The Real Teaching of Jesus on Women

At a public lecture many years ago, a speaker surprised me by saying that some of the most sexist organizations on this planet have been the world’s great religions. Indeed many of them, he went on to say, claim to base such prejudiced attitudes on the inspired written word of God. It occurred to me then that the matter bore investigation. 

Knowing how far apart the belief and practice of any organization can sometimes drift, I wondered if this prejudice was a matter of fundamental doctrine for the great religions, or was it just how things happened to develop in practice for any number of the many reasons imaginable.  So I began to look afresh at the principal writings that the great religions hold sacred, to see how they estimated women, such as the Old and New Testaments, the Talmud, the Koran, and the sacred scriptures of the Buddhists and Hindus.  It was a discouraging investigation. 

If we start with the most ancient, the Hindu laws of Manu state: “In childhood a female remains subject to her father.  In youth a female is subject to her husband.  When her lord is dead she shall be subject to her sons.”  ‘A woman must never be independent.’   Indeed the sacred texts of the Hindus state that it is the highest duty of a wife to burn herself after her husband has died.  Some central streams of Buddhism believe that to be born a woman is due to bad karma.  A woman ought to pray to be re-born as a man in a future existence. The Koran regards a woman as ‘half a man.”  Forgetfulness overcomes a woman. They are ‘inherently weaker in rational judgment.”  Even the great western thinker Plato quotes Socrates approvingly: “Do you know anything at all practiced by mankind in which the male is not far better than the female.”  It’s hardly surprising that Plato’s pupil Aristotle, the tutor of Alexander the Great, didn’t even accept that women were legitimate human beings: they were “failed men” due to some mishap in the womb during the conception process. 

There is no doubt that the influence of the Church has profoundly shaped our culture in the West, and that has brought many good things for which we should be profoundly grateful.  But it does not take much research into either the sacred texts of the great religions or the history of their practice down the centuries to see that they have played a central role in fostering the disenfranchisement of women.  That did not stay within the Church’s sphere, for its religious influence has come to be expressed in most bodies of fundamental secular legislation and practice around the world, not just in the West.   

But I came to see eventually that the facts of the matter were much more complicated even than this.  This was not an influence that found an unwelcome reception in those over whom it was exercised. It seemed to me unmistakable that a pro-male and anti-female bias was buried deep within the human male psyche, independent of and long prior to anything we would today regard as a religious influence.  If this is the case, then it should come as less of a surprise to find so much overt sexism in fundamental religious texts, given the traditions out of which those religions have themselves grown.  A language’s slang vocabulary can reveal a great deal of what prejudices lie deep at the heart of any culture, and Bishop Shelby Spong was one of the first to point out how so many popular words for sexual intercourse display enormous male hostility and contempt for the female. 

One of the greatest libraries that ever existed was established at Nineveh , beside Mosul in modern Iraq , by the last of the Assyrian kings, Assurbanipal (died about 627 BC). He was known as Asenappar in the Hebrew Bible and as Sardanapalus to the Romans. He was one of the few kings in antiquity who could read and write, and was the only literate monarch in fifteen centuries of Assyrian Kings. History regards him as forming the first deliberately collected library.  Its significance for us here is that we can assume all ancient written works and records in cuneiform literature that existed in Mesopotamia , that most ancient cradle of civilization, were collected at Nineveh using all the resources of the mighty Assyrian Empire to do so.  It is an incomparable record of the earliest recorded stages of human history and our best source to discover where the anti-female bias in our history truly began. The remains of this library were unearthed in the latter part of the 19th century and comprised more than one thousand documents now in the care of the Iraqi Department of Antiquities and the British Museum .  

Most reputable scholars today will admit that several of those documents are the precursors of seminal documents that later went to form the foundations of the Judeo-Christian tradition, in particular the Book of Genesis, which is central to understanding the estimate of the female in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Genesis is an immensely profound work despite having been turned on its head all too often by well-meaning preachers. These worthy gentlemen have apparently convinced themselves that it is no more difficult to read and understand a three thousand year old text from a culture as remote from ours as is possible to imagine, than it is to read the morning newspaper.  

Genesis wrestles with an age-old issue that must at some stage come to perplex every living person. If we persist in thinking of God and God’s relation to the world, in the homely ways to which we have so long grown accustomed, then we are left with an insoluble problem, which is what the opening chapters of Genesis wrestles with. 

The world as we know it is replete with more than its fair share of suffering, disease, old age, infirmity, natural disasters, frailty, disappointment, betrayal and ultimately death. That kind of world cannot have come from the hand of a good God, so either God did not create the world or something went wrong.  Those indeed are the only two options we have in the mindset I have labeled “the Hamburger Universe.” 

That God did a good job originally but something went wrong, was the explanation the authors of Genesis went for, but what is really notable is that the blame for what went wrong was laid fairly and squarely at the feet of Eve, the mother of the human race. So now from some of the earliest sources in the human record we have the female blamed for everything that’s wrong with the world, (even though it should be noted that in the Nineveh documents a minor god is blamed as well).  I had often noted in my biblical studies years ago that whenever something went really wrong, some woman was usually blamed. 

This prejudice against women as the cause of all our woes has descended as an integral part of most of our cultures and history, and it’s hardly surprising that eventually the distrust and avoidance of women became a central religious duty and indeed the very badge of holiness in the West. 

But we have to ask if those ancient texts are the root of the anti-female bias in the male psyche, or did those texts themselves grow out of an already existing bias? If it’s the former, then a major element in rectifying the situation would be to ask the religions to clean up their act as far as the female is concerned.   If it’s the latter, then we have a far deeper problem that originates way beyond the realms of rational thought and discourse, rooted in the shady realms of the unconscious, the subliminal, and taboo.  It probably also is connected to those aspects of the female that are related to the mysterious, their closeness to the facts of birth and the renewal of life, the unavoidable attraction they hold for men which undermines males’ perceived power, and those aspects of the female that provoked cries of ritual uncleanness in every culture of which we have knowledge.

Once we understand all of that we will have gained a major insight into the operation of religion and its rationale for the subjugation of women over the past four thousand years. Indeed some of the worst atrocities for which religions were responsible have come when the seal of divine approval is used to justify our wars, fears, hatreds and phobias and the oppression of the female must surely rank as one of the most outstanding examples of this. 

So even if the religions have historically been some of the most sexist organizations on earth it seems they were more the agencies who exacerbated what was already there than that they were the origins of it.  In turn that would mean that addressing the anti-female bias would have to be the first priority for any body of teaching that purported to be in the vanguard of spiritual evolution. It would also have to be the touchstone of its validity. 

This raises some serious issues.  Less than two decades after the Passion of Jesus, and some two decades before the appearance of the first Gospel of the New Testament, St. Paul started to put pen to paper. Over the next fifteen years more than half of the New Testament as we know it came from his hand, and those writings preceded all the Gospels. 

Paul never mentions the quintessential Christian female, Mary the Mother of Jesus, in his extensive writings. He states women will be saved only through motherhood (1 Tim. 2: 15 ); and that they ought to be subject to men.  There is little doubt among scholars of the New Testament that Paul saw in the growing emancipation of women in the Roman world, a major strand in the breakdown of orderly society, and he believed that Christians should adhere to the traditional strict lines of family life.  Peter says that women should be cherished because they are weaker, and the context implies he is not just thinking of physical weakness (1 Peter).  Things hardly improved when St. Jerome came on the scene and justified marriage only because it could produce more virgins.  The highest praise Augustine could manage for women, was to regard them as a “malum necessarium,” ‘a necessary evil.’ 

If we look back twenty or thirty years earlier than St. Paul ’s writings, we can see the cultural and religious background from which Jesus emerged. He had, of course, made enormous waves among the religious traditions of his day.  It was a time when at every religious service the men prayed; “Blessed are you O Lord who has not made me a woman,” or worse, “Blessed be God who has not created me a heathen, a slave or a woman.”