In other New Testament texts, the term “old women” works as a name tag for what is wrong. In the Pastoral Epistles, part of the so-called disputed Pauline, “old wives tales” is a category used to label false teaching (1 Tim 4:7).8 Old women are requested not to teach young women to slander or drink too much (1 Tim 3:11; Tit 2:3–5) and young widows are blamed for running around, gossiping and saying things they should not say (1 Tim 5:3–15).9 Women shall be saved through childbirth (1 Tim 2:15). Such requirements hide stereotyping and “othering” and gender rhetoric is used to blame. In the same letters, slaves are told to be obedient and not to talk back to their masters (1 Tim 6:1–2; Tit 2:9).10 The problem is not only that the text is “othering” women; several groups seem to be excluded. Women, children and slaves are also regulated in the so-called household codes, for example, in the Pseudo-Pauline “Letter to the Colossians”:
Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is your acceptable duty in the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart. Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord (Col 3:18–22).
The three relationship pairs—wives/husbands, children/parents and slaves/masters—may work rhetorically as isolated parameters, but not
8 Joanna Dewey, “Women on the Way: A Reconstruction of Late First-Century Women’s Storytelling,” in Holly E. Hearon and Philip Ruge-Jones (eds), The Bible in Ancient and Modern Media: Story and Performance (Eugene, Or.: Cascade Books, 2009), 36–48. Jouette M. Bassler, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, Abingdon New Testament Commentaries (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996).
9 These texts as discussed in Kartzow, op. cit. (note 4), 164.
10 More on slavery, see Bernadette J. Brooten and Jacqueline L. Hazelton (eds), Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies (New York: Palgrave, MacMillan, 2010);
Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
in the real life of the ancient world.11 Instead of hierarchical organized pairs, a complex web of intersecting relationships in which authority and power were negotiated and distributed corresponds better to the everyday experience of the first Jesus followers.
I will use “intersectionality” to rethink this cultural complexity.
Intersectionality as a theoretical concept has only very recently been applied to biblical scholarship,12 although the basic ideas and concerns have been articulated by African and African-American scholarship and womanist biblical interpreters in particular for some years now.13 The basic idea is the following: instead of examining gender, race, class, age and sexuality as separate categories, intersectionality explores how these categories overlap and mutually modify and reinforce each other.14 Intersectionality enables interpreters to “ask the ‘other’ question” and thereby make visible categories that otherwise are overlooked or downplayed.15
11 Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, “ ‘Asking the Other Question’: An Intersectional Approach to Galatians 3:28 and the Colossian Household Codes,” in Biblical Interpretation 18, no. 4–5 (2010), 364–89.
12 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Introduction: Exploring the Intersections of Race, Gender, Status, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies,” in Laura Nasrallah and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (eds), Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 1–23.
Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, “Intersectional Studies,” in Julia M. O’Brien (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Gender Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
13 Sarojini Nadar, “The Bible in and for Mission: A Case Study of the Council of World Mission,” in Missionalia 37, no. 2 (2009), 226. See also Brian K. Blount et al. (eds), True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007) and numerous works by Schüssler Fiorenza and for example Kwok (note 4).
14 See for example Kathy Davis, “Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful,” in Feminist Theory 9 (2008), 67–83; Gudrun-Axeli Knapp, “Race, Class, Gender: Reclaiming Baggage in Fast Travelling Theories,” in European Journal of Women’s Studies 12, no. 3 (2005), 249–65; Leslie McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30, no. 3 (2005), 1771–800; Ann Phoenix and Pamela Pattynama (eds), European Journal of Women’s Studies (Issue on Intersectionality), vol.
13 (2006); Sumi Cho, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, “Toward a Field of Intersectional Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis,” in Signs (Theme Issue:
Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory 38), no. 4 (2013), 785–810.
15 Mari Matsuda argues: “The way I try to understand the interconnection of all forms of subordination is through a method I call ‘ask the other question.’ When I see something that looks racist, I ask, ‘Where is the patriarchy in this?’ When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, ‘Where is the heterosexism in this?’ When I see something that looks homophobic, I ask, ‘Where are the class interests in this?’,” Mari J. Matsuda, “Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory out
In the social world of the New Testament, ethnicity, class, gender and age/
generation worked together and mutually constructed each other. A man could be either free or a slave—although slave men were not considered real men.16 Different rules worked for women depending on their status: slave women had no chance to follow the gender codes where honor and invisibility were the norm, as was expected of freeborn women.17 Small children, slave and free, may have played together and had some kind of schooling together, but the life waiting for them had clear borders and separated them into different social worlds according to gender and social class.18
So who were the insiders in the communities that produced the Christian sacred scripture? Who were those considered to be in control of themselves, their choices, their bodies? And who was the other? It is tempting to say that for Paul, free adult Jewish men like himself were the ultimate insiders.
He admitted that “in Christ Jesus,” all other parameters were of less value (Gal 3:28), but the metanarrative he wrote into what that privilege was belonged to a specific position in society. The other could be welcomed into the spiritual reality as long as they followed the code of obedience and submission according to gender, class, age and race. How do we deal with this message without letting the New Testament work like a text of terror?
We have to read against the grain and with a hermeneutics of suspicion.19 Paul and the Pauline traditions belonged to a specific cultural and social context, as the historical critical method has taught us. Theology is formulated accordingly, with the help of bodies, relationships and social interaction, as intersectionality may help us realize. Nevertheless, the Pauline letters, disputed or not, belong to the sacred scripture of Christianity. They are considered part of the Word of God. As a storyteller, Paul brings good news to the table, such as the credo of Galatians 3:28, but in his name, we also find stereotypes and othering. For good reasons, he has a firm status within the church, academy and Lutheran communities. I will nevertheless suggest that we read him in light of other, less famous texts from the Christian scripture.
of Coalition,” in Stanford Law Review 43 (1990), 1187. See also Jennifer C. Nash,
“Re-Thinking Intersectionality,” in Feminist Review 89 (2008), 12.
16 Halvor Moxnes, “Conventional Values in the Hellenistic World: Masculinity,” in Per Bilde, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Lise Hannestad and Jan Zahle (eds), Conventional Values of the Hellenistic Greeks, Studies in Hellenistic Civilization, 8 (Aarhus:
Aarhus University Press, 1997), 263–84.
17 Anna Rebecca Solevag, Birthing Salvation: Gender and Class in Early Christian Childbearing Discourse (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
18 Carolyn Osiek, Margaret Y. MacDonald, and Janet H. Tulloch, A Woman’s Place:
House Churches in Earliest Christianity (Minneapolis, MN.: Fortress Press, 2006).
19 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (London: SCM Press, 1983).