Several years ago I read the Women’s Bible Commentary which contains various essays of biblical scholarship written by some of the top feminist scholars in the field today. The commentary covers all the books of the Bible, including the Apocrypha, and each essay raises important questions about how women and other marginalized people are portrayed in the texts. They also evaluate things like gender roles, sexuality, political power, and family life, often challenging the long-held traditional readings and assumptions while sticking to the text itself. It’s a great read, if you’re into that sort of thing. English majors of the world, unite!

The Book of Matthew is regarded as the most “Jewish” of the gospels, likely written to convince a Jewish audience of the importance of Jesus. As such it provides strong ties to the Old Testament, linking the “new” messages of Jesus to the “old” propecies. The book also starts out with a lengthy genealogy. It then shifts to the teachings of Jesus, especially within an ethical and moral framework designed to address key differences with Jewish traditions, placing Jesus as the new authority.

Amy Jill Levine contributed the chapter on reading Matthew through a woman-centered lens. I suspect you’re not going to hear a lot of this in Gospel Doctrine, but I found many of her finds helpful in digging deeper on the role of women in relation to Jesus. I’ll share some of her highlights here, starting with Christ’s genealogy. In listing Jesus’ lineage, Matthew includes several noteworthy women from the Old Testament. By contrast, Luke provides a lineage without mentioning any women. I did a more lengthy post years ago about these women which is worth a perusal: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba. They are all women who have been maligned (often by early Church fathers); they were certainly disenfranchised and treated extremely unjustly, but their virtues (loyalty, wisdom, cleverness, bravery) caused them to come out on top against dire odds. Any way you slice it, their success is a clear indictment of the patriarchal family structure. The book of Matthew is concerned with the “higher righteousness” that Jews should be concerned with, not merely the function of the law.

The next example of the subversion of the “ideal” family is Jesus’ earthly parents. Mary is almost put away privily by Joseph who assumes she is either a rape victim (certainly by today’s standards given her age) or an adulterer (possibly by the standards of the time). Putting her away was a kindness and the “normal” thing for a man to do based on Jewish law in a situation like this, but instead he gives Jesus his name and “becomes” his father, ignoring his own rights (as a man) under the law. He then completely upends his life for this “fake” family that he knows he didn’t father. The Jewish tradition of paternal importance is once again subverted by the text.

The act of Mary’s conception is also feminized. The “Holy Spirit” is grammatically neutral in Greek, but feminine in Semitic languages. Matthew uses the passive phrase “was born” to further distance the event from paternal involvement. Matthew refers to it as a “virgin birth,” further feminizing the event.

In another dig at the importance of families, John the Baptist insults the pedigree-proud Pharisees and Sadducees, saying:

Brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore bear fruits worthy of repentance, and do not think to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I say to you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones.

Matthew 3: 7-9

Many of Jesus’ teachings in Matthew built on the Torah rather than replacing it, by extending the ideas to be more just. Likewise with Greek cultural norms. The existing Greek laws around adultery did not apply to sexual acts with slaves, prostitutes or courtesans. Jesus extended the views against adultery from the Second Temple Judaism to include the lust that led to the sinful relationship and to remarriage after divorce. The implication was that, unlike in the Old Testament, no woman should be regarded as merely a sex object. This revision moves the burden from the woman to the man: women are not considered the responsible party for male lust or for “enticing” men into sinful relationships. It is the man who is responsible to govern his own actions and even his thoughts.

Jesus’ prohibition on divorce was not given to protect wives from financial ruin; Jewish law already required that they be cared for (although the stories of Ruth and Tamar specifically illustrate the vulnerability of widows if they were treated unjustly or if they had the misfortune to lose all their male protectors).

The miracles Matthew describes focus on those who were outcasts or marginalized in Jewish society: Gentiles, women, demoniacs, tax collectors, sinners, those considered impure, and the dead (the most impure of all in Jewish culture). This view may not be entirely accurate, though, since many of these weren’t that marginalized. Gentiles had free access to synagogues and interactions with them were common and frequent. While Jewish culture was androcentric and patriarchal, women owned their own property and homes, had private funds, could travel freely, and could worship in synagogues and the temple. In many ways, they had more freedom than average women living in Victorian England. The other groups who received miracles (tax collectors, demoniacs, and the impure) had voluntarily absented themselves from society rather than being cast out.

Matthew further focuses on discipleship as an individual endeavor, more important than family ties:

And another of his disciples said unto him, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. But Jesus said unto him, follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.

Matthew 8: 21-22

The “found family” of disciples was given supremacy over the patriarchal family and its expected obligations and loyalties. This concept is one that is familiar those who identify as queer in modern society, and is an increasingly important facet of society. “Found families” replace traumatic or toxic biological relationships with a support network. Christianity was an early version of this, and for many converts, especially if they experience rejection through joining the church, their “ward family” replaces the family that has either rejected them or been rejected by them (e.g. disinviting parents or other relatives from temple weddings).

Another subversion of patriarchal families that takes direct aim at it is Paul’s claim that celibacy is superior to marriage (marriage is only for those too weak to withstand sex; “tis better to marry than to burn”). There’s not a whole lot you can say to twist that into a justification of patriarchy. Patriarchy relies on a hierarchical order between the sexes, male sexual domination over female (a very prevalent idea in ancient Rome which allowed for homosexual relationships but stigmatized being the “bottom”), and competition between males for scant resources (including desirable sexual partners). Celibacy upends all that. One wonders what Paul was on about, frankly. As the Quakers found out, celibacy leads to some really low membership numbers within a generation.

Despite all of these ways in which the New Testament as a text subverts the concepts of patriarchal families, the Church’s messages often downplay or overlook this subversion, instead claiming the opposite. This is honestly pretty easy to accomplish since most people 1) don’t read the Bible (or anything else), instead relying on others to tell them what it says[1], and or 2) view the world through their cultural assumptions rather than interrogating their own perspective. That’s just the human condition.

There’s been a recent trend in conservative Evanglical Churches of congregants angrily confronting their pastors about being “too woke” when they are literally just quoting Jesus. This is certainly an issue in today’s Mormon Church as well. Modern conservative secular ideas have been elevated above the gospel, and if there’s a contradiction, well, Jesus is losing. We’ve even had issues with the current First Presidency trying to distance the Church from the empathy required by the second great commandment, implying that love for God requires hatred of “God’s enemies” (who are apparently the same “enemies” conservatives fight: liberals, feminists, LGBTQ people, and undocumented immigrants). A recent talk by Pres. Oaks seems to acknowledge that this stance needs to soften. [3]

  • Have you noticed the ways in which the New Testament mismatches the so-called ideal preached at Church?
  • Do you see Christian discipleship as an individual endeavor or a communal one (as Joseph Smith preached [2])?
  • Can the Church ever get past its elevation of patriarchy or is that too baked in at this point? What would it take?

Discuss.

[1] Will the real lazy learners please stand up?

[2] While privately amassing extra wives and property?

[3] The talk in which he presents a “letter” from a teenage girl channeling her innner Amanda Bynes in Easy A: “Jesus tells us to love everyone, even the whores and the homosexuals. But it’s so hard! It’s so hard because they keep doing it, over and over again.”