Women Priests, Vegetarians, and Summer Dresses
Fourth-Century Church Tales
Women priests, vegetarians, and summer dresses
Mount Athos, jutting up from the Aegean Sea in northeastern
Greece, is a place of austere traditions. Twenty Greek Orthodox monasteries
cling to its rocky slopes and to a way of life that has excluded women
and even female farm animals since 1060. Yet ironically, one of its
monastic libraries has produced tantalizing evidence of the important
role of women in the first centuries of the Christian church.
This surprise appears in a manuscript that François Bovon,
now Frothingham professor of the history of religion at the Divinity
School, and a colleague from the University of Geneva, Bertrand Bouvier,
discovered in 1974. In the Xenophontos Monastery library they found
a fourteenth-century copy of the apocryphal Acts of Philip
that was based on a text written a millennium earlier--a manuscript
that proved to be far more complete than any other known to scholars.
Now, after a quarter-century of philological and historical scholarship,
Bovon and Bouvier have translated the Xenophontos version of the Acts
of Philip into French and have published, with the help of Bovon's
former student Frédéric Amsler, a critical edition of
this manuscript and other Greek manuscripts related to the apostle
Philip. An English translation will appear in a few years. Where scholars
of a century ago tended to dismiss the work as "grotesque" or the
writing of an "idiot," Bovon says, "I like it. It's one of the few
expressions from antiquity of popular culture."
Among the revelations turned up in this unexpurgated Acts of Philip,
especially in the story of a visit to Hell, are glimpses of a heretical
community whose members may have written or transmitted the text.
Devoted to ascetic practices, the group flourished in Asia Minor during
the fourth century A.D. Members were to eat no meat, drink no wine,
shun wealth, and abstain from sexual intercourse. Both sexes wore
men's clothing made only from plant fibers. Even the sacrament of
the Eucharist was modified, with water replacing wine. Sect members
believed that this level of purity not only guaran-
teed salvation after death, but allowed them to "talk with God" in
this life.
Within the community, women as well as men served at all levels. One
list mentions "presbytides" (female elders, or priestesses) alongside
"presbyters" (male elders, or priests). Deaconesses are paired with
deacons, as are virgins with eunuchs. (It is unknown whether the latter
rank required surgery or merely celibacy.)
Such groups did not escape the notice of the official church. The
council of Gangra (circa A.D. 343) declared such ascetic excesses
to be anathema, and another fourth-century council, at Laodicea, "forbade
the appointment of presbytides," says Bovon.
Also included in the lively Acts of Philip are fascinating
characters like Philip's sister, Mariamne, who may well have served
as a role model for women in the fourth-century ascetic community.
Bovon believes her to be Mary Magdalene of the canonical Gospels;
the name "Mariamne" is a variant of "Mary," and when the third-century
Christian writer Origen mentions the Magdalene, he uses the quite
similar name "Mariamme."
Mariamne supports her brother in his missionary work. When Philip
first receives his assignment from the risen Jesus, he burst into
tears--a lapse that causes Christ to tell Mariamne that her brother
is acting like a sissy. "Go with him wherever he goes," the Savior
says, adding, "And, Mariamne, change your clothes...Don't wear that
summer dress." (Such dialogue illustrates the vernacular language
that occasionally crops up in the apocrypha.) As Philip preaches,
baptizes, and heals a blind man--rubbing the sightless eyes with saliva
he dips from his sister's mouth--Mariamne also recruits converts,
including the governor's wife, and baptizes the women. Her active
participation is quite consistent with the concept of a contemporary
female priesthood.
~Peter
H. Desmond
François
Bovon e-mail address: francois_bovon@harvard.edu
Christian
Apocrypha website: www.ac.wwu.edu/~xnapocry-/xnalinks.html
Apocrypha
Now
What
is a heterodox text like the Acts of Philip doing in
an orthodox bastion like Mount Athos?
Religious literature flourished in the first centuries of the Christian
era, Bovon explains. The organized church soon felt the need to distinguish
among books that were canonical (divinely inspired), pious (useful
for private reading), and apocryphal (theologically incorrect). By
the sixth century, the Acts of Philip and similar texts about
other apostles--which purported to relate their missionary activities--had
been relegated to the disapproved list. Yet they retained an avid
readership: even in the ninth century, Patriarch Photius of Constantinople
was fuming that such works were full of "nonsense" and "contradictions."
Some of the books' popularity sprang from the fact that their protagonists
were saints whose feast days demanded edifying tales of their accomplishments;
religious art made use of scenes from their lives. In the Acts
of Philip, for example, the apostle eventually converts to Christianity
such unlikely candidates as a talking leopard and an equally eloquent
goat. (Bovon--recalling Isaiah 11:6, in which the leopard lies down
with the kid--suggests of this incident, "There are several levels
on which we can read it. Redemption through Christ reaches not only
humanity, but all creation.")
The church, therefore, struck a practical compromise: manuscript copyists
in metropolitan centers omitted heretical passages while transmitting
the rest of the apocrypha to future generations; in remote monasteries
like Mount Athos, on the other hand, libraries preserved the unexpurgated
versions. "Monks tend to be solitary and quirky," Bovon explains.
"They may enjoy reading peculiar religious works." He notes, for example,
that the most famous of the Gnostic texts, the Nag Hammadi library,
survived because they were copied by monks.
