On a personal note, I just want to say that scholars’ attempt to ‘ship Jesus (ship is fandom talk for putting into a dating relationship) with a female contemporary bring about my suspicion not because of some commitment to orthodoxy, but because both the Academy’s and Church’s continued exclusion of single persons. I don’t think this has been investigated in Christian circles, but I just wonder how many married people are uncomfortable with being saved by a single person, since they are always telling single people “they are incomplete” without a significant other and always trying to “save the singles” by setting them up. Yeah, this means I am even calling into question the eagerness of progressives to ‘ship Jesus ; see, even in the eyes of so-called ‘open-minded’ liberals, being single is considered a bad thing.
Anyways, I really felt that the 2 best responses to this forgery, one involved snark, and the other involved a response to Al Moehler.
Honestly, after reading Al Moehler’s response to this whole issue, I just don’t get how he understands Church history. History is filled with winners and losers. The Gnostics had to lose some if Moehler’s “historical Christian orthodoxy” won out. He just doesn’t get that the gnostics were a diverse group, and if anything, Evangelicals have more of a gnostic (that is, claiming that the material world is bad, promoting dis-embodiment) theology and the liberal scholars Moehler criticizes.
“The powerful have silenced those voices on the margin. In immediately and strongly dismissing the suggestion that Jesus may have had a woman disciple, Mohler places himself squarely on the side of the powerful, the side that won.”
from Natalie Burris: Moehler adn the Threatening Papyrus Fragment
The other half of the best responses to the fake Non-Gospel of Jesus’ fake made-up Wife is the Daily Shows Jon Stewart:
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Rod,
Well, again, you’ve written a provocative post, but what your readers should also find so good about it is that you link to and quote from some of the best responses to the new old fragment of text. (I wouldn’t have seen Burris’ analysis of Moehler if you hadn’t posted it.)
So, back to that singleness exclusion by so many: wow, what another huge human category of “difference” very much assumed to be “flawed” or “aberrant” or remarkable in the linguistically and culturally “marked” sense. Thank you for not allowing us so easily to go on through our day without considering the problems, our problems, with this!
Usually, we examine and problematize singlehood or biblical singlehood or ‘shiping Jesus or Paul only on the fly, if at all. Here’s a great pair of sentences I read recently. And yet, notice how it’s using “remaining single” to make a point about something else altogether:
“The case for women’s inequality can only be as strong as say, the case that Paul was right about remaining single (I Cor 7:8), yet that argument is not taken seriously in evangelical circles because so much seems to be at stake, and the default position in conservative Christian circles is to start with some degree of gender inequality.”
“Why We Still Need Feminist Theology” by Nicola Hoggard-Creegan (in Reconsidering Gender: Evangelical Perspective)
The brilliant thing Hoggard-Creegan does in these brief clauses is to expose the unquestioned “default.” What it seems you are doing, likewise, is exposing another “default,” namely the position of being in a committed relationship. How some Christians reading the new testament pick and choose their Pauline norms and push their own positions, then, on all the others who are unnormal and faulty.
Yes I am questioning the default!
Thank you JK!
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