Chris Geraghty, Virgins and Jezebels

           

- This very clearly written book is a fascinating history of early Christian writings and their bias against women. They have a long intellectual lineage - Plato and Aristotle and their students principally. 

- Geraghty provides a detailed analysis of a wide variety of early Christian texts written in the first three centuries of the Christian era, including the gospels and the letters of St Paul. 

- His expertise across all areas of early church history and scriptural scholarship is impressive. It's mostly an academic analysis despite the occasional misplaced breeziness. 

- Unfortunately he is also ahistorical at times. The notion that Jesus was a ‘feminist’ jars. He may have attracted women to his cause, and welcomed them to the gatherings of his followers, such as Mary Magdalen, but how significant was that? Jesus could well have been a sexually active and experienced young man. Good on him. (Not that Geraghty claims this). But his 12 apostles were all men. 

- The notion of ‘sexism’ prevailing in the early Christian Era is a misnomer. That description belongs to the 20th century. Sexual polarity was deeply ingrained and taken for granted in all ancient beliefs and societies. And it was widely celebrated in art and culture - ‘man the vision, woman the soul’. Gender equality and feminism only really emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And only in the West. The Islamic traditions across the globe prove that point. And like Islam the Judaeo Christian tradition was born in the Middle East.

- The chapter on the Acts of the Apostles is excellent. As are the chapters on Paul. Although there’s something about Paul that Geraghty doesn’t quite get right. He refuses to entertain the distinct possibility that Paul was gay, despite plenty of evidence, not only in what he wrote but in his preferred lifestyle as a solitary itinerant preacher. (Christos Tsiolkas in his superb novel Damascus certainly gets it).

- Geraghty ruthlessly and deliciously savages the utter misogyny of the early Fathers of the Church like Tertullian, Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria. They were obsessed with damning the everyday female practices of different hairstyles, make-up and fashion. Women had to be either modest, quiet and covered, or they were whores. The wide embrace of female virginity in many communities, based on a form of Gnostic ‘angelism’, was celebrated as ideal and normal. Virginity was the holiest of states, more honourable than marriage. It mirrored how we would be living in Heaven. 

- This sort of misogyny in the early Christian communities and in the writings of influential leaders was a reflection of the times. It was vicious and ignorant but universally accepted and uncontroversial: 

The ‘orthodox’ Christian churches sought to be part of the world, accepted in the wider community, melding in as part of the landscape - and the world was not ready to accept Jesus’ kingdom preaching or his way of involving women in his ministry.... From then on, Christianity would be a top-down institution governed by dogma, by theologians and bishops, by a canon of books, by rules and tradition, and by men. 

- Regarding Jesus and his revolutionary perspective, Geraghty is surprisingly fundamentalist. He sees Jesus as a rebel-rousing agitator for the poor and marginalised in his community of the time, including his women followers. 

- But he was far more than that. As Paul realised, Jesus was embedded in the Jewish Old Testament tradition, taking meaning as the Messiah, the liberator, the long awaited Saviour, the ultimate fulfilment of ancient prophecies. He can only be fully understood in that broader traditional context. 

- Nevertheless, Geraghty has written an intoxicating treatise which deserves to be widely read.