Geoffrey Kirk

Without Precedent


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rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_fbe89e30-bf65-5213-b643-1c877bed9cd2">25. Hampson, Theology and Feminism, 8.

      2: What did Jesus Really Think about Women?

      In Gospel research certainty is a very scarce commodity floating adrift in an ocean of probabilities.

      —Geza Vermes

      Jesus was neither a misogynist nor a feminist; his interests simply lay elsewhere.

      —Judith Ochshorn

      What did Jesus really think about women? The very question seems to invite anachronism. It seems to assume that Jesus thought about women in an analytical, politicized way. That, of course, is little short of absurd. Earlier ages and other cultures certainly debated the relations between women and men, and reached differing and conflicting conclusions. English readers will remember the extended debate on “sovereignty in marriage” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the Wife of Bath’s combative contribution. But something new and determinative happened in the late seventeenth–early eighteenth century which changed the debate forever. The first stage of feminist consciousness, writes Gerda Lerner, is “the awareness of a wrong.”61 Judith Lorber takes the matter further: “the long term goal of feminism must be no less than the eradication of gender as an organizing principle of post-industrial society.”62 This awareness of wrong, and the political analysis which follows from it, has its origins in the Enlightenment project. Writing in 1700, with an acute awareness of the constitutional implications of the Revolution of 1688, the Newcastle bluestocking Mary Astell was probably the first to argue that if absolute rule is illegitimate in the state, it ought also to be so in the family. She is wittily reversing the arguments of Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, the textbook of Stuart absolutism.

      Again, if absolute Sovereignty be not necessary in a State how comes it to be so in a Family? Or if so in a Family why not in a State, since no Reason can be alleged for the one that will not hold more strongly for the other? If Authority of the Husband, so far as it extends, is sacred and inalienable, why not that of the Prince? The Domestic Sovereign is without Dispute elected; and the Stipulations and Contract are mutual; is it not then partial in Men to the last Degree to contend for and practice that Arbitrary Dominion in their Families which they abhor and exclaim against in the State?63

      Mary