2006): 133-139.
Lives of Roman Christian Women, trans. and ed. Carolinne White. Penguin Books, 2010. Meeks, Wayne A. “The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Early Christianity.” In History of Religions 13, no. 3 (1974): 165-208. JSTOR https://www.jstor.org/stable/1061813
Moore, Stephen D. “Sex and the Single Apostle.” In God’s Beauty Parlor And Other Queer Spaces in and Around the Bible. Stanford University Press, 2002.
