The Dark Filter of Tradition

Through a glass darkly? That glass is sometimes very dark. The sacred writings of an age invariably reflect the powerful biases that then prevail and render those biases in a context suggesting that they carry divine approval. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, which has no female figure of the deity, it is possible to encounter such things as the following:

Simon Peter said to him, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.”

Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

This comes from the Gospel of Thomas, discovered in 1945 as part of the Nag Hammadi find in Egypt.  It contains purported sayings of Jesus, and this is one; indeed it is the last one in the document. I am showing the Lambdin translation, from the Coptic. It is conformant to all other translations, including a linear word-for-word rendering. The meaning is clearly what is stated above. The document dates to the period 130-250 AD.

I found this interesting because I’d chanced across it on the same day I’d listened to a television broadcast; there was no link between those two activities. The broadcast carried a conference session where assembled leaders discussed religious rights under current public policy. One strong thrust of the presentations was bemoaning the government’s support of feminist advocacy. The problem, of course, for organized religions, is that dark filter of tradition. There was evidently a time when men reflexively viewed women as in some way less than human. This same view is also echoed in some Shi’ite religious writings. Alas.

My view of revelation (developed elsewhere here) is that it comes from “above” but, after it ends up on paper, it carries an interpretation that echoes its own times. I reached this view by noting that, in successive revelations, the then prevailing culture always leaves “its Mark.”

Fortunately for those participating in the conference I viewed, such gospels as Thomas’ and many other writings, were scrubbed from the canon, beginning with St. Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria (died 373). Can you imagine the attendees’ problems if such verses as the above had to be defended as the word of God?