true of the New Testament. “There is no positive evidence,” says Hampson, “that Jesus saw anything wrong with the sexism of his day.”46 And Nicola Slee provides some interesting statistics.47 Of the main characters in Jesus’s parables in Mark none are women; in Matthew there are eighty-five characters, of whom twelve are women (but ten are bridesmaids in one story!); in Luke there are 108, of whom nine are women. And this poor rating is capped, as traditionalists never tire in pointing out, by the appointment of the Twelve—patriarchs of the New Israel, and a missed opportunity if ever there was one.
For Christian feminists, what is more, Lisa Jardine’s two conflicting approaches represent the clash of two contrasting cultures. Because Christianity is an historical religion in which “primitive” remains a term of approbation, more than nominal respect must be accorded the historical record. But sexual egalitarianism, as we have seen, is a recent development with its origins in the ideology of the Enlightenment. Church feminists, in consequence, find themselves co-belligerents with a class of persons whose posture toward the past might best be described as arrogance mingled with anger. “Men (sic) will never be free,” wrote Denis Diderot, “until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”48 They are not encouraging words for the priesting of women.
Much of the polemic against the Christian past marshalled by feminists has, in fact, been freely adapted from the writings of the radical Enlightenment. In Beverley Clack’s exhaustive anthology Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition,49 Tertullian, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas precede Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Rousseau. The irony is that much of the weaponry used against the former originated with the latter, and was part and parcel of their hatred of monasticism and contempt for celibacy. All this, it has to be said, is more prejudicial to their case than many Christian feminists have grasped. Christianity, as an historical religion, is essentially retrospective: it locates authority in past events. The Enlightenment project was essentially prospective: it looked to a progressively unfolding future. Anthony Pagden’s characterization is apt:
Unlike either the Renaissance or the Reformation, the Enlightenment had begun not as an attempt to rescue some hallowed past, but as an assault on the past in the name of the future. “If a century could be described as ‘philosophical’ merely because it rejected the wisdom of past centuries,” wrote the mathematician and philosopher Jean D’Alembert “. . . then the eighteenth would have to be called the ‘century of Philosophy par excellence.’ It was a period which sought to overturn every intellectual assumption, every dogma, every “prejudice” (a favourite term) that had previously exercised any hold over the minds of men.50
Christian feminists need to be aware that association with those who entertain such contempt for the past (and the Christian past in particular) is worse than fraternizing with the enemy: it is tantamount to sawing off the branch on which they sit.
* * *
In feminist terms, the historical record is, as most secular feminists seem to agree, one of unbroken patriarchy and intermittent bouts of more or less serious misogyny. No age but the present is congenial to them. But there are those for whom such a bleak vision of the past is too much. If women and men are truly equal and in every respect socially equivalent things, they suppose, it must at some time have been more rosy. So the search was on. They persuaded themselves that in far flung places and at times far distant, things had been different: there must have been thriving matriarchal societies, which, alas fell in the course of time, to the rapacity of men. Primitive matriarchy, interestingly, was a speciality of Soviet and Chinese communist ideology. The Standard English language history of the People’s Republic of China,51 for example, begins with an account of matriarchal communities along the Yangtze valley around 2,500 BC. The claim is largely evidence-free (no explanation is offered of how such information could have been gleaned from the archaeological evidence). In less doctrinaire times it has been withdrawn. Christian feminists, as we shall see, have sought comfort in the speculative reconstruction of what have been called “the earliest Christianities,” “fragments of a faith forgotten” located a lost Golden Age, among the papyri of the Egyptian desert and in the fragmented records of Gnostic communities long dead.
More rationally, the question has to be why patriarchy endured so long and has been universal across cultures and continents. Is there, as some religious traditionalists have claimed, something “natural” or even inevitable about patriarchy? Is the scriptural imagery of a male God redeeming creation through the action of His Son grounded in a language written into the human genes and upon the human heart? Some modern theorists have concluded precisely that. Steven Goldberg’s book of 1977, The Inevitability of Patriarchy,52 with its exhaustive catalogue and systematic refutation of every recorded claim about the existence of matriarchal societies, was greeted with a predictable hail of criticism from left-leaning academe. More irritating to them still was a review of the first American edition, by the anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Persuasive . . . accurate. It is true, as Professor Goldberg points out that all the claims so glibly made about societies ruled by women are nonsense. We have no reason to believe that they ever existed . . . Men have always been the leaders in public affairs and the final authorities at home.”53
Goldberg’s thesis that social structures inevitably reflect and express essential biological, hormonal, and physical differences between women and men—despite its unpopularity in some quarters—has received a good deal of support in recent years from other analysts. The work of Simon Baron-Cohen54 squarely confronts the received wisdom (current at least since John Stuart Mill’s deeply flawed The Subjection of Women) that male and female are “social constructs.” In a rather less theoretical mode, Steven Rhoads makes a case for adapting social policy to take account of the basic differences of aim and outlook between women and men.55 He has shown, as one professor of anthropology tersely put it, that the “the Empress of androgyny has no clothes.”56
Matriarchy, like the existence of Amazons, has always been located more in the imagination than in reality—in the territory of Rider Haggard, rather than that of serious anthropology. It is becoming increasingly clear that the notion of a feminist Jesus and a first century world peopled with Christian women priests is similarly inventive. These things never existed except in the minds of those who desperately want them to be so. They are myths answering a pressing need. That mythology is the subject of the chapters which follow. This is a book about the tales people tell when precedent is needed in order to justify an action for which there is no precedent.
* * *
We begin, necessarily, with Jesus. There has been, over the years, a recurrent, and perhaps understandable, attempt to harness the Son of God to every passing social and political bandwagon. C. S. Lewis identified this as the “Christianity and . . .” syndrome.
My dear Wormwood,
The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call “Christianity And.” You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform.
