Lusitania Sacra . 40 (julho-dezembro 2019) 215-239 doi: https://doi.org/10.34632/lusitaniasacra.2019.9760
Silence and subversion: the public behavior of women prophets in early Christian popular literature
NAIARA LEÃO
PhD student of Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean at the University of Iowa naiara-leao@uiowa .edu https://orcid org/0000-0003-0014-6942.
Abstract: Women portrayed in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, in the Acts of Paul (and Thecla), in the Acts of Thomas and in the Gospel of Mary of Magdala have visions, dreams, auditions, and bodily experiences that they deem divinely inspired or related to the “Spirit ”. These are prophetic experiences – understood in the ancient Mediterranean as a communication process between humans and the divine with the aim of reaching a larger audience – despite not being traditionally labeled as such . To validate their prophetic activity, women in these stories adopt changes in attire, disregard family and marriage, and adopt public functions . Such behavior, as well as their silence outside of moments of ecstasy, is a way of asserting publicly their identity as prophets . Keywords: Prophecy, Early Christian women, Early Christianity .
Silêncio e subversão: a postura pública de profetisas na literatura popular cristã antiga Resumo: As mulheres da Paixão de Perpétua e Felicidade, dos Atos de Paulo e Tecla, dos Atos de Tomé e do Evangelho de Maria Madalena têm visões, sonhos, audições e experiências corporais sensoriais que consideram divinamente inspiradas ou relacionadas com o Espírito Santo . Estas são experiências proféticas – entendidas no Mediterrâneo antigo como um processo de comunicação entre seres humanos e o divino com o objetivo de atingirem uma audiência mais ampla – apesar de não serem tradicionalmente nomeadas como tais . Para validarem estas atividades, as profetisas dessas histórias adotam mudanças em vestimentas, uma atitude de negligência em relação à família e ao casamento, e executam funções religiosas públicas . Tais comportamentos, assim como o facto de se manterem silenciosas fora dos momentos de êxtase, validam publicamente o seu caráter profético . Palavras-chave: Profecia, Mulheres e cristianismo antigo, Cristianismo primitivo .
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Introduction
In the popular literature of early Christianity, women oftentimes have divinely inspired dreams, visions, bodily experiences, and give inspired speeches. Perpetua, from the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, gets to know the fate of her group of friends in a dream where she climbs a ladder to heaven1. She also sees her dead brother in a vision, as an encouragement to pray for his suffering in the afterlife. Similarly, Tryphaena from Acts of Paul and Thecla communicates with her deceased daughter in a dream that prompts her to support the female apostle of Paul, in order to get intercession in favor of her daughter2. Thecla herself has a vision of the Lord sitting in the form of Paul among the multitude. Furthermore, Mygdonia, the ascetic disciple of Judas Thomas in theActs of Thomas is a dream interpreter3. These are only a few examples. In the late Mediterranean world where these stories were produced, dreams, visions, ecstasies, divination, and prophecy were abundant and seen as parts of the same phenomenon: the communication with the divine. The comparative scholar of ancient Mediterranean religions Martti Nissinen proposes a prophetic model that describes prophecy essentially as the transmission of a message from the divine realm to a person, and from this person to a larger audience4. Scholars of early Christianity corroborate that there was a widespread ancient perception of prophecy as a communication process between humans and the divine5. However, studies on early Christian prophecy largely tend to narrow their focus of attention on primary sources from New Testament canonical writings – such as the book of Acts and debates around women speech in pseudo-Pauline letters – and on Patristics commentaries of the Montanist movement6.
1 The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, I 3. . 2 Acts of Paul and Thecla, 28 and 21, respectively . 3 Acts of Thomas, 91 . 4 Martti Nissinen – What Is Prophecy? An Ancient Near Eastern Perspective . In Inspired Speech: Prophecy in the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of Herbert B. Huffmon . London; New York: T & T Clark International, 2004, p 17–37;. Martti Nissinen – Ancient Prophecy: Near Eastern, Biblical, and Greek Perspectives . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, p . 3-54 . 5 Laura S . Nasrallah – An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity . Harvard Theological Studies . 52 (2003) 1-28 . 6 The classic and most comprehensive study on the topic is still today David E . Aune – Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World . Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans, 1983 . Other examples that focus on Biblical literature are Laura S . Nasrallah – An Ecstasy of Folly…; Jill E . Marshall – Women Praying and Prophesying in Corinth: Gender and Inspired Speech in First Corinthians . Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament . 2 . Reihe 448 . Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017 . On Montanism, see Christine Trevett – Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy . Cambridge: Cambridge Univ . Press, 1996; Antti Marjanen – Female Prophets among Montanists . In Prophets Male and Female: Gender and Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Ancient Near East . Ed . Jonathan Stökl and Corrine L . Carvalho . Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013, p . 127–43 . Rex Butler – The New Prophecy and “New Visions”: Evidence of Montanism in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas . Mountain Home, AR: BorderStone Press, LLC, 2014 .
216 Silence and subversion: the public behavior of women prophets in early Christian popular literature
On the other hand, studies about women prophets in the popular literature of early Christianity are scant. Instead, women are most frequently analyzed under the lenses Biblical prophetism, and of authority and church offices for their roles as widows and ascetics. Therefore, despite the evident connection between ancient prophecy and women’s experiences of dreams, visions, sensorial experiences, inspired speech or messages described in the apocryphal acts, gospels, and martyrdom accounts, women in this body of literature are not commonly associated to the prophetic tradition. They are not labeled as prophetesses neither in the textual sources nor in the scholarly field of ancient Mediterranean prophecy. Does that mean they were not performing prophecy? What work is the label doing, especially in relation to gender? Does the praxis of naming legitimate certain practices? In this essay, I depart from these observations and inquiries to analyze women’s relationship to prophecy in four texts from the 2nd and 3rd century: the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, Acts of Paul, the Acts of Thomas, and the Gospel of Mary of Magdala. Here, they are presented under the rubric of “popular literature of early Christianity”, a designation suggested by Richard A. Norris Jr. for texts that were never actual candidates for official or canonical status but were undoubtedly popular, achieving considerable influence on early Christian practice and belief7. I purposefully select texts outside of the Biblical canon to expand the scope of the scholarship that has been traditionally concerned with the topic of prophecy. Are there women prophets in these stories at all? What makes a prophetess in early Christianity? Are women engaging in particular forms of behavior that makes them recognized or not as prophetesses? How does this dynamic of recognition and labeling operate in primary sources and in scholarly discourse? These are questions I explore here. My purpose is not to pose an exhaustive discussion of prophecy in each of the texts, nor to analyze in detail the context in which they were produced evaluating to which extent these literary works can offer evidence of historical practices. Instead, my goals are to look at how the topic appears throughout this body of literature, and how it relates to broader discussions of power, gender and speech in early Christian debates. At last, to qualify these texts as objects of study of prophecy.
On discussions about early Christian women prophets, see Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity . Ed . Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J . Walker . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; Women & Christian Origins . Ed . Ross Shepard and Mary Rose D’Angelo . New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 . In terms of primary sources, we can observe much attention is given to the mention of the daughters of Phillip in the book of Acts, Pauline and pseudo-Pauline letters; Tertullian’s treatises On Baptism, On the Veiling of the Virgins, and Prescriptions against Herectics; Eusebius’s History of the Church 3 and 5 and Epiphanius’s Panarion 49 . 7 Richard A . Jr . Norris – Apocryphal Writings and Acts of the Martyrs . In The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature . Edited by Frances Young, Lewis Ayres, and Andrew Louth . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p . 28–35 .
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Identifying prophecy
Martti Nissinen defines prophecy as a scholarly construct that attempts to explain a common phenomenon found throughout the ancient Mediterranean and that is present in Near Eastern, Greek and Biblical sources. Building upon the work of another Near Eastern scholar, Manfred Weippert, Nissinen defines prophecy as a social communication process that involves a divine sender of a message that was received and transmitted by a human – theprophet – to an audience8. Accordingly, prophecy requires the followings: “1. the sender of the message, believed to be a superhuman agent; 2. the message and its verbal or symbolic performance; 3. the transmitter of the message, or a mediator (the prophet); and 4. the human recipient(s) of the message”9.
His approach aims to be sufficiently broad to be adopted by scholars working with cross-cultural comparative methods – therefore useful for Late Antique Mediterranean Religions – but specific enough to overcome the religious connotations of the word, and a Bible-centered scholarly tradition that tends to use biblical prophets as the yardstick for other materials. I find it particularly useful to work with sources in which prophecy is not explicitly labeled as such, as is the case in this essay. In an earlier work, Nissinen argues that prophecy subjects the prophet to a specific social role and function – giving him/her “a condition of ‘otherness’ that is incompatible with the way of life of an average citizen”10. He also affirms that ancient prophecy has an evident predictive characteristic that helps humans deal with future choices rather than interpreting past events. However, he also highlights that conceptual definitions are working tools that should not be fixed but develop with its applications. Early Christianity, for instance, has particularities that tie prophecy to interpreting and teaching the scripture, speaking and preaching, as he points out11. The application of Nissinen’s conceptual framework demonstrates that many of the episodes involving women’s dreams, visions, bodily experiences and inspired speeches in the popular literature of early Christianity are prophetic. Therefore, there are women prophets in these texts. But the assertion of their identity as prophets,
8 Manfred Weippert – Prophetie im Alten Orient . Neues Bibel-Lexikon . 3 (1997) 196-200 . Translated and quoted in Martti Nissinen – Ancient Prophecy, p . 19–23 . 9 Martti Nissinen – Ancient Prophecy, p . 21 . 10 Martti Nissinen – What Is Prophecy?, p . 22 . 11 Martti Nissinen – What is prophecy?, p . 19 .
218 Silence and subversion: the public behavior of women prophets in early Christian popular literature and even of the prophetic message itself, depends on their public behavior. In some cases, they subvert ancient gender norms by rejecting marriage and familial duties related to sex and motherhood. In others, they veil/unveil, cut their hair short or loosen it, adjusting their attire to cause the desired effect to be bold or modest. Yet in others, they adopt public functions as preachers, missionaries and writers. There are also cases in which the assertion of the prophetic identity comes in the form of maintaining silence outside moments of ecstasy. It is not them who speak, but only God who speaks through them.
Perpetua, from the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, writer and spokesperson
The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas is a first-person account written in 203 C.E in Carthage, North Africa, by Vibia Perpetua, an early Christian martyr. It narrates her final days in prison before being executed in a public amphitheater with four members of her household, including a pregnant servant, Felicitas. The text is known from an early Latin version, a later Greek version and a short version called Acta Minora. 12 It has a preface and a conclusion, attributed to an editor – believed to be Tertullian – and a diary with detailed descriptions of dreams. Perpetua’s authorship is now mostly accepted, which makes this the earliest known work of a Christian female writer. In the story, Perpetua is pressured by her family to pay tribute to the gods of the Empire in order to avoid death, but she refuses to do so. She narrates in detail three main dreams/visions she has in prison: one of a ladder that takes her to heaven; one of a conversation with her deceased brother; and a third one of a fight with an Egyptian man wherein she is stripped and sees herself as a man. She instructs someone else to write about the day of her death and to compile everything. Throughout the report, Perpetua goes through at least seven experiences of communication with the divine13. She hears “the Spirit” during baptism14; has visions/dreams;15 sensorial experiences “tasting a sweetness” she “cannot
12 Candida R . Moss – Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012, p . 130 . 13 I worked with the English translations by R E. . Wallis, trans . A . Cleveland Coxe: The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas . In Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers down to A.D, vol . 3 . Ed . Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson . New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007, p . 697–703; Thomas J . Heffernan – The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity . Oxford: OUP, 2012 . The citations are from R E. . Wallis . 14 The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, para . I 2. . 15 The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, I 3,. II 3,. II 4,. III 2. . In the English translations, both names are used to describe the same experiences, and therefore a differentiation is not clear . In the Latin text, visio and ostension are used interchangeably . See: Patricia Cox Miller – Perpetua and Her Diary of Dreams . In Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture . Princeton, N J:. Princeton University Press, 1994, p . 148–83 . In the semantic analysis of Patricia Cox Miller, Perpetua marks small differences between the two terms . First, she asks to see “a visio, a technical onorilogical term designating a prophetic dream ”. Later, the use of ostension “denotes a type of
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describe”;16 and avoids physical pain by being “in the Spirit and in ecstasy”17. The analysis of these experiences according to Nissinen’s criteria is summarized in Table 1. Perpetua’s ladder vision and the sweet tasting are grouped as parts of a single episode.
Table 1. Weippert’s and Nissinen’s criteria applied to Perpetua
Transmitter Divine Audience Social Message Predictive sender Function Direct Indirect Direct Indirect II.2: Hears Spirit ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ during baptism I.3: Ladder vision (ends with sweet ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ tasting) II.3: First vision of ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ her brother II.4 Second vision ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ of her brother III.2 Arena vision ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ IV.3 Ecstasy during ✓ ✓ beasts’ attack
The analysis reveals that four of Perpetua’s experiences fully fulfill Nissinen’s criteria. This result considers Perpetua’s writing as a type oftransmission , and future audience as a valid audience (both “indirect”). The distinction between direct and indirect is not positioned by Nissinen but was added by me for clarification. In fact, Nissinen and other comparative scholars state that written communication and even non-verbal communication (symbolic acts) are valid expressions of intuitive prophecy18. Moreover, transmission of messages through writing for future readers is a well-established feature of Second Temple prophecy – through the fixation of prophecy and the pesher – and in early Christianity – through the gospels and teachings of Jesus. Moreover, Perpetua demonstrates a deep awareness of her role
figurative revelation that explains divine secrets ”. Patricia Cox Miller builds her interpretation on a citation of Jaqueline Amat – Songes et Visions . Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1985, p . 68 . According to Amat, ostension denotes “a striking scene, close to prodigious, that manifests divine power ”. 16 The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, I 3. . 17 The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, VI 3. . 18 Martti Nissinen – Ancient Prophecy, p . 22–23 .
220 Silence and subversion: the public behavior of women prophets in early Christian popular literature as a transmitter. The editor and writer of the prologue affirms that his task is to “obey the command of the most blessed Perpetua” to “add one more testimony” to Christians, in a probable reference not only to her request but also to the emerging hagiographical culture of Christian Lives19. Regarding other criteria, all experiences, except for the ecstasy, have a clear sender – sometimes designated as the “Spirit” or the “Lord,” sometimes not named but highlighted by the use of the passive voice (“this was shown to me”, “I was awakened”) 20. The sender reveals amessage not previously known which is transmitted to others – brother, fellow martyrs, and readers. It is worth mentioning that Perpetua is selective about which message to convey since her writing is not a comprehensive description of her martyrdom, nor a narration of daily facts in the dungeons or at court. Instead, it is a selection of remarkable experiences, a “diary of dreams”, as Patricia Cox Miller calls it21. Perpetua not only writes but also builds her message, as a legacy that she knows, as a martyr, will influence many Christians. She performs, on at least three occasions, a social function that gives her a condition of “otherness” which differentiates her not only from other citizens (from whom she was already distinguished by her prisoner and probable martyr condition) but also from other martyrs, women and ultimately Christians. She is aware of her unique status (“And I, who knew that I was privileged to converse with the Lord”) and ability to influence situations (“But I trusted that my prayer would bring help to his suffering”)22. She was, as Peter Brown describes, the group’s “spokesman and moral leader”23. Finally, Perpetua’s predictive character appears clearly in four visions.
Princess bride, Mygdonia and Mnesara, from the Acts of Thomas
TheActs of Thomas is an early third-century pseud epigraphy attributed to Judas Thomas, presented as Jesus’s twin brother. Because of its tendencies to encratism and Manichaeism, scholars have assigned its origin to East Syria. The text is accessible in Syriac manuscripts from the seventh and six centuries, and in a Greek version24. It is one of the major apocryphal acts and the only to have survived in its entirety. As it's characteristic of the genre of Acts, the text narrates the Apostle Thomas’s journey after Jesus’s death. His mission to India was filled with miracles,
19 The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, V 3. . 20 “This was shown to me” is at I 3,. II 3. and II 4;. “awakened” in the end of I 3. . 21 Patricia Cox Miller – Perpetua and Her Diary of Dreams. 22 The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, I . 3 and II 3. . 23 Peter Brown – The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity . New York: Columbia Univ . Press, 1988, p . 73 . 24 Petra Heldt – New Testament Apocrypha . In The Blackwell Companion to the New Testament . Edited by David E . Aune . Blackwell Companions to Religion . Chichester, U K. :. Blackwell; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, p . 666 .
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ascetic conversions, prayers, and hymns; there are at least ten episodes of visions, dreams, and auditions25. Most of them take place in the presence of the apostle and are shared by two or more people. They are often as simple and succinct as a voice approvingly saying “amen” from heaven26. At least four of these episodes involve female characters: the visit Christ pays to a bride and her groom 27; the manifestation of a demon that “no one except a woman and the apostle could see” 28; the dream interpretation performed by Mygdonia, one of Thomas’ converted ascetics29; and the vision of a young man that made Mnesara wake up from sleep and find her husband who was escaping prison30. Table 2 summarizes the prophetic episodes in the Acts of Thomas. This and the following analyses do not distinguish direct from indirect transmission and audience. Unlike Perpetua, the women described in the apocryphal acts and in the Gospel of Mary are not historical writers31.
Table 2. Weippert’s and Nissinen’s criteria applied to women in the Acts of Thomas
Divine Social Message Transmitter Audience Predictive sender Function 11. Princess bride sees ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ Christ 91. Mygdonia ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ interprets dream 154-155. Mnesara sees ✓ ✓ ✓ a young man *42-46. Woman and ✓ ✓ apostle see the demon
25 Acts of Thomas, paragraphs 11-12, 24, 27 (with two distinct episodes), 44-46, 91-92, 121, 145, 154-155, 158 . I worked with English translations: The Acts of Thomas . In The Apocryphal New Testament: Being the Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses ; with Other Narratives and Fragments. Ed . M . R . James . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986 . [Jan . 2019] . Available at: www:
222 Silence and subversion: the public behavior of women prophets in early Christian popular literature
In the Acts of Thomas, the story of the vision of a demon has an uncommon structure. First, its sender is the devil (still, a super human agent). Secondly, the demon first speaks to the apostle and only later addresses the woman. Their dialogue not only happens first, but the demon’s message is mainly directed to apostle. Thomas provokes the demon to manifest while the woman maintains a passive posture. The apostle is the mediator. For these reasons, this episode does not characterize the woman as a prophet. It is the apostle who takes this function. However, two of the other women’s episodes match all criteria established by Nissinen. There is a cleardivine sender of a message that is always predictive but also instructive. When Jesus speaks to the newly married couple, for instance, he lists the drawbacks of not being an ascetic. Sexual intercourse, he says, will bring the couple the burden of bearing children who are troubled and “unprofitable” (“For they become either lunatics or half-withered or crippled….”). The care of souls, on the other hand, will reward them with the birth of “living children”32. After hearing this teaching, the princess, very impressed, passes it forward. Her own resourcefulness in teaching impresses her audience and grants her a social function as a prophet that is clearly singular to those who contact her. In Mygdonia’s case, the message she conveys is an interpretation of her husband’s dream that she immediately transmits to him. He then bases his future actions on her divinatory skills, showing his dependence on her ability as a dream interpreter (“He said to Mygdonia, ‘What does this mean? For behold the dream and this act!’”33). Mygdonia not only has a social function but is empowered by divination. She later becomes Thomas’ assistant in baptism ceremonies, responsible for ministering to women34. Finally, there is the story of Mnesara, a Christian woman who is awakened by a young man and led by him in the dark to find her husband. Although she speaks about her experience, the purpose of the visitation or vision is to give her directions, not to pass a message on. There is no indication of her acquiring a special status among her companions. On the contrary, divine interaction appears to be ordinary for them.
Changes in attire in the Acts of Thomas
After having a vision of Christ, the princess bride from theActs of Thomas presents herself unveiled, bold and confident. When her parents enter her bedroom, they immediately note an unusual attitude and a difference in how she wears the
32 Acts of Thomas, para .12 . 33 Acts of Thomas, para . 92 . 34 Acts of Thomas, para .158 .
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veil: “He found the face of the bride uncovered, and the bridegroom was very cheerful. And the mother came and said to the bride, ‘Why do you sit thus, child, and are not ashamed (…)?”. She responds: “That I do not veil myself is because the mirror of shame has been taken away from me. I am no longer ashamed or abashed, since the work of shame and bashfulness has been removed from me,” she replies35. Ancient Christian texts advocate head-covering for women as a way of preventing the kind of sexual attraction that can bring shame not only upon women but also upon the man responsible for them, a father or husband36. By unveiling herself, the princess rejects being defined by her marital status, tutelage, or womanhood. Chastity frees her from all afflictions associated with sexual intercourse and the female gender. Her experience is described in terms of healing from a shameful past, with expressions such as “no longer” and the use of the present perfect37. She then acquires male characteristics such as rationality, fortitude, and intellectual capacity. In contrast, the groom describes his vision as a preventative warning, (“redeemed me from falling”) from circumstances that may occur in the future38. Still in the Acts of Thomas, Mygdonia puts on and off her veil in a silent battle in defense of chastity against her husband, the desirous Charisius. In their first encounter after she heard the ascetic teachings of Thomas, he finds her veiled, lying in bed, and then removes the veil and kisses her39. She refuses his company and leaves the next morning to meet the apostle again. When Charisius notes her absence, he gets angry but tries to contain himself because “she was superior to him in richness and intelligence” 40. However, Mygdonia refuses to have dinner with him again and the husband tempestuously reprehends her against “deceitful and foolish words” 41. Her reaction is to listen “silent like a stone”, pray, lay on bed and veil herself42. Another change in her appearance happens right after the apostle is imprisoned. She presents herself to Charisius with “her hair cut off and her garment rent” – James translates it as “hair disheveled”43 – disappointing his expectations to find her as seductive as before (“none were so good for love as she”44).
35 Acts of Thomas, para 13-14. . 36 Ross Shepard Kraemer – Thecla of Iconium, Reconsidered . In Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco- Roman Mediterranean . New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, p . 139; Margaret Y . MacDonald – Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion: The Power of the Hysterical Woman . Cambridge: New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p . 27–30 . 37 Acts of Thomas, paras 13-14. . 38 Acts of Thomas, para .15 . 39 Acts of Thomas, para . 89 . 40 Acts of Thomas, para . 95 . 41 Acts of Thomas, para . 96 . 42 Acts of Thomas, para . 97 . 43 Acts of Thomas, para .114 . 44 Acts of Thomas, para . 93 .
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Her choice for simple clothes may hold various meanings. First, it is a demonstration of agency. As Charisius believes the arrest would get his marriage back on track, he attributes Mygdonia’s behavior to the apostle influence. He neglects her freethinking and agency and reacts with surprise to her steadiness in the ascetic path. The change in attire immediately informs him and the readers that her choice is firm and not dependent on another man’s, the apostle, guidance. Secondly, we have to consider that in the ancient Mediterranean a woman’s garment indicated her economic and legal state – wealthy or ordinary, freeborn or slave45. Presenting herself more simply might have been “silent” Mygdonia’s way to express rejection of a previous status and a new life disposition. Ancient elite’s married women held an “honor, dignity, even a ‘majesty’ through which the civic, if not political, brilliance of their function manifested”46. Mygdonia’s change of clothes may manifest the exchange of earthly power and recognition for divine ones. The same is valid for Tertia, the wife of King Misdaeus who is converted by Mygdonia’s speech. She also shows up barefoot at home, as the slaves do, surprising her husband: “And why did you come on foot, which is unbecoming in a person like you (a free-born woman)?”47. The mentions to Mygdonia’s head covering seem strategic to help her cover any sexual attractivity and remain continent, and to demonstrate a commitment to ascetism. The princess bride’s uncovering is also strategic yet for a different reason. Since her groom has also accepted an ascetic calling, the people she has to convince are her parents and the governors. And she does so not through modesty, but through speech. Therefore, she presents herself as bold and defiant. The same defiant attitude is also part of Perpetua’s martyrdom. She keeps a playful attitude at the arena, repeatedly mentioning the joy of achieving such a glorious fate. In the middle of her final confrontation with a beast, she asks for a hairpin to keep her hair up because she does not want to be seen with “disheveled hair” nor “mourning in her glory”48. Through these examples, we can see that the changes in attire metaphorically represent the transformation of simple women into prophetesses. The necessary behavior to make such change can be sometimes modesty, like in Mygdonia’s and Tertia’s cases, and sometimes boldness, as in the stories of the princess bride, Perpetua and, as we will see, Thecla.
45 Ross Shepard Kraemer – Thecla of Iconium, Reconsidered, p . 137 . 46 Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot – História das mulheres no Ocidente. vol . 1 . Porto; São Paulo: Afrontamento : Ebradil, 1990, p . 132 . My translation . 47 Acts of Thomas para 137. . J . K . Elliot translates it as “a person like you ”. M R. . James as “free-born woman” . 48 The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, VI .3 .
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Thecla, Queen Tryphaena and Myrte, from the Acts of Paul
The second-century Acts of Paul and Thecla narrates the conversion of an elite virgin named Thecla by the apostle Paul. This text is now incorporated within a larger collection of Paul’s missions, letters, and martyrdom, composing theActs of Paul, but it once circulated independently49. The immense popularity of this story is corroborated by the survival of over forty primitive manuscripts only in Greek. Latin, Syriac, Armenian and Slavonic versions are also available. In 190 C.E., Tertullian mentions Thecla’s story as a popular tale that inspired many women to assume leadership roles in Christian circles – which he disapproved50. In this story, Thecla is soon to be married but opts for an ascetic and chaste life after hearing Paul’s preaching. She is confronted by her family and groom but remains firm. They denounce Thecla and Paul to the authorities, and as a result he is expelled from the city and she is condemned to be burned. In a miraculous intervention, she simply is not affected by the flames and survives. She goes after Paul but he, fearing her beauty may have her falling into carnal temptation, refuses her as an apostle. Eager to preach, Thecla promises to cut her hair off and follow Paul wherever he goes. This measure resonates with Mygdonia’s wish to cover any sexual attractiveness. It is only after Thecla overcomes further challenges that Paul encourages her to “go and teach the word of God”51. Meanwhile, rejected by Paul and distanced from her family, Thecla finds refuge with the Queen Tryphaena, who becomes a sort of maternal figure. However, Thecla is arrested another again and taken for public execution. Repeatedly, the young ascetic miraculously survives every scheme planned to kill her: wild beasts become docile in her presence; a lioness fights other animals that attack her; she baptizes herself in a pool full of seals. Authorities and the population finally surrender to what they watch, and free her. She then reunites with Paul, who encourages her to “go and teach the word of God”52. Distinct manuscripts have different endings for her story, as later versions includes new events about the end of her life. Most of the miraculous phenomena narrated in the text are part of the martyrdom in the arena53. Outside the arena, three other wondrous experiences
49 For the text’s context of production, see The Acts of Paul . In The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation . Ed . J . K . Elliot . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007, p . 350 -53; Petra Heldt – New Testament Apocrypha, p . 664–65 . 50 On Baptism 17 . Consulted in Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook . Ed . Ross Shepard Kraemer . Oxford: OUP, 2004, p . 260 . 51 Acts of Paul and Thecla, para . 41 . 52 Acts of Paul and Thecla, para . 41 . 53 Acts of Paul and Thecla, para . 21-37 .
226 Silence and subversion: the public behavior of women prophets in early Christian popular literature occur directly to women. In the first, Thecla sees “the Lord in the likeness of Paul”54. In the second, Tryphaena dreams of her dead daughter, who asks her to receive Thecla so she can pray for her afterlife – a plot somehow similar to Perpetua’s conversation with her dead brother55. In the third, Myrte transmits a message to her fellows as the Spirit “comes upon her”56. Table 3 has three episodes in which women receive an inspired message that was transmitted to others and not just a miracle analyzed in the light of Nissinen’s definition of prophecy.
Table 3. Weippert’s and Nissinen’s criteria applied to women in the Acts of Paul
Divine Social Predictive Message Transmitter Audience sender Function 21. Thecla sees the Lord ✓ ✓ N/A N/A ✓ in the form of Paul 28. Tryphaena speaks to dead daughter Falconilla, ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ in a dream IX. The Spirit comes ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ N/A N/A upon Myrte
According to the analysis, Thecla’s vision of the Lord brings asymbolic message of his protection and election of her. It also predicts her victory. She speaks about it (“Paul has come to look after me”57), but it is unclear if she does it out loud, to an audience, or if her saying is just a narrative thread to expose her thoughts and interior disposition. Because of the impossibility of determining this, it has been marked as non-applicable (N/A). The two other episodes have a cleardivine sender and a message that is transmitted to others. Myrte speaks as the Spirit has “come upon her”predicting the success of Paul’s endeavor in Rome. She seems to be in ecstasy or experiencing glossolalia and clearly is taken for the purpose of sharing a message with others. It is not possible to determine the social function of her message since the text fragment is just partially preserved. Tryphaena’s receives a message, transmits it to Thecla, and rejoices in its predictive purpose (that her daughter “may come to the place of
54 Acts of Paul and Thecla, para . 21 . 55 Acts of Paul and Thecla, para . 28 . 56 Myrte’s story is not in the Acts of Paul ad Thecla, but in another extract from the larger Acts of Paul para . IX, Fragment “Scenes of a Farewell” . Consulted in The Acts of Paul . In The Apocryphal New Testament: Being the Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses; with Other Narratives and Fragments. Ed . M . R . James . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986 . [Jan 2019] Available at: www:
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the just”) 58. However, the transmission is not public but intended to solve a private matter. Amongst the three texts evaluated in this essay, Acts of Paul is the one with the fewest correspondences to Nissinen’s concepts of prophecy or inspired speech. None of its episodes has a clear social function.
Disregarding family and marriage
Except for Mary of Magdala, which is subject of the next section, all women prophets in the consulted texts face some family or social conflict because they break gender roles as wives, brides or daughters. This type of conflict achieves its peak in Thecla’s story with several mentions to her shameful behavior distressing others. At a certain point, her groom finds her in ecstasy after spending three days sitting at the window, listening to the apostle59. He then joins her mother in crying “bitterly, Thamyris [groom] for the loss of a wife, Theoclia [mother] for the loss of a child”60. Thecla’s relationship with her mother is noteworthy, given Theoclia is the one who denounces her to the governor and asks him to burn her. Contrastingly, she develops a loving relationship with Queen Tryphaena. Ross Kraemer asserts that the contrast serves the purpose to criticize birth families and praise the settling of alternative families of believers among early Christians61. Additionally, Kraemer observes a pattern that differentiates male and female characters’ attitudes towards Thecla. Except for Theoclia, women constantly support Thecla (e.g., virgins cry out for her in the arena, and a lioness protects her from male animals) while men act in her disfavor. Even Paul repeatedly abandons her and shows great surprise after her survival. This pattern, she argues, emphasizes female solidarity. As an early Christian exemplary model, Thecla was supported by women and rejected by her own family. Another interesting episode in her story happens when a second man tries to marry her, and both Paul and Thecla break gender norms. A wealthy influential citizen of Antioch named Alexander brings money and gifts to Paul to negotiate marriage. In ancient societies, marriages were commonly arranged between men. Paul, however, dismisses him by saying that Thecla is not his. Then Alexander finds Thecla and tries to force sexual intercourse. In a maneuver that requires physical strength, she dominates him and steals his belongings: “And taking hold
58 Acts of Thomas, para . 28 . 59 Acts of Paul and Thecla, para . 10 . J K. . Elliot translates it as “overpowering emotion”; M R. James as “disturbance, ecstasy” . 60 Acts of Paul and Thecla, para . 10 . 61 Ross Shepard Kraemer – Thecla of Iconium, Reconsidered, p . 134 .
228 Silence and subversion: the public behavior of women prophets in early Christian popular literature of Alexander, she tore his cloak and pulled off his crown and made him a laughing- stock”62 . In this gender inversion, Thecla presents physical strength and aggressiveness, instead of feminine passivity. She also defies him socially, presenting herself as “a first among the Iconium,” that is, an elite citizen. The outcome of their meeting appears to offer a critique of Greco-Roman gender roles and power. Economic, political and social forces are overpowered by a Christian young woman. Thecla’s virginity is representative of a larger historical setting of early Christian communities. According to Peter Brown, differently from Greco-Roman traditional custom, early Christians saw the surveillance of virginity not as a duty of the father alone as the head of the family, but also as a duty of children to keep their body pure and safe.63 It is even possible, although not certain, says Brown, that Christian families were less willing than traditionalist pagans to give in marriage young girls. This does not mean that decisions to remain virgin were always welcomed by the family, as we see in the story of Thecla. But that the number of virgins increased significantly. The issue was so important that by the end of the third-century sexual violence against virgin women became a particular form of persecution to Christians. Yet, abstaining from sex was not a prerogative of virgins only. Married women like Mygdonia and the princess bride could adopt this behavior. In fact, this is a standard plot in all the apocryphal acts64 and has historical correspondences in cases that led to marriage dissolutions and persecution of male teachers65. By so doing the women and their converters break marital rules and gender roles from the Greco-Roman world, but in return, gain advantages in their religious communities. Credibility and respectfulness are some of them, and this relationship becomes even more beneficial for women prophets. According to Brown, early Christian prophets positioned themselves as “outstandingly reliable vehicles” by having a public life that attested their closeness to God. One of these public markers was sexual abstinence. And women prophets in the popular literature of early Christianity resort to it. The association between sexual continence and prophecy was also rooted in Jewish and pagan traditions, in which chastity, especially virginity, made the body
62 Acts of Paul and Thecla, para . 26 . 63 Peter Brown – The Body and Society, p . 191 . 64 Virginia Burrus – Chastity as Autonomy, p . 34-35 . 65 Justin Martyr’s mid-second century critique of the Roman legal system treatment of Christians tells the story of a converted matrona whose ascetic conversion ultimately led to divorce . On a payback, the ex-husband denounced her as a Christian (but she was spared by the emperor) and instigated the prosecution of her teacher Ptolomeus who was punished (presumably with martyrdom) . Quoted in Ross Shepard Kraemer – Four short stories . In Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean.
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worthy of divine possession66. In the ancient Mediterranean, a woman’s mouth was somehow associated with her vagina, as if was being penetrated during intercourse reinforced her fundamental passivity and lack of authority, impeditive for prophetic speech. “Women prophets are virtually always celibate, apparently under the cultural logic that a woman who is penetrated by a man, and under his authority, cannot be the conduit for divine speech,” summarizes Kraemer67. Another set of analogies mentioned by Kraemer involves speech and seed; knowledge and fertility. According to that, God is to the prophet what the husband is to the wife, and his words are a husband’s seed to a wife. Therefore, their family relations were replaced by spiritual relations, a personal and public sacrifice that testifies to their reliable character as Christians and prophetesses.
Mary Magdalene, from the Gospel of Mary of Magdala
The Gospel of Mary of Magdala is an early second-century text partially available through three groups of fragments68. The largest is a fifth-century Coptic manuscript discovered in 1896 at Oxyrhynchus. The other two are shorter fragments in Greek dated to the early third century. Since Coptic script was used almost exclusively by Christians in Egypt, it is assumed that Egyptian Christians were the ones who translated it from Greek and preserved it. There is not much information available about the Gospel of Mary of Magdala circulation and diffusion but it clearly has gnostic teachings. As far as known, it was no longer copied after the fifth century. TheGospel of Mary of Magdala starts with an instruction from the resurrected Jesus to the disciples about the nature of matter and sin. He encourages them to spread the word of God and leaves. After his departure, the disciples hesitated in following his instructions because they fear end up being persecuted as Jesus was. Mary Magdalene is the only one who shows commitment to Jesus’ orders, and they start debating what to do next. Peter asks her to tell the group the Jesus’s teachings only she knows. She accepts the invitation and reports a conversation she had with Jesus in a vision – the Savior had taught her about the nature of spiritual visions and the ascent of the soul. There are three pages missing from this part of the story, but it is possible to note the Lord defends the prevalence of
66 These associations are mentioned by Peter Brown – The Body and Society, p . 67–68; Ross Shepard Kraemer – Thecla of Iconium, Reconsidered, p . 148–50 . 67 Ross Shepard Kraemer – Thecla of Iconium, Reconsidered, p . 149 . 68 I worked with the English translation by Karen L . King – The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle. Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2003, p 13-18. .
230 Silence and subversion: the public behavior of women prophets in early Christian popular literature spiritual character over matter. The description of Mary’s vision takes most part of the text. After reporting Jesus’s words, Mary becomes silent, and Peter and Andrew question the integrity of her teachings. Their main argument is that Jesus would not have revealed such advanced knowledge to a woman. As the apostle Levi comes out in her defense, the available fragment ends abruptly, leaving the rest of the discussion unknown. That small final extract, however, is enough to present “the most straightforward and convincing argument in any early Cristian writing for the legitimacy of women’s authority,” according to Karen King69. Table 4 presents the analysis of the episode in which Mary, in the Gospel of Mary of Magdala, reports to other disciple teachings she received from “the Savior” in a vision70:
Table 4. Weippert’s and Nissinen’s criteria applied to Mary in the Gospel of Mary of Magdala
Divine Social Message Transmitter Audience Predictive sender Function 5.8 to 9.1: The Savior teaches Mary of Magdala ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ during a vision
The Savior, who is Jesus after the resurrection, is thedivine sender of a message to Magdalene. He is happy to see that she does not fear the sight of him and answers her question: “So now, Lord, does a person who sees a vision see it
69 Karen L . King – The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, p . 3 . 70 In some manuscripts it is unclear if Mary had a vision of the Lord and then received the teachings from Jesus in person or if she received this message during a second vision . Karen L . King presents translations of each manuscript . The one in Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 3525 solves the matter showing that their dialogue happened during a vision (7:1-2: ‘”When [the Lord] ap[peared] to m[e] in a vision, [I said]…) . 71 The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, 7 5. . 72 The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, 10 .14 .
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that the crucified Christ did. Hersocial function is obvious, guaranteeing the continuity of the work of Jesus. Her differentiation and superiority are also distinct since she was described as the Savior’s favorite, most loved person.
Adoption of public functions
From the Gospel of Mary, we learn little about Mary of Magdala’s social status and family relations. Nonetheless, from the perspective of public activity, her story is priceless as she faces one of the most obvious examples of resistance to female prophets. In the text, Mary of Magdala is said to have had a closer relationship to Jesus than the other disciples have and Peter invites her to “teach” them: “Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than all other women. Tell us the words of the Savior that you remember, the things which you know that we don’t because we haven’t heard them”73. However, after she teaches them, Peter and Andrew question the authenticity of her sayings: “Peter responded, bringing up similar concerns. He questioned them about the Savior: ‘Did he, then, speak with a woman in private without our knowing about it? Are we to turn around and listen to her? Did he choose her over us?’”74. Mary cries, offended that they question her good intentions, and Levi comes out in her defense: “Levi answered, speaking to Peter, “Peter, you have always been a wrathful person. Now I see you contending against the woman like the Adversaries. ‘For if the Savior made her worthy, who are you then for your part to reject her?”75. In the conflict there is a clear discomfort of men are in the position of listeners of a female speaker. This inverts the common association of men as masters and women as audience that is part of the Greco-Roman rhetorical and educational system76. Moreover, Levi’s comparison of Peter to “the Adversaries” is a probable reference to pagans that attacked women’s behavior in their critiques of Christians. In a now widely publicized quote, the philosopher Celsius calls Christianity a religion of “children” and “some stupid women.” He also credits the belief in Christ’s resurrection to the “hallucination” of some “hysterical female” or to the “fantastic tale” of a liar who wanted to “impress others” 77. Another possibility is that Levi’s words may refer to other Christian groups that used women’s gender transgression to disqualify some expressions of Christianity as heretical.
73 The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, 6 .1-2 . 74 The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, 10 3-4. . 75 The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, 10 7-9. . 76 Henri-Irénée Marrou – História Da Educação Na Antigüidade. São Paulo: Herder, 1966 . 77 Origen C.Cels. . 2 55;. 3 55. . Quoted in Margaret Y . MacDonald – Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion, p . 110 . Later, the hysterical female in his writings was identified as Mary Magdalene .
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In any way, the text revolves around issues of gender and authority. The teachings of the Savior sustain that the material body is inferior to the spiritual, eternal and true self. Because of that, spiritual people care for spiritual achievements, not bodily distinctions. In King’s interpretation, the Gospel of Mary argues that “rejecting the body as the self-opened up the possibility of an ungendered space within the Christian community in which leadership functions were based on spiritual maturity”78. This means the gnostic teaching in the text opened up the possibility of female teachers as Mary of Magdala to take leadership and minister their communities. Another textual strategy to legitimize her teaching role is the structure in dialogues, as King also notes79. The first dialogue happens between the Savior and the disciples, followed by his departure; the second takes place among the disciples, in which Mary is now the teacher as Jesus was. The structural similarity of the two emphasize how Mary of Magdala assumes the teaching role among the disciples that were previously played by the Savior. It “authorizes Mary’s teaching and her leadership role by placing her in a position parallel to that of the Savior: it is she who steps into the Savior’s place by turning the other disciples toward the Good and providing them with advanced spiritual instruction”80. The ancient dialogue assumed the participation of a student and also a pedagogical relationship in which teacher’s behavior provided a model to which disciples were expected to conform. The message in theGospel of Mary is that “the following of the Savior requires both comprehension of his teaching and imitation of his actions”81. Therefore, Mary of Magdala – the only disciple who fully understands his message and who is not afraid to imitate him – was meant to become a teacher and to preach the word of God. But she is certainly not the only woman in the popular literature of early Christianity to face resistance when performing public functions. The other women analyzed in this essay find resistance primarily at home. Because they are too busy answering a religious call, they fail to perform domestic activities reserved to them while assuming roles as teachers and baptizers, mostly reserved to men. Mygdonia, for instance, fails in dining and entertaining her husband at night82. Tertia (who is not a prophetess, but a new convert) leaves her husband without breakfast after spending the night out learning the gospel83. Perpetua and Felicitas do not breast-feed their children properly. Despite not actively
78 Karen L . King – The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, p . 89 . 79 Karen L . King – The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, p . 30–33 . 80 Karen L . King – The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, p . 30 . 81 Karen L . King – The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, p . 31 . 82 Acts of Thomas, paras . 89-97 . 83 Acts of Thomas, para . 137 .
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questioning their domestic tasks, their role in the public sphere works in the stories as a distraction from private life.
True versus false speech
Apart from moments of ecstasy, prayer or inspired speech, women prophets of the popular literature of early Christianity are often in silence. In theActs of Thomas, Mnesara was mentioned several times but speaks only to greet the apostle and to describe her vision. Her husband, on the other hand, gives a speech about their ascetic life as a couple84. Mygdonia was often described as a “silent” woman, who expresses gesturally and speaks just to teach other women and interpret her husband’s dreams. In another episode of the Acts of Thomas, in which a woman seeks the apostle’s help to get rid of a demon that had been following her for years, the dialogue was entirely taken between the apostle and the demon. The woman stands quiet even when the demon talks directly to her. In the Gospel of Mary, Mary of Magdala simply reproduces what Jesus had said to her: “After Mary had said these things, she was silent, since it was up to this point that the Savior had spoken to her”85. Thecla is also quieter than her exemplary status of female authority and defiance in early Christianity might suggest. In her first appearance in theActs of Paul, she spends three days and nights sitting at the window and listening to Paul. Later, she was described as an attentive listener sat at the apostles’ feet86. In her analysis of Acts of Paul, Kraemer observes that Thecla’s transformation from passivity to being the woman who “enlightened many with the word of God”87 happens gradually. Her first speech, the author observes, is “hardly transgressive” and consists of a formulaic prayer thanking God for saving her from the fire and allowing her to receive a vision88. Kraemer also presents theories that place the apocryphal acts as a counterpart to Pastoral Epistles, to which she partially consents. One of them identifies female stereotypes in those stories as vehicles to discussing opposing negative and positive attributes of women – falsehood is associated with talkative old widows; truth is the attribute of silent, pure virgins. “The continent heroine is essentially not a speaker but a listener… If falsehoods were associated with the uncontrolled speech of old
84 Acts of Thomas, para . 150 . 85 The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, 9 30. . 86 Acts of Paul and Thecla, paras . 8 and 18 . 87 Acts of Paul and Thecla, para . 43 . 88 Ross Shepard Kraemer – Thecla of Iconium, Reconsidered, p . 141 .
234 Silence and subversion: the public behavior of women prophets in early Christian popular literature women, the rapt listening of feminine youth and purity were linked to the truth,” she argues 89. Canonical New Testament literature, especially the pseudo-Pauline letters, has many references to women’s speech as false speech or improper teaching. In 1 Corinthians 14.34 and 35, Paul states that it is inappropriate for a woman to speak in the church, and in 1 Tim 2.11 and 12 he says that women should learn in submission without teaching men. In addition, 1 Tim 4.3 warns about those who were “forbidding marriage and ordering abstinence from food that God created” – typical behaviors of ascetics, widows, and celibates. Other excerpts from 1 Tim and 2 Tim 3.6 place false teaching as an improper female practice. 1 Tim 4.7 advises to “reject profane and old wives’ fables”. According to Margaret Y. MacDonald, these New Testament discourses about teaching as inappropriate for women are a reaction to the pagan association of Christian women to women who teach in public (and not simply to other women teaching in private, as its clear in Mary of Magdala and Thecla’s stories). Celsus, already mentioned, is one of these pagan critics, as well as Luciano de Samósata, who mocks, “old women called widows” who used to tell stories in the corners90, and others. MacDonald affirms that Christians responded to these critics by incorporating them. Christians formulating a conversionist theology, and gradually distancing from an eschatological perspective that awaited for a soon return of Christ, felt the need to adapt to the status quo of the larger Roman world in order to thrive in it. In that way, the early freedom and incentive to women’s leadership seen in the letters of Paul gave place to the restrictions of later pseudo-Pauline letters. This argument is well-established in Pauline scholarship and, while pseudo- Pauline writings are not central to this essay, they do shed light on how women’s public functions, in particular teaching, were controversial during the writing and editing of the New Testament. This is the same milieu in which the popular literature of early Christianity developed. The controversies between Christian practices and Greco-Roman social models are certainly influential to this popular literature as well. In the apocryphal acts, women prophets are literary constructs that display moral excellence and an ideal behavior whose standards change according to the circumstances: they are silent and passive at large, attending social expectations, but
89 Kate Cooper – The virgin and the bride: idealized womanhood in Late Antiquity . Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996, p . 63 . Quoted in Ross Shepard Kraemer – Thecla of Iconium, Reconsidered, p . 140-141 . 90 Lucian – The Passing of Peregrinus, p . 12-13, trans . A . M . Harmon (LCL 19) . Quoted in Margaret Y . MacDonald – Early Christian women…, p . 74 .
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prolific in speech and defiant in attitude solely to the purpose of spreading the word and will of God.
Women prophets. Why not?
An important question that arises when we classify women in these stories as prophetesses is why they were not credited as such during the writing and editing of the texts. The label of prophetess doesn’t show up designating women even in gnostic texts such as the Acts of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary. There might be at least two possible explanations for that. First, prophecy might have become so trivial in early Christian communities that authors felt no need to distinguish it explicitly. According to David E. Aune, early Christians were so accustomed to having divinely inspired experiences that modern scholars might assume Christians viewed everyone as potential prophets91. Following this approach, there would be no need to distinctively mark individuals as prophets. The prophet/ess would have no special “otherness” in his or her community. The second hypothesis is that prophecy might have been intentionally left out of these texts. This seems more probable given that charismatic authority and gender transgressions have been largely disputed among early Christian groups, as we see in the debates of the Gospel of Mary. In the second and third centuries, whereas orthodoxy was in development, Christian prophecy may have gone through a process similar to what Jewish prophecy underwent during the Second Temple period. In Jewish context, prophecy didn’t end but changed from spoken to written or fixated forms. As Nissinen puts it, the spontaneous “somewhat wild and precarious quality of prophecy had to be disciplined to meet the requirements of the authoritative theology or theologies”92. In early Christianity, the aspect of fixation of prophecy is not so prevalent, but the changes caused by the development of an authoritative theology certainly are. They constrain, reduce or make less visible forms of prophecy that are not adequate to these authoritative circles. We may assume that early Christian prophecy didn’t cease in face of orthodoxy, like Laura Nasrallah argues on her criticism of the Weberian “model of decline”93, but it certainly became less visible on the textual sources that we access today. The lack of explicit mentions to prophecy, particularly from women, at first sight might suggest that the phenomenon was not occurring at all. However,
91 David E . Aune – Prophecy in Early Christianity…, p . 200-201 . 92 Martii Nissinen – What Is Prophecy?, p . 30 . 93 Laura S . Nasrallah – An Ecstasy of Folly .
236 Silence and subversion: the public behavior of women prophets in early Christian popular literature prophecy was indeed present at the social life of early Christians, as the analysis of the apocryphal acts, the Gospel of Mary and the Passion of Perpetua just showed. I believe the scholarly allegation that women were not prophesying might rely too heavily on New Testament canonical texts and take the prohibitions for women’s authority in the pseudo-Pauline letter too seriously. This approach neglects the Christian diversity that were represented on the adjacent literature later deemed apocryphal, or even largely at the popular literature of early Christianity. Besides the issue of the selection of the sources, the orthodox prohibition of women’s prophecy does not indicate by itself that the phenomenon were effectively suppressed. Actually, it is quite the opposite. As Foucault demonstrates in History of Sexuality, a negative prohibitive speech about a topic is still an evidence of the occurrence and relevance of such topic94. That seems to be the case here, as women’s prophetic activity did not go unnoticed at all. Patristic authors from the second to the fourth century, contemporary to the texts analyzed here, discuss it passionately. Tertullian does it in his criticism of women’s offices and authority; Eusebius on his report of women’s false inspired speech among Montanists, and Epiphanius in his Medicine Box, listing it as an illness of the spirt95. Departing from a Foucaultian approach to not taking language for granted, the Church Fathers’s writings show that if there is the need to contest female speech and women’s prophecy that is because these are relevant and ongoing practices in the first place. It is also worth noting some of the nuances in the prohibitive discourse. Tertullian, for example, accepts female prophecy if it happens in individual sessions and private meetings96. His critique is only of women prophets who want to adopt male functions, such as preaching and baptizing. Regarding this, Ross Kraemer argues that Tertullian is “remarkably well aware of what, precisely, offended him about those practices”: “They violated his understanding of fundamental gender differences, which he took to be divinely ordained and inscribed in the order of creation. In Tertullian’s view, which would have been widely shared, teaching, exorcising demons, healing and baptizing were all inherently masculine practices, involving activity, authority, speech and public performance. Precisely because these are by their nature masculine, they are prohibited, he insists, to women”97.
94 Michel Foucault – The History of Sexuality, vol . 1 . New York: Vintage Books, 1990, p . 17–49 . 95 Tertullian – On Baptism 17, On the Veiling of the Virgins 9, On the prescription against Herectics 41; Eusebius, History of the Church 5 16;. Ephiphanius Medicine Box (Panarion) 49 . All consulted in Ross Shepard Kraemer – Women’s Religions… A Sourcebook, p. 259–61, 265–66 and 264 . 96 According to Ross Shepard Kraemer – Women’s religions…, p . 261-262, Tertullian praises female prophecy (On the Soul 9), but condemns women’s public speaking, exorcisms and cures (On the veiling of the virgins 9, On the Prescription against Heretics 41) . 97 Ross Shepard Kraemer – Thecla of Iconium, Reconsidered, p . 117–18 .
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This suggests the label of prophetess could have also been suppressed to avoid scandal and unwanted attention. This attitude finds precedents in the cultural milieu of pseudo-Pauline writing and editing in the first and early second century. The society in which early Christians were trying to thrive and adapt in the second and third centuries delegated women to the private sphere of life, not to the public. How could women conciliate that with the role of a prophet, essentially connected to public transmission of a message and public functions such as teacher ad preacher? Tertullian’s answer is that women could prophesy but publicly acknowledging it would be a step further. Therefore, between the two hypotheses previously raised to explain the lack of the prophetic label, it seems more probable that the title was intentionally left out of the texts.
Conclusion
The analysis of women’s experiences in theActs of Thomas, Acts of Paul, Gospel of Mary and Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas shows that there are women prophets in these texts. Their dreams, visions, inspired speeches and bodily experiences constitute a form of communication with the divine, in which they receive a message that was passed immediately or later on to a wider audience. Women’s teachings and preaching were directly related to the prophetic experiences, from which they draw public recognition and authority. Early Christian prophecy in the late second and third centuries was not uniquely defined by the public transmission of a message but also by moral teachings and interpretation of the scripture. We must not take classical biblical prophets as yardsticks to prophets in early Christianity but understand the latter as a phenomenon with its own particularities taking precedent on the written prophecy and interpretation of the Second Temple Period, and grounded on the diverse organization of early Christian groups. In the stories, prophecy depend much on the public behavior of women. This is what asserts their character and legitimates their message. Such behavior usually takes form in changes in attire after conversion. Sometimes, women veil and show modesty masking any sexual attractiveness. Other times, minor changes in hair and accessories indicate the boldness necessary to preach and teach. In addition, they disregard family and marriage, sometimes openly opposing it, sometimes just neglecting it, as their public function demands most of their time and dedication. Moreover, women are often silent outside of moments of ecstasy. They listen to men preach and debate but reply, supplement, and confront them only when taken by the Spirit. This silent attitude might be related to the accusations of false speech among Christian women disseminated by pagan authors.
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The popular literature of early Christianity is full of stories of women prophets. Despite of that, women are not explicitly named or labeled as prophetesses on it. There is no doubt the phenomenon was prevalent, as the insistence of Church Fathers in inhibit it shows. Early Christian strategies of adaptation to broader greco-roman gender norms that assign women to the private sphere of life, and the desire to insert and expand Christianity into the Greco-Roman world might explain the suppression of practices of naming and labeling women’s prophecy in the stories.
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