Cullen Murphy explores the revolutionary implications of feminism's encounter  with religion

"The Bible is famous for being the world's most overstudied book," Cullen
Murphy writes in the foreword to The Word According to Eve: Women and the
Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own. "Overstudied by male scholars and
commentators, that is to say."  Dramatic changes are now taking place in
biblical studies, however: during the past twenty-five years or so a rapidly
growing number of feminist scholars have moved into the field.  The Word
According to Eve is an introduction to much of what has emerged in this
early stage of feminism's encounter with the Bible, including revisionist
studies of the roles women played in early Christianity (women were much more
active than traditionalists would have us believe), examinations of
mistranslations that have ossified and become dogma (the Hebrew source of the
word "virgin" in the story of Jesus' birth, for example, may have only meant
"young woman"), and much more.  In the short term, Murphy notes, the feminist
study of the Bible has led to "discomfort and uncertainty, and a
cacophony of agendas, and a sometimes acrimonious rethinking of yesterday and
today." This debate is often dismissed by commentators as meaningless and
purely academic, but Murphy's underlying point in The Word According to
Eve is that women's involvement in biblical studies is
likely to lead to an unprecedented religious, cultural, and intellectual
revitalization.  "Perhaps the most important lesson offered by the work of
feminist biblical scholars comes in the form of a reminder," Murphy concludes.
"In religion, as in other spheres, circumstances have not always been as we see
them now.  Evolution occurs.  Some things, it turns out, are not sacred."
 

Murphy spoke recently with Atlantic Unbound's Toby Lester

Q. You put years of work into this book.  What first drew you to the study of
women and the Bible -- and what kept you interested?
A.  A combination of things. Personally, I come from a family that has
always taken a broad interest in religion. Also, among my friends and relatives
are women for whom some aspects of religion, particularly attitudes toward
gender, came to loom as a painful obstacle -- for instance, an obstacle to
ordination. As a journalist, I've been interested in the story of what is
happening as women seek to acquire greater and greater roles in organized
religion, and greater and greater influence in the study of religion -- that
story, I am convinced, will come to be regarded as one of the most important of
our time, even if it is not recognized as such today. The part that I chose to
write about -- scholarship about the Bible by feminists -- is one key element
of this larger transformation, and it hadn't been addressed in a journalistic
survey for the general reader.
 

Q. Is it odd that a man should write this book?
A. The only reason that a book like this could be written by anyone is
that during the past two or three decades scores of women have already written
hundreds of much more focused studies on women and the Bible. It is on this
work that my own book rests. I wondered when I first started out whether, as a
man, I would be greeted with suspicion by the feminist scholars I wanted to
talk to. I never was. If anything, they may have been intrigued to discover
that their work might be as interesting to men as it is to women. And I do
think it is -- or ought to be.
 

Q. One of the main points of your book is that women are staking out turf for
themselves in religions that have, at least for the past fifteen hundred years
or so, been dominated by men.  What sorts of changes might scholarship by women
and  women's growing official influence in Judaism and Christianity bring
about?
A. The impact will be considerable -- although it will not always come, or
even mostly come, in a linear, direct way. In some cases the impact is
straightforward: the evidence about the equal role played by women in the
ministry of the early Christian church is persuasive, for example, and will
ultimately change people's minds with respect to contemporary debates on
ordination. The larger impact will be harder to pin down -- almost a matter of
psychology, but no less real -- and it will occur as scholarship begins to
infuse the broader culture, as some kinds of scholarship does do. And it
will begin to occur as more and more women achieve prominence within religion.

Imagine a future in which the story of the Creation is always told in the
biblical scholar Phyllis Trible's way -- men and women created in equality. In
which the story of Adam and Eve and the Serpent is always told in a
pre-Augustinian manner -- as a parable of moral freedom, not as the founding
myth of feminine duplicity. In which the figure of God is portrayed just as
often using the feminine imagery of Wisdom as it is using the masculine imagery
of Father. In which the first passage from Paul that comes to mind is not the
passage from Ephesians, about wives submitting to their husbands, but the
passage from Galatians, about there being no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no
male or female, for all are one. Well, that world is coming.
 

Q. What is the Bible's message to women and men about gender?
A. In her preface to "The Woman's Bible"  Elizabeth Cady
Stanton gave a brisk, and damning, answer to this question: "The Bible teaches
that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall
of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried,
condemned and sentenced.  Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage,
maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she
was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material
wants." The Bible has obviously been interpreted and used this way, and many
people would simply wash their hands of it entirely.  One also can't argue with
the fact that the Bible depicts societies in which women were subordinate to
men. And yet it's also true, as Tikva Frymer-Kensy and others have pointed out,
that this same Bible offers a radical new view: unlike other ancient sacred
literature, the Bible divides neither divine nature nor human nature along
gender lines. It does not give "fertility," say, to women, while giving the
elements or the heavens to men.  There are no male or female attributes. There
is no "battle of the sexes."  There is no sacralizing of masculinity or
femininity. Women are capable of doing everything men can do.

Some feminists who are reluctant to let go of the Bible, despite what they see
as its profound problems for women, bring up a larger issue: What is the Bible
"about," they ask. Is it "about" the purity regulations in Leviticus?
Is it "about" the negative stereotypes that have built up around
characters like Jezebel and Delilah? Is it "about" Paul's teaching in
Corinthians that women should not speak in church, or his teaching in Ephesians
that women should submit to their husbands? Are these things the Bible's point?
Or is it, rather, the record of a people arguing with itself, and sometimes
contradicting itself,  over enduring questions? Is the Bible's point, rather,
to tell a story of unfolding liberation?

Q. Who are your favorite women in the Bible?
A. I would begin at the beginning -- with Eve. Eve is mentioned by name
only twice in Genesis (to this day, if you look up "Eve" in the
"Encyclopaedia Britannica," you will find only the editorial instruction,
"See Adam and Eve"), and yet it is Eve's sensibility that most readers are
naturally drawn to. Indeed, Adam scarcely has a sensibility at all, whereas Eve
is curious and thirsts for knowledge and is prepared to take action.

Miriam is a provocative figure. It is only her fast thinking that saves the
life of Moses in the bulrushes, though we don't even learn her name until much
later. With her brothers Moses and Aaron she leads the Israelites out of Egypt,
and watches from the shore as the waters of the Red Sea close in upon Pharaoh
and his army.  And then Miriam has a victory song snatched from her lips by the
Bible's editors, some scholars say, and given to Moses. After that she is
essentially evicted from the Israelite leadership in circumstances of great
ignominy, when she asks a question that can almost stand as an epigraph to
biblical studies by women: "Does the Lord speak only through Moses?"
Nevertheless, despite her experience, the memory of Miriam cannot be
suppressed. Her name is the one that gives us "Mary."  Popular will is more
powerful than the red pencil of the biblical editors.

I have always been drawn to the courage of the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark.
She asks Jesus to cast out a demon from her daughter, and Jesus gives her a
fairly tart brush-off, implying that because she is a gentile he has more
important concerns. She replies, "Sire, even the dogs under the table
eat the children's crumbs" -- a retort that, by throwing what seems to be
small-mindedness back at Jesus,  is in effect a rebuke. Does Jesus feel the
sting? He certainly is brought up short, and relents.

And then there is Balaam's ass, in the Book of Numbers, who keeps turning away
from a certain path even though the seer Balaam whips the poor beast
repeatedly. It turns out that the angel of death had been lying in wait, and
that the ass saved Balaam's life. It was Elizabeth Cady Stanton who pointed out
that Balaam's ass is a "she."

Q. Who are your least favorite women in the Bible?
A. I'd prefer to talk about my least favorite "stories" about women.
There certainly is no lack of women who are cruelly mistreated in the Bible --
the unnamed concubine in Judges, who is raped and dismembered. Tamar, the
daughter of David, who is raped by Amnon. The daughter of Jephthah --
sacrificed by her father as the price of a military victory, and not even given
the dignity of a name. The story of Hagar is among the most haunting in the
Bible, to my mind -- she is the slave woman who bears a child by Abraham,
because Sarah cannot conceive. But when Sarah at last conceives, Hagar and her
son Ishmael are cast out into the desert. Yet she is the first woman in
Scripture to whom God speaks directly.

Some of the "mistreated" women in the Bible have been mistreated as much by
interpretation as anything else. The case of Delilah is instructive. We have an
image of Delilah -- Hedy Lamarr, say, playing opposite Victor Mature -- as an
evil temptress, a brazen sexpot, although the Bible is actually quite laconic
in its description of her, and in truth it is men who are orchestrating the
plot against Samson, not Delilah. In any event Delilah's wiles, such as they
are, are in the service of her people -- she is doing nothing that Judith does
not also do. And yet Judith -- the one person in the Bible who actually prays
to God to help her to commit a sin, in the form of a lie -- is a hero.  Delilah
is a cardboard symbol of the lethal seductress.

Q. How do women scholars view the Bible differently from men?
A. The biggest difference is the decision to look at women in the Bible,
and to look at the way the Bible treats women, in the first place. Women and
issues of gender have not been much on the minds of biblical scholars these
past few centuries, to put it mildly. That has now changed, forever. Of course,
the Bible is an androcentric collection of writings to begin with -- only about
150 of the 1400 named people in the Hebrew Bible are women. The proportion is a
little higher in the New Testament, but still small. And yet this represents a
vast amount of terrain that had been only cursorily explored. Who were all
these women? And what about all the other women, mentioned but not named? What
kinds of societies did they really inhabit? What kind of authority did they
really wield?

Q. What do we know today, as a result of feminist biblical scholarship, that we
didn't know twenty years ago?
A. One thing that has been achieved is simply the greater awareness of
women's subsidiary status in the Bible -- legally, socially, and numerically.
The prominence of some women, such as Miriam and Mary
Magdalene, seems to have been downplayed by an editorial hand.

We also have a better sense of how and why certain episodes -- from Adam and
Eve, to Samson and Delilah, to the Corinthian women in Paul -- came to be given
the anti-female interpretation they were given, and how other interpretations
are not only justified but may even have long precedent.

There is a much better understanding of the diversity of religion in ancient
Jewish and Christian life -- and of the roles played by women in community
leadership, although the memory of those roles has been largely suppressed.
There is also a much better picture of how biblical societies actually
functioned, and how reality for women might sometimes depart from the picture
painted in the Bible -- or is reflected in hints in the Bible that we have
failed to pick up on. How did women function economically? In the transmission
of culture? Parts of a lost history of women are beginning to be reclaimed.

There is a better sense of how inaccuracies in translation have often covered
up feminine language and imagery. Just as important, there is a greater
appreciation of how a female "voice" emerges in certain kinds of poetry and
chants and prophecy. At the same time, egalitarian themes, whether in Genesis
or the Jesus movement, have achieved new emphasis. A final achievement is that the issue of women and the Bible is now a permanent part of the larger biblical conversation.

Q. You quote David Tracy, a prominent Catholic theologian, as saying that the
result of feminism's encounter with religion will be "the next intellectual
revolution."  Is this encounter more dramatic than feminism's encounter with
any number of other disciplines or cultural attitudes?
A. It probably will be more dramatic. Most academic disciplines
don't come with an element of public "praxis," to use a jargon term. You can be
a feminist professor of chemistry or a feminist professor of English or
history, but this doesn't necessarily have vast consequences outside one's
immediate circle. Religion, in contrast -- especially religion with a strong
reformist bent -- demands to be reflected in behavior, and in public avowals.
Let's face it: religion can be a powerful force. Harnessing feminism to
religion will cut a broader swath in the world than harnessing it to the local
university's Department of Semiotics.
 

Q.  Women are currently  forbidden to enter the ministry in some eighty
Christian denominations, but many of the scholars whose work you discuss in
your book seem to be unearthing evidence that women played a crucial role in
disseminating and administering early Christianity.  Will such discoveries ever
lead to, as you put it, "a feminization of the pulpit"?
A. Inevitably, yes. Indeed, it is already happening, although the numbers
are hard to come by -- there are just too many denominations, all with
different bookeeping procedures.  But there are probably about 50,000 ordained
women now serving in Jewish and Christian ministry. Divinity-school student
bodies are at least a third female, and some of the most prestigious schools
are more than 50 percent female. All the significant pressures are pushing in
the same direction: the social and demographic forces, the findings of
scholarship. In the Catholic Church the recent harsh pronouncements from the
Vatican against the ordination of women are, I think, basically a sign of
weakness.

Q. You devote a whole chapter to the question, "Was Jesus a Feminist?"  Some of
the scholars you profile feel he had feminist principles explicitly in mind;
others argue he preached a broad egalitarian message that was implicitly
feminist.  Many critics, however, feel that Jesus is currently being co-opted
by anybody and everybody with a politically correct agenda.  What's your take
on Jesus' feminism?
A. Although I call one chapter "Was Jesus a Feminist?" the question --
which often comes up -- can't really be answered in the way it is asked. Was
Jesus a feminist in the way that term is now understood? Did he know he was,
and intend to be, a feminist? On the one hand, the answers to those questions
probably have to be No and No. On the other hand, an egalitarian ethic lies at
the heart of his teachings and in some fashion survived into the early church.

This question about Jesus often gives rise to some heat. To play up the
egalitarianism of the Jesus movement is sometimes seen as implying a contrast
with the norms of first-century Judaism. Or the contrast may not be implied but
asserted explicitly. As Judith Plaskow has pointed out, Christian feminism can
easily become an unwitting form of anti-Judaism. In any event, as many scholars
note, that contrast is at the very least simplistic. First-century Judaism, on
which women are focusing more attention, was itself very diverse, and very
far-flung, and very hard to generalize about.
 

Q. The United States, you write, is the most religious nation in the developed
world.  How then do you explain the fact that the media devote so few reporters
and resources to covering the religious beat?
A. The explanation isn't very complicated. First, most people in
journalism don't have active religious backgrounds, and most people in
journalism are living in urban areas, where it's easy to miss the way religion
is woven into the texture of American life. Second, most news stories require a
solid peg or a template of conflict -- why else would the stories be "news"?
But the ordinary practice of religion doesn't have a peg or a template of
conflict. No one says on CNN: "Our top story tonight -- 80 million Americans
attended religious services this weekend." But that's what does happen
every weekend.

Q. What are your own religious convictions?
A. I should say at the outset that although my book is about religion, it
is not a "religious" book -- and I tried to write it for an audience that I
presumed to be diverse in its attitudes toward religious questions. Certainly
the attitude of the scholars themselves is diverse. For some, religion and the
Bible are merely compelling objects of study, important because they speak to
aspects of social reality and human history. For others, profound questions of
personal belief are involved. In any event, the short answer to the question is
that I am a Catholic.

Q. If tomorrow you had to deliver a general "State of Christianity" address to
the world, what would you say?
A. Actually, I would duck the invitation altogether -- probably with words
like "judge not, and ye shall not be judged."

Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
Murphy photograph © Martin Cornel.